Environmental News For The Week Ending 27February 2019

Written by rjs, MarketWatch 666

This is a collection of interesting news articles about the environment and related topics published last week. This is usually a Tuesday evening regular post at GEI (but can be posted at other times).

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Note: Because of the high volume of news regarding the coronavirus outbreak, that news has been published separately:

• 28 Feb 2021 – Coronavirus Disease Weekly News 28February 2021

• 28 Feb 2021 – Coronavirus Economic Weekly News 28February 2021

The first collection includes news on the mutant strains of the virus, the vaccines, their efficacy and problems with them, and on disease demographics, whereas the 2nd collection includes related policy and politics as well as economic impacts. There is a lot on the economic stimulus package making its way through congress, and for reasons I don’t quite understand, maybe a couple dozen articles on problems encountered by school systems reopening in the middle of February.

It appears that new Covid cases and Covid deaths have stopped going down in the US; i say “appears” because it’s possible that the apparent uptick in cases early this week might have been due to underreporting of cases last week, when there were widespread power outages in Texas and several other states in the wake of an unprecedented cold wave. At any rate, for the 7 days ending Saturday, reported cases were only down 0.3% from the prior week, but down 28.6% from two weeks prior. Deaths attributed to Covid over the past 7 days were only 0.1% lower than the prior seven days, and again down 23.7% from the 7 days of two weeks ago. On the other hand, hospitalizations for Covid fell by about 18% this week from the prior week for the 2nd week in a row.

Globally, this week’s new Covid cases were 6.9% higher than the prior week, but 3.3% lower than two weeks earlier; deaths attributed to Covid globally were 7.4% lower this week than the prior week, and 21.7% lower than two weeks ago.

Vrus mutations continue to be the main threat we face to getting the virus under control, and it seems more are being discovered every day, probably because they’re now looking for them. The two most notable mutants that showed up in the news this week were in New York and California; the New York variant is said to be able to evade vaccinations, whereas one report indicated that the California mutation is 11 times more likely to be fatal. Since they’ve only shown up in the past week, it’s not clear if they’re likely to spread or if they’ll have an impact on their states or anywhere else yet. Florida continues to have the most significant outbreak of mutant virus cases, with around 2,000 cases of the more contagious UK virus (aka B.1.1.7) and a small number of the Brazilian strain.

Some of the COVID-19 graphics presented in the articles linked at the beginning of this post have been updated below.

Summary data graphics:

Below is a copy of today’s graph of new US cases from WorldOMeters so you can get a visuallization of what the growth and decline of this thing looks like.

New cases globally have started to decrease. (See Johns Hopkins graph below.) This graphic shows the daily global new cases since the start of the pandemic up through 02 March.

Globally deaths appear to have also started to decrease, although much more slowly than new cases. (See Johns Hopkins graph below.) This graphic shows the daily global deaths since the start of the pandemic up through 02 March.

The week’s environment and energy news follows; it’s heavy on the Texas grid failure, the weather leading up to it, and then some about how it happened, although I’m sure that further investigations will be forthcoming. It’s also a little disjointed, because my normal approach of grouping environmental stories like weather separately from those about power sources and the grid didn’t work in this case, leaving a lot of stories dangling. And as usual, a bunch of stories relating to the Ohio nuclear bribery scandal are at the end.

Here’s the news:

How Safe Is Your Baby Food? Here’s What You Need to Know About Arsenic, Lead and Other Heavy Metals — Heavy metals including lead, arsenic and mercury can be found in commercial baby foods at levels well above what the federal government considers safe for children, a new congressional report warns. Members of Congress asked seven major baby food makers to hand over test results and other internal documents after a 2019 report found that, out of 168 baby food products, 95% contained at least one heavy metal. Foods with rice or root vegetables, like carrots and sweet potatoes, had some of the highest levels, but they weren’t the only ones. I have investigated health safety concerns for several years in drugs and dietary supplements, including contamination with heavy metals and the chemical NDMA, a likely carcinogen. Heavy metals come from the natural erosion of the earth’s crust, but humans have dramatically accelerated environmental exposure to heavy metals, as well. As coal is burned, it releases heavy metals into the air. Lead was commonly found in gasoline, paint, pipes and pottery glazes for decades. A pesticide with both lead and arsenic was widely used on crops and in orchards until it was banned in 1988, and phosphate-containing fertilizers, including organic varieties, still contain small amounts of cadmium, arsenic, mercury and lead. These heavy metals still contaminate soil, and irrigation can expose more soil to heavy metals in water. When food is grown in contaminated soil and irrigated with water containing heavy metals, the food becomes contaminated. Additional heavy metals can be introduced during manufacturing processes. The World Health Organization and the Food and Drug Administration have defined tolerable daily intakes of heavy metals. However, it’s important to recognize that for many heavy metals, including lead and arsenic, there is no daily intake that is completely devoid of long-term health risk.

Falling sperm counts ‘threaten human survival’, expert warns —Falling sperm counts and changes to sexual development are “threatening human survival” and leading to a fertility crisis, a leading epidemiologist has warned. Writing in a new book, Shanna Swan, an environmental and reproductive epidemiologist at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, warns that the impending fertility crisis poses a global threat comparable to that of the climate crisis. “The current state of reproductive affairs can’t continue much longer without threatening human survival,” she writes in Count Down. It comes after a study she co-authored in 2017 found that sperm counts in the west had plummeted by 59% between 1973 and 2011, making headlines globally. Now, Swan says, following current projections, the median sperm count is set to reach zero in 2045. “That’s a little concerning, to say the least,” she toldAxios. In the book, Swan and co-author Stacey Colino explore how modern life is threatening sperm counts, changing male and female reproductive development and endangering human life. It points to lifestyle and chemical exposures that are changing and threatening human sexual development and fertility. Such is the gravity of the threats they pose, she argues, that humans could become an endangered species.“Of five possible criteria for what makes a species endangered,” Swan writes, “only one needs to be met; the current state of affairs for humans meets at least three.”Between 1964 and 2018 the global fertility rate fell from 5.06 births per woman to 2.4. Now approximately half the world’s countries have fertility rates below 2.1, the population replacement level.While contraception, cultural shifts and the cost of having children are likely to be contributing factors, Swan warns of indicators that suggest there are also biological reasons – including increasing miscarriage rates, more genital abnormalities among boys and earlier puberty for girls.Swan blames “everywhere chemicals”, found in plastics, cosmetics and pesticides, that affect endocrines such as phthalates and bisphenol-A. “Chemicals in our environment and unhealthy lifestyle practices in our modern world are disrupting our hormonal balance, causing various degrees of reproductive havoc,” she writes.

Use of Disinfectants Has Soared, Sparking New Examination of Ingredients – Disinfectant use has exploded during the coronavirus pandemic as people try to keep their hands and surfaces clean. But one family of cleaning chemicals is receiving scrutiny for potential health concerns.Quats, or quaternary ammonium compounds, are charged molecules that can kill bacteria, fungi, and viruses. Quats are effective disinfectants, but some researchers are raising alarm given recent research on the compounds’ possible human health and environmental effects, including fertility issues, endocrine disruption, occupational asthma, marine toxicity, and potential to spur antibiotic-resistant bacteria.And, while industry defends quats as safe, some states are taking notice and looking into regulations.The pandemic has increased demand for products like Lysol wipes that use quats as active ingredients: sales of Lysol wipes were up nearly 50 percent in spring of 2020 compared to 2019. Other cleaning products are also in high demand – aerosol disinfectant sales as a whole have doubled in 2020 in the U.S., a large fraction of which also contain quats.All those additional sales mean quats are becoming more present in the environment. “We’re in an era now where the concentration [of quats] is certainly higher than ever before,” William Arnold, an environmental engineer at the University of Minnesota, told EHN. He published a paper in June that revealed an increased load of quats may be ending up in wastewater plants, with some worrisome implications. Quats can end up in wastewater plants after they’re flushed down the drain – at the levels of use during the pandemic, some plants can’t keep up, so quats have the potential to pollute waterways. There, they might disrupt marine food chains, as quats have been found to be toxic to small invertebrates like plankton in lakes. The ingredients also may be spurring antibiotic-resistant germs, Arnold said.

New Data Show Higher Rates of Contamination in Pork Plants Under New Slaughter System — New data released Friday revealed pigs slaughtered at plants piloting a controversial new system – which speeds production while replacing many government inspectors with slaughterhouse employees – had much higher rates of fecal and digestive matter contamination than animals processed in other plants, information that the Trump administration hid from the public while expanding the system. The consumer advocacy group Food & Water Watch said in a statement that from 2014 to 2017, pork processing plants implementing the New Swine Inspection System (NSIS) on a trial basis had, on average, “nearly double the violations than comparably sized plants outside the program” and “were almost twice as likely to be cited for contamination.” According to Food & Water Watch, the plant’s higher rates of United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) violations were for the agency’s FS-2 food safety standard for fecal matter, digestive contents, and milk. “These substances can contain human pathogens, like potentially deadly Salmonella, which the agency has estimated is responsible for 69,000 people getting sick from eating pork each year,” Food & Water Watch said. “Because of its seriousness, the agency has zero tolerance for FS-2 violations, meaning that no carcass contamination is acceptable.” “This new data should end this argument once and for all: Meat companies should not be left to police themselves to protect consumers from dirty and dangerous pork products,” said Zach Corrigan, a senior attorney for Food & Water Watch, in a statement Friday. The new revelations follow 2018 reporting – based on documents obtained by Food & Water Watch – that plants piloting the NSIS were “rife with food safety violations,” including “fecal contamination, sanitation issues, and failure to remove diseased carcasses from the food chain.”

Climate change threatens Pa.’s farmers. How growers treat their soil could help them adapt – and benefit the rest of us, too -Rain can be friend or foe to a farmer. It all depends on how much is falling. Record rainfall in 2018 caused problems for growers across Pennsylvania, and some were hit harder than others. At Allegro Winery in southern York County, grapes burst on the vines, leaving them vulnerable to disease. Owner Carl Helrich said a subsequent cold snap wiped out 3,000 vines. Helrich has been running the vineyard and winery for 20 years and said every year has different challenges. But now he’s noticing more freak weather. “Our little place here on the East Coast, we’re just seeing extreme events,” he said. “We’re seeing extreme cold which we never had before, extreme wet that we never had before.” Climate scientists say you can’t attribute any one weather event to climate change, but global warming is making extreme weather events more likely. Pennsylvania, itself a large emitter of greenhouse gases, is starting to see it in the form of heavier rain. The more sensitive parts of Pennsylvania’s agriculture industry are already under threat from climate change and growers are looking for ways to adapt. Some adaptation techniques focused on soil health also draw greenhouse gases from the air and trap them underground. That has some advocates – including the Biden Administration – looking to so-called “regenerative agriculture” as a big part of the climate solution. To farmers, the focus is less on trying to solve the climate crisis and more on keeping their businesses going.

Pesticide imidacloprid threatens future for key pollinator – An insecticide used to control pest infestations on squash and pumpkins significantly hinders the reproduction of ground-nesting bees — valuable pollinators for many food crops, a new University of Guelph study has revealed. This first-ever study of pesticide impacts on a ground-nesting bee in a real-world context found female hoary squash bees exposed to imidacloprid dug 85 per cent fewer nests, collected less pollen from crop flowers and produced 89 per cent fewer offspring than unexposed bees. “Because they’re not making nests and not collecting pollen, they cannot raise offspring,” said Dr. Susan Willis Chan, a post-doc in the School of Environmental Sciences (SES), who conducted the study with Dr. Nigel Raine, holder of the Rebanks Family Chair in Pollinator Conservation in SES. “That means imidacloprid-exposed populations are going to decline.” Neonicotinoids (or neonics) are neurotoxic insecticides that kill insects by attacking their nervous systems, affecting learning, foraging and navigation in many kinds of bees. Farmers use the neonic imidacloprid to control cucumber beetles, the most damaging crop pest for squash and pumpkins. Many species of ground-nesting bees, including the hoary squash bee, are responsible for pollination of numerous fruits, vegetables and oilseed crops in North America, said Chan. “Solitary ground-nesting bees make up about 70 per cent of bee species. It’s a really important ecological group and is also really important in crop pollination,” she said. However, these ground-dwellers are often overlooked when it comes to evaluating the impacts of pesticides on pollinators, she added.

U.S. Senate confirms Vilsack for a second stint as Agriculture Secretary; FL’s U.S. senators opposed – The Senate on Tuesday in a 92-7 vote confirmed former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack to run the U.S. Department of Agriculture for a second time. Vilsack, 70, also headed the $151 billion agency under the Obama administration, for eight years. But he has garnered criticism from Black and minority farmers for his treatment of them during his tenure. Civil rights leaders also criticized his mishandling of former USDA adviser Shirley Sherrod of Georgia, whom he wrongfully forced to resign. Sen. Debbie Stabenow, chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee, spoke in favor of Vilsack on the floor prior to the vote. “I know he’s very focused on tackling the climate crisis and has done a lot of work since leaving as secretary of Agriculture a few years ago to focus on voluntary, producer-led, farmer friendly efforts that can make a real difference and allow agriculture to lead in addressing the climate crisis,” the Michigan Democrat said. Senators who opposed Vilsack included Republicans Rick Scott and Marco Rubio of Florida, Ted Cruz of Texas, Rand Paul of Kentucky, Josh Hawley of Missouri and Dan Sullivan of Alaska, as well as Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent.

Bernie Sanders Votes Against Biden’s Choice for USDA Chief –Sen. Bernie Sanders on Tuesday was the lone progressive to vote against Tom Vilsack reprising his role as secretary of agriculture, citing concerns that progressive advocacy groups have been raising since even before President Joe Biden officially nominated the former Obama administration appointee.The Senate voted 92-7 to confirm Vilsack, with Sanders (I-Vt.) and six Republicans opposing his appointment. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) was the only member who did not vote.In a statement on his decision, Sanders first said that “I have known Tom Vilsack for many years and look forward to working with him as our new secretary of agriculture.””I opposed his confirmation today because at a time when corporate consolidation of agriculture is rampant and family farms are being decimated, we need a secretary who is prepared to vigorously take on corporate power in the industry,” Sanders explained. “I heard from many family farmers in Vermont and around the country who feel that is not what Tom did when he last served in this job.”The Hill reports Sanders made similar remarks about Vilsack to journalists after the vote, saying that “I think he’ll be fine, but not as strong as I would like.”The progressive group RootsAction praised Sanders on Twitter for taking a stand against Biden’s pick to run the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Fordham University law professor Zephyr Teachout also welcomed Sanders’ move.”This is the correct vote. Vilsack failed farmers, farmworkers, the land, and the public, and Shirley Sherrod,” Teachout tweeted, referencing the former Georgia state director of rural development at USDA who was ousted under Vilsack. Sherrod, who is Black, recently told The 19th that “I have no ill will towards him, none at all,” but added that if Vilsack returned as USDA chief, “he should be ready to get on the ground to make real change this time around. And we need to hold him to it. Black people need to see some real change.” As Common Dreams previously reported, Vilsack has faced criticism for the USDA’s treatment of Black farmers when he headed the department during the Obama administration – among other critiques. Early Tuesday, in anticipation of Vilsack’s bipartisan confirmation, Food & Water Watch executive director Wenonah Hauter – whose group has been raising alarm about him for months now – issued a warning about what to expect going forward.”We can confidently predict what Tom Vilsack’s leadership of the Agriculture Department will look like, because he’s led it before. And the prediction is grim,” she said. “In his previous stint at USDA, Vilsack backed mass corporate consolidation of our food system at the expense of struggling family farmers. Similarly, he readily advanced industry-driven initiatives allowing companies to inspect their own poultry processing plants, dismantling federal oversight of food and worker safety.”

Air pollution puts children at higher risk of disease in adulthood — Children exposed to air pollution, such as wildfire smoke and car exhaust, for as little as one day may be doomed to higher rates of heart disease and other ailments in adulthood, according to a new Stanford-led study. The analysis, published in Nature Scientific Reports, is the first of its kind to investigate air pollution’s effects at the single cell level and to simultaneously focus on both the cardiovascular and immune systems in children. It confirms previous research that bad air can alter gene regulation in a way that may impact long-term health – a finding that could change the way medical experts and parents think about the air children breathe, and inform clinical interventions for those exposed to chronic elevated air pollution. “I think this is compelling enough for a pediatrician to say that we have evidence air pollution causes changes in the immune and cardiovascular system associated not only with asthma and respiratory diseases, as has been shown before,” . “It looks like even brief air pollution exposure can actually change the regulation and expression of children’s genes and perhaps alter blood pressure, potentially laying the foundation for increased risk of disease later in life.” The researchers studied a predominantly Hispanic group of children ages 6-8 in Fresno, California, a city beset with some of the country’s highest air pollution levels due to industrial agriculture and wildfires, among other sources. Using a combination of continuous daily pollutant concentrations measured at central air monitoring stations in Fresno, daily concentrations from periodic spatial sampling and meteorological and geophysical data, the study team estimated average air pollution exposures for 1 day, 1 week and 1, 3, 6 and 12 months prior to each participant visit. The researchers used a form of mass spectrometry to analyze immune system cells for the first time in a pollution study. The approach allowed for more sensitive measurements of up to 40 cell markers simultaneously, providing a more in-depth analysis of pollution exposure impacts than previously possible. Among their findings: Exposure to fine particulate known as PM2.5, carbon monoxide and ozone over time is linked to increased methylation, an alteration of DNA molecules that can change their activity without changing their sequence. This change in gene expression may be passed down to future generations. The researchers also found that air pollution exposure correlates with an increase in monocytes, white blood cells that play a key role in the buildup of plaques in arteries, and could possibly predispose children to heart disease in adulthood. Future studies are needed to verify the long-term implications.

Long-term exposure to low levels of air pollution increases risk of heart and lung disease — Exposure to what is considered low levels of air pollution over a long period of time can increase the risk of heart attack, stroke, atrial fibrillation and pneumonia among people ages 65 and older, according to new research published today in the American Heart Association’s flagship journal Circulation. Air pollution can cause harm to the cardiovascular and respiratory systems due to its effect on inflammation in the heart and throughout the body. Newer studies on the impact of air pollution on health are focused on understanding the potential harm caused by long-term exposure and are researching the effects of multiple air pollutants simultaneously. “People should be conscious of the air quality in the region where they live to avoid harmful exposure over long periods of time, if possible,” “Since our study found harmful effects at levels below current U.S. standards, air pollution should be considered as a risk factor for cardiovascular and respiratory disease by clinicians, and policy makers should reconsider current standards for air pollutants.” Researchers examined hospitalization records for more than 63 million Medicare enrollees in the contiguous Unites States from 2000 to 2016 to assess how long-term exposure to air pollution impacts hospital admissions for specific cardiovascular and respiratory issues. The study measured three components of air pollution: fine particulate matter (PM2.5), nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and ozone (O3). Using hundreds of predictors, including meteorological values, satellite measurements and land use to estimate daily levels of pollutants, researchers calculated the study participants’ exposure to the pollutants based upon their residential zip code. Additional analysis included the impact of the average yearly amounts of each of the pollutants on hospitalization rates for non-fatal heart attacks, ischemic strokes, atrial fibrillation and flutter, and pneumonia. Statistical analyses found thousands of hospital admissions were attributable to air pollution per year. Specifically: The risks for heart attacks, strokes, atrial fibrillation and flutter, and pneumonia were associated with long-term exposure to particulate matter. Data also showed there were surges in hospital admissions for all of the health outcomes studied with each additional unit of increase in particulate matter. Specifically, stroke rates increased by 2,536 for each additional ug/m3 (micrograms per cubic meter of air) increase in fine particulate matter each year. There was an increased risk of stroke and atrial fibrillation associated with long-term exposure to nitrogen dioxide. Pneumonia was the only health outcome in the study that seemed impacted by long-term exposure to ozone; however, researchers note there are currently no national guidelines denoting safe or unsafe long-term ozone levels.

