Superstorms, abrupt climate shifts and New York City frozen in ice. That’s how the blockbuster Hollywood movie “The Day After Tomorrow” depicted an abrupt shutdown of the Atlantic Ocean’s circulation and the catastrophic consequences.

While Hollywood’s vision was over the top, the 2004 movie raised a serious question: If global warming shuts down the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, which is crucial for carrying heat from the tropics to the northern latitudes, how abrupt and severe would the climate changes be?

Twenty years after the movie’s release, we know a lot more about the Atlantic Ocean’s circulation. Instruments deployed in the ocean starting in 2004 show that the Atlantic Ocean circulation has observably slowed over the past two decades, possibly to its weakest state in almost a millennium. Studies also suggest that the circulation has reached a dangerous tipping point in the past that sent it into a precipitous, unstoppable decline, and that it could hit that tipping point again as the planet warms and glaciers and ice sheets melt.

In a new study using the latest generation of Earth’s climate models, we simulated the flow of fresh water until the ocean circulation reached that tipping point.

The results showed that the circulation could fully shut down within a century of hitting the tipping point, and that it’s headed in that direction. If that happened, average temperatures would drop by several degrees in North America, parts of Asia and Europe, and people would see severe and cascading consequences around the world.

We also discovered a physics-based early warning signal that can alert the world when the Atlantic Ocean circulation is nearing its tipping point.

The ocean’s conveyor belt

Ocean currents are driven by winds, tides and water density differences.

In the Atlantic Ocean circulation, the relatively warm and salty surface water near the equator flows toward Greenland. During its journey it crosses the Caribbean Sea, loops up into the Gulf of Mexico, and then flows along the U.S. East Coast before crossing the Atlantic.

This current, also known as the Gulf Stream, brings heat to Europe. As it flows northward and cools, the water mass becomes heavier. By the time it reaches Greenland, it starts to sink and flow southward. The sinking of water near Greenland pulls water from elsewhere in the Atlantic Ocean and the cycle repeats, like a conveyor belt.

Too much fresh water from melting glaciers and the Greenland ice sheet can dilute the saltiness of the water, preventing it from sinking, and weaken this ocean conveyor belt. A weaker conveyor belt transports less heat northward and also enables less heavy water to reach Greenland, which further weakens the conveyor belt’s strength. Once it reaches the tipping point, it shuts down quickly.

What happens to the climate at the tipping point?

The existence of a tipping point was first noticed in an overly simplified model of the Atlantic Ocean circulation in the early 1960s. Today’s more detailed climate models indicate a continued slowing of the conveyor belt’s strength under climate change. However, an abrupt shutdown of the Atlantic Ocean circulation appeared to be absent in these climate models.

Ted-Ed Video: “How do ocean currents work? – Jennifer Verduin”

This is where our study comes in. We performed an experiment with a detailed climate model to find the tipping point for an abrupt shutdown by slowly increasing the input of fresh water.

We found that once it reaches the tipping point, the conveyor belt shuts down within 100 years. The heat transport toward the north is strongly reduced, leading to abrupt climate shifts.

The result: Dangerous cold in the North

Regions that are influenced by the Gulf Stream receive substantially less heat when the circulation stops. This cools the North American and European continents by a few degrees.

The European climate is much more influenced by the Gulf Stream than other regions. In our experiment, that meant parts of the continent changed at more than 5 degrees Fahrenheit (3 degrees Celsius) per decade – far faster than today’s global warming of about 0.36 F (0.2 C) per decade. We found that parts of Norway would experience temperature drops of more than 36 F (20 C). On the other hand, regions in the Southern Hemisphere would warm by a few degrees.

These temperature changes develop over about 100 years. That might seem like a long time, but on typical climate time scales, it is abrupt.

The conveyor belt shutting down would also affect sea level and precipitation patterns, which can push other ecosystems closer to their tipping points. For example, the Amazon rainforest is vulnerable to declining precipitation. If its forest ecosystem turned to grassland, the transition would release carbon to the atmosphere and result in the loss of a valuable carbon sink, further accelerating climate change.

The Atlantic circulation has slowed significantly in the distant past. During glacial periods when ice sheets that covered large parts of the planet were melting, the influx of fresh water slowed the Atlantic circulation, triggering huge climate fluctuations.

So, when will we see this tipping point?

The big question – when will the Atlantic circulation reach a tipping point – remains unanswered. Observations don’t go back far enough to provide a clear result. While a recent study suggested that the conveyor belt is rapidly approaching its tipping point, possibly within a few years, these statistical analyses made several assumptions that give rise to uncertainty.

Instead, we were able to develop a physics-based and observable early warning signal involving the salinity transport at the southern boundary of the Atlantic Ocean. Once a threshold is reached, the tipping point is likely to follow in one to four decades.

The climate impacts from our study underline the severity of such an abrupt conveyor belt collapse. The temperature, sea level and precipitation changes will severely affect society, and the climate shifts are unstoppable on human time scales.

It might seem counterintuitive to worry about extreme cold as the planet warms, but if the main Atlantic Ocean circulation shuts down from too much meltwater pouring in, that’s the risk ahead.

This article was updated on Feb. 11, 2024, to fix a typo: The experiment found temperatures in parts of Europe changed by more than 5 F per decade.

René van Westen, Postdoctoral Researcher in Climate Physics, Utrecht University; Henk A. Dijkstra, Professor of Physics, Utrecht University, and Michael Kliphuis, Climate Model Specialist, Utrecht University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

(The Conversation) – We are seeing deadly heat and fires circle the world. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns we are fast running out of time to secure a liveable and sustainable future. Without emergency action to stop mining and burning fossil fuels, the world faces an unthinkable 2.8℃ temperature rise.

It’s incomprehensible, then, that many of our politicians support “unlocking the Beetaloo Basin” in the Northern Territory and developing another 48 oil and gas projects across Australia.

“Unlocking” means starting large-scale shale gas extraction. After drilling through 3–4km of rock and aquifers, a cocktail of chemicals, sand and water is forced down the well. This process of hydraulic fracturing is commonly known as fracking. This brings to the surface, and then into the atmosphere, carbon that had been securely stored underground for 300–400 million years.

Today we have launched a report that demonstrates the many risks of oil and gas development for human health and wellbeing in Australia. Based on a review of over 300 peer-reviewed studies, our report provides the public and decision-makers with a summary of the now-extensive evidence of these risks.

