This story was produced by the independent, nonprofit newsroom Canary Media and co-published by Mother Jones. Gary Yerman, 75, sat nervously in a noisy ballroom in Virginia Beach, Virginia, counting down the minutes until he could shed his ill-fitting double-breasted suit for a sun shirt and blue jeans. He introduced himself as a fisherman of 50 years to a stranger seated next to him at the banquet table. “That sounds really hard,” the other man replied.  “Not as hard as it’s going to be to go accept this award and talk to a room full of people,” joked Yerman. Moments later, his name was called, and he walked onto a professionally lit stage to accept a small crystal trophy from the Oceantic Network, a leading trade group for the burgeoning multibillion-dollar US offshore wind industry. It was an unlikely sight. America’s fishermen have long treated wind developers as their sworn enemies.  The conflict started in the early 2000s, when the first plans for New England’s offshore wind areas were sketched out. In packed town hall meetings that often devolved into shouting matches, fishermen claimed the projects would make it harder to earn a living: fewer fishing grounds, fewer fish, damaged ocean habitat.  Few of these predictions have come to pass in places like the UK, which has already built over 50 offshore wind farms in its waters. Wind areas there are thriving with sharks and serving as a surprising habitat for haddock. But even today, fisher-led groups in the US are spearheading lawsuits aiming to halt at least two offshore wind farms under construction on the East Coast. One former offshore wind executive told Canary Media that the amount of pushback from fishermen in America has made offshore wind investments riskier than in Europe. > “Everyone knows that fishermen hate offshore wind companies. Well, guess what? > Offshore wind companies hate fishermen.” Yerman was one of the first fishermen in the US to cross this bitter divide. He’s become the reluctant face of a group of over 100 fishermen and fisherwomen who go by the name Sea Services North America. They’ve decided to work for offshore wind farms—not against them. Doing so supplements their income from scalloping, a centuries-old bedrock of the New England fishing economy that has seen revenues dry up.  Pursuing work in wind power has come at a cost. After the awards event, back in blue jeans and with a celebratory beer in hand, Yerman recounted the exact word New England fishermen used when he and his crew first crossed the Rubicon. “They called us traitors,” he said.   Those tensions have become supercharged with the election of President Donald Trump, who has called offshore wind “garbage” and “bullshit” and, in the weeks leading up to his inauguration, pledged that “no new windmills” would be built in the US during his presidency. He’s backed up those words with action since taking office, stopping new projects from proceeding and attempting to block some of the country’s eight fully permitted offshore wind projects, too.  Yerman and his crew are left wondering if the industry they’ve bet their livelihood on—and work they’ve risked their reputations for—will all come crashing down.  Many of the fishermen who work through Sea Services voted for Trump. And if the president fulfills his promise to halt the industry, it would be devastating not only for the Northeast’s climate goals and grid reliability—but for thousands of workers in the region, from electricians to welders to Sea Services’ fishermen. One of Sea Services’ captains, Kevin Souza, put it simply: The impact would be “big time.” Six years ago, Yerman was like the others—angry with offshore wind developers, particularly Danish giant Ørsted, which had set up shop in his hometown of New London, Connecticut.  Concerned that wind turbines might push his son out of the scalloping business, he pulled one of the only levers he could think to pull and contacted his state senator at the time, Paul Formica, a Republican who owned a local seafood restaurant.  Formica wanted to see the two sides get along. He arranged a meeting between Yerman and an Ørsted executive named Matthew Morrissey, who happened to be a native of New Bedford, Massachusetts, the most lucrative commercial fishing port in America. Offshore wind turbine blades in the staging area of the recently modernized Marine Commerce Terminal in New Bedford, Massachusetts, this spring.Clare Fieseler/Canary Media Yerman found in Morrissey a sympathetic ear, and in turn, he listened to what the executive had to say—that Ørsted was open to partnering with fishermen. Morrissey had seen, with his own eyes, fishers working for and coexisting with Ørsted in a tiny port in Kilkeel, Northern Ireland. The energy firm had a team of about two dozen marine affairs employees, Morrissey relayed, who could help make something like that happen in America if Yerman was on board. He pitched it as a win-win.  “Everyone knows that fishermen hate offshore wind companies. Well, guess what? Offshore wind companies hate fishermen, too,” Morrissey, who no longer works at Ørsted, told Canary Media earlier this year. “Our goal here is to spread the understanding that these two industries can and do and will work together.” The idea intrigued Yerman. In the US, profits from scalloping have fluctuated from year to year, and, following a crash in the 1990s, scallop numbers remain unpredictable. In his view, if offshore wind companies were moving into their waters—like it or not—they might as well make some money from it.  Yerman got to work.  His first call was to Gordon Videll, a longtime friend and affable small-town lawyer, who knew things about contracts that Yerman didn’t. The two flew to Kilkeel—on their own dime—to see the model for themselves. Videll noticed that some of Kilkeel’s fishermen were driving cars nicer than his. He and Yerman were inspired.   When they returned to Connecticut, Yerman recruited about a half dozen of his commercial fishing buddies, and Videll started putting together the paperwork. They dubbed themselves Sea Services North America and in 2020 landed their first small contract, with Ørsted. It was a pilot, said Morrissey, to see if this arrangement would work here in America.  “Everyone was skeptical,” recalled Morrissey with a laugh. “Because their boats were in such poor safety condition. But you know what? They pulled it off.”  > Since taking office in January, President Trump has launched an all-out > assault on the offshore wind industry. Today, Sea Services operates like a co-op and has brought 22 fishing boats up to certified safety standards. With Videll at the helm as part-time CEO, the group has completed over 11 contracts in eight different wind farm areas, from Massachusetts to New Jersey. Instead of hiring ferries or work boats, developers rely on Sea Services fishermen to provide safety and scout services for offshore wind vessels.  It’s important work: making sure, for example, no fishing gear, like crab traps, is in the way of cables, monopiles, or survey operations. If necessary, Sea Services fishermen move gear—with the owner’s approval. When not cleared, these obstacles have caused days and sometimes weeks of costly delays for developers, according to Morrissey.  Sea Services was an “indispensable partner” in helping to build South Fork Wind, which went online last year and became America’s first large-scale offshore wind project, wrote Ed LeBlanc, a current Ørsted executive, in an email to Canary Media. The firm has since contracted the group for other projects, in no small part because of their expertise about local waters, he added. Cooperation between these two sides—offshore wind and commercial fishing—does exist elsewhere in America. For example, Avangrid and Vineyard Offshore, the codevelopers of the Vineyard Wind project off the coast of Massachusetts, have paid out $8 million directly to local fishermen unaffiliated with Sea Services for similar safety jobs over the past two years. But Sea Services is unique. Today the group offers an expansive network of 22 partner vessels based in six states and is led by a commercial fisherman. Videll brought on new technology, allowing developers to track their work remotely. He said they adopted a co-op model to maximize the amount of money going into participants’ pockets.  Receiving the Oceantic Network award in late April was a big deal for the collective, said Videll. It’s an example of how successful the venture has been in a short period of time—and, more importantly, it should be good for business. Industry awards mean visibility. More visibility could mean more Sea Services contracts. Cofounders of Sea Services North America wait among gala attendees on April 29, 2025, to receive a Ventus Award from the Oceantic Network. Clare Fieseler/Canary Media But, right now, the Sea Services business faces headwinds that no award can help overcome.  Since taking office in January, President Trump has launched an all-out assault on the offshore wind industry. On his first day in office, he halted new lease and permitting activity and called for a review of the nine projects that already had their federal permits in hand. In March, his Environmental Protection Agency chief revoked a key permit for Atlantic Shores, a fully permitted project that has since been called off in part due to roadblocks created by the administration.  The most eyebrow-raising step came in April, when Trump’s Interior Department issued a stop-work order for Empire Wind 1, two weeks after the project had begun at-sea construction. It was a wake-up call for Sea Services, which works for Norwegian energy giant Equinor on the project. Videll, Sea Services’ CEO, said at the time that the cessation of Empire Wind would be a crushing blow that could cost the co-op a total of $9 million to $12 million worth of work.  In May, the administration suddenly lifted the stop-work order. Sea Services’ contract was safe, at least for the time being. But it was the most bracing illustration yet that the business, in spite of all its success, now faces very choppy waters under the Trump administration.  On a cloudless late-February day at the New Bedford port, 57-year-old Souza hovered over a checklist and laptop in the captain’s quarters of the Pamela Ann. Souza is the captain of the boat, and he needed to make sure everything was in order before he and his crew left New Bedford that afternoon. They’d be at sea for 10 days, working in many of the spots Souza had fished in for decades.  Those 10 days at sea would not be spent dredging up scallops from the seafloor and tallying their catch, however, but conducting safety operations for the Revolution Wind offshore wind project, which is being built off the coast of Rhode Island and Massachusetts. The hulking scalloping boat, with its ebony-painted hull and wood-paneled interior, was bustling ahead of the journey. In the galley, Souza’s 25-year-old son, one of the three mates onboard, sorted through the food they’d need. Jack Morris, a 73-year-old scalloper and Sea Services manager, paced around the Pamela Ann checking in on its recently updated safety assets, like a new tracking beacon and safety suits.  Trips like these have become a lifeline for Souza, his crew, and an increasing number of fishermen who depend on the struggling scalloping industry.  Today, there are roughly 350 vessels sitting in ports from Maine to North Carolina that have licenses to harvest sea scallops. For several decades, East Coast scallopers managed to eke out a comfortable middle-class lifestyle on scalloping alone. Morris said that “years ago” he’d pull in $200,000 to $300,000 of profit annually as a scallop boat captain. “Yeah, those days are gone,” scoffed Morris.  While the price of scallops remains high, making it one of the most lucrative US fisheries, rules passed over the last 30 years have restricted when and where scallopers can harvest, resulting in fewer days at sea, fewer scallops caught—and less money for the entire industry. Souza has mixed emotions about the regulations. On the one hand, scallops are no longer being overfished. A 2024 third-party audit of the fishery said it “meets the requirements for a well-managed and sustainable fishery.” In fact, for over a decade, US sea scallops sold on grocery store shelves have carried a little blue-check label—the mark of a seafood certified by the Marine Stewardship Council. But most scallop fishermen are now limited to an extremely short window of time during which they can harvest scallops—in 2025, it was just 24 days. Some of their favorite fishing grounds are regularly closed for scallop recovery. There are simply fewer scallops to go around. Souza estimates that captains who stick to scalloping alone are making half of what they did in years past: “They’re probably lucky to make a hundred [thousand].” Offshore wind work has helped fishermen like Souza and Morris ease the sting of that lost income.  > “You’ll have the lobster guys and they’ll say shit to you—like, ‘traitor.’ Or > ‘Trump’s gonna shut that down, ha ha ha.'” Across Revolution Wind’s two-year construction window, Souza expects to make over $200,000 as a part-time boat captain. For the younger generation, who Souza said as deckhands can expect to make only around $30,000 per year from scalloping, offshore wind work makes it possible to keep earning a middle-class wage.  