Plastic Burning Makes It Harder for New Delhi Residents to See, Study Suggests -India’s New Delhi has been called the “world air pollution capital” for its high concentrations of particulate matter that make it harder for its residents to breathe and see. But one thing has puzzled scientists, according to The Guardian. Why does New Delhi see more blinding smogs than other polluted Asian cities, such as Beijing? To answer this question, scientists looked at the chemical composition of the region’s smog and found that its density is likely linked to the burning of plastics. The specific chemicals released by this burning and other industrial processes are responsible for around 50 percent of the low visibility, the study authors wrote. The study, published in Nature Geoscience in late January, measured the chemical composition of the particulate matter in the cities of Delhi and Chennai. These are both cities in the Indo Gangetic Plain, a region blanketed in dense smog, particularly in December and January, a PTI story published by The Indian Express explained. The researchers found that the smog in both cities, though particularly in Chennai, had high amounts of chloride. The researchers then looked at which chemicals also spiked along with the chloride, and found it matched what would be released by the burning of plastic, The Guardian explained. “We realised that despite absolute PM2.5 mass burden over Delhi being much less than other polluted megacities around the world, including Beijing, the pollution and atmospheric chemistry of Delhi is much more complex to understand,” “This work put forward importance of measurements and modelling approaches to scientifically conclude that half of the water uptake and visibility reduction by aerosol particles around Delhi is caused by the hydrochloric acid (HCl) emissions, which is locally emitted in Delhi potentially due to plastic contained waste burning and other industrial processes.”The low visibility is a deadly and costly problem for New Delhi, the study authors wrote. It increases car accidents and flight delays. Particulate matter in general caused 12,000 excess deaths in New Delhi in 2017, according to one estimate. But the burning of plastics poses other, unique risks, The Guardian explained. It can release highly toxic dioxins that contaminate the food chain and react with smog to increase levels of ground-level ozone, which have been linked to crop yield reductions of 20 to 30 percent.

Ohio Republicans’ bill would force state agencies to reduce their rule books Senate Bill 9 says agencies must cut their use of phrases including “must,” “shall,” “require” and “prohibit.” Ohio Republicans are again pushing for arbitrary cuts in “regulatory restrictions” with a bill that, if enacted, could significantly weaken consumer, environmental, and public health protections.A similar bill died in December when the last legislative session ended without final votes after conference committee work. Sens. Kristina Roegner, R-Hudson, and Rob McColley, R-Napoleon, have resurrected the proposal this session asSenate Bill 9.The two lawmakers are chair and vice chair of the Ohio Senate’s Government Oversight and Reform Committee, which has held three hearings on the bill so far. A fourth hearing is on the agenda for today’s committee meeting at 10:30 a.m. Eastern time.“SB 9 is an across-the-board 30% reduction of ‘regulatory restrictions’ without any concern over their impact on clean energy or our environment,” said Trent Dougherty, general counsel for the Ohio Environmental Council Action Fund. “Unless there are amendments to this bill, Ohioans could see a 30% increase in pollution, 30% reduction in quality of life for Ohio communities and 30% more roadblocks to our clean energy economy.”“I find this legislation deeply troubling,” said Sen. Hearcel Craig, a Democrat from Columbus and ranking minority member for the Ohio Senate committee. “This number was selected without any factual evidence that it would benefit Ohioans.” In Craig’s view, “Ohioans should be concerned with the increase in air pollution and the potential impacts this bill would have on our climate if this bill were to pass.” He likewise worries about the bill’s implications for social justice. Like earlier versions, SB 9 defines regulatory restrictions based on the use of words such as “shall,” “must,” “require” and “prohibit.” In addition to the bill’s percentage target, it would mandate that any new regulatory requirements could only be adopted if two other rules are cut. An agency likewise could not adopt any new rule if it would “cause the number of regulatory restrictions to exceed the state limit.” “This study did not look at the purpose of these regulations, including whether they set standards for food or building safety,” Craig said. Instead, the report counted how many times various words were used, including “shall,” “must” and so on. “Cutting regulations just because certain politicians think our laws include the word ‘must’ too many times is not good public policy,” he said.

ERCOT asked feds to pause federal environmental limits during winter storm – As last week’s historic winter storm was rolling across Texas, officials with the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, ERCOT, was asking the federal government to temporarily suspend environmental limits for several power producers. The request, signed by ERCOT CEO Bill Magness, asked for the U.S. Department of Energy to issue an emergency order and declare an “electric reliability emergency exists within the state of Texas that requires intervention by the Secretary.”The request was sent on Feb. 14 and asks the Acting Secretary of Energy, David Huizenga, to allow certain power plants to operate at maximum levels and be allowed to exceed federal limits on emissions and wastewater release until Feb. 19.“This duration will ensure additional supply is available during a period in which ERCOT may continue to experience unprecedented cold weather that has forced generation out of service,” the emergency request read. “In ERCOT’s judgment, the loss of power to homes and local businesses in the areas affected by curtailments presents a far greater risk to public health and safety than the temporary exceedances of those permit limits.”

Texas freeze led to release of tons of air pollutants as refineries shut (Reuters) – The largest U.S. oil refiners released tons of air pollutants into the skies over Texas this past week, according to figures provided to the state, as refineries and petrochemical plants in the region scrambled to shut production during frigid weather. An arctic air mass that spread into an area unused to such low temperatures killed at least two dozen people in Texas and knocked out power to more than 4 million at its peak. It also hit natural gas and electric generation, cutting supplies needed to run the plants along the U.S. Gulf Coast. Shutdowns led to the refineries flaring, or burning and releasing gases, to prevent damage to their processing units. That flaring darkened the skies in eastern Texas with smoke visible for miles. “These emissions can dwarf the usual emissions of the refineries by orders of magnitude,” said Jane Williams, chair of the Sierra Club’s National Clean Air Team. She said U.S. regulators must change policies that allow “these massive emissions to occur with impunity.” The five largest refiners emitted nearly 337,000 pounds of pollutants, including benzene, carbon monoxide, hydrogen sulfide and sulfur dioxide, according to preliminary data supplied to the Texas Commission on Environment Quality (TCEQ). Valero Energy Corp said in a filing with the TCEQ that it released 78,000 pounds over 24 hours beginning last Monday from its Port Arthur, Texas, refinery, citing the frigid cold and interruptions in utility services. The 118,100 pounds of emissions from Motiva’s Port Arthur refinery from Monday to Thursday were more than three times the excess emissions that it declared to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for the whole of 2019. Marathon Petroleum Corp’s MPC.N Galveston Bay Refinery released 14,255 pounds over less than five hours on Monday, equivalent to about 10% of its total releases above permitted levels in 2019. Exxon Mobil Corp said its Baytown Olefins Plant emitted nearly a ton of benzene and 68,000 tons of carbon monoxide, citing in its disclosure the halting of “multiple process units and safe utilization of the flare system.” Valero did not have an immediate comment. Motiva did not respond to a request for comment. “We don’t typically provide comment on our operations beyond our filings,” said Marathon spokesman Jamal Kheiry. The flaring continued through the week as refiners kept plants out of service.

Opposition to relocation of toxic metal recycling plant to Chicago’s working-class Southside raises political questions – Chicago activists are engaged in a hunger strike to stop the relocation of a metal recycler from a wealthy North Side neighborhood to a working-class neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. Chicago’s working-class neighborhoods bear the burden of being home to most of the city’s industrial and manufacturing plants and, with it, their deleterious health consequences. The conditions of Chicago’s working-class neighborhoods are the end results of decades of pro-capitalist policies implemented by the Democratic Party. Reserve Management Group (RMG) shuttered their one-hundred-year-old metal recycling plant, named General Iron, at the end of the last year. Situated on the Chicago River, the former plant is located in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood, an upper-middle-class-to-extremely wealthy neighborhood with an average household income, according to city-data.com, of $138,558 per year. RMG is building its new plant, called Southside Recycling, along the Calumet River in Chicago’s southeast Hegewisch neighborhood, where the median household income, according to city-data.com, is $61,168 per year. The General Iron plant has a history of violations. Between December 2019 and March 2020, it was cited 11 times for violations of pollution and nuisance laws. In May 2020, it agreed to pay $18,000 to settle with the city, a slap on the wrist overseen by Chicago’s Democratic Mayor Lori Lightfoot. The driving impetus of RMG’s move is the development of the Lincoln Yards project, which neighbors the now defunct plant. The $6 billion megadevelopment, hatched by former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, is receiving some $1.6 billion in city subsidies. The city no doubt worked with RMG to give them a deal to relocate. The opportunity may also give the company an opportunity to modernize their plant, reduce costs and increase profits, a win-win for the city and company. The development as a boon for its developers and the already wealthy neighborhood of Lincoln Park and its adjacent neighborhoods. And in turn, Chicago’s Southeast Side will receive a toxic metal recycling plant.

Deforestation and Mining Increased in Tropically Forested Countries During COVID –A new report reveals that tropically forested countries are facing higher-than-ever rates of destruction, due to COVID-19.1 This has had – and will continue to have – a devastating impact on the environment, the global climate, and the many Indigenous peoples who rely on these ancient and biodiverse forests for their homes and sustenance, unless the governments of these countries are called to task and held accountable. Researchers analyzed how forestry protection measures have changed in COVID times in the five most tropically-forested countries in the world – Brazil, Colombia, Peru, Indonesia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The result is a lengthy report, titled “Rolling back social and environmental safeguards in the time of COVID-19,” that details how all of these countries have indeed bulldozed their own environmental protections, citing a need to stimulate an economic recovery.1There has long been a positive link between Indigenous stewardship of land and higher rates of natural preservation. When Indigenous peoples are allowed to control their own lands, territories, and resources, less is extracted and more is protected. This makes them “indispensable for the sustainable management of our planet’s limited resources,” as explained in the report’s foreword. “The respect and protection of these rights is therefore not only essential for their survival, but for the survival of us all in overcoming this crisis.” With COVID-19’s arrival, however, any agreements between Indigenous peoples and the governments of the countries they live in have largely been ignored. One of the report’s main findings was that governments have responded quickly to requests from mining, energy, and industrial agriculture sectors to expand, but have not followed through with the Indigenous peoples whose free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC) they would normally be required to obtain. In some cases they have insisted on virtual consultations, even though these are “inconsistent with Indigenous peoples’ cultural and self-governance rights.”Governments have justified this negligence by saying it’s difficult to meet in person and to use the usual channels of communication, but the UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples says none of this business activity should be allowed to resume without renewed consent. The Special Rapporteur goes even further, saying that states should “consider a moratorium on all logging and extractive industries operating in proximity to Indigenous communities” during the COVID-19 pandemic, as it is effectively impossible to obtain consent.

As Extreme Weather Events Increase, What Are the Risks to Wildlife? – A hailstorm in South Texas. Tornadoes in Tennessee. Wildfires across the West. A barrage of Gulf Coast hurricanes. Those are among the record 22 weather and climate disasters that each topped $1 billion in damages last year in the United States.In all, the price tag for 2020 hit a whopping $95 billion – and that’s just in the United States. Reinsurance firm Swiss Re put global economic losses at $175 billion last year, including $32 billion for floods in China and $13 billion in damages from Cyclone Amphan across India and Bangladesh. While experts tabulate the economic losses – homes destroyed, crops ruined, businesses shuttered – ecosystems and wildlife can also sustain damage that’s harder to quantify.Many plants and wildlife evolved with and have adapted to dealing with large-scale disturbances, but we’re beginning to see “megadisturbances” at levels beyond what we saw in the past, says Stein.And that can take a toll. Extreme weather can kill animals directly – or indirectly, like by destroying food sources, contaminating water or altering habitat, forcing a species to move into areas where there may be more competition, fewer resources or a greater risk of predation. “What we begin to find when you get some of these mega disturbances is that it’s beyond the ability of a species – or their adaptive capacity – to bounce back,” says Stein.Species that are already threatened or endangered are of course especially at risk.Take the Attwater prairie chicken. A million of these birds once ranged across the prairies of Texas and Louisiana.Today fewer than 100 remain in the wild and scientists have sought to bolster their populations with captive breeding programs. But when Hurricane Harvey walloped Texas with 130-mile-per-hour winds and record rainfall in 2017, the birds were right in harm’s way. “The Attwater Prairie Chicken National Wildlife Refuge tracked 29 individual birds, mostly hens. Post-hurricane, staff confirmed only five of them still alive,” Texas Climate News reported. “The hurricane also killed roughly 80% of a prairie chicken population on private property in Goliad County.”Other species with limited ranges, like those on islands, also face big threats. “If a species is well distributed, then if one part of its range gets hit, there’s the ability for it to recover,” says Stein. “But if essentially all its eggs are in one basket, and that particular place gets hit by one of these big disturbances, that’s when you have a real concern.”

Wisconsin Wolf Hunt Ends Early as Hunters Exceed Quota — Wisconsin will end its controversial wolf hunt early after hunters and trappers killed almost 70 percent of the state’s quota in the hunt’s first 48 hours.By the end of Tuesday, the second day of the hunt, 82 wolves had been killed, The Associated Press reported. As of Wednesday morning, 135 had been killed, exceeding the quota, according to the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR).”Wisconsin’s actions offer a tragic glimpse of a future without federal wolf protections,” the Wolf Conservation Center tweeted in response.President Donald Trump’s delisting of gray wolves under the Endangered Species Act triggered the hunt. The DNR originally set a quota of 200 wolves to be killed between Feb. 22 and Feb. 28. Of the 200, 81 were allocated to the Ojibwe Tribes in accordance with treaty rights, the Wisconsin State Journal reported. Hunters killed about half of the remaining 119 by Tuesday morning and 69 percent by Tuesday afternoon, The Associated Press reported. By Wednesday morning, hunters exceeded the quota by 16 wolves.Hunters also exceeded the quota set for three of the state’s hunting zones, according to DNR. They killed 33 of an 18-wolf quota in zone 2, located in the northeast; 24 of a 20-wolf quota in zone 3 located in the center; and 30 of a 17-wolf quota in southern zone 6. The hunt ended Wednesday at 10 a.m. CT in the most depleted zones and will end at 3 p.m. CT for the remaining half. After wolves were returned to state management under Trump in January 2021, Wisconsin intended to plan a hunt for November 2021, arguing that it needed the time to study the population and consult with Native American tribes and the general public. However, pro-hunting group Hunter Nation sued the state to start the hunt earlier in the year, with a judge ruling in their favor. This past Friday, an appeals court dismissed the Wisconsin DNR’s appeal,Wisconsin Public Radio reported.

Rescued Orangutans Are Returned to Indonesia Wild Amid COVID-19 Risk –With lockdowns in place and budgets slashed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many environmental protections vanished this past year, leaving some of the world’s most vulnerable species and habitats at risk. But conservationists at the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation were faced with an entirely different threat.Their beloved orangutans share a strikingly similar DNA to humans, making them susceptible to respiratory illnesses such as COVID-19, Reuters reported. So when it came time to reintroduce a group of rescued orangutans back into the wild, conservationists had to rethink their usual transportation methods to prevent potentially spreading the virus.The solution? Reintroduce the critically endangered species via helicopter. Last week, ten orangutans returned to the wild by taking a flight to the Indonesian portion of Borneo Island, Reuters reported.”For an entire year, we have not been able to release orangutans due to the global pandemic, but we are still strongly committed to the orangutan conservation effort,” Jamartin Sihite, CEO of the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation, said in a statement. Prior to their release, the orangutans were held in rehabilitation centers, according to Reuters. They included five males, a mother and two babies and two other females.”Using a helicopter is the best way to transport orangutans during the pandemic,” Denny Kurniawan, BOSF program manager, told Reuters. Normally it would take three days to drive the orangutans to their drop-off area, adding to the risk of further exposure between humans and orangutans, Reuters noted. However, air travel reduced travel time and kept veterinarians and orangutans at a safer distance.

One Third of Freshwater Fish Face Extinction, New Report Warns – The latest warning of the Earth’s mounting extinction crisis is coming from its lakes and rivers.A new report from a coalition of 16 conservation groups warns that almost a third of freshwater fish species face extinction because of human activity.”Nowhere is the world’s nature crisis more acute than in our rivers, lakes and wetlands, and the clearest indicator of the damage we are doing is the rapid decline in freshwater fish populations. They are the aquatic version of the canary in the coal mine, and we must heed the warning,” Stuart Orr, WWF global freshwater lead, said in a statement Tuesday announcing the report.WWF is one of the many organizations behind the report, along with the Alliance for Freshwater Life, Conservation International and The Nature Conservancy, to name a few. Together, the groups emphasized the incredible diversity of the world’s freshwater fish and their importance for human wellbeing.There are a total of 18,075 freshwater fish species in the world, accounting for 51 percent of all fish species and 25 percent of all vertebrates. They are an important food source for 200 million people and provide work for 60 million. But their numbers are in decline. The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species has declared 80 to be extinct, 16 of those in 2020 alone. The numbers of migratory freshwater fish such as salmon have declined 76 percent since 1970, while mega-fish such as beluga sturgeon have fallen by 94 percent in the same time period. In fact, freshwater biodiversity is plummeting at twice the rate of biodiversity in the oceans and forests. Despite this, freshwater fish get much less attention than their saltwater counterparts, the report authors say. Titled “The World’s Forgotten Fishes,” it argues that policy makers rarely consider river wildlife when making decisions. The main threats to freshwater fish include building dams, syphoning river water for irrigation, releasing wastewater and draining wetlands. Other factors include overfishing, introducing invasive species and theclimate crisis. “As we look to adapt to climate change and we start to think about all the discussions that governments are going to have on biodiversity, it’s really a time for us to shine a light back on freshwater,” Orr told NBC News.

