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WARREN AND HARRIS JOIN THE COMPETITION FOR ‘CLIMATE CANDIDATE’ MANTLE: Democratic presidential contenders are escalating their competition to be the “climate candidate” ahead of CNN’s unprecedented seven-hour town hall later tonight, with more unveiling new plans, including top-tier candidate Elizabeth Warren and middling challengers Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg.
Warren, and to a lesser extent, Harris, are explicitly gunning to replace Jay Inslee as the most serious proponent of federal climate change action.
“I’m adopting and building upon his ten-year action plan to achieve 100% clean energy for America by decarbonizing our electricity, our vehicles, and our buildings,” Warren said of Inslee in a Medium post Tuesday night.
Didn’t Warren already release climate plans? Yes. Warren’s new plan builds on previous proposals she’s issued, including a $2 trillion climate innovation plan in June that focused mostly on a “Green Industrial Mobilization” effort using federal procurement to create demand for new green energy products.
She proposes to spend an additional $1 trillion over 10 years — paid for by reversing President Trump’s tax cuts — to help accomplish more immediate goals set by Inslee, including requiring utilities to achieve 100% carbon-neutral power by 2030, and reaching all renewable electricity generation by 2035.
Warren also copies Inslee as the only candidate to set a specific target to retire all coal plants, aiming to “establish regulations” to retire coal power within a decade.
In other sectors, she seeks 100% zero-carbon pollution for all new commercial and residential buildings by 2028, and all zero-emissions vehicles by 2030.
Harris joins the climate race: Not to be outdone, Harris released a $10 trillion plan Wednesday to combat climate change, pledging to achieve 100% net-zero greenhouse gas emissions across the entire economy by 2045.
The price tag for her plan, representing a mix of public and private funding, is the second highest of all climate plans proposed, topped only by Bernie Sanders’ $16.3 trillion figure (Julián Castro, a lower-polling candidate, matched the $10 trillion figure with his own plan released Tuesday, which also targets net-zero emissions by 2045, a timeline faster than the mid-century target set by most other candidates).
Harris also borrows from Inslee’s plans, using his language in calling for a vague “climate pollution fee,” a more agreeable-sounding way to describe a tax on carbon emissions.
Inslee encourages the arms race: Inslee is taking notice of candidates work-shopping his plans, and argues it’s a good sign for the sustained prominence of climate change in the Democratic primary.
“We have seen an arms race of candidates competing to have the most effective plans — and I think that’s a good thing,” Inslee said on CNN Wednesday.
In a sign of how progressive the climate arms race has become, Buttigieg attempted to cast his plan released Wednesday as more “realistic,” despite it containing similar goals to others.
He followed front-runner Joe Biden and fellow Midwesterner Amy Klobuchar in releasing a plan Wednesday setting a 2050 goal for net-zero emissions headlined by a proposal for a carbon tax that returns the revenue to households. Buttigieg also seeks zero-emissions electricity and zero-emissions passenger vehicles by 2035, while vowing to quadruple federal clean energy R&D funding to more than $200 billion over 10 years.
Biden and Warren have topped that target, promising to provide $400 billion over a decade for clean energy R&D.
All of these proposals are unprecedented: Jeff Navin, a former chief of staff at the Energy Department in the Obama administration, told me it would be a “big lift” for the U.S. to attain net-zero emissions by 2050, the most conservative of targets set by candidates, but a promise more aggressive than anything proposed before this year.
“That’s what the IPCC says we need to get to, and that’s a big shift in terms of ambition and focus,” Navin said. “The level of detail in plans is also unprecedented.”
Looking ahead to tonight’s town hall, Navin, cautioned candidates to not stray beyond what U.N. scientists say is necessary to combat climate change.
“I’ll be looking for whether or not the plans are actually focused on emissions in a serious way,” he said. “Do their solutions follow the the IPCC recommendations to use all of the clean energy tools in the toolbox? Are they willing to accept things like carbon capture and advanced nuclear, which the IPCC makes clear that we’ll need?”
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ENERGY DEPARTMENT FINALIZES ROLLBACK OF LIGHTBULB EFFICIENCY RULES: The Energy Department finalized its rollback of rules requiring more energy-efficient specialty lightbulbs on Wednesday.
The changes to the 2017 Obama administration rule would apply to lightbulbs commonly used in bathrooms, chandeliers, and recessed lighting fixtures. The Energy Department acted after the trade group for the world’s leading lightbulb manufacturers, the National Electrical Manufacturers Association, lobbied the Trump administration for the change, saying the Obama rules were rushed and violate the law.
