Trump Evaluating Stance on Paris Agreement

The Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions at Duke University

Administration officials are reported to be meeting at the White House today to deliberate on whether the United States should stay in or exit the Paris Agreement, the global accord to address global warming.

Although candidate Trump said he would “cancel” U.S. participation, eight Republican House colleagues are urging President Trump to take a different route, weakening the Obama-era emissions reduction commitment and taking other steps to bolster domestic industries (subscription). They argue that the underlying United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which covers nearly all the world’s countries, and the Paris deal, which has been ratified by more than 140 parties, have become international energy forums—participation in which gives the United States a platform for advancing domestic energy, including coal, interests. Energy Secretary Rick Perry favors a treaty renegotiation, although how that would be accomplished remains unclear. Two other administration officials appear divided on the deal: Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has said the United States should remain a party to the agreement, and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt has said the country should exit it.

If the United States does stay in the Paris accord—Trump’s decision is expected in May—the Washington Post projects that it is unlikely to meet its pledge under the agreement to cut its emissions 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025, because the policies that made the pledge possible are being dismantled.

On “CBS This Morning” Monday, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Charles Pope, former executive director of the Sierra Club, offered a more optimistic view. Given recent emissions reductions and leadership from cities and states, Bloomberg suggested that the United States will meet the Paris goals. 

Study: Climate Change Increased Odds of Some Extreme Heat, Wet and Dry Periods

The latest research in the emerging field of climate science called “extreme event attribution” finds links between a warming climate and record-setting weather events. A paper published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is the first to present a four-step framework for testing such links for Earth’s hottest, wettest, and driest events in recent decades. Using a computer model and statistical analyses of climate observations, the authors concluded that climate change had increased the odds of a record-breaking heat in 85 percent of the surface area of the Earth that they studied.

“The world is not yet at a place where every single record-setting hot event has a human fingerprint, but we are getting close to that point,” said lead author Diffenbaugh of Stanford University. “Greater than 80 percent of those record hot events is a substantial fraction.”

The researchers also found that climate change had increased the probability of the driest year on record in 57 percent of the observed areas and that of the wettest five-day period in each of these areas by 41 percent (subscription).

Climate scientists typically examine potential links between warming of Earth and extreme weather events such as heatwaves or downpours on a case-by-case basis. But the group led by Diffenbaugh developed a more global, comprehensive approach to investigating such links.

The team first examined the historical weather trend without factoring in climate models and then asked whether the severity or the odds of a record-setting weather event had changed (subscription). It used climate models to determine whether the odds of an event changed after factoring in the effect of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. When the climate model simulations were consistent with the real-world data, and when the likelihood of extreme events increased in those simulations, the team determined that global warming had probably been influential.

One of the research’s high-profile test cases was the record-low Arctic sea ice cover observed in September 2012. In that instance, the research revealed overwhelming statistical evidence that global warming contributed to the severity and probability of the low ice.

March Highlights Concerns about Science Budget Cuts, Climate Change

On Earth Day, tens of thousands of scientists and science advocates rallied in Washington, D.C., and at some 600 other sites around the world at the first-ever March for Science. The event organized by the Earth Day Network was intended to encourage policy makers to use scientific evidence to craft legislation, adopting policies consistent with the scientific consensus on climate change and other issues.

Among the featured speakers at the march endorsed by major science advocacy groups and publishers, such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Geophysical Union, was Christiana Figueres, a key architect of the Paris Agreement, a global accord to limit global warming increases.

The official march website said the event was meant to reaffirm “the vital role science plays in our democracy.” It asserted that “Anti-science agendas and policies have been advanced by politicians on both sides of the aisle, and they harm everyone—without exception. Science should neither serve special interests nor be rejected based on personal convictions. At its core, science is a tool for seeking answers. It can and should influence policy and guide our long-term decision-making.”

Although organizers said the event was non-partisan, Reuters reported that many marchers were in effect protesting President Trump’s stance on climate change and his proposal to make deep cuts to agencies funding scientists’ work.

