Articles You Might Have Missed

Climate Good News

Around the world people are taking the initiative to mitigate climate change.
Here are some good news briefs compiled by the Climate Issue group
of the LWV of Bellingham/Whatcom.

With Repeal Measure Rejected,
WA Carbon Credit Auction Prices Soared

Prices in Washington’s fledgling carbon market spiked this month, after the state’s Climate Commitment Act survived a hard-fought repeal effort in November. Initiative 2117, bankrolled by political action committee, Let’s Go Washington, sought to repeal the state’s landmark climate change law.

The Climate Commitment Act requires the state’s most polluting businesses to reduce their emissions or purchase allowances to cover them. Over the course of seven three-year periods, state officials will reduce the number of allowances sold, ramping up pressure on the industries to lower their emissions.

The state’s Dec. 4 auction raised nearly $272 million from some of the state’s largest climate polluters by selling about 5.3 million 2023 and 2024 allowances at $40.26 each and 2.2 million 2027 allowances at $26 each. One allowance represents one metric ton of emissions for the year it is labeled.

Another $108 million went to utilities, which sold nearly 2.7 million allowances they receive for free as part of the program. The revenue from those allowances must be used for the benefit of ratepayers.

This is the first auction conducted since voters decisively defeated Initiative 2117, preserving this cornerstone of Washington’s climate policy. With the program’s future now more secure, covered entities appear to be bidding more aggressively, which could contribute to higher allowance prices compared to the last auction. The defeat of Initiative 2117 has likely bolstered confidence among market participants, removing uncertainty around the program’s future and reinforcing its durability. Higher prices reflect robust demand for allowances, signaling that covered entities are prioritizing compliance and long-term planning within this transformative program.

– The Seattle Times: “WA’s carbon market prices increase after failed repeal effort” by Amanda Zhou, Dec. 11, 2024.

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Bill McKibben Encourages Climate Optimism

Amid the angst we are feeling over last year being the unexpectedly hottest ever on the planet earth and the new administration coming in January, who are talking “drill baby drill,” there are actually some good news stories and numbers we can focus on.

Solar power expanded so rapidly in 2023 (86 percent up on 2022 worldwide) that some wondered whether the change could continue. It actually did, with the best guess being we will see a further growth of nearly 30 percent this year. We’ve clearly moved into the steep part of the S-curve of clean-energy expansion, where even the most optimistic forecasts are consistently surpassed, and, at the moment we appear to be installing a gigawatt’s worth of photovoltaic panels (roughly the size of a nuclear power plant) every 18 hours or so.

In California, which has been working on this transition more vigorously than most states, the combination of solar arrays and batteries reached some kind of tipping point this year: beginning in March, for up to 10 hours a day over more than four months, the Golden State produced more than a 100 percent of its electricity from renewable energy; when night fell, enormous new batteries, which had soaked up excess power all afternoon, often became the largest source of power supply on the state’s grid. Despite all the (warranted) concern about new data centers and artificial intelligence soaking up power, Stanford’s Mark Jacobson said a few weeks ago that his home state would use 25 per cent less natural gas to generate power this year than last. That’s a big number, big enough that, if it were replicated in a lot of places, it would make a dent in the estimates of future warming.

Globally, so far, we haven’t quite hit the peak of fossil-fuel combustion — the latest data from early November predict that the world will burn a little less than one per cent more than last year. But California isn’t the only place demonstrating that another world is possible. Early this year, analysts started noticing something unusual in Pakistan: demand for electricity from the national grid was dropping sharply. Some investigating — including looking down from the sky via Google Earth — revealed the cause. Local business people and farmers, annoyed by an expensive and unreliable electricity supply and lured by cheap Chinese solar panels, were covering the roofs of homes, factories, and stores with photovoltaic arrays. By the middle of the year, as the energy analysts Azeem Azhar and Nathan Warren wrote, this silent solar revolution had seen Pakistanis erect the equivalent of 30 percent of the national grid in six months.

Farmers who depend on tube wells, which pull water from aquifers for irrigation and are often diesel-powered, were putting up panels, too; diesel sales in the country dropped 30 percent. And, something of the same magnitude, again driven by the incredibly inexpensive Chinese panels, seemed to be happening across much of southern Africa. In sunny Germany, meanwhile, where solar panels are now cheaper than wood fencing, at least half a million apartment dwellers hung them from there balconies.

The clean-tech momentum that had begun to build in the United States as President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act went into effect will certainly be dampened down with the new administration, though blue states from Washington to Massachusetts have announced big new initiatives in the days since the November vote. In Washington state, voters were very clear that they wanted to continue the cap and trade system passed in the Climate Commitment Act, that Initiative 2019 was designed to stop. The repeal lost even in traditionally red areas. In the auction of credits this year, the state earned over $2 million that will be used to combat the effects of climate change.

As “bomb cyclones” hit the West, hurricanes became more damaging as they picked up speed over warmer water, and flooding devastated not only our country but all over Europe, China and Africa. It may convince even the deepest skeptics that something has changed with the weather. Perhaps the most salient fact is that renewable energy is a pocketbook issue. Costs are coming down and efficiency has been upgraded. The naysayers may have bought some time, but the hope is that markets will prevail as renewable energy becomes more widespread. As renewable energy comes into its own, “the bottom line” might be our saving grace.

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– The New Yorker: “Hotter and Hotter” by Bill McKibben, Dec. 13, 2024: https://www.newyorker. com/culture/2024-in-review/ hotter-and-hotter.

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