Much Remarkable, but Insufficient, Progress Decarbonizing the World
Author
Joseph E. Aldy - Harvard Kennedy School
Harvard Kennedy School
Issue
4
Joseph E. Aldy

The 2015 Paris Agreement established the goal of limiting global warming to “well below 2°C above preindustrial levels.” The pact also provides for a periodic assessment of progress toward this objective through a “global stocktake.” In November of this year, the United Ar

The 2015 Paris Agreement established the goal of limiting global warming to “well below 2°C above preindustrial levels.” The pact also provides for a periodic assessment of progress toward this objective through a “global stocktake.” In November of this year, the United Arab Emirates will host the UN climate change talks that will include the first such worldwide assessment.

Over the eight years since the Paris conference, national governments have enhanced their near-term reduction ambitions. The United States has since pledged to cut its emissions at least in half by 2030, compared to its 2015 pledge of a 26-28 percent cut by 2025. The European Union has pledged to reduce its emissions by 55 percent by 2030, compared to its previous pledge of a 40 percent reduction. And about 140 countries have proposed, pledged, or enshrined in domestic law net-zero emission targets for 2050 or soon thereafter.

Governments have also advanced their mitigation actions, driving substantial gains in clean energy. In 2015, 10 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions were covered by a tax or cap-and-trade program; by 2022, this share had increased to 25 percent. The average price on emissions has increased significantly since then across these carbon pricing systems. Over 2015-21, global renewable energy consumption—led by wind and solar power—more than doubled.

The Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy subsidies are forecast to reduce U.S. carbon dioxide emissions by about 10 percent over the next seven years. The rapid growth in investment in clean energy manufacturing signals the potential to deliver accelerating deployment of next generation technologies. Last year, global installed manufacturing capacity for batteries grew by 72 percent, solar photovoltaics by 39 percent, and electrolyzers by 26 percent.

Despite this progress, fossil fuels still comprise more than 80 percent of global energy consumption. With the exception of 2020, fossil fuel consumption has been higher every year since 2015. Fossil fuel consumption may peak soon—McKinsey’s “Global Energy Perspective 2022” suggests peak consumption by 2025. But this peak will likely occur later and higher than is consistent with the Paris Agreement’s temperature objective.

Last year, the UN Environment Programme estimated that global greenhouse gas emissions would reach about 58 gigatons based on current policies. This level would be 15 gigatons higher than what is necessary to limit warming to 2°C, and 23 gigatons higher than would be consistent with a 1.5°C temperature goal. Cutting the level of annual emissions by at least 15 gigatons over 7 years is daunting. To put this in perspective, the largest single-year decline in global energy carbon dioxide emissions was about 2 gigatons in 2020, primarily reflecting the COVID pandemic.

The emergence of low-cost renewable power has displaced much of fossil fuels in meeting growing energy demand, but has not meaningfully driven existing fossil fuel-related infrastructure into retirement. A 2019 paper in the journal Nature estimated that if current fossil fuel infrastructure continued operating through their expected economic lifetimes—with no new fossil fuel-powered power plants, factories, vehicles, etc. coming online—then the world would likely exceed warming of 1.5°C and could go beyond 2°C. Since this analysis was undertaken, new fossil fuel-powered facilities and transportation systems have entered the market and, in many economies around the world, new fossil fuel infrastructure projects are planned for future investment.

This reflects the political challenge of designing and implementing aggressive decarbonization policies and the associated difficulty of raising the price of fossil energy. Given continued subsidies in developing countries and European energy subsidies in response to the energy shock induced by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, global fossil fuel subsidies exceeded $1 trillion last year for the first time. Outside of California, the vast majority of U.S. climate policy operates through clean energy subsidies, with little if any cost penalty applied to sources of carbon dioxide emissions.

The bottom line is that the global climate will very likely overshoot 1.5°C and likely go beyond 2°C. Even with unprecedented growth in clean energy, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will exceed levels consistent with these temperature goals. Returning to these temperature levels would require large-scale negative emission technologies, such as the direct air capture of carbon dioxide coupled with underground storage, or the deployment of solar geoengineering to reduce incoming solar energy to the planet’s surface. As temperatures rise, there will be a growing public debate about the potential role of these novel technologies and the need to manage the risks during this period in which we overshoot our temperature goals.

ab Emirates will host the UN climate change talks that will include the first such worldwide assessment.

Over the eight years since the Paris conference, national governments have enhanced their near-term reduction ambitions. The United States has since pledged to cut its emissions at least in half by 2030, compared to its 2015 pledge of a 26-28 percent cut by 2025. The European Union has pledged to reduce its emissions by 55 percent by 2030, compared to its previous pledge of a 40 percent reduction. And about 140 countries have proposed, pledged, or enshrined in domestic law net-zero emission targets for 2050 or soon thereafter.

Governments have also advanced their mitigation actions, driving substantial gains in clean energy. In 2015, 10 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions were covered by a tax or cap-and-trade program; by 2022, this share had increased to 25 percent. The average price on emissions has increased significantly since then across these carbon pricing systems. Over 2015-21, global renewable energy consumption—led by wind and solar power—more than doubled.

The Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy subsidies are forecast to reduce U.S. carbon dioxide emissions by about 10 percent over the next seven years. The rapid growth in investment in clean energy manufacturing signals the potential to deliver accelerating deployment of next generation technologies. Last year, global installed manufacturing capacity for batteries grew by 72 percent, solar photovoltaics by 39 percent, and electrolyzers by 26 percent.

Despite this progress, fossil fuels still comprise more than 80 percent of global energy consumption. With the exception of 2020, fossil fuel consumption has been higher every year since 2015. Fossil fuel consumption may peak soon—McKinsey’s “Global Energy Perspective 2022” suggests peak consumption by 2025. But this peak will likely occur later and higher than is consistent with the Paris Agreement’s temperature objective.

Last year, the UN Environment Programme estimated that global greenhouse gas emissions would reach about 58 gigatons based on current policies. This level would be 15 gigatons higher than what is necessary to limit warming to 2°C, and 23 gigatons higher than would be consistent with a 1.5°C temperature goal. Cutting the level of annual emissions by at least 15 gigatons over 7 years is daunting. To put this in perspective, the largest single-year decline in global energy carbon dioxide emissions was about 2 gigatons in 2020, primarily reflecting the COVID pandemic.

The emergence of low-cost renewable power has displaced much of fossil fuels in meeting growing energy demand, but has not meaningfully driven existing fossil fuel-related infrastructure into retirement. A 2019 paper in the journal Nature estimated that if current fossil fuel infrastructure continued operating through their expected economic lifetimes—with no new fossil fuel-powered power plants, factories, vehicles, etc. coming online—then the world would likely exceed warming of 1.5°C and could go beyond 2°C. Since this analysis was undertaken, new fossil fuel-powered facilities and transportation systems have entered the market and, in many economies around the world, new fossil fuel infrastructure projects are planned for future investment.

