Saturday 15

More than 300 Local Officials from 40 States Call for Green New Deal, End of Fossil Fuels

The open letter includes a signature from a former high-level Mobil Oil executive.

In a little over a month, the so-called Green New Deal has won endorsements from more than three dozen sitting or incoming federal lawmakers as Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) makes a high-profile bid to shift debate over climate change toward policy on the scale of the crisis. 

On Friday, the effort got a boost from 311 state and local officials.

Forty-four mayors, 63 county and state legislators and 116 city council members were among the officials from 40 states ― including some top oil and gas producers ― who signed an open letter issuing a sweeping, full-throated call for the phaseout of fossil fuels and adoption of Green New Deal-style climate policies.

One signatory, L.W. Allstadt, a trustee of the Upstate New York village of Cooperstown, is a former executive vice president of Mobil Oil, the giant that merged with Exxon in 1998 to form the world’s largest publicly traded oil company.

“The existence of climate change and its potential disastrous impacts have been known for decades,” Allstadt said in a statement.  “The solutions, primary among which is elimination of the use of fossil fuels, have also been known.” 

The letter ― published Friday online and shared in advance with HuffPost ― was organized by Elected Officials to Protect America, a nonprofit formed in 2015 to rally support for local climate action.  It lays out three demands.  It calls for 100 percent renewable energy, though does not specify a timeline.  To buttress that, it proposes ending “public subsidization of fossil fuels,” and divesting from fossil fuel companies to “shift public investments to accelerate the transition to 100 percent clean energy and pay for the harm fossil fuels cause our states and municipalities.”

Read more at More than 300 Local Officials from 40 States Call for Green New Deal, End of Fossil Fuels

Final Dispatch from COP24: What Just Happened?

For most of us the UN climate talks — or COP24 — are drawing to a close and home is in sight.

That’s probably not the case for hundreds of negotiators who still have a lot to sort out before they can agree on the rules to implement the Paris Agreement, and are likely to work through the night and possibly beyond to do so.

After two weeks of protesting, lobbying, greenwashing, setbacks, and admittedly important progress made on the rulebook for the Paris Agreement, the end of the conference offers a time to reflect.

I spent two weeks running around the long corridors of the climate conference in Katowice, Poland, striving to make sense of what this was all about.

As I leave the conference center one last time, the euphoric momentum that sent shockwaves through the world when the Paris Agreement was reached three years ago has tapered off.

As things stand, the historic commitment countries made to collectively reduce emissions and tackle the climate crisis seems more vulnerable than ever to political and corporate obstruction.

Inside the negotiations, big oil and gas exporters such as the US, Saudi Arabia, Russia, and Kuwait blocked the welcoming of one of the most important scientific reports warning of the dangers of climate inaction.  The rest of the world seems to have endorsed the more ambitious goal of limiting global temperature to 1.5 degrees — no small feat.

Meanwhile, the head of a powerful business lobby representing big corporations and fossil fuel companies openly told me the group was actively engaging in one section of the negotiations and hoping to influence its outcome.

While this may have the merit of transparency, there are still many questions to be asked about the fact dozens of country delegates with access to closed negotiation rooms have ties to the oil, gas, and mining sectors.

There has also been a great dose of disinformation throughout the conference.  A tight group of notorious climate science deniers were seen sitting in the front of row of a pro-fossil fuel event held by the Trump administration and backed by Australia’s environment ambassador.

The group of about a dozen men (and one woman) was largely ignored by the rest of the conference.  But in the age of Trump and Bolsonaro, these marginal figures have been emboldened to use the stage of the climate talks to spread disinformation and lies.

Read more at Final Dispatch from COP24:  What Just Happened?

California’s Bus Fleet Will Be 100 Percent Electric by 2040

Any new public transit bus purchased in California by 2029 must be a 100 percent electric vehicle, according to a new unanimous vote by the California Air Resources Board, the state’s clean air agency.  It is the first statewide policy in the United States to require an entire vehicle class go electric, the Union of Concerned Scientists wrote.

Within five years, 25 percent of transit agencies’ new bus purchases must be electric vehicles.  That jumps to 50 percent by 2026, and 100 percent by 2029.  This equates to about 14,000 zero-emissions buses on California roads by 2040 — up from 132 today —and will reduce the state’s carbon emissions by 1 million metric tons per year in just two decades.  School buses and privately owned buses are not covered under the policy.