What You Need to Know About Coastal Darkening -Coastal waters around the world are growing darker from pollution and runoff. This has the potential to create huge problems for the ocean and its marine life. Coastal darkening is a change in the color and clarity of water. According to Hakai Magazine, the underlying causes include fertilizer pollution creating algal blooms, along with boats stirring up silt. Both of these issues block light. Even heavy rains can contribute when they loosen organic matter from decaying plants and soil, carrying them to the ocean as a brown, light-blocking slurry, Hakai Magazine noted. According to Science Norway, sunlight hitting these particles gets absorbed or blocked, instead of penetrating further down the water column. The result is that the underwater world is darker. Science Norway also reported that the amount of loose organic material that ends up in the sea has increased during the last 30 years. According to the Coastal Ocean Darkening project’s website, “Light availability in the coastal ocean is closely coupled to its physical, biological and chemical processes and is experiencing changes on all spatial and temporal scales.” This will have profound ecological implications that are just beginning to be understood. First, physical impediments create biological changes in water. A study from the Coastal Ocean Darkening project published in Frontiers in Marine Science showed that as more organic matter blocked sunlight from penetrating the water, phytoplankton concentrations dropped. Because phytoplankton are the base of the oceanic food chain, decreasing numbers and shifting concentrations of specific types could have catastrophic, cascading consequences for the entire ecosystem, Hakai Magazine reported.Over time, other biological changes in marine life might be observed, the study found. Decreased light availability benefits creatures such as jellyfish that don’t rely on sight to hunt, while hindering those that are visual hunters, such as fish, Hakai Magazine reported. A 2009 study found that coastal water darkening was implicated in regime shifts of predominant animals in Norwegian fjords. For example, jellyfish enjoyed a “mass occurrence” after more than 70 years of coastal darkening in the fjords. A 2021 report of Norwegian fjords found that darkening makes life difficult for plankton, kelp, seagrass and fish because all depend on light to make their food, reported Science Norway. Reductions in vast ecosystems, such as kelp forests and seagrass beds because of light scarcity, have negative consequences for fish species that use these areas as nurseries, the report added.

Flood damage on the rise for NJ homes –More than 94,000 New Jersey houses are subject to substantial flooding this year at an average cost of some $4,400 per property, and the financial damage will get worse as climate changes over the next 30 years, according to a report published Monday.“The Cost of Climate” by the nonprofit First Street Foundation calculated that another 10,800 properties across the state will suffer flood damage by 2051 because of the bigger storms and higher seas that come with climate change, and that the average annual loss will rise 53% to $6,755.The report also found that residential properties carrying federal flood insurance – as those inside the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s special flood-hazard areas are required to do – can expect flood-related losses averaging $5,676, or almost three times the average premium for those properties.Outside the FEMA-designated areas, the gap between annual losses and flood insurance premiums paid is even greater, the report said. It estimated that those premiums would have to rise 3.7 times to cover the anticipated cost of the damage. And in a reminder of the challenges facing the already-indebted National Flood Insurance Program, the report estimated that if all of New Jersey’s flood-prone properties were federally insured, the payout risk would exceed premiums by some $11 billion over the next 30 years.

Extreme monsoon rains submerge parts of capital Jakarta under 2.7 m (8.8 feet) of water, Indonesia – Extreme monsoon rains brought massive flooding to the Indonesian capital Jakarta on Saturday, February 20, 2021, with parts of the city (population 30 million) under 1.2 to 2.7 m (3.9 – 8.8 feet) of water. The floods forced the evacuation of some 1 380 residents to temporary shelters. The waters are now receding, but more heavy rain is expected in the week ahead, and Jakarta remains on alert for the next 4 days.National rescue agency spokesman Yusuf Latif said the floods were triggered by extreme downpours — with some areas recording 226 mm (8.9 inches) from Friday to Saturday.The worst affected were the southern and eastern areas of the city, forcing 1 380 people to evacuate. Fortunately, no casualties have been reported. According to the latest data, 200 neighborhoods have been affected, Jakarta Governor Anies Baswedan said. “The rain has stopped, but water from other areas is still affecting the city. Hopefully, it won’t hit the city center and when the water recedes people can resume their activities,” Baswedan said. The Meteorology Climatology and Geophysics Agency (BMKG) has warned the heaviest rain of the season may fall in and around the densely populated capital in the coming days, with extreme weather, including heavy rain, thunder and strong winds, expected throughout the next week.

State of emergency declared in Madre de Dios as severe flooding leaves 15 000 people affected, Peru — (videos) Heavy rainfall since mid-February has triggered widespread, severe flooding in Madre de Dios, Peru, leaving at least 15 000 people affected and thousands of property damage. This has prompted the government to declare a state of emergency for the region for 60 days.According to environment minister Gabriel Quijandria, floodwaters damaged about 4 000 homes, several schools and health facilities, and around 3 000 ha (7 400 acres) of crops.The affected areas include Pueblo Viejo, Las Piedras, Laberinto, and Boca Colorado.”We have flown over the areas near and far from Puerto Maldonado and the truth is that the situation is worrying,” said the minister. “There is significant damage in several towns, such as Laberinto.” Peru’s National Civil Defense Institute (INDECI), along with the armed forces, are working together to distribute relief supplies, including personal hygiene, cleaning products, mattresses, sheets, kitchen utensils, and mosquito nets. Puerto Maldonado registered 150.8 mm (5.9 inches) of rain in a 24-hour period to February 19. The Madre de Dios River was also at a red alert level, according to the National Meteorology and Hydrology Service SENAMHI. In the Las Piedras district, Tambopata Province, the overflowing of the Madre de Dios river damaged 50 homes and prompted 37 families to evacuate.

Record flooding affects more than 100 000 people in Acre, northwestern Brazil – (video) More than 100 000 people have been affected by severe flooding in Acre, northwestern Brazil, after multiple rivers overflowed and reached record levels around Friday, February 19, 2021. Authorities have declared the situation an emergency, saying the state is facing one of its most challenging times in history.In Cruzeiro do Sul, the Jurua River reached record levels of 14.31 m (46.94 feet) on Friday, smashing the previous high of 14.24 m (46.71 feet) set in February 2017. Around 33 000 people have fled their homes in the municipality.In Sena Madureira, the Laco River hit 18.04 m (59.18 feet), well above the flood stage level of 15.2 m (49.8 feet). About 18 000 people have been affected by inundations across the municipality. On Saturday, February 20, around 28 000 people have been affected after the Tarauaca River reached 11.05 m (26.25 feet), which was above the flood stage of 9.5 m (31.2 feet).In Fejio, more than 3 200 people were impacted after the Envira River jumped to 14.25 m (46.75 feet), surpassing the 14 m (46 feet) flood stage.In Santa Rosa do Purus, the Purus River hit 9.46 m (31.03 feet) exceeding the flood stage of 9 m (29.5 feet). More than 1 500 people have been affected, although levels have dipped under 7 m (22.96 feet). Meanwhile, the Acre River in Rio Branco stood at 15.64 m (51.31 feet), surpassing the flood stage of 14 m (45.9 feet), which affected 2 700 families.

More than 59 000 people flee as Dujuan brings widespread flooding and disruption to Philippines –More than 59 000 people have evacuated their homes as Tropical Storm “Dujuan” — locally known as Auring, brought widespread flooding and disruption to the Philippines on Monday, February 22, 2021. As of 03:00 UTC (11:00 LT), the storm has weakened into a Low-Pressure Area (LPA) prior to crossing the Rapu-Rapu Islands in Albay and is forecast to traverse the central region in the next 24 hours. Dujuan made landfall in Batag Island in Laoang, Northern Samar, at 01:00 UTC (09:00 LT) on Monday. The worst-affected provinces in the south have been Caraga and Surigao del Sur. As a safety precaution, the power was cut off in several towns of Surigao del Sur, said provincial governor Ayec Pimentel. More than 18 000 people were preemptively evacuated in the province, while more than 8 000 individuals have fled their homes. The storm also caused disruptions as around 36 domestic flights have been canceled. More than 2 000 passengers were stranded in various ports in the eastern region as rough seas prompted coast guard officials to suspend ferry trips.

10 people rescued from ice floes that drifted away on Lake Erie –They went with the floe. Ten people had to be rescued in Ohio – after getting stranded on ice floes that broke away from the shore of Lake Erie.The Great Lakes division of the Coast Guard announced Sunday afternoon that it was rescuing seven adults and three children who ignored safety advice to stay off the ice on the frozen lake.The 10 stranded people appeared to be in two separate groups who had wandered onto the ice, then became stranded when it cracked free on a sunny day and drifted out into the lake, WOIO said.Six were rescued by a Coast Guard ice skiff, while the other four were taken to shore by a Cleveland Fire Department rescue team, officials said.All 10 were offered medical observation at the scene, but it appears none were treated or taken to the hospital, reported WOIO, which noted one even had ice skates.

Jackson, Mississippi’s public water system collapses after winter storm’s deep freeze –City officials in Jackson, Mississippi reported late last week that water service had been knocked out indefinitely for most of the city after a devastating winter storm shut down power and froze water lines, resulting in a drop in water pressure last week. Of the many cities across the Southern US devastated by freezing temperatures last week, Jackson, Mississippi’s capital and largest city with 160,000 residents, is among the worst hit. Water main breaks constitute a major cause for concern, with Jackson experiencing 13 breaks in less than a week. Pressure drops and outages and boil water advisories were rampant across the state as the region’s old and poorly maintained infrastructure struggled to function under adverse weather conditions. Many of the city’s water mains and pipes have not been replaced in decades, with some piping being over 100 years old. Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba told reporters on Thursday, “We do not have a definitive timeline as to when the water will be restored within the tanks. “This becomes increasingly challenging due to the pandemic,” Lumumba said. He attempted to blame the outage on COVID-19 restrictions and the closure of schools, claiming, “so many residents are at home instead of school, which means people are trying to use water at a higher rate than usual.” However, severe winter weather has caused a strain on Jackson’s infrastructure in the recent past, and it is well known that a significant investment in the city’s water system is overdue. During a period of freezing cold temperatures in 2014-15, then Jackson Mayor Tony Yarber issued a state of emergency in an attempt to secure federal funding to update city water mains and roads. Back in 2015 it was estimated by city officials that somewhere between $750 million to $1 billion would be needed to fully replace or repair the city’s water mains and roads. “Our infrastructure is not prepared to handle this,” Lumumba admitted on Thursday. Many people have been without water since Monday. Residents have resorted to gathering snow to melt to create enough water to flush their toilets. The city set up stations at fire houses, some schools, a mall and other sporadic locations to hand out bottles and jugs of water to people able to go out in the cold and wait, a difficult task for the region’s elderly and infirm residents. Icy roads have prevented water treatment crews from receiving delivery of much needed chemicals to ensure the water being pumped into the city tanks is safe for use. As it stands, there remains a citywide boil water advisory, with residents who have water flowing from their taps instructed to boil their water before use to ensure potability.

Winter Freeze Damage Expected to Hit $18 Billion From Burst Pipes, Collapsed Roofs – WSJ == Property insurers face an estimated $18 billion bill for damage to homes and businesses from the long stretch of frigid weather in Texas and numerous other states, the equivalent of a major hurricane, according to a leading risk-modeling firm. Over half of the payments will be headed to Texas, and businesses – rather than homeowners – will receive the majority of the payouts, according to Boston-based Karen Clark & Co., which runs catastrophe-modeling software widely used in the U.S. insurance industry. Much of the damage stems from widespread freezing of pipes, which have burst inside schools, museums, churches, commercial spaces as well as homes, leading to extensive water damage, Ms. Clark said in an interview Friday. Residents of Texas continued to see power and water disruptions after a series of winter storms, leaving millions to search for heat, food and clean water. The damage is spread over about 20 states. Besides Texas, hard-hit states include Arkansas, Missouri, Oklahoma and Tennessee, Ms. Clark said. “This event has snow and ice, but it is predominantly a freezing event and most of the claims are going to be related to water damage,” she said. Her firm’s estimate incorporates collapses of commercial roofs, “and a sprinkling of lots of different types of claims, but they will be dominated by water claims.” She called it “a perfect storm” in the way it paired extremely low temperatures with snow and ice that contributed to power outages, and the extreme temperature anomalies lasted longer than this type of weather usually does in southern states. If the industry’s tab does turn out to be $18 billion, the winter storm will end up on the top-10 list of costliest natural catastrophes in the U.S., as measured by losses to property insurers. It would fall just below Hurricane Ike in 2008, which cost the industry $21.51 billion, according to trade group Insurance Information Institute. Ike is in eighth place on the trade group’s list. In ninth place currently is a 2012 drought that caused $16.42 billion in insured damage, and Hurricane Wilma in 2005 is in 10th place, at $13.84 billion in insured damage. “Texas was ground zero of the temperature anomalies,” Ms. Clark said. “And it wasn’t just part of Texas but the complete state.You have a lot of population being impacted.”

Winter storm leaves behind billions of dollars’ worth of damage across Texas – Last week’s winter storm, which subjected a sizable portion of the US to subfreezing temperatures that reached well into the South, is set to inflict record-breaking economic losses, potentially surpassing the cost of Hurricane Harvey in 2017. Due to its deficient infrastructure, Texas shouldered the majority of the damage. Insurance Council of Texas representative Camille Garcia told the Dallas Morning News that she expects hundreds of thousands of insurance claims, with the storm threatening to become the state’s costliest catastrophe on record. Claims are expected from commercial and residential properties that experienced losses from flooding and other damage caused by frozen and broken pipes. The total value of losses is still being tallied, but the severity and geographic scope of the storm has meant that the total cost could exceed the $19 billion in damage inflicted by Hurricane Harvey in 2017. Experts estimate a full recovery could take months. Still, these figures cannot fully measure the toll the crisis has taken on the population. Tens of millions of workers, already crushed under the weight of the COVID-19 pandemic, now face added economic stress. Residents face tens of thousands of dollars of repair costs and, in some cases, exorbitant electricity bills from power companies profiting from a surge in market prices for electricity. Many working class families that were forced to double up with relatives or stay in hotels last week still cannot safely return to homes with collapsed ceilings and extensive flooding. On top of trying to figure out where to go next, workers have to figure out how to pay for damages that may not be covered by their insurance policies, if they had insurance. Workers had already suffered job losses or significant reductions in income due to the pandemic. December’s unemployment rate in Texas stood at 7.2 percent, more than double the rate of 3.5 percent a year earlier. Meanwhile, the state’s outdated and understaffed unemployment insurance office has left countless Texans struggling to receive necessary unemployment payments. Further compounding the crisis, some 8.6 million people, nearly a third of Texas’ population, still remain without access to safe water. According to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, more than 1,200 public water systems were disrupted by the cold weather. More than 12,000 households remained without power Tuesday evening, according to poweroutage.us, even though Governor Greg Abbott projected power would have already been fully restored by Monday. Across Texas, the official tally of deaths related to the winter storm continues to rise. Reports indicate there have been dozens of deaths linked to the storm, but experts say the death toll is likely much higher. Additionally, it could take weeks or months before the true magnitude is known.

POLITICS: Fringe weatherman advised Abbott before deadly Texas storm — Thursday, February 25, 2021 — Days before a historic snowstorm crippled his home state, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) sought advice from an unusual source: Joe Bastardi, the go-to weather forecaster of Fox News host Sean Hannity.

TikTok users spread conspiracy that Texas snow was manufactured by the government –Viral videos by TikTok users purportedly in Texas have falsely claimed that the snow from the deadly winter storm that hit the state this month is fake and was created by the U.S. government. The clips on the popular video platform show users holding up a lighter, match or hairdryer to snow, which in some videos appears to burn or get smaller without dripping any water, Business Insider reported. Some TikTok users have used the phrase “government snow” to describe the phenomenon. The hashtag #governmentsnow had more than a million views on TikTok as of Monday.Multiple reports noted that there is an explanation for the phenomenon. Through a process known as sublimation, the solid snow turns directly into a gas from the heat instead of a liquid dripping off of the snowball. This is not the first time a false claim about snowstorms or snow accumulation in the U.S. has spread on social media. The conspiracy theory also went viral in 2014, according to multiple reports.

Dallas sees 80-plus degree temp swing in just 1 week – A substantial warmup unfolded throughout the middle of the United States this week, including across areas that were hit hard by disastrous winter weather last week, with places like Dallas, Oklahoma City and Topeka, Kansas, experiencing remarkable temperature turnarounds over where temps bottomed out last week in the throes of the historic cold snap.Rounds of snow and ice compounded a power crisis across parts of the South Central states that left millions of Americans without heat amid the coldest air in decades. And the bitterly cold air left behind a mess too. Many Texans face lengthy cleanup from burst pipes along with ongoing water shortages in the aftermath of the winter storms.Brutal cold spread across the Plains, reaching as far south as Texas and Louisiana. Low-temperature records fell as the mercury plummeted to below zero in southern cities like Oklahoma City and Dallas.Fast forward to one week later and a big warmup was enveloping the Central states Tuesday thanks to the retreat of Arctic air back into Canada.Temperatures began climbing in earnest over the weekend, with some areas finally creeping above freezing and into the 40s and 50s. The warming trend continued to ramp up early in the week. On Monday, Feb. 22, the temperatures in Rapid City, South Dakota, soared to 57 degrees in the afternoon after bottoming out at 24 degrees below zero last week, making for an 82-degree temperature swing. “It’s not just the fact that we have a huge warmup from last week to this week, it’s the fact that temperatures are also above normal as well,” Temperatures in the low to upper 70s in cities like Oklahoma City are about 15 degrees above normal for late February and are more typical of mid-April.The temperature in Dallas bottomed out at 2 below zero on Feb. 16 and reached a high of just 18 that day. With the high temperature soaring to 81 on Feb. 23, people in Big D felt a big temperature swing of 84 degrees exactly a week later.Oklahoma City also came in with an 87-degree temperature swing by Tuesday afternoon as the temperature soared to 72 degrees there. In Oklahoma City, the mercury plunged to 14 degrees below zero last Tuesday.

Beijing records warmest February day since 1951, China — China’s capital Beijing has recorded its hottest February temperature since 1951 as the city registered a high of 25.6 °C (78 °F) on Sunday, February 21, 2021. Records from the meteorological observatory in Daxing district showed that temperatures hit 25.6 °C (78 °F) at around 08:00 UTC (16:00 LT) on Monday. It was the city’s hottest February temperature in 70 years. Many residents took advantage of the unseasonably warm weather, according to local reports, enjoying outdoor activities such as rock climbing and relaxing at rooftop bars. However, the warm weather will be short-lived as temperatures are likely to return to normal and it may take a while before the city experiences such warm temperatures again. Reports said highs of up to 14 °C (57.2 °F) are expected until Tuesday, February 23.