Although Trump did not react to the March on Science, he did release a statement recognizing Earth Day. “Rigorous science is critical to my administration’s efforts to achieve the twin goals of economic growth and environmental protection,” said the president. “My administration is committed to advancing scientific research that leads to a better understanding of our environment and of environmental risks.”

On April 29, the People’s Climate March in Washington, D.C., and other U.S. cities will again highlight calls for action on climate change.

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.

EPA Administrator Says United States Should Exit Paris Agreement

The Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions at Duke University

In an interview last week, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator (EPA) Scott Pruitt said that the United States should “exit” the Paris Agreement—the first time such a high-ranking Trump administration official has so explicitly rejected the global accord to limit global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit that increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Pruitt also vowed that the EPA would “roll back” the Clean Power Plan, a key component of former Obama administration’s plan to meet the U.S. pledge under the Paris Agreement, which calls for an emissions reduction of 26–28 percent from 2005 levels by 2025.

“Paris is something we need to look at closely,” Pruitt said. “It’s something we need to exit in my opinion. It’s a bad deal for America It’s an ‘America second, third or fourth’ kind of approach.”

Pruitt said that he would not risk U.S. jobs to comply with the agreement, the subject of a battle within the Trump administration—one that President Donald Trump’s most senior advisers are expected to resolve in the next few weeks (subscription).

Pruitt said that complying with the Paris Agreement means “contracting our economy to serve and really satisfy Europe and China and India. They are polluting far more than we are. We’re at pre-1994 levels with respect to our CO2 emissions.”

In total, only China emits more carbon dioxide than the United States, according to tracking data released by the World Resources Institute last week. Those data show that emissions from India and from the European Union are, respectively, one-half and two-thirds emissions from the United States. Moreover, on a per capita basis, the United States in 2015 produced two times more carbon dioxide emissions than China and eight times more than India.

How the Trump administration could actually exit the Paris Agreement, as Pruitt suggested, remains unclear. Under the agreement’s terms, it takes three years for a party to withdraw, followed by a one-year waiting period.

Pruitt followed up his interview with a proclamation of a new era of environmental deregulation in a speech at a coal mine fined for contaminating local waterways with toxic materials. There he said the EPA’s new “back to basics” agenda would give oversight of clean air and water to individual states and would bolster jobs in fossil fuel industries.

Study: Meeting Paris Agreement Goal Means World Has One Decade to Peak Emissions

The latest research establishing a timeline for phasing down fossil fuel consumption to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius—the more stringent of the two Paris Agreement temperature goals—finds that global carbon dioxide emissions need to peak within 10 years (subscription).

Net emissions could peak by 2022, the study in the journal Nature Communications shows, under a “high-renewable” scenario in which wind, solar and bioenergy increase by some 5 percent annually.

Overall, the analysis produced by the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) suggests that, by 2100, fossil fuel consumption must likely be reduced to less than a quarter of primary energy supply. But if carbon-capture-and-storage technology coupled with bioenergy production is found to be unfeasible, uneconomical or too burdensome on ecosystems, the analysis suggests that the world may have to rely heavily on nascent “negative emissions” technology.

The authors did note one other opportunity to rein in emissions, suggesting that land use and agriculture might absorb more carbon dioxide than their model considered.

“The study shows that the combined energy and land-use system should deliver zero net anthropogenic emissions well before 2040 in order to assure the attainability of a 1.5°C target by 2100,” said Michael Obersteiner, IIASA Ecosystems Services and Management Program director and study coauthor.

The study is one of the first published results from the newly developed—and freely available—FeliX model, a system dynamics model of social, economic, and environmental Earth systems and their interdependencies.

“Compared to other climate and integrated assessment models, the FeliX model is less detailed, but it provides a unique systemic view of the whole carbon cycle, which is vital to our understanding of future climate change and energy,” said Obersteiner.

The day after the IIASA study was published, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration released data showing that March ranked as the second hottest on record for the planet. It followed the second hottest February and third hottest January on record.