In the past year, Souza has recruited to Sea Services both of his sons, his nephew, and a few other young folks from longtime fishing families who might have otherwise left the scallop industry if not for the supplemental income. “This wind farm business is the number one way for scallop guys, captains, mates, deckhands, to make extra money,” said Morris. It’s also helping to revitalize the port of New Bedford, a city of 100,000 that is not only the most valuable fishing port in America but also a place of tremendous historic importance to the industry. It was once the epicenter of the whaling world and serves as the backdrop for the opening scenes of Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick.”  In just 10 years, the offshore wind industry has ushered in a transformation the city hadn’t seen “since the whaling era,” according to Jon Mitchell, the city’s mayor since 2011.  The companies building Vineyard Wind now stage their offshore wind infrastructure in New Bedford. Their presence has brought a flood of public and private funding to the city, with over $1.2 billion already invested and pledged to help give the terminals, docks, and harbor a facelift, according to Mitchell. For all the money offshore wind has brought to the city—and into the pockets of locals like Souza and Morris—offshore wind remains highly controversial among many commercial fishermen in New Bedford.  That’s in spite of Mitchell’s insistence that, when push comes to shove, New Bedford’s local government will always side with scalloping.  Still, Mitchell, one of New England’s fiercest offshore wind defenders, remains unpopular with many down at the boat docks. “I’ve put myself in the loneliest place in American politics, which is right in the middle. Between offshore wind and commercial fishing,” he said.  The fishermen who take part in Sea Services also float in that lonely place.  It’s not uncommon for them to face harassment from other fishermen over the radio when out on the water, Yerman said. One time, he said a Sea Services fisherman was turned away from a Rhode Island dock, in what Yerman characterized as an act of revenge.  The hardest part of Yerman’s job is overcoming this cultural aversion and getting fishermen to the table, convincing them that working for the offshore wind developers is a way to sustain a livelihood whose viability has begun to fade. “You’ll have the lobster guys and they’ll say shit to you—like, ‘traitor.’ Or ‘Trump’s gonna shut that down, ha ha ha,’” Souza said, imitating the taunts he receives over the marine radio bolted to the wall near the helm of the Pamela Ann.  The lobstermen have a point regarding Trump. As frustrating as their remarks may be, the biggest threat to offshore wind is not snipes from colleagues, but the actions of a president who many Sea Services members—including Souza—voted for.  Captain Kevin Souza prepared the Pamela Ann, a scallop-fishing vessel docked in New Bedford, for an Captain Kevin Souza prepared the Pamela Ann, a scallop-fishing vessel docked in New Bedford, for a February excursion.Clare Fieseler/Canary Media As Souza prepared to leave the New Bedford port in February to go help Ørsted build giant wind turbines in the ocean, something Trump swore would not happen during his term, he explained his support for the president. “Trust me, I want Trump to ‘drill, drill, drill.’ I’m all for it,” said Souza of the president’s plans to expand oil and gas production.  But he still thinks offshore wind is necessary to get more power onto New England’s grid and lower energy costs. Experts say that the federal permitting process for offshore wind in America takes too long—about four years. But, in the Northeast region, according to energy analyst Christian Roselund, finishing the deployment of the offshore wind projects already in the permitting pipeline will be much faster than starting up new nuclear or fossil-gas power plants.   “Once we ‘drill, drill, drill,’ you’re still gonna need more electricity,” Souza said. “Where are you gonna get it? My electric bill at my house is stupid high!” > “When you put that first wind turbine up there,” Avila recalls other fisherman > saying to him, “we’re going to hang you from it!” Most of the fishermen in New Bedford are Trump supporters, he insisted. Morris, who also voted for Trump, agreed. Overall, Trump won 46% of the city’s votes in last November’s election—a much higher proportion than his Massachusetts statewide total of 36.5%. The “TRUMP 2024” flags flown from the dozens of scallop boats docked across New Bedford’s port underscored the point. A few of those Trump flag-flying boats even work for the offshore wind companies, Morris claims. ThePamela Ann, for its part,does not have a Trump flag.  “I support Trump even though I know he’s against wind. … I believe this will still be around,” said Souza, gesturing toward the ocean, where somewhere over the horizon an array of wind towers was being erected. “He’s gonna see the light.”  Trump, of course, has not seen the light—though he did revoke his stop-work order against Empire Wind.  After being grounded for a month, Sea Services fishermen began operations on Empire Wind again in early June, when the project resumed at-sea work. The co-op’s members are helping Equinor’s construction vessels lay boulders on the seafloor to stabilize all 54 wind towers that will be raised over the next two years and eventually supply much-needed carbon-free power to New York City.  But nothing is certain. When the Trump administration unpaused the project, it left open the door to stopping it again—or killing it altogether. A May letter from the Interior Department to Equinor noted that it is still conducting an “ongoing review” to determine if the project’s permits were “rushed” and therefore illegitimate in the eyes of the Trump administration.  Meanwhile, a coalition of a dozen fishing companies and several anti-offshore wind groups typically allied with Trump sued the administration on June 3, just days before Empire Wind restarted at-sea construction, in an attempt to reinstate the stop-work order. The move came weeks after wind opponents asked Trump to also pause Revolution Wind, one of the more lucrative contracts Sea Services holds. In his opposition to offshore wind, Trump has positioned himself as a defender of the commercial fishing industry, claiming falsely at a May 2024 campaign rally in Wildwood, New Jersey, for example, that the turbines “cause tremendous problems with the fish and the whales.”   But for the increasing number of fishermen working with offshore wind companies, halting the industry would not help—it would crush a financial lifeline.  Not long ago, in 2017, Sea Services captain Rodney Avila remembers being one of the only fishers in New Bedford willing to seize this lifeline. He recalled with a laugh what a long-time fisherman friend said to him then: “When you put that first wind turbine up there…we’re going to hang you from it!” Times have changed. In New Bedford alone, almost 50 local fishing vessels have performed some kind of safety or scouting work for offshore wind projects. At least one captain lowers his MAGA-supporting flag before setting out to work on the projects the president has sworn to stop, according to Avila. He said politics has always been tangled up in fishing. And work is work.  “They don’t care whether it’s red, or blue, or whatever color…They don’t care,” Avila shrugged, while sipping coffee inside a Dunkin’. Five scalloping boats bobbed on calm water just beyond the parking lot. “It’s money that they need to support their families, wherever it comes from.”

This story was originally published by Vox.com, and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The Supreme Court handed down an opinion on Thursday that reads like it was written by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, the authors of an influential book arguing that excessive regulation of land use and development has made it too difficult to build housing and infrastructure in the United States. (Ezra is also a co-founder of Vox.) Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, Colorado concerns a proposed railroad line that would run through 88 miles of Utah, connecting the state’s oil-rich Uinta Basin to the broader national rail network. The line is expected to make it easier to transport crude oil extracted in this region to refineries elsewhere in the country. The court’s opinion in Seven County places strict new limits on a federal law that a lower court relied upon to prevent this line from being constructed—limits that should make it easier for developers to build large-scale projects. Before this rail project can move forward, it must be approved by the Surface Transportation Board. Under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), moreover, this board is required to produce an environmental impact statement, which identifies any significant environmental effects from the rail project as well as ways to mitigate those effects. > The court’s concurring opinions mirror a growing bipartisan consensus that > NEPA has become too much of a burden to development. Significantly, as Justice Brett Kavanaugh explains in the Court’s Seven County opinion, “NEPA imposes no substantive environmental obligations or restrictions” on the board or on any other federal agency. It requires agencies to identify potential environmental harms that could arise out of development projects that they approve, but once those harms are identified in an environmental impact statement, the agency is free to decide that the benefits of the project outweigh those harms. Nevertheless, NEPA is often a significant hindrance to land development because litigants who oppose a particular project—be they environmental groups or just private citizens looking to shut development down—can often sue, claiming that the federal agency that must approve the project did not prepare an adequate environmental impact statement. As a result, Kavanaugh writes in his Seven County opinion, “litigation-averse agencies…take ever more time…to prepare ever longer EISs for future projects.” Indeed, the Seven County case itself is a poster child for just how burdensome NEPA can be. The Surface Transportation Board produced an environmental impact statement that is more than 3,600 pages, and it goes into great detail about the rail line’s potential impact on topics ranging from water quality to vulnerable species, such as the greater sage-grouse. Nevertheless, a federal appeals court blocked the project because it determined that this 3,600-page report did not adequately discuss the environmental impacts of making it easier to extract oil from the Uinta Basin. The appeals court reasoned that the agency needed to consider not just the direct environmental impacts of the rail line itself but also the impact of increased drilling and oil refining after the project is complete. All eight of the justices that heard the Seven County case (Justice Neil Gorsuch was recused) agreed that this appeals court decision was wrong, although Kavanaugh’s majority opinion for himself and his Republican colleagues is broader than a separate opinion by Justice Sonia Sotomayor. The justices’ agreement in Seven County, moreover, mirrors a growing bipartisan consensus that NEPA has become too much of a burden to development. As Kavanaugh notes in his opinion, President Joe Biden signed legislation in 2023 that limits environmental impact statements to 150 pages and requires them to be completed in two years or less. Still, Kavanaugh’s opinion goes even further, repeatedly instructing courts to be deferential to an agency’s decision to greenlight a project after producing an environmental impact statement. One striking thing about Kavanaugh’s opinion is how closely it mirrors the rhetoric of liberal proponents of an “abundance” agenda, which seeks to raise American standards of living by promoting large infrastructure projects. These proponents often claim that well-meaning laws intended to advance liberal values can have the opposite effect when they impose too many burdens on developers. As Kavanaugh argues, NEPA has “transformed from a modest procedural requirement into a blunt and haphazard tool” that even stymies clean energy projects ranging “from wind farms to hydroelectric dams, from solar farms to geothermal wells.” Broadly speaking, Kavanaugh’s opinion imposes two limits on future NEPA lawsuits. The first is simply a blunt statement that courts should be highly reluctant to second-guess an agency’s decision that it has conducted an adequate environmental review. As Kavanaugh writes, “the bedrock principle of judicial review in NEPA cases can be stated in a word: Deference.” Kavanaugh also criticizes the appeals court for blocking one project—the Utah rail line—because of the environmental impacts of “geographically separate projects that may be built” as a result of that rail line, such as an oil refinery elsewhere in the country. As Kavanaugh writes, “the effects from a separate project may be factually foreseeable, but that does not mean that those effects are relevant to the agency’s decisionmaking process or that it is reasonable to hold the agency responsible for those effects.” Both Kavanaugh and the separate opinion by Sotomayor also point to the fact that “the Board here possesses no regulatory authority over those separate projects.” That is, while the transportation board is tasked with approving rail lines, other agencies are in charge of regulating projects, such as oil wells or refineries. As Sotomayor writes, an agency is not required to consider environmental harms that it has “no authority to prevent.” So Seven County is a fairly significant victory for land developers as well as for traditional libertarians and for liberal proponents of an abundance agenda. It significantly weakens a statute that has long been a bête noire of developers.