This reflects the political challenge of designing and implementing aggressive decarbonization policies and the associated difficulty of raising the price of fossil energy. Given continued subsidies in developing countries and European energy subsidies in response to the energy shock induced by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, global fossil fuel subsidies exceeded $1 trillion last year for the first time. Outside of California, the vast majority of U.S. climate policy operates through clean energy subsidies, with little if any cost penalty applied to sources of carbon dioxide emissions.

The bottom line is that the global climate will very likely overshoot 1.5°C and likely go beyond 2°C. Even with unprecedented growth in clean energy, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will exceed levels consistent with these temperature goals. Returning to these temperature levels would require large-scale negative emission technologies, such as the direct air capture of carbon dioxide coupled with underground storage, or the deployment of solar geoengineering to reduce incoming solar energy to the planet’s surface. As temperatures rise, there will be a growing public debate about the potential role of these novel technologies and the need to manage the risks during this period in which we overshoot our temperature goals.

Much Remarkable, but Insufficient, Progress Decarbonizing the World.

Lost and Never Found
Author
Akielly Hu - Environmental Law Institute
Environmental Law Institute
Current Issue
March-April 2023
Issue
2
The aftermath of Typhoon Nina in Iriga City, Camarines Sur, Philippines, in December 2016. Photo from Shutterstock.

In 1975, New Zealand set up a tribunal to distribute billions of dollars in cash and land settlements to Maori people, recognizing a long history of brutal colonization. From 1945 to 2018, Germany paid close to $87 billion to Holocaust survivors and their descendants. In 1988, the United States allotted $20,000 to each living Japanese American person who had been wrongfully detained in “internment” camps.

As Noah Gordon at The New Republic points out, “Reparations aren’t radical, and they aren’t without precedent.” Making reparations—financial or other forms of compensation to those who have been wronged—is not only feasible, it has been done. Yet despite long-standing activism movements, “Notably absent from a list of U.S. reparations are payments to enslaved people or their descendants,” Gordon writes.

But a lack of progress is by no means an indication that the global struggle for reparations is dormant. Last November, world leaders at the annual UN climate conference, COP27, in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, reached a landmark agreement to create a new “loss and damage” fund. The facility will distribute money from developed countries to nations that are most vulnerable to—and least able to cope with—climate disasters.

“Loss and damage” is UN lingo for the range of devastating climate impacts countries experience, including droughts, floods, crop failures, sea-level rise, and heat waves. Activists have referred to the new fund as a form of climate reparations, recognizing that, as Barry E. Hill writes in ELR—The Environmental Law Reporter, “Those who are least responsible for climate change suffer its greatest environmental and public health consequences.”

To confirm this logic, one only needs to look out the window or glance at today’s headlines. Climate change has been linked to “a historic drought in East Africa, which is pushing millions of people to the edge of starvation,” the Washington Post reports. In Uganda, last summer’s prolonged drought left more than half a million facing starvation. The Philippines, facing rising sea levels and increasingly severe typhoons, has been named the country most at risk for climate impacts by the Institute for Economics and Peace. And for participants at COP27, the devastating floods in Pakistan last summer, which affected more than 33 million and killed 1,500 people, were a fresh reminder of our climate realities.

“An estimate of damage and loss has exceeded 30 billion dollars,” Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said at the UN climate conference. “This all happened, despite our very low carbon footprints. . . . We became a victim of something with which we had nothing to do.”

Developed countries are responsible for about three-fifths of historical fossil fuel-based carbon emissions, based on data published by the Global Carbon Project. When you get down to the granular level, the disparity is even more pronounced. “Consider that Pakistan generated 0.6 percent of the world’s CO2 emissions in 2021. Uganda produced 0.02 percent. . . . These countries are almost carbon neutral,” writes Émile P. Torres in Salon. The Philippines stacks up at only 0.39 percent, according to Our World in Data.

The new fund is the result of a decades-long battle to recognize this injustice. In 1991, Vanuatu, an island nation in the South Pacific, first proposed a global insurance pool to provide funding for countries dealing with sea-level rise. The idea was rejected, and loss and damage didn’t show up in UN climate language until the Bali Action Plan 16 years later. The Paris Agreement of 2015 mentions loss and damage, but includes a clause (added by developed countries) that clarifies that the concept “does not involve or provide a basis for any liability or compensation.”

COP27 was the first time parties agreed to put loss and damage on the official agenda, and reaching agreement brought negotiations down to the wire. Now that the fund has been established, many basic details still need to be hammered out. Which countries will contribute, and how much? Who will receive the funds? And in what form will funds be transferred? These questions “may sound technical to the lay reader, but it literally means life or death for our children and grandchildren, and for generations yet unborn,” writes Pakistan Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari. To provide answers, a 24-member transitional committee will deliberate during this year and make recommendations for countries to adopt at COP28 in November.

To understand the opportunities this new fund presents, we first need to consider the current landscape of loss and damage financing. According to preliminary research by the World Resources Institute, existing funding sources are “extremely difficult to identify.” One reason is the lack of an official definition for loss and damage, which means funds may not be properly classified. Yet upon a review of a wide range of potential sources, WRI concludes that at every turn, existing funding “is not enough.”

One potential source, humanitarian assistance, is clearly falling short. Research by Oxfam has found that humanitarian aid appeals for extreme weather events have gone up eight-fold compared to 20 years ago. Over the past five years, half of those appeals haven’t been funded, totaling an unmet need of $3 billion.

Other multilateral funds are also found wanting. In 2009, developed nations pledged that by 2020, they would funnel $100 billion a year in public and private climate finance to developing countries. As a part of this effort, parties to the UN climate talks created the Green Climate Fund to help developing countries adapt to climate change and decarbonize energy systems. Today, countries have failed to reach that pledge by at least tens of billions of dollars. Furthermore, only 16 percent of all Green Climate Fund projects explicitly tie loss and damage to their main activities, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Remaining UN sources, including the Least Developed Countries Fund, the Special Climate Change Fund, and the Adaptation Fund, “only seemed to provide funding for adaptation,” WRI reports.

Another potential funding source is disaster risk financing. As Mary Boyer, disaster risk management specialist at the World Bank, tells me, “Disaster risk financing is about arranging financial instruments ex ante so that you can have access to quick and cost-effective liquidity when a disaster happens and prepare institutionally for how to allocate and implement the resources.”

Boyer describes a layered approach that multilateral organizations like the World Bank use when working with a country on disaster risk. For events at the lowest level of risk, countries could prepare a rainy day fund within their government, earmarked for disaster response or other shocks. At the medium level, countries could access contingent loans or lines of credit from donors—in the Caribbean region, for example, that donor might be the Inter-American Development Bank or the World Bank. Finally, for the most severe disasters, countries could use risk transfer instruments, an umbrella term for different methods to “transfer risks to the market through some kind of financial institution, like insurance.”

The Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility and the African Risk Capacity Group are examples of regional bodies that offer disaster insurance and other risk-transfer mechanisms. Insurance schemes made headlines recently when a climate risk initiative called the Global Shield was launched ahead of COP27 by the G7, a group of industrialized countries, and the V20, a group of finance ministers from climate vulnerable countries. Like the new loss and damage fund, specific details for how the Global Shield will operate have yet to be finalized. The initiative will likely provide insurance programs and other forms of financial assistance.