Energy Department Orders Grid Study

U.S. Department of Energy Secretary Rick Perry has ordered a 60-day study of the U.S. power grid to determine whether policies that favor wind and solar energy—including a recently renewed production tax credit that helps offset the cost of wind and solar installations and, in some states, renewable power mandates—are speeding the decline of baseload coal and nuclear power plants and potentially hampering grid reliability.

In an April 14 memo to his chief of staff, Perry wrote that grid experts have “highlighted the diminishing diversity of our nation’s electric generation mix and what that could mean for baseload power and grid resilience.”

The memo orders consideration of “the extent to which continued regulatory burdens, as well as mandates and tax and subsidy policies, are responsible for forcing the premature retirement of baseload power plants,” among other things.

Travis Fisher, a senior advisor in the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, has been tapped to head the study. Greenwire reported that Fisher has made several public statements through interviews, op-eds and blog posts in which he warned that federal regulations, the wind production tax credit and state renewable mandates were threatening grid reliability.

Electricity regulators are already examining how state policies might be affecting regional electricity markets and grid reliability, reports Bloomberg. Next month the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) will hold a technical conference to consider state and federal jurisdictional battles over electricity markets, along with state programs that direct credits to renewable energy and zero-emission power.

In laying out her vision for the conference, FERC’s acting chair, Cheryl LaFleur, said that she hopes for a negotiated solution to wholesale power market issues.

“As I see it, there are three potential outcomes that we could achieve here, and the first is some kind of negotiated or planned solution—in my mind, the best option for stakeholders in different regions,” said LaFleur, who also mentioned litigation and re-regulation.

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.

California’s Cap-and-Trade Program Survives Legal Challenge

The Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions at Duke University

Last week, California’s Cap-and-Trade Program to reduce carbon emissions was handed a victory when a state appeals court ruled that program’s auction of emissions permits does not constitute an illegal tax because the program is voluntary and the emissions permits have value. In a 2–1 vote, the Court of Appeal for the Third Appellate District upheld the cornerstone piece of California’s climate change policy, siding with the program’s operator, the California Air Resources Board (CARB), by finding that the auction revenues are more akin to regulatory fees than a tax. The court ruled against the California Chamber of Commerce, a tomato processor, and the National Association of Manufacturers, all of whom alleged that CARB lacked legislative authority to create the auctions and that the emissions allowances amounted to a tax that would have required a two-thirds vote of the legislature.

California created the Cap-and-Trade Program as part of its program to meet its targets of reducing carbon emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 and to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030. The program requires factories, power plants, and other companies to buy permits to emit greenhouse gases. By putting a cap on carbon emissions and by creating a market for emissions permits, which covered entities can bank and sell if they don’t need them, the program aims to encourage pollution reduction at the least possible cost. Specifically, it allows businesses to determine whether their most cost-effective compliance option is to reduce their emissions or to pay to pollute, a flexibility that figured in the appeals court decision.

“Reducing emissions reduces air pollution, and no entity has a vested right to pollute,” the court wrote. “The purchase of allowances is a voluntary decision driven by business judgments as to whether it is more beneficial to the company to make the purchase than to reduce emissions.”

The court decision frees California to continue holding auctions through 2020 but does not eliminate all the uncertainty that has dampened demand for permits and reduced state revenues that have been used for programs linked to emissions reductions. Although the decision immediately gave carbon markets a boost, an oversupply of permits has kept them inexpensive at roughly $12.50 or $13.50 a metric ton. Experts say that price needs to reach $30 to $40 to properly incentivize new pollution control investments.

Whether emissions permits in a cap-and-trade system should be given away or sold by the government has long been debated by scholars, reports Inside Climate News. California companies had wanted permits to be handed out for free, but California chose to auction them and to use the revenue to help finance spending on energy efficiency and other parts of its climate agenda.

State lawmakers are presently debating whether to extend the Cap-and-Trade Program past 2020 to eliminate any additional uncertainty about the program.