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration On a warm July morning in 1943, in the middle of World War II, a thick cloud of acrid smoke blanketed downtown Los Angeles, turning its clear blue skies into an inscrutable brown haze that left Angelenos with burning eyes, noses, and throats. The aerial assault was so intense it sparked rumors of chemical warfare as city officials scrambled to identify the source of one of the city’s first bouts with smog. Within a decade, a scientist at the California Institute of Technology had isolated the irritant in smog as ozone and identified the primary culprit: hydrocarbon emissions from oil refineries and automobiles, which interacted with compounds in the atmosphere and sunlight to form the health-harming gas.  The unique conditions that shaped Los Angeles—a steady influx of people attracted to a sunny city built for cars and ringed by pollutant-trapping mountains—made it the nation’s smog capital. They also prompted state officials to pass the nation’s first tailpipe emissions and air pollution standards in the 1960s.  Congress, in turn, recognized that California “demonstrated compelling and extraordinary circumstances sufficiently different from the Nation as a whole to justify standards on automobile emissions which may, from time to time, need to be more stringent than national standards.”  In other words, Congress gave California the authority under the Clean Air Act to ask the Environmental Protection Agency for a waiver from rules that bar states from passing stricter air and climate pollution rules than the federal government. But President Donald Trump moved to revoke California’s special status by executive order on his first day in office, as he tried to do in his first term. On Wednesday and Thursday, the Republican-dominated House, with some Democrats, voted to pass three resolutions to revoke the waivers that underlie California’s nation-leading climate and air pollution rules through means that, critics say, abuse the law. “Trump Republicans are hellbent on making California smoggy again,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a statement. Over several days on the House floor, Republicans, who once championed states’ rights, repeated Trump’s talking points about President Biden’s “radical agenda,” California’s “EV mandate” and decision-making by “unelected bureaucrats” to justify preventing California from enacting the nation’s toughest vehicle-emissions standards. Democrats countered that Republicans’ resolutions assume illegitimate authority to assail California’s ability to pursue ambitious climate policies and protect its residents from air that is perpetually among the worst in the nation.  Maxine Dexter, an Oregon Democrat, said she opposed the resolutions “that strip away a state’s right to protect its residents from dangerous air pollution.” More than 156 million people in this country live in counties with dangerous levels of ozone and particulate matter, Dexter said. “And yet, instead of empowering states to raise the bar on clean air, Republicans are telling them to stand down.” The transportation sector—which includes passenger and commercial vehicles and their fuels—accounts for half of California’s greenhouse gas emissions and 80 percent of its harmful smog-causing pollutants.  On Monday, members of the House Rules Committee set the stage for how Republicans planned to subvert California’s ambitious climate policies. The committee, which controls which bills go to the floor and the terms of debate, considered three joint resolutions to use the Congressional Review Act (CRA), to provide “congressional disapproval” of the waivers—which the Republican majority called rules.  The decision by the Biden administration to grant a waiver to California “is part of an orchestrated campaign against fossil fuels by EPA bureaucrats who act without regard for the inflation it would impose on Americans,” said rules chair Virginia Foxx (R-NC). The waiver has been “exploited time and again by environmental activists” to set standards for the rest of the country, Foxx said.  “It gives California unilateral authority to cram its ‘comply or die’ zero-emission truck rule down the throats of every American,” Foxx said. “It would decimate the trucking industry, lead prices of basic commodities Americans rely on to skyrocket and burden hard-working families and truckers everywhere across the nation.” Regulatory requirements in California, now the fourth-largest economy in the world, can impact markets nationwide. But states are free to adopt or reject California standards as they see fit under certain conditions, in keeping with Clean Air Act amendments passed under Republican President George H.W. Bush in 1990. Several other states have chosen to adopt California’s light- and heavy-duty vehicle regulations. President George H.W. Bush signs the Clean Air Act in the East Room of the White House in 1990.George Bush Presidential Library and Museum If Republicans cared about high prices for consumers, they would address the “economic and constitutional crisis facing American families,” said Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández, a New Mexico Democrat. “One hundred days of economic pain, as Trump’s on again, off again temper tantrum of tariffs tank the dollar, drive up prices, destroy the markets, and threaten a recession.” In a letter to House leadership on Friday, automakers asked Congress to repeal the waiver supporting California’s Advanced Clean Cars II program, which requires all new passenger cars, trucks and SUVs sold in the state to be zero-emissions vehicles by 2035. In the letter, the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, the traditional auto industry’s main trade group, urged the House “to repeal the Environmental Protection Agency rule permitting California and affiliated states to ban the sale of new gas vehicles.” A ban on the sale of new gas vehicles “will increase automobile prices and reduce vehicle choices for consumers across the country,” the alliance wrote. “These CRAs are a pretty naked quid pro quo,” said Rep. Mary Scanlon, a Pennsylvania Democrat on the Rules Committee. “Republicans are giving a massive regulatory handout to their donors in the auto industry.” The automobile industry spent more than $85 million on lobbying last year, according to OpenSecrets, a nonpartisan nonprofit group that tracks money in politics.  The CRA requires federal agencies to submit rules to Congress for review before they take effect. Resolutions of disapproval allow legislators to use the CRA to overturn recently issued regulations. If both the House and Senate vote against a rule, it cannot be reissued in “substantially the same form.” Yet waivers do not fit the definition of a rule and so are not subject to the CRA, the Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan congressional watchdog, determined in 2023 and again in March. The Senate parliamentarian arrived at the same conclusion earlier this month.  The Senate parliamentarian upheld decades of precedent and confirmed that California’s waivers are not subject to the Congressional Review Act, said Sen. Alex Padilla, a California Democrat, in a statement. He called attempts to use the CRA “a clearly bogus attempt to undercut California’s climate leadership.” What’s more, experts say, there is no legal basis for rescinding a Clean Air Act waiver once it’s been issued. > “California emission standards are a matter of life and death .” When Congress passed the Air Quality Act of 1967, and amended it as the Clean Air Act in 1970, it prohibited states from adopting their own air pollutant emissions standards for new vehicles and their engines. But since California had already passed its own vehicle pollution standards before the 1967 act was passed, Congress allowed the state to seek waivers from the EPA. Over nearly 60 years, California has received more than 100 waivers. The California waiver was originally viewed as essential to getting the federal law passed, with the stipulation that federal law would take precedence with exceptions for California under specific circumstances that were submitted to the EPA for review, said Ted Lamm, associate director of the Center for Law, Energy and the Environment at the University of California, Berkeley. “Every prior administration has followed the law and issued the waiver under circumstances where it is required and has not contemplated the act of rescinding it,” Lamm said. Revoking a waiver, he said, “doesn’t functionally exist as a legal concept.” The waiver was created to address California’s unique circumstances of not only pioneering and leading the country in the creation of air-quality and air-emissions control policy, but also of having very specific air-pollution challenges relating to vehicles, geography and industry, Lamm said. “It’s a bedrock part of the Clean Air Act.” Dave Clegern, a spokesperson for California’s Air Resources Board, which develops and oversees the state’s clean-vehicle rules, said there’s no precedent to use the CRA to revoke California’s waivers. “By using the Congressional Review Act, the Trump EPA is doing what no EPA under Democratic or Republican administrations in 50 years has ever done, and what the US Government Accountability Office has confirmed does not comply with the law,” Clegern said. Nonetheless, Congressional Republicans—aided by a handful of Democrats on Wednesday and 35 on Thursday—voted to use that law to cancel three waivers for clean vehicle programs issued under the Biden administration that allowed California to enact stringent car and truck emission standards. Two Democrats from conservative-leaning California districts and nearly three dozen from Ohio to Texas voted to block the waiver underlying the state’s plan to ban gas-powered vehicles by 2035. “The president has unlocked America’s energy potential, or at least taken a giant step to do so, reopening 625 million acres for drilling, withdrawing from the disastrous Paris Climate Agreement, improving new LNG projects,” said Rep. Chip Roy, a Texas Republican who serves on the Rules Committee, Tuesday on the House floor. “And here before us today, we have what we call CRAs, of the Congressional Review Act, and the purpose of these is to undo burdensome Biden regulations.” > “If other states don’t like California’s approach, they don’t need to follow > it…But Congress shouldn’t intervene.” Roy told the Rules Committee that he and his Republican colleagues are using the CRAs to clean up “the disastrous mess of the four years of the Biden administration.” The CRA gives Congress the power to “look at the ridiculous regulations put in at the last part of the administration,” Roy said, which he called “radical leftist policies.”  Yet Democrats on the Rules Committee pointed out that the three agency actions the Republican resolutions are targeting are not rules. “They’re not covered by the Congressional Review Act,” said Scanlon, the Pennsylvania Democrat.  “While Congress has the unambiguous right to pass legislation to modify or cancel an agency action, what Congress can’t do is use the Congressional Review Act to nullify these three agency actions,” Scanlon said. Several Democrats argued on the House Floor that attacks on the waivers are not only illegal but would thwart California’s ability to protect its citizens by implementing rules designed to improve air quality and public health.  Mark DeSaulnier, a California Democrat, called the Republicans’ attempt to use the CRA to kill California’s waivers “blatantly illegal.”  Zoe Lofgren, chair of the California Democratic Congressional delegation, called them “completely illegitimate,” citing the GAO and the Senate parliamentarian’s decisions.  Air pollution is responsible for killing millions of people worldwide a year, researchers reported in the journal BMJ in 2023. Fossil fuels are a primary source of these pollutants, they said, pointing to an urgent need for a rapid and just transition to cleaner energy.  A coalition of health, business, labor, faith, environmental, and consumer protection groups have urged representatives and senators to oppose the misuse of the CRA to target “ineligible policies” in multiple open letters to Congress. “This vote is an unprecedented and reckless attack on states’ legal authority to address the vehicle pollution causing asthma, lung disease, and heart conditions,” said Kathy Harris, director of clean vehicles at the Natural Resources Defense Council, in a statement. “If other states don’t like California’s approach, they don’t need to follow it,” Harris said. “But Congress shouldn’t intervene and try to block state leaders from protecting their residents from dangerous pollution.” Over several days of debate on the House floor, several Democrats urged their colleagues to consider the health and well being of their fellow Americans. “Air pollution is directly linked with increased rates of asthma, cancer, and other diseases, and parental and childhood exposure to pollution is linked to long-term health risks adversely impacting babies and young children,” said Lofgren, who represents Silicon Valley. “Just one of California’s standards that would be blocked, Advanced Clean Cars II, is estimated to reduce health-care costs by $13 billion over the next 25 years.” Doris Matsui, a Democrat representing Sacramento, said California has the same “compelling and extraordinary circumstances” today that justified stronger emission standards under the Clean Air Act in 1970. “According to the American Lung Association’s 2025 state of the air report, five of the top ten most polluted cities in America are in California, and that includes my district.” And California experiences some of the most severe impacts from climate change-fueled wildfires, atmospheric rivers and droughts, Matusi said.  “In Sacramento, we have faced deadly flooding from more intense winter storms as well as longer and more extreme droughts while the foothills above Sacramento are still scarred from the many wildfires we’ve seen in recent years,” she said. “California emission standards are a matter of life and death for my constituents.” It’s difficult to imagine in today’s polarized political climate, but environmental protection used to be a bipartisan issue. The modern Clean Air Act was passed under President Richard Nixon, a California Republican, and then considerably strengthened in 1990 with penalties for polluters who failed to comply under another Republican, President George H.W. Bush.  At a signing ceremony in November 1990, Bush called the amendments “a long-awaited and long-needed chapter in our environmental history” that would usher in a new era for clean air.  Bush praised the bipartisan efforts of Congress in collaboration with industry and environmental leaders to pass what he hailed as “the most significant air pollution legislation in our nation’s history.” “In passing the Clean Air Act on an overwhelmingly bipartisan basis, Congress explicitly granted California the ability to set more stringent vehicle emissions standards to protect public health from California’s unique air quality challenges,” said California’s Padilla. Over time, as air-quality, emissions and climate challenges became more complex, Republican administrations have shifted and tried to deny the waiver, said UC Berkeley’s Lamm, starting with Bush’s son, George W., in 2008. “But what’s happening now is a totally different, unprecedented thing that really has no basis in the law,” Lamm said. “To try to actually rescind a waiver that’s been issued, the law does not contemplate that. It’s not how the statute works.” The administration’s attempts to undercut a system of governance designed by elected representatives of the people is “extralegal,” Lamm said, and “simply contrary to the simple principles of government.”