Critics of disaster insurance schemes argue that countries need more direct forms of funding for loss and damage. The advocacy group Loss and Damage Collaboration states that insurance usually “only pays out a small proportion of the loss and damage,” and “is ill-suited to address non-economic loss and damage and slow onset climatic processes.”

Regardless of funding structure, a central question remains: How will the new fund get enough money? The fundamental challenge lies with the voluntary nature of most international commitments. Countries will need to give up money of their own volition, and in a nation like the United States, where appropriating money for its own citizens regularly results in gridlock, the proposition can seem out of touch with reality. At a New York Times event only two months before COP27, U.S. climate envoy John Kerry responded incredulously to the idea. “You think this Republican Congress . . . is going to step up and do loss and damage? Good luck!”

There’s also the issue of debt. As philosopher and scholar Olúfémi O. Táíwò points out in Reconsidering Reparations, funds directed to developing countries often come in the form of loans, “saddling recipients with debt rather than relief.” One solution proposed by Táíwò is to convert “sovereign debt into fuel for climate relief.” In fact, the government of Barbados has proposed a similar plan to simultaneously relieve government debt and fund climate resilience.

Some have proposed innovative sources to fund loss and damage. Scholars Margaretha Wewerinke-Singh and Diana Hinge Salili suggest imposing a climate damages tax on fossil fuel companies based on how much carbon is embedded in extracted oil and gas. Divestment from fossil fuels, a popular movement on college campuses in the United States, is another possibility. Meanwhile, in September, UN Secretary-General António Guterres urged “all developed economies to tax the windfall profits of fossil fuel companies.” He asked world leaders to instead redirect fossil fuel subsidies and profits “to countries suffering loss and damage caused by the climate crisis, and to people struggling with rising food and energy prices.”

The new loss and damage fund signals a seismic shift in the political climate. Guterres says “Polluters must pay”—and the global community seems to agree. It’s no longer a question of if climate vulnerable countries should receive compensation, but rather “how much” and “in what form.”

But when it comes to any form of reparations, “The devil is often in the details,” as Táíwò reminds us. The loss and damage transitional committee will need to grapple with many tough questions, both practical and existential. On a procedural level, how will the UN assess the amount of loss and damage? How will non-quantitative losses, like the loss of cultural heritage, be accounted for? How will funds be used, monitored, and evaluated for effectiveness once received? Perhaps most fundamentally, as Gordon asks in The New Republic, “How do you put a price on monumental human suffering?”

In communities that need loss and damage compensation the most, some members maintain a reasonable amount of doubt that world leaders will actually follow through. After all, this would not be the first broken promise from the UN climate proceedings. “How are we to ensure that there are direct resources to the communities that have experienced these losses and damages, as opposed to just new mechanisms for states to further entrench our communities into more loss and damages in our homelands?” asks Eriel Tchekwie Deranger, executive director of Indigenous Climate Action, as reported by Democracy Now!

These concerns underscore a crucial component of meaningful reparations: self-determination. The principle recognizes “everyone’s rights to pursue the political programs that fit their situation, culture, and values,” Táíwò writes. “Different people will come up with different actions and approaches fitting different cultural contexts and strategic situations.” For a challenge as wide-ranging, complex, and context-dependent as climate losses and damages, only a “deeply pluralistic” approach will suffice. TEF

Akielly Hu is associate editor at The Environmental Forum. Views expressed are her own.

THE BRIEFING The new UN loss and damage fund aims to compensate developing nations for climate impacts. Will it live up to its promise?

A Destabilized, Dystopian World: A Future Foretold If We Don’t Act
Author
Bruce Rich - Attorney & Author
Attorney & Author
Current Issue
January-February 2023
Issue
1
Bruce Rich

The 27th Conference of the Parties to the climate convention that met last November struggled with unresolved tensions that have persisted since the first COP in 1995. Most major emitters have failed to deliver on reduction commitments, and richer nations have come up short in aiding poorer nations transition to a carbon-neutral economy. What we are seeing is a world where nation states and international institutions are unable to cope with a myriad of interconnected and accelerating environmental, economic, technological, and political changes.

A sobering guide to these stresses can be found in the global trends reports of the U.S. National Intelligence Council. The NIC was established in 1979 to facilitate collaboration of the intelligence community with policy experts and researchers inside and outside the government. Every four years since 1997 the NIC has published these reports.

The most recent, “Global Trends 2040,” foresees a destabilized, “more contested world.” Environmental, social, and economic costs of climate change will fall disproportionately on the world’s poorer nations, creating new global “vulnerabilities and exacerbating existing risks to economic prosperity, food, water, health, and energy security.” Environmental stresses combined with aging populations in developed and middle-income nations (e.g., China) will slow world economic growth—and exacerbate existing trends of economic inequality in most countries, fostering increased geopolitical competition. The power of international corporations will increase, but face political movements for regulation and protectionism.

Within populations, pessimism and distrust will grow vis-a-vis the ability of governments to cope with global challenges increasingly experienced at the local level. The trends report predicts many will seek refuge within ethnic, national, and religious identities, as well as in populist political movements that offer specious solutions. Advanced information technology and social media risk promoting an increasingly siloed information world that fuels these social trends, with growing threats to democracy. Rich countries may have less resources and political capital to deal with a world of failing states, as environmental disasters stress their domestic financial and institutional resources.

According to the report, emerging energy technologies with falling costs can speed up the transition to a climate-friendly economy. Examples include solar photovoltaic and wind energy; advanced energy storage systems; and small-scale modular nuclear reactors. But the successful deployment of these technologies is very much a function of the political economy of nations and the international system.

Technology will not save us, unless we save ourselves by reforming political and economic systems mismatched to deal with global challenges. As national and international institutions and multilateral agreements are “overwhelmed or sidelined” by the challenges, the trends report warns, nations, or even individual corporations and billionaires, may take reckless unilateral actions, with unforeseen consequences. Geoengineering, for example, could entail unintended catastrophic side effects on global weather patterns.

“Global Trends 2040” concludes with five scenarios offering different outcomes depending on the evolution of political and economic factors. The optimistic “Renaissance of Democracies” scenario envisages a renewal of the rules-based, western-led international order, both within nations and internationally, spurred by rising economic growth and technological advances. Global challenges will be met, as wealth and technology is shared more equitably with poorer nations. In “A World Adrift,” current trends continue, the international political system and global economy atrophy, and the world spirals into greater turbulence as climate change pushes humanity closer to the edge. In “Competitive Coexistence,” the United States, China and other states cooperate in setting rules for peaceful competition, but “long term climate challenges remain.” “Separate Silos” portrays an Orwellian future where the international order disintegrates into economic and military-security blocs, trade is reduced, more poor countries become failed states, climate change is unchecked, and global problems multiply. Finally, “Tragedy and Mobilization” envisages a future of worldwide environmental catastrophes, causing global food shortages, and mass famine. Violent calls for political change create the political will for the European Union, China, and the United States to effectively act together.

