The Pandemic Could Not Derail Corporate Sustainability Ambition
Author
Sally R.K. Fisk - Pfizer Inc.
Pfizer Inc.
Current Issue
March-April 2021
Issue
2

Reflecting on the past year, who could have anticipated the magnitude of the lives lost or how long the pandemic may last? Many writers posited early in the course of the disease that we should take the temporary suspension of travel and commerce, the slowing and stopping of ordinary life, as an opportunity to “build back better.”

As people across the United States simultaneously also fought for social justice and tested the limits of democracy, the advancement of corporate sustainability could easily have fallen by the wayside, becoming one of the many losers to the stress induced by a deadly communicable disease and social disruption. But it didn’t. Indeed, the impact was quite the opposite: environmental, social, and governance issues thrived across the corporate sector.

A World Economic Forum article titled “Why COVID-19 is a litmus test for corporate attitudes to sustainability” noted that investor interest is increasing in ESG because such activities are more resilient to disruption — something we had plenty of in 2020, and something we are likely to have more frequently in the future due to climate change.

The authors say “ESG is growing in importance for businesses and stakeholders everywhere.” They further note “the pandemic is helping increase awareness that companies must focus on long-term sustainability over short-term profits.” They also predict COVID-19 “will serve as a litmus test, dividing those firms who are serious about a low-carbon future — and those who are not.” Since those that are serious about greenhouse gas emissions are likely to both survive and thrive, they will be favored going forward.

A quick search reveals the scope and ambition of corporate sustainability actions, with many companies announcing new targets, including Microsoft, Starbucks, Walt Disney, Ford, and Unilever.

My experience at Pfizer was similar. We began developing a new sustainability strategy before the pandemic broke, but the momentum increased and by the end of December we had developed and announced our next-generation climate goal and new sustainable medicines strategy, updated our longstanding climate change position statement, integrated ESG into our enterprise risk management process, announced our first chief sustainability officer, changed the name of the Corporate Governance Committee to the Governance & Sustainability Committee to more prominently reflect oversight responsibility for sustainability and corporate responsibility, and worked to enhance our ESG reporting to align more closely to the frameworks of the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board and the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures.

Consistent with our commitment to applying science, our new climate goal is to become carbon neutral across our internal operations by 2030, and to use our influence to catalyze similar reductions across our value chain. To achieve carbon neutrality, we commit to a 45 percent absolute reduction in emissions from a 2019 baseline, including purchasing 100 percent renewable energy, with remaining emissions offset through verifiable carbon credits. We also commit to reducing emissions related to business travel by 25 percent and logistics by 10 percent, both by 2025.

Our new Sustainable Medicines Strategy will leverage our strengths in scientific innovation to reduce the environmental impact of our drugs throughout the product lifecycle. To that end, we commit to developing sustainable medicines criteria to help demonstrate the social and environmental value of our products and allow for targeted goals to facilitate transparency and accountability. These criteria and more targeted goals will be announced in the coming months.

The pandemic reminds us of the danger of infectious disease. We also recognize the growing threat to human health from anti-microbial resistance, called AMR. Pfizer remains committed to the AMR Industry Alliance roadmap to assure the responsible manufacture of our products and to providing greater transparency to our supply chain. Given recent scientific developments, together with the alliance and other stakeholders Pfizer is leading efforts to develop a consensus-based standard that will be the forerunner of a certification that an antibiotic has been responsibly manufactured. This type of private environmental governance has also been a focus for ELI.

Pfizer’s example is just one of many of business sustainability actions thriving despite the pandemic and other upsets during a challenging year. And while voluntary corporate actions have driven incredible progress, there is much work yet to do and a new administration focused on climate change, environmental justice, and the broader range of ESG issues at the national legislative and regulatory level, hopefully leveling the playing field for further voluntary actions by all businesses.

The Pandemic Could Not Derail Corporate Sustainability Ambition.

To “Build Back Better,” Biden Must Undo Trump’s Obstruction Legacy
Author
David P. Clarke
Current Issue
March-April 2021
Issue
2
David P. Clarke

Given his stated commitment to an aggressive climate agenda as a top priority, it came as no surprise that on his first day in office President Joe Biden signed an executive order to rejoin the Paris Agreement on climate change.

But now the hard work begins of rebuilding credibility and crafting what experts at a Columbia University webinar said must be a realistic plan to decarbonize the U.S. economy by 2050 to avert dangerous atmospheric warming.

During the January 19 online event, Tufts University professor Kelly Sims Gallagher said the Biden administration’s first step in preparing to participate in the upcoming November meeting of the climate convention parties in Glasgow must be the adoption of a robust domestic climate policy. Under Trump, the United States failed to double its investment in clean energy research and development, didn’t meet its pledge to the Green Climate Fund, and isn’t on track to achieve its 2025 climate targets, she said.

The new administration will also have to review the legacy of Trump’s regulatory rollbacks that included weakening more than 125 environmental rules and erecting barriers to further actions. Biden’s administration must advance its environmental agenda while undoing much if not all of Trump’s deregulatory broadside.

Jump starting the process, Biden chief of staff Ronald Klain in a January 20 memorandum to heads of federal agencies called for a “regulatory freeze pending review.” Biden’s appointees must have an opportunity to review and approve new and pending rules to determine whether they raise “substantial questions of fact, law, or policy.” The outcome of that review should be well worth watching.

If agencies want it, there’s no shortage of advice. The Wilderness Society highlighted Trump’s auctioning off the Arctic National Wildlife to drillers, though lease sales drew only three bidders. But in Trump’s closing months oil companies also applied for over 3,000 drilling permits on western public lands, according to the Bureau of Land Management.

Two environmental groups in a “First Things to Fix” report listed five immediate priorities, including rejoining Paris, stricter automobile emissions standards, far-reaching limitations on National Environmental Policy Act environmental impact assessments — the list goes on and on.

Although every administration adopts 11th hour rules to cement its agenda, Trump has “ushered in an unusually large number of energy and environmental policies,” according to a Washington Post analysis, including more than two dozen since losing the election in November.

Among Trump’s closing actions, EPA’s January 6 Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science Rule qualifies as particularly egregious, an official with an environmental group said privately. It applies to “the majority of what EPA does” — water, climate change, toxic chemicals, and other protections,

Small wonder that the Environmental Defense Fund and other plaintiffs on January 11 filed a lawsuit asking the court to declare EPA’s rule unlawful and enjoin its enforcement until at least 30 days after Federal Register publication. Describing the regulation as an internal “housekeeping rule,” EPA leaders made it effective immediately.

But, the rule’s “entire purpose” is directed at constraining EPA’s “discretion to consider scientific research” when underlying data are not publicly available. Data underlying human studies that are critical for developing health standards are barred for legal and ethical reasons from public disclosure. The rule is a “substantive restriction,” not mere “housekeeping,” the plaintiffs argue.

But EPA’s Science Advisory Board in its final comment letter recognized the rule’s importance and said in some cases the rule could “reduce scientific integrity,” and on February 1 a U.S. District Court accepted a Biden administration request to vacate the regulation.

And it’s not just 11th-hour rules Biden’s team will have to review. In January 2020 Trump’s DOE published a “process rule” that Biden “will have to unwind” because it hampers upgrading energy efficiency standards for dishwashers, refrigerators, and other domestic and commercial appliances and building equipment, says Joanna Mauer, a senior researcher with the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy. As a result of the Trump DOE’s failure to meet more than 20 deadlines for updating efficiency standards, years of carbon emission reductions have been foregone, and economically justifying upgrades are now more complex and slower.

As Trump left the White House to the sound of the military band he had demanded, it was clear at least to some degree the new president will be deflected from building his future-facing agenda by having to undo much of Trump’s backward-moving deregulatory measures.

To “Build Back Better,” Biden Must Undo Trump’s Obstruction Legacy.

Ambitious Agenda Versus Deep Divides
Author
Lynn Scarlett - The Nature Conservancy
The Nature Conservancy
Current Issue
January-February 2021
Issue
1
Parent Article
Can Biden Get the Job Done?

President Trump heralded a theme of energy dominance, with a subtext to “bring back coal.” Five months later, he withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement. He questioned climate science; his agency leaders blotted out references to climate change. And, by October 2020, he had reversed, revised and unraveled well over 120 environmental policies. Many of these revisions unfolded at the Department of the Interior, manager of 20 percent of the nation’s lands.

Despite a few bright spots — for example, signing the Great American Outdoors Act, the administration took the environmental narrative back decades to a framing that pitched economy versus the environment and saw the “deep state” of federal agencies as a problem. The contrast with Joe Biden’s agenda could hardly be greater. Biden would reinstate U.S. leadership on climate and conservation—rejoining the Paris accord, reversing executive orders curtailing climate action, revising pollution regulations, seeking legislation on clean energy, and protecting public lands.