Flank eruption at Klyuchevskoy volcano, lahar forms along the Krutenkaya River, Russia — A flank eruption began to form on the northwestern slope of the Klyuchevskoy volcano, Kamchatka, Russia late February 17, 2021, presenting a real danger of mudflows for the Kyuchi village. Bright incandescence was observed at video-data by IVS FEB RAS from 15:23 UTC on February 20, when a lava flow began to move from a lateral break at an altitude of about 2.5 – 2.7 km a.s.l. (1.5 – 1.6 miles) near the Erman glacier. The Aviation Color Code was raised to Orange at 02:06 UTC on February 24. Bright incandescence over two craters of the flank eruption continues on satellite and video images, KVERT said, adding that lava flows are still moving from the craters. The intensive melting of the glacier led to the formation of a lahar along the Krutenkaya River, about 7 km (4.3 miles) east of the Klyuchi village on February 23. Moderate gas-steam activity of the volcano continues on February 24. The danger of ash explosions up to 5 – 6 km (16 400 – 19 700 feet) a.s.l. from flank craters remains. Ongoing activity could affect low-flying aircraft, KVERT warns. Klyuchevskoy (also spelled Kliuchevskoi) is Kamchatka’s highest and most active volcano. Since its origin about 6 000 years ago, the beautifully symmetrical, 4 835 m (15 862 feet) high basaltic stratovolcano has produced frequent moderate-volume explosive and effusive eruptions without major periods of inactivity. It rises above a saddle NE of sharp-peaked Kamen volcano and lies SE of the broad Ushkovsky massif.

‘Incredibly powerful’ paroxysm at Etna, lava fountains exceeding 1 000 m (3 300 feet) in height – The fourth paroxysmal eruptive episode in just 4 days started at Etna’s Southeast Crater on the evening of February 20, 2021, and continued into February 21. This was the strongest of the four episodes since February 16. The average magnitude of the volcanic tremor started increasing around 17:26 UTC on February 21, together with increasing infrasonic signals mainly located at the Southeast Crater. Strombolian activity was progressively increasing to about 19:30 UTC when volcanic tremors showed a sudden increase to top levels. Lava overflow began shortly after 21:30 UTC toward the Valle del Bove, eventually reaching a length of about 1 km (0.62 miles), with a front at about 2 800 m (1.7 miles). The activity at the eastern mouth of SE Crater gradually switched to pulsating lava fountains by 22:00 UTC and further intensified by 23:24 UTC. Another surge in intensity was detected at 00:28 UTC on February 21, with lava fountains exceeding 1 000 m (3 300 feet) above the crater.

Powerful eruption at Etna volcano, Italy – Volcanic activity at Mount Etna, Italy intensified again at 21:10 UTC on February 22, 2021, and evolved into the 5th paroxysm since February 16 — truly spectacular and most powerful in recent years. The activity started gradually increasing at around 20:47 UTC, reaching high levels by 22:05 UTC, with lava jets up to 300 m (985 feet) above the Southeast Crater. The Aviation Color Code was raised to Red at 22:05 UTC and is still at this level as of 08:00 UTC on February 23. A second mouth activated at the crater at 22:27 UTC, producing lava fountains. At 22:28 UTC, lava overflow took place toward the Valle del Bove. By 23:36 UTC, lava fountains were reaching 1 000 m (3 280 feet) above the crater, as seen in the image below. Lava fountains up to 1 500 m (4 900 feet) were seen before the event was over.This activity produced an eruptive column that rose several kilometers from the top of the volcano. Volcanic tremor reached maximum values at 23:50 UTC, followed by a sudden decrease, but still at high values. A sudden decrease in the height of lava fountains started at around 00:15 UTC on February 23 but explosive activity continued. Another intensification started at 03:50 UTC, accompanied by ash emissions from the Southeast Crater and two small lava flows. Image credit: INGV

6th impressive paroxysm at Etna volcano, Italy —This is the 6th paroxysmal eruptive episode at Etna volcano, Italy since February 16, 2021.After 5 impressive paroxysms, the activity at the volcano intensified again at 19:00 UTC on February 24 and evolved into another spectacular event. Video courtesy Gio Giusa.

‘Global Dimming’ Was Caused by Human Pollution, Study Confirms In the late 1980s, scientists noticed something odd. Less of the sun’s brightness was reaching Earth’s surface, leaving us with a darker planet. This phenomenon, known as “global dimming,” is now in reverse, according to Science Alert. But a mystery remained. What was driving the shifts in brightness? Was it human-caused air pollution or natural variations in cloud cover? A new study published in Geophysical Research Letters this month comes down firmly on the side of air pollution. “Although we’d already assumed as much, we’d been unable to prove it directly until now,” study lead author and ETH Zurich professor Martin Wild said in a press release. In order to prove it, Wild and his team looked at “one of the longest and best‐maintained records of sunlight measured at Potsdam, Germany,” they wrote in the study. The record covered the period from 1947 to 2017, according to the press release. The researchers were able to filter out the impacts of clouds and study brightness on both cloudy and sunny days. This enabled them to determine that overall patterns in both dimming and brightening remained consistent without cloud cover. “This implies that aerosol pollutants play a crucial role in these variations and points to a discernible human influence on the vital level of sunlight required for sustainable living conditions,” the paper authors wrote.

Gulf Stream is weakest it’s been in more than 1,000 years A group of scientists from Europe presented new research this week claiming that the Gulf Stream is weaker now than it’s been at any point over the last 1,000 years. The Gulf Stream is an Atlantic Ocean current that plays a largely hidden role in shaping weather patterns in the United States. Much has been researched and learned about the influential current over the past 500 years, particularly due to the expertise of one of America’s Founding Fathers, Benjamin Franklin.But in recent decades, a shift in the Gulf Stream’s circulation has become weaker than any other time over the last millennium, according to a recently published study by scientists from Ireland, Britain and Germany. The weakening of the Gulf Stream, formally known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), can be mostly pinned to one catalyst, the researchers said: human-caused climate change.The Gulf Stream current moves a massive amount of water across the Atlantic Ocean. According to Stefan Rahmstorf, one of the study’s authors, it moves nearly 20 million cubic meters of water per second, acting like a giant conveyor belt.How strong of a current is that? “Almost a hundred times the Amazon flow,” he told the Potsdam Institute. The main function of the Gulf Stream is to redistribute heat on Earth by way of the ocean current. The ocean circulatory system plays a crucial role in many weather patterns around the world, particularly along the U.S. East Coast. Rahmstorf said that his team’s research was groundbreaking for being able to combine previous bits of research to piece together a 1,600-year-old picture of the AMOC evolution.“The study results suggest that it has been relatively stable until the late 19th century,” he said. “With the end of the little ice age in about 1850, the ocean currents began to decline, with a second, more drastic decline following since the mid-20th century.” So what are the implications of this decline in the ocean currents? AccuWeather Senior Meteorologist Bob Smerbeck said it could plausibly lead to rising sea levels if water levels are warmed this year. However, Smerbeck added that it is tricky to know just how warm the waters could get. Previously, studies have shown that rising water temperatures and higher sea levels can lead to more extreme weather events such as stronger tropical storms, a higher likelihood for extreme heat waves or a decrease in summer rainfall. However, other researchers have also come out with contrasting data, suggesting that the Gulf Stream hasn’t actually declined over the past 30 years. Using a different data modeling system, researchers from the United Kingdom and Ireland pieced together data from climate models that they said in a study published earlier this month showed “no overall AMOC decline.”

Melting Ice Sheets Could Hasten Ocean Current’s Collapse — The climate crisis could push an important ocean current past a critical tipping point sooner than expected, new research suggests. The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) helps move heat from the tropics to the Northern Hemisphere, and is one of the reasons why Europe has relatively mild winters, Science Alert explained. However, the current has begun slowing down in recent years, and scientists want to know what it would take for the current to stop. A study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Monday calculates that this moment could come sooner than expected.. Essentially, the new findings come down to timing. The AMOC is threatened by increasing freshwater into the North Atlantic as the Greenland ice sheet melts. A certain amount of freshwater will cause the current to stop. But Lohmann wanted to test what would happen if that water were added quickly instead of gradually. “These tipping points have been shown previously in climate models, where meltwater is very slowly introduced into the ocean,” Lohmann told Gizmodo. “In reality, increases in meltwater from Greenland are accelerating and cannot be considered slow.” So researchers used an ocean model called Veros to calculate when the current would stop if freshwater were gradually added, the press release explained. Researchers then added freshwater at increased rates and found that quickly added freshwater would stop currents before reaching the initial freshwater threshold. This has serious implications for the AMOC current itself. If it were to completely halt, tropical monsoon patterns would shift, rainfall in the Northern Hemisphere would decrease and the North Atlantic would get stormier. It also raises concerns about other climate tipping points, such as polar ice sheets collapsing or the Amazon rainforest drying out. If the AMOC can stop before the previously calculated tipping point is reached, is the same true for other systems? “The results show that the safe operating space of elements of the Earth system with respect to future emissions might be smaller than previously thought,” the study authors wrote.

Russia’s far east aims for unexpected climate target: net zero by 2025 – Fossil fuel-rich Russia may not be known as a leader on climate action – but in the country’s remote far east, authorities have launched an unexpected experiment: an effort to try out carbon trading and reach net-zero planet-heating emissions by 2025. The government of the Russian island region of Sakhalin, in the Pacific Ocean north of Japan, is planning tax breaks, charging stations and dedicated parking lots for electric vehicles, alongside a ban on all petrol and diesel cars by 2035. Coal-fired power plants will be replaced with somewhat cleaner natural gas and hydrogen-fuelled passenger train lines developed in the region the size of Ireland, Sakhalin officials said, after their net-zero roadmap was approved by Moscow. The Russian government – which has been criticised by green groups and analysts for setting unambitious climate action goals – in January gave a green light to Sakhalin’s proposal for a pilot carbon emissions trading scheme, a first for the country. The economy of the Sakhalin region, home to about half a million people, is largely based on fossil-fuel extraction, including coal. According to its net-zero plan, an inventory of Sakhalin’s greenhouse gas emissions and natural carbon sequestration potential will be carried out by August, before setting up an emissions trading system to start operating in mid-2022. “This experiment will allow us to try various measures to regulate carbon and evaluate their effectiveness, for later scaling up at the national level,” Russia’s Economic Development Minister Maxim Reshetnikov said in an official statement.

Republican senators take aim at Paris agreement with new legislation — Volume 90% Republicans are taking aim at the Biden administration’s decision to rejoin of the Paris climate agreement, introducing long-shot legislation on Monday aiming to undercut it. Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.) is introducing a resolution expressing the sentiment that the agreement qualifies as a treaty and should be sent to the Senate for approval. Meanwhile, Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) is unveiling a bill aimed at cutting off funding for the administration’s move to rejoin the multinational deal. A spokesperson for Blackburn told The Hill in an email that the senator’s bill was particularly aimed at preventing the administration from sending money to other countries to make up for the U.S.’s withdrawal under the Trump administration. “President Biden violated the Constitution when he chose to rejoin the poorly negotiated and deeply flawed Paris Climate Agreement – a deal that’s horrible for America and good for China,” Daines said in a statement. “This deal will do nothing except cause more hard-working Americans to lose their jobs and burden American families with higher energy prices,” he added. Former President Obama angered lawmakers in 2016 when he joined the deal without securing Senate approval. Some Republicans say the move violated Article II, Section 2, Clause 2 of the Constitution, which calls for a two-thirds vote from the Senate to enter into treaties. But the Paris accord let countries set their own commitments to the deal, rather than enter into a more formal agreement, which the Obama administration viewed as allowing the U.S. to join the deal without Senate approval. It has been estimated that about 90 percent of the international agreements the U.S. has entered into since the 1930s have been executive agreements, which don’t get ratified by the Senate. The Republicans’ legislation is unlikely to be taken up in the Senate, as Democrats hold control of the chamber.

Annapolis Sues 26 Oil and Gas Companies Over Climate Change – Annapolis, Maryland, is suing 26 oil and gas companies for deceiving the public about their products’ role in causing climate change. The city is among two dozen state and local governments to file such a lawsuit.”The companies worked to deceive people of the danger, hiding their knowledge and engaging in an intentional campaign to mislead the public about the science proving the growing danger posed by fossil fuels,” Annapolis Mayor Gavin Buckley told reporters.The city seeks to force the companies to help cover the mounting costs of climate change, including severeflooding that disproportionately harms communities of color. “We’re looking at a price tag of almost $100 million,” Jacqueline Guild, deputy city manager for resilience and sustainability, told reporters. “And that’s just the tip of the melting iceberg, if you will.”The Annapolis lawsuit comes as state and local plaintiffs and fossil fuel industry defendants await a Supreme Court decision on BP PLC v. Mayor and City Council of Baltimore, which could have major implications for states’ and municipalities’ lawsuits.For a deeper dive: Annapolis: Capital Gazette, AP, E&E; SCOTUS: E&E

Climate change should play big role in pandemic, recession recovery plans – Global carbon dioxide emissions declined globally in 2020 by about 7 percent, the largest decline ever in global emissions (by comparison, the Great Recession of 2009 saw a drop of 1.3 percent). This is mainly because of lockdowns in response to the pandemic, and consequent reduction in transportation and other economic activity. Coincidentally, that’s just about the same as the necessary annual emissions reductions (7.6 percent) that need to happen over the next decade if the world is to keep global temperature rise from exceeding 1.5 degrees C, and give the world a fighting chance to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change. The experience of the pandemic is thus a rough indicator of the scale of change needed to reduce our carbon emissions. While transition away from fossil fuels will require major changes, it need not bring austerity and pain, and, in fact, holds many opportunities. Phasing out fossil fuels will bring an end to jobs in those industries but create many more jobs in renewable energy. We can alter many of our wasteful practices without losing quality of life. Affluent people can live better while consuming less energy and material, and make room for the poor to rise to a level of consumption sufficient for a good life. Alleviation of poverty, when combined with family planning and education for women, can also slow population growth, another factor in global emissions. A world with less poverty and conflict will be a better world for all. A second lesson of the pandemic is that ignoring the problem because of the economic cost is even more costly in the long run. The U.S., with 4 percent of the world’s population, has had 20 percent of COVID deaths, disproportionately among Black, Indigenous and people of color. This public health failure is complex, but it included insufficient investment in pandemic preparedness, including testing capacity and PPE, premature reopening without adequate contact tracing, and denial and inaction from an administration afraid of the economic consequences of social distancing. This fear was misplaced. According to one analysis, “countries that have contained the virus also tend to have had less severe economic impacts than those that haven’t,” whether measured by GDP growth, trade or consumer spending. The only way for the economy fully to recover, we have learned, is by ending the pandemic. Similarly, insufficient action on climate change now, because of the cost of carbon fees, efficiency standards and public investments in alternatives, will only result in huge costs associated with climate change down the road. The record-breaking U.S. wildfires and Atlantic storms in 2020 had a combined cost of $71 billion. The recent storm in Texas, the kind of event likely to occur more frequently with climate change, may be “the costliest winter weather event” in the state’s history. One recent report concludes that the total cost of global warming in a business-as-usual scenario could be as high as 3.6 percent of GDP, and “four global warming impacts alone – hurricane damage, real estate losses, energy costs and water costs – will come with a price tag of 1.8 percent of U.S. GDP, or almost $1.9 trillion annually (in today’s dollars) by 2100.” These estimates ignore losses not easily measurable in dollars but no less important, like species extinction and the tragedy of wars sparked by climate migrations or conflict over scarce water. The true choice is thus not between the economy and the environment, it is between reducing our carbon emissions “by design,” or by “disaster” as Peter Victor put it. If we don’t reduce our emissions now, disaster will force us later and more painfully.

Sunrise Movement Rallies at Texas State Capitol Demanding Green New Deal — While millions of Texans on Monday continued living without safe drinking water and many faced storm damage and massive electricity bills, youth leaders with the Sunrise Movement rallied at the state capitol in Austin, using the current conditions across the Lone Star State to bolster their demand for a Green New Deal.”Texas is the perfect example of what happens when our politicians cater to fossil fuel executives instead of the young people who have been shouting from the rooftops for years, warning of an impending climate emergency like this,” said Sunrise leader Chante Davis in a statement ahead of the rally.The Houston teenager’s family moved to Texas in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.”I’ve survived three once-in-a lifetime storms in my 17 years of life,” Davis said. “We need change, and the Green New Deal is the obvious, urgent solution. As our communities come together to fill the void of our government, our leaders must invest in us to provide jobs that directly address the crises we face.”The group has been a key proponent of the Green New Deal resolution introduced in 2019 by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.).

Why Texas Republicans Fear the Green New Deal – – Naomi Klein -A fateful series of decisions were made in the late-’90s, when the now-defunct, scandal-plagued energy company Enron led a successful push to radically deregulate Texas’s electricity sector. As a result, decisions about the generation and distribution of power were stripped from regulators and, in effect, handed over to private energy companies. Unsurprisingly, these companies prioritized short-term profit over costly investments to maintain the grid and build in redundancies for extreme weather. Today, Texans are at the mercy of regulation-allergic politicians who failed to require that energy companies plan for shocks or weatherize their infrastructure (renewables and fossil fuel alike). In a recent appearance on NBC’s “Today” show, Austin’s mayor, Steve Adler, summed it up: “We have a deregulated power system in the state and it does not work, because it does not build in the incentives in order to protect people.” This energy-market free-for-all means that as the snow finally melts, many Texans are discovering that they owe their private electricity providers thousands of dollars – a consequence of leaving pricing to the whims of the market. The $200,000 energy bills some people received, the photos of which went viral online, were, it seems, a mistake. But some bills approaching $10,000 are the result of simple supply and demand in a radically underregulated market. “The last thing an awful lot of people need right now is a higher electric bill,” said Matt Schulz, chief industry analyst with LendingTree. “And that’s unfortunately something a lot of people will get stuck with.” This is bad news for those customers, but great news for shale gas companies like Comstock Resources Inc. On an earnings call last Wednesday, its chief financial officer said, “This week is like hitting the jackpot with some of these incredible prices.” Put bluntly, Texas is about as far from having a Green New Deal as any place on earth. So why have Republicans seized it as their scapegoat of choice? Blame right-wing panic. For decades, the Republicans have met every disaster with a credo I have described as “the shock doctrine.” When disaster strikes, people are frightened and dislocated. They focus on handling the emergencies of daily life, like boiling snow for drinking water. They have less time to engage in politics and a reduced capacity to protect their rights. They often regress, deferring to strong and decisive leaders – think of New York’s ill-fated love affairs with then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani after the 9/11 attacks and Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic. Large-scale shocks – natural disasters, economic collapse, terrorist attacks – become ideal moments to smuggle inunpopular free-market policies that tend to enrich elites at everyone else’s expense. Crucially, the shock doctrine is not about solving underlying drivers of crises: It’s about exploiting those crises to ram through your wish list even if it exacerbates the crisis. To explain this phenomenon, I often quote a guru of the free market revolution, the late economist Milton Friedman. In 1982, hewrote about what he saw as the mission of right-wing economists like him: “Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.”