Only one of these scenarios is hopeful for avoiding climate catastrophe and mitigating social and geopolitical risk. Effective action in that direction depends on a growth of trust that governments can address, and together will address equitably, these synergistically interconnected environmental, economic, and social challenges.

A Destabilized, Dystopian World: A Future Foretold If We Don’t Act

Preparing for Climate Hellscape—Federal Agencies Advance Resilience
Author
David P. Clarke - Writer & Editor
Writer & Editor
Current Issue
January-February 2023
Issue
1
David P. Clarke

Are we “on a highway to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator,” as the UN secretary-general declared last November at COP27, the annual meeting of the parties to the climate convention? While the U.S. Department of Defense’s recent Climate Adaptation Plan 2022 Progress Report wasn’t quite so dramatic, it did state, “No country can find lasting security without tackling the climate crisis.”

DOD was one of 20 agencies that published first-ever climate “adaptation-and-resilience plans” in 2021. In comprehensive comments on the plans, the Union of Concerned Scientists lauded the department’s recognition that “no entity” has the luxury of “opting out” of climate change’s impacts, and singled out DOD’s statement as “perhaps the strongest language” on the subject of any federal agency’s climate plan.

In describing the significance of the agency plans overall, Shana Udvardy, UCS’s senior climate resilience policy analyst, says it’s important for the federal government and agencies “to walk the talk,” offering “a model for the nation” as climate-related disasters increase. Moreover, adaptation-and-resilience investments are money well spent, Udvardy says, citing a 2019 report from the congressionally chartered National Institute of Building Sciences. Since 1995 federal mitigation grants have cost taxpayers $27 billion but will ultimately save $160 billion. An even greater 16:1 benefit-cost ratio would be provided by Gulf Coast building upgrades to protect against severe weather.

The federal progress reports came shortly before the COP27 meeting in Egypt, making them especially timely, Udvardy says. At the meeting, delegates overcame longstanding U.S. and E.U. objections to placing “loss and damage” on the agenda—a demand that richer nations responsible for planet-warming emissions should fund poorer countries’ efforts to achieve greater resilience—as flooding, drought, and other disasters are worsening. CNN reported that money quickly surfaced as COP27’s “key issue” and “the most difficult to resolve.”

Showcasing how adaptation and resilience can be done is important internationally, as well as for the United States at the national, state, and local levels, Udvardy adds.

The fact that DOD’s 2021 adaptation-and-resilience plan and 2022 progress report stand out is not surprising. After all, as early as 2010 DOD’s Quadrennial Defense Review cited the U.S. Global Change Research Program’s findings that heavy downpours, rising temperatures, and other “climate-related changes” were already being seen worldwide, including in this country.

Then in 2018, Hurricane Michael slammed Tyndall Air Force Base, inflicting “catastrophic” damages and prompting the Air Force to invest an estimated $5 billion to build Tyndall as an “installation of the future” that will meet strong reliability and sustainability standards. Across Florida the hurricane’s total damages were $18.4 billion, which were far exceeded by last September’s Hurricane Ian, which inflicted damages of more than $50 billion from Florida to the Carolinas.

In its progress report, DOD describes five “lines of efforts,” starting with LO1, “climate-informed decision-making,” and concluding with LO5, “enhance adaptation and resilience through collaboration.” In 2021, according to LO1, the department published a climate adaptation plan and created a climate working group to track the department’s implementation of its climate directives and progress.

In critiquing the progress reports, Udvardy says agencies should provide more quantitative metrics of progress toward “closing the resilience gap,” or reducing the degree to which a community or nation is unprepared for climate effects. She applauds metrics associated with DOD’s Climate Assessment Tool for evaluating the exposure to eight climate hazards, including flooding, heat, drought, wildfire, and historic extreme weather events. The tool has been used to assess all major domestic defense installations and is being expanded to all major international installations, which will help prioritize resources.

The reports are of uneven quality. Generally, DOD clearly took time to detail its engagement with climate change as a national security threat. In contrast, the Department of Homeland Security’s report has a slapped-together quality. All of the reports could use more metrics, Udvardy comments.

Although resilience planning lacks the punch of greenhouse gas regulatory mandates, concerns have begun shaping some agency policies in important ways, Udvardy notes. For example, the Federal Emergency Management Agency updated its National Flood Insurance Program’s risk-rating method for the first time in 50 years.

And there’s money for resilience—at least $50 billion in the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and more than $37 billion in the Inflation Reduction Act. Consider the funds down-payments as we brace for climate hell.

David P. Clarke is a writer and editor who has served as a journalist, in industry, and in government. Email him at davidpaulclarke@gmail.com.

Preparing for Climate Hellscape—Federal Agencies Advance Resilience

Is It the Law or Us? We Must Do Better
Author
Sharon Buccino - Natural Resources Defense Council
Natural Resources Defense Council
Current Issue
November-December 2022
Issue
6
Parent Article
A Time for Triage

Flooding is increasing, while in many parts of the country water is scarce and becoming scarcer. Heat waves are growing more intense and more frequent. So are wildfires. All these adverse trends can be tied to climate change triggered by human-induced warming. We know we need to act—and to act quickly.

Where We Need to Go: Fighting climate change by cutting carbon pollution and expanding clean energy is the best way to build a better world for our communities and for generations to come. A clean energy future can create jobs. It can improve public health. It can diversify local economies.

To avoid the most catastrophic impacts of climate change, we must end our dependence on fossil energy. While oil, coal, and natural gas have served us well for many generations, they do not anymore. We do not have to—and cannot—stop using fossil fuels overnight. However, we must make investments for the future in other sources of energy. The Natural Resources Defense Council has laid out a pathway to a safer climate future. Like most other pathways, NRDC’s proposal calls for a dramatic increase in wind and solar power generation, as well as new transmission lines to deliver the power to where it is needed.

How We Get There: We need to build a lot and we need to build it fast. But how we build matters and some of our core environmental laws can help us build well. Take NEPA—the National Environmental Policy Act, signed into law by President Nixon in 1970. It requires the federal government to assess the environmental impacts of a proposed action before taking it. More than an environmental law, NEPA provides a foundation for democracy. NEPA requires federal agencies to cooperate “with state and local governments, and other concerned public and private organizations.”

Some blame NEPA for getting in the way of building the infrastructure the nation needs. The law, however, is not the problem. We still need what it promises: integration, information, and inclusion.

The problem is in the implementation. We do not need environmental impact statements that spend hundreds of pages covering every possible issue in minute detail. We do need analysis that identifies issues critical to affected communities. This is especially true when these communities are the same ones that have borne environmental burdens in the past, including air pollution, toxic waste, and neglect.

Importantly, the Environmental Justice for All Act, a bill now being considered in the House and the Senate, offers specific ideas about how to involve affected communities efficiently and effectively. It requires notice and outreach to community-based organizations, senior citizen organizations, business associations, public health clinics, and local religious organizations. But agencies do not need new legislation to put these ideas into practice.