What is the evidence against oil and gas?

There is a need to combat widely held misconceptions and repeated misinformation about the safety of the oil and gas industry. We undertook the review at the request of concerned paediatricians in the Northern Territory.

New research clearly shows that “unlocking gas” is at least as harmful to the climate as mining and burning coal. This is largely due to methane leaks at many stages of production. Methane is 86 times more powerful than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere over 20 years.

Doors opened for the 49 planned projects in Australia after state reviews of potential impacts. These reviews are flawed and outdated as the volume of published studies has grown rapidly in recent years. Reviews were undertaken, for example, in New South Wales in 2014, Northern Territory in 2017, South Australia in 2015 and Western Australia in 2018.

Our report synthesises recent scientific and public health research on five areas of concern about oil and gas operations:

1. threats to biodiversity, water and food security arising from site preparation, drilling, fracking, wastewater handling, gas pipeline transport and processing

2. contributions to the climate emergency

3. a vast array of potentially harmful chemicals

4. contamination of water, soil and air

5. physical, social, emotional and spiritual health impacts near oil and gas fields and their sprawling infrastructure.

Each fracking event to release shale gas uses 6 million to 60 million litres of fresh water. Fracking is often applied many times to each of hundreds to thousands of wells in a region. This puts water security at risk in arid areas.

Each step of gas production creates risks of contamination of surface and ground water. With vast quantities of wastewater, it can happen through spilling, leaking, flooding and overflows. Wastewater can even be deliberately spread for so-called “beneficial uses”.

This wastewater contains hundreds of chemicals. Some are naturally occurring. Others are added during drilling and fracking.

These chemicals can include heavy metals, phenols, barium, volatile organic compounds including benzene, toluene, ethylene and xylene, radioactive materials, fluoride, polyaromatic hydrocarbons, salt and many chemicals of unknown toxicity.

Air becomes contaminated with volatile organic compounds, polyaromatic hydrocarbons, nitrogen oxides, radioactive materials, diesel fumes, hydrogen sulfide, acrolein and heavy metals. Formaldehyde, particulate matter and ground-level ozone are formed and travel long distances, damaging health and agriculture.

What are the health impacts?

People exposed to oil and gas operations experience a long list of harms. These include:

• more severe asthma in children requiring more medical treatment, emergency department visits and hospitalisations

• higher hospitalisation and death rates due to heart attacks, heart failure, respiratory diseases and some cancers

• higher injury and fatality rates due to increased heavy vehicle traffic

• increases in depression, anxiety and social withdrawal, especially among young and pregnant women

• increases in sexually transmitted infections associated with the industry’s mobile workforces

• reproductive harms and interference with development of unborn babies, including higher risks of low birth weight, pre-term delivery and spontaneous abortion

• higher risk of severe birth defects

• higher risk of acute lymphoblastic leukemia.

Putting Indigenous people and others in harm’s way

Many of the 49 planned projects affect Aboriginal land. Some companies have allegedly violated the rights of Traditional Owners to free, prior and informed consent. The massive disruption of Aboriginal Country and life puts people at great risk of physical, social, emotional, cultural and spiritual harm.

The report also issues a loud warning about sexual violence against First Nations Americans and Canadians associated with oil and gas activities. The WA parliamentary inquiry into women’s experiences of sexual harassment and sexual violence in “fly in, fly out” (FIFO) mines suggests these risks apply equally in Australia. Yet all government assessments of oil and gas development in Australia completely ignore these risks.

In the United States, the industry has grown so vast within two decades that over 17.6 million people live within a mile (1.6km) of oil or gas wells. By 2016, the estimated cost to the community was US$77 billion. This was the cost of illness, extra health care and premature deaths (7,500) from asthma, respiratory and cardiovascular disease due to air pollution alone.

Our report makes clear any further gas development will have serious impacts on the climate, the people living in or near gas fields and the overburdened health services that serve them.

Melissa Haswell, Professor of Health, Safety and Environment, Queensland University of Technology and Professor of Practice in Environmental Wellbeing, Office of the Deputy Vice Chancellor (Indigenous Strategy and Services) and Honorary Professor (School of Geosciences), University of Sydney; David Shearman, Emeritus Professor of Medicine, University of Adelaide; Jacob Hegedus, Research Assistant, University of Sydney, and Lisa Jackson Pulver, Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Professor of Public Health and Epidemiology, University of Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The reduction in fossil fuel use was primarily owing to the abandonment of coal, which plummeted by almost a quarter (-23%) compared to the same period in the previous year. In May, 2023, the 27 nations of the European Union used coal to generate only 10% of their electricity, a record low unparalleled in recent years.

The use of fossil gas was also down, by 13%.

In some countries, the retrenchment from coal and gas was even more dramatic, with a 20% reduction in 11 EU countries, and in five the fall was by 30% year over year — those were Portugal, Austria, Bulgaria, Estonia, Finland

One of the reasons for less resort to coal and fossil gas to generate electricity was that over-all demand for electricity in the 27-nation bloc fell 5% compared to the previous year. That fall idled coal plants in particular. There was less demand because people were conserving energy, especially last winter, when the Russian war on Ukraine had driven up energy prices substantially, so people cut back to avoid sky-high bills. There were also government directives for people to be more frugal with electricity use during the crisis.

Although many analysts had predicted that the Ukraine War’s impact on high energy prices would cause a spike in the use of coal and gas, no such spike materialized. People didn’t fire up coal plants to meet the challenge. Rather, they cut back their electricity use on the one hand and put up a lot of solar and wind plants on the other.

For instance, solar electricity generation in the first six months of this year increased by 13% compared to the same period in 2022.

Wind generation increased by 5%.

Some countries did especially well with renewables, with record amounts of power from these sources being generated in the first half of this year. Greece and Romania for the first time ever obtained over half of their electricity from renewables. Denmark and Portugal came in at 75% renewables-based electricity.

The Ember team remarks that these signs point to substantial progress in decarbonizing Europe’s grid. This progress needs to be accelerated substantially, however, if the world is to keep global heating to 1.5 degrees C. (2.7 degrees F.) above the pre-industrial norm. Climate scientists fear that if we heat up the earth more than that, there is a danger that some climate systems will go chaotic, with dire implications for civilization. For instance, imagine a string of really destructive hurricanes hitting the same areas over and over again, leveling everything. How would those areas come back from such a repeated pummeling. Puerto Rico has had trouble coming back from just two such hurricanes, but what if it had been five or six?

