Active Hope is not wishful thinking. Active Hope is not waiting to be rescued by the Lone Ranger or some savior. Active Hope is waking up to the beauty of life on whose behalf we can act. We belong to this world. –Joanna Macy & Chris Johnstone.
Area Climate News
The Climate Action Alliance of the Valley is a 2024 Clean Virginia Community Giving Program recipient. The $75,000 grant will help fund their Climate Justice Outreach and Engagement effort, which is an ongoing collaboration with CHP Energy Solutions. In 2023, they were able to work with four local nonprofits to parlay a $35,000 grant into more than $250,000 of weatherization and energy efficiency investment in more than 20 energy-burdened homes.
Harrisonburg will apply for an Environmental Protection Agency grant aimed at helping disadvantaged communities reduce pollution and make neighborhoods more resilient to climate change. The city will be the lead applicant along with Church World Service and the Northeast Neighborhood Association. Other groups and organizations may still be added as partners after the grant has been awarded.
The Virginia Department of Rail and Public Transportation will be expanding the Virginia Breeze bus lines with a new east-west route connecting Harrisonburg and Virginia Beach in 2025. This bus route called the Tidewater Current will be the fifth Virginia Breeze route. Another route serving Harrisonburg is the Valley Flyer traveling from Blacksburg to Washington, D.C.
Our Climate Crisis
June 2024 marked the 12th month of average global temperatures reaching 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. It was also warmer than any previous June in the data record at 0.14°C above the previous high set in June 2023. The extreme heat is wilting and burning forests, making it harder to curb climate change.
Another year of heat and floods has spurred China to make adapting to extreme weather a policy priority. This summer has begun with a massive emergency response effort in multiple provinces to prevent extreme heat and flooding, now routine, from turning into a political and humanitarian crisis. China is now building two-thirds of the world’s wind and solar projects.
Hurricane Beryl, which hit Houston as a Category 1 hurricane, knocked out power to more than 2 million people and dumped nearly a foot of rain in parts of the city. The flooding and destruction are expected to drive up insurance costs in a city that already pays more than twice the national average. Climate change is making such severe weather events more common.
Politics and Policy
A Trump appointed federal judge reversed the Department of Energy’s freeze on new liquefied natural gas export approvals, handing a win to the oil industry and a coalition of 16 Republican-led states that had challenged the Biden administration plan. The U.S. is the largest LNG exporter in the world and has plans to more than triple its export capacity.
Despite record-breaking heat and rising public concern, the Republican National Convention focused on expanding fossil fuel use while dismissing climate science. Former President Trump joked, “Global warming is fine. In fact, I heard it was going to be very warm today. It’s fine.”
The Biden administration is awarding nearly $2 billion in grants to help restart or expand electric vehicle manufacturing and assembly sites in eight states including Virginia. The grants cover a broad range of the automotive supply chain, including parts for electric motorcycles and school buses, hybrid powertrains, heavy-duty commercial truck batteries and electric SUVs.
The United Kingdom’s new Labor government has confirmed a legislative agenda with the environment “front and center.” This recognizes the urgency of the global climate challenge, the job opportunities that can come from leading the development of new technologies of the future, and as ways to reduce the cost of living.
JD Vance, Donald Trump’s newly selected running mate, has come under scrutiny for his climate skepticism. He is a staunch supporter of the oil and gas industry and an opponent of renewable energy. He has only held such views in recent years, a shift that coincides with his bid to have Trump choose him to be his running mate.
A right-wing policy think tank sponsored by The Heritage Foundation recently touted Project 2025, a policy blueprint that seeks to fundamentally restructure the federal government in a Republican administration. It would undermine our country’s extensive network of environmental and climate policies and alter the future of American fossil fuel production, climate action, and environmental justice.
We’re saying goodbye to the first climate president ever as Joe Biden has dropped out of the 2024 presidential race. He has done more to support clean energy than any president before, giving the U.S. a fighting chance to cut emissions at the speed climate change demands.
Kamala Harris has captured the support of a key coalition of progressive, youth-led and environmental justice-focused climate advocates, with the Green New Deal Network endorsement of her candidacy. It’s a boost for Harris from members of a voter segment that will be key to victory in November. On the other hand, it’s fodder for the Trump’s campaign strategy of painting Harris as a radical leftist who will block U.S. oil and gas development.
Speaking at the Inter-American Development Bank, U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said that $3 trillion in new capital is required each year to combat climate change. “Neglecting to address climate change and the loss of nature and biodiversity is not just bad environmental policy. It is also bad economic policy,” she said.
