Joe Biden Just A Climate Change Fighting Machine These Days
Joe Biden Just A Climate Change Fighting Machine These Days
Hey, let's cut 10 *billion* tons of carbon emissions!
In all the grimdark madness of the daily news cycle, it can really be easy to feel like things are just terrible, and lord knows we can’t deny there’s plenty to worry about. But here’s a little fact that just doesn’t get enough attention: After more than 30 years of inaction on climate, suddenly under Joe Biden the US has a real, aggressive climate policy. You’ve undoubtedly seen us talking up his biggest achievements, like the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act (better name needed, sigh). Voters need to know that! But more keeps on happening. Keep reading!
Here’s another thing we really hope you’ll remember and tell others about as this campaign year goes forward: The Biden-Harris administration has also, in just the past few months, unveiled a bunch of new administrative policies that will result in enormous additional reductions in greenhouse emissions in coming years.
The IRA uses the carrot of incentives that will help get the energy transition built. The new regulations coming from multiple agencies are the stick that will force emissions reduction, and if polluters gripe about how that’s haaaard, they can be pointed to all the incentives that will help them get there.
On that theme, we were happy to see this piece by Michael Thomas in his Distilled newsletter, which points out in just the two and a half months since he explained Biden’s impressive climate record in another article, the administration has gone and
passed a handful of climate policies that will collectively cut more than 10 billion tons of planet-warming pollution over the next three decades, more than the annual emissions of India, Russia, Japan, South Korea, Canada, Saudi Arabia, and the entire continent of Europe—combined.
In this new piece, Thomas briefly goes over three new climate policies from the administration that will help the US reach our Paris climate goals, albeit with the proviso that they’ll first have to survive challenges in the courts, which with the Alito Court is a decidedly big “if.” Let us review!
Bye, Coal, Bye!
As we covered in April, the Environmental Protection Agency rolled out new rules on power plant emissions that will require dirty old coal-fired power plants to either clean up or shut down by 2039. There are three options for owners of coal plants:
Announce they’ll close by 2032, in which case the plants can operate under current rules until they’re retired.
Retire by 2039, in which case the plants will have to reduce emissions starting in 2030 by burning a combination of coal and natural gas.
Any coal plants staying open past 2039 must limit carbon emissions by 90 percent starting in 2032. The only current technology to do that — maybe — involves capturing CO2 and storing it underground.
Plants that can’t meet that 90 percent reduction must shut down altogether.
New fossil gas-fired power plants meant to supply “baseline” power must also meet that 90 percent emissions reduction standard.
All told, the new power plant rules would result in emissions reductions of about 1.4 billion metric tons by 2047, which is roughly equal to one year of the US power sector’s current total emissions.
Here’s the kicker from Thomas, which our own piece on the new rule only brushed on:
In passing the rule, federal regulators are calling the utility industry’s carbon capture bluff. Ever since the first climate regulations cropped up decades ago, the owners of fossil fuel power plants have said that it's possible to burn fossil fuels to produce power without heating up the planet. But these same companies have invested little in the technology and, when they have, they’ve offered little evidence that carbon capture can work.
Now utilities will have to either “put up or shut up,” according to Jesse Jenkins, an energy systems researcher and professor at Princeton, who explained the new policy in a recent podcast.
The rule is designed to comply with the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling in West Virginia v. EPA, which demanded that any new regulations be limited to regulations from individual plants, not the power sector as a whole.
On top of that, alert readers will recall that the Biden administration has also announced an end to new coal leases (but not existing ones) in the largest coal-producing area of the US.
The Big One: Auto Emissions
We’ll do a pretty quick summary here, because we covered this one in some detail when the EPA announced its new car and light truck tailpipe emissions standards in March. Automakers will need to reduce the total carbon emissions of their new vehicle fleets over coming years, with the most stringent limits kicking in between 2032 and 2035.
The rules don’t explicitly mandate electric vehicles, or ban sales of gasoline or diesel-powered vehicles. If automakers want to sell big polluting trucks in 2035, they can, but to meet the fleet carbon limits, the rest of the vehicles they sell must have extremely low or zero carbon emissions, meaning they’ll have to be EVs or plug-in hybrids (unless some miracle technology arrives by 2035).
Setting the carbon emissions limits at the fleet level follows the same model the EPA has always used for its fuel-economy standards, which ought to help the rule survive court scrutiny, at least in theory. All told, the rule could nudge manufacturers to make up to 56 percent of their new-vehicle fleets electric by 2030, and higher percentages after that.
Assuming the rule survives the inevitable challenges, it would cut a whopping seven billion tons of carbon emissions over the next 30 years.
Water Heaters That Don’t Heat The Planet*
We clean missed this new rule altogether when the Energy Department rolled it out at the end of April. New energy efficiency standards for residential water heaters will require that they become far more efficient than those currently in use, which is a heckin’ big deal because water heaters are the second-biggest source of energy consumption in the average US home, after heating/cooling.
The new standard requires electric water heaters to become more efficient by incorporating heat pump technology, which is incredibly energy efficient compared to current water heaters. Not only will the regulation cut another 2.5 billion metric tons of carbon emissions over the next 30 years, the Energy Department estimates the cleaner water heaters will save consumers $7.6 billion a year on their power and water bills.
Currently, heat pump water heaters are fairly pricey compared to conventional — and far less efficient — electric water heaters. Those prices will come down as they’re produced at scale, probably well before the 2029 requirement — and they qualify for a hefty federal tax incentive through the IRA, which will remain in place through 2032.
* Now, here’s where that asterisk in our subheading comes in: To truly heat water with no planet-warming emissions, the new water heaters would of course have to run off renewable electricity, either from rooftop solar and storage, or from the increasingly cleaner grid. And since they’re so much more efficient, the new heat-pump water heaters will reduce strain on the electric grid — possibly fewer new power plants needed, yay!
The new standard will go into effect in 2029, giving manufacturers time to retool their products. Once the rule goes into effect, the DOE estimates over half of new water heaters sold will use heat pump technology, nudging the market toward that becoming the norm. Average households should see about $1,800 in savings over the life of their water heaters.
And as Thomas points out, all these new emissions reductions are coming from the executive branch of an “administration whose party doesn’t have control of both chambers of Congress.” Just think what more could be accomplished by returning Democrats to power in Congress and the White House — and of all that we risk losing if Donald Trump returns to office.
PREVIOUSLY!
[Distilled / Energy Department / Utility Dive / Takashi Hososhima, Creative Commons License 2.0]
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Ta, Dok. OHJB wants to make this the kind of place where we can thrive.
You know what's nice about electric water heaters? No pilot lights. Mine goes out all the time, and is it ever a pain in the ass to start up. (There's some regulation that says they can't use electric starters like a gas stove's.)