We’re going to flip the script a bit this week and start with some curated content. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis gets this week’s Head-in-the-Sand Award for signing a bill that will erase the words “climate change” from a range of state statutes and also remove consideration of climate impacts from the decision-making of state agencies, according to the Florida Phoenix and a range of other media outlets.
Climate change is accelerating sea-level rise in South Florida, which could be swamped by an extra 2 feet of water above current levels in the next 40 years, according to a report in the Miami Herald.
Sea-level rise is also a concern in Boston, where major sections of the city are built on landfill and could be under 2 to 5 feet of water by the end of the century, Jon Lamson writes for NetZero Insider. Those rising waters could be a problem for Massachusetts’ main utilities, which are mandated by state law to submit plans for electric system modernization every five years, including how they are going to prepare for potential flooding that could knock out their transformers.
In California, environmental groups are lobbying the state’s Public Utilities Commission to dedicate $233 million in federal funds from the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program to installing fast chargers for medium- and heavy-duty trucks, our Ayla Burnett reports. The caveat: As in many other states, California has yet to install its first NEVI-funded charger.
New York and California often compete on which state has the most aggressive climate goals and policies, but John Cropley found storage industry stakeholders at New York’s Capture the Energy 2024 conference pushing hard to identify the economic and regulatory policies needed to meet the state’s goal of deploying 6 GW of storage by 2030.
On the federal policy beat, K Kaufmann has the story on President Joe Biden’s announcements of major increases in tariffs on Chinese imports, including solar cells, solar panels, battery components and electric vehicles.
Moving back to curated content, as GHG emissions from the power and transportation sectors are trending downward, heavy industry could become the top emitter in the U.S. by the mid-2030s, according to a new report from the Rhodium Group, covered by Canary Media.
Speaking of which, Argonne National Laboratory is looking to slash emissions from iron production with a “microwave-powered hydrogen plasma in a rotary kiln furnace,” which would use half the electricity of traditional iron making and produce no GHG emissions, according to Hydrogen Central.
In an op-ed in The Hill, Rep. Brandon Williams (R-N.Y.) invokes the historical role of the Republican Party as champions of environmental conservation ― think Teddy Roosevelt ― and calls for the GOP to focus on an all-of-the-above, common sense strategy. “American energy is clean energy, plain and simple,” Williams writes, including “responsible use of fossil fuels.”
An op-ed from The Revelator looks at the “silent tragedy” of anti-renewable ordinances being adopted by counties across the country. Many of these areas are already struggling with job loss and falling tax revenues, author James Goodwin argues, and anti-renewable ordinances put them at risk of missing out on the vitally needed economic and environmental benefits of clean energy projects.
Want more? Check out this week’s Intelligence Report:
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