The Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions at Duke University
Friday, in a 52-46 vote, the Senate confirmed Scott Pruitt, Oklahoma attorney general to head the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Pruitt was sworn in that evening.
As Oklahoma’s attorney general, Pruitt filed 14 lawsuits challenging EPA regulations, including limits on carbon emissions from fossil fuel-fired power plants. Many of the cases are pending in the courts, creating “serious conflicts of interest,” said Delaware Senator Tom Carver the day before the vote. On Tuesday, Oklahoma asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to replace Pruitt in the Clean Power Plan lawsuit with the state’s new attorney general.
In his first speech to EPA staff on Tuesday, Pruitt said, “I believe that we as an agency, and we as a nation, can be both pro-energy and jobs, and pro-environment. We don’t have to choose between the two.”
He steered clear of specifics about the Trump administration’s energy policies, instead hinting at some agency reforms, saying that the agency has a responsibility to “avoid abuses that occur sometimes” in rulemaking, and he stressed the importance of following the “rule of law” and in partnering with states.
“I seek to ensure that we engender the trust of those at the state level,” he said (subscription).
Those comments echoed Pruitt’s first interview as EPA administrator, in which he told the Wall Street Journal that he intends to restore power to states, that environmental laws were not meant to be a “one-size-fits-all model,” and that “the state departments of environmental quality have an enormous role to play” as well as suggested that the public has trust issues with the EPA’s procedure for producing studies and cost-benefit analyses.
“The citizens just don’t trust that EPA is honest with these numbers,” he said. “Let’s get real, objective data, not just do modeling. Let’s vigorously publish and peer-review science. Let’s do honest cost-benefit work. We need to restore the trust.”
During the interview, Pruitt appeared to contradict his confirmation hearing testimony by questioning EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases, saying that “the courts have seriously called into question the legality” of both the Clean Power Plan and the Waters of the United States Rule, which clarifies the EPA’s regulatory authority under the Clean Water Act. Both rules may be targets of future executive actions. Although the order may not cancel the Clean Power Plan outright, it would mark the first step in weakening the Obama-era climate rule.
The Supreme Court ruled in Massachusetts vs. EPA that the EPA possesses authority to regulate greenhouse gases as air pollutants under the Clean Air Act—an authority that the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s panel on the environment is looking to roll back (subscription).
Senate Democrats had sought to delay Pruitt’s Senate confirmation vote, saying lawmakers could afford to wait a few days to learn more about Pruitt’s ties to the oil and gas industry, a reference to an Oklahoma judge’s ruling, that required Pruitt to hand over nearly 3,000 e-mails related to his communications with the industry, the subject of a public records lawsuit. The Center for Media and Democracy published those e-mails yesterday, two years after Pruitt initially refused to release them. The e-mails share close ties to the oil and gas industry. AP detailed a few of the ways in which those e-mails show how Pruitt and his staff coordinated their legal strategy with oil and gas industry executives and advocacy groups funded by those profiting from fossil fuels to fight federal efforts to curb carbon emissions.
Study Examines Spill Risk of Hydraulically Fractured Wells
A new analysis led by the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions, which appeared Tuesday in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, concludes that making states spill data more uniform and accessible could provide stakeholders with important information on where to target efforts for locating and preventing future spills at hydraulically fractured oil and gas wells.
“… Reporting requirements differ across states, requiring considerable effort to make the data usable for analysis,” said Lauren Patterson, policy associate at the Nicholas Institute and the study’s lead author. “Given the rapid recent development of unconventional oil and gas development, data are scarce on both how often spills happen, where in the process they occur, and what caused them.”
“The presence of a spill,” she added, “does not mean an adverse impact; many spills were small or contained. The data on containment and potential impacts varied between states and over time, making it difficult to do more than report on the number of spills.”
It identifies 6,648 spills reported across Colorado, New Mexico, North Dakota and Pennsylvania during a 10-year period (2005 and 2014). The work also shows that the range of requirements makes it impossible to compare states or come up with a comprehensive national picture. For example, Colorado and New Mexico require spills of more than 210 gallons to be reported to the state, whereas North Dakota calls for any spill of more than 42 gallons to be documented.
Making this state-level data more uniform could help regulators and industry reduce future spills.