Swinging the pendulum toward a clean energy future will not be easy. No Blue Wave of new Democrats accompanied Biden’s election. Thus, the new president must chart a course toward a cleaner, greener future amid deep political divides.

His first speech set forth his pledge not to divide, but “to unify.” This was visionary, while the hard work is how to realize such unity, especially in the often-fraught realms of natural resources, public lands management, and climate.

For his environmental agenda, four ingredients will be important: public sentiment beyond the beltway; the people who lead his agency teams; his narrative; and how he manages key relationships.

Public sentiments on the environment are not what they seem in national-level campaign polarities. Outside the Beltway, 15 out of 15 conservation ballot measures passed in widely diverse states, bringing $2.2 billion with overwhelming support. Hundreds of companies have set ambitious goals to address climate change. Many, including the forestry and agricultural sectors, see economic opportunity in that pursuit.

With the right people and the right narrative, Biden can tap that well of unity for conservation and climate action. The “people signs” look promising. His transition teams are filled with people of diverse backgrounds, including a sprinkling of Republicans and many people with deep policy knowledge and experience at all levels of government. This team profile sets the stage for hammering out policies that are both feasible and sensitive to tensions and trade-offs.

But what about the narrative? Finding some points of unity will require a 21st century story affirming that environmental and economic benefits interconnect. Clean energy brings job opportunities. Investing in natural infrastructure — coastal reef restoration, floodplain restoration, tree canopy in cities, and more — helps protect communities from floods, manage stormwater, reduce extreme heat, and often does so at less cost than traditional sea walls, pipes, and concrete. Better, cheaper, greener, smarter investments that bring jobs constitute a motivating narrative.

The ultimate test for unity, though, resides in relationships. Biden has those relationships — with Republican and Democrat senators, with governors, with former cabinet officials. In this era of top-down congressional governing, finding common ground with Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is essential. Republican governors are also key players — during Obama’s tenure, it was their lawsuits that slowed ambitious clean energy action — and they will be important on public lands issues, as well.

Focusing on solutions to shared problems — like risks from extreme fires and storms and COVID economic recovery — and on opportunities for jobs and innovation linked to investing in nature and clean energy provides a starting place. The rest will depend on complicated dynamics that juxtapose the need for everyone to get things done versus partisan positioning and the tensions between ambitious outcomes and feasible politics.

Louisiana's Approach Government-Wide
Author
Charles Sutcliffe - Louisiana Office of the Governor
Louisiana Office of the Governor
Current Issue
January-February 2021
Issue
1
Parent Article
Preparing for Climate Disasters

In addition to the pandemic, Louisiana has been tragically impacted by five named storms between May and November. These multiple disasters have highlighted, yet again, how the underlying strengths or weaknesses of the economic, social, and environmental conditions of the communities they strike play a large role in how these disasters have unfolded.

While there is universal agreement that pre-disaster planning and mitigation activities are preferred to reactionary, post-disaster interventions, we must do more than simply adjust our timing. The methods by which we design and direct resilience investments must also be calibrated to meet the complexity and interconnectedness of today’s challenges while keeping an eye on tomorrow’s.

This approach requires new tools and new ways of working together to manage the multifaceted challenges of climate adaptation.

Louisiana’s Comprehensive Master Plan for a Sustainable Coast, currently in its third iteration, has been the gold standard for comprehensively addressing our state’s increasing risk from coastal flooding and land loss.

Fundamentally based in science and informed by public input, the master plan process considers multiple analytical challenges over a 50-year time horizon. The plan produces a final list of projects eligible for state funding that are deemed the most effective at reducing damages from flooding and building or maintaining land.

Thanks to the coastal master plan, Louisiana makes strategic investments before disaster strikes, but it also allows the state to put new funding to good use when the inevitable does happen.

Guided by the coastal master plan, Louisiana has made investments that have improved 336 miles of levee and benefitted more than 75 square miles of coastal habitat over the last 15 years.

In 50 years, however, an investment of $50 billion is still likely to result in the loss of an additional 2,900 square miles of coast due to sea-level rise and other factors. This level of change will mean the state must not only continue to prepare for the direct impacts of land loss and flooding, but also adapt to longer-term, slower-moving challenges that will indirectly result from our changing coast.

For these reasons, Louisiana is beginning to evolve and broaden its approach to coastal adaptation and resilience-building so that the solutions can be as comprehensive as the problem. Rather than continuing to rely on a single agency to address the coastal crisis, we are taking steps to move to an all-of-government approach.

By defining the problem in its broadest terms and including more state agencies in the development of solutions, Louisiana will bring more tools and different types of expertise to the task of planning for and mitigating the economic and social implications of our degrading coastline. We can begin leveraging relevant state programs to meet common goals for our state — like preserving our cultural heritage and our working coast.

We can begin aligning policies so that post-disaster interventions incorporate more forward-looking activities and do so more uniformly. And we can begin the necessary and sometimes challenging task of taking bold new actions that will produce meaningful results for our environment, our economy, and our communities.

Pre-disaster investment is critical, but so is recognizing that the best way to improve the resilience of our communities is to craft comprehensive and inclusive solutions that are able to address the complex problems we face.

There will never be a single funding program large enough to meet all of the needs of states and communities at risk from climate change. But by collaborating across government around a common challenge with a common vision for the future, we can maximize the benefits of the funding that is available, be creative about how we invest in solutions to problems to achieve multiple benefits, and better support the people who need it the most.

How to Not Over-Engineer our Future
Author
Jessie Ritter - National Wildlife Federation
National Wildlife Federation
Current Issue
January-February 2021
Issue
1
Parent Article
Preparing for Climate Disasters

If there has been one uniting principle in disaster policy over the past several years, it is the recognition that we must invest in community resilience efforts before the next hurricane, flood, or wildfire strikes. We have seen increasing funding for efforts to “pre-spond” to disasters. The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s new Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities Program is perhaps the most prominent example, but states and localities are also in the game. In addition, an economic recovery package under the incoming Biden administration will likely fund proactive infrastructure upgrades.

As states and local communities choose which projects to pursue, the first question they should ask is, What role are natural systems — such as floodplains, wetlands, forests, and oyster reefs — playing in protecting my community, and can that role be enhanced? To see the wisdom in beginning with this question, we should consider that an engineering design to safeguard communities today may actually undermine future resilience.

For example, decades of development-oriented engineering efforts in South Florida constructed a complex system of canals and water control structures, which have starved the Everglades of water and fueled toxic algal outbreaks on the coasts. The state and federal governments are now investing billions to functionally undo this “re-plumbing” of the great swamp, which is a critical hurricane buffer for South Florida.

Similarly, the Mississippi River was straight-jacketed with improved levees after the devastating floods of 1927. What seemed an appropriate decision at the time is a costly one today. In the Midwest, levees and other engineered structures constrain the river and contribute to higher and increasingly frequent floods. Downstream, the state of Louisiana is scrambling to fund its $50 billion Coastal Master Plan, which will, in part, create controlled openings in the levees to allow the river’s sand and sediment to rebuild the rapidly-eroding delta, as it did naturally for millennia.

This lesson applies to disaster mitigation today. It is better to work with nature, not against it. To be clear, natural systems cannot solve every resilience challenge. In some places, structural solutions are the only reasonable recourse. But rather than defaulting to building bigger, higher, stronger bulkheads, levees, dams, and ditches to shield our communities, we need a paradigm shift that looks first at our natural defenses.

By not considering nature first, we are leaving money and other benefits on the table. A large and growing body of research demonstrates that natural infrastructure provides measurable risk reduction benefits, and is often the most cost-effective way to reduce risk (nwf.org/protective-value-of-nature). Natural infrastructure also frequently enhances the quality of life in communities — by improving water quality, increasing the numbers of birds and fish, and creating new recreational opportunities.

Unlike concrete and steel, natural systems have the capacity to recover from disasters and adapt to ongoing changes. For example, wetlands and mangroves can migrate inland and oyster reefs can grow taller in response to gradual sea-level rise.

There is more to do to ensure these investments are truly sustainable. We must continue to expand our understanding of how natural defenses perform, and when they are most effective. As states and local governments undertake hazard planning, we also must ensure they have the tools needed to identify, and protect or restore, natural systems with risk reduction potential. We need to guarantee that communities themselves drive the decisions about resilience investments, and that as we deploy nature to enhance local quality of life, we avoid environmental gentrification effects. Finally, we must look across sectors and agencies to ensure that natural defenses are equally accessible options for communities from regulatory and funding perspectives.

Natural infrastructure should be our first and favored defense as we prepare for a changing climate. To best protect communities, we should strive to have disaster planning and spending reflect this consensus.

