Hill Heat

The oft-repeated claim that the United States has significantly reduced its greenhouse pollution since 2005 by switching from coal to gas depends on the EPA’s official accounting that methane pollution has declined during the fracking boom, an implausible scenario.

Today, the International Energy Agency revealed in a major report that methane pollution from the fossil-fuel industry is 70 percent higher than official figures globally. Their Global Methane Tracker finds that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has been seriously undercounting methane pollution. The IEA estimate of 2021 methane pollution is 77 percent higher than the EPA’s inventory:

Not surprisingly, that cancels out all the purported climate benefits of switching electricity production from coal to natural gas.

Furthermore, the U.S. EPA calculates the effect of methane on global warming by using its impact over 100 years, which is about 30 times that of CO₂, instead of more scientifically defensible dynamic measures that take into account methane’s 20-year impact, which is 86 times that of CO₂.

3/7/20 Update: Russia invaded Ukraine the day after the IEA report dropped, so that may help explain why this report didn’t get too much attention. However, the oil and gas industry are claiming the invasion means we have to drill everywhere, and the Senate Energy Committee found time to attack FERC for regulating methane pollution. So I think there’s capacity to discuss this report and its shattering implications, which include the need for the United States to shut down the fracking boom as fast as humanly possible.

Link to meeting webcast when live

Meeting agenda
ADMINISTRATIVE
A-1	AD22-1-000	Agency Administrative Matters
A-2	AD22-2-000	Customer Matters, Reliability, Security and Market Operations
ELECTRIC
E-1	AD22-5-000	Implementation of Dynamic Line Ratings
E-2	ER20-1718-002	New York Independent System Operator, Inc.
E-3	ER20-1068-003	The Dayton Power and Light Company
E-4	EL19-47-002	Independent Market Monitor for PJM v. PJM Interconnection, L.L.C.
	EL19-63-002 (Consolidated)	Office of the People’s Counsel for District of Columbia, Delaware Division of the Public Advocate, Citizens Utility Board, Indiana Office of Utility Consumer Counselor, Maryland Office of People’s Counsel, Pennsylvania Office of Consumer Advocate, West Virginia Consumer Advocate Division, and PJM Industrial Customer Coalition v. PJM Interconnection, L.L.C.
	ER21-2877-001	PJM Interconnection, L.L.C.
	ER21-2444-001 (Not consolidated)
E-5	ER21-2900-000	Duke Energy Carolinas, LLC
	ER21-2900-001
	ER21-2900-002
	ER21-2900-003
E-6	EL22-26-000	PJM Interconnection, L.L.C.
	ER22-957-000
E-7	ER18-1702-002	Southwest Power Pool, Inc.
E-8	EL17-21-001	Kansas Electric Power Cooperative, Inc. v. Southwest Power Pool, Inc.
E-9	EL18-9-001	Xcel Energy Services Inc. v. Southwest Power Pool, Inc.
E-10	ER20-2550-003	Entergy Mississippi, LLC
E-11	OMITTED
E-12	ER21-1802-000	PJM Interconnection, L.L.C.
E-13	EC21-125-000	PSEG New Haven LLC, PSEG Power Connecticut LLC, PSEG Power New York LLC, and Generation Bridge II, LLC
	EC21-128-000	PSEG Fossil LLC, PSEG Fossil Sewaren Urban Renewal LLC, PSEG Keys Energy Center LLC, PSEG Energy Resources & Trade LLC, Parkway Generation, LLC, and Parkway Generation Essex, LLC
GAS
G-1	AD22-7-000	Oil Pipeline Capacity Allocation Issues and Anomalous Conditions
G-2	RP21-1187-002	Eastern Gas Transmission and Storage, Inc.
	RP21-1187-003
HYDRO
H-1	P-10853-022	Otter Tail Power Company
H-2	P-2101-178	Sacramento Municipal Utility District
H-3	P-2197-140	Cube Yadkin Generation LLC
H-4	P-2997-032	South Sutter Water District
Certificates
C-1	PL18-1-000	Certification of New Interstate Natural Gas Facilities
C-2	PL21-3-000	Consideration of Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Natural Gas Infrastructure Project Reviews
C-3	CP17-40-012	Spire STL Pipeline LLC

Join Climate Xchange’s webinar on federal climate funding initiatives.

