The United States is Stepping Up to Climate Change, and the United Nations Climate Convention lays the foundations for a clean-energy economy
“Climate change is here,” says Arati Prabhakar, Biden’s chief science adviser and director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. But Prabhakar says that the United States is stepping up to the challenge with significant new climate investments, “and this gives us hope that we can move at a scale that the climate notices”.
The nation’s total greenhouse-gas emissions fell by around 17% between 2005 and 2021, according to the latest US emissions report to the United Nations climate convention. The country must increase emissions reductions from the current 1% a year to around 6 per year to meet midcentury targets.
The more solar panels and wind turbines the nation can deploy, the faster it can get to that 6 percent. The Inflation Reduction Act of last year allocates hundreds of billions of dollars to speed up decarbonization, which involves tax breaks for home improvements like better insulation and switch to electric appliances. According to one study, it has already created over 75,000 jobs and spurred more than $86 billion in private investments.
The Biden sdministration also announced today that it’s providing more than $6 billion in investments for climate action, $3.9 billion of that going toward modernizing the grid. Zaidi says that clean electrons are the way to decarbonize most of the economy. “That’s going to require us to upgrade our local grid infrastructure, for example, for charging of heavy-duty vehicles.”
The nation’s creaky energy grid desperately needs an overhaul, both to cope with increasingly extreme weather and to accommodate more renewable energy. The number of power failures that affected more than 50,000 customers increased by about 64 percent in the two years since the last report was published. The US needs a grid that’s better able to ferry electricity from renewable-energy hot spots, like solar power generated in the sunny Southwest and wind power from the gusty Midwest. “Undergrounding” more powerlines, especially in the parched West, would prevent the infrastructure from igniting catastrophic blazes, like the Camp Fire that destroyed the town of Paradise in 2018.
For Cleetus, the report weaves a compelling picture about the need for fairness and equity as the country moves to build a clean-energy economy. She says that policymakers need to make sure marginalized communities are aware of the full benefits of the fossil-fuel industry.
A member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation who studies environmental justice at the University of Michigan says it is a breath of fresh air. A lead author on the chapter on Indigenous peoples, Whyte says the report highlights Indigenous rights alongside climate solutions. The infrastructure in native communities is not strong enough to protect them from the effects of climate change.
The message should ring loudly in the public and in the policy-making community, says the author and chief scientist with The Nature Conservancy. “Our actions matter,” Hayhoe says, “and that’s the science”.
After taking office, Biden had the United States rejoin the United Nations’ Paris climate agreement, which Trump had exited. Biden promised halving the country’s greenhouse-gas emissions by 2030, and to achieve net-zero emissions by mid-century. The United States has fallen short of its goals on the climate assessment.
“This is not about curling up in a corner in despair,” says Rachel Cleetus, policy director and lead economist for the Climate and Energy Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, an advocacy group based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. There are some concrete steps we can take to cut emissions.
Tropical Storm Watch for the US Hurricane Hillary Wildfires in the Light of High-Redshift Weather Forecasts from June 20 to June 30, 2015
At least 97 people were killed by the deadliest US wildfire in more than a century, and the first tropical storm watch was issued for southern California in the wake of Hurricane Hillary.