Can Biden Get the Job Done?
Author
Jeremy Bernstein - InsideEPA
InsideEPA
Current Issue
January-February 2021
Issue
1
Can Biden Get the Job Done?

Joe Biden may not have been the first presidential candidate to have pledged to address climate change and environmental justice, but he is the first to have developed such ambitious plans — and to have made implementing them top-tier priorities. “Our nation is grappling with a pandemic, an economic crisis, powerful calls for racial justice, and the existential threat of climate change,” Biden said shortly after winning the election. “We can’t simply go back to the way things were before. The team being assembled will meet these challenges on Day One and build us back better.” Build us back better has become his slogan and foreshadows both his environmental aspirations and his starting point, with many of the Obama-Biden administration’s achievements undercut or undone and huge challenges like the pandemic, the jobs crisis, crumbling infrastructure, and worsening climate impacts looming.

While his plans may be ambitious, implementing them in the face of a narrowly divided Senate, a resurgent House GOP, and a conservative Supreme Court will almost certainly temper Biden’s options. So too will former President Donald Trump, who, regardless of whether he runs for re-election in 2024, will be tweeting from the sidelines, urging his supporters to defend his deregulatory record.

“One thing is for certain: if Joe Biden shuffles into the White House, he will do so lacking any kind of mandate to make energy more expensive, restrict the use of our domestic natural resources, ban fracking on federal lands, or impose a carbon tax or other restrictive carbon policies on the American public,” says Tom Pyle, president of the American Energy Alliance, who led Trump’s Energy Department transition team. Still, there may be some smaller-bore options for bipartisan cooperation to address climate change, especially given what some Democrats see as a shift in Republican attitudes. “The folks who used to come to the floor and rail about Chinese hoaxes and fake science — all that has been shut up,” says Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI). ”We are just not hearing any of that nonsense any longer.”

Although Congress is unlikely to provide major legislative victories, there is no shortage of regulatory, administrative, and other executive options the incoming administration is considering. But it is not clear whether such actions will satisfy a range of progressive groups, whose leaders are warning that failure to deliver on his campaign promises will lead to a loss of support from many of the youth voters who fueled his campaign. “Joe Biden [is] about to get whiplash from how quickly young people turn back into his harshest critics if he doesn’t deliver on the political mandate this election delivered,” the climate-focused Sunrise Movement said in a statement after Biden’s win. “We showed up to vote Trump out with clearer margins than any generation. We expect results.”

Politics aside, cutting greenhouse gases is widely viewed as an imperative, especially given the effects of Trump rollbacks and the slowdown in constraining emissions. “The impact of the Trump administration on emissions has been significant, but the actual regulatory rollbacks were only part of it,” says Trevor Houser of the Rhodium Group. “The bigger impact was four years of lost federal policy action.”

Entering the White House after the unprecedented deregulatory actions of the Trump administration, Biden will have his work cut out — especially given his primary initial focus on the coronavirus pandemic and its economic fallout. “I expect to see all levers of the federal government mobilized in appropriate ways to at first repeal very pernicious policies of the Trump administration and then set forth an attractive affirmative agenda,” says Ricky Revesz, the Lawrence King professor of law at New York University. But reversing many of Trump’s rollbacks will take years — especially if incoming officials hope to avoid imitating the string of litigation losses racked up by their predecessors’ shoddy rulemaking practices — so Biden is also expected to quickly sign executive orders, step up enforcement actions, and take other steps that can have immediate effects.

Some are also suggesting Biden declare a climate “emergency,” which will authorize use of a range of budget, enforcement, and other tools to address climate change without congressional action. Certainly President Trump made use of this authority in diverting funds from the Pentagon to his border wall.

Much of the agenda will be guided by campaign plans. For example, his initial Plan for a Clean Energy Revolution and Environmental Justice — which was developed by a unity task force Biden created with Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) as an alternative to the Green New Deal — promises a range of short- and longer-term actions, including, on Day One rejoining the Paris Agreement, setting an economy-wide target of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 and a carbon-free power sector by 2035, and rescinding Trump’s deregulatory executive orders. EPA will immediately be ordered to restore “aggressive” methane limits for new and existing oil and gas operations. The agency will have to set “rigorous” fuel economy standards for light- and medium-duty vehicles to eventually achieve zero emissions and require annual fuel-efficiency “improvements” for heavy-duty trucks, the plan says. On public lands, Biden is promising to impose a moratorium on new oil and gas leases, restore the Obama-era moratorium on new coal leasing, reintroduce climate analysis into National Environmental Policy Act reviews, encourage renewable energy projects, and reconsider land management plans. But faced with a 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court, such rules could face some high hurdles. For example, approaches like the Obama-era Clean Power Plan, which sought to regulate greenhouse gases across the power sector, are unlikely to pass muster.

Within his first 100 days as president, Biden also promised to convene a climate world summit to persuade other leaders to “join the United States in making more ambitious national pledges, above and beyond the commitments they have already made.” His related Plan to Secure Environmental Justice and Equitable Economic Opportunity in a Clean Energy Future calls for strengthening the Clinton-era Executive Order 12898. When implemented, this should increase enforcement to protect fence-line and other vulnerable communities, and strengthen environmental monitoring requirements. It will require EPA to create new, real-time notification requirements for communities exposed to facility releases, and ensure neighborhoods are engaged in any remediation planning. And it will set a range of environmental cleanup standards to address widespread contamination from troublesome PFASs —per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances.

Biden later detailed an even more ambitious climate plan, serving as much to spell out his policy agenda as to unite opposing labor, environmental, and other factions within the Democratic coalition. Framed around a pledge for at least $2 trillion in clean energy-related investments within four years, his subsequent proposal outlines a range of additional commitments. These include building modern infrastructure, long on policymakers’ wish list. Biden also wants to position the auto sector to “win the 21st century” while the nation achieves a “carbon pollution free” power sector by 2035. The proposal would make dramatic investments in energy efficiency in buildings, require a “historic investment” in clean energy innovation, and advance “sustainable agriculture and conservation.”

Although Biden is not expected to target natural gas in the direct way that President Obama’s regulations went after coal, whatever regulatory policies he imposes on methane from the oil and gas sector and emissions standards for new power plants, together with large investments in wind, solar, and other clean renewables, are nevertheless expected to eventually drive natural gas and other fossil fuels out of the market. “De-carbonization isn’t a debate — it’s a fossil-fuel death sentence,” says Kevin Book, managing partner of ClearView Energy Partners, a consulting firm. “It means a resource is going off the grid. That is the inevitable implication.”

To address such far-reaching challenges, Biden is taking a “whole of government” approach, implementing a policy architecture across the federal system while reinventing parts of it too. “From the very beginning of the campaign, when President-elect Biden rolled out his climate plan, he made it clear he sees this as an all-of-government agenda, domestic, economic, foreign policy,” says Stef Feldman, Biden’s campaign policy director. “From the very beginning, when he talked about infrastructure, he talked about making sure that it built in climate change, that we are making our communities more resilient to the effects of climate change.”

EPA and Interior will certainly be mobilized, but so too will Agriculture, Transportation, Treasury, and other departments that can focus on climate change without the need for congressional action. Biden has already made clear, for example, that he will re-orient the Transportation Department to advance deployment of electric vehicles and their charging infrastructure. A post-election discussion with General Motors’ CEO Mary Barra about building 550,000 EV charging stations may already have borne results: days later, the company dropped its support for the Trump administration’s scaled-back fuel economy standards. Biden also has called for climate measures at the Treasury Department that promote carbon reductions through tax, budget, and regulatory policies. Other options include creation of a “carbon bank” under the Agriculture Department’s Commodity Credit Corporation that could pay farmers and other landowners to sequester carbon, and changes to the department’s crop insurance program to develop healthier soils.

Of particular interest are agencies overseeing the financial system, including the Securities & Exchange Commission and the Federal Reserve. For example, Biden has already called for the SEC to craft a regulation requiring corporations to disclose climate risks and greenhouse gas emissions. Similarly, the Federal Reserve is expected to soon join the Network of Central Banks and Supervisors for Greening the Financial System, the global coalition dedicated to dealing with risks posed by climate change, though membership is conditional on Biden’s return to the Paris Agreement. And the new administration is expected to undo a Labor Department rule restricting environmental, social, and governance investing.

Biden’s climate and environmental justice plans provide broad frameworks to address not only adverse environmental effects of climate change and ambient pollution but also a governing agenda across a range of policy areas, including infrastructure, economic development, and finance. “There is no more consequential challenge that we must meet in the next decade than the onrushing climate crisis,” Biden says. “When Donald Trump thinks about climate change, the only word he can muster is ‘hoax.’ When I think about climate change, the word I think of is ‘jobs.’”

