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An offshore wind lease sale in the Gulf of Maine yesterday ended with two bidders offering a combined $22 million for the rights to develop projects on four ocean tracts. While that’s only half of the leases that were up for sale, the results were better than many local advocates had hoped for considering the uncertainty for the industry related to the upcoming election. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin has written, “Trump has special contempt for wind energy in all its forms — to him, all wind turbines are bird murderers, but offshore turbines are especially deadly.” Trump has promised to shut down the industry on “day one.”
If fully developed, the leases could generate 6.8 gigawatts of electricity, or enough to power about 2.3 million homes, according to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. But that part of the ocean is deep, and the projects will need to utilize still-nascent floating offshore wind technology.
The Biden administration announced the winners of the Clean Ports program on Tuesday, a $3 billion grant program created by the Inflation Reduction Act to reduce toxic air pollution and carbon emissions at the nation’s shipping hubs. The 55 grants across 27 states and territories will support the electrification of cargo handling equipment, drayage trucks, trains, and ferries, as well as solar power projects and EV charging infrastructure. The projects are expected to cut more than 3 million metric tons of CO2 over the first 10 years of implementation. For context, the three largest U.S. ports emitted more than 2.5 million tons of CO2 in 2019.
A report from the American Lung Association published this morning highlights the potential for satellites to improve our understanding of air quality. New methods for translating measurements of various gases and particles into estimates of ground-level pollution can help fill data gaps in communities that don’t have local air quality monitoring systems. Nearly two-thirds of U.S. counties lack monitoring stations, the report says, whether due to cost constraints, low population density, or rapid land use change. The authors identified 300 counties with incomplete or no monitoring data that likely had unhealthy levels of air pollution in 2020, 2021, and 2022.
The indefatigable Ben Elgin at Bloomberg has uncovered yet another problem in the carbon market. Twenty years ago, Nike created millions of carbon credits tied to the sneaker brand’s efforts to stop using sulfur hexafluoride, a powerful greenhouse gas that was previously pumped into its soles. Now, ACR, formerly known as the American Carbon Registry, has disclosed that more than a million of those credits are in its “buffer pool,” which is supposed to provide insurance for buyers. If a forestry project in the registry burns, for example, credits set aside in the buffer pool can be cancelled to make up for the loss.
But Nike’s credits were basically meaningless to begin with — the decision to change the shoes had nothing to do with the carbon market, Nike confirmed to Bloomberg — and they’re even more meaningless 20 years later. “It was a somewhat notorious project for those of us in the North American carbon market 15 years ago,” Derik Broekhoff, a senior scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute, told Elgin.
Driverless Waymo vehicles now complete more than 150,000 passenger trips per week. “If ‘driverless Waymo car’ were a transit system, it would be the nation’s 11th most used, between Miami Metrorail and the Staten Island Railway,” according to NYU Stern professor Arpit Gupta.
A self-driving Waymo on the streets of Los Angeles. Mario Tama/Getty Images
