Congress’ tax bill is selling out America’s public lands and waters

  Congress is moving forward with President Donald Trump’s bill to provide tax cuts for billionaires while ripping social services away from millions of Americans. In particular, the natural resources section of this massive bill reveals how congressional Republicans are trying to sell out public lands to the highest bidder to fund those insider tax breaks, while Big Oil campaign donors and other Wall Street insiders stand to see financial gain.

  If passed, this bill would be the largest successful attack by Congress on U.S. lands and waters in modern American history. It would give the oil industry free rein over more than 293 million acres of public lands and waters—an area larger than Texas and California combined—for drilling through its first rounds of mandated lease sales alone.* Factoring in expected tax cuts and other legal changes that would benefit fossil fuel CEOs, the tax bill would be a massive win for Big Oil and a massive loss for the American public.

New EPA regulations target air, water, land and climate pollution from power plants, especially those that burn coal

  Electric power generation in the U.S. is shifting rapidly away from fossil fuels toward cleaner and lower-carbon sources. State clean energy targets and dramatic declines in the cost of renewable electricity are the most important reasons.

  But fossil fuel plants still generate 60% of the U.S. electricity supply, producing air, water, and land pollutants and greenhouse gases in the process. To reduce these impacts, the Environmental Protection Agency announced a suite of rules on April 25, 2024. They focus mainly on coal plants, the nation’s most-polluting electricity source.

State budgets tied to fossil fuels are slowing the energy transition and leaving workers and communities behind

  Achieving America’s net-zero energy future and avoiding the worst impacts of climate change requires a rapid transition away from fossil fuels toward clean energy. But a significant source of state funding for important programs—including schools, public health, and infrastructure—relies on continued oil and natural gas extraction from federal lands. Simply put, direct payments from the federal government to states are higher when more oil and natural gas is extracted from public lands and waters, creating a perverse incentive to drill more. These payments are at odds with public policy objectives: The federal oil and gas program creates political opposition to climate policy and undermines efforts to build a more equitable economy that works for all Americans.

The average person’s daily choices can still make a big difference in fighting climate change – and getting governments and utilities to tackle it, too

  The average American’s everyday interactions with energy sources are limited. They range from turning appliances on or off, to commuting, to paying utility bills.

  The connections between those acts and rising global temperatures may seem distant.

  However, individuals hold many keys to unlocking solutions to climate change – the biggest challenge our species currently faces – which is perhaps why the fossil fuel industry spent decades misleading and misinforming the public about it.

How oil lobbyists use a rigged system to hamstring Biden’s climate agenda

  During President Joe Biden’s first week in office, he announced a pause on all new lease sales on public lands and waters alongside a review of the entire federal oil and gas program. Despite these attempts, a Trump-appointed U.S. District Court Judge Terry A. Doughty in Louisiana blocked the leasing pause, and the Biden administration announced they would hold lease sales both on and offshore in the coming months. The onshore lease sales are poised to offer up 740,000 acres of public lands, and offshore plans will offer a whopping 80 million acres of public ocean to oil companies to lease. Federal leases lock in oil development for decades, and the offshore lease sale alone has the potential to emit 723 million metric tons of CO2* into the atmosphere over its lifetime, equivalent to operating more than 70 percent of the United States’ coal-fired power plants for a year.

These 3 energy storage technologies can help solve the challenge of moving to 100% renewable electricity

  In recent decades, the cost of wind and solar power generation has dropped dramatically. This is one reason that the U.S. Department of Energy projects that renewable energy will be the fastest-growing U.S. energy source through 2050.

  However, it’s still relatively expensive to store energy. And since renewable energy generation isn’t available all the time – it happens when the wind blows or the sun shines – storage is essential.

Climate change is an infrastructure problem – map of electric vehicle chargers shows one reason why

  Most of America’s 107,000 gas stations can fill several cars every five or 10 minutes at multiple pumps. Not so for electric vehicle chargers – at least not yet. Today the U.S. has around 43,000 public EV charging stations, with about 106,000 outlets. Each outlet can charge only one vehicle at a time, and even fast-charging outlets take an hour to provide 180-240 miles’ worth of charge; most take much longer.

  The existing network is acceptable for many purposes. But chargers are very unevenly distributed; almost a third of all outlets are in California. This makes EVs problematic for long trips, like the 550 miles of sparsely populated desert highway between Reno and Salt Lake City. “Range anxiety” about longer trips is one reason electric vehicles still make up fewer than 1% of U.S. passenger cars and trucks.

Energy-efficient buildings are central to modernizing U.S. infrastructure

  If roads, bridges, and phone and transmission lines are the veins of American infrastructure, buildings are the heart. Whether residential or commercially owned, the buildings that serve as places of work and living in the United States unquestionably shape public health, safety, and economic productivity. As buildings’ multiplying energy needs increasingly force their integration into the United States’ energy grid, it has become necessary to update building practices and technologies accordingly. These updates should minimize energy leakage and make greater use of each unit of energy consumed.