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The world used clean power sources to meet more than 40 percent of its electricity demand last year for the first time since the 1940s, figures show. A report by the energy thinktank Ember said the milestone was powered by a boom in solar power capacity, which has doubled in the last three years. The report found that solar farms had been the world’s fastest-growing source of energy for the last 20 consecutive years. Phil MacDonald, Ember’s managing director, said: “Solar power has become the engine of the global energy transition. Paired with battery storage, solar is set to be an unstoppable force. As the fastest-growing and largest source of new electricity, it is critical in meeting the world’s ever-increasing demand for electricity.” Overall, solar power remains a relatively small part of the global energy system. It made up almost 7 percent of the world’s electricity last year, according to Ember, while wind power made up just over 8 percent of the global power system. The fast-growing technologies remain dwarfed by hydro power, which has remained relatively steady in recent years, and made up 14 percent of the world’s electricity in 2024. Hydro power is one of the modern world’s oldest renewable energy technologies, and made up a large proportion of global electricity in the 1940s—when the power system was about 50 times smaller than it is today. The continuing growth of solar means clean power—including nuclear and bioenergy—is on track to expand faster than the world’s overall electricity demand, according to Ember. This should mean fossil fuels beginning to be squeezed out of the global power system. Ember had previously predicted that 2023 would be the year in which emissions from electricity reached a peak, after a plateau in the first half of the year. Climate experts hoped then that emissions would begin to fall, but a series of heatwaves across the globe ignited a surge in demand for electricity to power air conditioning and refrigeration systems, which caused fuel electricity to grow by 1.4 percent that year. The report, which accounted for 93 percent of the global electricity market across 88 countries, found that the surge in demand pushed emissions from the global power sector up by 1.6 percent to an all-time high last year. MacDonald said heatwaves were unlikely to ignite a similar demand surge in the year ahead—but the increasing use of electricity to power artificial intelligence, data centers, electric vehicles, and heat pumps was expected to play a bigger role in the world’s appetite for electricity. Combined, these technologies accounted for a 0.7 percent increase in global electricity demand in 2024, double what they contributed five years ago, the report found. “The world is watching how technologies like AI and EVs will drive electricity demand,” MacDonald said. “It’s clear that booming solar and wind are comfortably set to deliver, and those expecting fossil fuel generation to keep rising will be disappointed.”

Cities looking to eliminate fossil fuels in buildings have notched a decisive court victory. Last week, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit brought by plumbing and building trade groups against a New York City ban on natural gas in new buildings. The decision is the first to explicitly disagree with a previous ruling that struck down Berkeley, California’s first-in-the-nation gas ban. That order, issued by the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals in 2023 and upheld again last year, prompted cities across the country to withdraw or delay laws modeled after the Berkeley ordinance.  While New York City’s law functions differently from Berkeley’s, legal experts say that this month’s decision provides strong legal footing for all types of local policies to phase out gas in buildings—and could encourage cities to once again take ambitious action. > “This ruling demonstrates that there’s absolutely no reason to interpret the > Berkeley decision so broadly.” “It’s a clear win in that regard, because the 9th Circuit decision has had a really chilling effect on local governments,” said Amy Turner, director of the Cities Climate Law Initiative at Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. “Now there’s something else to point to, and a good reason for hope for local governments that may have back-burnered their building electrification plans to bring those to the forefront again.” In 2021, New York City adopted Local Law 154, which sets an air emissions limit for indoor combustion of fuels within new buildings. Under the law, the burning of “any substance that emits 25 kilograms or more of carbon dioxide per million British thermal units of energy” is prohibited. That standard effectively bans gas-burning stoves, furnaces, and water heaters, and any other fossil-fuel powered appliances. Instead, real estate developers have to install electric appliances like induction stoves and heat pumps. The policy went into effect in 2024 for buildings under seven stories, and will apply to taller buildings starting in 2027. Berkeley’s law, on the other hand, banned the installation of gas piping in new construction. The first-of-its-kind policy was passed in 2019 and inspired nearly a hundred local governments across the country to introduce similar laws. But the ordinance quickly faced a lawsuit by the California Restaurant Association, which argued that gas stoves were essential for the food service industry. In April 2023, the 9th Circuit court ruled in favor of the restaurant industry, holding that federal energy efficiency standards preempted Berkeley’s policy. In January 2024, a petition by the city of Berkeley to rehear the case on the 9th Circuit was denied. The denial included a detailed dissent by eight of the 29 judges on the 9th Circuit, who argued that the court’s ruling had been decided “erroneously” and “urge[d] any future court” considering the same argument “not to repeat the panel opinion’s mistakes.” Writing a dissent at all is unusual for an action as procedural as denying a rehearing, Turner noted. “It was clearly drafted to give a road map to other courts to find differently than the 9th Circuit did.”  One year later, that’s exactly what happened. In the New York City lawsuit, building industry groups and a union whose members work on gas infrastructure used the same logic that prevailed in the Berkeley case, arguing that the city’s electrification law is preempted by energy efficiency standards under the federal Energy Policy Conservation Act of 1975 (EPCA). This law sets national efficiency standards for major household appliances like furnaces, stoves, and clothes dryers. Under the law, states and cities can’t set their own energy conservation standards that would contradict federal ones. The trade groups argued that EPCA should also preempt any local laws, like New York City’s, that would prevent the use of fossil-fuel powered appliances that meet national standards.  Berkeley’s law, which was struck down by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, banned the installation of gas piping in new construction.Robert Nickelsberg / Getty via Grist “By design, the city set that level so low as to ban all gas and oil appliances,” the groups wrote in their complaint. “The city’s gas ban thus prohibits all fuel gas appliances, violating federal law” and “presents a significant threat for businesses in New York City that sell, install, and service gas plumbing and infrastructure.” Citing the 9th Circuit’s dissent, the US District Court for the Southern District of New York dismissed those claims. The plaintiffs’ argument broadens the scope of EPCA beyond reasonable bounds, District Judge Ronnie Abrams wrote in the court’s opinion. Regulating fuel use within certain buildings is standard practice in states and cities, she noted: New York City, for example, has banned the indoor use of kerosene space heaters for decades. “Were plaintiffs correct about the scope of EPCA, these vital safety regulations would likewise be preempted—an absurd result that the court must avoid,” Abrams wrote. The decision could help reassure some states and cities that withdrew electrification plans after the Berkeley case, said Dror Ladin, a senior attorney at Earthjustice, a nonprofit that submitted an amicus brief on behalf of local environmental groups in the lawsuit. “This ruling demonstrates that there’s absolutely no reason to interpret the Berkeley decision so broadly,” he said. The argument brought forth by trade groups “is one that would bar a whole host of health and safety regulations, and alter the power of cities and states in a way that we’ve never seen in this country.” By agreeing with the 9th Circuit dissent’s interpretation of EPCA, last week’s decision bolsters all types of electrification policies, including the one in New York City and those modeled after Berkeley, Turner noted. “This decision we’ve just gotten from the Southern District is more broadly protective,” she said. “Even if the air emissions route is not right for a city for whatever reason, other variations of a building electrification requirement or incentive could pass muster.” The trade groups behind the lawsuit have said they will appeal the decision. Meanwhile, legal challenges using the same arguments brought against Berkeley’s gas ban have been launched against New York’s statewide building code and electrification policies in places like Denver; Montgomery County, Maryland; and Washington, DC.  Judges in those cases will inevitably refer to the Berkeley decision and last week’s ruling by the Southern District of New York, said Ladin—and he hopes they’ll give more weight to the latter. “Berkeley is not a well-reasoned decision, and this judge saw right through it, and I think many other judges will see through it too.”