NEPA is about the big picture; let’s not lose sight of it. The law speaks of the nation’s commitment “to create and maintain conditions under which man and nature can exist in productive harmony, and fulfill the social, economic, and other requirements of present and future generations of Americans.” Who opposes this?

We have become lost in details. Early environmental impact statements were a few dozen pages long. They were succinct, focused, and even eloquent. It is not the law that needs fixing, but how we use it. The law should be a mechanism to identify tradeoffs and discuss how to make them.

We’ve got to roll up our sleeves at the local level to get projects done. All parties involved need to put the issues on the table early. Agencies need to engage diverse stakeholders through robust and creative public outreach. The Inflation Reduction Act provides some of the resources necessary to do this. Project proponents need to work through key community issues, rather than bulldoze over them. Creative mitigation across a landscape in which a proposed project sits can help. Projects that cause less harm can move quickly.

It’s not the law; it’s us. We can and must do better.

A Time for Triage
Author
Michael B. Gerrard - Columbia Law School
Columbia Law School
Current Issue
November-December 2022
Issue
6
A Time for Triage

The world is desperately behind in the energy transformation needed to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. Catching up requires a massive buildout of wind and solar power and associated infrastructure, but in the United States many impediments stand in the way. Among them, ironically enough, are environmental laws. Here I argue that we must accept difficult tradeoffs, sacrificing some of what we consider precious in order to avoid far worse impacts.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that avoiding catastrophic climate change requires keeping global average temperatures within 1.5 Celsius degrees above pre-industrial levels. In May, the World Meteorological Organization said there is a 50/50 chance that we will hit that level in just five years. We are now at around 1.2 degrees, and we are already seeing record-breaking heat waves, wildfires, droughts, and flooding; every added notch on the thermometer makes things worse.

According to the Climate Action Tracker, if all countries fulfill their latest pledges pursuant to the Paris climate agreement, the world will be between 1.7 and 2.6 degrees hotter by 2100. Unfortunately, many countries—including the United States—are far behind in meeting their pledges, and the actual policies and actions underway would take us to 2.0–3.6 degrees by the end of the century. Especially at the upper end of that range, such an increase would be an unimaginably terrible world, with large areas rendered uninhabitable and billions of people (that’s billions, with a “b”) displaced from their homes and looking for some place, any place, to live.

Every scenario for staying even at a fallback position of 2 degrees at century’s end includes the all-out construction of renewable energy projects, primarily wind and solar. The United States in particular needs a World War II-scale mobilization. That era saw a huge investment in research and development, and a nationwide commitment to meeting defense workforce and production goals.

This renewable energy is needed not only to replace fossil fuels in generating electricity, allowing the country to shut down all of its coal plants and almost all of its natural gas plants. Along with other countries, we also need to electrify transport, heating, buildings, and much of industry. U.S. electricity demand would about double, even after aggressive efforts to improve energy efficiency.

To get all this electricity from where it will be generated to where it is used, we also need a massive expansion of transmission—a tripling or quadrupling in capacity under some scenarios.

One attempt to quantify all of this was undertaken by Princeton University’s Net Zero America project in 2021. It sets forth several scenarios for the United States, of which only one does not rely on a large number of new nuclear power plants along with carbon capture and sequestration to allow continued use of natural gas for electricity. That scenario involves 3,085 gigawatts of wind generating capacity and 2,750 gigawatts of solar. This would require an estimated 4,000 square miles of land for the wind and 21,000 square miles for the solar (though much of this land could simultaneously support agriculture or other commercial or industrial uses). That adds up to about the land area of West Virginia.

The reason so much land is required is power density: it takes one or two orders of magnitude more acreage to produce a given amount of electricity with wind or solar than with coal, natural gas, or nuclear power, even considering the land disturbance to acquire their needed fuel.

Several studies conclude that achieving the needed level of wind and solar requires building on the order of 100 gigawatts a year out to 2050. To put this in perspective, one good-sized nuclear power plant, or a very large wind farm, has a capacity of about 1 gigawatt. So we would have to build the equivalent of around 100 of these every year.

The principal way to reduce the amount of new wind and solar required under these scenarios would be large-scale deployment of technologies that are not yet and might never be at a commercial scale. These include small modular nuclear reactors, fusion power, tidal generators, carbon capture, geothermal, or perhaps other energy sources that are not yet on the horizon. These may work out, and a great deal of research and development is being pursued, as it should, but we cannot assume success and relax other efforts.

The worsening projections about future climate conditions also mean that we will need to build more infrastructure to adapt to those conditions—sea walls, larger drainage systems, elevated buildings and roads, and much else. We may also need to build new cities and expand old ones to accommodate those who are displaced from drowning coastlines, parched lands, and forests that have become tinderboxes. This may be millions or tens of millions of Americans, without doing anything for the far greater numbers of people in other countries who will be displaced in large part because of historical emissions from the United States.

There are many impediments grounded in law to achieving this level of wind and solar and the needed adaptation infrastructure. Each one could become, if not a veto point, a cause of years of delay that can kill a project, or a specter that keeps it from serious consideration in the first place.

Local zoning and building codes are high on the list. So are various federal statutes—the Endangered Species Act and other species protection laws; the National Environmental Policy Act and its state equivalents, with all of their procedural intricacies; and the wetlands and coastal protections in Section 404 of the Clean Water Act. We also have the laws protecting public lands and marine habitat. Concerns of environmental justice communities and Indigenous peoples must be considered. Labor and human rights conditions along the supply chains must be addressed. Property rights and trade protections will play important roles.

Each of these factors is entirely legitimate. Each has its own strong constituency that understandably does not want to budge on its particular issues. But cumulatively they contribute to preventing us from building what is needed at the pace and scale essential to address the climate crisis. So do many other financial, engineering, labor, supply chain, and other considerations. When all this is added up, it is difficult to imagine how the United States can build the renewables capacity needed to come even close to our temperature targets.

The Inflation Reduction Act, which President Biden signed on August 16, provides for approximately $370 billion over the next decade in energy and climate spending, including tax credits that will make it much less expensive to build renewables and other elements of clean energy infrastructure. The law provides a great deal of money for agencies to hire staff or consultants to prepare environmental impact assessments and to process applications, but otherwise it does little to clear away the obstacles to all this construction. The deal between Senators Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Chuck Schumer (D-NY) that allowed the passage of the law also included the enactment this fall of separate “permitting reform” legislation; the inevitable fight over that bill will feature loudly competing voices on how much needs to be given to the fossil fuel industry, and what environmental procedures need to be relaxed in exchange for an easier path for clean energy.

This brings me to my point. Rather than climate denial, the environmental community has tradeoff denial. We don’t recognize that it’s too late to preserve everything we consider precious, and to linger in making decisions. Society has run out of time to save everything we want to save, and to mull things over for years. Had the emissions curves peaked and started falling in the 1980s, when an increasing number of scientists were trying to sound the alarm about climate change, we might not have been forced into these tough choices. But that didn’t happen; we squandered the time. We have to acknowledge that we need to be in an era of triage, where we save what we can but recognize that there are things we’ll have to give up.

