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No one ever said the energy transition was going to be easy, a fact that keeps NetZero Insider reporters on the front lines, covering key stories.
James Downing starts our coverage this week with another loss for the Biden administration, in this case, a decision from the U.S. District Court of Western Louisiana, rolling back the Department of Energy’s pause in considering new applications for LNG export facilities, mostly on procedural issues.
The rubber is also meeting the road in New York, where a new report predicts the state will fall short of its 70%-by-2030 renewable energy target, mostly because building clean energy projects in the state is expensive, and permitting and interconnection take too long, John Cropley reports.
Massachusetts is tackling the challenges of going green with a new Office of Energy Transformation, New England reporter Jon Lamson writes. Top priorities here include ending the state’s reliance on “costly and dirty fossil fuel infrastructure” and ensuring that consumers and environmental justice communities have a central voice in policy decisions.
Facing a July 3 deadline, the California State Assembly rushed through passage of a $10 billion bond measure for a range of climate resilience initiatives, which will now go on the ballot for voter approval in November. Clean energy projects would get a modest slice of the pie ― $850 million ― correspondent Elaine Goodman writes in her preview of the bill.
The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management also continues to push ahead with offshore wind development. New Jersey correspondent Hugh Morley has the story on BOEM’s approval of the 1,510-MW Atlantic Shores OSW project, while John Cropley reports on the announcement of the Aug. 14 auction of two sites off the Central Atlantic coast, with a potential to provide 6.3 GW of clean power.
The Supreme Court decision overturning the doctrine Chevron deference continues to make headlines in our curated content. Canary Media dives in with an analysis of the ruling’s potential to disrupt President Joe Biden’s “whole of government” approach to tackling climate change, and Grist follows up with a look at the combined impact of Chevron and the court’s ruling overturning the time limitation on challenges to federal regulations.
Meanwhile, Biden announced new regulations to protect workers from extreme heat. The New York Times quotes Biden saying that anyone denying the impacts of climate change is “condemning the American people to a dangerous future, and either is really, really dumb or has some other motive.”
Reporters in sweltering states are also writing about our ongoing heat waves. The Missouri Independent covers the challenges for Northeastern states, where temperatures have been rising at record rates over the past two years, and looks at the growing number of Southern cities, like Miami, that now have chief heat officers.
Growing power demand from data centers has also been a hot topic, but Microsoft founder Bill Gates is trying to cool concerns, arguing that the massive kilowatt-guzzlers will not raise global energy demand more than 6%, which could be offset by demand cuts made possible by using AI to boost power system efficiency, TechSpot reports.
Election coverage continues with NC Newsline’s article framing the upcoming contest as a critical inflection point for clean energy and climate action. If returned to the White House, Donald Trump could once again take the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement and ramp up oil and gas drilling.
Read on for this week’s Intelligence Report:
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