To oversee such a wide-ranging agenda, the incoming administration is likely to take a series of steps to restructure the federal government, starting with the White House itself. Biden has already tapped John Kerry, the former secretary of state and architect of the Paris Agreement, to serve as a presidential climate envoy with a seat on the National Security Council. “For the first time ever, there will be a principal on the National Security Council who will make sure climate change is on the agenda in the Situation Room,” Biden says. The new president also plans to create a domestic climate czar to elevate the issue in the White House, along with the creation of a National Climate Council — that is to be co-equal to the Domestic Policy Council and the National Economic Council — that will coordinate actions across federal agencies.

To bolster consideration of environmental justice concerns, Biden has also called for elevating EPA’s National Environmental Justice Advisory Council into a White House office to advise policymakers, and for creating the White House Environmental Justice Interagency Council to coordinate government-wide efforts. Both will be reporting to the Council on Environmental Quality. And he promises to “overhaul” EPA’s civil rights office to “ensure it brings justice to frontline communities that experience the worst impacts of climate change and fence-line communities that are located adjacent to pollution sources.” He added, “For too long” the office has “ignored its requirements under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. That will end in the Biden administration.”

The president-elect also pledged to “strategically support ongoing plaintiff-driven climate litigation against polluters,” bringing federal resources to the ongoing court battles that teen plaintiffs have been waging against oil and gas companies, but which have become mired in procedural disputes. Such an effort would be aided by his plan to create an Environmental & Climate Justice Division within the Department of Justice that would complement the existing Environment and Natural Resources Division.

“This represents a significant escalation in potential liability risk for fossil fuel companies, as not only does the federal government possess greater resources to prosecute such actions, but it is possible that the DOJ may bring enforcement actions under an aggressive theory of liability in addition to the civil tort actions currently prevalent,” says Jacob Hupart, a lawyer who has represented oil and gas companies. And should Biden depart from the Trump administration’s view that such litigation is preempted by federal law, “then the legal position of fossil fuel companies in the existing climate change lawsuits may also be under additional pressure.”

To staff such efforts, Biden has already selected experienced personnel, many with a history of dealing with climate change in the Obama administration. His initial high-level cabinet appointments — including Secretary of State Tony Blinken and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen — have lengthy resumes advocating for actions to address climate change. “What I see is a growing recognition on both sides of the aisle that climate change is a very serious concern and that action needs to occur,” says Yellen, the former chair of the Federal Reserve. She has long called for a carbon tax with a dividend paid to taxpayers.

Others have seen the effects of climate change up close. Ron Klain, the new White House chief of staff, led the Obama’s administration’s response to the Ebola outbreak, an experience that made clear the connections between climate change and deadly diseases. “As the Earth’s climate alters, we are seeing changes in where and how humans live; these changes increase the risk that deadly diseases will emerge and spread more rapidly,” Klain wrote in 2017 with Brian Deese, Obama’s former climate advisor, whom Biden has tapped to lead his National Economic Council. “While the interactions between climate change and disease are hard to predict with certainty, the scientific linkages are unmistakable. If we fail to integrate planning for the impact of climate change with planning for the prevention and management of pandemic disease, the consequences will be deadly,” they wrote.

Getting nominees confirmed by the narrowly divided Senate will be a heavy lift for some. Neera Tanden, whom Biden has picked to lead the Office of Management and Budget, is “radioactive,” says Senator John Cornyn (R-TX). But Biden will only be able to make some selections if they can first run the gauntlet of progressive groups over their ties to fossil fuel and other corporate entities. A case in point: Representative Cedric Richmond (D-LA), whom Biden has tapped as a senior advisor and director of the White House Office of Public Engagement, with a broad portfolio that initially will include climate and other issues. Richmond’s appointment “feels like a betrayal,” the Sunrise Movement said after his selection, “because one of President-elect Biden’s very first hires for his new administration has taken more donations from the fossil fuel industry during his congressional career than nearly any other Democrat, cozied up to Big Oil and Gas, and stayed silent and ignored meeting with organizations in his own community while they suffered from toxic pollution and sea-level rise.”

Such criticisms have turned frosty the goodwill that had built up between Biden’s team and Sanders-aligned groups, who face the risk of being tuned out. “They can either continue to just beat the drums on the streets or they can start to leverage the relationship they have. It’s up to them which strategy they adopt,” says one Democrat in touch with Biden’s team.

Such tensions also reflect a stormy debate among Democrats in Congress, where moderates and progressives are arrayed in a circular firing squad over who is to blame for surprising electoral losses that have left Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) with the smallest majority in 18 years and limited legislative prospects. Many moderates blame progressive policies like the Green New Deal and calls to ban fracking for such losses. “We pay the price for these unprofessional and unrealistic comments about a number of issues, whether it is about [defunding] the police or [banning] shale gas,” says Representative Conor Lamb (D-PA), who held onto his gas-heavy district in western Pennsylvania. “Those things aren’t just unpopular, they’re completely unrealistic, and they aren’t going to happen. And they amount to false promises by the people that call for them.”

But progressives, like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), author of the Green New Deal, are promising to continue pushing their agenda through the 2022 mid-term elections, a ballot that has usually seen the president’s party lose seats. Ocasio-Cortez, who co-chaired the Biden-Sanders unity task force on climate change with Kerry, says she expects Biden to make good on his promises. “We’re not going to forget about that agreement, for the sake of an election, are we? What we’re gonna do is that we’re going to organize and demand that this administration — which I believe is decent, and kind, and honorable — keep their promise,” she says. Corralling such a fractured caucus will be a tough road for Pelosi, who has promised an array of climate legislation early in the new Congress, including measures recommitting the United States to the Paris Agreement, and requiring states to account for climate change before implementing federally funded infrastructure projects — and to meet certain greenhouse gas emission goals when they accept the funding.

Still, there may be opportunities for some bipartisan House progress on environmental policy. Representative Debbie Dingell (D-MI), the lead sponsor of comprehensive bipartisan legislation to regulate PFAS releases under the pollution control statutes, says she plans to re-introduce her bill in January and quickly advance it “to keep the pressure on and signal to the incoming administration that this is a top priority of the Congress. We think this can be a fast environmental win.” Dingell says that she is working with House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Frank Pallone (D-NJ) to quickly advance the legislation. Dingell says she also plans additional PFAS legislation “where possible,” including banning the use of PFAS in food contact containers and cosmetics. But even as she prepares to act, Dingell says that she and her supporters are also working with incoming administration officials to help them “knock out PFAS regulations that won’t require an act of Congress.”

Winning Republican support for such measures may have been possible in the past, when GOP lawmakers from contaminated districts backed Dingell’s legislation, especially given the Trump administration’s reluctance to regulate. But with a Biden administration now expected to do some of the heavy lifting, Republicans may not have the same incentives. “Before people run out and file legislation [to address PFAS] you really want to make sure you’ve got everything, that all the consequences that this could affect, because if you don’t, you can have real serious consequences out there on what you’re doing and what’s happening in the market,” says Bob Latta (R-OH), a top Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

Prospects for bipartisan agreement on affirmative policies face similar hurdles in the Senate, where key Republican and Democratic leaders of the energy and environment committees hail from fossil-energy states. Senator John Barrasso (R-WY), who is slated to lead the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, has promised to keep his state’s abundant coal and gas resources at the center of his agenda. His Democratic counterpart is Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV), another fossil-fuel friendly senator who has a mixed environmental record. West Virginia Senator Shelley Moore Capito will lead Republicans on the Environment and Public Works Committee, where Senator Tom Carper (D-DE) will serve as her Democratic counterpart.

Despite their home-state biases, these lawmakers have previously cut deals that could provide a model for legislating in the Biden era. Barrasso, Capito, and Carper struck a legislative agreement in 2019 that led to an initial round of regulations on PFAS, such as Toxics Release Inventory reporting requirements and prohibiting future uses of some chemicals that have been phased out. Additional measures could be in the works, especially given that Capito has listed new drinking water standards for the chemicals as a priority.

Barrasso and Capito both back legislation that supports carbon capture from coal and other combustion, including tax credits and research, bills that Rhode Island’s Whitehouse also supports. That Democrat is also leading bipartisan measures to reduce emissions across a range of industry sectors, including bills to create voluntary greenhouse gas credit markets for the agriculture and forestry sectors, preserve existing nuclear power plants, encourage low-carbon manufacturing, support carbon capture and sequestration research, and phase down the use of hydrofluorocarbons with a high global warming potential.