U.S. Power Sector Shrinks Carbon Footprint in Record-Breaking Way

A continuing drop in coal use, along with relatively mild winter temperatures, drove a second consecutive year of reductions in U.S. power sector carbon dioxide emissions, according to figures released by the Energy Information Administration (EIA) on Monday. The EIA reported that those emissions dropped 1.7 percent, compared with the previous year. That reduction was largely attributed to an 8.6 percent drop in coal-related emissions, which was offset by increases in emissions from oil (1.1 percent) and natural gas (0.9 percent). Those figures added up to a record-breaking decrease in the power sector’s carbon intensity, a measure that relates carbon emissions to economic output.

“Overall, the data indicate about a 5 percent decline in the carbon intensity of the power sector, a rate that was also realized in 2015,” the EIA said. “Since 1973, no two consecutive years have seen a decline of this magnitude, and only one other year (2009) has seen a similar decline.”

“These recent decreases are consistent with a decade-long trend, with energy-related CO2 emissions 14 percent below the 2005 level in 2016,” the EIA added.

Whether the trend will continue will depend on several factors. Climate Central reports that utilities’ increasing switch from coal to less carbon-intensive natural gas is not a panacea for climate change, because extraction processes for natural gas emit methane, a greenhouse gas 34 times stronger than carbon dioxide over 100 years. Moreover, it’s unclear how the Trump administration’s push for fossil fuels development will play out. It may only delay the closure of coal-fired power plants slated for retirement if natural gas prices remain low. But carbon emissions could begin to rise again in the United States if demand for electricity and gasoline increases and if the average fuel economy of new vehicles does not increase.

The EIA reported that the only U.S. sector in which carbon emissions increased last year was transportation. Emissions directly from motor gasoline increased 1.8 percent. Notably, overall transportation sector emissions were higher than power sector emissions, a trend the EIA expects to continue until at least 2040.

Gorsuch Sworn in as Supreme Court Justice

After being confirmed Friday by a 54-to-45 vote—following Republicans’ invocation of the so-called nuclear option, which lowered the threshold on Supreme Court nominations to a simple majority vote—Colorado appeals court judge Neil M. Gorsuch took his oaths to be the Supreme Court’s 113th justice Monday. Gorsuch breaks the court’s perceived 4-4 ideological split since the February 2016 death of conservative stalwart Justice Antonin Scalia.

During his federal appeal court tenure, Gorsuch mirrored Scalia’s originalist approach to the law, interpreting the Constitution according to the meaning understood by its drafters. But he could envision his job in more “muscular” terms than his predecessor, according to The Economist. Of particular importance to climate policy is Gorsuch’s evident skepticism of the Chevron deference, whereby judges defer to an agency’s reasonable interpretation of federal laws when the law is ambiguous. The Chevron deference, as a principle, stems from a decision in a 1984 case that Chevron brought against the Environmental Protection Agency regarding its reading of the Clean Air Act. In last year’s Gutierrez-Brizuela v Lynch, notes The Economist, Gorsuch called into question the Chevron principle, writing that it allows agencies to “swallow huge amounts of core judicial and legislative power” and that it “concentrate[s] federal power in a way that seems more than a little difficult to square with the constitution of the framers’ design.” He suggested that it might be time to fundamentally rethink the Chevron principle.

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.

EPA Budget Cut Priorities Outlined in Internal Document

The Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions at Duke University

An internal budget draft shows how the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposes to meet Trump’s FY2018 Budget submission to Congress, which reduces EPA spending 31 percent.

The memo repeatedly portrays climate as outside the EPA’s core statutory requirements. It focuses instead on funding “core legal requirements,” scrapping 56 programs dealing with scientific research, climate change and education while sending other functions to state and local governments. One of those proposed cuts is to the program responsible for producing new car fuel economy labels and certifying that new vehicles, engines and fuels conform to clean air standards. Dubbed the Federal Vehicle and Fuels Standards and Certification program, it helped to uncover Volkswagen AG’s emissions cheating.

The agency’s budget also proposes to lay off 25 percent of EPA employees.

