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As the opening of the summer season, Memorial Day weekend sees roads to the New Jersey shore jammed with sun and surf seekers, but the Garden State has also become a bellwether for climate action, as covered by NetZero Insider’s Hugh Morley.
While shore communities have led opposition to offshore wind development, Morley reports that the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s final environmental impact statement for the Atlantic Shores project finds that major impacts on fisheries and tourism could occur even without the 200-turbine, 1,510-MW installation.
Morley also listened in on the first of four public hearings the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities is holding to gather input on updating the state’s Energy Master Plan, with advocates calling for more aggressive action on cutting methane emissions and electrifying transportation.
Meanwhile, the future of fossil fuel-fired generation continues to be a point of debate at both the federal and state level. The Edison Electric Institute has joined the litigation challenging EPA’s final rule on reducing greenhouse gas emissions from existing coal-fired power plants and new natural gas-fired plants, NetZero’s James Downing writes.
In Massachusetts, the Department of Public Utilities approved contracts aimed at keeping the Everett LNG import facility up and running through May 2030, Jon Lamson reports.
The White House has recently kept the focus on building out clean energy supply chains, with our K Kaufmann digging into what solar developers are saying about President Joe Biden’s latest action on to reinstate tariffs on solar cells and panels imported from Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam.
Kaufmann also covered a Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing where Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) said he is still going to push hard to get a bipartisan permitting bill to the floor of the chamber.
With the beginning of summer, stories in our curated content are focusing on the potentially lethal impacts of climate change, such as The New York Times article on the deaths of endangered howler monkeys in Mexico: They are literally falling out of trees in temperatures over 100 degrees.
Houston continues to dig out from its recent deadly storms, which left more than half a million homes and businesses without power, the Associated Press reports, and local utility CenterPoint Energy said it could take days, or even longer, to completely restore power.
Inside Climate News provides coverage of the International Tribunal of the Law of the Sea’s historic ruling that greenhouse gases are a form of marine pollution and that countries are legally obligated to “protect and preserve” oceans from climate change impacts.
The battle over fossil fuels is also a major theme in our curated content with utilities and business groups in Kentucky spending a record $12.4 million to lobby for a bill that would create new obstacles to the retirement of fossil fuel-fired plants, the Kentucky Lantern reports.
Andrew Wheeler, who headed EPA during the Trump administration, tells POLITICO that he is ready to start rolling back Biden’s climate rules should the former president win re-election in November.
At the other end of the spectrum, the Inflation Reduction Act’s direct pay provisions are allowing municipal utilities to take advantage of clean energy tax credits and push for more deployment of renewable energy, according to analysis in Thomson Reuter’s Context news platform.
Read on in this week’s Intelligence Report:
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