This story was originally published by Yale e360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. In the first six weeks of the new Trump administration, it’s become clear that the president intends to undo not just Joe Biden’s environmental legacy, but an entire generation’s worth of action on climate change. The administration has announced it is withdrawing from the Paris Agreement. It has frozen Inflation Reduction Act grants, stopped issuing permits for offshore wind development, and declared an “energy emergency” to boost fossil fuel production. The White House appears to be preparing to go after the Environmental Protection Agency’s 2009 “endangerment finding,” which undergirds EPA regulations on greenhouse gas emissions, while cutting EPA spending by 65 percent. How should environmentalists respond? Activist and author Bill McKibben has been a leading voice on climate change since 1989, when he published The End of Nature, the first book on the subject aimed at a general audience. McKibben spoke to e360 contributing writer Elizabeth Kolbert about the urgency of the moment, the role of protest, the future of clean energy, and where he sees glimmers of hope. If you care about the future of the planet, what do you do at a time like this? I think it’s fair to despair a little bit. I mean, we should acknowledge what a remarkable moment it is that the government of the most powerful country on Earth, at least for the moment, is rejecting flat-out the science that’s been developed over many decades, often by scientists working for the government, about the single most dangerous thing that’s ever happened in human history. And the level of irresponsibility, indeed just craziness, is off the charts. The Inflation Reduction Act represented the first significant act by the US Congress to deal with climate science. It was a far from perfect bill, but powerful in many ways. So powerful that the fossil fuel industry needed to do what it could to shut it down and to shut down the energy transition to the extent that it could. And hence, the oil industry spent unprecedented sums of money—the number I saw most recently was $455 million—on the last election cycle. > “I sense in everyone’s despair and upset a sort of hunger for some kind of > joyful possibility, for something to rally around.” I’d say the two slight saving graces are, one, as the US retreats from leadership here, there are others, especially the Chinese, who have been stepping up to fill this vacuum. I have a lot of problems with the Chinese government and don’t particularly look forward to their hegemony. But on issues around energy, they’ve been more responsible than we have and built out most of the world’s clean energy at this point. And the second saving grace is that though they can delay this energy transition, they can’t stop it. It’s rooted in the simple fact that we now live on a planet, as of the last three or four years, where the cheapest way to produce energy is to point a sheet of glass at the sun. And that won’t change. So, Americans may be denied some of the fruits of that technological revolution, and it will be delayed in ways that make the climate crisis far worse, but it’s not as if [the Trump administration] has complete control of this situation. The moratorium that the Biden administration put on export permits for liquefied natural gas was a big climate win. You were very much a part of that. But now Trump seems to be using the threat of tariffs to get countries to increase their liquefied gas imports from the US. This scares me a ton. It’s one thing for us to derail our own energy future, and it’s another to try and derail everybody else with what is essentially a shakedown. My guess is that it’ll work in the short run, and it’ll backfire in the long run. Europeans have figured out in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine that it was foolish to be dependent on the good graces of Vladimir Putin for their energy supply. Anyone who puts themselves more under the thumb of Donald Trump than they need to is a fool. You’ve indicated you are worried about civil disobedience as a form of climate activism, because instead of looking at a night in jail, people might now be looking at a year or more of jail, as some activists in the UK have gotten. I think that we need to continue to use all the tools that we have, and we will. But I do think that at the moment civil disobedience of the sort that we’ve been doing a lot of in recent years is unlikely to be particularly effective. I think that the Trump-MAGA world welcomes resistance of that kind. They like those kinds of fights. It energizes them. They’re cruel, and cruelty really is their kink in a lot of ways. We’re gearing up to do this big national day of action in September. It’s called Sun Day. I think it’s going to be a huge celebration of possibility. And I think that that’s more dangerous right now to the MAGA agenda. They depend on people staying in a fearful crouch, convinced that whatever they have is under threat from somebody. And the idea of Sun Day, instead, is that we’re on the edge of this extraordinary possibility for solar. I’m excited about figuring out how we do huge parades of e-bikes, and inaugurate dozens of community solar farms, and have thousands of Americans opening their homes so their neighbors can see their heat pumps. And get millions of people who already have solar panels to put a green light in the window that night to tell everybody that they’re powered by the sun. I sense in everyone’s despair and upset—all of which is completely justified and correct—a sort of hunger for some kind of joyful possibility, for something to rally around as well as stuff to rally against. The Inflation Reduction Act put billions of dollars towards clean energy manufacturing. So far something like 80 percent of the manufacturing investments spurred on by the law have gone to red states. Do you see any payoff for that with support for clean energy in those states? I don’t know. The laws of normal political gravity in America don’t seem to be operating. That’s why we’re doing the Sun Day thing. We need to build again, and maybe from the ground up, a real constituency demanding action. And it’s got to include workers at that factory. It’s got to include solar panel installers. It’s got to include local officials who would like to keep energy money close to home instead of sending it off to Saudi Arabia. There’s some hope that climate action will continue at the state and local level. Do you see that happening? There are lots and lots of things that localities can do to make things much easier. For example, it costs about three times as much to put solar on your roof in this country as it does in Europe or Australia. The panels are the same price. The soft costs, which are mostly around permitting and marketing, are much, much higher because we have this endless welter of regulations that gets in the way of what should be a very simple act: just giving someone a permit, if they should even require one, to put a solar panel, a safe thing, on their roof. And so those are the kinds of barriers that we can continue to knock away in blue states and blue cities and really in some red states. Last year in Germany, a million and a half people put solar panels on their balconies of their apartments. And in many cases, those were supplying 20 percent of the electricity they used. You can’t do that in this country. You can’t go to IKEA the way you can in Germany and just buy a solar panel and hang it from your balcony and plug it in. It’s illegal. And those are the kind of things that can and should shift.  One of the things that the new administration really has taken a sledgehammer to is every environmental justice program. [Environmental justice] manages to combine the things they hate most in the world: clean energy and sensitivity to American history. It’s truly terrible. Just in terms of sheer honesty, we need to keep reckoning with the fact that the people who’ve done the least to cause the problems that we face suffer the most from them, here and around the world. And because these are people who are paying a huge percentage of their income for energy, in a rational world, that’s where we’d be concentrating this stuff first. We also seem to be looking at the government potentially not doing any climate research under Trump. At this point we’ll be very lucky if we keep operating the observatory at Mauna Loa [in Hawaii, which measures global carbon dioxide levels]. It has provided the single most important scientific instrument in the history of the world. But if there’s any good news in this, it’s that most of the really crucial science has been done. It’s certainly a kick in the teeth to watch what’s going to happen at NOAA and everyplace else. But my prediction is that the­­ Chinese will pick up a lot of this slack, because they’ve understood that this is their ticket to some kind of moral high ground on this planet. > “Our species is now fully capable…of moving from an energy source that’s > concentrated in a few hands in a few places to one that’s diffuse and > ubiquitous.” The US has always had an uneven role in global climate negotiations, waffling in and out. But this time it feels different. You can make an argument that it might not be the worst thing in the world to have the US out of the way, because we’re the reason that Kyoto didn’t work, we’re a big part of the reason that Copenhagen didn’t work, just on and on and on. And that’s a kick in the teeth because America is really where we learned about the climate crisis—it was from great research. And America is where the first wind turbine and the first solar cells and other key things came from. But, as I say, the slight silver lining to that cloud is we’ve been in many ways a stumbling block as much as a boost to getting anything done. I’m wondering if you are feeling at all hopeful right now. In a world where there are a lot of bad things going on, the one overwhelming good thing is this sudden emergence of this possibility [of clean energy]—a possibility that I think most people haven’t fully recognized yet. Even those of us who want it still refer to it as alternative energy, and that’s no longer the truth. It’s not the Whole Foods of energy, pricey and a bit nice. It’s the Costco of energy: cheap, available in bulk on the shelf, ready to go. Our species is now fully capable, in short order, of moving from an energy source that’s concentrated in a few hands in a few places to one that’s diffuse and ubiquitous, available everywhere. And I think that’s the most subversive and liberating possibility that we really have at the moment on this planet. And in the places that have started to do the work, we get the sense of what’s possible. What are some of those places? California last year used 25 percent less natural gas than it did the year before to generate electricity. They reached a tipping point. They have enough batteries and enough solar panels out there that day after day they’re supplying more than 100 percent of their electricity renewably. And Texas is now putting up clean energy faster than California. Pakistanis over the last three years imported enough solar panels to build out the equivalent of half their national electric grid. Truly amazing what happened inside of 12 months just because they had access to a lot of cheap Chinese solar panels. The same thing seems to be happening in parts of southern Africa. And so those numbers—25 percent less fossil fuel in a year—those are numbers big enough to take a bite out of the 3 degrees Celsius [of warming] that we’re aimed at right now. And I think this is the only way forward. I do not think humans are going to change their behaviors in large numbers in short order in ways that will reduce our emissions. I think this is the path.

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Days before President Donald Trump returned to the Oval Office and took actions to stall the transition to clean energy, a disaster unfolded on the other side of the country that may have an outsize effect on the pace of the transition. A fire broke out January 16 at the Moss Landing Energy Storage Facility in California, one of the largest battery energy storage systems in the world. The fire raged through the weekend, forcing local officials to evacuate nearby homes and close roads. Battery storage is an essential part of the transition away from fossil fuels. It works in tandem with solar and wind power to provide electricity during periods when the renewable resources aren’t available. But lithium-ion batteries, the most common technology used in storage systems, are flammable. And if they catch fire, it can be difficult to extinguish. This month’s fire is the latest and largest of several at the Moss Landing site in recent years, and I expect that it will become the main example opponents of carbon-free electricity use to try to stop battery development in other places. “This is really a Three Mile Island event for this industry,” said Monterey County Supervisor Glenn Church at a January 17 news conference. He was referring to the 1979 incident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania. The partial meltdown led to panic across the region and helped to cement the idea that nuclear power was unsafe. > “There are some real challenges in protecting batteries in indoor > installations.” I’ve been to enough local public hearings on energy projects to know that I’m going to spend years hearing Church’s quote used to oppose any battery project, even ones that have little in common with Moss Landing in terms of design and technology. My initial reaction is that Church is justified in being upset that the operator of the plant, Vistra Corp., has been unable to prevent this string of safety incidents. I don’t want to minimize the disruption, damage, and constituent fears to which he is responding. (Vistra, based in Texas, didn’t respond to a request for comment.) The battery storage facility is on the site of a closed power plant, and it’s right next to a natural gas power plant that is still operating. The storage facility was built in three phases, the first two going online in 2021 with a combined capacity of 400 megawatts, and the third phase going online in 2023 with capacity of 350 megawatts. The batteries are built to run for up to four hours before needing to be recharged. The problems at Moss Landing could be used to boost safety fears about battery storage in general, with grave consequences for the energy transition. Or officials could look specifically at what aspects of Moss Landing’s design contributed to its fire risk, and use those lessons to make existing and future projects safer. To get a better sense of what can be done, I spoke with Matthew Paiss, a technical advisor for battery materials and systems at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. He advises on safety issues, but it’s a second career for him: He spent most of his adult life as a firefighter. “I have a really strange background,” he said. He knows the Moss Landing plant well, having seen it inside and out as part of his work at the lab. He lives in Santa Cruz, close enough to Moss Landing that he could see flickering light in the sky last week as the fire burned. He began his description of the fire risk by explaining “thermal runaway,” a self-heating process in which a lithium-ion battery is damaged or misused and triggers a chemical reaction that releases highly flammable gases and lots of heat. If there is a spark or other flame, the gases can serve as fuel for a fire that can spread from one module to entire racks of batteries. Sprinkler systems may be able to help in an early stage, but many of these fires are too powerful and burn too hot to be suppressed. So how do system designers reduce the chances of thermal runaway? A big factor is the system design. Many, if not most, battery storage systems being built today look like rows of shipping containers that sit outdoors. These “cabinets,” as they’re called, can help to reduce the chances of large fires because flames would need to burn through the container’s shell and then leap across an outdoor space and burn through the shell of a nearby container. That’s not easy and it rarely happens. In contrast, the systems that have now caught fire multiple times at Moss Landing are indoor installations, set up inside the shell of a building left over from the natural gas plant that used to be on the site. The project is an unusually large example of repurposing an old building for energy storage. “There are some real challenges in protecting batteries in indoor installations,” Paiss said. > “I like making decisions based on data, and I encourage others to do the > same.” He said that writers of safety codes have been reluctant to prohibit indoor installations, but he thinks there is a growing body of evidence that designers of these systems need to take steps to offset the potential for higher fire risk. One strategy would be to have greater separation within the buildings, so there are hard barriers to reduce the spread of fire. This would also allow a portion of the facility to continue to operate even while another part is damaged and offline. Another significant fire risk factor is battery chemistry. The part of Moss Landing that caught fire housed lithium-ion batteries that used a nickel-manganese-cobalt (NMC) technology. This kind of battery has high energy density, which is good in terms of the amount of energy that can be stored, but has downsides in terms of heat tolerance. “The higher the energy density, the spicier” it can be when damaged, Paiss said. NMC batteries have lost market share in favor of lithium iron phosphate, or LFP, a chemistry that has lower energy density. Among the other tradeoffs is that LFP can produce more flammable gas than NMC, although the severity of the fires is often less. “One consistent thing you can say is when you go down in energy density, you increase in safety,” Paiss said. “It’s safer because it can tolerate higher temperatures, and that’s a good thing. And when it does fail, it doesn’t necessarily produce a lot of arcing and sparking in flames right away.” I asked what he wanted to still learn about this most recent fire. “I like making decisions based on data, and I encourage others to do the same,” he said. “I think one of the most important datasets that we need to see is whether or not there was any toxic emissions that were actually measurable, either airborne as far down the smoke column as could be measured or where people were, as well as any surface contamination.” (The US Environmental Protection Agency said on Wednesday that its air monitoring of the site during and after the fire showed “no risk to public health” from the incident, based on testing for hydrogen fluoride and particulate matter.) Just like I expect this fire to be a topic at public hearings about proposed systems across the country, Paiss expects it to be a topic at gatherings of officials and experts who set safety codes. “I think that the question that will be on a lot of discussions in upcoming code meetings is, should they be allowed indoors? Should we look closer at that and would limiting the installation indoors be an undue burden on electrifying our grid?” he asked.

