Don't stop thinking about 2030

Your guide to the political forces shaping the energy transformation

Jul 08, 2022 View in browser   By Arianna Skibell The sun sets on Earth. | Christopher Furlong/Getty Images The U.S. still has a chance to help the world avert climate catastrophe — but only if everything goes right. And as POLITICO's E&E News reporter Benjamin Storrow notes in a story today, little has gone right so far. Instead, the Supreme Court just limited the Environmental Protection Agency's power, Congress is plagued by inertia and soaring gas prices have shifted the discourse in Washington back to fossil fuels. In a conversation with Ben this morning, he said the most important question, however, is what the U.S. does between now and 2030 — a period when meaningful cuts to the nation's carbon output would be hard but achievable. Why the end of the decade matters "The longer it takes for the U.S. to start making progress, the more we have to cut, and so 2030 is this interim target that is going to tell us, in a lot of ways, whether the country is on track for reaching net zero by 2050," Ben said. The 2030 time frame is also crucial for President Joe Biden's pledge to comply with the Paris climate agreement. Hitting those targets would require the nation's carbon emissions in 2030 to be half what they were in 2005. But under current U.S. policy, emissions would fall at most 25 percent by decade's end, according to a Rhodium Group analysis. Another way to look at it: The U.S. needs to cut its emissions at least 3 percent a year. During the past decade, those have fallen only by an average of 1 percent a year. Oh, and from January to May of this year, they went up 5.7 percent. Reaching Biden's goal would require a combination of new federal regulations and infrastructure investments to clean up power plants, factories, homes and vehicles, Ben writes. Beyond 2030, bigger challenges await Climate scientists have largely concluded that during the current decade, policymakers should focus on cleaning up the electricity grid and light-duty vehicles — areas that are easier to wean off fossil fuels compared with heavy-duty transportation and industry, because the technology to do so already exists. "At a policy level, what you do this decade may look very different from what you do in future decades," Ben told us. "But the country is still struggling with what is essentially the easiest thing on our to-do list." Another way to think about time The world has 11 years to stop warming from exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius, the level that would trigger really bad climate change, according to the Global Carbon Project. It has 32 years to prevent it from passing 2 degrees, the catastrophe line. A lot can happen in 11 years. During the same period following Ronald Reagan's reelection, the Berlin Wall fell, the USSR vanished and the World Wide Web was born.   Thank goodness it's Friday — thank you for tuning into POLITICO's Power Switch. I'm your host, Arianna Skibell.  Power Switch is brought to you by the journalists behind E&E News and POLITICO Energy. Send your tips, comments, questions to askibell@eenews.net. Featured story Steel manufacturing plant in Gary, Indiana. | Jamie Kelter Davis/POLITICO Biden's other green promise The president has vowed to protect poor communities from bearing an unfair burden of air and water pollution. To do it will require reversing decades of industry-friendly regulations, write Annie Snider and Sean Reilly. This in-depth feature explores the long history of toxic pollution in northwestern Indiana, and the questions surrounding Biden's promises to redress these kinds of racial and social disparities. Read the full story here. You can also catch Sean speaking more about the piece on POLITICO's Energy podcast. Power Centers Francis Chung/E&E News EPA's silver lining The Supreme Court's decision last week may still allow EPA to write meaningful climate regulation, even as it consigned to the scrap heap certain ambitions, writes Jean Chemnick. While the decision guarantees that EPA will write new rules under a cloud of legal uncertainty, the decision offered some regulatory wins including the ability to set "actual, numerical, substantive" emissions limits. "The decision kept alive EPA's ability to write a meaningful rule, even if it isn't a transformative one," Jean told us. Here's the story. Let the games begin Two decades after hosting the Winter Olympics, Salt Lake City is vying to bring the event back to Utah, with major implications for the state's electricity mix, writes Jason Plautz.   The Olympics has instituted new green rules the city must follow, and advocates hope the requirements could catalyze the clean energy transition in coal-reliant Utah. Read more here. Gas sanctions Ukraine's energy minister urged Canada not to send back a key component needed to ramp up natural gas flows on the Russia-to-Germany Nord Stream pipeline, writes America Hernandez. Russian gas flows to Europe have plummeted since June 16, and a letter obtained by POLITICO shows that Kyiv is asking Canada not to make an exception to its sanctions against Moscow for the gas turbine. Here's the story. In Other News Space tourism. Maybe don't: The increasingly popular trend of rich men launching themselves into space is threatening to erase years of emissions reductions gains. Climate blues? File suit: A series of European lawsuits alleges that climate inaction is causing psychological harm and violating human rights. Today in the POLITICO Energy podcast: Lara Korte explains how climate change and drought are complicating a federal mandate that seven states drastically reduce their Colorado River water usage. Subscriber Zone Massachusetts Dept. of Environmental Protection/Flickr Massachusetts will cut carbon emissions in half by 2030, requiring multiple regulatory changes and massive infrastructure build-outs for such a large state. A federal court ruled that FERC adequately justified its approval for a 256-mile natural gas pipeline from Ohio to Michigan in its second attempt to permit the project. Investigators are looking into a Colorado pipeline leak that's spilled at least 25 million cubic feet of natural gas, enough to power more than 300 homes for a year. That's it for today, folks. Thanks for reading, and have a great weekend!   Follow us on Twitter Arianna Skibell @ariannaskibell   Follow us

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