With the creation and continuing development of several new federal funding initiatives like the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, Build Back Better, Justice40, and others, many are wondering how state-level climate action will be affected. States looking to secure funding for effective and equitable climate projects and programs must know how best to prepare for and implement these varying funding sources and guidelines, and we want to help you do just that.

Joining us to discuss these federal funding developments and the implications for states are three experts in the space. Shannon Baker-Branstetter, Director of Domestic Climate and Energy Policy at the Center for American Progress, Joseph Kane, Fellow at Brookings Metro of the Brookings Institution, and Colleen Callahan, Deputy Director at UCLA’s Luskin Center for Innovation, will each provide insight into what states need to know about these funding initiatives and how they will affect state-level actors in securing a better, brighter future for the climate.

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The purpose of the hearing is to examine the opportunities and challenges in using “clean” hydrogen in the transportation, utility, industrial, commercial, and residential sectors.

Witnesses:

• Dr. Sunita Satyapal, Director, Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technologies Office, Hydrogen Program Coordinator, U.S. Department of Energy
• Dr. Glen Richard Murrell, Executive Director, Wyoming Energy Authority
• Mike Fowler, Director, Advanced Energy Technology Research, Clean Air Task Force
• Michael J. Graff, Chairman & Chief Executive Officer, American Air Liquide Holdings, Inc.
• Brian Hlavinka, Vice President, New Energy Ventures, Corporate Strategic Development, Williams

On Tuesday, February 8th at 7pm ET, Stop the Money Pipeline is hosting its first hour-long online training on how we can build power to demand that regulators like the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency curb reckless behavior by Wall Street that is driving environmental injustice and climate chaos.

• Sharon Lavigne, Founder of RISE St. James and 2021 Goldman Prize Recipient North America
• Lisa Anne Hamilton, Attorney and Climate Law and Policy Consultant and former Adaptation Program Director for the Georgetown Climate Center
• Tracey Lewis, Policy Counsel at Public Citizen (moderator)

This event was organized by Action Center on Race and the Economy, Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund, Positive Money US, Public Citizen, Stop the Money Pipeline, and The Sunrise Project.

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Rescheduled from February 3rd. The purpose of the hearing is to consider the nominations of:

• Maria Duaime Robinson, to be an Assistant Secretary of Energy (Office of Electricity)
• Dr. Joseph F. DeCarolis, to be Administrator of the Energy Information Administration
• Laura Daniel-Davis, to be an Assistant Secretary of the Interior (Land and Minerals Management)

Hearing page

Nominees

• Shalanda D. Young, to be Director, Office of Management and Budget. To be introduced by Senator Patrick J. Leahy and Senator Kyrsten Sinema
• Nani A. Coloretti, to be Deputy Director, Office of Management and Budget. To be introduced by Senator Alex Padilla

“People were expensive; the way to display, or to enjoy, great wealth was to build an environment that could only have been wrought, and could only be sustained from one hour to the next, by unceasing human effort.” — Neal Stephenson, Termination Shock

One of my favorite techniques in science fiction is taking pop-culture jokes seriously, expanding upon their ramifications with character, setting and story. Bruce Sterling’s 1998 gem Distraction opens with members of a local Air Force base holding a shake-down bake sale.

Neal Stephenson’s 2021 stratospheric-geoengineering treatise Termination Shock launches with an attack by “30-50 feral hogs,” inspired by a tweet that launched a memetic debate over whether and how much the threat of backyard feral hogs are “legit” or ridiculous.

Stephenson convincingly demonstrates that the feral hogs overrunning Texas are a demonic scourge, in an extended opening sequence in which the hereditary queen of the Netherlands, Frederika Mathilde Louisa Saskia, barely survives a plane crash caused by a roving herd.

The herd is led by a Moby-Dick-esque beast known as Snout, who killed the young daughter of one of the other main protagonists, Rufus “Red” Grant, in his yard in rural Texas. Having tracked Snout’s herd for years, Grant saves the queen and kills his nemesis. He then helps her make her rendezvous with the cornpone oil billionaire T.R. “McHooligan” Schmidt, who has begun secretly launching sulfur rockets into the stratosphere to dim the sun. This rogue effort is a cheap way to simulate the effects of nuclear winter enough to counteract the deadly buildup of greenhouse pollution, as long as the rockets keep going.