“Analyses like this one are so important, to define and mitigate risk to water supplies and human health,” said Kate Konschnik, co-author on the paper from Harvard Law School’s Environmental Policy Initiative. “Writing state reporting rules with these factors in mind is critical, to ensure that the right data are available—and in an accessible format—for industry, states and the research community.”
Singapore Commits, States Consider Carbon Tax
A proposed carbon tax by a group of Republican lawmakers—the Climate Leadership Council—hasn’t made much headway with Congress since its introduction earlier this month, but others are starting to think about the concept.
State lawmakers in California are debating whether to extend the current cap-and-trade system beyond 2020, or replace it with a carbon tax—or cap and tax. Like the cap-and-trade system, this alternative strategy would place a cap on emissions that would decline each year, but it would also tax all emissions at the EPA-set social cost of carbon, or $50 per ton in 2030. And, ClimateWire reports, Washington state has proposed a $25-per-ton carbon tax to bolster the state budget. A second proposal to impose a $15-per-ton tax is also on that state’s legislative agenda (subscription).
Across the pond in Southeast Asia, Singapore announced plans to implement a S$10–$20 per ton carbon tax in 2019—committing to reducing emissions 36 percent compared with 2005 levels by 2030.
“The most economically efficient and fair way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is to set a carbon tax, so that emitters will take the necessary actions,” said Singapore Finance Minister Heng Swee Keat. “Singapore is vulnerable to rises in sea level due to climate change. Together with the international community, we have to play our part to protect our living environment.”
The Climate Post offers a rundown of the week in climate and energy news. It is produced each Thursday by Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions.
The Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions at Duke University
The Congressional Review Act was used to repeal a rule that forced energy companies on the U.S. stock exchanges to disclose the royalties and other payments that oil, natural gas, coal and mineral companies make to governments in an effort to fight corruption in resource-rich countries. President Donald Trump signed legislation to scrap the rule, implemented by the Securities and Exchange Commission under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, on Tuesday.
“This is one of many,” Trump said after the signing of H.J. Res. 41. “We have many more left. And we’re bringing back jobs big league.”
The repeal of the Obama-era rule was made possible through the rarely used Congressional Review Act, which allows Congress a small window to scuttle regulations before they take effect with a simple majority vote and blocks regulators from writing similar rules in the future unless Congress authorizes them through subsequent legislation. Given the infrequency with which the Congressional Review Act has been used, however, legal uncertainty hangs over how the government approaches a statutorily required regulation that is overturned through the Congressional Review Act. Before Trump took office, the Congressional Review Act had been used only once, in 2001, to overturn a Clinton administration ergonomics rule.
So far, the House has moved to repeal eight other rules, including a rule restricting coal companies from dumping mining waste into streams and one curtailing methane waste from oil and gas drilling on public lands. The Senate could consider the latter, H. J. Res. 36, which would rescind the Bureau of Land Management’s Waste Prevention, Production Subject to Royalties, and Resource Conservation rule, this week. Also this week, Trump could sign a separate resolution scrapping the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Stream Protection Rule, enacted to protect 6,000 miles of streams and 52,000 acres of forests.
Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell filed cloture Monday for six of Trump’s cabinet nominees, allowing them to come before the full Senate for a vote. Trump’s environment-focused nominees—Ryan Zinke (U.S. Department of the Interior) and Rick Perry (U.S. Department of Energy), are presently on hold. Some reports say Zinke’s confirmation may not be until March.
Although a Senate vote for Trump’s pick to lead the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was expected this week, Senate Democrats requested Scott Pruitt’s vote be delayed due to a pending court case regarding e-mail records. There is no indication at this point that the vote will be delayed, however.
“These records are needed for the Senate to evaluate Mr. Pruitt’s suitability to serve in the position for which he has been nominated,” the Democrats wrote.
Sea Ice Continues to Shrink at Both Poles; Study Examines Method to Refreeze
Sea ice at the north and south poles continues to reach record low levels. In Antarctica, sea ice has shrunk to its lowest level since record keeping began in 1979—contracting to 2.287 million square kilometers. The average between 1981 and 2010 was more than 3 million square kilometers.
