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.
Giant Solar Installations Crop Up Around the Country
In northeastern Oregon, nearly 9,500 acres of farmland will soon be transformed into a 1,200-megawatt solar project. State regulators approved Sunstone Solar, the nation’s largest proposed solar-plus-storage facility, last fall.
Once up and running, the project will include up to 7,200 megawatt-hours of storage, and its nearly four million solar panels will produce enough clean electricity to power around 800,000 homes each year. Pine Gate Renewables, the North Carolina-based developer behind the project, touted a first-of-a-kind initiative to invest up to $11 million in local wheat farms to offset economic impacts on the region’s agriculture. Construction will begin in 2026.
Sunstone is the latest — and largest — in a slew of giant solar installations cropping up around the country. As states, including Oregon, pursue ambitious clean energy targets, developers are building more and more massive solar plants to keep pace — and increasingly pairing them with batteries to soak up any excess power.
According to a data analysis by climate journalist Michael Thomas, the average size of a solar farm in the United States grew sixfold from 2014 to 2024, from 10 megawatts to 65 megawatts. Battery projects are expanding at an even faster pace, with 15 times the average storage capacity last year compared with 2019.
One major reason for building bigger is that developers are reaping greater returns on investment by capitalizing on economies of scale. Large-scale projects cost significantly less per watt than smaller ones to build, according to data from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
The Oregon project is unusual in that it aims to provide up to six hours of energy storage — notably higher than most battery plants which only produce four hours of storage.
That could change as the costs of battery technologies continue to drop and longerduration options become more financially viable. According to BloombergNEF [a research organization], the price of lithiumion battery packs fell 20 percent in 2024, in part driven by a surplus of production among manufacturers in China, which assembles most of the world’s batteries.
Interest in longer-duration energy storage has grown in recent years as governments and utilities look to provide reliable clean power to decarbonize the grid. State law requires Oregon’s two main electric companies to achieve 100 percent carbonfree electricity by 2040 — a target that will require the already accelerating pace of solar buildout to ramp up even more.
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Canary Media: “Oregon to host nation’s largest solar-plus-storage installation” by Akielly Hu, 1/21/2025:
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/oregon-to-host-nations-largest-solar-plus-storage-installation
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Michael Bloomberg Steps in to Help Fund UN Climate Body
Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s philanthropy arm said on Thursday it will provide funding to help cover the U.S. contribution to the U.N. climate body’s budget, filling a gap left by President Donald Trump.
The new Republican president announced after taking office on Monday that he would withdraw the United States from the Paris climate agreement and end the country’s international climate funding. Trump had also withdrawn the U.S. from the Paris deal in his first 2017-2021 White House term. Bloomberg is a media billionaire who also serves as a U.N. special envoy on climate change.
“Bloomberg Philanthropies and other U.S. climate funders will ensure the United States meets its global climate obligations,” the organization said in a statement, adding this included covering the amount the U.S. owes each year to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
The UNFCCC is the U.N.’s leading climate body. It runs annual climate negotiations among nearly 200 countries and helps implement the agreements that are made in these talks — the biggest of which is the 2015 Paris Agreement. Michael Bloomberg also pledged to work with states, cities and companies to ensure that the U.S. stayed on track with its global climate obligations. “From 2017 to 2020, during a period of federal inaction, cities, states, businesses, and the public rose to the challenge to uphold our nation’s commitments — and now, we are ready to do it again,” he said in the statement.
The U.S. is responsible for funding around 21 percent of the UNFCCC’s core budget. Last year, it paid the UNFCCC a 7.2 million euro ($7.4 million) required contribution for 2024, and also paid off a $3.4 million euro arrears for missed contributions over 2010-2023.
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Reuters: “Michael Bloomberg steps in to help fund UN climate body after Trump withdrawal” by Valerie Volcovici, 1/23/25:
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/bloomberg-philanthropy-cover-us-climatedues-after-paris-withdrawal-2025-01-23/
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To Keep Clean Drinking Water Flowing to Paris,
Farmers Are Going Organic
One-hundred miles southeast of Paris, a small portion of the 156-kilometer aqueduct network, forms “The Aqueduct of the Vanne,” says Zoltan Kahn, gesturing over to what is a small portion of the 156-kilometer network built by Baron Haussman, the former prefect of Paris, in the late 19th century. “It carries water all the way to Paris.”
The Vanne, which supplies a fifth of Paris’s tap water, is fed by the water sources in these parts. Home to one of the largest forests in France, the region is rich in biodiversity and has been a key drinking water catchment area for centuries.
Yet, with France’s growing intensification of farming in the 1960s — making it today the leading European agricultural producer, with about 18 percent of the continent’s output — that changed. To ramp up productivity, French farmers began to use more chemicals on their crops. Those fertilizers and pesticides in turn made it into major water supplies, in particular the watersheds that eventually would flow to Paris.
For many years, that was accepted as the norm. Costly water-processing plants were built to clean up the water in cities across the region and in the French capital so that it was safe enough to be used for drinking by large urban populations.
However, with the rapid onset of climate change, which is tightening use of water reserves and triggering droughts in France and across the world, that approach is no longer seen as viable. Instead, the city now believes that water supplies must be protected at the source.
So, when Kahn was approached by Eau de Paris with support to go fully organic, he jumped at the opportunity.
In exchange for switching to organic, he would receive a so-called “Payment for Environmental Services” for each hectare of his farmland cultivated every year as well as technical support and agricultural advice from a coordinator in the area.
As part of the €48 million (US$51.8 million) project, Eau de Paris and the Seine-Normandy Water Agency, a public institution fighting water pollution in the region, are supporting 115 farmers based in watersheds that supply the city to either reduce their use of chemicals or go fully organic (as 58 percent of the farmers have).
Policies to preserve watersheds like that of Paris could reap a wide range of benefits, from protecting biodiversity to sequestering carbon and providing millions of rural landowners with new sources of income, according to Giulio Boccaletti, scientific director of the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change (CMCC) and author of the book “Water: A Biography.”
Of enormous importance, urban source watersheds supply water for drinking and domestic use to an estimated 1.7 billion people living in cities around the world, according to research by Boccaletti, and that number is growing rapidly. But, he also found that they are under threat: deforestation, poor agricultural practices and other land uses have caused degradation in 40 percent of the world’s urban watersheds.
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Reasons To Be Cheerful: “To Keep Clean Drinking Water Flowing to Paris, Farmers Are Going Organic” by Peter Yeung:
https://reasonstobecheerful.world/paris-organicfarming-clean-water-supply