Energy
The US has become one of the world’s leading oil exporters, elbowing aside classic petrostates like the UAE and Kuwait. No country in history has extracted as much oil as the US has in each of the past six years, and US gas production now tops the global charts, having surged 50% in the past decade. Louisiana has become ground zero for exporting oil and gas.
Renewable energy sources accounted for 29.1% of electricity generation globally in 2022. The other 70.9% came from fossil fuels, nuclear energy, and pumped storage. Last year, however, renewables accounted for nearly 86% of new electricity capacity worldwide.
Google’s greenhouse gas emissions have surged nearly 50% over the past five years due to the energy demands of its growing AI technologies. The environmental cost of AI cannot be ignored even as it promises transformative benefits for various sectors, including healthcare, transportation, and climate modeling. The huge surge in emissions raises serious questions about the sustainability of tech-driven solutions and the industry’s role in climate change.
Electrical grid reliability is becoming an increasing challenge in the US in what is being described as a “hyper-complex risk environment.” This includes: 1) rapidly increasing electrical demand from data centers, electric vehicles, and electrification in general, 2) increasing extreme weather events related to climate change, 3) the increasing adaptation of wind and solar energy, which is intermittent, and 4) the inertia of the regulatory environment.
Dominion Energy acquired a second offshore wind project area that could put the utility closer to achieving renewable energy goals of the Virginia Clean Economy Act that seeks to decarbonize the electric grid by mid-century. The 40,000-acre lease area off the coast of North Carolina adjacent to Virginia could produce 800 megawatts of electricity.
Fervo Energy has landed a massive contract for providing geothermal power to the California grid. The company uses a fracking technique to break up rocks, drive water through them horizontally, and collect the resultant steam to drive turbines at the surface. They believe this method can change the geothermal landscape because it could work in many locales—not just those where hot rocks are close to the surface like in Iceland and New Zealand.
Battery installations in the U.S. are on track for the best year ever. Overall storage installations—meaning utility-scale, home, and commercial projects—grew 84% in the first quarter. Grid battery installations grew even faster. It is projected that the U.S. grid battery fleet will nearly double in 2024.
Climate Justice
Researchers estimate that global income will be reduced by 19% because of the carbon we have already emitted. This is due to falling agricultural yields, labor productivity, and harm to existing infrastructure. Poor countries least responsible for climate change are predicted to suffer income loss that is 60% greater than the higher-income countries.
Facing gentrification and climate change, an historic African American community outside Charleston, S.C., is embracing conservation as a way to preserve its historical character. Community leaders are considering forestry projects, land trusts and greenbelt initiatives, which prohibit development. Sustainable forestry also offers landowners a way to make money from their family’s land without selling to a developer.
Textile waste is an urgent global problem. Only 12% is recycled worldwide and only 1% of castoff clothes are recycled into new garments. The problem is especially pressing in China, the world’s largest textile producer and consumer, where most textile waste ends up in landfills. Cheap unrecyclable synthetic clothes, produced from petrochemicals that contribute to climate change, air and water pollution, account for 70% of domestic clothing sales in China.
Climate Action
A half-mile-long, 1.3 megawatt pilot project of covering an irrigation canal with solar panels on tribal land in Arizona shows the benefits of covering the thousands of miles of such waterways in the US. Studies suggest this has the potential to help canals do their jobs better; an over-the-canal design can prevent water from evaporating and inhibits algae growth.
Elizabeth Bagley, the managing director of Project Drawdown, makes the case for discussing climate change with kids and shares tips for approaching the topic in a way that inspires hope instead of fear. She writes, “Talking to children about climate change is not just about educating them on the science. It’s about empowering them to be part of the solution.”
Weatherizing your house—caulking, sealing, and installing insulation—is an important strategy not only for getting greater value out of heating and cooling systems but also for contending with increasingly prevalent extreme temperatures. If you are considering switching to an energy efficient electric heat-pump system, weatherizing your house first can reduce the size of a heat pump needed, saving you thousands of dollars upfront and costing less to run.
Our food systems account for one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions. “There isn’t a single silver bullet solution that addresses climate change in the food system,” writes Jonathan Foley, a climate scientist and the Executive Director of Project Drawdown. “Vegan diets won’t solve it alone. Neither will regenerative agriculture or improved fertilizers. Instead we must use a whole portfolio of solutions and deploy them in tandem.”
Self-installed, plug-and-play solar panels are popping up in yards and on balcony railings across Germany, driven by bargain prices and looser regulations. More than 500,000 of the systems have already been set up and in the first six months of the year, enabling the country to add nine gigawatts of photovoltaic capacity.
Compiled by Earl Zimmerman for the Climate Action Alliance of the Valley.
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Chris Graham