Sea ice in the Arctic is also tracking low—13.9 million square kilometers compared to the 30-year average of 15.2 million square kilometers.
“No one knows for sure what will happen, as there might be a rebounding from the very large decreases last year, or there might be a continuation of those decreases,” said Claire Parkinson, a NASA sea ice researcher. “Whichever way it turns out, the added information will probably help scientists to get a better handle on the likely causes.”
A new study published in Earth’s Future, the journal of the American Geophysical Union, suggests that it may be possible to refreeze ice in the Arctic, building back up record-low ice levels.
“This loss of sea ice represents one of the most severe positive feedbacks in the climate system, as sunlight that would otherwise be reflected by sea ice is absorbed by open ocean,” authors write. “It is unlikely that CO2 levels and mean temperatures can be decreased in time to prevent this loss, so restoring sea ice artificially is imperative.”
The authors examine a means for increasing sea ice production using wind power to pump water from the ocean and spray it on the surface during Arctic winters. Because the mean annual thickness of Arctic ice is approximately 1.5 meters, the authors say, this plan could increase the thickness of the ice by about 70 percent over the course of a winter—enough to counteract the 0.58 meters lost each year due to the changing climate.
“Thicker ice would mean longer-lasting ice. In turn, that would mean the danger of all sea ice disappearing from the Arctic in summer would be reduced significantly,” said Arizona State University’s Steven Desch, an author of the plan to use 10 million wind-powered pumps.
Human Activities Dwarf Natural Forces When It Comes to Climate Change Impacts
Two researchers who examined the Earth as a single complex system say they have captured in a one equation the impact of human activities. Those activities, specifically, the emission of greenhouse gases, are causing the climate to change 170 times faster than natural forces.
The study, published in the journal The Anthropocene Review, represents that exceptional rapid rate of change in an “Anthropocene equation.”
Explaining the equation in New Scientist, co-author Owen Gaffney of the University of Stockholm said it was developed “by homing in on the rate of change of Earth’s life support system . . . For four billion years the rate of change of the Earth system has been a complex function of astronomical and geophysical forces plus internal dynamics: Earth’s orbit around the sun, gravitational interactions with other planets, the sun’s heat output, colliding continents, volcanoes and evolution, among others.”
“In the equation, astronomical and geophysical forces tend to zero because of their slow nature or rarity, as do internal dynamics, for now,” Gaffney added. “All these forces still exert pressure, but currently on orders of magnitude less than human impact.”
Gaffney said that although complex interactions between the Earth’s core and the biosphere had rendered Earth relatively stable over millions of years, human societies would be unlikely to fare so well. The research concluded that failure to reduce anthropological climate change could “trigger societal collapse.”
The Climate Post offers a rundown of the week in climate and energy news. It is produced each Thursday by Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions.
The Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions at Duke University
Using a rarely invoked Congressional Review Act, Congress has paved the way for President Donald Trump to roll back three Obama-era environmental regulations.
On Thursday, the Senate, in a 54-45 vote, gave final legislative approval to a measure repealing a new rule aimed at preventing the dumping of coal mining debris into nearby streams. When announcing the Stream Protection Rule in December, the Department of the Interior said that it would protect 6,000 miles of streams and 52,000 acres of forests.
On Friday, the House approved a Congressional Review Act resolution against the Bureau of Land Management’s methane venting and flaring rule. If approved by the Senate and signed by President Trump, the rule, which keeps companies from venting natural gas on public and tribal lands, would come off the books. In announcing the rule, which updated 30-year old regulations governing venting, flaring, and leaks of natural gas, the DOI said it would reduce the waste of public resources, cut methane emissions that contribute to climate change, and provide a fair return on public resources for taxpayers.
On the day Rex Tillerson was confirmed as Secretary of State, the House, with a strict party-line vote, killed a Securities and Exchange Commission transparency rule requiring companies to disclose mining- and drilling-related payments to foreign governments. When he was Exxon CEO, Tillerson had lobbied against the rule in part because it affected the company’s business dealings in Russia (subscription).
The Congressional Review Act allows Congress a small window to scuttle regulations before they take effect with a simple majority vote and blocks regulators from writing similar rules in the future unless Congress authorizes them via subsequent legislation.