DOE projects minimal effects: DOE’s rule change would affect only 11% of the lighting market, a senior Energy Department official told reporters on a press call. He said the market is moving on its own to more efficient LED lightbulbs, and more stringent standards are not economically or legally justified.
“A more strict standard would only affect a small slice of the market,” the official said. “This is not a rule that radically affects the lighting market overall.”
Opponents see more significant damage: A coalition of 16 Democratic attorneys general opposing the Trump administration’s action estimate that 3 billion light sockets contain the types of bulbs targeted by the rule, or nearly half of all lighting sockets in residential buildings across the U.S.
The Obama administration and supportive groups said its standards would have saved consumers money, and limited greenhouse gas emissions.
“The Energy Department flat out got it wrong today,” said Jason Hartke, the president of the Alliance to Save Energy, a group representing industrial, technological, and clean energy companies. “Instead of moving us forward, this rule will keep more energy-wasting bulbs on store shelves and saddle the average American household with about $100 in unnecessary energy costs every year. At a time when we need to take aggressive steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, this is an unforced error.”
HURRICANE DORIAN TRACK EDGES CLOSER TO CAROLINAS: The latest forecast for Hurricane Dorian could be trouble for the Carolinas, the Washington Examiner’s Daniel Chaitin reports.
In its 5 p.m. advisory on Tuesday, the National Hurricane Center said the Category 2 hurricane’s expected path is inching closer to the coast than previously thought. Trump signed an emergency declaration for North Carolina on Tuesday night.
“The track envelope has edged closer to the coasts of South Carolina and North Carolina and the NHC track has been adjusted in that direction,” the NHC said in a discussion post. “A track that close to the coast, even if landfall does not occur, is likely to bring dangerous winds, life-threatening storm surge, and flooding rains across the eastern portions of the Carolinas.”
As many as 13,000 homes have been destroyed in the Bahamas, and at least five people have been killed by the hurricane, which over the weekend peaked at Category 5 status with 185-mph sustained maximum winds.
Dorian is weakening down to 110-mph sustained winds, but its wind field has grown, increasing the range by which tropical storm-force and hurricane-force winds can reach.
UTILITIES PREPARE FOR DORIAN RESPONSE: Electric utility companies have activated their emergency response plans and are prepared to respond to areas impacted by Dorian, the industry group Edison Electric Institute said Tuesday night.
Workers from 36 states, the District of Columbia, and Canada are standing by to restore power to customers affected by Dorian in Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia.
SANDERS BLAMES DORIAN ON CLIMATE CHANGE: Sanders blamed Dorian on climate change Tuesday.
“The fossil fuel industry is now the equivalent of the tobacco industry. It creates death and destruction, then spends billions denying its responsibility. Let us be clear: Hurricane Dorian has everything to do with climate change, which is the existential crisis of our time,” the Vermont senator tweeted.
The relationship between hurricanes and climate change is complex, but scientists have become more comfortable linking some attributes of storms to global warming, such as more rainfall, greater storm surge from sea level rise, and the likelihood of storms stalling longer over one place, as happened with Dorian and the Bahamas. See this helpful thread by climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe to learn more.
WIND DEVELOPERS ORDERED RECORD AMOUNT OF TURBINES: Wind developers across the world ordered a record amount of turbines in the second quarter of this year.
Developers globally ordered 31 gigawatts of wind turbines during the second quarter and 79 gigawatts over the past 12 months, the research group Wood Mackenzie said in a report Wednesday.
The record for the quarter is 13.2 gigawatts larger than the previous high of wind turbine orders for a quarter.
Developers in China are leading the way, ordering more than 17 gigawatts of wind turbines in the second quarter of 2019. The U.S. and Brazil were second and third in most orders.
The Rundown
Politico California raises the caution flag on ‘green jobs’
Washington Post Top Interior official who pushed to expand drilling in Alaska to join oil company there
Wall Street Journal Coal mine closures shake Wyoming
E&E News Hydropower giant Bonneville Power is going broke
Calendar
WEDNESDAY | SEPTEMBER 4
House and Senate are out of session.
WEDNESDAY | SEPTEMBER 4
12:15 p.m., Resources & Conservation Center. FERC Chairman Neil Chatterjee speaks at a Resources for the Future event on “the state of US energy markets, energy policy, and climate change.”
THURSDAY | SEPTEMBER 5
10 a.m. to noon, 1300 Pennsylvania Ave, NW. The United States Energy Association hosts an event on “opportunities in carbon utilization — a vital pathway to decarbonization.”