Another possible area of agreement is including climate provisions in infrastructure spending legislation, an approach that the Senate environment committee has already adopted on a bipartisan basis and is strongly supported by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. A bill the committee unanimously approved in 2019 provided $10.8 billion over five years for GHG-reduction measures, including $3 billion in new funding for states to support projects that lower highway-related emissions, as well as additional regulatory and financial incentives for states to conduct emissions planning and lower per-capita emissions. However, the infrastructure bill never came up for a vote on the Senate floor after environmentalists objected to provisions exempting some natural gas projects from NEPA reviews and other permit-streamlining measures.

But with a President Biden in the White House eager to cut deals with Republicans, such compromises may be the bitter pill that Democrats and environmentalists may have to swallow to make some progress on addressing climate change, environmental justice, and other critical issues. TEF

COVER STORY “Build us back better” has become his slogan and foreshadows both his environmental aspirations and his starting point, with many of the Obama-Biden administration’s achievements undercut or undone and huge challenges looming.

We Need Data to Lower Lower Carbon Dioxide Footprints
Author
Nanette Lockwood - Trane Technologies
Trane Technologies
Current Issue
January-February 2021
Issue
1
Parent Article
Handprints v. Footprints

The information gap on real-time carbon emissions from electric power plants continues to be a barrier for home and other building owners who want to reduce their carbon footprints. Emissions from generation change throughout the day, and some sources, especially those commonly dispatched during peak loads, can be significantly more carbon intensive. Without knowing the hourly emissions profile of their electricity use, once owners have exhausted efficiency gains they can only rely on conservation, reducing the amount of electricity used, rather than creatively managing when it is used.

In 2019, Trane Technologies created the Gigaton Challenge, which pledges a reduction in its customers’ emissions by one gigaton of CO2-equivalent by 2030. The lack of transparency of electricity generation emissions on an hourly basis makes this more challenging, since home and building automation systems optimize energy consumption from some of the largest electricity consuming devices, like HVAC systems, based on the time of day.

Real-time emissions data is a crucially missing piece of information for optimizing energy use in homes and other buildings. While both electric costs and emissions levels are generally correlated — higher electricity prices typically mean higher levels of emissions — that is not always the case. Without this data, it is difficult to optimize building heating and cooling systems based on the emissions profile of the grid. While it is easier to find the real-time price of electricity for customers who live inside organized wholesale markets, it is far more difficult — if not impossible — to determine the relevant required emissions information elsewhere.

In addition to challenging achievement of Trane Technologies’ goals, this lack of transparency limits quantification of emissions reductions policies. As electrification begins for traditionally fossil-fueled technologies such as vehicles, furnaces, and boilers, the true emissions impact will be unclear. Implied in the promise of beneficial electrification is the idea that the grid will become increasingly carbon-neutral, as increasing amounts of solar and wind energy replace traditional technologies such as coal and natural gas generation. The key challenge, however, is that renewable energy production is often unpredictable, which makes it difficult to know exactly which hours of the day HVAC systems should be running if their goal is to reduce emissions from the grid.

Trane Technologies supports a standardized emissions regime that enables building owners and policymakers to track emissions on a more timely and accurate basis. As it stands, the only widely available emissions data in the United States is published by EPA through its Emissions & Generation Resource Integrated Database, known better as eGRID. While these values are instructive, they are not granular and dynamic enough to be of use to optimize energy consumption. Emissions rates published by eGRID are annual average values, calculated by dividing total emissions by total megawatt-hour production for U.S. regions. This is not useful for building operators, who make decisions to operate HVAC equipment on an hour-to-hour basis.

Electric operators turn on power plants in line with demand. As the demand increases, more expensive (and dirtier) plants come online. This move up the generation supply stack frequently means shifting from emissions-free nuclear and hydro-electric resources to natural gas and coal-fired power plants. Naturally, this means that the emissions rates for the grid increase in line with the sources. An average annual emissions rate as provided by eGRID is insufficient to account for these intraday movements. A back of the envelope analysis of eGRID values finds that the emissions can be 50 percent higher or more than average annual values.

The capability to adjust to dynamic energy prices exists for homeowners and building operators of all types. What continues to be missing is the data transparency to realize that potential.

Handprints v. Footprints
Author
Stephen Harper - Intel Corporation
Intel Corporation
Current Issue
January-February 2021
Issue
1
Handprints v. Footprints

Every company contributes to climate change. That direct, negative impact is often referred to metaphorically as a corporate footprint. At the same time, the information, communications, and technology sector — or ICT as we’ll refer to it — is virtually unique in having a significant handprint. The handprint metaphor captures the fact that while ICT devices and networks embody carbon in their manufacturing, supply chain, and use, overall their applications in networks employed throughout society reduce greenhouse gas emissions more than they create them. And the good news is that ICT companies are here to help you reduce your footprint too.

So, what follows are some examples of handprints as well as of how government policies can promote a more rapid scaling of this effect to accelerate the transition to a net zero carbon world.

Why net zero? The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the global expert body responsible for assessing the science, issued a report in 2018 concluding that keeping future warming in the atmosphere to below 1.5 degrees Celsius is necessary to avoid the worst potential consequences of climate change. This temperature limit, in turn, translates into achieving net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. These goals were a significant increase in ambition for the UN agency. The previous assessment pointed to 2.0 degrees and an 80 percent reduction by 2050.

Despite the strength of the scientific consensus behind these goals, the last four years of federal policymaking in the United States has been characterized by an almost-rabid backtracking by the Trump administration with respect to previous American commitments and pledges. Withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, replacing the Clean Power Plan, and reversing progress in auto fuel economy are just the most visible decisions undoing policy progress under President Obama.

Despite these federal policy reversals, the United States has made progress in reducing its GHG emissions. Indeed, during the mid-to late-2010s, total U.S. emission reductions have outpaced those of the European Union, which typically takes the moral high ground in this realm. This cut is largely due to three factors, namely the rapid shift in electricity generation from coal to natural gas, state-level renewable energy mandates, and leadership by American firms in making and delivering on GHG reduction commitments. One can only imagine what would have been accomplished if these efforts had been matched by an overarching federal program to coordinate and build on the achievements.

While the U.S. government has backtracked, the other big emitters have increased their ambition. The EU is pursuing its Green Deal, targeting a 55 percent reduction in emissions by 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2050, as per the IPCC’s latest goal. And China recently announced what is for them a very ambitious target, carbon neutrality by 2060. The Chinese are busy reflecting this goal in the development of their 14th Five-Year Plan.

The results of the U.S. election mean that one can assume that this policy asymmetry between the United States and the Chinese and EU may improve. Complementing continued leadership by many states — both blue and red — on mandating renewable power, we can expect Washington to legislating and implementing a wide variety of new policies. And policy progress is critical to meeting the climate change challenge, which will require nothing short of reinventing the way we generate, distribute, and use energy.

Where does my industry fit in this frame? Intuitively, perhaps, the energy embedded in ICT products and the electricity consumption associated with their use would suggest the industry has a large footprint and is a big part of the climate problem. This perception dates to the early 2000s and the first California energy crisis, which some blamed on data center growth — although ultimately the blame was laid at the feet of a badly designed electricity market and predacious behavior by some market participants like Enron. Indeed, around this time Forbes magazine published an article entitled “Dig More Coal, The PCs Are Coming.” But for now, while estimates vary, a reasonable sizing of the ICT industry’s share of global electricity consumption is approximately 4 percent, while its portion of global carbon emissions is less than 2 percent, according to a recent report by the Information Technology Industry Foundation. Focusing solely on U.S. data centers, a recent EPA-commissioned analysis by Lawrence Berkeley Labs determined that, in recent years, while the amount of data being processed in data centers has exploded dramatically, the total amount of electricity consumed in this process has in fact leveled off or declined slightly.

The foundation’s conclusion: “Alarmists claim the tech sector’s carbon footprint is mushrooming out of control. But they wildly misrepresent the facts. Not only is the ICT sector making significant progress in decarbonizing, but ICT is also a powerful technology that enables other sectors to become more efficient.”

This ability of the ICT sector — the entire network, including microchips, computers, Internet of Things sensors, smartphones and tablets, data centers, and networking equipment — to enable other sectors to improve their energy efficiency has been called various things. The American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy has called it “Intelligent Efficiency.” The Alliance to Save Energy uses the term “Active Efficiency.” The International Energy Agency terms it “Digitalization.” Most recently, Intel and others have used the handprint-versus-footprint terminology used here.

The metaphor of an environmental footprint has of course been in use since “tread lightly on the Earth” posters during Earth Day. Whatever the terms, all companies, all industries, and all people have a footprint in terms of GHG emissions. The ICT industry has reduced its footprint and helps offset it via its wide handprint, the role of our technology in helping other sectors (and ours too of course) reduce their footprints. The concept of a handprint is much newer. And while other industries can claim some handprint impact (aluminum, for example, can help the auto industry reduce weight and thereby improve fuel economy), the ICT industry probably is unique in the breadth and extent of its handprint impact.