Trump has also targeted specific regulations he believes hamper job growth, including the Waters of the U.S. Rule and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Clean Power Plan, which aims to limit carbon pollution from existing power plants but is under a Supreme Court stay. On Wednesday, a group of Republicans led by former Secretary of State James A. Baker III, with former Secretary of State George P. Shultz and Former Secretary of the Treasury Henry M. Paulson Jr., met to discuss the prospect of imposing a national carbon tax, rather than using federal regulations, to address climate change.
“I really don’t know the extent to which it is manmade, and I don’t think anybody can tell you with certainty that it’s all manmade,” said James Baker, one of the members of the newly formed Climate Leadership Council. However, “the risk is sufficiently strong that we need an insurance policy and this is a damn good insurance policy.”
The group meets with White House officials this week about the plan to raise the cost of fossil fuels to bring down consumption—suggesting a tax of $40 a ton that would increase steadily over time. Tax proceeds, they state, would be redistributed to consumers on a quarterly basis in what they call “carbon dividends” that could be approximately $2,000 annually for a family of four.
Sessions Confirmed; Pruitt and Zinke Still Waiting
Jeff Sessions, President Donald Trump’s nominee for attorney general who has served as a Senator from Alabama since 1997, was confirmed in a 52-47 vote Wednesday evening. He is expected to be sworn in today.
This week, Bloomberg BNA reported that the environment may not be a top priority for Sessions, who as a senator regularly voted against environmental protection legislation—for example, against a rule limiting emissions of mercury and other hazardous air pollutants from coal-fired power plants (in 2012) and a rule setting greenhouse gas standards for new and modified power plants (in 2015).
For Scott Pruitt, the path to consideration by the full Senate to lead the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is not without controversy. On Monday, nearly 450 former EPA employees urged Congress to reject his nomination.
“Our perspective is not partisan,” they wrote, noting that many of the 447 names on the letter had served as career employees under both Republican and Democratic administrations. “However, every EPA administrator has a fundamental obligation to act in the public’s interest based on current law and the best available science. Mr. Pruitt’s record raises serious questions about whose interests he has served to date and whether he agrees with the long-standing tenets of U.S. environmental law.”
As Pruitt awaits his Senate confirmation, a new bill—HR861—aims to get rid of the agency altogether. Introduced during the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology hearing “Make the EPA Great Again,” its details are sparse.
Ryan Zinke, Interior Secretary nominee, and Rick Perry, Energy Secretary nominee, were both approved by Senate committee vote last month but await consideration by the full Senate. According to Senator Jon Tester, that could be a bit.
“I think that right now, the priority was put on DeVos, and Price, and on Sessions and Mnuchin, and I think that’s where the majority wants to move,” said Tester. “They want to move on those four very controversial ones before they get to Perry and Zinke, and I think Perry and Zinke, neither one of those are near as controversial. I think that they’ll go through, it’s just a matter of getting them floor-time to send them through.”
New Study Affirms Nonexistence of Global Warming Slowdown Amid Furor Over Earlier Study
A study by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that in 2015 found no evidence of a warming slowdown over the last decade is under the microscope again. At the time, challenges by climate change doubters prompted a U.S. House of Representatives committee to subpoena the study authors’ e-mails—and the threat of subpoenas was raised again on Sunday by House Science, Space and Technology Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) who accused NOAA scientists of politically motivated fraud.
Citing statements critical of the 2015 NOAA study (sometimes referred to as the Karl study after lead author Tom Karl) by former National Climatic Data Center scientist John Bates that appeared in The Daily Mail, Smith said, “Dr. Bates’ revelations and NOAA’s obstruction certainly lend credence to what I’ve expected all along—that the Karl study used flawed data, was rushed to publication in an effort to support the president’s climate change agenda, and ignored NOAA’s own standards for scientific study.”
The truth, according to a new analysis of data from ocean buoys, robotic floats, and satellites published in the journal Sciences Advances, is that earlier suggestions of a warming slowdown are incorrect and were the result of measurement error—a confirmation of the NOAA study conclusion.
“Our results mean that essentially NOAA got it right, that they were not cooking the books,” said lead author Zeke Hausfather when the study was published in January.