Asked about the budget in an interview with Fox News, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt said that the agency expects states to assume a greater role in environmental protection.

“Over the last several years, there has been a lack of commitment to state partnership,” said Pruitt, adding that would change under his tenure (subscription).

But as Greenwire points out, much of that partnership is fueled by federal dollars, and Trump’s proposed EPA budget cuts, if implemented, could undermine Pruitt’s pledge to state environmental regulators.

Sent March 21 by Acting Chief Financial Officer David Bloom, the draft budget was addressed to the heads of EPA departments. They are supposed to provide feedback and explain how they would make the cuts but still fulfill statutory requirements. John Konkus, an EPA spokesperson, said that the agency is “working towards implementing the president’s budget based on the framework provided by his blueprint,” offering little else about the review process surrounding the draft.

Trump’s official budget is scheduled to go before Congress in mid-May.

Following Executive Order, Climate Rule Notices Published in Federal Register

President Donald Trump may not be finished issuing executive orders related to environment and energy, according to Mike McKenna, the former head of the Department of Energy transition team and founder of MWR Strategies.

“I don’t think we’re quite done with the executive orders,” said McKenna, speaking at the Energy Bar Association’s annual meeting in Washington (subscription). He noted that “offshore energy development” and “probably something clarifying where we are going with [the] Antiquities [Act]” could be next.

Last week, Trump signed a long anticipated executive order promoting fossil fuel extraction, greatly diminishing the role climate change plays in U.S. government decision making, and directing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to review the Clean Power Plan, which sets limits on carbon dioxide emissions from existing fossil-fuel fired power plants.

On Tuesday, notices announcing the review of Clean Power Plan as well as performance standards for        new fossil-fuel fired power plants and oil and gas facilities were published in the Federal Register. That step is the first in the rulemaking process to amend or rescind the rules. The EPA also withdrew its proposed rules for a federal plan to implement the Clean Power Plan. Those rules would have provided a template for states setting up their own regulations to meet the plan’s emissions reductions targets.

After Trump Executive Order, Others Seek to Provide Climate Leadership

President Donald Trump’s March 28 executive order formalizing his commitment to “unwind science-based climate action in the United States” would “relegate the United States to the bottom of the global climate action league,” according to a report released by Climate Action Tracker), a research coalition that rates all major nations on their pledges under the Paris Agreement, which is aimed at holding the global average temperature increase to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and at pursuing efforts to limit that increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius. The report finds that the order sets the United States on a trajectory to fall well short of its Paris Agreement commitment for 2025: instead of the 13 percent decrease from 2014 levels needed to meet that commitment, U.S. emissions in 2025 and 2030 would be roughly similar to today’s levels. But the report also finds that market pressures will continue the global clean energy transition.

Reacting to Trump’s executive order, which did not address the Paris Agreement, many nations acknowledged a vast investment shift from fossil fuels to clean energy and, notably, China, one of the world’s largest emitters, reaffirmed its commitment to the agreement.

All countries should “move with the times,” said Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesman Lu Kang. “No matter how other countries’ policies on climate change, as a responsible large developing country China’s resolve, aims and policy moves in dealing with climate change will not change.”

Within the United States, Trump’s order elicited a similar sentiment by some cities and states.

“Climate change is both the greatest single threat we face, and our greatest economic opportunity for our nation,” the mayors of New York, Los Angeles, Houston and 72 other cities wrote in an open letter to the president. “That is why we affirm our cities’ commitments to taking every action possible to achieve the principles and goals of the Paris Climate Agreement, and to engage states, businesses and other sectors to join us.”

The Democratic governors of California, Connecticut, Minnesota, New York, Oregon and Washington, along with five mayors in those states, said in a statement that they would continue to lower carbon emissions despite conflicting policy from the Trump administration.

“Our commitment to limiting global average temperature increase to well below 2 degrees Celsius remains,” said the group. The signatories are members of the Under2 Coalition, a group of 167 cities, states and countries committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 2 tons per capita, or 80–95 percent below 1990 levels by 2050.

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.