The United States has a special obligation to accelerate the clean energy transition—we have the world’s greatest financial and technological resources, our per capita greenhouse gas emissions are much higher than those of almost any other country, and our cumulative emissions and consequent climate damage are still the world’s largest.

All this leads me to what will certainly be a number of very unpopular suggestions.

One of the things I’d like to put on the table for debate is that sometimes we need to intrude into the critical habitat of an endangered species if that habitat is where we need to put our wind farms, solar arrays, transmission lines to carry the power, or the mines to extract essential minerals for the manufacture of the new clean energy equipment. We should certainly look for sites with the smallest impacts and also strive to mitigate the impacts that remain. But if despite reasonable measures some birds, bats, or plants will die as a result of building the necessary clean energy projects, that is the hard choice we need to make. Because if we don’t make this choice, far more birds, bats, and much else will die from the ravages of climate change.

We will need to give up some scenic mountain and ocean vistas. It’s wonderful to look at unadorned nature, but the best places for wind turbines are where winds are strongest, such as on top of ridge lines or off the coasts. I would rather see wind turbines on the horizon than know that coastal cities are drowning and millions of acres of human and species habitat are flooded or on fire. The wind and solar facilities in the Princeton scenario could be visible from an area the size of Texas and California combined; if we are precluded from putting these turbines and panels anywhere that people can see them, we’re totally sunk.

We also need to find ways for NEPA to take a lot less than the current average of 4.5 years to go through the environmental impact statement process. (The first section of the New York City subway system was built in less time.) The average approval time for new transmission lines (without which many wind and solar farms are useless) now exceeds 10 years. EISs shouldn’t have to rival War and Peace in length.

We also need to re-examine the demand for local consent. My work has found that in nearly each of the 50 states, cities and towns have enacted zoning or building laws to block renewables. (That’s why in 2019 I founded the Renewable Energy Legal Defense Initiative, which provides pro bono legal assistance to community groups and others that favor wind and solar but that are facing local opposition.) We have to preempt a lot of these laws that block renewables—in other words, to allow a higher level of government to nullify restrictions imposed by a lower level. New York adopted a law in 2020 giving the state sole authority to approve utility-scale wind and solar projects; Albany needs to consider local restrictions but does not have to follow them. New York had adopted a prior law in 2011 on renewables siting, but no project was approved under that law until 2018. Since the enactment of the new law, New York has approved 17 projects; few required going against local restrictions, but the hanging sword of that possibility no doubt sped up some of the projects, as did other expedited procedures under the law. California adopted a similar law last summer.

We also can’t afford to spend years negotiating every project until everyone is happy. To meet our renewables targets, we will need to reform public participation (important as it is) to keep it from paralyzing clean energy development until some elusive form of consensus is reached. And while it may be desirable to compensate neighbors who suffer losses as a result of these projects, this should not be asymmetric; clean energy projects should not have to pay for their negative externalities while (in the absence of a carbon tax) fossil fuel projects do not.

So I think we need to have a serious conversation about what does and does not survive the triage that we must undertake. What do we absolutely, positively have to preserve regardless of everything, and what might we have to sacrifice? These are tough and painful choices. There is no objective, right answer. It depends on a series of normative judgments. We environmental professionals will not be the ones making those judgments, but we can influence them. At a minimum, when there is an important clean energy or climate adaptation project that has some negative impacts and we know how to block or delay it using the environmental laws we have mastered, maybe we should instead refrain from doing that, and get out of the way. When an agency official is curious about some possible obscure impact, maybe she shouldn’t insist that the environmental impact statement study it, and perhaps the courts should excuse the absence.

For many years much of my law practice included litigating against things like highways, landfills, and incinerators. I used to say that I never met an EIS that I couldn’t sue. But the worm has turned. The task before us now is to quickly build a massive amount of clean energy and climate adaptation infrastructure. For these sorts of projects, we need to set aside our tools of obstruction (though of course we should continue using them against fossil fuel projects that have clean substitutes).

This is not all about making sacrifices. The needed energy transition will confer many benefits in addition to slashing greenhouse gas emissions and helping to solve the climate crisis. It will also lessen the conventional air pollution that takes millions of lives globally every year, and the water pollution from many forms of fossil fuel extraction. It will reduce reliance on imported fuels and on the countries that produce them, such as Russia and Saudi Arabia. It will cut down the use of fuels whose prices can fluctuate wildly; high energy prices are one of the core causes of today’s inflation. It will create many jobs; according to the Princeton study, the all-renewables scenario would lead to a net increase of about five million jobs in the United States (after subtracting the jobs lost in fossil fuel industries— mostly gasoline station employees).

I think we also need to set aside a number of illusions about easy solutions that appear to be just around the corner but actually allow us to avoid tough choices such as those mentioned above.

In theory, we could create much of the renewable electricity capacity we need by putting solar panels on rooftops, parking lots, and similar surfaces. In reality only a small fraction of building owners, especially homeowners, will put panels on their roofs, certainly if they have to pay for it themselves up front. We can require new structures to have them, but there is little discussion of mandating their placement on existing buildings that are otherwise not undergoing major work. Cumbersome local approval processes also stand in the way. (In Australia, these installations can be approved online in as little as a day; in the United States it can take months.) Abandoned agricultural and mined land may have greater potential, if it is available for sale and otherwise physically suitable, and solar panels can be floated on reservoirs (“floatovoltaics”). So far at least, “distributed” solar costs around three times as much as utility-scale solar for the same generating capacity, so choices are needed about what to subsidize.

In theory, a price could be put on carbon that will percolate through the economy and transform our energy and consumption patterns; but in reality our political leaders are spooked by increases in the price of gasoline and electricity, and there is little if any indication that they’ll ever agree to impose a carbon price—certainly not one of the magnitude that economists say is necessary to do the job, despite protestations by advocates that the carbon revenues can be distributed in ways that can offset the pocketbook impact. The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 demonstrates that Congress is all about carrots, not sticks—and not a single Republican member of the House or the Senate voted for even the carrots.

In theory, we could shut down our existing nuclear power plants even though they are operating well, and replace them with renewables and efficiency. In reality, whenever we’ve shut down a nuclear power plant, its electricity has mostly been replaced by natural gas. And much of the new renewables that have been brought on line aren’t able to aid in decarbonization since they’re having to stand in for a reactor that, until it was shut down, was a close to zero-carbon power source.

In theory, we could avoid having to build hundreds of millions of electric cars (with all the minerals needed to build them and the electricity to run them) by switching to mass transit and bicycles. In reality, mass transit and bicycles are wonderful in parts of some cities, but in few suburbs and almost no rural areas, where the densities are too low to support transit and the distances are too great for bicycles except for the hardiest (though the new generation of electric bikes certainly helps). There are many reasons to try to achieve greater densities (reducing racial segregation, improving affordability, consuming less land, encouraging physical activity through more walking and biking), but that is a campaign that has already been fought for decades and has its own withering battles with limited success. In sum, we can reduce the number of car trips, but there are real limits.