In Carbon Brief, Hausfather said, “What he [Bates] fails to mention is that the new NOAA results have been validated by independent data from satellites, buoys and Argo floats and that many other independent groups, including Berkeley Earth and the UK’s Met Office Hadley Centre, get effectively the same results.”
Bates, in an interview with E&E News on Tuesday, clarified that his issue was with the publication process and not with the data underlying the NOAA research.
To determine whether the 2015 NOAA study findings were correct, Hausfather and his colleagues took an independent look at ocean temperatures. Rather than combine old ship measurements with data from new buoys, as NOAA had done, they created temperature records from individual data sources. They found that—no matter the source, whether satellites, robotic floats, or buoys—the warming ocean trends matched those found in the NOAA study. The conclusion? Oceans have warmed consistently over the previous 50 years, at about 0.12 degrees Celsius per decade.
The Climate Post offers a rundown of the week in climate and energy news. It is produced each Thursday by Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions.
The Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions at Duke University
On Monday, President Donald Trump signed an order that will require federal agencies to cut two existing regulations for every new rule and that will set an annual cap on the cost of new regulations with the exceptions of military and national security regulations. For fiscal year 2017, the cap will require that the cost of new regulations be completely offset by the rescinding of existing rules. Starting in 2018, the order directs the White House Office of Management and Budget head to give each agency a budget for increasing or decreasing regulatory costs.
Yet, legal experts suggest that the executive order could be impossible to implement because many regulations are required by laws written by Congress.
“It should be noted that no [executive order] can change underlying statutes adopted in the regular order by Congress and signed by the president,” Scott Segal, an industry lawyer at Bracewell LLP, told ClimateWire (subscription).
The new order comes on the heels of a Congressional Research Service study finding that the Clean Air Act’s regulatory structure “faces an unusual degree of uncertainty” this year, with one or more branches of government poised to weigh in on key existing EPA rules. Those rules include the Clean Power Plan, methane rules for new or substantially modified oil and gas operations, and EPA’s latest ambient air quality standards for ozone. Yet other rules could be vulnerable under the Congressional Review Act, which allows Congress 60 legislative working days from the time a federal regulation is finalized to pass a “joint resolution of disapproval” on the rule.
The House passed two bills on Wednesday invoking the seldom used Congressional Review Act to attempt to roll back the Stream Protection Rule and the Securities and Exchange Commission rule requiring oil, gas and mining companies to reveal payments made to foreign governments. The rules were among five Obama administration regulations, including the Bureau of Land Management’s restrictions on methane emissions from flaring and venting during oil and gas operations on public and tribal lands, being targeted for reversal.
Trump has targeted specific regulations he believes hamper job growth, including the Waters of the U.S. Rule and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Clean Power Plan, which aims to limit carbon pollution from existing power plants but is under a Supreme Court stay.
Trump Nominates Supreme Court Justice; Some Cabinet Appointees Move Forward
President Donald Trump on Tuesday appointed 10th Circuit Judge Neil Gorsuch as his nominee to fill the Supreme Court seat left vacant last February by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. The decision, which has implications for environmental policy, comes as Trump promised—within two weeks of taking office.
Gorsuch’s parallels to Scalia were described by SCOTUSBlog writer Eric Citron as “eerie.”
“He is an ardent textualist (like Scalia); he believes criminal laws should be clear and interpreted in favor of defendants even if that hurts government prosecutions (like Scalia); he is skeptical of efforts to purge religious expression from public spaces (like Scalia); he is highly dubious of legislative history (like Scalia); and he is less than enamored of the dormant commerce clause (like Scalia),” Citron wrote.
Although Gorsuch hasn’t ruled on many environmental matters, Inside EPA reports that he has called for limiting the discretion of the EPA and other agencies to interpret their own authority. Last year, in Gutierrez-Brizuelo v. Lynch, Gorsuch indicated he was fine without Chevron deference, the legal doctrine granting government agencies interpretation of ambiguous statutes unless their interpretation of a statute is unreasonable.
“We managed to live with the administrative state before Chevron. We could do it again,” wrote Gorsuch in the majority opinion.
In that opinion, Gorsuch argued that the meaning of the law is for judges, not federal bureaucrats, to decide.
“Where in all this does a court interpret the law and say what it is?” Gorsuch said. “When does a court independently decide what the statute means and whether it has or has not vested a legal right in a person? Where Chevron applies that job seems to have gone extinct.”