This story was originally published by Vox.com and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. As President Donald Trump’s first week in office comes to a close, his biggest accomplishments are things many of us anticipated: chaos and confusion. Some of the many executive orders the president has signed do threaten democracy and others endanger the planet. But others simply endorse hypothetical policies with more spectacle than is necessary, like printing out tweets on paper, signing them with a black Sharpie, and holding them up for the world to see. The challenge there, of course, is that only legal scholars know at first glance which of Trump’s executive orders will affect policy — and which will get stuck in court for years to come. Nevertheless, the pieces of paper scare and confuse people. And that confusion will hang around, holding up actual progress for a meaningful amount of time. Trump’s first assault on the fictional electric vehicle “mandate” serves as a perfect example of this strategy. Hours after taking the oath of office, Trump signed an executive order with the cinematic title “Unleashing American Energy.” In it, he outlines several new policies to, as the title implies, “unleash America’s affordable and reliable energy and natural resources.” This is code for: Promote fossil fuel and hobble the renewable energy transition. While Trump targeted EVs in several questionable ways during his first week, let’s focus on one specific thing in this executive order: Section 7, which is titled “Terminate the Green New Deal.” This section goes after programs that support building out the country’s EV charging infrastructure. It specifically targets the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) Formula Program and the Charging and Fueling Infrastructure (CFI) Grant Program, which came out of one of former President Joe Biden’s signature achievements, the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. Together, the two programs allocate $7.5 billion to build out the US charging infrastructure. Trump wants to halt the disbursement of unspent funds from those programs. Trump said he was going to do this on the campaign trail. He falsely claimed that trillions of dollars were unspent, and that his administration would “redirect that money for important projects like roads, bridges, dams and we will not allow it to be spent on meaningless Green New Scam ideas.” So it was ironic when, after Trump issued the executive order taking aim at US infrastructure, the Federal Highway Administration, which builds roads and bridges, halted payments and stopped approving new projects out of an abundance of caution. The Trump administration, to its credit, issued a memorandum a day later, clarifying that the executive order only applied to “funds supporting the ‘Green New Deal.’” The Green New Deal is not the same thing as the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. In fact, while it’s a popular concept, the Green New Deal is not real — it’s not a law at all. Terminating this concept is part of the latest party platform of the GOP, which refers to it as the “Socialist Green New Deal.” Since Trump promised to freeze this EV charging infrastructure funding on the trail, legal experts have explained that he can’t actually shut down these programs. Doing so would likely violate the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, which prevents US presidents from blocking spending that has been appropriated by Congress. President Trump has also promised to repeal that law and give power to his executive branch. But he would need Congress to do that. Trump will also need Congress to shut down the programs providing funding for EV charging infrastructure. Meanwhile, 22 out of the 25 congressional districts receiving federal funding for EV manufacturing are represented by Republicans. So any real assault on the industry might face resistance on Capitol Hill, where Republicans have narrow majorities in both the House and the Senate. “These programs are legally entrenched, widely supported, and designed to withstand political turbulence,” said Kathy Harris, director of clean vehicles, climate, and energy at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “The rhetoric is designed to grab headlines, but the reality is more complicated.” It’s theater, and it’s nothing new for Trump. That said, the fact that Trump decided to attack EVs as one of his first acts in office deserves some concern. He’s effectively setting the tone for his presidency, and that tone is decidedly hostile toward the environment. In addition to freezing funding for EV charging infrastructure, Trump rescinded an executive order from President Biden that called for half of all new vehicles sold to be electric by 2030. Trump also plans to roll back EPA rules issued last year that implement stricter tailpipe emissions standards in an effort to fight climate change. Trump also wants to end EV subsidies and incentives, including the $7,500 tax credit for people who buy new EVs. His executive orders, so far, do none of these things. The auto industry, to its credit, does not seem too fazed by any of this. While some companies have rolled back certain plans ahead of Trump’s victory — Ford notably canceled a three-row electric SUV last August — there’s little doubt that when it comes to transportation, the future will be electrified. It would be foolish to bet on fossil fuels at this point. In Harris’s words, “the American auto industry is not in a bubble, and the global auto industry is moving towards these cleaner vehicles.” Trump is leaving himself a pretty big opening here. By leading with a ban on EV chargers, he’s not taking direct aim at the American auto industry. It almost seems like this executive order is the applause line, and he’s waiting to gauge the audience’s reaction before axing programs, like tax credits, that directly impact carmakers and buyers. And while he’s holding up that order, the signed tweet so to speak, Trump leaves the real stakeholders twisting their caps in their hands, wondering once again if he can really do that. It will take months, if not years, to find clarity here.

Luchia Brown used to bomb around Denver in her Subaru. She had places to be. Brown, 57, works part time helping to run her husband’s engineering firm while managing a rental apartment above their garage and an Airbnb out of a section of the couple’s three-story brick house. She volunteers for nonprofits, sometimes offering input to city committees, often on transportation policy. “I’m a professional good troublemaker,” she jokes when we meet in her sun-soaked backyard one fine spring day. She’s also an environmentally conscious type who likes the idea of driving less. Brown bought a regular bike years ago, but mainly used it just for neighborhood jaunts. “I’m not uber-fit,” she says. “I’m not a slug, but I’m not one of the warriors in Lycra, and I don’t really want to arrive in a sweat.” Then, a couple of years ago, she heard Denver was offering $400 vouchers to help residents purchase an e-bike—or up to $900 toward a hefty “cargo” model that can haul heavier loads, including children. She’d considered an e-bike, but the city’s offer provided “an extra kick in the derriere to make me do it.” She opens her garage door to show off her purchase: a bright blue Pedego Boomerang. It’s a pricey model—$2,600 after the voucher—but “it changed my life!” she says. Nowadays, Brown thinks nothing of zipping halfway across town, her long dark-gray hair flying out behind her helmet. Hills do not faze her. Parking is hassle-free. And she can carry groceries in a crate strapped to the rear rack. She’d just ridden 4 miles to a doctor’s appointment for a checkup on a recent hip replacement. She rides so often—and at such speeds—that her husband bought his own e-bike to keep up: “I’m like, ‘Look, when you’re riding with me, it’s not about exercise. It’s about getting somewhere.’” She ended up gifting the Subaru to her son, who works for SpaceX in Texas. The only car left is her husband’s work truck, which she uses sparingly. She prefers the weirdly intoxicating delight of navigating on human-and-battery power: “It’s joy.” Many Denverites would agree. Over the two years the voucher program—pioneering in scale and scope—has been in effect, more than 9,000 people have bought subsidized e-bikes. Of those, more than one-third were “income qualified” (making less than $86,900 a year) and thus eligible for a more generous subsidy. People making less than $52,140 got the most: $1,200 to $1,400. The goal is to get people out of their cars, which city planners hope will deliver a bouquet of good things: less traffic, less pollution, healthier citizens. Research commissioned by the city in 2022 found that voucher recipients rode 26 miles a week on average, and many were using their e-bikes year-round. If even half of those miles are miles not driven, it means—conservatively, based on total e-bikes redeemed to date—the program will have eliminated more than 6.1 million automobile miles a year. That’s the equivalent of taking up to 478 gas-powered vehicles off the road, which would reduce annual CO2 emissions by nearly 190,000 metric tons. Subsidizing electric vehicles isn’t a new concept, at least when those vehicles are cars. President Barack Obama’s 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act offered up to $7,500 to anyone who bought an electric car or light truck, capped at 200,000 per automaker. In 2022, President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act created new and similar rebates without the caps. The US government has spent more than $2 billion to date subsidizing EV purchases, with some states and cities kicking in more. Weaning transportation off fossil fuels is crucial to decarbonizing the economy, and EVs on average have much lower life-cycle CO2 emissions than comparable gas vehicles—as little as 20 percent, by some estimates. In states like California, where more than 54 percent of the electricity is generated by renewables and other non–fossil fuel sources, the benefits are even more remarkable. Now, politicians around the country have begun to realize that e-bikes could be even more transformative than EVs. At least 30 states and dozens of cities—from Ann Arbor, Michigan, to Raleigh, North Carolina—have proposed or launched subsidy programs. It’s much cheaper than subsidizing electric cars, and though e-bikes can’t do everything cars can, they do, as Brown discovered, greatly expand the boundaries within which people work, shop, and play without driving. Emissions plummet: An analysis by the nonprofit Walk Bike Berkeley suggests that a typical commuter e-bike with pedal assist emits 21 times less CO2 per mile than a typical electric car (based on California’s power mix) and 141 times less than a gas-powered car. And e-bikes are far less resource- and energy-intensive to manufacture and distribute. Cities also are coming to see e-bikes as a potential lifeline for their low-income communities, a healthy alternative to often unreliable public transit for families who can’t afford a car. And that electric boost gives some people who would never have considered bike commuting an incentive to try, thus helping facilitate a shift from car dependency to a more bikeable, walkable, livable culture. In short, if policymakers truly want to disrupt transportation—and reimagine cities—e-bikes might well be their secret weapon. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I’m an avid urban cyclist who rides long distances for fun, but I don’t ride an electric. So when I landed in Denver in April, I rented a Pedego e-bike to see how battery power would affect my own experience of getting around a city. Reader: It was delightful. Denver is flat-ish, but it’s got brisk winds and deceptively long slopes as you go crosstown. There are occasional gut-busting hills, too, including one leading up to Sunnyside, the neighborhood where I was staying. Riding a regular bike would have been doable for an experienced cyclist like me, but the battery assist made longer schleps a breeze: I rode 65 miles one day while visiting four far-flung neighborhoods. On roads without traffic, I could cruise along at a speedy 18 miles an hour. The Cherry Creek bike trail, which bisects Denver in a southeast slash, was piercingly gorgeous as I pedaled past frothing waterfalls, families of ducks, and the occasional tent pitched next to striking pop art on the creekside walls. My Apple watch clocked a decent workout, but it was never difficult.  