Alison Cassady: The Clean Power Plan: A critical step toward decarbonizing America’s energy system

  The United States is in the midst of an energy transition in which cheap natural gas is displacing coal as the go-to fuel choice for electricity generation. While this trend has helped reduce carbon pollution from the nation’s power plants, switching fuel sources does not go far enough to achieve the deep reductions necessary to prevent catastrophic and irreversible climate change. Ambitious deployment of renewable energy and energy-efficiency technology must form the cornerstone of any successful climate mitigation strategy. The Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA’s, Clean Power Plan is a critical part of the U.S. strategy to transition away from carbon-intensive fuels and toward a cleaner energy future.

Making subsidy reform stick

  Fossil-fuel subsidies impose a significant economic and environmental burden around the world, distorting markets and draining national budgets. In recent years, the total cost of fossil-fuel consumption subsidies worldwide has ranged from $480 billion to $630 billion per year, plus more than $100 billion spent every year in production subsidies.

Cameron Smith: The balancing act between economy and environment

  According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s International Energy Outlook 2013, world energy consumption is projected to increase 56 percent between 2010 and 2040.

  Even with such growing demand, we are making significant progress towards a cleaner environment. Consider air quality in Alabama. According to the EPA’s Air Quality Index, the number of days in which air quality in Alabama has been unhealthy has fallen 97% since 1980. During the 1980s, approximately 1 in every 8.3 days in Alabama had unhealthy air in at least one of its cities. As of 2010-2012, that ratio has declined to 1 in every 80 days.

With only $93 billion in profits, the big five oil companies demand to keep tax breaks

  The 2013 profit totals are in for the big five oil companies—BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Exxon Mobil, and Shell. Their financial reports indicate that they earned a combined total of $93 billion last year, or $177,000 per minute. After years of oil production declines, the big five oil companies actually increased their total production in 2013, predominately due to BP and ConocoPhillips almost doubling their total production. The companies’ higher oil production yet lower profits indicate that it is becoming more expensive to produce oil as the number of newer, easier, and cheaper fields shrink. This is why, despite their outsized earnings, the oil companies are not only fighting to keep their tax breaks but also lobbying to lift the crude oil export ban. But doing so could hurt working families, our economy, and our energy security. Instead, we need to invest in cleaner transportation alternatives.

Five more items for President Obama’s climate change to-do list

  On the eve of President Barack Obama’s second inauguration in 2013, the Center for American Progress recommended 10 energy and environmental priorities for President Obama’s second term to build on his first-term clean energy successes. Now, one year later, with the annual State of the Union address coming up, we can assess the status of these recommendations and add five new actions that would further enhance our health and safety, grow our economy, and protect our air, water, and climate.

Richard W. Caperton and Daniel J. Weiss: Moving forward on reducing carbon pollution

  “This is the global threat of our time. And for the sake of future generations, our generation must move toward a global compact to confront a changing climate before it is too late. That is our job. That is our task. We have to get to work.” – President Barack Obama, June 19, 2013

  President Obama knows that climate change is the defining challenge of our time and his presidency. Early in his administration, he committed to putting the United States on a path to reduce the carbon pollution that causes climate change. This commitment—made in Copenhagen in 2009—is a pledge by the United States to reduce its greenhouse-gas pollution to 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020. The president took significant actions during his first term to fulfill that promise, and news reports indicate that on Tuesday he will announce the most important step in this effort: reducing carbon pollution from power plants.

Jesse C. Moore: Should the United States subsidize fossil fuel companies?

  The world needs a reliable supply of energy. To ensure that, many countries have granted subsidies and tax breaks to fossil fuel companies to help develop energy resources. However, with the concern over our carbon emissions and over the economic crises that many countries are facing, the wisdom of continuing those subsidies needs to be examined. The fossil fuel companies are now quite profitable. The five most profitable companies in the United States are Ford ($20 billion), Microsoft ($23.2 billion), Apple ($25.9 billion), Chevron ($26.9 billion), and Exxon Mobil ($41.1 billion). The two most profitable companies are oil companies with Exxon Mobil greatly exceeding the profitability of the other four.

America’s future under ‘Drill, Baby, Drill’

  When it comes to Big Oil, the latest news clips say it all—soaring gas prices topping $4 a gallon; a record-high $33.5 billion, or $368 million per day, in 2012 first-quarter profits for BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Royal Dutch Shell; the industry sitting on more than $58 billion in cash reserves as of the end of 2011 but still receiving $2 billion in government subsidies; and a continued practice of bankrolling the campaigns of conservative lawmakers who then demand more drilling and less federal regulation and oversight.

  These almost-daily news stories, however, are the tip of a much larger iceberg. Today the American Petroleum Institute (API) launches their long-term vision for the future, which to no surprise centers on “unleashing the full benefit of developing U.S. oil and natural gas resources.”