Also this week, several of Trump’s cabinet picks—Department of Energy Secretary nominee Rick Perry, U.S. Attorney General nominee Jeff Sessions and Department of the Interior nominee Ryan Zinke—gained committee approval and now move forward for consideration by the full Senate.
All 10 Democrats on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, which is tasked with considering whether to move Scott Pruitt’s nomination to lead the EPA to the full Senate, opted to boycott the Wednesday meeting. They said Pruitt failed to provide substantive answers to questions about rules governing air pollution, toxic chemicals and lead in gasoline. But today, Republicans on the committee advanced Pruitt’s nomination on a party line vote after suspending committee rules because of the boycott.
Rex Tillerson, the former chairman and chief executive of Exxon Mobil, was confirmed by the Senate as the next Secretary of State by a 56-43 vote and was sworn in Wednesday evening. At his confirmation hearing, he acknowledged that the climate is changing but said that he believes science is not conclusive on the issue of how rising greenhouse gas emissions will affect life on Earth. He expanded on his views when providing written responses to questions posed by two senators.
“I agree with the consensus view that combustion of fossil fuels is a leading cause for increased concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere,” he wrote to Senator Ben Cardin of Maryland. “I understand these gases to be a factor in rising temperature, but I do not believe the scientific consensus supports their characterization as the ‘key’ factor.”
Study Says Carbon Capture Necessary to Meet Paris Agreement Goal
The global climate can survive the possible withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Agreement, said the authors of a study published this week in the journal Nature Climate Change. The bigger threat, they said, is a world without widespread deployment of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies. Absent those technologies, achieving the climate treaty’s goal to limit warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit that increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius could be impossible.
The authors reached that conclusion by reviewing past energy trends and examining nearly 150 countries’ pledged carbon reduction targets in the context of more than 100 climate simulations indicating how changes in energy production and use through 2040 could meet the 2 degrees Celsuis goal. To deal with the mix of targets—among them, straight emissions reductions (for example, 30 percent by 2030), lowered emissions intensity (emissions per unit of GDP), and technology deployment (for example, expansion of renewables)—the study used the Kaya Identity method, which breaks the carbon dioxide emissions rate into the human factors that affect it—broad factors such as GDP and more specific ones such as quantity of deployed renewables.
The study paints a good news-bad news picture of progress toward the 2 degrees Celsius goal. It indicates that the rate of global emissions has leveled off over the last few years due to a reduction in coal burning by China, a shift from coal to gas and renewables plus increased industrial energy efficiency in the United States, rapid expansion of renewables in the European Union, and slowed GDP growth in the U.S., EU and China. But sustaining this trend of decreasing carbon intensity of energy will not be easy. Although renewables development is keeping pace with 2 degree Celsius scenarios, nuclear power is lagging and CCS is barely past the starting gate. Only a few CCS facilities are operational, and only a couple of dozen are in construction.
“The greatest challenge is the slower-than-expected rollout of technologies to capture and permanently store carbon from fossil fuel and bioenergy combustion,” said study co-author Robbie Andrew of the Centre for International Climate and Environmental Research (CICERO). “Most scenarios suggest the need for thousands of facilities with carbon capture and storage by 2030, and this compares with the tens currently proposed.”
Thus far, high up-front costs have stymied development of commercial-scale CCS plants. If they don’t materialize, the world faces a harsh reality, suggests lead author Glen Peters of CICERO.
“If we don’t have CCS, then we will need to reduce use of fossil fuels much faster and in a much more disruptive way,” he said.
Study co-author Robert Jackson of Stanford University noted that CCS technology will prove even more crucial if President Donald Trump makes good on his pledge to revive the nation’s limping coal industry.
“There’s no way to reduce the carbon emissions associated with coal without carbon capture and storage,” Jackson said.
We may find out soon whether Trump will follow through on his pledge to remove the U.S. from the Paris climate deal when he issues an expected review of the U.S.’s involvement in multinational treaties. InsideEPA lays out mechanisms through which the administration could do so (subscription).
The Climate Post offers a rundown of the week in climate and energy news. It is produced each Thursday by Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions.
