News from a Changing Planet -- This Week on Earth #12
Taking the clean energy transition into your own hands, new permitting rules, what's happening in the ocean, and more essential climate news.
Just a brief aside to say that I’m going to take the next two weeks off to get some new ideas. I’ll be back to you in September. In the meantime, feel free to visit the archives! Did you miss the one about nuclear testing? Or the Clean Water Act? Or the Canadian wildfires? Or dolphins in New York City? Or deep-sea mining? Or using old coal mines for carbon-free heat? Or the Marine Mammal Protection Act? Or why beef doesn’t cost more? Have a good rest of the summer!
IF SHE CAN DO IT, SO CAN WE: How a climate and energy political scientist used the Inflation Reduction Act to turn her home into a fossil-free paradise (Granted, she helped write the IRA but still…) (The Atlantic)
Leah Stokes, a climate and energy politics professor at UC Santa Barbara, had had enough: her local utility was lobbying against clean energy in California, so she decided to cut them off. She put solar panels on her house, got a back up battery, two heat pumps, an induction stove, and hasn’t looked back.
It wasn’t necessarily the easiest process, and it can still be difficult for many households to afford these changes, even with the incentives provided by the IRA. That’s because some of these appliances (like heat pumps) are still expensive to buy, and it can be hard to get contractors to install them because of labor shortages or lack of expertise. Plus, the law relies on tax credits for the most part, and many people can’t wait a year or more to get their money back, if they ever do, since filing taxes is stupidly complicated.
But, she writes, this should get cheaper and easier over time:
The IRA includes about $50 billion in funding for low-income and disadvantaged communities. Most households will also soon be able to receive upwards of $10,000 to make climate-friendly installations, including insulation and induction stoves. Plus there’s an additional $7 billion for low-income households looking to install solar panels. The brilliance of the IRA is that the law is designed to build up clean manufacturing here in the United States, which will spur innovation and lower costs.
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[T]he law is so much bigger than consumer incentives for clean machines. It’s also reshaping the economy, generating more than 170,000 new jobs and $278 billion in new investments in battery manufacturing, wind-turbine factories, and solar manufacturing plants. In another decade, the IRA—although not perfect—may prove to be an inflection point in America’s relationship with fossil fuels. Thanks to this law, millions more people will have electrified their homes, and our old relationship with the gas company will feel like a distant, bad memory. We’ll look back and wonder: Why did we put up with them for so long?
THE RULES ARE THERE ARE NO RULES: Just kidding, but the Department of Energy proposed a new rule that will make transmission easier! (E&E News)
I’ve written before about how one of the main obstacles to the clean energy transition is how difficult it is to get permits to build new projects, especially transmission lines. Well, the Department of Energy has proposed a new rule that would streamline the process, making it the lead agency for conducting environmental impact statements and other reviews, so that developers wouldn’t have to go through every federal agency involved, and to complete these reviews in two years. This could be a very big deal: right now, a developer might have to go through the DOE, the Department of the Interior, the Fish and Wildlife Service, and other federal agencies to get permission, and that can take many years. Plus there’s already a huge backlog, which makes an already drawn out process take even longer. Sometimes, to get through the red tape you have to…make some more red tape, but just different! Okay!
WAIT, WHAT IS THE AMOC? And is it about to collapse?
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