Republicans Offer Preview of Brutal Climate Policies in Texas – As Texas battled a severe snowstorm and mass power outages this winter, Tim Boyd, the now-former Republican mayor of Colorado City, revealed his party’s plan for the deadly extreme temperatures linked to climate change. In a lengthy Facebook post that was deleted soon after it went viral, then-Mayor Boyd told his residents that they were entirely on their own as the brutal winter weather caused mayhem and deaths across the Lone Star state.His honesty was like catching a glimpse of a rare animal in the wild. “Sink or swim[,] it’s your choice!” he wrote, without bothering to couch his words in euphemisms. Boyd added, “The City and County, along with power providers or any other service owes you NOTHING!” For such an exhortation to come from the elected leader of a city – a man literally chosen by his people to ensure that local government works for them – was shocking.Just as they pay their mayor, Colorado City’s residents also pay authorities to provide them with basic necessities like electricity and water. But apparently, Boyd thought an expectation of services was out of line. He conjectured, “If you don’t have electricity you step up and come up with a game plan to keep your family warm and safe.” Many Texans have tried to do just that, running their car engine in their garage to warm their homes. So far in Harris County, there have been at least 50 cases of carbon monoxide poisoning and several people have died.“If you have no water you deal without and think outside of the box to survive and supply water to your family,” posited Boyd, expecting Texans who were searching for ways to provide their own electricity to also deal with a lack of water as pipes froze in the plummeting temperatures.Boyd’s diatribe veered into familiar Republican territory as he blamed residents for their own plight by saying, “If you are sitting at home in the cold because you have no power and are sitting there waiting for someone to come rescue you because your (sic) lazy [it] is [a] direct result of your raising.” It is a long-simmering idea among conservatives that Americans who depend on their government are simply lazy.Generally, white conservatives have reserved the word “lazy” for people of color who are victims of systemic racial discrimination. Indeed, the weather-related blackouts in Texas impacted the residents of minority neighborhoods disproportionately. Boyd and those who share his views would likely assume this must have been a direct result of their laziness.

Power failure: How a winter storm pushed Texas into crisis – Two days before the storm began, Houston’s chief elected official warned her constituents to prepare as they would for a major hurricane. Many took heed: Texans who could stocked up on food and water, while nonprofits and government agencies set out to help those who couldn’t. But few foresaw the fiasco that was to come. As temperatures plunged and snow and ice whipped the state, much of Texas’ power grid collapsed, followed by its water systems. Tens of millions huddled in frigid homes that slowly grew colder or fled for safety. And a prideful state, long suspicious of regulation and outside help, was left to seek aid from other states and humanitarian groups as many of its 29 million people grasped for survival. At one hospital, workers stood outside to collect rainwater. Others stood in line at a running tap in a park. A mother of three took her children to shelter in a furniture store after she could see her breath forming in the family’s trailer. University professors fundraised so their students could afford meals. Images of desperate Texans circulated worldwide. To some, they evoked comparisons to a less wealthy or self-regarding place. To others, they laid bare problems that have long festered. The state’s Republican leadership was blamed for ignoring warnings that winter could wreak the havoc that it did, and for not providing local officials with enough information to protect residents now. A lack of regulations to protect critical infrastructure and failure by officials to take recommended steps to winterize equipment left the nation’s largest energy-producing state unprepared for last week’s weather emergency. A week after she warned her county’s nearly 5 million residents about the impending storm, Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo was sleeping on an air mattress at the county’s emergency operations center. Her home was without power for three nights. “It’s worth asking the question: Who set up this system and who perpetuated it knowing that the right regulation was not in place?” Hidalgo said. “Those questions are going to have to be asked and I hope that changes will come. The community deserves answers.”

U.S. energy regulator to examine climate change’s threat to power reliability (Reuters) – U.S. federal energy regulators said on Monday they will examine threats that climate change and extreme weather events pose to the country’s electric reliability in the wake of last week’s deadly Texas freeze that left millions of people without power. “The effects of climate change are already apparent,” Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Chairman Richard Glick said in a statement. “We must do everything we can within our statutory authority to ensure that the electric grid is capable of keeping the lights (on) in the face of extreme weather.” FERC, which regulates the interstate transmission of electricity, oil and natural gas and approves fossil fuel projects such as pipelines, could play a big role in President Joe Biden’s promise to make the power grid emissions-free by 2035. It was not immediately clear how FERC, a panel of five commissioners which has a 3-2 Republican majority until about June, can keep help power delivery reliable in an age of extreme weather events. In California last August a crushing heat wave led to rolling blackouts for two days. A decade ago, after a milder Texas cold snap led to power outages, FERC probed ways to protect the grid and wrote recommendations for winterization of natural gas and other installations. “We followed up on those for a couple of years, but actual implementation was in the hands primarily of the Texas authorities who run the grid, and as memories faded most of those steps were not taken,” former FERC chair Cheryl LaFleur told Reuters in a video interview here. She said the severity of last week’s freeze, which killed at least two dozen people, should prompt a stronger response. Earlier this month, Glick, a Democrat, said FERC will create the panel’s first position to oversee environmental justice. The person will ensure that FERC decisions do not unfairly hurt historically marginalized communities with pollution, he said.

Rolling blackouts in Kansas helped regional power grid avoid ‘cascading failures’ – A small crowd gathered last Wednesday in Emporia on the hillside next to the Prairie Street bridge, seeking respite from rolling blackouts and extreme cold. Much of Emporia, and Kansas, had shut down for three days, leaving residents struggling to understand the rolling blackouts and skyrocketing natural gas prices. Federal regulators were preparing to launch an investigation into how the Midwest power grid had come so dangerously close to a more catastrophic failure.Managers of the Southwest Power Pool delivered a series of emergency warnings from their office in Little Rock, commanding utilities across a 14-state region to begin shutting off power for rotating blocks of customers. For Evergy, serving eastern Kansas and western Missouri, that had meant imposing a temporary blackout for 170,000 customers in the Kansas City region, and 60,000 customers elsewhere.“What happens is that if they don’t take any corrective action, then an unplanned event happens, and it could lead to cascading failures – and that would be a disaster because it takes days to recover from,” said Anil Pahwa, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Kansas State University, where he has taught and conducted research since 1983.“It’s not just a small part of the city, like Topeka or Kanas City, being in the dark for a short period,” Pahwa said. “We could be talking about all of Kansas being out for days or weeks.”Critics of renewable energy seized an opportunity to complain that wind was unreliable. The greater risk turned out to be a failure to winterize elements of the power grid in preparation for increasingly likely extreme weather conditions caused by climate change. Coal-powered plants and wind turbines suffered from extreme cold – temperatures in parts of Kansas dropped into the -20s – and utilities were unable to rely on natural gas to make up the difference, like they normally would, because of scarce supply. Frozen pipelines and well pumps made it difficult to access natural gas at a time when there was more demand than ever to heat homes. The price of natural gas spiked from $3 to sometimes more than $500 per mmbtu.

As Texas went dark, power flowed in America’s coldest place — Wednesday, February 24, 2021 — – Greg Schulzetenberg arrived for work last week during the coldest air temperature ever felt in Minnesota’s Iron Range. It was minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit, with wind chills pushing minus 60. News from the Texas winter storm and grid collapse was top of mind at Lake Country Power in Cohasset, Minn., where Schulzetenberg is marketing manager for the electric cooperative in one of the coldest places in the United States. The freezing temperatures were driving the co-op’s electricity demand to near-record levels. But there was no sign of panic. The utility’s 8,300 miles of transmission and distribution lines were delivering power just like the day before. And the day before that. “I think we were operating under a conservation alert, but we were not in a crisis, per se,” Schulzetenberg said in a telephone interview this week. “We’re not strangers to extreme weather up here. We’re built to handle extreme cold.” Utilities across the northern United States have long fortified themselves against the cold, preventing the sort of widespread outages seen in Texas last week. Gas lines are buried deeper underground to prevent freezing. Power plants are enclosed and insulated to guard against the cold. And some gas plants are equipped with oil backup in case pipelines freeze or heating demand surges, as happened in Texas. Yet these power systems remain highly reliant on fossil fuels to keep the lights on and the heat humming during cold snaps. Coal generated 43% of electricity on Feb. 15 in the 15-state power grid including much of Minnesota, while gas contributed an additional 29%, according to federal figures.

How Texas’ Drive for Energy Independence Set It Up for Disaster – NY Times –Texas has refused to join interstate electrical grids and railed against energy regulation. Now it’s having to answer to millions of residents who were left without power in last week’s snowstorm. – Across the plains of West Texas, the pump jacks that resemble giant bobbing hammers define not just the landscape but the state itself: Texas has been built on the oil-and-gas business for the last 120 years, ever since the discovery of oil on Spindletop Hill near Beaumont in 1901. Texas, the nation’s leading energy-producing state, seemed like the last place on Earth that could run out of energy. Then last week, it did. The crisis could be traced to that other defining Texas trait: independence, both from big government and from the rest of the country. The dominance of the energy industry and the “Republic of Texas” ethos became a devastating liability when energy stopped flowing to millions of Texans who shivered and struggled through a snowstorm that paralyzed much of the state. Part of the responsibility for the near-collapse of the state’s electrical grid can be traced to the decision in 1999 to embark on the nation’s most extensive experiment in electrical deregulation, handing control of the state’s entire electricity delivery system to a market-based patchwork of private generators, transmission companies and energy retailers. The energy industry wanted it. The people wanted it. Both parties supported it. “Competition in the electric industry will benefit Texans by reducing monthly rates and offering consumers more choices about the power they use,” George W. Bush, then the governor, said as he signed the top-to-bottom deregulation legislation. Mr. Bush’s prediction of lower-cost power generally came true, and the dream of a free-market electrical grid worked reasonably well most of the time, in large part because Texas had so much cheap natural gas as well as abundant wind to power renewable energy. But the newly deregulated system came with few safeguards and even fewer enforced rules. With so many cost-conscious utilities competing for budget-shopping consumers, there was little financial incentive to invest in weather protection and maintenance. Wind turbines are not equipped with the de-icing equipment routinely installed in the colder climes of the Dakotas and power lines have little insulation. The possibility of more frequent cold-weather events was never built into infrastructure plans in a state where climate change remains an exotic, disputed concept. “Deregulation was something akin to abolishing the speed limit on an interstate highway,” said Ed Hirs, an energy fellow at the University of Houston. “That opens up shortcuts that cause disasters.” The state’s entire energy infrastructure was walloped with glacial temperatures that even under the strongest of regulations might have frozen gas wells and downed power lines. But what went wrong was far broader: Deregulation meant that critical rules of the road for power were set not by law, but rather by a dizzying array of energy competitors..

Texas and California built different power grids, but neither stood up to climate change – Texas and California may be worlds apart in their politics and climate policies, but they have something in common: Extreme weather crashed their power grids and left people stranded in the dark. The two sprawling, politically potent states have devoted massive sums to their power networks over the past two decades – California to produce huge amounts of wind and solar energy, Texas to create an efficient, go-it-alone electricity market built on gas, coal, nuclear and wind. But neither could keep the lights on in the face of the type of brutal weather that scientists call a taste of a changing climate. That presents both an opportunity and a challenge for President Joe Biden, potentially aiding his efforts to draw support from lawmakers and states for his multitrillion-dollar proposals to harden the nation’s energy infrastructure to withstand climate change. But he’s already facing entrenched resistance to his pledges to shift the nation to renewable energy by 2035 – including from fossil fuel advocates who have sought to scapegoat wind and solar for the energy woes in both states. The catastrophe this week in Texas left more than 4 million people in the dark and the cold, and even more without clean water, when a rare blast of Arctic air drove temperatures down, freezing both natural gas plants and wind turbines. Texas “planned more for heatwaves than for ice storms,” said Dan Reicher, who worked in the Clinton administration’s Energy Department on renewable energy and is now at Stanford University. And the onus now is on figuring out how to prevent a repeat – a tricky situation given the independence of Texas’ grid and sharp opposition from Republicans there to linking up to other states and giving federal regulators oversight of its power system. So far, the Biden administration has shown little sign of pushing its agenda on Texas, which already leads the nation in wind power. But Congress is eyeing hearings to look at this week’s power failures, which are likely to put a spotlight on the state’s grid. “How much and how far does the Biden administration want to dig into this from the broader federal perspective? And that remains to be seen,”

Rep. McCaul defends Texas power grid: ‘We’re not used to this type of weather’ – Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) defended his state’s independent power grid Sunday, telling CNN’s Dana Bash that “we’re not used to this type of weather” and pointing to a decade-old report on winterization as the way forward. The Texas power grid “was set up that way to be independent of federal oversight and regulations,” McCaul said on “State of the Union.” “That’s very good with things like cybersecurity; not so good when it comes to an Arctic blast like this one.” Texas, the only state in the continental U.S. that operates an independent electric grid, has come under fire this week following a crippling winter storm that left millions without power and dozens dead when temperatures dropped well below freezing for days on end. The extreme weather has also led to pipes bursting, leaving many around the state without clean water. Power-sharing, McCaul acknowledged, “would [also] have been helpful. We could have shared with other power grids.” He described a 2011 report from the state’s Legislature that contained recommendations “as to how to winterize our operations,” which was never properly implemented. “That’s what we’re going to be taking a look at moving forward,” he said, “so this never happens again.” “The difference between Texas and, say, the Northeast, is we’re not prepared for this,” McCaul went on. “We’re not used to this type of weather.” The grid “was not winterized for subzero-degree temperatures.” “All of what happened this past week was foreseeable and preventable,” Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner, who served in the state Legislature in 2011 and introduced a bill that would have winterized the grid, said on CBS News’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday. Adding insult to injury, many residents also received historically high energy bills as a result of the extreme weather – which McCaul said federal funds will help reimburse customers for.

How Texas failed to protect its power grid against extreme weather – Texas regulators and lawmakers knew about the grid’s vulnerabilities for years, but time and again they furthered the interests of large electricity providers. In January 2014, power plants owned by Texas’ largest electricity producer buckled under frigid temperatures. Its generators failed more than a dozen times in 12 hours, helping to bring the state’s electric grid to the brink of collapse. The incident was the second in three years for North Texas-based Luminant, whose equipment malfunctions during a more severe storm in 2011 resulted in a $750,000 fine from state energy regulators for failing to deliver promised power to the grid. In the earlier cold snap, the grid was pushed to the limit and rolling blackouts swept the state, spurring an angry Legislature to order a study of what went wrong. Experts hired by the Texas Public Utility Commission, which oversees the state’s electric and water utilities, concluded that power-generating companies like Luminant had failed to understand the “critical failure points” that could cause equipment to stop working in cold weather.In May 2014, the PUC sought changes that would require energy companies to identify and address all potential failure points, including any effects of “weather design limits.”Luminant argued against the proposal. In comments to the commission, the company said the requirement was unnecessary and “may or may not identify the ‘weak links’ in protections against extreme temperatures.” “Each weather event [is] dynamic,” company representatives told regulators. “Any engineering analysis that attempted to identify a specific weather design limit would be rendered meaningless.” By the end of the process, the PUC agreed to soften the proposed changes. Instead of identifying all possible failure points in their equipment, power companies would need only to address any that were previously known. The change, which experts say has left Texas power plants more susceptible to the kind of extreme and deadly weather events that bore down on the state last week, is one in a series of cascading failures to shield the state’s electric grid from winter storms, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune found.

Fact-checking the Texas energy-failure blame game – CNN –This week, all eyes have been on Texas. An unprecedented winter storm left 4 million people without power across the state, and put nearly half of all Texans under a boil-water advisory.Initial reports from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which manages the state’s power grid, suggested frozen wind turbines were partially to blame. Though ERCOT’s report on Sunday said that limited natural gas supplies had also crippled the power grid, many Republican officials seized on frozen wind turbines and solar panels as primary culprits behind the outages. On Tuesday evening, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, told Fox News host Sean Hannity that due to the weather “our wind and our solar got shut down, and they were collectively more than 10% of our power grid and that thrust Texas into a situation where it was lacking power on a statewide basis.” Texas GOP Rep. Dan Crenshaw listed “frozen wind turbines” as a major reason for the statewide outages. “This is what happens when you force the grid to rely in part on wind as a power source. When weather conditions get bad as they did this week, intermittent renewable energy like wind isn’t there when you need it,” Crenshaw said in a Twitter thread Tuesday. Facts First: It’s incorrect to claim that issues with wind and solar were directly or even primarily responsible for the state’s power outages. Additionally, suggesting that Texas has “force[d] the grid to rely in part on wind” energy is misleading.Though frozen wind turbines were a contributing factor, wind shutdowns accounted for less than 13% of the outages, Dan Woodfin, senior director of system operations for ERCOT, toldBloomberg.Most of the power outages were due to losses in coal, natural gas and nuclear energy, according to ERCOT.On Wednesday, ERCOT reported 46,000 megawatts of generation were offline. Of that, ERCOT officials said 28,000 megawatts came from thermal sources such as coal, gas and nuclear plants, and 18,000 megawatts were from renewable energy, namely solar and wind.”It’s really a bigger failure of the natural gas system,” Michael Webber, an energy resources professor at the University of Texas at Austin, told CNN. “That’s the part that really struggled to keep up.”

‘Heads will roll’: Grid crisis sparks political firestorm –Lights are back on for most Texans, but the policy fights over astronomical power bills, unprepared generating plants and an isolated grid are just beginning.That was evident over the weekend as Texas’ electricity crisis grabbed attention on Sunday news shows and the White House said President Biden could soon visit the state.Authorities are still sorting out the toll from last week’s winter storm that left millions of Texas residents clustered in homes without heat, power or potable water for hours or days. Others kept power but may face bills in the hundreds or thousands of dollars, depending on their plans. Gov. Greg Abbott (R) held a meeting Saturday with Texas lawmakers to discuss potential solutions for spiking energy costs to consumers.Fallout from the historic power failure will take center stage this week and beyond in Austin, Texas, as calls for reform echo across the country.”Politically, a lot of heads will roll,” said Alison Silverstein, a Texas-based energy consultant. “There will be a lot of finger-pointing. I don’t know how much of this is going to be heat as opposed to light as opposed to smoke in terms of meaningful, substantive changes.”Texas’ competitive power market includes retail choice in some areas, such as Dallas and Houston. While many customers are on fixed-price plans that offer more protection from market swings, others signed up for rates tied to changes in the wholesale price of electricity. When numerous generators tripped offline early last week, prices surged, leaving some customers exposed to bills in excess of $5,000 or even $10,000.Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who caused a firestorm last week by traveling to Mexico with his family during the Texas crisis, said on Twitter yesterday that “Texans shouldn’t get hammered by ridiculous rate increases” for the energy debacle. He pointed to a news story about Griddy, whose customers see their rates fluctuate with wholesale prices.Abbott said lawmakers, who are in session until May 31, intend to address both the surprise utility bills and the broader problem of weatherizing the state power system, although he said a decision hasn’t been made on how to fund it.