So everyone should hurry up and install as many solar panels and wind turbines as we possibly can as soon as we possibly can. As the European statistics show, these energy sources are anyway cheaper than coal or gas, even if the health and climate impact of the latter is not taken into account.

( Foreign Policy in Focus ) – The United States is producing record amounts of oil and natural gas, despite the fact that the ongoing use of these fossil fuels poses an existential threat to the planet.

Even today, as the planet faces catastrophic warming, leaders in both the Democratic and Republican Parties keep pushing for more oil and natural gas production, believing that most of the world will continue to rely on these fossil fuels for decades to come.

“You can write this down, you can go to every NGO, and they’ll tell me I’m nuts, but I predict this,” former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said at the Aspen Security Forum last month. “There will be more crude oil consumed 30 years from now than there is today.”

A Fossil Fuel Powerhouse

For the past decade, the United States has been a fossil fuel powerhouse. Since 2011, the United States has been the world’s top producer of natural gas, and since 2018, the United States has been the world’s top producer of oil.

The United States became a fossil fuel powerhouse by embracing hydraulic fracturing. The technique, also known as “fracking,” uses a high-powered spray of water and chemicals to break apart underground rock formations. It has enabled U.S. energy companies to gain access to previously inaccessible deposits of oil and natural gas.

Environmental groups have criticized fracking for contaminating groundwater and triggering earthquakes, leading some states to ban it.

In Washington, top officials have embraced the fracking boom. During the Obama administration, officials boasted that the United States was becoming an “energy superpower” and the “energy center of the world.” Officials in the Trump administration were even more enthusiastic, saying that they were leading the world into a new era of “energy dominance.”

Exuberance over energy dominance remains widespread in the Biden administration. Officials boast that the United States is continuing to break new records in oil and natural gas production.

“There is actually record [oil] production from the United States,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken explained late last year. “We’re producing more and selling more around the world than we ever have.”

The Threat to the Planet

The U.S. move to become a fossil fuel powerhouse has come with major costs to the environment. By continuing to produce oil and natural gas at record levels, the United States is leading the world into the climate crisis.

There is a direct connection between the use of fossil fuels and the warming of the planet. The burning of fossil fuels creates greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, which are emitted into the atmosphere, where they have the effect of warming the planet. Climate scientists calculate that the Earth has warmed by 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.1 degrees Fahrenheit) since the late nineteenth century.

Unchecked global warming poses an existential threat to the planet. Already, people in many parts of the world are grappling with extreme weather events, including record-breaking heat, rain, droughts, floods, storms, and wildfires. This past July was the planet’s hottest month on record.

“Climate change is here,” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said in a July 27 press conference. “It is terrifying. And it is just the beginning.”

For decades, world leaders have been familiar with the problem of human-caused climate change. Repeatedly, they have created arrangements for reducing carbon emissions, including the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (1992), the Kyoto Protocol (1997), the Green Climate Fund (2010), and the Paris Agreement (2015).

Under the Paris Agreement (2015), nearly every country in the world created voluntary emissions targets with the goal of limiting global average temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) and keeping it well below 2.0 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). Participants agreed to meet every five years to review their progress.

Despite these steps, the world is no closer today than it was in the early 1990s to preventing catastrophic global warming. In many ways, things are much worse, despite some progress in countries such as the United States that have shifted away from coal, a fossil fuel that generates more carbon emissions than oil or natural gas.

Not only is the world producing and consuming fossil fuels at or near record levels, but the world’s greenhouse gas emissions continue rising at a record pace. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an international body of climate experts, global average temperature rise is on track to reach 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) in the early 2030s, about a decade away.

Moving Toward Climate Doom

The issue of whether the world will be able to avert climate doom will largely depend on the actions of some of the world’s most powerful countries, including China and the United States. Together, China and the United States account for nearly half of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. Although China is the world’s top emitter of carbon dioxide, largely due to its burning of coal, the United States is responsible for the largest amount of historical emissions and remains the world’s second largest emitter of carbon dioxide.

Image by John R Perry from Pixabay

“We have a responsibility, a major responsibility, around this climate issue, for two reasons,” Blinken explained last year. “First of all, today we are unfortunately the number two emitter in the world after China.” And second, “what we did for our own development, we did things that we are asking other countries not to do today,” such as use coal.

Officials in Washington have been slow to take responsibility, however. Leaders in both political parties continue to prioritize U.S. dominance in oil and natural gas over a global just transition to clean energy. The Biden administration has set a goal of reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions to half of the country’s 2005 levels by 2030, but the country is not on track to meet the administration’s target.

Republican leaders have largely dismissed the climate threat, falsely claiming that climate science is unclear and inconclusive. Republicans are organizing around Project 2025, a plan to increase drilling and eliminate environmental protections.

Natural gas is going to be “the most important energy resource for the next 40 years,” Pompeo said at last month’s event. Both oil and natural gas, he insisted, “are going to continue to be very important.”

Many U.S. officials see oil and natural gas as strategic assets. They believe that U.S. energy dominance will enable the United States to maintain influence over countries that have fewer resources, such as China.

“China has almost none of them, so we have an enormous amount of leverage with respect to that,” Pompeo said, referring to oil and natural gas.

In contrast to their Republican counterparts, Democratic leaders have been more willing to acknowledge the climate threat, sometimes describing the climate crisis as the greatest challenge of our time, but they share many of the same priorities. Not only do they view oil and natural gas as strategic assets against China, but they remain committed to increasing the production and consumption of these two fossil fuels.

For years, the Biden administration has been pushing for more oil production. Even as the administration has supported a transition to clean and sustainable energy, backing unprecedented investments in batteries and renewable energies in the Inflation Reduction Act, the administration has empowered U.S. energy companies to keep setting records in oil and gas production, leading to record profits.

“There is nothing standing in the way of domestic oil and gas production,” Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm commented earlier this year.

What U.S. leaders and oil companies are doing, in short, is leading the world toward a climate catastrophe. By prioritizing fossil fuel production and great power politics over the findings of climate scientists, they are creating a future in which “we’re doomed,” as U.S. climate envoy John Kerry once put it.

“The world is not living sustainably, and if you look at history, civilizations have disappeared due to that reality,” Kerry said earlier this year.