To better understand the handprint metaphor, let’s list some concrete examples of the phenomenon in action. Recent analysis by the ITU, a UN-affiliated international institution central to the global governance of the radio spectrum, classifies the climate-beneficial impacts of ICT systems into the discrete realms of climate monitoring, climate change mitigation, and climate change adaptation.

In the world of climate monitoring, ICT systems include weather satellites that can track the progress of hurricanes, typhoons, tornadoes, forest fires, and other potential indicators of climate change. Satellites and artificial intelligence software can also be instrumental in monitoring sea-level rise, enabling governmental agencies to map areas that need to enhance their resilience, and hence the survival of physical human infrastructure as well as natural habitat and sensitive ecosystems. The over-arching network that provides these benefits is the Global Observing System, a function of the World Meteorological Organization.

A significant percentage of world greenhouse gas emissions can be attributed to the growing, storing, transporting, selling, consumption — and wasting — of food. A wide variety of ICT systems play a role in this literal food chain, from sensors that monitor soil conditions to sensors that track the progress of food through the supply chain to the supermarket. In another agricultural realm, satellites can monitor deforestation as well as biomass growth as a result of reforestation and afforestation. Monitoring and quantification of biomass growth can be key to generating credits as part of established carbon markets. Here again, environmental and economic benefits obtain.

In the climate change mitigation realm, examples of ICT’s handprint contribution include energy-efficiency benefits, especially in the realm of end-use energy consumption. Virtually anything labelled as smart — cities, homes, buildings, and those new interactive speakers — generally involves the application of ICT devices and networks to optimize the energy performance of the system being managed. Smart home and building applications of digital technology include so-called “digital twining” tools that can be used to create virtual models of existing or proposed homes or buildings that can be used to simulate the energy-efficiency impacts of various design or retrofit options.

Further, increasing the ability of electricity grids to incorporate intermittent renewable energy sources is aided through advanced data analytics that are key to meeting the real-time balancing requirement facing grid managers. Perhaps most creatively, ICTs can play a role in addressing one of the biggest challenges inhibiting the further growth of renewable energy, namely the curtailment of renewable sources when the supply of such energy is excess to the grid’s requirements.

Most grids are based on fossil-fueled baseline generation that can be counted on to run 24/7 and can be increased or decreased as needed by consumers. Inherently variable renewable sources, absent adequate, affordable storage, can either generate too much or too little power. When the sun shines and the wind blows, grid managers may have to curtail their purchase of renewables due to the need for real-time supply-versus-demand balancing. ICT can not only help monitor and balance these loads, but a new idea being pioneered by Andrew Chien (University of Chicago) and Sangwon Suh and Jiajia Zheng (UC Santa Barbara) could help mitigate the problem. Their idea essentially is to identify data center computational “jobs” that can be time- and location-shifted, then transported over the Internet to be run in data centers where, real-time, there is an excess supply of renewables that would otherwise be curtailed.

Back on the farm, “precision agriculture” utilizes in-field sensors and GPS to track variability in soil conditions throughout a field. It allows optimizing the application of water, fertilizer, and pesticides to most efficiently maximize production with a minimum of inputs. This has environmental benefits as well as benefits to farmers’ bottom lines and is already proving popular with progressive growers.

The handprint plays a role in climate adaptation as well. Satellite imagery, GPS applications, and data analytics provide critical communications capabilities to first responders and distressed communities in dealing with weather or climate disasters. These same technologies play a key role in forward-thinking conservation, enabling planners and environmentalists to identify and prioritize certain areas for preservation. In a coastal ecosystem, for example, planners can use these technologies and sea-level rise models to target for preservation habitats that are likely to remain above the rising water levels.

Realizing the full handprint potential of ICT applications will not happen on its own. The technologies mentioned above are all on-the-shelf and already in, or
ready for, application. Behind them in the queue are a vast array of other on-the-drawing-board technologies waiting for a market. The newly burgeoning fields of the Internet of Things and AI promise vast new possibilities. So far, so good, but this is an arena where supportive public policies can play a crucial role. In somewhat simplified terms, companies and individuals invest in new technologies in two circumstances — either they must, due to some government mandate, or they want to, because of perceived cost savings, or both.

But there are no public policy magic bullets to promote handprint markets. Regulators are familiar with various policy levers to reduce the footprint of the ICT sector. The Energy Star program in the United States, the ErP Directive in Europe, and multiple requirements and labels in China all represent the Carpenter Principle: When you have a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail. Regulators know how to reduce the ICT footprint, but they aren’t as familiar with means to increase the ICT handprint.

The classic example of this failure can be found in the European Union. Back in 2010, the European Commission launched what they termed the “ICT for Energy Efficiency Forum.” This was a commission-industry co-chaired initiative that, at its launch event, was pledged to focus on both the footprint and the handprint, although those terms were not used. Indeed, the initiative launched a workgroup focused on “enabling energy efficiency in other sectors using technology where there is greatest scope for energy efficiency improvements and emissions reductions: transport and logistics, buildings and construction, and energy supply, based on a snapshot of cities as a systemic way of looking at all sectors.” Great words and grand plans. Unfortunately, sod all for the handprint.

Fast forward to today and the Green Deal and the Circular Economy, two recent, significant policy thrusts in the mid-pandemic European Union. (Do not confuse the EU Green Deal with the proposal for a Green New Deal in the United States.) What do the Green Deal and the Circular Economy have to say about the handprint? The baseline premise of the Green Deal is that Europe will be climate neutral by 2050, in line with the IPCC’s recommendation. The European Commission has opined that “digitalization is an enabler of decarbonization” in all sectors of the EU economy. The commission places heavy emphasis, and rightly so, on the role of data and data analysis as key to delivering on the digital decarbonization promise. But despite some righteous words about the handprint, a casual perusal of the various reports and policy documents issued by the commission and its consultants makes it clear that, as far as ICT and the Green Deal are concerned, the focus is primarily on the footprint. This is even though some of the documents make it clear that ICTs can reduce more greenhouse gas emissions than they create.

Why is the EU seemingly so shortsighted? Mostly, I think that is due to the nail and hammer effect. Regulators know how to regulate the efficiency of ICT devices; how to incent the handprint is a tougher intellectual and policy challenge. A cynic might observe that another reason is the simple fact that the ICT industry includes very few EU-based champions. The industry is composed almost entirely of companies of American, Japanese, and Chinese lineage, easy targets for EU regulators.

Pivoting to the United States, what are the opportunities to advance the handprint via future climate policy initiatives in Washington or the states? Anticipating a climate policy-friendly environment in Washington, Intel has joined with several other companies as the founding members of a new policy-influencing group, the Digital Climate Alliance. DCA member companies (including also Johnson Controls, Trane Technologies, XCHG, Nautilus Data Technologies, and Enel) have experience developing and utilizing digital technologies to reduce their own footprint, as well as developing handprint markets so that those technologies can be used to reduce their customers’ footprint.

Utilizing that experience, DCA is building a library of handprint case studies that will serve as evidence to support policy advocacy. DCA may also participate in demonstration projects that shine a spotlight on handprint possibilities. The North Star of DCA advocacy will be the passage of a discrete digital title as part of successful climate legislation. Failing that, DCA will promote specific digital policy proposals that can be included individually in various pieces of climate, energy, and infrastructure legislation.

But what are some of these digital policies? At a high level, they are a collection of mandates and incentives through which the federal government can work with the ICT industry and its customers to enable the growth of handprint technology markets. Mandates can be effective means of overcoming market failures and defects, including for example a legislative requirement that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission develop a long-range infrastructure strategy with a major focus on using ICT to improve grid resilience to extreme climate and weather events.

Given the power of government procurement to create product markets and economies of scale, legislation could direct federal agencies to develop and implement plans for the procurement of ICT applications to reduce the footprint of their operations. The Department of Energy could be directed to document the benefits of these investments and communicate those benefits to the private sector generally. Where there are market benefits illuminated by DOE, well-managed companies will seek them out.

One of the most important future factors in advancing digital climate solutions will be policies to promote the transparency of information and the availability of energy-related data. The adage you can only manage what you can measure pertains here. For example, the federal government has a role to play in collecting, compiling, and harmonizing emissions data from load-serving entities, generators, renewables, and stored energy. Increased transparency into the emission profiles of our electricity grid at or near a real-time basis would enable consumers to understand the carbon footprint impact of their energy consumption and, in deregulated markets, to make informed choices regarding from whom to source. Similarly, recognizing that utility consumers have an ownership interest in their own consumption data would replicate the experience in those states that have adopted this policy — a flowering of technologies and consumer apps that help them manage and reduce their usage.