Lawsuits already being filed against ERCOT over power outages in Texas — The snow hadn’t even completely melted before lawsuits began cropping up against the Electric Reliability Council of Texas Inc. over its response to the winter storm that socked the state last week.Nationally prominent litigator Mikal Watts of San Antonio is part of legal teams that have already filed two such lawsuits, including one involving a Houston man believed to have died of hypothermia Tuesday as a result of a power outage that left him without heat in his home.ERCOT, the nonprofit that manages the grid that provides power to some 26 million Texans, instituted rolling blackouts to avoid a catastrophic grid failure. Power plants around the state were unable to withstand the frigid temperatures, and millions of Texans were plunged into the dark without heat.“ERCOT has singularly failed to meet its mission,” Watts said. “It not only failed to provide reliable electricity to people of the state of Texas, it put their safety in grave danger, leading to the unnecessary deaths of countless Texans.”At least 35 deaths reportedly occurred in Texas as result of the storm. The action in Harris County was filed Monday in the death of Doyle A. Austin, whose house lost power late in the evening of Feb. 14. He was still without power the following evening when a relative found him unresponsive. Paramedics were unable to revive him. The lawsuit over Austin’s death was brought by his daughter Linda Brown. She’s suing ERCOT and local power company CenterPoint Energy Inc. for negligence in failing to prepare for the state’s power needs. She also has a gross negligence claim to also recover punitive damages. ERCOT spokesperson Leslie Sopko declined to comment on the lawsuits it faces. On Friday, Watts and other lawyers filed a suit against ERCOT on behalf of Corpus Christi resident Donald McCarley. The suit also names the local electrical provider, AEP Texas Inc., and its parent company, American Electric Power Co. Inc. McCarley’s claims include gross negligence, but he’s also alleging the rolling blackouts amounted to a “taking of property” without adequate compensation – a violation of the Texas constitution. He also says the loss of power “interfered with (his) use and enjoyment of his home.”

Top board leaders resign after deadly Texas power outage – Top board leaders of Texas’ embattled power grid operator said Tuesday they will resign following outrage over more than 4 million customers losing electricity last week during a deadly winter storm, including many whose frigid homes lacked heat for days in subfreezing temperatures. The resignations are the first since the crisis began in Texas, and calls for wider firings remain in the aftermath of one of the worst power outages in U.S. history. All of the four board directors who are stepping down, including Chairwoman Sally Talberg, live outside of Texas, which only intensified criticism of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. The resignations are effective Wednesday – a day before Texas lawmakers are expected to sharply question grid managers and energy officials about the failures during hearings at the state Capitol. A fifth board member also resigned, and a candidate for a director position who also does not live in Texas withdrew his name. The board members acknowledged “concerns about out-of-state board leadership” in a letter to grid members and the state’s Public Utility Commission, which oversees ERCOT. During the crisis, ERCOT officials removed contact information for board members off its website, saying they had become the target of threats. “Our hearts go out to all Texans who have had to go without electricity, heat, and water during frigid temperatures and continue to face the tragic consequences of this emergency,” the letter read. The other board members are vice chairman Peter Cramton, Terry Bulger and Raymond Hepper. Talberg lives in Michigan and Bulger lives in Wheaton, Illinois, according to their biographies on ERCOT’s website. Cramton and Hepper spent their careers working outside Texas. The fifth board member leaving is Vanessa Anesetti-Parra. There are a total of 16 members on ERCOT’s board, which appoints officers who manage the grid manager’s day-to-day operations.

Investigation called for after Austin power outage by Travis County –Travis County District Attorney Jose Garza said Tuesday that he is opening a criminal investigation to determine whether any entity or individuals should face charges stemming from last week’s power outages that left millions of Texans in the dark.Garza told the American-Statesman and KVUE-TV that “our office will be be conducting an investigation into the events that led to last week’s crisis, and we will do everything we can to hold powerful actors accountable whose actions or inactions may have led to the suffering.””Lives were lost, homes were lost and it will take weeks, months and – in some cases – years for some people to be made whole again,” Garza said. “We will not forget the horror our community experienced.” Garza declined to cite the target of his investigation and whether it was aimed specifically at the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which operates the state’s power grid. He added that he was heartened to see how the Austin community and others came together, and he specifically named EMS and hospital workers, firefighters and law enforcement. Garza, who had been evaluating whether to open the investigation in recent days, made the announcement hours after state Rep. Trey Martinez Fisher, D-San Antonio, sent a letter to Garza urging him to investigate the “failure of the state of Texas and the Texas energy industry to prepare for last week’s catastrophic winter storms.” Fisher then issued a statement: “Put plainly, what happened last week in our state was a crime. No amount of promises from industry players to do better next time will fix this, and even the most forward-thinking policy is insufficient to offer justice to Texans impacted by the storm.” “The state of Texas cannot investigate itself,” Fisher said. “We need a thorough outside investigation to determine whether acts and omissions of state officials violated the law.”

Texas lawmakers promise tough questions during hearings on outages –When Texas lawmakers convene Thursday for a series of hearings aimed at examining power outages that left millions of people in the cold and dark amid a winter storm, it won’t be the first time they’ve talked about the issue. The question is: Will they do anything about it this time? Past legislative efforts to make changes to the state’s electric grid and at the Public Utility Commission stalled, including after winter storms in 2011 that prompted rolling blackouts. But lawmakers say the catastrophic impact of this year’s storm, the spotlight on past inaction and early pledges from state leadership to make changes mean the Legislature has no choice but to act. “We can’t fail again,” said state Rep. Donna Howard, D-Austin. Howard serves on the House State Affairs Committee, one of three legislative panels convening Thursday to examine the outages. The House Energy Resources Committee will hold a joint meeting with the State Affairs Committee, while the Senate Business and Commerce Committee will hold its own hearing. Both hearings will feature invited testimony from leaders at the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (which oversees the electricity grid that serves most of the state and is commonly known as ERCOT), the Public Utility Commission and the Railroad Commission, which regulates the oil and gas industry. The meetings will be closed to public comment, but individuals wishing to register their opinions can submit comments in writing to both the House and Senate committees. Some changes are already in motion at these regulatory agencies – including the resignations of six board members at ERCOT – but energy experts say the Legislature is ultimately responsible for ensuring that reforms are adopted. “The buck stops with the state Legislature,” said Daniel Cohan, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rice University, during a Wednesday webinar about the power outages. “We’re a state with a weak governor system, we’ve kept federal regulators out of our business, and each agency only addresses one piece of the problem – ERCOT with the power grid, the Railroad Commission with the oil and gas pipelines. This is going to need a fix from the state Legislature.” Lawmakers held similar legislative hearings in 2011, after a winter storm led to rolling blackouts that affected more than 3 million customers. Lawmakers at the time vented at representatives of ERCOT and various power companies about the outages, but the upshot of the hearings consisted mainly of assurances that the state’s grid wouldn’t be caught flat-footed again – legislators did not approve new enforcement tools.

After Texans died during winter storm, Harris and Travis counties launch investigations into power outages — Officials in Travis and Harris counties are launching separate investigations into the events that led up to last week’s massive power outages. Harris County will be probing decisions made by the board that operates the state’s power grid, energy providers and the Public Utility Commission.“Members of our community died in this disaster, and millions of Texans languished without power and water while suffering billions in property damage,” Harris County Attorney Christian Menefee said in a Tuesday statement. “Harris County residents deserve to know what happened, who made which decisions and whether this could have been avoided or mitigated.”Separately, Travis County District Attorney José Garza told KVUE and the Austin American-Statesman that his office had launched a criminal investigation to determine whether charges should be filed against any person or entity. The move came after state Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer, D-San Antonio, earlier on Tuesday called on Garza’s office to launch “a thorough outside investigation to determine whether acts and omissions of state officials violated the law.”The Texas Tribune thanks its sponsors. Become one.”The state cannot investigate itself,” Martinez Fischer said in a statement and urged his House colleagues to call for similar investigations in their districts.Spokespeople for the Electric Reliability Council of Texas and the Public Utility Commission could not immediately be reached for comment.Dozens of Texans died because of last week’s winter storm, which caused damages throughout the state that experts say could cost billions. Gov. Greg Abbott blasted ERCOT for its handling of the emergency. He declared reform of the organization anemergency item for the 2021 legislative session.Garza did not indicate whether ERCOT would be a target of the investigation, KVUE and the Statesman reported.

Lessons from the Texas mess – By now, the story of what happened in Texas last week is familiar: an extraordinary cold snap simultaneously a) raised demand on the grid to well higher than the grid operator’s worst-case winter projections, and b) knocked out more than 30 gigawatts worth of energy generators. Supply and demand must be kept in perfect balance on a self-contained grid like Texas’, so when demand spiked and supply plunged, something had to give – thus the not-so-rolling blackouts. Most of that lost generation was natural gas and coal. Freezing afflicted not only the water used in power plants but the mining, distribution, and storage of fossil fuels. And, yes, some wind turbines froze, though wind actually performed better than the modest expectations set by ERCOT, Texas’ grid operator. I’m not going to go through the story in detail. I just want to talk a bit about what it means and what we can learn from it. To learn more about what happened, those affected, and the role Texas’s grid and regulations played in events, I recommend reading the following:

• The Houston Chronicle had a great story on the events as they unfolded and is, in general, all over it.
• In The New Republic, Kate Aronoff has a great overview, with crucial historical context for why the Texas grid is isolated and why it has an energy-only power market.
• In the Atlantic, Rob Meyer has great coverage of the Texas planning failures.
• The team at ProPublica has a piece on how Texas regulators “have repeatedly ignored, dismissed or watered down efforts to address weaknesses in the state’s sprawling electric grid.”
• In the Los Angeles Times, Sammy Roth has another great wrap-up, with a focus on grid vulnerability.
• In the New York Times, a team of journalists pulls together a great backgrounder on Texas’s unique power market structure and grid independence.
• In the New York Times, Princeton energy analyst Jesse Jenkins has a piece onthe crucial failure of Texas utilities to future-proof their assets.
• In the Wall Street Journal, Katherine Blunt and Russell Gold have a story onthe implications of the disaster for the energy-only market.
• In Utility Dive, Alex Gilbert and Morgan Bazilian write on what happened and what it means for Texas grid regulation.
• The New York Times’ Brad Plumer explains what climate impacts will mean for the nation’s power grids.
• At Gizmodo, Molly Taft reports on how much the oil and gas industry is paying Republicans to lie about what happened.
• And here’s the Wall Street Journal editorial board lying about what happened.

Any handful of those stories (save the last) will fill you in on what happened and why. Now let’s talk about what we can learn from it.

Elderly bear the brunt of Texas power outage catastrophe – The decision by ERCOT (Electric Reliability Council of Texas) to initiate indefinite rolling blackouts across the state of Texas has taken its biggest toll on the elderly. Seniors – particularly those dependent on Social Security benefits for housing, medicine, and essentials – were in many cases trapped inside their homes, unable to leave and impossible to reach for days on end. As of Wednesday, more than 1.3 million residents across 200 Texas counties remained without clean water in their homes, forcing them to boil water, wait in line for bottled water or purchase it at the store. At the peak last week, nearly 15 million Texans were under a boil-water advisory after widespread power outages knocked out water treatment and distribution across the state. Freezing temperatures that set in two weeks ago overwhelmed the state’s electrical system, freezing natural gas lines and shutting down power plants, leaving more than 4 million people without power, many for days on end. The implementation of weatherization measures that would have prevented the disaster was avoided because they would have cut into profit margins. ERCOT’s CEO, Bill Magness, presented a chart to a meeting of the company’s board Wednesday that showed that the electric system was four minutes and 37 seconds away from a complete collapse that would have lasted weeks or ever months. “I mean, we saw something here that, you know, outstrips any extreme scenario,” Magness reported. Almost half of the state’s power generating units shut down at the peak of the crisis. Millions of Texans were left out of the state’s Emergency Warning System, and a disproportionate amount of preventable human suffering fell on the oldest, most isolated, and most dependent members of society. So far, at least 58 deaths in Texas and across the US have been attributed to the extreme weather, including an 11-year-old who died in his bed of suspected hypothermia after his family’s trailer home lost power.

His Lights Stayed on During Texas’ Storm. Now He Owes $16,752. – The New York Times – As millions of Texans shivered in dark, cold homes over the past week while a winter storm devastated the state’s power grid and froze natural gas production, those who could still summon lights with the flick of a switch felt lucky. Now, many of them are paying a severe price for it. “My savings is gone,” said Scott Willoughby, a 63-year-old Army veteran who lives on Social Security payments in a Dallas suburb. He said he had nearly emptied his savings account so that he would be able to pay the $16,752 electric bill charged to his credit card – 70 times what he usually pays for all of his utilities combined. “There’s nothing I can do about it, but it’s broken me.” Mr. Willoughby is among scores of Texans who have reported skyrocketing electric bills as the price of keeping lights on and refrigerators humming shot upward. For customers whose electricity prices are not fixed and are instead tied to the fluctuating wholesale price, the spikes have been astronomical. The outcry elicited angry calls for action from lawmakers from both parties and prompted Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, to hold an emergency meeting with legislators on Saturday to discuss the enormous bills. “We have a responsibility to protect Texans from spikes in their energy bills that are a result of the severe winter weather and power outages,” Mr. Abbott, who has been reeling after the state’s infrastructure failure, said in a statement after the meeting. The electric bills are coming due at the end of a week in which Texans have faced a combination of crises caused by the frigid weather, beginning on Monday, when power grid failures and surging demand led to millions being left without electricity.

State of Texas should pay for enormous energy bills after power outages, Houston mayor says – Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner on Sunday called on the state of Texas to pay for the enormous electric bills that scores of Texans reported after severe winter weather knocked out power and rose energy prices. Frigid conditions last week caused major grid failures and skyrocketing demand that left millions of people without heat and electricity. Now, as power resumes for most of Texas, some households face utility bills as high as $10,000.“For people getting these exorbitant electricity bills and having to pay to repair their homes, they should not have to bear the responsibility,” Turner said during an interview on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” “Those exorbitant costs should be borne by the state of Texas and not the individual customers who did not cause this catastrophe this week.”The high utility bills in Texas are due to the state’s unregulated power grid that’s nearly cut off from the rest of the country. In the market-driven system, customers pick their own power suppliers. In many cases, when demand increases, prices also rise.The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which manages power for roughly 90% of the state, was unprepared for the cold conditions and the surge in demand for power as people tried to heat their homes.”All of what happened this past week was foreseeable and preventable. Our system in Texas is designed for summer heat and not necessarily a winter event,” Turner said.”Climate change is real and these major storms can happen at any time,” he added. “These systems need to be weatherized … we need to open up the Texas grid.” The exorbitant bills prompted Republican Gov. Greg Abbott to hold an emergency meeting with lawmakers on Saturday to address how the state can reduce the burden on consumers.

Texas utilities can’t stick customers with huge bills after storm: Abbott (Reuters) – Texas utility regulators will temporarily ban power companies from billing customers or disconnecting them for non-payment, after the deadly winter storm that caused widespread blackouts, Governor Greg Abbott said on Sunday. Abbott called an emergency meeting with state lawmakers on Saturday after reports of many customers receiving bills for thousands of dollars for just a few days’ electricity service while Texas was gripped by frigid temperatures. “Texans who have suffered through days of freezing cold without power should not be subjected to skyrocketing energy bills,” Abbott told reporters on Sunday in San Antonio. He said the Public Utility Commission of Texas will order electricity companies to pause sending bills to customers, and will issue a temporary moratorium on disconnection for non-payment. The state will use the time to find a way to protect utility customers, Abbott said. “The issue about utility bills and the skyrocketing prices that so many homeowners and renters are facing is the top priority for the Texas legislature right now,” he said. Texas has a highly unusual deregulated energy market that lets consumers choose between scores of competing electricity providers. Some providers sell electricity at wholesale prices that rise in sync with demand, which skyrocketed as the record-breaking freeze gripped a state unaccustomed to extreme cold, killing at least two dozen people and knocking out power to more than 4 million people at its peak; some 30,000 people were still without power on Sunday, Abbott said. As a result, some Texans who were still able to turn on lights or keep their fridge running found themselves with bills of $5,000 for just a five-day period, according to photos of invoices posted on social media by angry consumers.

Dan Patrick Says Texas May Ban Utility Plans That Produced $17k Power Bills: ‘Read the Fine Print’ – Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick said on Wednesday that variable utility plans which delivered extraordinary power bills to Texans may be banned because customers were not reading the fine print.Patrick told Fox News‘ Harris Faulkner that residents should “not panic” after being broadsided by the unexpected debts, vowing that the state would help “figure that out.” Although millions were left without electricity amid Texas’ unprecedented cold snap earlier this month, many of those who did not have power cut saw their bills skyrocket, with some invoices soaring as high as $17,000 due to variable pricing plans. “I saw the story about the high bills, let me explain that,” Patrick said. “We have in Texas, you can choose your energy plan and most people have a fixed rate. If they had a fixed rate per kilowatt hour, their rates aren’t going up. Now, their bill might be up because they used more energy because they had the heat up when they got the power back. But the people who are getting those big bills are people who gambled on a very, very low rate. And it would go up with the power.” “I’ve told those folks do not panic, we are going to figure that out” added Patrick. “But going forward, people need to read fine print in those kinds of bills. And we may even end that type of variable plan because people were surprised.”

Texas Electric Bills Were $28 Billion Higher Under Deregulation – WSJ -Texas’s deregulated electricity market, which was supposed to provide reliable power at a lower price, left millions in the dark last week. For two decades, its customers have paid more for electricity than state residents who are served by traditional utilities, a Wall Street Journal analysis has found.Nearly 20 years ago, Texas shifted from using full-service regulated utilities to generate power and deliver it to consumers. The state deregulated power generation, creating the system that failed last week. And it required nearly 60% of consumers to buy their electricity from one of many retail power companies, rather than a local utility. The roughly 60% of Texans who must choose a retail electricity provider consistently pay more than customers in the state who buy their power from traditional utilities.Source: Wall Street Journal analysis of U.S. Energy Information Administration data. Those deregulated Texas residential consumers paid $28 billion more for their power since 2004 than they would have paid at the rates charged to the customers of the state’s traditional utilities, according to the Journal’s analysis of data from the federal Energy Information Administration.The crisis last week was driven by the power producers. Now that power has largely been restored, attention has turned to retail electric companies, a few of which are hitting consumers with steep bills. Power prices surged to the market price cap of $9,000 a megawatt hour for several days during the crisis, a feature of the state’s system designed to incentivize power plants to supply more juice. Some consumers who chose variable rate power plans from retail power companies are seeing the big bills.Since 2004, Texans who had to choose their electricity provider from competing retailers paid $28 billionmore than they would have paid at the rates charged by the state’s traditional utilities.Source: Wall Street Journal analysis of U.S. Energy Information Administration dataNote: Total extra cost paid each year by retail electricity consumers in Texas. None of this was supposed to happen under deregulation. Backers of competition in the electricity-supply business promised it would lower prices for consumers who could shop around for the best deals, just as they do for cellphone service. The system would be an improvement over monopoly utilities, which have little incentive to innovate and provide better service to customers, supporters of deregulation said.The EIA data shows how much electricity each utility or retail provider sold to residents in a given year and how much customers paid for it. The Journal calculated separate annual statewide rates for utilities and retailers by adding up all of the revenue each type of provider received and dividing it by the kilowatt-hours of electricity it sold.From 2004 through 2019, the annual rate for electricity from Texas’s traditional utilities was 8% lower, on average, than the nationwide average rate, while the rates of retail providers averaged 13% higher than the nationwide rate, according to the Journal’s analysis.