If that sounds like an enjoyable start to a novel, then you probably have read other books by Stephenson. Unfortunately, it’s by far the most dynamic sequence of the book. The beginning thrill ride is pretty much a headfake, as the book switches erratically to its main topic of geoengineering and becomes, even by Stephenson’s standards, boring and talky.3

The vast majority of the rest of the 720-page tome offers an extremely good sense of what it would be like to hang out with techno-billionaires like Nathan Myhrvold and Jeff Bezos, offering several practical tips on how to stay on their good side (he’s worked for both).

In interviews, Stephenson has said that Termination Shock is meant to describe “the geopolitical reaction” to global warming and the potential decision to engage in geoengineering. His goal was to have “realistic characters having realistic arguments” about geoengineering, in order to “make it a topic of conversation.”

I do think this is a helpful entry in spurring that needed conversation. But on its own, the book is less a serious investigation of the geopolitical ramifications of geoengineering than a monologue from a globe-trotting techno-enthusiast. I do wish his characters had any real psychological differences. It’s great to be reminded that gender, race, and wealth are irrelevant to whether you are a reliable, hyper-competent, semi-horny techno-enthusiast MacGyver, but it’s genuinely difficult to tell the characters apart when they’re talking.

So while it goes into remarkable detail on the mechanisms of the sulfur-launcher and the Netherlands’ movable seawalls, Shock’s political analysis doesn’t go much deeper than: it’s hard to cut carbon pollution, Greens don’t want us to do anything, geoengineering might benefit some regions and might harm others.

For example: by necessity of making the rogue billionaire geoengineer something of a good-guy protagonist, Termination Shock is blithely optimistic about the reliability of climate-model downscaling of the impacts of stratospheric sulfur injection. There’s the repeated implication that there would be clear regional winners and losers, as opposed to new and different forms of anthropogenic climate chaos.

As a novel, _Termination Shock_—whose truly global scope may be its strongest attraction— feels a bit too much like a collection of magazine-length travelogues; the stitching still shows. That said, the up-to-the-minute references to COVID and QAnon and the January 6 insurrection imply that awkwardness may be deliberate. Stephenson is okay with breaking the fourth wall, reminding the reader that the novel’s characters don’t exist but that the real world very much does. Set vaguely in the future, Shock is fundamentally a 700-page essay of Stephenson’s opinions at and about the moment of writing (June 2021).

As explicitly-of-the-moment climate-politics tracts go, I greatly preferred Swedish author Andreas Malm’s Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency, written and published a year earlier. It too has great cover art, punchy writing, and covers our global climate politics with greater insight and depth in less than a third as many pages.

However, I enjoyed Termination Shock much more than Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future, a 560-page assemblage which has been heralded as a serious work of climate fiction. I won’t go into my feelings about Ministry here (if you’re deeply interested, here’s a thread), but one element of comparison is worth raising. Robinson has India do stratospheric sulfur injection without sparking World War III, whereas Stephenson has the U.S. (technically, a rogue American) do it. So, I guess they’re both optimists. Unlike Ministry, though, Shock doesn’t even try to imagine turning off the fossil-fuel spigot.

So far, of the three white western-American-male climate SF novels I’ve read recently —_Termination Shock_, Ministry for the Future, and Paolo Bacigalupi’s Water Knife, written in 2016—I feel that only Water Knife fully worked as a novel and an analysis of politics and society under global warming.

Some of that may simply be because Bacigalupi didn’t make technocrats, royalty, or billionaires his protagonists. They certainly exist in his narrative and shape it, but their stories are, in the end, kind of boring. Like Ministry and Shock, Water Knife begins with heart-stopping action, but then doesn’t let up. It’s a much more harrowing read, but I think it would be a mistake to think of it as dystopic and the others as optimistic—they’re stories focusing at different moments of different people’s lives on one functionally equivalent near-future hothouse Earth.

I’ve been an admirer and enthusiast of Stephenson since reading Snow Crash when it came out in 1992. It was a particular delight to discover his earlier books, The Big U and Zodiac, were thinly fictionalized depictions of his and his friends’ adventures in my hometown of Boston. He was literally one of those cool weird environmentalist techno-geeks I admired as a teenager.

Termination Shock has been described as Stephenson’s first global-warming book, but Zodiac was a roman à clef about a Greenpeace activist, Snow Crash depicts hordes of climate refugees swarming a newly temperate Alaska, Diamond Age a post-21st-century-World-War-III global society, Seveneves the apocalypse. So it would be better to say this is the first time Stephenson’s work has been branded as climate fiction.