Al-Jaber wears several hats, including chairman of the board of Masdar, the UAE’s green energy corporation, and CEO of ADNOC, a major oil and gas concern that is seeking a massive global expansion.

Masdar built a model city near Abu Dhabi that I went to visit once. It was envisaged as demonstration project for a low-carbon urban environment. They had these cute little electric vehicles and the buildings had solar panels. If I’m not mistaken, Mr. al-Jaber was on the premises at the time and I met him and got his business card. Seemed like a nice guy, and very idealistic.

Masdar is an important player in the green energy field and is doing great things that are an extension of al-Jaber’s vision. It is active in 40 countries. Masdar has 20 gigawatts’ worth of green energy facilities in its portfolio, and al-Jaber has set a goal of 100 gigawatts by 2030. That would be an incredible achievement for a single company. Germany, a green energy pioneer, only has 58 gigawatts of wind power to date, and 70 gigawatts of solar, so Masdar as a single company wants to achieve nearly as much green power generation as Germany has accumulated historically until this moment.

Andrew Lee at Recharge reports that Masdar is investing $1.5 billion with the Spanish firm Iberdrola in the Baltic Eagle offshore wind installation off Germany, which will generate 476 MW. It is slightly over a $3 bn project.

Some of Masdar’s investments, as in offshore floating windmills for Scotland, could be game-changers. California’s offshore waters are too deep for pylons, so its offshore wind will have to be on floating platforms of the sort Masdar is pioneering with its partners.

The company also set up the world’s largest floating solar facility in Indonesia, and is now partnering with Malaysia for 2 gigawatts of green energy projects.

It is his role as chairman of the board at Masdar that catapulted al-Jaber into the presidency of COP28.

Here’s the problem, though. Masdar itself is owned by a consortium of three corporations, one of them being the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), of which Mr. al-Jaber has been group CEO since 2016. It is an irony that the venture capital for Masdar came in part from a gas and oil company.

But it is also troubling, because most movers and shakers in the Gulf oil states don’t have an appreciation for how urgent the climate crisis is and how important it is to Keep it in the Ground. They aren’t blind. They know an energy transition is coming. But their horizon for it is fifty or sixty years, not ten or twenty. It may not seem like a big difference. For the health of the earth, it is an enormous difference. We have a “carbon budget.” All the carbon pollution we have so far put into the atmosphere will go into the oceans. If we stop producing CO2, the earth will immediately cease heating up further, and then, gradually, over a couple of centuries, will go back to what was normal before about 1850. But the ocean will run out of absorptive capacity in 2050, and if we go on spewing billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere after that, we’ll make the earth a hellhole for many centuries, maybe millennia, to come.

To be fair, even the Chinese Communist Party doesn’t plan to stop building new coal plants until 2030, and doesn’t plan to get to carbon zero until 2060, even though it is making bigger strides toward a green energy economy, as measured by gigawatts of green energy, than any other country in the world. Coal is to the Chinese economy what petroleum is to the UAE economy, and neither can easily let go (the CPP is afraid of the coal workers for one thing). So it isn’t only the Gulf oil states who have this tunnel blindness.

But here’s the kicker: Ivan Levingston, David Sheppard and Andrew England at the Financial Times write that ADNOC “has earmarked $150bn in capital expenditure over the next five years towards expanding its oil and gas production, with $15bn set aside for low-carbon solutions over a longer period.”

And you want to shout, no, no, no! UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned in June that based on UN studies, the world can only avoid the catastrophes that will come with exceeding the pre-Industrial Revolution average temperature by 1.5 degrees C. by cutting, not just present emissions, but fossil fuel production.

He called on financial institutions to “commit to end financing and investment in exploration for new oil and gas fields, and expansion of oil and gas reserves – investing instead in the just transition in the developing world.” He called on the fossil fuel industry to drive the transition to green energy.

So Mr. al-Jaber is doing half of what Secretary-General Guterres is asking. ADNOC is in fact using Masdar to effect a green energy transition, with plans to expand its gigawattage by an enormous 80 gigs.

But his ADNOC is not doing the other half. It isn’t ceasing investment in and exploration for new oil and gas. $150 billion over 5 years for expansion of fossil fuel production is a crime against humanity. Ask Maui.

And this is why Mr. al-Jaber is such a controversial pick to chair COP28. His Masdar activities are what make John Kerry, President Biden’s special emissary on climate change, defend Mr. al-Jaber, and those activities are indeed praiseworthy.

But the ADNOC expansion plans are not consistent with leadership on the climate crisis. Moreover, they are likely bad business strategy. The electrification of transportation is coming much more quickly than most people realize (read Tony Seba), and wasting money to produce more oil for ten years from now when demand will likely be cratering is a good way to go bankrupt.

The heat index numbers, which combine the temperature with the humidity reading, are truly horrific, with some towns along the Gulf of Mexico seeing a heat index of 125 F. Scientists have discovered that a temperature of 122°F along with 80% humidity, i.e. a heat index of 160 F is fatal to human beings. A heat index of 125 F. is only very, very dangerous and militates against doing much work outside. Humans cool down by sweating, but that doesn’t work in high heat and humidity, so they can’t get cool and get heat stroke.

A study by Climate Central found that climate change increased the likelihood of the Texas heat wave by a factor of five.

J. David Goodman at the New York Times points out that solar power installations have doubled in Texas since the beginning of the year, and are set to double again by the end of 2023.

(Juan says that this development comes in part from the incentives in Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act for renewables and in part from Biden’s decision to lift the bar on importing panels from places like Vietnam that had been put in place under Trump.)

At the moment, solar is generating 15% of the electricity used by Texans. For the year, that percentage is 7% so far, with 31% from wind. Given the heat dome, they are running their air conditioners heavily. But the legacy power plants have sometimes gone off line. A nuclear plant was inoperable for a few days, and then a coal plant went out.

Solar power wanes, of course, in the evening. But luckily, by around 9 pm the wind typically picks up, so wind turbines provide power at night. Even Texas’ energy company, ERCOT admits that battery power is among the means they have to keep the grid stable during this transition.

Tigue also pointed out that much of the slack was immediately made up with battery storage. And what filled up the batteries? Texas’s renewables. Wind/ Water/ Solar/ Battery can provide 100% of our electricity needs now. The problem is that most states haven’t installed enough battery back-up. The Republican refrain that renewables are unreliable is a typical Big Lie. With batteries, they can be quite reliable.

