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Looking ahead to next week: On Tuesday, President Biden is expected to announce new China tariffs targeting “strategic sectors” including electric vehicles, batteries, and solar cells, according toBloomberg. Existing levies will remain in place. Biden wants to “contrast his approach” with that of former President Trump heading into the November election, Reutersadded. Trump has proposed sweeping tariff hikes on China that some analysts say would boost inflation. But both candidates no doubt want to be seen as tough on China, which largely dominates in global EV sales and is a major producer of cheap solar and battery tech. The Biden administration is worried “that Chinese dominance of the global market for these essential technologies would harm the U.S. economy and national security,” as Somini Sengupta explained for The New York Times.
Earlier this week, climate envoy John Podesta sat down with his Chinese counterpart Liu Zhenmin to discuss climate issues ahead of COP29 later this year. No word yet about what came out of those talks…
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And speaking of Trump, a bombshell Washington Postreport details the goings on at a Mar-a-Lago dinner where the former president rubbed shoulders with oil executives and lobbyists last month. Unnamed sources say Trump told the wealthy attendees to raise $1 billion to help him take back the White House, and in return, he promised to:
Biden campaign spokesman Ammar Moussa told the Post that “Donald Trump is selling out working families to Big Oil for campaign checks. It’s that simple.”
Heatmap’s Jeva Lange reported recently on how allies of Big Oil pumped more than $6.4 million into Trump’s joint fundraising committee in just the first three months of 2024 — on pace to surpass the $6.9 million the industry contributed in all of 2023.
Water levels are rising in the lake that supplies the Panama Canal, and authorities say they expect the passage to be back to its full operating capacity by early 2025. The canal is one of the world’s biggest shipping routes, moving some $270 billion worth of cargo every year. But a record prolonged drought in the region has reduced the number of daily crossings over the last year or so. Increased rainfall means the drought is beginning to ease, and authorities will start slowly permitting more traffic over the coming months.
As Reutersreported, U.S. liquified natural gas exporters are jostling for some of those additional slots, and the canal’s administrator Ricaurte Vasquez is exploring how to reasonably accommodate them. “They have very big aspirations in which they would like to have a canal dedicated to them,” Vasquez said, “but that is not possible, since this is a canal that should be open to every type of commerce internationally.”
The canal authorities have been exploring ways to safeguard against future droughts brought by a warming climate. One suggestion involves creating a “dry canal” that would move cargo using existing infrastructure like roadways, railways, and ports. The president-elect Jose Raul Mulino this week said he would speed up permitting for building new water reservoirs by 2030.
The amount of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere jumped in March, marking the biggest year-over-year increase ever recorded. According to UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the global average concentration of CO2 in March was 4.7 parts per million (ppm) higher than in March last year, which is a greater leap than the previous highest increase of 4.1 ppm recorded in 2016. “We sadly continue to break records in the CO2 rise rate,” said Ralph Keeling, director of the CO2 program at the institute. “The ultimate reason is continued global growth in the consumption of fossil fuels.”
The unusual jump is due partly to the El Niño event and an “unusual dip” in March 2023. But the records show that the rate of growth is generally increasing as we continue to burn fossil fuels. Keeling added that a very high growth rate could continue for several more months. “This recent surge shows how far we still need to go to stabilize the climate system,” he said. “Stabilization will require that CO2 levels start to fall. Instead, CO2 is rising faster than ever.” Back in 2022, NOAA confirmed that modern CO2 concentration levels match those not seen since 4 million years ago, when “sea levels were between 5 and 25 meters higher than today, high enough to drown many of the world’s largest modern cities.”
“Now that I’ve seen a glimpse of what’s going on in China, the Western manufacturers, particularly the American ones, don’t seem like they’re trying at all.” –Kevin Williams writing for Inside EVs about his trip to the Beijing Auto Show, where he realized just how advanced China’s EVs really are.
“The renewables future has arrived,” said Dave Jones, Ember’s director of global insights. “Solar, in particular, is accelerating faster than anyone thought possible. The decline of power sector emissions is now inevitable. 2023 was likely the pivot point – peak emissions in the power sector – a major turning point in the history of energy.” But... clean electricity growth has to continue to speed up if we are to meet the COP28 goal of tripling renewables by 2030 to 60% of global supply. In the immortal words of Jeff Goldblum, “must go faster.”
Ember
Vermont’s senate yesterday passed a bill that would require the state’s utilities be powered 100% by renewables by 2035. H.289 would double the amount of renewables utilities are required to build in state; require utilities to provide customers with additional, new renewable energy of any size from anywhere in the region; and yes, require utilities to provide customers with 100% renewable electricity (some by 2030, others by 2035 at the latest). Republican Gov. Phil Scott is expected to veto the bill, but the veto will likely be overturned by the state legislature. The law “represents the largest single move towards renewable electricity and away from fossil fueled power that Vermont has ever taken,” and its emissions-cutting potential would be equivalent to taking up to 250,000 cars off the road, the Sierra Club said in a statement.
Venezuela has become one of the first nations in modern times to lose all its glaciers to melting. The Humboldt glacier, also known as La Corona, was the last of six glaciers in the country. Five melted in 2011, and La Corona has shrunk so much that it’s no longer classified as a glacier, but as an ice field. “The loss of La Corona marks the loss of much more than the ice itself, it also marks the loss of the many ecosystem services that glaciers provide, from unique microbial habitats to environments of significant cultural value,” Caroline Clason, a glaciologist and assistant professor at Durham University, toldThe Guardian. Other countries that could soon be glacier free are Indonesia, Mexico, and Slovenia, according to climatologist and weather historian Maximiliano Herrera.
Mercedes was expected to tell shareholders at its annual general meeting today that the group will abandon its plan to be fully electric by 2030 following sluggish EV sales, and that combustion-engine and hybrid vehicles will continue to be part of the mix “well into the 2030s.” “The transformation might take longer than expected,” CEO Ola Källenius said in prepared remarks, according toBloomberg. The company’s EV deliveries fell by 8% in the first quarter of 2024. “With China not phasing out sales of new combustion-engines until 2060, luxury-car makers still see potential for their legacy products in the world’s biggest auto market,” Bloomberg noted.
This is kind of cool: A company in Austria has created a “terracotta” solar panel that can match the coloring of the red tiles that sit atop many of the country’s buildings, including historic monuments. “We would like to make a contribution to ensuring that monument protection and sustainable energy production go hand in hand,” said Sonnenkraft’s Peter Prasser.
Sonnenkraft
And speaking of rooftop solar, a 450,000-square-foot GAF Energy manufacturing facility opened recently in Texas. The Timberline Solar factory will produce GAF’s nailable solar shingles – essentially solar panels that double as rooftop shingles. The new factory will increase GAF’s capacity by 500%, which Electrekestimates will make the company the world’s largest solar roofing producer.
Beloved British naturalist, biologist, and broadcaster David Attenborough celebrates his 98th birthday today.
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