These transparency-oriented policies can also apply to the manufacturing and commodity sectors. Although technologies to help reduce industrial emissions are beginning to mature, there remains no clear and consistent way for the market to differentiate and value low-carbon industrial products compared to higher-polluting alternatives. This market challenge presents a new opportunity for the ICT industry to meet these needs by providing new monitoring, reporting, and verification applications to drive consumer awareness of corporate and product emissions profiles. This capability could be very useful to the steel and cement industries, which are striving to document their efforts to reduce the embedded carbon in their more innovative produce offerings.

Research, development, and demonstration projects are another role for the federal government. RD&D is key to the adoption of handprint technologies, owing to the conservatism of utilities and their state regulators. New technologies cannot find a market until they are well proven. Opportunities include, for example, directing DOE to undertake, with private-sector partners, demonstration projects to spotlight the benefits of various digital technologies, including dispatchable data centers that can thrive in an ebb and flow of tasks. A few projects have shown the potential for digitalizing electrical grid substations to make them more energy efficient, more resilient, and better able to integrate renewable energy sources onto the grid. But RD&D investments in this technology could conclusively demonstrate the value of such projects and make them more attractive to distribution utilities and state regulators. Another potentially fruitful realm involves vehicle-grid connectivity schemes that advance both electric car uptake and grid stability, such as utilizing the grid emission data mentioned above to inform optimal times to charge your vehicle, or using the energy stored in the batteries of parked vehicles to even renewable loads on the grid.

Paralleling RD&D, DOE’s existing outreach programs can be augmented to bring knowledge of the benefits of digitalization to small and medium-sized businesses. By building a virtual library of successful case studies and working directly in an “extension service” role with industrial enterprises, the government can help to close an information gap that is a primary barrier to handprint markets. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s existing extension programs can be augmented by adding precision agriculture to their outreach capabilities. The regular Farm Bill could provide powerful mandates and incentives for precision agriculture and other technology applications.

Tax incentives can also play a part. New technologies often carry a high price tag due to diseconomies of scale. Tax incentives have played a key part in increasing production volumes of solar and wind technologies, as well as electric cars, dramatically driving down per unit prices. The same could be true for many handprint applications.

Direct government financing is an important possibility. The Treasury Department could be directed to create an incubator program to facilitate loan funding of technology-based energy-efficiency applications, perhaps targeted to low-income communities. Establishment of “green bank” funding programs at the federal and state levels could be pivotal. The 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act provides a great template for how post-COVID recovery and infrastructure investment could prime handprint markets. And, given the key role of 5G connectivity in enabling handprint solutions, network investment must be part of the recovery.

Another priority of the recovery should be addressing social equity issues that have always been there but have been laid bare by our COVID-19 struggles. Righting environmental injustices will require actions on many levels. But ICT and the handprint can be part of the solution, starting with ensuring universal 5G access. Again, measurement is the basis of management and addressing the environmental aspects of social inequity. Remote sensing and networks of low-cost ICT monitors can provide the basis for documenting the real-time levels of pollutants in minority and low-income neighborhoods. Those same technologies can provide the same service in rural areas suffering from fugitive air emissions and water contamination from natural gas fracking.

Finally, as important as enabling the handprint is, the ICT sector needs to continue reducing its direct footprint. And the recent news there is mostly positive. PCs, servers, and most elements of the network have gotten dramatically more efficient over the last two decades. A recent consultant’s report to the European Commission documented that the electricity consumption of ICT products in the EU had actually decreased by 1.7 percent annually since 2012. The obvious conclusion: “Despite the exponential increase in data traffic and ICT product performances over the period, the energy efficiency of ICT-related products increased even more.” Coincidentally, a report on American data center electricity consumption commissioned by EPA concluded that demand was flat to down in recent years, despite an explosion of data computation.

These trends aren’t inevitable. But once again, because we can measure these trends, we are more likely to successfully manage them. Our ability to do so, while growing the handprint, will determine ICT’s net contribution to meeting the climate change challenge going forward. But we need a more supportive and overarching federal policy environment to allow a thousand apps to bloom. TEF

CENTERPIECE The information, communications, and technology sector has a recognized energy and climate footprint. But it is the only sector to have a significant “handprint” as well, the ability to enable it — and other sectors — to reduce global warming impacts.

Trying a Whole-of-Government Approach to Climate Change
Author
Joseph E. Aldy - Harvard Kennedy School
Harvard Kennedy School
Current Issue
January-February 2021
Issue
1
Joseph E. Aldy

It is hard to imagine any economic activity that does not influence the climate. Likewise, it is challenging to identify any community that will be immune to the threats posed by global warming. This necessitates policies that mitigate risks throughout the economy. In calling for a whole-of-government approach to climate change, the Climate 21 Project, of which I was a steering committee member, has developed recommendations for how to do that.

The Treasury Department provides an excellent illustration of how the Biden administration can pursue such a whole-of-government methodology. With its role in economic policy through oversight, regulations, legislation, foreign aid, diplomacy, and more, Treasury can promote the economy’s decarbonization while enabling more resilience to new conditions.

The treasury secretary will play a critical role in the post-COVID economic recovery. This creates an opportunity for advancing policies and supporting legislation that simultaneously create new jobs and promote investment in climate-friendly infrastructure. Directing some of the economic recovery program toward climate change priorities can stimulate near-term activity and make longer-term growth more resilient to new conditions. With greater renewable electricity a key component of any long-term decarbonization scenario, the secretary can accelerate the build out of wind and solar power.

The secretary also serves as the nation’s leading economic diplomat. As the new administration attempts to rebuild bridges with partners around the world, Treasury can champion greater support for international climate finance. Securing increased appropriations for the World Bank, the Global Environment Facility, and the Green Climate Fund can demonstrate renewed climate leadership by the United States, provide critical resources for least-developed countries, and enable Washington to promote reforms to improve the effectiveness of these institutions. For example, such multilateral funds could subsidize the early retirement of coal-fired power plants in developing countries in order to grow the market for zero-carbon alternatives.

As the chair of the Financial Stability Oversight Council, the secretary of the treasury facilitates action and coordination among all federal regulators in identifying and addressing systemic risks to the U.S. financial system. Given the prospect that climate change could impose significant, correlated threats across the U.S. economy and financial system, the secretary could highlight climate change within the council and spur regulatory action by other financial regulators. This could take the form of climate risk disclosures mandated by the Securities and Exchange Commission, climate-risk stress tests of financial institutions by the Federal Reserve, and climate finance and regulatory sandboxes that permit experimentation with innovative climate-oriented financial instruments.

The Treasury Department provides oversight over many broad functions of government. As the chair of the boards of trustees of the Social Security and Medicare trust funds, the secretary of the treasury could direct explicit consideration of climate change risks over the long-term finances of both programs. For example, climate change could influence worker productivity and labor force participation, which have implications for both the revenues and the benefits paid out through Social Security as well as the revenues for Medicare. Moreover, expenditures to mitigate climate-related morbidity and mortality could influence the Medicare balance sheet over time. Through the Federal Insurance Office, the Treasury Department monitors the insurance sector and can use this position to increase consideration of climate change risks in the design and issuance of insurance policies.

Federal tax policy runs through the Treasury and the Internal Revenue Service. Interpreting and implementing current tax law (such as tax credits for renewable power and electric vehicles) as well as working on new tax policy with Congress (perhaps extending tax credits for clean energy investment or a carbon tax) involve Treasury leadership in the future of decarbonization policy.

Finally, the secretary of the treasury serves as the leading economic spokesperson for the administration. This provides the bully pulpit through which the secretary can draw attention to those opportunities where good climate policy and good economic policy are aligned. In doing so, the secretary can engage and empower business leaders — CEOs of major corporations and major investors — so that they make decisions that advance the nation’s efforts in combatting climate change. In doing so, the department — in tandem with actions throughout the federal government — can ensure that a whole-of-government approach to climate change mobilizes a whole-of-economy response to the challenge.

Trying a Whole-of-Government Approach to Climate Change.

ELI Report
Author
Akielly Hu - Environmental Law Institute
Environmental Law Institute
Current Issue
November-December 2020
Issue
6

Consensus Report Study finds courts are largely in agreement on climate science, but jurists remain reluctant to wade into politics

Climate change is a source of political controversy in the United States, and climate skepticism — or doubts about the basics of climate science — has periodically emerged in public debate. At the same time, U.S. courts in several high-profile cases, such as Juliana v. United States and City of Oakland v. BP p.l.c., while not finding for petitioners, have accepted as authoritative the science behind climate change, including its conclusions that the climate is warming, human activities are driving these changes, and that climate change will have disastrous consequences.