Gov. Greg Abbot, an inveterate liar in the back pocket of Big Carbon, blamed the 2021 energy outages during a cold spell on wind turbines freezing up. Investigations showed that the wind turbines did fine. It was the fossil gas plants that froze up.

Luke Metzger at Environment Texas explains that Republicans in the Texas legislature introduced a raft of bills this spring aiming to slap high extra fees and disincentives on wind and solar energy in the state. Luckily, he says, the worst measures did not get enough votes to pass. This time. One bill centered on building $10 billion worth of new fossil gas plants, which would be much more expensive than solar/ wind/ battery and would also contribute to the global heating that caused the heat dome in the first place.

Burning fossil gas puts carbon dioxide, a heat-trapping gas, into the atmosphere. It prevents the heat of sun rays that strike the earth from easily radiating back out into space at the rate they did before the Industrial Revolution. Unless humanity stops producing CO2 by 2050, there is a danger we will make our climate chaotic and present people in places like Texas with severe challenges.

So the Texas Republicans now want to kill off the only thing that is helping Texans survive this heat dome– renewable energy and battery storage. One question, though, is whether the federal subsidies and the constant fall in price per kilowatt hour of wind and solar will outweigh any advantages the corrupt GOP tries to give fossil gas. Another question is how long Texans will go on putting these clowns into the state legislature, who want to kill us all with their CO2?

Hint: rationing is a better approach than markets.

( Foreign Policy in Focus ) – The burning of fossil fuels—oil, coal, natural gas—is responsible for nearly 90 percent of global carbon emissions. Despite almost-universal recognition of the need to reduce the use of those fossil fuels, the industrialized world is having the hardest time breaking its addiction. The economic rebound from the COVID-19 shutdowns generated the largest ever increase in global emissions from fossil fuels in 2021—around 2 billion tons. The increase in 2022 was considerably more modest—thanks to a surge in renewable energy investments—but it was an increase nonetheless. Meanwhile, subsidies for fossil fuel consumption rose to a record $1 trillion last year.

The prevailing approach to reducing dependency on fossil fuels has been price-based—either by way of a carbon tax or some form of emissions trading scheme. Around two dozen countries levy carbon taxes: establishing a price for carbon and making emitters pay that price per unit of carbon consumed. Meanwhile, under the various “cap-and-trade” systems in place in the European Union and other places, a “cap” on emissions is established through the issuance of permits. But industries can exceed their “cap” by simply paying a penalty, while those that don’t use the full value of their permit can effectively sell their allowance to others.

One problem with the carbon tax is that the price of carbon has traditionally been set too low, so that producers and consumers do not feel the economic push to abandon fossil fuels. The problem with the cap-and-trade mechanism is that it has generally moved carbon emissions around rather than substantially reduce them.

“As I’ve explored with colleagues in peer-reviewed work in the past, ‘cap-and-trade’ almost invariably contains no meaningful cap,” explains Shaun Chamberlin, an author and activist who has advised the UK government on carbon rationing and was involved with the Transition Towns and Extinction Rebellion movements from the outset. “It always has some form of safety valve mechanism, which basically means that if the price gets out of hand, the cap is ignored.”

Accordingly, the market has failed to guide the global economy to a fossil-fuel-free future in the time frame necessitated by rising temperatures and other effects of climate change. Scientists now estimate that the world will pass the critical threshold of 1.5 degrees over pre-industrial levels in the first half of the 2030s. Market-based approaches tend to reinforce the status quo rather than transform the structures that have created the problem in the first place.

By contrast, in crises characterized by scarcity, one common solution has been to ration valuable resources. During wartime, for instance, many commodities have been rationed, from food to energy. During natural disasters, water might be rationed. Such systems introduce a measure of equity to prevent the rich and the powerful from simply buying up the scarce items and the unscrupulous from engaging in price-gouging to make quick profits. In such circumstances the cap on consumption is obvious since more food, energy, or water is simply not available.

With fossil fuels, the urgency is not around scarcity—there’s still a lot of oil, natural gas, and coal under the ground and ocean (though it’s not limitless). Rather, the international community must act quickly because of the collective harm that fossil fuels produce. As such, the various plans put forward to ration fossil fuel use are not temporary measures that elapse when surpluses return. Rather, “the cap-and-ration” approach establishes a cap that declines over time to eliminate dependency “in a way that ensures sufficiency, equity, and justice for all,” observes Stan Cox, a research fellow in ecosphere studies at the Land Institute. “These policies would include, at a minimum, careful allocation of energy among economic sectors and fair-share rationing for consumers.”

Using rationing to reduce fossil fuel use—especially in the Global North—has already come close to political reality. The UK government commissioned a feasibility study of such a rationing system, Tradable Energy Quotas (TEQs), which reported positive findings in 2008, and a significant number of MPs supported the implementation of a TEQs system in 2011. The idea also attracted interest from the European Commission in 2018, because it offered the means to actually implement and achieve the carbon capping targets set by the politicians.

Since these caps are designed at a national level—based on internationally agreed-upon carbon reduction targets like those of the Paris agreement—they are subject to democratic decision-making. But they don’t necessarily reflect global justice.

“It doesn’t take into account the existing climate debt,” points out Ivonne Yanez, an Ecuadorian environmentalist and founder member of Acción Ecológica and Oilwatch international. “The richer countries have historically ‘occupied’ the atmosphere with their emissions. So, these carbon budgets are calculated without regard to this historic injustice.”

Via Pixabay.

In a March 21 session sponsored by Global Just Transition, Chamberlin, Cox, and Yanez discussed the value of rationing fossil fuels as a method to address the worsening climate crisis.

Beyond Carbon Pricing

The United Kingdom has a carbon budget that is legally binding—at least theoretically— and that restricts the amount of carbon emissions the country as a whole can emit over each five-year period. It was the first country to enact such a measure.

“As our government never tires of telling us, here in the UK we’ve been ‘leading the world in carbon budgets since 2010,’” Shaun Chamberlin notes. “Our Climate Change Act said we would reduce emissions in the UK by 80 percent by 2050. What we don’t have—and don’t look to have anytime soon—is any reasonable plan for actually delivering on these targets. Instead, we have a Climate Change Committee that regularly puts out reports saying, ‘Actually, we’re nowhere near delivering on what the government promised in its legally binding targets.’”