The books also track Stephenson’s progress in society, from the scrappy dirtbag protagonists of the Big U, Zodiac, and Snow Crash to the scrappy dirtbags, billionaires, and queens of Reamde, Fall, and Termination Shock. He writes what he knows!

It is fun to read T.R. Schmidt’s plot-driving actions, magpie personality, and love for explanatory bloviation as a stand-in for the author as he constructed this novel. This, for example, could be authorial self-description: “T.R. was the living embodiment of what was now denoted ADHD. He went off on tangents, a small percentage of which made money.”

The tangent-prone Stephenson really can write action sequences! And depictions of complex machinery! He and his characters have a great sense of humor and a deep appreciation for cool. And every so often he turns out a gem of a sentence like this:

“It was one of those insane statistics about the scale of America that had once made the United States seem like an omnipotent hyperpower and now made it seem like a beached whale.”

To return this to where I started: Termination Shock shares a good amount of plot geography with Sterling’s Distraction, which also primarily takes place in the fetid Texas-Louisiana zone of a broken-empire America and gives the Netherlands a starring role in weird war. I believe that the quarter-century-old Distraction is still one of the strongest climate-politics SF novels extant, and re-read it about once a year. Each sentence crackles, the ideas come fast and furious, the politics are meaningful, the characters compelling, the plot tight and satisfying. I’d love to read more like that.

Want to learn about how climate policy campaigns are developing in states across the country – from Vermont to Nebraska to Montana to Hawaii? Have exciting climate policy developments to share with a network of like-minded individuals?

Join us for our monthly State Climate Policy Network national call! This one-hour, once-a-month call is the perfect opportunity to learn about the different legislation and movements going on in states across the US. Legislators, advocates, and experts will join us and inform the network of what is going on in their state as it relates to climate policy, and what you might be able to do to help.

For those of you joining us for the first time, the SCPN call is also an opportunity to simply listen to other states’ updates and challenges. We typically have campaign leaders and policymakers in 15-20 states calling in and providing updates, and dozens of people listening and asking questions on the line. The call is a great information-sharing and networking opportunity. Feel free to contact Kristen Soares, our SCPN Manager, at kristen@climate-xchange.org with any questions, or if you are interested in speaking on an upcoming call.

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To combat climate change, in addition to reducing emissions, we will also need to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. Ocean CDR (ocean carbon dioxide removal) is a set of strategies to sequester carbon dioxide in ocean waters. Sarah Cooley (Ocean Conservancy) will moderate a conversation between Holly Buck (University at Buffalo) and Nick Pidgeon (Cardiff University) about social acceptance, environmental governance, and other issues around ocean CDR strategies. The webinar will include discussion of the new National Academies report, A Research Strategy for Ocean-based Carbon Dioxide Removal and Sequestration.

Speakers:

• Holly Buck is an assistant professor of Environment and Sustainability at the University at Buffalo and a contributing author to an IPCC chapter on cross-sectoral governance, including carbon dioxide removal governance. Her research involves the social and environmental dimensions of emerging technologies to remove carbon from the atmosphere, and she served on the report committee for A Research Strategy for Ocean-based Carbon Dioxide Removal and Sequestration.
• Nick Pidgeon is a professor of Environmental Psychology and Risk and the Director of the Understanding Risk Research Group at Cardiff University. His work focuses on public engagement with risk and technology, climate change risks, and emerging technologies including greenhouse gas removal, and he has led numerous projects on public responses to environmental and technological risk and on ‘science in society’ for UK Government Departments, the UK Research Councils, the Royal Society, The US National Science Foundation, and charities. He is currently Co-Investigator of the Leverhulme Centre for Climate Mitigation, a major 10-year interdisciplinary effort to understand the carbon removal potential, localized benefits and risks, public risk perceptions, and the social and ethical implications of using enhanced rock weathering technologies in agricultural production settings for greenhouse gas removal.
• Sarah Cooley is the Director of Climate Science at Ocean Conservancy and currently a Coordinating Lead Author on Working Group II of the IPCC’s 6th Assessment report. Using science synthesis and strategic communications, she educates and engages decision-makers and stakeholders on climate science and ocean acidification to identify ways that different groups can take action.

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