Author Clive Thompson (left) and Mike Salisbury ride together in Denver.Theo Stoomer I did a lunch ride another day with Mike Salisbury, then the city’s transportation energy lead overseeing the voucher program. Tall and lanky, with a thick mop of straight brown hair, Salisbury wears a slim North Face fleece and sports a beige REI e-bike dusted with dried mud. He’s a lifelong cyclist, but the e-bike, which he’d purchased about two years earlier, has become his go-to ride. “I play tennis on Fridays, and it’s like 6 miles away,” he says, and he always used to drive. “It would never, ever have crossed my mind to do it on my acoustic bike.”  E-bikes technically date back to 1895, when the US inventor Ogden Bolton Jr. slapped an electric motor on his rear wheel. But for more than a century, they were niche novelties. The batteries of yore were brutally heavy, with a range of barely 10 miles. It wasn’t until the lithium-ion battery, relatively lightweight and energy-dense, began plunging in price 30 years ago that e-bikes grew lighter and cheaper. Some models now boast a range of more than 75 miles per charge, even when using significant power assist. All of this piqued Denver’s interest. In 2020, the city had passed a ballot measure that raised, through sales taxes, $40 million a year for environmental projects. A task force was set up to figure out how to spend it. Recreational cycling has long been a pastime in outdoorsy Colorado, and bike commuting boomed on account of the pandemic, when Covid left people skittish about ridesharing and public transit. E-bikes, the task force decided, would be a powerful way to encourage low-emissions mobility. “We were thinking, ‘What is going to reduce VMT?’”—vehicle miles traveled—Salisbury recalls. His team looked at e-bike programs in British Columbia and Austin, Texas, asked dealers for advice, and eventually settled on a process: Residents would get a voucher code through a city website and bring it to a local dealer for an instant rebate. The city would repay the retailer within a few weeks. A program was launched in April 2022 with $300,000, enough for at least 600 vouchers. They were snapped up in barely 10 minutes, “like Taylor Swift fans flooding Ticketmaster,” Salisbury wrote in a progress report. His team then secured another $4.7 million to expand the program. “It was like the scene in Jaws,” he told me: “We’re gonna need a bigger boat.” Every few months, the city would release more vouchers, and its website would get hammered. Within a year, the program had handed out more than 4,700 vouchers, two-thirds to income-qualified riders. Mike Salisbury, former head of Denver’s e-bike voucher programTheo Stroomer Denver enlisted Ride Report, an Oregon-based data firm, to assess the program’s impact: Its survey found that 65 percent of the e-bikers rode every day and 90 percent rode at least weekly. The average distance was 3.3 miles. Salisbury was thrilled. The state followed suit later that year, issuing e-bike rebates to 5,000 low-income workers (people making up to 80 percent of their county’s median income). This past April, state legislators approved a $450 tax credit for residents who buy an e-bike. Will Toor, executive director of the Colorado Energy Office, told me he found it very pleasant, and highly unusual, to oversee a program that literally leaves people grinning: “People love it. There’s nothing we’ve done that has gotten as much positive feedback.”  I witnessed the good cheer firsthand talking to Denverites who’d taken advantage of the programs. They ranged from newbies to dedicated cyclists. Most said it was the subsidy that convinced them to pull the trigger. All seemed fairly besotted with their e-bikes and said they’d replaced lots of car trips. Software engineer Tom Carden chose a cargo model for heavy-duty hauling—he’d recently lugged 10 gallons of paint (about 110 pounds) in one go, he told me—and shuttling his two kids to and from elementary school. Child-hauling is sort of the ideal application for cargo bikes. I arrange a ride one afternoon with Ted Rosenbaum, whose sturdy gray cargo e-bike has a toddler seat in back and a huge square basket in front. I wait outside a local day care as Rosenbaum, a tall fellow clad in T-shirt and khakis, emerges with his pigtailed 18-month-old daughter. He straps her in and secures her helmet for their 2.5-mile trek home. “It’s right in that sweet spot where driving is 10 to 15 minutes, but riding my bike is always 14,” Rosenbaum says as we glide away. “I think she likes this more than the car, too—better views.” The toddler grips her seatposts gently, head swiveling as she takes in the sights. Rosenbaum rides slowly but confidently; I’d wondered how drivers would behave around a child on a cargo bike, and today, at least, they’re pretty solicitous. A white SUV trails us for two long blocks, almost comically hesitant to pass, until I give it a wave and the driver creeps by cautiously. At the next stoplight, Rosenbaum’s daughter breaks her silence with a loud, excited yelp: There’s a huge, fluffy dog walking by. E-bikes stir up heated opposition, too. Sure, riders love them. But some pedestrians, drivers, dog walkers, and “acoustic” bikers are affronted, even enraged, by the new kid on the block. This is particularly so in dense cities, like my own, where e-bikes have proliferated. By one estimate, New York City has up to 65,000 food delivery workers on e-bikes. Citi Bike operates another 20,000 pay-as-you-go e-bikes, and thousands of residents own one. When I told my NYC friends about this story, probably half, including regular cyclists, blurted out something along the lines of, “I hate those things.” They hate when e-bikers zoom past them on bike paths at 20 mph, dangerously close, or ride the wrong direction down bike lanes on one-way streets. And they hate sharing crowded bikeways with tourists and inexperienced riders. > “You have to build” bike infrastructure first, notes one advocate. “If we’re > going to wait for the majority of the population to let go of car dependency, > we’re never going to get here.”  In September 2023 near Chinatown, a Citi Bike customer ran into 69-year-old Priscilla Loke, who died two days later. After another Citi Biker rammed a Harlem pedestrian, Sarah Pratt, from behind, Pratt said company officials insisted they weren’t responsible. Incensed, a local woman named Janet Schroeder co-founded the NYC E-Vehicle Safety Alliance, which lobbies the city for stricter regulations. E-bikes should be registered, she told me, and she supports legislation that requires riders to display a visible license plate and buy insurance, as drivers do. This, Schroeder says, would at least make them more accountable. “We are in an e-bike crisis,” she says. “We have older people, blind people, people with disabilities who tell me they’re scared to go out because of the way e-bikes behave.” Dedicated e-bikers acknowledge the problem, but the ones I spoke with also felt that e-bikes are taking excessive flak due to their novelty. Cars, they point out, remain a far graver threat to health and safety. In 2023, automobiles killed an estimated 244 pedestrians and injured 8,620 in New York City, while cyclists (of all types) killed eight pedestrians and injured 340. Schroeder concedes the point, but notes that drivers at least are licensed and insured—and are thus on the hook for casualties they cause. Underlying the urban-transportation culture wars is the wretched state of bike infrastructure. American cities were famously built for cars; planners typically left precious little room for bikes and pedestrians, to say nothing of e-bikes, hoverboards, scooters, skaters, and parents with jogging strollers. Cars hog the roadways while everyone else fights for the scraps. Most bike lanes in the United States are uncomfortably narrow, don’t allow for safe passing, and are rarely physically separated from cars­—some cyclists call them “car door lanes.” The paths winding through Denver’s parks are multimodal, meaning pedestrians and riders of all stripes share the same strip, despite their very different speeds.  Even in this relatively bike-friendly city, which has 196 miles of dedicated on-road bike lanes, riding sometimes requires the nerves of a daredevil. I set out one afternoon with 34-year-old Ana Ilic, who obtained her bright blue e-bike through the city’s voucher program. She used to drive the 10 miles to her job in a Denver suburb, but now she mostly cycles. She figures she clocks 70 miles a week by e-bike, driving only 10. Her evening commute demonstrates the patchiness of Denver’s cycling network. Much of our journey is pleasant, on quieter roads, some with painted bike lanes. But toward the end, the only choice is a four-lane route with no bike lanes. Cars whip past us, just inches away. It’s as if we’d stumbled into a suburban NASCAR event. “This is the worst part,” she says apologetically. The fear of getting hit stops lots of people from jumping into the saddle. But officials in many cities still look at local roadways and conclude there aren’t enough cyclists to justify the cost of more bike lanes. It’s the chicken-egg paradox. “You have to build it,” insists Peter Piccolo, executive director of the lobby Bicycle Colorado. “If we’re going to wait for the majority of the population to let go of car dependency, we’re never going to get here.”  E-bikes can be rented in Denver. The city also has a voucher program to subsidize e-bike purchases.Theo Stroomer Advocates say the true solution is to embrace the “new urbanist” movement, which seeks to make cities around the world more human-scaled and less car-dependent. The movement contends that planners need to take space back from cars—particularly curbside parking, where vehicles sit unused 95 percent of the time, as scholar Donald Shoup has documented. That frees up room, potentially, for wider bike lanes that allow for safe passing. (New York and Paris are among the cities now embracing this approach.) You can also throw in “traffic calming” measures such as speed bumps and roads that narrow at intersections. One by-product of discouraging driving is that buses move faster, making them a more attractive commute option, too.  > The Inflation Reduction Act initially included a program that could have put > nearly 4.5 million e-bikes on the road. It was cut. Cities worldwide are proving that this vision is achievable: In 2020, the mayor of Bogota added 17 permanent miles of bike lanes to the existing 342 and has plans for another 157. (Bogota and several other Colombian cities also close entire highways and streets on Sundays and holidays to encourage cycling.) Paris, which has rolled out more than 500 miles of bike lanes since 2001, saw a remarkable doubling in the number of city cyclists from 2022 to 2023—a recent GPS survey found that more people now commute to downtown from the inner suburbs by bicycle than by car. In New York City, where bike lane miles have quintupled over the past decade, the number of cyclists—electric and otherwise—has also nearly doubled. Colorado has made some progress, too, says Toor, the Energy Office director. For decades, state road funds could only be used to accommodate cars, but in 2021, legislators passed a bill to spend $5.4 billion over 10 years on walking, biking, and transit infrastructure—“because it’s reducing demand” on roadways, he explains. The transportation department also requires cities to meet greenhouse gas reduction targets, which is why Denver ditched a long-planned $900 million highway expansion in favor of bus rapid transit and safer streets. One critique of e-bike programs, ironically, involves the climate return on investment. Research on Swedish voucher programs found that an e-bike typically reduces its owner’s CO2 emissions by about 1.3 metric tons per year—the equivalent of driving a gas-­powered vehicle about 3,250 miles. Not bad, but some researchers say a government can get more climate bang for the subsidy buck by, for example, helping people swap fossil fuel furnaces for heat pumps, or gas stoves for electric. E-bike subsidies are “a pretty expensive way” to decarbonize, says economist Luke Jones, who co-authored a recent paper on the topic. That’s because e-bikes, in most cases, only replace relatively short car trips. To really slash vehicular CO2, you’d need to supplant longer commutes. Which is clearly possible—behold all those Parisians commuting from the inner suburbs, distances of up to 12 miles. It’s been a tougher sell in Denver, where, as that 2022 survey found, only 5 percent of trips taken by voucher recipients exceeded 9 miles.  