According to its targets, the UK is supposed to cut its carbon emissions by 68 per cent by 2030 (relative to 1990 levels) in order to reach net zero by 2050. But the government has admitted that even in the best of circumstances—should all projected cuts be made and the latest carbon-capture technology actually work—the UK will still only hit 92 percent of its 2030 goal. In other words, their strategy based on carbon pricing continues to fail.

“There’s been such a focus, and rightly so, on agreeing to globally appropriate carbon budgets that are sufficiently steep to address the problem of climate change, but also not so demanding that that they destroy economies and lives,” Chamberlin explains. “But there’s been so little focus on the parallel question of how we actually reduce Global North emissions by 90 percent in 20 years, or whatever we consider to be radical emissions reductions.”

The plan the UK almost adopted more than a decade ago—Tradable Energy Quotas or TEQs—would have taken a very different approach. “TEQs emerged from a different paradigm to the whole carbon pricing approach,” Chamberlin explains. “There’s this impossible tension built into carbon pricing. We need to make carbon sufficiently expensive that it gets driven out of the economy. But at the same time, we need to keep energy affordable.”

According to the International Energy Agency, however, about 80 percent of global energy still comes from fossil fuels, a level that has remained consistent for decades. “So, if our energy is so highly carbonized, it becomes—unsurprisingly—impossibly difficult to raise the carbon price without raising the energy price,” Chamberlin points out. The carbon pricing approach has not been able to square this circle.

“What TEQs would do is turn that on its head,” he continues. “By removing any need to raise carbon prices, it would unify everybody in common purpose around genuinely shared and actually compatible goals—minimizing the destabilization of our climate while striving to keep energy services available and affordable. And it would make the economy exist within a carbon budget, rather than the other way around.”

TEQs Explained

The TEQs system, established by economist and cultural historian David Fleming in 1996, is a national-level system for capping and then reducing the fossil fuel-based energy consumption of all energy users—individual, institutional, and corporate.

“It’s a national system for implementing national carbon commitments agreed by the government of that country,” Chamberlin explains. “All individuals within that country receive an unconditional, equal, and free entitlement of what are called TEQs units, which you might think of as electronic ration coupons. To purchase any fuel or energy anywhere in the economy, these units have to be surrendered alongside the usual payment of money. So, you go to the gas station, you pay in cash or by credit card, and you also surrender some of these TEQs units.”

He continues, “Your entitlement will be an equal proportion of the national carbon budget. If you use less than that, if you are a below-average energy user, then you’ll have some spare left from your entitlement which you receive each week, and you can sell that spare back to the issuer. So, those who are energy-thrifty get a financial benefit from using less. Those who want to use more than their entitlement can buy those spare units, but of course they’re then effectively paying the more energy-thrifty people for the benefit of doing so.”

The system is administered by a registrar that issues the quotas. “In the UK, around 40 percent of emissions come from individuals and households, and around 60 percent of emissions come from industry and companies and non-household energy users,” Chamberlin says. “In line with those proportions, 40 percent of the budget goes to individuals while 60 percent goes via an auction to all other users. Only individuals and households get the free TEQ units; all other energy users need to purchase the units they need, which sets a single national price. The only place that anybody can get their TEQ units is from the registrar. There’s no trading between you and your neighbor directly. If you want to sell some units, you sell them to the registrar. If they want to buy some units, they buy them from the registrar.”

Since TEQs units are necessary for all energy use, and are only issued in line with the national carbon cap, the national carbon cap can’t be exceeded. “As such, carbon pricing is unnecessary—and without that artificial need to raise the price of energy, everyone’s focus can turn to keeping energy as affordable as possible and life as good as possible under the cap,” he continues.

The other key part of the system is a rating system. “The government will assess each energy retailer in the country for the carbon intensity of its fuel,” Chamberlin explains. “For example, if one oil company has a more carbon-efficient refining process than another, their petrol will require fewer TEQs units from the consumer at the point of purchase. This creates an incentive all the way through the economy for lower carbon processes. And of course, relative to any oil producer, renewable energy is going to require vastly fewer TEQs units. Not none, because there is still fossil fuel used in the production of wind turbines or solar panels, but vastly fewer.”

And because the carbon-intensity of energy/fuels is assessed and rated where they enter the economy, there is no need for impossibly complex lifecycle analysis of products. “We don’t need to figure out how much carbon went into every bag of crisps,” Chamberlin continues. “There’s no need to measure the emissions that come out of every chimney or every car exhaust pipe. Instead, the rating system applies upstream, and people engage with it downstream.”

Equity is also built into the system. “At any point, people can go to the registrar to purchase more TEQs units if they feel that they need them, and at any point people can sell,” Chamberlin adds.  “Because the number of units issued into the economy is fixed by the carbon budget, the price at any given time is determined by the demand. If lots of people are really struggling to live under the carbon budget, there are going to be lots of people trying to buy TEQs units, which will drive the price up. This creates a very clear message to the whole society that it’s not adapting very well to the budget, which creates a common purpose and real political momentum behind decarbonizing the economy and bringing that price down for everyone. Equally, if the price is dropping, just about everybody’s going to welcome that. Everybody has access to units at the same price at any time. The national price fluctuates in line with national demand. And buying and selling is very straightforward, like topping up a mobile phone.”

“The system we have today is essentially rationing by wealth,” he notes. “There’s only so much energy available and the richest get it. TEQs would move us from this system in which you burn what you can afford, to a system which fairly shares out what we can collectively afford to burn, while facilitating the radical reductions that an understanding of climate science demands.”

TEQs would also generate money through the auctioning of the units to non-household energy users such as industries, which is then used to subsidize consumers who are hardest hit by the price of fuel or to invest in difficult-to-fund infrastructure projects like public transportation.

Gas stations and electricity generators would surrender their TEQs when they purchase from wholesalers. “When they buy their fuel from suppliers or from the drillers or the extractors or the importers, they have to surrender units,” Chamberlin continues. “No matter whether that’s all integrated into one company or whether it’s 20 companies along the line, eventually those units end up with the people who are bringing the energy into the economy, whether they’re extracting it within the national borders or importing it. In order to have their license to operate, they have to surrender those units back to the registrar. So, you have a circular system.”