After Pearl Harbor, Congress gave immense powers to the War Production Board, and U.S. industry mobilized with stunning speed to produce the airplanes, tanks, and other materiel needed to win the war. But very few Americans were standing in the way. Indeed, the era saw unprecedented unity, and people of all kinds joined the war effort, including women and racial minorities who had previously been excluded from many roles. Unfortunately, today we have a major political party doing everything it can to block action on climate change. Anti-renewables organizations have sprung up, and right-wing media are amplifying their false messages.

Several academics have written about what we need to do to speed up the process. Among them are J.B. Ruhl, Jim Salzman, Jeff Thaler, Alexandra Klass, John Dernbach, Uma Outka, and John Ruple. Some of the suggestions that have emerged are more federal preemption of state and local control over renewables and transmission; more centralized decisionmaking, not just coordination, so that individual agencies can’t hold things up; broader allowance of mitigation when adverse impacts are found; and extensive use of eminent domain, especially for transmission lines.

We could have more use of programmatic EISs (which cover multiple similar projects, not just one) and regional assessments of species habitat and historic sites (necessarily accompanied by considerably greater agency staffing to do all of this) so that individual projects within the studied regions can move quickly. We should also adopt standard assessment and mitigation measures and permit conditions, so that the wheel doesn’t have to be reinvented and renegotiated every time, and impose tighter timelines for project reviews, with default approvals if those timelines are exceeded. Congress could provide for limits on judicial review, perhaps requiring all challenges to projects to be brought in the D.C. Circuit on the administrative record, with a short statute of limitations. Early engagement with disadvantaged communities, tribal governments and Indigenous peoples has also been found to be helpful.

A major challenge is that, in the hands of a pro-fossil fuel president or Congress, most of these tools could as readily be used to hasten the approval of dirty as well as clean energy projects. This further highlights the central importance of electoral politics in addressing the climate crisis.

We can’t afford any more obstacles. I think it’s incumbent on all of us who do understand the frightening magnitude of the climate threat to work to clear the path for the energy transformation we need.

There are some models of laws that have achieved speedy approvals for certain kinds of projects—the Telecommunications Act of 1996 for cell phone towers; the Defense Base Closure and Realignment Act of 1990; the Second War Powers Act of 1942. Whatever it is, I believe we need to move forward in this fashion, and not just plod along with business-as-usual environmental regulation toward a world of killing heat and mass human migration and species extinction. We need to end tradeoff denial. TEF

COVER STORY 2 It’s too late to protect everything. To save the climate, we need to build so much wind and solar that some will go in bad places. Not doing so would be much worse. Rather than climate denial, the environmental community has tradeoff denial.

Centering the People Most Impacted
Author
Chanté Coleman - National Wildlife Federation
National Wildlife Federation
Current Issue
September-October 2022
Issue
5
Parent Article
The Clean Water Act at Year 50: What's Next for Water Protection?

The Environmental Protection Agency’s longstanding mission statement reads: “Federal laws protecting human health and the environment are administered and enforced fairly, effectively, and as Congress intended.” Protecting human health is a basic function of the government, and in the 21st century, no one’s health should be compromised due to environmental concerns.

Yet, low-income communities and communities of color are disproportionately impacted by climate change, pollution, and other environmental burdens. Decades of research point to this stark reality that we can no longer ignore. One way to address this is to make improvements to statutory or regulatory laws, such as the Clean Water Act. However, if we do not confront the underlying systems of oppression that continue to allow for some communities to be protected while our most vulnerable communities suffer, then we are not addressing the root cause of these issues. One way that racism and discrimination are upheld is through the disproportionate impact of laws, statutes, regulations, and policies, including the CWA. Indeed, race is the strongest factor in slow and ineffective enforcement of federal drinking water law in communities.

The CWA, as currently written, does not require communities of color and low-income communities to be prioritized in the implementation and enforcement of clean-up plans. Furthermore, while the CWA requires states to clean up impaired waterways, states have the autonomy to develop and prioritize clean-up plans in ways that often do not account for the overburden of pollution on low-income communities and communities of color. This disregard for unequal impacts will lead to increased pollutant discharges in these communities and a decline in overall health, widening the gap between the communities privileged enough to receive the benefits of these laws and those who are not.

To ensure the CWA truly protects the people most impacted by pollution, several key changes need to be made. First, states should be required to use all information available to prioritize clean-up plans in areas that are over-impacted, or even ban new pollution sources in these areas. EPA already collects relevant information through EJScreen, an environmental justice screening and mapping tool that combines environmental and demographic indicators in maps and reports. This data can be used to further target equitable implementation and enforcement of clean-up plans.

Governments should also expand this data on impacts to include climate change and emerging pollutants. The effects of climate change are increasing in severity and frequency, and low-income communities and communities of color are on the frontlines—especially when it comes to increased flooding and its associated surges in nonpoint source pollution. In addition to looking at past impacts of pollution, an update to the CWA should require states and EPA to address the degradation of water quality due to climate change in areas that are already overburdened from cumulative environmental impacts and systemic oppression. Another step to protect drinking water would be to remove exemptions in the Act that allow agriculture and many industries to pollute without safeguards.

Lastly, this data should be used to support funding for communities most in need. In the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, EPA is now required to undertake an analysis of the Drinking Water State Revolving Fund and Clean Water State Revolving Fund “to identify historical distribution of funds to small and disadvantaged communities and identify new opportunities and methods to improve equitableness of funds to rural, low-income, minority, and tribal communities.” This requirement, championed by the National Wildlife Federation, will ensure more funds go into the communities that are most impacted and least resourced to address infrastructure upgrades and other improvements. For the Clean Water SRF in particular, EPA should ensure that state implementation guidance includes equitable distribution of funding, such as allocating no less than half of funds toward communities identified through the holistic data measures outlined above.

While these proposed changes would strengthen the CWA and help prioritize affected communities, they are not enough. We must also directly address the issue of sacrifice zones. These are the marginalized, low-income communities, often communities of color, who we treat as less-than—and as a result, we over-pollute and over-extract these places to the point where community members are highly impacted and exposed to harms. Changing the CWA can only do so much to reduce the unjust concentration of pollution burden in these communities. We must understand and address the many systems, including unequal access to housing, education, and transportation, that perpetuate this harm and continue to hold us back from reaching our pollution-reduction goals.

I want to thank my colleagues who helped this article come to fruition, including Anna Brunner, Elizabeth Lillard, Glenn Watkins, Jim Murphy, Matt O’Malley, Dr. Mustafa Santiago Ali, and Peter Marx.

Chanté Coleman is vice president of equity and justice at National Wildlife Federation.

The World Needs ELI at Its Creative Best
Author
Scott Fulton - Environmental Law Institute
Environmental Law Institute
Current Issue
January-February 2022
Issue
1
Scott Fulton

This column is indeed my “closing statement.” Come January, I will step down from my role as president to take up residence with my wife in Rome. I will continue working with the Institute from Europe on a part-time basis, primarily supporting ELI’s international portfolio. The balance of my time will be devoted to working with the consultancy Sustainability Frameworks.