Texas lawmakers seek to assign blame for deadly power blackout (Reuters) – Texas state lawmakers dug into the causes and cast blame on Thursday for deadly power blackouts that left millions shivering in the dark as frigid temperatures caught its grid operator and utilities ill-prepared for skyrocketing power demand. Dual hearings in the state House and Senate are highlighting shortcomings by grid planners, electric utilities, natural gas suppliers, renewable energy and transmission operators that led to billions of dollars in damages and dozens of deaths. One fact everyone agreed on: No one warned Texans that blackouts would last days, not hours. “Who’s at fault?” State Representative Todd Hunter demanded of utility executives. “I want to hear who’s at fault. I want the public to know who screwed up.” Mauricio Gutierrez, the chief executive of NRG Energy Inc, said, “The entire energy sector failed Texas.” A spokesman for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality told Reuters that 711,938 Texans were still grappling with water supply problems by Thursday, though the number had fallen sharply. The figure compared with Wednesday’s 1.3 million, itself down from Sunday’s 9 million, or about a third of the state’s population. While executives pointed to broad failures, the biggest was the state’s natural gas system, responsible for the largest share of Texas power generation, said Curtis Morgan, chief executive of Vistra Corp. Texas is the country’s biggest producer of natural gas, but without better ties between gas producers, pipelines and power plants, the state will face future cold weather outages. “We just couldn’t get the gas at the pressures we needed,” said Morgan, who told employees to buy gas at any price but could not get enough to run plants. The Comanche Peak nuclear power plant southwest of the Dallas-Fort Worth area was minutes from going offline, Morgan said.At one point, 40% of its gas suppliers had cut it off despite firm purchase agreements, said Calpine Chief Executive Thad Hill, which has a dozen natural gas plants in Texas. Up to 48% of the state’s power generation was offline at times last week and at least 32 people died, including an 11-year-old boy, who succumbed to hypothermia in an unheated mobile home.

Factbox: Winners and losers in energy sector from Texas cold snap (Reuters) – A winter storm that hit parts of the southern United States over the past week led several energy companies to report stronger-than-expected results after they were called on to provide more power at higher prices, while others faced millions of dollars in losses. Here is a look at the winners and losers in the energy sector from the storm:

• WINNERS:Comstock Resources said the last week was “like hitting the jackpot,” adding it was able to sell at “super-premium prices” a material amount of production at anywhere from $15 per million cubic feet of gas (mcf) to as much as around $179 per mcf.EQT Corp said last week that it also benefited from high prices in regions affected by the cold snap. The company mainly produces gas out of the Marcellus and Utica shale regions in Pennsylvania and Ohio. Australia’s Macquarie Group, the second biggest gas marketer in North America after oil major BP, lifted its profit guidance on Monday due to the effects of the extreme winter weather. It expects 2021 profit to rise by 10%, after earlier anticipating earnings to drop.Other natural gas weighted production companies, including Cabot Oil & Gas, Southwestern Energy Co, Range Resources Corp and Antero Resources, may benefit from the freeze, Morgan Stanley analysts said in a note.Shares of refiners such as HollyFrontier Corp and Valero Energy Corp rose after the freezing temperatures knocked a large swath of U.S. Gulf Coast refining offline, . Eurozone refiners, including Shell and Total, are positioned to benefit as they ramp up their shipments of gasoline into New York Harbor, he said.
• LOSERS: Just Energy raised doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern, after it forecast a $250 million loss from the Texas winter storms. Innergex Renewable Energy Inc forecast a financial impact of up to C$60 million on its Texas wind farms. Algonquin Power & Utilities Corp said on Friday it expects the potential hit to adjusted core earnings for this year to be between $45 million and $55 million after bad weather restricted production at its Renewable Energy Group’s Texas-based wind facilities. Atmos Energy said on Friday it purchased natural gas for an extra $2.5 billion to $3.5 billion due to higher cost of the fuel, adding it was evaluating financing options to pay for the additional purchase cost. Solaris said on Monday last week’s weather would have an impact on first quarter financials, but did not quantify the hit. Shale oil producers in the southern United States could take at least two weeks to restart the more than 2 million barrels per day of crude output that shut down. Some production may never return, analysts said. Diamondback Energy said it expects the weather to wipe off up to five days of production in the current quarter. Cimarex Energy Inc said it expects an up to 7% hit to production volume in the quarter. Occidental Petroleum forecast first-quarter Permian production of 450,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day to 460,000 boepd, including a 25,000 boepd hit from downtime related to the winter storm. Laredo Petroleum said its Permian Basin operations were affected for the last 12 days and estimated the combined impact of shut-in production and completions delays to reduce first-quarter total output by about 8,000 boepd and oil production by about 3,000 bpd. Refiners with oil processing facilities along the Gulf Coast, the main U.S. refining hub, such as Phillips 66 and Exxon Mobil, were forced to halt operations. By Thursday last week, the historic sub-zero temperatures in Texas and Louisiana shut at least 3.5 million barrels per day, or about 19%, of U.S. refining capacity.

ChartWatch: Companies tally millions in gains, losses from grid-crippling freeze | S&P Global Market Intelligence – Several electricity and natural gas providers have warned of significant financial impacts from the deep freeze that swept across the Western U.S., while other energy companies expect to benefit from the supply constraints and related price hikes. Just Energy Group Inc. on Feb. 22 said it could record a total of US$250 million, or C$315 million, in losses from the brutal cold stretch of weather that prompted widespread blackouts in Texas. The retail energy provider also warned that the financial impact could be “materially adverse to the company’s liquidity and its ability to continue as a going concern.” The uncertainty from the extreme weather event in Texas prompted Just Energy to withdraw its fiscal 2021 guidance and delay the filing of its financial statements for the three and nine months ended Dec. 31, 2020. Increased demand and rolling outages in Texas caused Just Energy to balance power supply at very high clearing prices through the Electric Reliability Council Of Texas Inc., “artificially set at USD $9,000/MWh for much of the week.” The Public Utility Commission of Texas on Feb. 15 directed ERCOT to adjust wholesale energy prices to ensure they accurately reflect current conditions amid the state’s energy emergency. Power providers Vistra Corp. and NRG Energy Inc. were initially believed to have the most exposure to generation outages in ERCOT given their large generation fleets in the state. Irving, Texas-headquartered Vistra on Feb. 17 disclosed only about 1,000 MW of its more than 19,000 MW of generation was offline during the widespread generation outages. As fully integrated power providers, NRG and Vistra also own large retail electricity companies in Texas. Vistra has a “long” position, with more generation in Texas than retail load, while NRG has more retail load than generation. On Feb. 22, NRG pushed its planned release of earnings results to March 1, because President and CEO Mauricio Gutierrez is scheduled to appear before the Texas Legislature on Feb. 25. Natural gas distribution company Atmos Energy Corp. reported accruing about $2.5 billion to $3.5 billion in natural gas purchases due to “unforeseeable and unprecedented market pricing” during the winter storm. Atmos said it was considering several options to cover the costs, including tapping short-term or long-term debt and issuing equity. Meanwhile, natural gas producers Comstock Resources Inc., Antero Resources Corp. and EQT Corp. are among those expected to cash in on the surge in fuel prices. “We feel very fortunate to be able to have gas in storage at a time when it’s needed in a big way,” Energy Transfer LP co-CEO and Chief Commercial Officer Marshall McCrea said on a Feb. 17 earnings call. “We hate what’s going on in the country, in this state, but we’re doing everything we possibly can to pull gas out of storage and deliver it to the power plants and to the LDCs.” The economic impacts of the energy crisis also were felt outside of the U.S. Canadian solar and wind developer Innergex Renewable Energy Inc. expects a financial hit of between C$45 million to C$60 million as a result of realized losses on power hedges. Algonquin Power & Utilities Corp., a Canadian company that owns U.S. utilities, said Feb. 19 it expects a negative financial impact of $45 million to $55 million on 2021 adjusted EBITDA from the winter storm. The company said it has asserted force majeure and is assessing other potential mitigating options. German power producer RWE AG, which owns more than 3 GW of mostly wind capacity in Texas, said the outages and unfavorable pricing conditions will trigger a “significant negative earnings impact” for its onshore wind and solar segment in the U.S.

How Investors Can Play The One Clear Winner From Texas’ Electric Grid Collapse: Battery Storage –The Electric Reliability Council of Texas did not live up to its name last week. And although daytime high temperatures in Houston have already returned to their regularly scheduled 70 degrees, the impact of the deep freeze lingers on in busted water pipes, empty store shelves and long lines at gas stations. Along with the plumbers working through their massive backlogs, there will be another big winner that emerges from the ice storm: batteries. As politicians wangle over how to reform ERCOT and the Texas power grid to withstand a future freeze, expect Texans to take matters into their own hands. There will plenty of new sales of more traditional natural gas-powered backup generators; leading manufacturer Generac reported a surge of new interest from homeowners last week. But expect bigger interest in systems that can work all year around, combining solar panels and battery storage. Houston-based Sunnova is offering home solar systems with battery storage at 0% finance rates and no downpayment. Competitor Sunpower offers home systems that include integration with an A.I.-informed smartphone app that enables a homeowner to sell excess solar power from their batteries back into the grid. “Storage is coming down in cost as fast as solar did,” saysSunpower CEO Tom Warner. “You can have a power plant at home where you have total control.” Every new rooftop solar system will take pressure off what is clearly a stressed out grid. “The current grid is incapable of handling an increasing number of climate-driven extreme weather events,” says Carl Fleming, partner in the energy finance practice of McDermott Will & Emery. Solar and wind “would be more effective at energizing the grid during such times with the addition of strategic battery storage to allow for immediate response time, or for ample energy storage of multiple durations.”

Texas freeze casts renewable energy as next battle line in US culture wars – The frigid winter storm and power failure that left millions of people in Texasshivering in darkness has been used to stoke what is becoming a growing front in America’s culture wars – renewable energy.The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (Ercot), which oversees the Texas grid,has been clear that outages of solar and wind energy were only a minor factor in blackouts which, at their peak, left 4 million Texans without electricity, with many resorting to burning furniture or using outdoor barbecues to desperately warm themselves amid the shocking blast of Arctic-like conditions. Crucially, the supply of natural gas, which supplies about half of Texas’s electricity, seized up due to frozen pipes and a lack of standby reserves. The grid failed after about a third of Ercot’s total capacity – supplied by coal, nuclear and gas – went offline as demand for heating dramatically surged. Regardless, the Republican leadership in Texas, abetted by rightwing media outlets and a proliferation of false claims on social media, has sought to pin the crisis on wind turbines and solar panels freezing when the Lone Star state needed them most.“The Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America,” Greg Abbott, Texas’s governor, told Fox News last week, in reference to a plan to rapidly transition the US to renewable energy that currently only exists on paper. “Our wind and our solar got shut down … It just shows that fossil fuel is necessary.”Abbott subsequently walked backed these comments but others have been less hesitant to use the crisis to attack renewables. Sid Miller, Texas’s agriculture commissioner, stated that “we should never build another wind turbine in Texas” on Facebook, while Tucker Carlson, the prominent rightwing Fox News host, said “windmills” were “silly fashion accessories” prone to failure.Fox News blamed renewables for the blackouts 128 times in just a 48-hour period last week, according to Media Matters. The distortions were amplified by social media, with a picture of a helicopter de-icing a wind turbine widely shared on Twitter and Facebook, even though the photo was taken in Sweden in 2014.A YouTube live stream by the conservative commentator Steven Crowder blaming the blackouts on “the failures of green energy” has been viewed about a million times, while the Texas Public Policy Foundation used paid Facebook adverts to urge people to “thank” fossil fuels for keeping them warm while assailing “failed” wind energy.The scorn heaped on renewables has echoes of the blackouts suffered by California during devastating wildfires last year, which caused several prominent Texas Republicans such as Dan Crenshaw, a member of Congress, and Senator Ted Cruz, who last week fled his stricken home state for sunny Cancún, to mock California’s shift to cleaner energy. The expansion of wind and solar, a key policy goal of Joe Biden, is now developing into yet another cultural battle line, despite strong public support for renewables. Jesse Keenan, an expert in climate adaptation at Tulane University, said the use of “targeted disinformation” and conspiracy theories is obscuring the more pressing issue of how states like Texas cope with the challenges of extreme weather linked to the climate crisis.

Bill would give local control over wind, solar farm approval – Farm and Dairy – A new Ohio Senate bill would put control of approving new large wind and solar developments in the hands of townships. Senate Bill 52 would set up a referendum process on certain wind farm and solar facility certificates before the projects go before the Ohio Power Siting Board. The legislation was introduced by Republican Sens. Bill Reineke, of Tiffin, and Rob McColley, of Napoleon. There’s a lack of public awareness about these types of projects, Reineke said, during the first hearing for the bill, Feb. 17, in the Senate Energy and Public Utilities Committee. Large utility-scale wind and solar projects are certified through the Ohio Power Siting Board and, currently, do not need local approval to be built. There is a public comment process through the power siting board, but Reineke said it’s not meaningful or effective for residents. “The intent of the legislation is not to thwart wind development or the development of renewable energy in Ohio at all,” Reineke said during the hearing. “Senate Bill 52 aims to allow local citizens to decide what is best for their community instead of leaving that decision to people in Columbus, unelected bureaucrats, or us, who think we know what’s best for other peoples’ communities.” Senate Bill 52 would require developers to give notice to and share project details with township trustees 30 days before applying for a certificate from the Ohio Power Siting Board. Trustees would then have 30 days to decide whether to pass a resolution allowing or requiring public input, or to do nothing, which would imply support for the project. A resolution allowing public input would let residents petition for a referendum. The referendum, if allowed, would then be held during the next primary or general election. The bill would also require a copy of the wind turbine manufacturer’s safety specifications, including the manufacturer’s recommended safety distances for the wind turbines, to be included in the certification application. The minimum setback will be whichever is greater, the current Ohio standards, or the distance in the safety manufacturer’s manual.

Former Michigan Gov. Granholm confirmed as energy secretary (AP) – Former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm won Senate confirmation Thursday to be energy secretary, joining President Joe Biden’s Cabinet as a leader of Biden’s effort to build a green economy as the United States moves to slow climate change. The vote was 64-35, with all Democrats and 14 Republicans, including GOP leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, voting yes. Granholm, 62, served two terms as governor in a state dominated by the auto industry and devastated by the 2008 recession. She has promoted emerging clean energy technologies, such as electric vehicles and battery manufacturing, as an answer for jobs that will be lost as the U.S. transitions away from oil, coal and other fossil fuels. Granholm, who was sworn in late Thursday, is just the second woman to serve as energy secretary. She tweeted her thanks to senators and said, “I’m obsessed with creating good-paying clean energy jobs in all corners of America in service of addressing our climate crisis. I’m impatient for results. Now let’s get to work!″ Sen. Joe Manchin, chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said Granholm has the leadership skills, vision and compassion needed at the Energy Department to “develop innovative solutions for the climate challenge″ while preserving jobs. During her confirmation hearing last month, Granholm pushed her plans to embrace new wind and solar technologies. But her position caused tension with some Republicans who fear for the future of fossil fuels. “We can buy electric car batteries from Asia, or we can make them in America,” Granholm told senators. “We can install wind turbines from Denmark, or we can make them in America.″ Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso, the top Republican on the Senate energy committee, said Biden “seems to want to pull the plug on American energy dominance. So I cannot in good conscience vote to approve his nominee for secretary of energy.″

ELECTRIC VEHICLES: Postal Service sidetracks Biden EV plan — Wednesday, February 24, 2021 —The U.S. Postal Service yesterday made a $482 million decision to replace its aging truck fleet with a mix of fossil-fuel and electric vehicles, falling short of President Biden’s goal of electrifying the federal vehicle fleet.