Chamberlin enumerates the benefits of the system. “It doesn’t take money from people in the way taxation does, so it’s actually improving their situation,” he says. “It benefits the poorer in society, because they tend to use less energy, but also provides assured entitlements to energy for all. It addresses fuel scarcity as well as guaranteeing emissions reductions. It’s not cumbersome or difficult for ordinary people to deal with, but does actively integrate into our daily lives the importance of reducing energy usage. And it provides a new paradigm of leadership for the nation that allows us to actually achieve our climate change targets, by making the economy exist under a carbon cap rather than the other way around.”

Approaching Implementation

The UK first funded research into the TEQs system in 2006. Two years later, the government enacted the Climate Change Act, and the government launched a full feasibility study into TEQs. The conclusion, however, was that the TEQs system was “ahead of its time.”

“The government decided instead to focus on what it called international abatement,” Chamberlin laments. “In other words, rather than actually reducing UK emissions, the government intended to pay other countries to reduce them on its behalf, because that was more economically efficient. That same year, 2008, the Parliamentary Environmental Audit Committee, which is the official body that reviews Parliament’s proceedings, was incredibly critical of this position, saying that the government should be looking at this much more urgently and pushing forward toward implementation.”

Three years later, an All-Party Parliamentary Group on Climate Change published a report on TEQs that garnered international media coverage, received the endorsements of a number of prominent people, “and again was essentially ignored by the government,” Chamberlin recalls. In 2015, Chamberlin teamed up with two academics to publish a peer-reviewed paper on TEQs in the journal Carbon Management. That year, and again in 2018, the European Commission took up the issue but failed to implement the system.

His experience of the details behind these headlines has made Chamberlin somewhat wary. “If we do again get TEQs anywhere close to political implementation, we’re going to again face a determination to undermine it,” he says. “Let’s imagine a global campaign for TEQs over the next five years that creates irresistible political momentum. There would come a point at which the people within some government department or corporate think tank would say, ‘Yeah, that’s fine but we just need to put in this little safety valve to make sure that prices don’t get too high.’ And the significance of that—essentially changing it back into yet another carbon-pricing policy—will be something that only us policy-wonks will understand. The danger here is that something implemented under the name of TEQs or rationing will not actually be either, and they’ll be able to channel all of that political momentum into something that just maintains the status quo. So, for me that’s a central challenge—how can we defend the core facets of the system as it gets closer to political reality?”

Who Makes the Decisions?

Despite many discussions of clean transitions and dramatic cuts in carbon emissions, the Global North remains a heavy consumer of fossil fuels. The United States, for instance, is the leading consumer of oil and natural gas in the world. (China and India, however, are the leading consumers of coal.)

These consumption rates have not only kept carbon emissions high but have shaped the conversation to focus on carbon budgets—how much is still feasible to emit—rather than simply slashing extraction and consumption as quickly as is feasible. TEQs could be put to work in support of either aim but, as Chamberlin points out, “TEQs offers no help with political agreement on how rapidly nations should cut fossil fuel use—rather it offers the means to make it possible to achieve more radical and rapid energy use reductions in the Global North, when or if that aim is deemed politically acceptable.”

Ivonne Yanez works for Acción Ecológica in Ecuador, which has “worked on climate change for more than 20 years,” she points out. “Also, for more than 20 years, we have supported the idea of leaving fossil fuels in the ground. This is the most important premise that we have to take into account in defining any policy regarding carbon dioxide reductions, regarding energy, or any energy transition or transformation.”

Chamberlin agrees: “Absolutely the priority should be to leave fossil fuels in the ground. Then, the question becomes, how do we get that to happen? One of the things we need to do is for people in the Global North to learn to live without using as much energy as they do, which is where TEQs comes in.”

Yanez points out that carbon budgets are established by national governments. The budgets that count, in terms of having an impact on oil and gas production and consumption, are those of Global North countries. These are the same countries that are responsible for fully half of global emissions since the start of the Industrial Revolution. “So, when a commission establishes the UK carbon budget, is it taking into account the current consumption of energy in the country or the 50 less percent energy that the UK should be consuming according to a fair calculation of climate justice?” she asks.

“I agree that the idea of a carbon budget is itself problematic,” Chamberlin replies. “To my point of view, there is no acceptable carbon budget left to burn. We’re already at a point where the climate has been destabilized and is having profoundly undesirable effects. We’re torn between the physical reality and the political reality: if I could click my fingers and transform both of those, I would. But the reason why countries aren’t willing to say, ‘Yes, we’ll just stop emitting carbon tomorrow’ is because their whole economy is dependent on the fuel that contains that carbon. And hence we’ve got this huge and very dysfunctional UN process of countries trying to negotiate among themselves over what would be an appropriate carbon budget.”

Ensuring Equity

Fossil fuels are quite cheap to use—because governments use subsidies to keep prices low for consumers and because the environmental costs of extraction and use are not factored into the price tag. This means that an increase in fuel prices disproportionately affects the consumers who can least afford to buy solar panels or switch to an electric vehicle. It also means that increasing the price of gas is politically unpopular.

“TEQs and other cap-and-ration systems have solid potential to gain broad political acceptance,” Stan Cox says. “As long as it’s clear that the majority in society under these systems would have guaranteed access to affordable energy to meet their needs and with greater economic security than they may even have today.”

Cox and his colleague Larry Edwards, an engineer and environmental consultant, have developed a system similar to TEQs that they call “Cap and Adapt.” The difference is that the caps and the rations are measured in terms of barrels of oil, cubic meters of gas, and tons of coal, rather than carbon units.

The rationing in these systems, Cox explains, doesn’t put the burden of emission reductions on individuals in households by limiting their consumption. Rather, it’s the declining cap that ensures the reductions in total emissions. “Such a straight-ahead rationing program is meant to ensure that everyone has enough and that access is equitable,” he says. “In these systems, rationing is not the bully, rationing is your friend. It’s something to make society fairer and ensure sufficiency.”

Such systems would ideally dovetail with “a comprehensive industrial policy that directs energy and other resources toward the production of essential goods and services and away from wasteful and unnecessary production,” he adds. “Such policies, for example, could divert resources away from military production and toward development of green infrastructure and retrofitting buildings. Or away from aircraft and private vehicles and toward public transportation. Or away from the construction of McMansions toward affordable, energy-efficient, durable housing. Or from the production of feed grain for cattle and toward grains and legumes for food. Or, overall, away from luxury goods and towards basic necessities.”