Looking back over our last six-plus years, there is much to feel good about in what we have accomplished together.

We have grown ELI’s revenue base by about 50 percent, attracting a host of new donors and funders to the Institute’s rule of law and governance work. A pandemic that we feared might break us saw instead an increase in funding and productivity.

We have turned ELI’s recruitment processes for staff and the board decisively in the direction of diversity so that ELI reflects more fully the constituencies we serve.

We added to ELI’s appeal through our Emerging Leaders Initiative and the ELI WELL (Women in Environmental Law and Leadership) program.

We have modernized ELI’s knowledge-transfer platforms, digitizing our celebrated print publications, establishing and growing ELI’s podcast and blog offerings, and adding new virtual engagement vehicles for most of our programs, dramatically enlarging the reach of ELI content.

We have established new vehicles for business engagement and leadership, from our in-house EHS dialogue series, to our award-winning China International Business Dialogue on Environmental Governance — an interface that seeks to share the learning of high-performing multinational companies’ best regulatory practices with China’s regulators, with ELI brokering the conversation.

We added important new lanes on technology, from our Innovation Lab to our GreenTech initiative, shining a light on environmentally beneficial technologies, and the law and policy conditions needed for them to accelerate.

We have made ELI’s mark in the climate arena, from our development of a model climate law for developing countries; to our publication of the ground-breaking book Legal Pathways to Deep Decarbonization; to our Climate Judiciary Project, which seeks to bring basic climate science education to judges, here and around the world, who are encountering climate change questions in a widening array of cases.

We have made important strides in enhancing ELI’s contributions in the environmental justice arena, led by our board’s groundbreaking “Statement on Race and Environmental Justice,” and as reflected by our new pro bono platform for connecting members of the bar with EJ communities needing legal support.

And these are just the tip of a much bigger iceberg of contributions that included growth in ELI’s leadership in advancing environmental rule of law and environmental peacebuilding around the world; expansion of natural resources work with Indigenous Peoples, particularly in the Arctic region, and through our growing Ocean Program; deepening engagements with environmental justice communities and other local communities in the Gulf region, the Mississippi River basin, and elsewhere; our continued work building the capacity of state and local governments — and so much more.

So, looking back, there are many positives. But looking forward, we see a world increasingly on fire, both metaphorically and in actuality. The ideas of effective governance and rule of law — so central to the ELI mission and identity — are being put to the match in various ways. Politics are hotter — and more toxic — than ever, chronically on the verge of combusting or imploding. The fires of racial injustice are raising questions anew about the uneven distribution of environmental benefits and burdens, exacerbated by the overlay of a pandemic that reserves its worst for the disadvantaged among us.

And the Earth itself is heating up, with the costs of a changing climate mounting in the form of extreme weather events and prolonged drought, accelerating rates of species extinction, degradation of the marine environment as sea levels rise, and wildfires that are now often burning out of control.

If necessity is the mother of invention, then surely the world needs ELI at its creative best. And to be what the world needs of it, ELI and its new leader, Jordan Diamond, will continue to need you — your support, your ideas, and your presence.

Many thanks to all of you and ELI’s remarkable staff, executive team, and board for these years of support and successful collaboration. No resting on laurels, however. There is vitally important work yet to be done.

On Why World Needs ELI's Creative Best.

Lessons From the Pandemic for the Future of Work
Author
Scott Fulton - Environmental Law Institute
Environmental Law Institute
Current Issue
September-October 2021
Issue
5
Scott Fulton

During the spring of 2020, while we were in the early grip of the pandemic, I pointed in this column to a possible silver-lining. Perhaps what appeared then to be broad societal acceptance of the science around the coronavirus might leave us better able to also rally around the science on our other mega challenge — climate change.

Well, the broad consensus on pandemic science hasn’t exactly held. The prior administration downplayed the pandemic — and the science behind it — in an effort to rally the economy and stir up support for a reelection bid. Then, with the turnover at the White House and in the Senate, the politicization of pandemic science intensified, with some questioning whether a scourge that has disrupted lives everywhere and killed over four million people is actually an elaborate hoax.

But this doesn’t mean that we have nothing to learn from the pandemic. Our collective experience in shifting to the use of remote engagement tools, the quantum leap in the quality of those tools, and our discovery that we cannot only hold our own but in some cases increase our productivity, should mean something going forward. Indeed, if, when we reach the other side of the pandemic, we simply snap back to how things were done before, we will be missing a major opportunity to reshape our approach to work in ways that can enlarge our impact, improve quality of life, and contribute to our environmental objectives.

Let’s take ELI’s experience. We, like everyone, were quite concerned about whether our programming could survive a period of home sequestration. But we pivoted to virtual approaches, and experienced, to our amazement, dramatic bump-ups in most of our activity measures. So, for example, we saw through the use of virtual engagement tools a dramatic increase in the number of educational programs that we were able to bring forward and a near doubling of attendance at those programs. We were likewise able to increase the number of podcasts we produced and saw a near doubling in podcast listenership. Our video views also nearly doubled. Downloads of our research reports also saw a significant bump-up. These are dramatic increases in both productivity and reach.

As our staffing has not increased, the increases in productivity signal that virtual tools are making us more efficient at what we do. I’d like to think that the expanded reach reflects the ever-improving quality of our products, but there is clearly more going on than that alone. The increases in listenership, viewership, and participation also signal recovered bandwidth within our community.

There’s no doubt that for some, regular work has been down, which helped enlarge the space for engaging with ELI’s programs. But a current that cuts across organizations and sectors is the harvest of time that came from greatly limiting all forms of movement — travel, commuting, trips across town, and jaunts up and down the halls and stairs for meetings. From this collective experience, we have learned just how much time is consumed in moving about and what is possible when we put it to other use.

And of course it’s not just time that is saved — there is potential for reducing environmental impacts. There is considerably more study needed of the trade-offs between the energy demands connected to remote, distributed work, and the demands associated with office work performed in installations that are often oversized and inefficiently used.

But we do know for sure that less transportation means better local air quality and a smaller carbon footprint. It also means less traffic congestion, fewer mass-transit hassles, fewer airport and transit irritations — perhaps a net reduction in some of the more grinding aspects of modern life. This is no doubt why many surveyed employees don’t want to return to the way things were.

There are no panaceas when it comes to human systems, and an all-remote, all-the-time approach is not problem free. Inequities can emerge between those whose work is portable and those whose work is not. The cohesion of work teams can suffer. Networking and forming new relationships can take more effort. The spontaneous synergies and collective creativity that comes from inventive people being in proximity can be lost. There is also the problem of losing the physical separation between work and home and the tendency for many of us to just never stop working in the absence of such a seam. For these reasons, the work of the future will likely need to include some elements of the past. But the new normal should also carry forward with strength some of the learning and tools from this bizarre, abnormal period from which we are hoping to emerge. We can work differently — and should.

On Pandemic’s Lessons for Work Future.

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