Ilargi: But….Then There’s the [Lithium] Math –Yves here. One topic that is weirdly mentioned more than occasionally yet then treated as if it simply doesn’t exist is the high environmental cost of supposedly green clean technologies. This post highlights a specific issue: there simply isn’t enough lithium to supply Tesla’s planned electric vehicles, let alone those of other car makers.EV defenders will argue other battery technologies are just around the corner, like sodium ion, which promises to be more efficient as well as environmentally less taxing. See here for a recap of the status and advantages of other battery technologies under development.The wee problem is that the time it takes to perfect and test a new technology to the degree that it’s ready for industrial implementation is often longer than its boosters would like to believe. So reader input on what next gen battery technologies might be ready for prime time when would be very much appreciated. By Raúl Ilargi Meijer, editor of Automatic Earth: Dr. D posted this as a short comment, not an article, and he’s welcome, encouraged even, to expand on it at a later date. But I think it’s important enough, and detailed enough, to in fact make it an article. We can take if from here. The blind drive towards EV’s is going to hurt, and we should prepare for that.The idea, and the concept, that we can simply switch from one energy source to another and keep motoring and do all the other things we do, is nothing but a cheap and meaningless sales pitch. To produce 20 million Tesla’s would require 165% of the entire 2019 global lithium production, says this chart from mining.com:That’s just Tesla, that doesn’t yet include the entire rest of the world’s car manufacturers who also claim they’ll go “green”. But then we’ll just raise the production of lithium! Well, there may be a problem with that…

Will California’s desert be transformed into Lithium Valley? –California’s desert is littered with remnants of broken dreams – hidden ghost towns, abandoned mines and rusty remains of someone’s Big Idea. But nothing looms larger on an abandoned landscape than the Salton Sea, which languishes in an overlooked corner of the state.The water shimmers and broils in the desert like a rebuke: born of human error, made worse by 100 years of neglect and pollution. California’s largest lake is also one of its worst environmental blights, presenting a problem so inverted that its toxic legacy intensifies as its foul water disappears. For generations, Imperial Valley residents have been breathing in a Periodic Table of minerals and metals, as well as agricultural chemicals. But for all the misery that these receding waters have unleashed – asthma and other respiratory ailments triggered by dust clouds – the Salton Sea now offers a potential way out: A bounty of lithium, called “white gold,” one of the planet’s most prized elements, used to manufacture batteries that power electric cars and drive a fossil-fuel-free future.And the state of California wants to be in on it.The California Energy Commission has stepped in as an angel investor, doling out $16 million in grants to a handful of companies to determine if it’s technically and commercially feasible to extract lithium from the brine that geothermal plants are already pulling from the Salton Sea.One of the recipients, CalEnergy Resources, a subsidiary of the giant Berkshire Hathaway Energy Renewables, is using $6 million in state grants to piggy-back a lithium-extraction pilot project onto its existing geothermal plants near Calipatria, at the southeast end of the dying sea. The company, which expects to break ground soon, will build a small-scale demonstration plant to begin operating next year. Should all go well, it envisions that it could eventually produce nearly a third of the world’s lithium. From the standpoint of California public policy, the project offers a unique intersection of two state priorities: increasing sources of renewable energy and encouraging new battery technology for electric cars and energy storage. The state’s target for electric cars, for example, could use a boost. Gov. Gavin Newsom last year directed the state to ban all new gasoline-powered cars by 2035. Such an expansive project would transform the entire Imperial Valley, home to 174,000 people, 85% Latino, who face chronically high unemployment and few job opportunities outside farm fields. But environmental justice advocates worry about the potential impacts of additional waste and air pollution from extracting and processing lithium at the Salton Sea. Since it’s an experimental technology, the environmental effects have not been analyzed yet.The Imperial Valley already is perennially ranked at the top of California’s most polluted places – with all the serious health problems that go along with it. “Disadvantaged communities are always going to be on the losing end,”

WV Coal Association jumps into AEP rate case to defend Mitchell coal plant against possibility of closing — The West Virginia Coal Association is pushing back against American Electric Power after the company’s subsidiaries warned in a recent rate case that they may close a coal-fired plant. Appalachian Power and Wheeling Power said in a Dec. 23 filing with the Public Service Commission of West Virginia that the Mitchell coal-fired generating facility in Marshall County would cease operation in 2028 if the companies choose to retire the plant rather than make an additional investment to ensure that the plant complies with federal guidelines limiting wastewater to continue operating beyond that year. “It’s easy to say, ‘Washington’s making us do this,’” West Virginia Coal Association President Chris Hamilton said. “We’re not convinced of that.” The Coal Association weighed in with a petition to intervene in the case Friday in which it said that the demand for coal mined by its members could be “radically altered by the outcome of this proceeding.” “We want to protect all the good that that plant represents … the industrial job base that it sustains and all the working families that are planning their career path around that plant being in place until 2040,” Hamilton said. The companies say they could make modifications to comply with the wastewater rule and a federal rule regulating coal combustion residuals at the Mitchell plant, the John Amos plant in Putnam County and the Mountaineer plant in Mason County that would allow each of those plants to operate until 2040. The filing argues that it would benefit customers to ensure compliance at the John Amos and Mountaineer plants and keep them operating until the end of their projected useful lives in 2040. But the companies report that performing only the coal combustion residual compliance work at Mitchell and retiring the plant in 2028 has “comparable costs and benefits” to making the additional wastewater compliance investment to allow the plant to operate beyond 2028. Replacing a portion of the retired Mitchell capacity with a portion of Appalachian Power’s excess capacity in 2028 would result in savings to West Virginia customers of approximately $27 million annually from 2029 to 2040, the companies said in the Dec. 23 filing.

Groups threaten Ameren suit over coal ash – – Three environmental groups on Wednesday announced they have filed a notice of intent to sue Ameren regarding alleged violations of the federal Clean Water Act. Representatives of the Waterkeeper Alliance, the Missouri Confluence Waterkeeper and the Great Rivers Environmental Law Center alleged Ameren is continuing unpermitted discharges of toxic coal ash pollutants from the company’s Sioux Energy Center four miles from Portage Des Sioux, across the Mississippi River from Godfrey. The groups state that coal ash, a by-product of burning coal, contains multiple contaminants known to be associated with long-term human health and ecological risks, including mercury, boron, sulfate, cadmium, molybdenum, lead and arsenic. The groups said Ameren is storing more than 3 million tons of coal ash in a massive unlined disposal pit on the banks of the Mississippi River, one of its backwater chutes and Poeling Lake. “There could not be a worse place to leave this waste forever and allow the pollution to be released into the Mississippi River for decades to come,” said Bob Menees of Great Rivers Environmental Law Center. “Ameren cannot continue to discharge toxic coal ash pollution to these rivers in violation of the Clean Water Act and must take action to remove the waste and clean up the pollution at the site.” Brad Brown of Ameren Missouri Communications said there currently is not a filed lawsuit to respond to at this point, only a notification. He noted Ameren has an extensive discussion of coal combustion residual related plans online at Ameren.com/CCRFacts. Menees said, according to Ameren’s own records for the Sioux Energy facility, the disposal pit is discharging toxic coal ash pollutants into the shallow groundwater beneath the site and, ultimately, into the adjacent surface waters, including the Mississippi River.

Legislation aims to strengthen coal industry – From tax holidays to more research money, legislation aimed at preserving North Dakota’s coal industry is finding some traction in the 2021 Legislature. This session has seen more than the usual number of energy-related bills, with coal particularly at the forefront. The announced closure by Great River Energy of its Coal Creek Generating Station near Washburn in the second half of 2022 has raised an alarm for the coal industry, which is looking to the Legislature for ways to strengthen coal’s place in the state’s energy mix. “The state’s primary role in helping protect our baseload generation industry is a combination of regulatory burden and tax policies,” said Sen. Jessica Bell, R-Beulah, who has introduced several energy-related bills. “Regulatory relief or advantage for baseload, coupled with a tax break, is a good place for the state to start in providing assistance. Small changes like these can help reassure we have reliable, affordable electricity into the future. The Clean and Sustainable Energy Future Act is a great start in prioritizing carbon capture utilization and storage technology, lifting it from the testing to commercial phase.” Bell refers to House Bill 1452, which creates a new chapter in state law relating to a clean sustainable energy authority and a clean sustainable energy fund. The bill was amended in the House Energy and Natural Resources Committee and now is before the House Appropriations Committee because of the proposed $40 million appropriation for the creation of the energy fund.

Coal ash in Georgia: Here’s the update from the General Assembly —— Georgia coal ash is back on the docket in the Georgia General Assembly. The House’s Natural Resources and Environment Committee was given an update on coal ash pond closures by the Environmental Protection Division and Georgia Power. There’s also been a new bill proposed that would require coal ash ponds to be closed by removing the ash and putting it in a lined landfill. Right now, there are two types of closure plans that operators can pick from — closure by removal, which House Bill 176 asks be a requirement, and closure in place. The closure in place method would leave ash at the site after the pond has been dewatered and stabilized. A cap would then be placed on top of the pond. Georgia Power has requested a coal ash closure in place permit for Plant Scherer in Monroe County, a pond that has been surrounded by reports of groundwater contamination in areas around the Plant. Thirty years of post-closure care and groundwater monitoring would have to be done with this type of closure. Nineteen of the 29 ponds in Georgia have permits requested to remove the ash completely, through closure by removal. According to Aaron Mitchell with Georgia Power, those 19 ponds are the ponds closest to outside water sources, like rivers, lakes, and creeks. State Representative Joe Campbell asked how close a pond has to be to another water source to require closure by removal. Mitchell responded that there is no specific requirement. It is up to engineers and geologists on the site to make the determination based on the specifics of the site. The other 10 ponds in the state have permits requested for closure in place. Only one of the 10 ponds closed in place would have a liner at the bottom of the pond.

Blackjewel Ordered to Clean up Kentucky Mine Site (AP) – Bankrupt coal company Blackjewel has been ordered by a federal judge to clean up a Kentucky mine site. In a bankruptcy court ruling issued Wednesday, Judge Benjamin Kahn said the Bell County site presented a potential threat and ordered Blackjewel to excavate and treat coal mining ponds until the company is allowed to abandon them, the Courier Journal reported. The state had argued the mine presented an imminent danger, which the judge rejected. Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet inspectors found coal mining ponds this year that were overfull, contained high levels of iron and manganese and could breach at any time. Officials argued that threatened drinking water, a state highway, a railroad and the environment. Scott Kane, a lawyer for Blackjewel, said the company was working to mitigate the problem.

This Obscure Energy Treaty Is the Greatest Threat to the Planet You’ve Never Heard Of — On 4 February the German energy giant RWE announced it was suing the government of the Netherlands. The crime? Proposing to phase out coal from the country’s electricity mix. The company, which is Europe’s biggest emitter of carbon, is demanding €1.4bn in ‘compensation’ from the country for loss of potential earnings, because the Dutch government has banned the burning of coal for electricity from 2030. If this sounds unreasonable, then you might be surprised to learn that this kind of legal action is perfectly normal – and likely to become far more commonplace in the coming years. RWE is suing under the Energy Charter Treaty (ECT), a little-known international agreement signed without much public debate in 1994. The treaty binds more than 50 countries, and allows foreign investors in the energy sector to sue governments for decisions that might negatively impact their profits – including climate policies. Governments can be forced to pay huge sums in compensation if they lose an ECT case. On Tuesday, Investigate Europe revealed that the EU, the UK and Switzerland could be forced to pay more than €345bn in ECT lawsuits over climate action in the coming years. This amount, which is more than twice the EU’s annual budget, represents the total value of the fossil fuel infrastructure that is protected by the ECT, and was calculated using data gathered by Global Energy Monitor and Change of Oil International. With ECT-covered assets worth €141bn (or more than €2,000 per citizen), the UK – which in 2019 became the first major economy to pass a net zero emissions law – is the country most vulnerable to future claims. In 2019 the European Commission called the ECT “outdated” and “no longer sustainable”, and more than 450 climate leaders and scientists and 300 lawmakers from across Europe have called on governments to withdraw from the treaty. But in response, powerful interests have mobilised to not just defend the treaty, but to expand it to new signatory states. These interests include the fossil fuels lobby keen to keep its outsized legal privileges; lawyers who make millions arguing ECT cases; and the Brussels-based ECT Secretariat, which has close ties to both industries and whose survival depends on the treaty’s continuation.

Six nuclear power plants in Illinois operated nearly at full power during cold snap – – While temperatures plunged across the U.S. last week, Exelon Generation’s six Illinois nuclear plants operated around the clock, producing enough power to keep 11 million homes and businesses warm. All six nuclear facilities ran at nearly 100 percent output levels last week, providing schools, hospitals, businesses and residences the electricity needed to keep heaters running during the cold snap, according to a press release from Exelon. “We are dedicated to delivering carbon-free, reliable energy for our customers when they need it most,” said Dave Rhoades, Exelon Generation Chief Nuclear Officer. Nuclear produces clean energy around the clock and is the most reliable form of power generation, especially during extremely cold stretches when demand for electricity is high in Illinois, the press release said. Despite the weather, the state’s nuclear plants have continuously sent baseload electricity to the grid. The six Illinois nuclear plants recorded a near-perfect reliability rate last winter, running nearly 99 percent of their planned operating time. Together, the plants generate more than half of Illinois’ electricity and nearly 90 percent of its carbon-free energy. Winter resiliency and reliability requires year-long planning and maintenance. Exelon Generation workers spend months ensuring that backup generators and supplemental equipment are ready for inclement weather. Last fall, operators and maintenance personnel inspected freeze protection systems, tested electrical equipment, and aligned plant systems to prepare all Exelon Generation facilities for sub-zero temperatures, icy conditions, and heavy snowfall. These efforts are in addition to the many equipment upgrades and winter readiness maintenance activities performed during refueling outages. Illinois’ nuclear plants recorded a near-perfect reliability rate last summer as well. During June, July and August 2020, which was Illinois’ hottest summer on record, the plants operated 98.9 percent of the time, according to company officials.

A $75 million fund for domestically mined uranium came after years of lobbying and campaign contributions from the industry, including Energy Fuels, which owns and runs the White Mesa mill in southeastern Utah. — When the latest COVID-19 relief bill was signed into law by President Donald Trump on Dec. 27, uranium companies with mines in the United States cheered. And that included a big one with operations in Utah. The legislation provides $75 million to create a stockpile of domestically mined uranium that will reduce the need to import ore from abroad. Although details of how exactly the stockpile will be managed have yet to be determined, the funding will prop up a sector of the mining industry that has been flagging for decades. It also comes on the tail end of an extensive lobbying effort by uranium companies. The funding was tucked into the massive $1.9 trillion pandemic relief bill under a section titled “National Nuclear Security Administration” and subtitled “weapons activities.” But earlier discussions of the uranium reserve program in Congress and from the industry indicated the stockpiled material would be used in power plants, not nuclear weapons. Curtis Moore, vice president of the uranium company Energy Fuels, which has a mill and mines in Utah, said he believes that’s still the case. “Our understanding is that it is to be basically a backup source of fuel for our nuclear power plants,” Moore said. “I have not heard anything about this material being available or being needed for weapons.” Environmental groups opposing the stockpile said they were waiting for more details, stating that Moore’s interpretation could be correct despite the sparse details included in the legislation itself. The reserve’s future will be negotiated by the Biden administration. “We hope that the strategic uranium reserve will get a second look because we’re not sure it’s anything more than a handout to the uranium industry and specifically to Energy Fuels,” said Amber Reimondo, energy director for the Grand Canyon Trust, adding that tribal governments whose citizens might be impacted by new uranium mining should be included in those discussions.

Toxic legacy of uranium mines on Navajo Nation confronts Interior nominee Deb Haaland – (video)

Ohio bribery probe: Federal judge accepts guilty plea from dark money group – A federal judge in Cincinnati accepted a guilty plea Friday from a dark-money political action committee connected to what prosecutors have called the largest political corruption case in state history. Generation Now admitted to a single felony racketeering count, the third of six defendants admitting involvement in the scheme to enact a $1 billion nuclear plant bailout. Jeffrey Longstreth, a longtime aide of former Republican House Speaker Larry Householder, signed the plea agreement late last month as the representative of Generation Now. U.S. District Judge Timothy S. Black formally accepted the plea early Friday afternoon in a hearing held via video conferencing because of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. As part of the plea, Generation Now will forfeit $1.5 million from two bank accounts and faces up to five years of probation. Black will announce a final sentence at a later date. Generation Now, Householder, Longstreth, former Ohio Republican Party Chairman Matt Borges and lobbyists Neil Clark and Juan Cespedes were arrested in July after investigators alleged they used dark money from FirstEnergy and related entities to bankroll the campaigns of supporters, enact House Bill 6 and block referendum efforts to overturn the nuclear bailout legislation. Investigators say Generation Now, formed by Householder and Longstreth, received tens of millions of dollars to ensure passage of HB 6. As a social welfare nonprofit, the group was not required to disclose its donors. In addition to Friday’s plea, Longstreth and Cespedes admitted to racketeering counts in the case in late October. Householder was forced from his position as House Speaker but retained his legislative seat. He was reelected to a new term in November and remains a member of the Ohio House.

Critics fear investors’ push for profits could thwart other FirstEnergy priorities –A notorious investor’s plan to acquire a significant stake in FirstEnergy voting shares has critics worried that pressure to turn quick profits could undercut the company’s duties to ratepayers and need to invest in a cleaner and more resilient grid.In its Feb. 18 earnings call, FirstEnergy revealed it had received notice of Icahn Capital’s intent to acquire between $184 million and $920 million in voting securities. The fund would have a minority voting interest, but it might be enoughto sway changes in its board of directors, company management and more. The news comes three years after affiliates of four other equity investment firms put$2.5 billion into FirstEnergy.“When you have a utility company that is increasingly being owned by private equity investors who are looking to maximize their profits and return, that’s just counter to utility finance models and long-term reliability and performance,” said Howard Learner, president and executive director of the Environmental Law & Policy Center.Utility stocks have traditionally been viewed as steady, low-risk performers, less prone to the ups and downs of cyclical market volatility. What’s happening with FirstEnergy is unusual and concerning, Leaner said, because of some of the firms’ reputation for demanding big changes for short-term financial gain.Carl Icahn has been described as a “corporate raider” or “vulture,” the most high-profile in a class of equity fund leaders that target distressed companies. Starting in the late 1980s, Icahn used his stake in TWA to recoup most of his investment through a stock buyback, which was followed by selling off of the airline’s most profitable routes and eventually bankruptcy. In the 1990s, Icahn engineered a split of USX shares to separate the profitable Marathon oil operations; he first tried to divest the original U.S. Steel Corporation’s steel operations altogether. Icahn’s threats to break up Time Warner in the 2000s led to another huge stock buyback. Scandal has surrounded FirstEnergy over questions about what role it may have played as “Company A” in an alleged $60-million conspiracy to pass and uphold Ohio’s coal and nuclear bailout bill. Its share price just before the Icahn Capital news was still down roughly 25% compared to the days preceding the July 21 release of the federal government’s criminal complaint against former Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder in July.“The last guy in the world you want running a utility is a corporate raider,” said Ashley Brown, executive director of the Harvard Electricity Policy Group and former member of the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio. Public utilities are entitled to a fair profit, but they owe a fiduciary opportunity to the people who gave them a monopoly franchise, he noted. “The obligation is to provide the service, not to satisfy some greedy folks on Wall Street.”

Ohio GOP lawmaker seeks to extend state’s renewable-energy mandates, restore solar standards gutted by House Bill 6 – cleveland.com – New GOP-sponsored Ohio Senate legislation would indefinitely continue the state’s solar and other renewable-energy standards for utilities, which are set to end in a few years due to the scandal-ridden House Bill 6. Senate Bill 89, sponsored by state Rep. Matt Dolan, a Chagrin Falls Republican, marks the latest attempt by state lawmakers to tear away at parts of HB6, the 2019 energy law that authorities say that ex-House Speaker Larry Householder passed with $60 million in FirstEnergy Corp. bribe money. HB6 rolled back a 2008 law stating that, by 2026 onward, all electric utilities in Ohio must obtain 12.5% of their power from renewable sources such as wind and solar — including 0.5% specifically from solar power plants. The standards were designed to provide an economic incentive to build wind and solar plants. HB6 lowered Ohio’s overall renewable-energy standard to 8.5% by 2026, after which it ends permanently. It also immediately killed the state’s solar-energy standard altogether. Dolan’s bill would keep the maximum renewable-energy standard at 8.5% from 2026 on, rather than restore it to the 12.5% under the 2008 law. But rather than ending the standards after 2026, SB89 would continue that 8.5% standard into 2027 and beyond. It would also restore the solar standard to 0.5% by 2026, after which it, too, would continue indefinitely. A third thing SB89 would do is extend a pilot project that effectively allows local governments greater freedom in how they can spend the money that wind and solar farm developers would pay in property taxes. The pilot project is currently set to end in 2023 – SB89 would let it continue until 2030. Dolan, who voted for HB6, now favors repealing the law entirely. However, the legislature now seems to favor attacking HB6 in an “a la carte” way, introducing several bills that target particular parts of the law. “I was concerned that this part of the ‘carte’ would be forgotten,” Dolan said of the renewable and solar standards. “I’m not going to let anybody forget it.” Partially restoring such standards, he said, would make Ohio a more attractive place for wind and solar developers to invest in.

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