Climate 411

Stronger Standards, Better Monitoring Will Protect Communities from Toxic Pollution

By / Published: June 4, 2024

(This post was co-authored by EDF analyst Jolie Villegas)

The Environmental Protection Agency’s recent updates of the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards include several steps that provide substantial public health benefits by reducing toxic air pollution from coal plants.

In our last blog post we wrote about one of those steps – closing the “lignite loophole” that allows power plants that burn lignite coal to avoid commonsense pollution limits that protect people’s health and safety.

There’s a second step that EPA took in updating the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards – requiring coal-fired power plants to use a Continuous Emissions Monitoring System so that people and communities are protected from dangerous pollution 365 days a year.

And as a third step to protect communities from harmful exposures, the updated Mercury and Air Toxics Standards meaningfully strengthen limits for hazardous metal emissions.

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Also posted in Just Transition, News, Policy / Comments are closed

We need to close a mercury pollution loophole for lignite coal plants

By / Published: April 12, 2024

(This post was co-authored by EDF attorney Richard Yates)

The Environmental Protection Agency is soon expected to update our national protections against mercury and other toxic pollution from coal-fired power plants – pollution that is extremely dangerous to human health and has been linked to brain damage in children.

EPA proposed strengthening the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards and closing a loophole for lignite coal and is expected to issue its final update soon. EDF has found that, even as we have made great progress in reducing mercury pollution overall, the lignite coal loophole leaves parts of the U.S. at especially high risk.

Mapping Big Mercury Polluters

[(i) The owner/operator of the Comanche plant in Colorado has announced its intention to retire unit 2 by 2025 and unit 3 by 2030; unit 1 retired in 2022. (ii) The owner/operator of the Sherburne County plant in Minnesota has announced its intention to retire unit 1 by 2025 and unit 3 by 2034; unit 2 retired in 2023. (iii) The owner/operator of the Cardinal plant in Ohio has announced its intention to retire unit 3 by 2028; units 1 and 2 have no scheduled retirement dates. (Data: EPA’s Clean Air Markets Program Data; EIA’s 2022 Form EIA-860 Data – Schedule 3)] 

Two years ago, EDF published a map of the top 30 mercury-polluting power plants in 2020 across the United States. We have now refreshed this map based on data from 2022, and you can see the results above.

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Also posted in Clean Air Act, Indigenous People, News, Policy / Comments are closed

Auction results and budget decisions emphasize importance of investments from Washington state’s Climate Commitment Act

By / Bio / Published: March 13, 2024

This blog was co-authored by Janet Zamudio, Western States Climate Policy Intern

The last week has been eventful in Washington, seeing the end of legislative session last Thursday and the first quarterly cap-and-invest auction of 2024, which posted results today. With the legislative session wrapped up and budgets passed, we now know what additional spending lawmakers plan to do with the revenue generated by these cap-and-invest auctions thanks to the supplemental budget passed last week. And with the results from the first auction of 2024 now in the books, it seems the Evergreen State will continue to see significant revenue from this program to reinvest in communities, clean energy projects and climate resilience. There’s a lot to unpack, so let’s start with the auction results:

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Also posted in California, Carbon Markets, Cities and states, Economics, Energy, Greenhouse Gas Emissions, Policy / Comments are closed

Building a greener future: How federal purchasing power can drive a low-carbon cement industry

By / Bio / Published: March 7, 2024

This blog was co-authored by Dara Diamond, Federal Climate Innovation Intern

Historic climate investments from the Biden administration have put a much-needed down payment toward cutting emissions from industry — a major economic sector that makes up over a quarter of U.S. emissions. Still, a lot of hard work remains to meaningfully scale up solutions in this sector. A particularly tricky piece of the industrial emissions problem is hidden in plain sight all around us, in our buildings, sidewalks, highways and bridges: cement.

The scale of this climate challenge is colossal. Cement is the most widely used man-made material on the planet. If the cement industry were a country, it would be the third largest emitter in the world.

To slash emissions from cement production, policymakers will need to make the most of existing climate investments and put forward a range of new solutions, including putting the federal government’s massive purchasing power to work.

Here is why cement poses unique climate challenges — and how policymakers can leverage public procurement to help meet them.

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Also posted in Clean Power Plan, Economics, Energy, Greenhouse Gas Emissions, Innovation, Policy, Science / Comments are closed

Cut carbon, raise cash: How New York’s cap-and-invest program could invest billions in communities

By / Published: January 25, 2024

In leading climate states, you’ll find trailblazing projects that are benefiting people’s lives and cutting costly pollution right now.

In Washington, young people ride the ferry across Puget sound and buses around the state for free. In California, low-income residents get money-saving home energy efficiency upgrades at no cost. And in New York, businesses and apartments earn major rebates to install EV charging stations — with 4,000 stations installed so far.

These are just a few projects supported by funding from cap-and-invest programs. While limiting and driving down harmful climate pollution, these programs are in turn raising revenue that is re-invested in communities.

As New York develops the rules for its statewide cap-and-invest program — the third such program in the nation — a high-ambition program would give New Yorkers an exciting opportunity to shape and direct billions of potential investments each year for communities. From improving public transportation access to lowering energy bills, the possibilities are endless.

Here are just a few ways that other statewide programs, like California and Washington, are putting their revenues to work, and how New York’s participation in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) is already funding projects around the state — investments that could be significantly expanded and scaled up with a strong statewide cap-and-invest program.

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Also posted in California, Carbon Markets, Cities and states, Economics, Energy, Greenhouse Gas Emissions, Jobs, Policy / Comments are closed

The latest on climate change in the U.S. – from the Fifth National Climate Assessment

By / Published: November 28, 2023

A wildfire in California, 2021

The U.S. government recently released the Fifth National Climate Assessment, a comprehensive report that shows the harmful impacts of extreme weather and other climate hazards are increasing for people across the United States.

The Fifth National Climate Assessment confirms messages in previous reports but brings the details into sharper focus for U.S. regions.

Climate change is increasingly expensive. The direct cost of exacerbated disasters costs the country a whopping $150 billion a year. But there are additional costs as well, including missed workdays from wildfires and heat when the air is so unhealthy that it is too dangerous to work outside.

Scientists can now confidently attribute worsening extreme weather in the U.S. to climate change, including heatwaves, droughts, heavy downpours like those that caused dangerous flooding in New York City in September, and  the deadly wildfires in Hawaii and the West.

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Also posted in Basic Science of Global Warming, Extreme Weather, Greenhouse Gas Emissions, News, Science / Comments are closed