Given the growing number of cases involving climate change, the question remains whether these court decisions are representative of a broader trend in the judiciary or whether they are outliers. With support from the Institute’s Board of Directors, ELI commissioned a report, Climate Science in the Courts: A Review of U.S. and International Judicial Pronouncements, to analyze this question.

Authored by ELI Visiting Attorney Maria L. Banda and published in April, the report examines judicial pronouncements in climate-related proceedings since 2015, including in civil, administrative, constitutional, and criminal law matters, in the United States and in a dozen foreign jurisdictions.

The report finds vast consensus by U.S. and international courts on the causes, extent, urgency, and effects of climate change. Courts have described the science behind climate change as “substantial,” “copious,” and “overwhelming,” and have established a basic causal chain between human activities and current climate risks.

This consensus holds across different types of cases, including nuisance complaints, constitutional claims, and administrative law proceedings. It also holds true across state and federal courts in the United States and internationally.

This finding represents a major shift since early climate lawsuits, where climate skepticism was still relatively common among both judges and litigants. Courts have shifted from doubting climate science to unequivocally accepting the evidence for climate change.

One reason for this shift is the evolving nature of climate science. Federal agencies like the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have generated a vast amount of climate data in recent years to underpin courts’ analyses. Courts in other countries have reviewed much of the same scientific evidence, including reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In this sense, climate science has acted as a lingua franca across courts.

However, judicial consensus on climate science has not necessarily translated to judicial intervention. U.S. courts have remained generally conservative on climate action, frequently deferring to government agencies to address climate-related issues. This appears to be the case especially when it comes to constitutional or civil claims, which tend to use new legal theories or challenge threshold issues such as standing.

Judicial consensus on climate change plays an important role in shaping public understanding about climate science. Courts are among the most respected public institutions, and are often trusted to separate fact from fiction in a democratic society. Greater understanding of judicial conclusions on climate science could help move public consensus to align with this emerging judicial consensus. Finally, public awareness of how the courts analyze climate data may increase government accountability and galvanize political leaders to act on climate change.

 

Institute and partner work with Bozeman on water scarcity

With the support of the Turner Foundation, the Alliance for Water Efficiency and the Environmental Law Institute have worked with the City of Bozeman, Montana, to amend a local ordinance in a manner that facilitates water-neutral growth.

The recommendations by ELI and AWE were based on the Net Blue Ordinance Toolkit, a guide written by the two organizations. The Toolkit offers examples of water-offset ordinances from around the country; a Model Ordinance Worksheet that guides users through the development of a water-offset ordinance tailored to their political climate, legal framework, and environmental conditions; and an Offset Methodology Workbook that provides strategies for evaluating and selecting options to offset projected new water demand. Water-neutral growth ordinances can offset additional water demand by either requiring or incentivizing water-efficient retrofits of existing development. These measures can include fixture and appliance replacements, rainwater harvesting, and stormwater capture.

The city of Bozeman served as a Net Blue Partner Community, advising on the development of the Toolkit. The city has experienced rapid growth but is in an area with limited water resources. Capitalizing on the existing partnership between the city, AWE, and ELI, the groups implemented the Net Blue Toolkit there, collaboratively developing revisions to a simple water rights transfer and in-lieu fee ordinances.

Beginning in early 2019, ELI and AWE staff worked with Bozeman city planners and attorneys on various concepts and drafts of both the revised ordinance and its associated manual. The Bozeman City Commission approved the ordinance revisions in August. Revisions to the water manual, which houses the details of the ordinance’s implementation, are still in progress.

As the Toolkit notes, water managers in 40 out of 50 states anticipate water shortages within the coming years. This effort with the city of Bozeman represents a successful application of ELI’s research and analysis in local government policy. The hope is that Net Blue’s adoption in Bozeman will inform other local governments and encourage them to adopt similar ordinances.

 

Food waste initiative strives to improve community composting

The Nashville Food Waste Initiative, led by the Nashville-based nonprofit Urban Green Lab with support from the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Law Institute, recently launched a project to develop community composting training and pilot sites in Nashville. Through this project, the Institute for Local Self Reliance, a national leader in community composting, is collaborating with NRDC to bring training and technical support on community composting to Nashville.

In 2015, NRDC launched the Nashville Food Waste Initiative as a pilot project to develop tools, policies, and strategies to prevent food waste, rescue surplus food to those in need, and digest what’s left to build healthy soil. ELI Senior Attorney Linda Breggin served as the project coordinator for several years and continues to support the initiative as senior strategic advisor.

The community composting initiative follows up on a recent NFWI study on community composting, which highlights benefits and opportunities related to re-establishing community composting in Nashville. Community composting is a valuable part of a resilient food scrap recycling infrastructure, offering a relatively cheap and quick way to reach higher diversion potential than practices like backyard composting. It also provides a huge range of environmental and social benefits, such as engaging communities in zero waste practices, increasing demand for and interest in composting, and providing useful skills and job training.

Following the release of this report, the Initiative convened local stakeholders last winter to discuss ways to overcome barriers and identify resources for community composting. Groups expressed interest in managing sites, providing land, and hosting volunteers.

Building off this initial interest, the community composting initiative will lay the groundwork for a robust community composting network, targeting often overlooked and under-resourced communities, and train practitioners and future trainers.

Through the end of 2020, the first phase of this project will focus on identifying and providing technical support to composting demonstration sites and community composting pilot projects. Concurrently, a series of live webinars and online training modules will build interest and skills for community composting within the greater Nashville community.

 

ELI in Action: States at front lines of transition to renewables

ELI and the American University Washington College of Law Program on Environmental and Energy Law co-sponsored a webinar, State Approaches to a Just Transition, to explore how states protect frontline communities while advancing the transition to a renewable energy economy. The panel featured four experts advancing a just transition in the District of Columbia, Illinois, and New York. Speakers provided lessons learned from climate legislation, including the New York Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, the Illinois Future Energy Jobs Act, and the District of Columbia’s Clean Energy Omnibus Amendment. The discussion highlighted the implications of these policies in addressing the dual crises of racial injustice and a global pandemic.

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Each summer, ELI convenes a complimentary seminar series that offers an introduction to the legal and policy foundations of environmental protection in the United States. Taught by experts in their fields, the ELI Summer Schoolseminars cover major environmental statutes such as the National Environmental Policy Act, Clean Air Act, and Clean Water Act. The 2020 Summer School series was the second year to host a session on environmental justice, which will become a mainstay portion of Summer School moving forward.

This year’s Summer School was also the first to be held remotely due to COVID-19. On average, each session received about double the number of registrations compared to last year’s sessions. In total, over 3,900 participants registered for the 2020 Summer School series.

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The Trump administration has taken dramatic and sweeping steps to remake federal environmental regulation. A recent ELI report, Environment 2021: What Comes Next? offers a detailed analysis of how these deregulatory initiatives will affect environmental protection in the coming years.

Authored by Senior Attorneys James M. McElfish and Jay Austin, the report helps environmental practitioners, policymakers, and the public understand the scope and significance of recent changes and consider future directions for the regulatory system. The report makes no assumptions about this fall’s electoral results, but explores possibilities for various regulatory reform efforts under different electoral outcomes. The report is available for download on the ELI website.

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As the first part of a webinar series on environmental issues affecting Indigenous peoples, ELI convened a webinar titled Fighting Fire With Fire: Restoring Traditional Indigenous Practices for Ecological Stewardship. The webinar, featuring leaders from the U.S. Forest Service, California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, and the Karuk Tribe, explores opportunities for tribes to collaborate with state, local, and federal authorities to provide prescribed fires and fire-related services on traditional lands under federal jurisdiction.

The speakers provided an overview of wildfire management at the federal, state, and tribal levels, including current efforts and opportunities for collaborative activities between tribes and governments. In a concluding discussion, speakers noted the importance of recognizing the value of traditional ecological knowledge, understanding a tribe’s history and context, and building relationships when entering collaborative agreements. Intertribal organizations innovating in tribal forest management include the Intertribal Timber Council and the National Indian Carbon Coalition.

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In August, the Institute announced the inaugural class of the Jim Rubin International Fellowship, a program to support rising environmental lawyers from developing countries. The fellowship honors the legacy of Jim Rubin, a highly respected attorney, environmental advocate, and devoted public servant.

This year’s fellows, Ginary Tatiana Gutiérrez Robledo of Colombia and Junhong Li of China, will work with ELI staff on cutting-edge issues of environmental law. Gutiérrez Robledo was most recently an attorney at the Inspector Attorney General Office in Colombia, focusing on government compliance, education, community empowerment, and environmental justice. Junhong Li previously represented local communities in public interest litigation at the Center for Legal Assistance to Pollution Victims at the China University of Political Science and Law.

The Judiciary accepts climate science, ELI study finds.

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