But the value of e-bikes lies not only, and perhaps not even principally, in cutting emissions. Cycling also eases traffic congestion and improves health by keeping people active. It reduces the need for parking, which dovetails neatly with another new urbanist policy: reducing or eliminating mandatory parking requirements for new homes and businesses, which saves space and makes housing cheaper and easier to build. And biking has other civic benefits that are hard to quantify, but quite real, Salisbury insists. “It has this really nice community aspect,” he says. “When you’re out riding, you see people, you wave, you stop to chat—you notice what’s going on in the neighborhoods around you. You don’t do that so much in a car. It kind of improves your mood.” That sounds gauzy, but studies have found that people who ride to work do, in fact, arrive in markedly better spirits than those who drive or take transit. Their wellbeing is fueled by fresh air and a feeling of control over the commute—no traffic jams, transit delays, or hunting for parking. “It’s basically flow state,” says Kirsty Wild, a senior research fellow of population health at the University of Auckland. Nobody has ascribed a dollar value to these benefits, but it’s got to be worth something for a city to have residents who are less pissed off. What would really make e-bikes take off, though, is a federal subsidy. The Inflation Reduction Act initially included a $4.1 billion program that could have put nearly 4.5 million e-bikes on the road for $900 a pop, but Democratic policymakers yanked it. Subsequent bills to roll out an e-bike tax credit have not made it out of committee. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- E-bike sharing companies are sometimes seen as gentrifiers, but Denver’s experience shows that e-bikes can be more than just toys for the affluent. Take June Churchill. She was feeling pretty stressed before she got her e-bike. She’d come to Denver for college, but after graduating had found herself unemployed, couchsurfing, and strapped for cash. Having gender-­transitioned, she was estranged from her conservative parents. “I was poor as shit,” she told me. But then she heard about the voucher program and discovered that she qualified for the generous low-income discount. Her new e-bike allowed her to expand her job search to a wider area—she landed a position managing mass mailings for Democratic campaigns—and made it way easier to look around for an affordable place to live. “That bike was totally crucial to getting and keeping my job,” she says. It’s true that e-bikes and bikeshare systems were initially tilted toward the well-off; the bikes can be expensive, and bikeshares have typically rolled out first in gentrified areas. Denver’s answer was to set aside fully half of its subsidies for low-­income residents. Churchill’s experience suggests that an e-bike can bolster not only physical mobility, but economic mobility, too. Denver’s low-­income neighborhoods have notoriously spotty public transit and community services, and, as the program’s leaders maintain, helping people get around improves access to education, employment, and health care. To that point, Denver’s income-qualified riders cover an average of 10 miles more per week than other voucher recipients—a spot of evidence Congress might contemplate. But there are still some people whom cities will have to try harder to reach. I ride one morning to Denver’s far east side, where staffers from Hope Communities, a nonprofit that runs several large affordable-­housing units, are hosting a biweekly food distribution event. Most Hope residents are immigrants and refugees from ­Afghanistan, Myanmar, and other Asian and African nations. I watch as a procession of smiling women in colorful wraps and sandals collect oranges, eggs, potatoes, and broccoli, and health workers offer blood-pressure readings. There’s chatter in a variety of languages. Jessica McFadden, a cheery program administrator in brown aviators, tells me that as far as her staff can tell, only one Hope resident, a retiree in his 70s named Tom, has snagged an e-bike voucher. The problem is digital literacy, she says. Not only do these people need to know the program exists, but they also have to know when the next batch of vouchers will drop—and pounce. But Hope residents can’t normally afford laptops or home wifi—most rely on low-end smartphones with strict data caps. Add in language barriers, and they’re generally flummoxed by online-first government programs. Tom was able to get his e-bike, McFadden figures, because he’s American, is fluent in English, and has family locally. He’s more plugged in than most. She loves the idea of the voucher program. She just thinks the city needs to do better on outreach. Scholars who’ve studied e-bike programs, like John MacArthur at Portland State University, recommend that cities set up lending libraries in low-income areas so people can try an e-bike, and put more bike lanes in those neighborhoods, which are often last in line for such improvements. In Massachusetts, the nonprofit organizers of a state-funded e-bike program operating in places like Worcester, whose median income falls well below the national average, found that it’s crucial to also offer people racks, pannier bags, and maintenance vouchers. As I chat with McFadden, Tom himself suddenly appears, pushing a stroller full of oranges from the food distro. I ask him about his e-bike. He uses it pretty frequently, he says. “Mostly to shop and visit my sister; she’s over in Sloan Lake”—a hefty 15 miles away. Then he ambles off. McFadden recalls how, just a few weeks earlier, she’d seen him cruising past on his e-bike with his oxygen tank strapped to the back, the little plastic air tubes in his nose. “Tom, are you sure you should be doing that?” she’d called out. Tom just waved and peeled away. He had places to be.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. A small North Carolina town has launched the nation’s first-ever climate accountability lawsuit against an electric utility. The litigation, filed by officials from Carrboro, North Carolina, on Wednesday morning, accuses Duke Energy of waging a “deception campaign” to obscure the climate dangers of fossil fuels. Those efforts resulted in delayed action to curb planet-heating pollution, which has pushed up the costs of climate action today, the lawsuit says. “When you’re dealing with something like the existential threat of climate change, that requires us to make bold moves,” said Carrboro’s mayor, Barbara Foushee, who helped bring the suit. The litigation follows a November report from the non-profit research group Energy and Policy Institute, which found some of the utility companies that comprise today’s Duke Energy Corporation—including Duke Power, Carolina Power & Light, and Public Service Indiana—were cautioned about the climate crisis decades ago. “Although Duke has understood the dangers of climate change for decades, the company actively participated in a far-reaching, decades-long campaign to deceive the public and decision-makers about these dangers,” the suit says. In 1969, the lawsuit says, officials from utilities now owned by Duke attended a meeting of the Edison Electric Institute, a trade group, where they were informed that scientists believed increasing carbon emissions would be a “long-term problem of major consequence.” The same trade group in 1984 commissioned a study that included two hypothetical news stories from the future—one in which fossil fuel emissions continued unabated and caused devastating impacts, and another in which emissions were reined in and a safer future was secured, the lawsuit says. > “When it comes to this kind of injustice, it doesn’t matter who calls it out > as long as somebody does.” Despite these warnings, Duke continued to build out fossil fuel infrastructure, oppose legal limits to planet-heating pollution and back efforts to promote doubt about climate science, according to the suit. In 1991, the lawsuit says, the Edison Electric Institute placed newspaper advertisements with the message: “How much are you willing to pay to solve a problem that may not exist?” Duke maintained its membership in the institute. “They tried to sow confusion about climate change and the fact that there’s a threat that we face in the future,” said Howard Crystal, legal director of the Energy Justice Program at the non-profit Center for Biological Diversity, who is advising the plaintiffs on the case. The deception continues to be a problem today, now in the form of “greenwashing,” said Crystal. On social media, Duke has portrayed itself as a leader in bringing on “cleaner energy solutions” despite having one of the largest planned gas buildouts of any company in the US. “They’re still expanding fossil fuels and suppressing renewables—in flat defiance of scientists demanding that we do the exact opposite,” said Jim Warren, executive director of local non-profit NC Warn, in a statement. According to one study, Duke Energy in 2021 had the third-largest emissions footprint of any business in the United States. Duke Energy’s deception about its emissions has led to delayed climate action that has in turn placed a burden on Carrboro, the lawsuit says. It alleges the company broke five state laws, including those protecting citizens from public and private nuisances. “Carrboro is a true victim here, and they’ve incurred a lot of damages,” said Matthew Quinn, an attorney at the North Carolina firm Lewis and Roberts who is representing the plaintiffs. The town, which sits about 20 miles southwest of Durham, is seeking damages for the climate-fueled costs of adapting roads and infrastructure to increased flooding, and for increased energy costs. “Those costs could add up to millions, many millions,” said Crystal. The exact amount the case could yield in damages is unclear. “We’re content to let a jury of our peers determine what we get,” said Foushee. It may not be easy for a municipality with a population of 22,000 to go up against a major corporation, Foushee added, but the town is no stranger to taking up climate issues. It has long worked to slash its emissions and support environmental justice, she said. “It may seem like a David-and-Goliath situation and in reality it is one,” she said. “But when it comes to this kind of injustice, it doesn’t matter who calls it out as long as somebody does.” The new filing comes as part of a wave of lawsuits from dozens of states and municipalities accusing fossil fuel interests of sowing doubt about the environmental risks associated with their products. On November 26, Maine’s attorney general filed a case against Exxon, Shell, Chevron, BP, Sunoco and the industry group the American Petroleum Institute. The following day, Ford county, Kansas, sued major fossil fuel interests, alleging they had waged “a decades-long campaign of fraud and deception about the recyclability of plastics.” In October, Oregon’s Multnomah county, which includes Portland, became the first municipality to sue a utility over climate deception when it added the regional gas provider NW Natural to its 2023 lawsuit against fossil fuel corporations for fueling a fatal 2021 heat dome. Randee Haven-O’Donnell, a councilmember in Carrboro, said more utilities could soon be named in similar lawsuits. “We’re the little engine that could, and we hope other towns can be, too, and hold their polluting utilities accountable,” she said in a statement.