In addition to the policy’s climate benefits, another major motivator was that the shift to electric vehicles will help further combat California’s air pollution; the state is home to eight of the top 10 most polluted cities in the U.S., including Los Angeles and Bakersfield.

“This is the biggest public transportation breakthrough since we switched from trolleys to diesel buses a century ago,” Jimmy O’Dea, a senior vehicles analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said in a statement.  “Bus riders, bus drivers, and anyone who has gulped the exhaust from a passing truck or bus knows we must do something about these vehicles.  Electrifying them is a one-two punch:  we reduce carbon emissions that worsen climate change and we clean up the air we breathe.”

Green energy experts said the impact of California’s new policy will ripple across the transportation industry.  The state is the largest U.S. bus market in the U.S.  In addition, four of the five major U.S. bus manufacturers are headquartered in the state.

Read more at California’s Bus Fleet Will Be 100 Percent Electric by 2040

Friday 14

We Have 12 Years to Stop Climate Catastrophe. These Young Activists Have a Plan.

In the wake of the stark U.N. report, direct-action groups like Sunrise Movement and Extinction Rebellion are out to disrupt the fossil fuel economy.

On a clear and sunny morning in San Francisco’s downtown SoMa district, 40 people stand side by side with interlinked arms blocking the entrance to the San Francisco Federal Building.  Just a couple of weeks ago this city was shrouded in a suffocating blanket of wildfire smoke that had traveled down from giant blazes in the north.  But the haze has since cleared, and its absence has revealed a clarity of vision which stretches far beyond a healthier air quality index.

“I’m here today because we have a 12-year deadline,” Lydia Macy, 18, told HuffPost from behind a 40-foot banner that she was helping to hold up.  “Climate change is the No. 1 issue that we’re facing in the 21st century, and if we don’t fight we won’t have a world to live in.”

A student at Berkeley High School, Macy was joined by hundreds of others in this action organized by the Bay Area chapter of Sunrise Movement — a youth-led organization with the mission to stop climate change and create millions of good jobs in the process.  Sunrise Movement’s most recent campaign has been focused on putting pressure on members of Congress to support Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) in pushing for a Green New Deal, a policy proposal aiming to ensure a just and rapid transition to a decarbonized economy.

Following a day of sit-ins and protests on Monday outside the Capitol Hill office of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) — which drew in thousands and saw more than 130 arrested — the action in San Francisco on Tuesday also targeted Pelosi, whose local district office was just on the other side of the demonstrators’ human barricade.

Read more at We Have 12 Years to Stop Climate Catastrophe.  These Young Activists Have a Plan.

More than 680 Gigawatts of New Wind Power to Come Online by 2027

More than 680 gigawatts (GW) of new wind power is expected to come online around the globe in the next decade, according to new research from Wood Mackenzie Power & Renewables.

Wood Mackenzie announced this week that it had upgraded its Global Wind Power Market Outlook Update:  Q4 2018 by 2% compared to only a quarter ago, with the majority of the expected growth to occur in the medium-term, boosting annual capacity additions from 2020 to 2023 by an average of 2.7 GW.

However, it is the long-term outlook which is most impressive, with Wood Mackenzie analysts forecasting that more than 680 GW worth of new wind power — both onshore and offshore — will be brought online through 2027.

In Europe, Wood Mackenzie expects the maturation of the region’s offshore wind sector will act as a strong driver of growth, while both Japan and South Korea are expected to boast an offshore base of over 2 GW each — not bad, considering neither country has more than 100 megawatts worth of offshore capacity.

“With 16 GW of offshore wind power capacity installed in Europe by the end of 2018 and more than 47 GW expected to come online in the region from 2018 to 2027, the European offshore sector continues to be a focal point of growth for the wind power industry,” said lead author Luke Lewandowski, director of Americas power & renewables research.  “The European offshore wind power experience has encouraged governments in other regions to support offshore wind to comply with carbon reduction strategies and renewable energy targets as well as more firmly secure domestic power supply.”

The burgeoning US offshore wind market also received an upgraded outlook from Wood Mackenzie, as “Attractive price signals are expected to motivate an increase in state-level procurement activity from both pioneering states, such as Massachusetts and New York, as well as new entrants over the long term, such as California and Delaware,” according to Lewandowski.  Specifically, Wood Mackenzie now expects the US will boast around 10 GW worth of offshore wind by the end of 2027.

More than 680 Gigawatts of New Wind Power to Come Online by 2027