Cox also proposes a more comprehensive approach that goes beyond price controls and rationing: “a system of universal basic services that guarantees every household sufficient access to essential goods and services, including such things as public water and energy supplies, medical services, public education, and transportation, good quality food, affordable housing, green space, clean air, and public safety without repression.” He is quick to clarify. “I don’t mean that everything would be free. But there would be some guarantee that people, no matter what their income, would have access. Could all of this be feasible? Yes, by focusing energy supplies on essential goods and services rather than on wasteful, solely-for-profit production. It would also mean the sacrificing of growth for growth’s sake.”

Movements in the Global South have also been addressing the problem of unrestrained growth. Yanez points out that the term “degrowth” has little resonance “because how can we ask the indigenous people to degrow? I’d rather talk about post-growth or this idea of living well: buen vivir in Spanish or sumac kawsay in Quechua.”

“The degrowth movement is centered mainly in Europe,” Cox concedes, “but it has been very valuable in envisioning what a degrowth or postgrowth society would look like, and pointing out the differences between economic growth and the growth of human well-being. The movement purposely has not gotten into mechanisms to achieve degrowth. But I think it’s important for society to see that we have to choose between growth or survival, and that if we do what’s necessary for survival, we won’t have growth. We in the affluent societies would be better off with less, and in the meantime, there are going to be other solutions in non-affluent societies.”

Actions Together

Although a rationing system for fossil fuels has yet to be implemented by any national governments, several states have joined together to end their dependency on oil and gas. Led by Denmark and Costa Rica, the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance members have pledged to end new exploration for oil and gas. Under the new leadership of Gustavo Petro, Colombia too wants to join their ranks, which is significant given the country’s economic dependency fossil fuel exports. In 2018, Ireland became the world’s first country to divest from fossil fuel funds.

The Pacific island nations of Tuvalu and Vanuatu, meanwhile, are leading an initiative at the UN level to pass a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty that would end the expansion of fossil fuel production, phase out existing fossil fuel infrastructure, and accelerate a just transition to clean energy.

There have also been many initiatives from below to reduce fossil fuel use. One path has been to stop extraction. “For decades, movements of indigenous peoples, campesinos, and fisherfolk have been fighting against climate change,” Ivonne Yanez points out. “And how? They do not talk about carbon emissions or reductions. They just want to stop oil, gas, and coal extraction. Here in Ecuador, for example, there are so many communities resisting oil extraction and being criminalized because of this.”

Yanez also notes that acting together means not only solidarity among peoples but establishing stronger links with the rest of nature. “It would be good to incorporate in the TEQs proposals and debate the point of view of non-humans, including the stones and the spirits,” she proposes.

Chamberlin strongly agrees on both points. “I myself have been arrested in trying to shut down fossil fuel extraction sites, and I was one of the first arrestees with Extinction Rebellion,” he relates. “TEQs is an attempt to translate some of the wisdom of restraint and absolute limits into the language of a sick empire. This is an attempt from within an omnicidal culture to limit some of the damage that it’s doing.”

He continues, “Ultimately, it’s not about the growth or degrowth of the market economy. It’s about getting ready for the moment when the system collapses under the weight of its own unsustainability. We have inherited a system that depends on growth; that growth will end by accident or by design, and soon. After this system fades into history, future systems will again be based on informal relationships between beings on the planet just like they always have been in the past before these few centuries of madness. The older cultures on our planet know how to live in that world and we should absolutely be listening to them more.”

“In the meantime, we would doubtless be wise to slash emissions as drastically as we can,” he concludes. “And it is surely beyond time to move from the endless debates over ‘fair’ carbon budgets to the actual work of reducing fossil fuel consumption in the Global North, in solidarity with the indigenous-led resistance in the Global South working to stop fossil fuel extraction. For this, cap-and-ration—whether TEQs or other closely-related proposals—appears the only policy paradigm suited to cut the paralyzing Gordian knot that carbon pricing has tied us into.”

Via Foreign Policy in Focus

The new rules are being released for public comment and once finally approved will go into effect in 2024. They will likely face a court challenge, but Regan says that this time the agency has gotten the regulation right in terms of existing law.

Regan is requiring fossil gas and coal plants to use carbon capture and storage techniques to reduce their output of greenhouse gases. This equipment is an extra expense, and that in itself could spell doom for any of these plants that are already having trouble competing in a market where wind and solar are typically competitive or cheaper. Wind nowadays is typically 4 cents per kilowatt hour and solar varies but on average is a little over 6 cents per kilowatt hour. Appalachian coal nowadays also comes in at about 6.2 cents per kilowatt hour. So coal can’t compete with either one, since wind and solar are going to pick up billions in government tax offsets and grants via the Inflation Reduction Act.

Not only are solar and wind plummeting in price over time, with constant technological innovation making them cheaper, but now fossil gas and coal will have the extra burden of the carbon emissions limit.

Although Regan assures us that carbon capture and storage exists and is economically feasible, fossil fuel industry leaders deny this. I think the latter know best. Nevertheless, the EPA has been found by the Supreme Court to have the authority to regulate air quality and emissions based on federal law. It just can’t tell the power plants how they should attain those limits.

If carbon capture and storage is vaporware that doesn’t even really exist or is too expensive, then fossil gas and coal plants will have to find some other way to cut their carbon dioxide emissions.

Via Pixabay

For fossil gas plants, that might be to burn more hydrogen with their gas, reducing their carbon footprint.

For coal plants, there isn’t really a good alternative except to reduce their hours of operation or to close down. Which is what we want, anyway.

These plants are already closing down at a fast clip, but not fast enough to stop them from wrecking the earth. Of all the electricity plants closing in 2023, 98% will be coal and fossil gas fired.

Just three years from now, in 2026, 50% of presently existing coal-fired plants are expected to close. Then another 40% will close by 2030. During the rest of this decade 80 gigawatts of coal power will be retired.

H/t Institute for Energy Economics

And all these projections were before today’s announcement.

Through 2042, the new standards would “avoid up to 617 million metric tons of total carbon dioxide (CO2).”

The new standards also regulate particulate matter, the tiny stuff that gets into your lungs and causes cancer. Only about half of lung cancer patients had smoked, and scientists for a long time were confused about how the other half fell ill. It is now clear that particular matter from burning fossil fuels is the culprit.

If these standards are implemented, by 2030 they would forestall: