A host of recent federal legislation is already paying dividends. The Inflation Reduction Act is the largest climate package in U.S. history, and the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act has provided a much-needed funding boost to modernize and upgrade infrastructure. From electric vehicles to battery plants to energy storage and solar panels, this legislation is leveraging tens of billions of dollars in private investment to manufacture and deploy new clean energy technology. As a result, we are seeing thousands of new jobs in red, blue and purple states alike, and across every region of the country. 

In the states, this adds up to a major opportunity to capitalize on new grant programs and historic federal tax credits for businesses and consumers shifting to clean energy. Leading governors and lawmakers recognize that, by passing their own ambitious policies that facilitate climate action, they can leverage all those federal dollars to unlock even more private investment in their states.

And this year, nobody has done a better job than Colorado.

The administration of Gov. Jared Polis and the state legislature explicitly set out to maximize the benefits for federal investments for Colorado’s businesses, residents, communities and overall economy. They’ve emerged from an impressive blitz of legislation and policymaking in a much better position to do so.

Deeply aware of the risk that climate change poses to some of its premiere industries, from skiing to brewing, Colorado in 2019 passed a strong climate law, pledging to reduce climate pollution by 90 percent by 2050. But because the Inflation Reduction Act, increasingly ambitious private sector action, and technological advances have all put a 100 percent reduction in play, this year Colorado passed legislation to increase its 2050 ambition to achieving a net zero economy with strong interim targets along the way. The upped ambition sends a strong signal to industry that the state is committed to a clean economy, inviting investment, innovation and solutions to achieve that mission.

And to kickstart that effort, lawmakers also passed a menu of state tax credits to help consumers and companies access clean technology. The package includes incentives to encourage the adoption of heat pumps, e-bikes, electric lawn equipment, and zero-emission cars and trucks — including both passenger vehicles and larger commercial vehicles. Designed to complement or, in some cases, fill in the gaps of the Inflation Reduction Act’s federal tax credit, it provides even more incentive to adopt clean technologies that will ultimately benefit the climate, save consumers money, and grow Colorado’s economy.

The new incentives will add to the already surging demand for electric vehicles. But the Polis administration accounted for that as well by adopting a pair of important clean transportation regulations that will ensure the availability of their vehicles for consumers and companies alike.

The Advanced Clean Trucks rule, adopted earlier this year, will ensure that manufacturers boost production of medium- and heavy-duty vehicles as corporate fleet owners increasingly look to adopt them to save on gas and maintenance costs. Meanwhile, the next phase of the Advanced Clean Cars program, which the state is in the process of adopting, will similarly encourage automakers to bolster electric vehicle sales in the state. Not only do these programs help to address transportation-related climate pollution — the largest source of it in the state —it also signals that the state is prepared to act as a leader in adopting clean vehicles that are rapidly growing in popularity.

And those were just the headliners. The state passed several additional policies as well, including efforts to encourage geothermal heating, to expand electric vehicle charging, and to organize utilities’ planning processes around achieving the state’s clean energy targets — all of which will further complement and build off those federal investments.

The surge of clean energy investment across the nation is living proof of what forward-looking companies and investors have been saying for years: strong public policy to confront the climate crisis and build out the infrastructure to do so is not just an imperative for the good of the planet but a massive economic opportunity. 

Still, states that want all that federal and private investment shouldn’t just count on it pouring in. By taking action, Colorado is now ideally situated to attract huge sums of federal and private investment to grow the economy of the future. It's an alluring position for any state, and Colorado has provided the model to get there.

Alli Gold Roberts is the senior director of state policy at the sustainability nonprofit Ceres.

First, the extremes we are witnessing are not normal. Not normal in the sense that they are not natural. This summer’s heat domes and smoke waves are much more likely on a planet where people have been burning coal, oil, and natural gas for 150 years. Some of the events we’ve witnessed are so far beyond historical norms that they truly could not exist without climate change. This is especially true for the recent global temperature record, which isn’t likely to last long.  

While the extremes are unnatural, they aren’t surprising. We are living in the climate predicted by climate models 30 years ago. Those models couldn’t predict that Texas would be baking in July 2023, but they did predict that a world with a CO2 concentration of 420 ppm would have heatwaves like this one. We’ve also known from basic physics that warmer air can hold more moisture, which increases the chances of extreme rains like what New York and Vermont endured last week. 

Second, these conditions are new, but scientifically they are not the new normal in the sense that they represent permanent conditions that we can get used to or plan for. Climate scientists use “normal” in a technical sense to describe the 30-year average conditions. NOAA updated the current climate normals in 2021, and now reports conditions relative to the 1991-2020 average. That average is supposed to guide planning for things like roads, buildings or storm drains. But it no longer works. The 1991 normal reflects a world 0.9°C (1.6°F) warmer than pre-industrial temperatures. It’s already out of date. We are now closer to 1.3°C (2.34°F). 

The insidious feature of climate change is that there is no normal and there won’t be one anytime soon. As long as the world keeps warming, the climate will keep changing, and extreme conditions will only become worse and more frequent. (And yes, Earth’s climate has changed in the past, but the scale and the speed of today’s change are unprecedented in modern human history.)  

For the first time since people began growing crops and building cities, relying on past conditions — normals — can’t help us protect ourselves. If we only adjust to what we’ve experienced, we will always be a step or two or more behind. The best we can do is to try to anticipate conditions before they occur. Climate models provide a high-level but blurry view of the future. They don’t really have hurricanes and they definitely don’t have tornadoes. Scientists can also use high-resolution weather models to simulate the weather in a given future climate, but this remains challenging and will probably always be limited.  

Another approach — call it a climate life-hack — is to bet on the trend. Assume that if something in the weather is changing or weird, then it’s probably related to climate change and probably going to occur more often. Last week’s extreme rain in New York and Vermont is a good example. We’ve seen intense rainfall in these areas from events like Hurricanes Irene and Ida, and we’ve also seen more ordinary storms without names produce catastrophic rainfall and flooding in places like Maryland and Kentucky. The safest way to protect people in the future is to assume that the entire region faces an increasing risk of these events, and plan accordingly.  

So we are not living in a new normal. Climate projections and climate trends clearly tell us that. But science is also clear on what we have to do to find a new normal: stop burning coal, oil and natural gas. When we stop adding CO2 to the atmosphere, global temperatures will stabilize and we will have weather that we can get used to. Every new wind turbine or solar farm or electric vehicle makes that possibility more likely. But our current pace of change means that we have decades of work ahead of us to reach a true new normal. 

Andrew Pershing is vice president for science at Climate Central.

The bad news is that the culprits of the plastic pollution crisis are now working hard to delay and distract us from progress by peddling false solutions. Those false solutions effectively allow corporations dealing in petrochemicals and plastics to continue perpetuating and profiting from their pollution.

The name for the petrochemical and plastic industries’ favorite business tactic is “greenwashing,” the practice of fabricating or exaggerating the eco-friendly (“green”) qualifications of a brand, product or service. False, greenwashed solutions commonly offer quick fixes while causing further problems, instead of making necessary systems change eliminating waste.

One common greenwashed false solution is single-use products made from “bioplastics.” While the word may confer a green image, in reality, bioplastics are anything but. These materials can be made fully or partially from highly processed plant-based ingredients, such as sugar cane, corn or potato starch.

Some bioplastics may contain as little as 25 percent plant-based ingredients and up to 75 percent fossil fuel ingredients. While bioplastics may emit fewer total greenhouse gas emissions than conventional plastics, crops grown for bioplastics have many known social and human and ecological health costs.

Instead of biodegrading, as their name and plant-based chemistry might imply, bioplastics — PLA, PHA, PBAT and others — more commonly act just like conventional plastics, breaking up into small particles that travel around ecosystems and into our bodies. What’s more, bioplastics are typically made with many of the same additives as plastics, and research shows that these chemicals are harmful.

Like conventional plastics, bioplastics and their petrochemical ingredients are produced in facilities that drive pollution and injustice, and are likely to end up in landfills and incinerators that do the same. Industrial facilities of all kinds — including those churning out bioplastics and conventional plastics alike — are most likely to be placed in underserved low-income, rural, Black, Indigenous and people-of-color communities, as are most forms of waste infrastructure. These sites emit dangerous pollutants, reduce overall quality of life and pose a heightened risk of industrial accidents like fires and explosions. Bioplastic is already a $7 billion industry; without intervention, its size is only expected to grow to $12 billion by 2028.

Another greenwashed false solution is biodegradable, compostable plastics, which require infrastructure and specific conditions to actually be compostable, and are likely to still contain conventional fossil-fuel based plastics and/or toxic additives.

Other such false solutions include “chemical recycling”  or “advanced recycling;” incineration (with or without energy recovery); oxo-degradable plastics; plastic credits; and plastic-to-fuel technologies. Conventional “mechanical” plastics recycling is also greenwashing — the process is not circular, as corporations have claimed, but rather wasteful and toxic. It causes pollution and injustice, and that is if the recycling occurs at all, which often it does not. 

Despite being marketed as solutions, these strategies are neither efficient, effective nor safe. In establishing lucrative end-markets for our “plastic waste,” plastics production is only further incentivized. False solutions are characterized by perpetuating the wasteful notion of single-use — which we know is fueling the crisis at hand, and is keeping the petrochemical and plastic industries wealthy at all of our expense.

Corporations push false solutions with aggressive marketing materials such as PSAs, press releases, branded content (that can look a lot like news to the untrained eye), advertisements and more. Such marketing materials also commonly dupe the media, which has perpetuated greenwashing. Industry trade groups lobby policymakers to kill or water down legislation aimed at addressing plastic pollution, seriously complicating the pathway to real solutions and corporate accountability.

Individuals and policymakers can learn how to detect greenwashing by reviewing common plastic greenwashing terms and strategies. Journalists and others in the media industry must also learn how to spot and avoid greenwashing to bring truth and real solutions into their reporting and content. This opens up space for us all to engage in the behaviors and mindsets necessary to eliminate our use of plastic, facilitating the wider policy and systems change we need to turn off the tap on petrochemical and plastic production.

Real solutions to plastic pollution exist and include adopting and embracing practices and systems that allow us to refill, regenerate, repair, share and reuse nontoxic, plastic-free materials and items. In short, we must live far less wastefully than we do today. To succeed, solutions must be just, equitable, and accessible to all people, everywhere, and meet local needs. A global plastics treaty, if it can be written in a way that takes greenwashed false solutions off the table, has much potential to help us address this crisis rapidly and effectively.

Historically, markets and governments have not adequately protected the public from harmful and deceptive greenwashing; the practice remains a deep-seated problem, particularly in the U.S.

Short of an effective systemic approach to implementing and enforcing restrictions on corporate greenwashing, individuals must learn to spot the difference between real and false solutions and choose the real solutions we know will free us of our wasteful plastic lifestyles.

Erica Cirino is a science writer, artist, author of Thicker Than Water: The Quest for Solutions to the Plastic Crisis, and communications manager of the nonprofit Plastic Pollution Coalition.

There's an old saying about liars: Fool us once, shame on them; fool us twice; shame on us. We all should be ashamed of letting the fossil energy industry deceive us about global climate change. The price of that con has become unacceptably high.

I've described the industry and its backers in Congress as a carbon cartel. But national energy policy also makes the American people unwitting partners in a Faustian bargain between the federal government and Big Oil.

Even President Joe Biden, who has done more for clean energy than any of his predecessors, has been drawn into the cartel. He has embraced an "all of the above" energy strategy that allows coal, oil and natural gas to remain indefinitely in America's energy mix. If the United States is to do its part in keeping global warming at or below 1.5 degrees Celsius, we should retire carbon-based fuels from the economy as soon as possible.

Research in 2021 estimated that most of the world's proven fossil energy reserves must remain in the ground for just a 50 percent chance of holding climate change to manageable levels by mid-century. In the U.S., two-thirds of America's oil reserves, half our gas and 97 percent of coal reserves are unextractable. But considerably more should be left in the ground because a 50-50 chance is far too big a gamble on an existential threat like global warming.

The United States should off-ramp all three fossil fuels from the economy well before 2050. National energy policy should clearly define when and how those retirements will proceed. Instead, President Biden waffles.

He said during his campaign that the oil industry's transition would happen "over time." In 2021, he said, "the idea that we're going to be able to move to renewable energy overnight … it's just not rational." In his most recent State of the Union address, the president said, "We're going to need oil for at least another decade … and beyond that." But the industry, its shareholders, investors, workers and customers need greater certainty to prepare for decarbonization.

Rather than making the future of Big Oil a political problem, Congress should let market forces determine the industry's fate. The industry neither needs nor deserves taxpayer subsidies. Besides, we have known for some time that we can't trust the oil majors. They have consistently deceived the government and the American people about their responsibility for global warming.

Investigations by Inside Climate News and the Los Angeles Times blew the industry's cover in 2015 by revealing that oil executives knew as early as the 1960s that their products were causing global warming. They covered it up. Starting in 1968, Exxon (now ExxonMobil) reportedly gave more than $31 million to groups spreading climate change misinformation.

The five biggest oil companies earned a record $200 billion in profits last year, double the year before. But instead of significant investments in clean energy, they used the profits to pay bigger dividends to shareholders and buy back stock to increase its value. BP, Exxon and Shell pulled back on cutting their emissions and investing in renewable energy.

President Biden should follow the example set by Christiana Figueres, who led international climate negotiations until 2016. In a recent newspaper editorial, she admitted falling for Big Oil's lies when it promised to join the fight against global climate change.

In 2015, she urged critics to stop "pointing the blaming finger at fossil fuel companies" because "bringing them with us has more strength than demonizing them." Now she admits she was wrong. She acknowledges that oil and gas companies are making "no effort to get on the right side of history, and they "do not have the right to determine the future of everybody on this planet."

Time magazine reports that fossil fuels have pushed the world into "uncharted territory." The Earth is hotter than it's been for 125,000 years, and the climate is becoming deadly faster than humans and many other species can adapt. Time warns, we are "remaking our planet into one in which large swaths may become inhospitable to human life."

Meanwhile, the Biden administration is again leasing public lands for oil and gas development. The president supported faster permitting of oil and gas infrastructure even though the International Energy Agency (IEA) warned in 2011 that the world should invest no more money in fossil fuels. Biden also approved permits for the controversial ConocoPhillip's Willow oil project in Alaska.

An oil industry executive responded happily, "Everyone is moving to the middle" on energy policy. But unceasing fossil fuel pollution has left the world with no time for a transactional change in the energy economy. We need a wartime footing for an energy transformation.

So, what should the president and Congress do?

Biden can start by recognizing climate change for what it's become: a threat to economic and national security. He can declare a climate emergency, giving him additional authority to deal with the crisis. Second, he can reinstate the moratorium on oil and gas production on public lands.

Next, he and Congress can embrace the conservative principle that markets, not government, should pick the winners in the energy economy. The government can stop all public subsidies for fossil fuels. Given the oil industry's maturity and enormous profits, it does not need and cannot justify taxpayer support. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimates this would generate $35 billion in new federal revenue in the U.S. The money could help fossil-energy workers and communities through the clean energy transition.

Fourth, Congress can fully unleash market forces with a clean carbon-pricing bill so fossil fuel prices more accurately reflect their actual costs to society. The IMF estimated those costs in the United States to be well over $600 billion in 2020. According to the IMF, carbon dioxide pollution would drop 36 percent by 2025 if fossil-energy prices worldwide equaled their actual social and environmental costs.

Congress can learn from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative founded by Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states in 2009. It reportedly has cut carbon pollution by more than half, saved consumers more than $1 billion in energy costs, created thousands of jobs, and added $4 billion to the region's economy.

To put it plainly, current national energy policy is not only unsustainable; it's also morally wrong. It makes the American people unwitting members of the carbon cartel and enablers of Big Oil's greed.

To paraphrase Figueres, the fossil fuel industry powered human development in the 20th century and is destroying it in the 21st. Neither we nor our government should be part of that deal.

William S. Becker is executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project, a nonpartisan initiative that works with national thought leaders to develop recommendations on national energy and climate policy. The project is not affiliated with the White House. He is a former U.S. Department of Energy central regional director and special assistant to the assistant secretary of energy efficiency and renewable energy.

The challenge of estimating GDP, employment and the general levels of prices and interest rates — along with their directions, even in the near or medium terms — is daunting enough. The Biden administration, nevertheless, recently convened the first of a series of four workshops under the auspices of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine aimed at “incorporating Climate Into Macroeconomic Modeling.”

Errors of the past notwithstanding — few if any macroeconomists foresaw the Great Depression, the Great Recession, or any other economic crisis — the White House now wants to add even more complexity to macro models by accounting somehow for the market “frictions” supposedly created by climate change in economic forecasts.

The problem goes much deeper than model specification and estimation, however. Macroeconomic theory and practice are based on fiction — “science fiction,” as I’ve often characterized the entire field of study. 

As Prof. Richard E. Wagner, my former colleague at George Mason University, has argued forcefully, macroeconomists erroneously treat macroeconomic aggregates, such as GDP, employment, the price level and interest rates, as explicit objects of choice by public policymakers. It is as if some politician or bureaucrat — or a group of them — decides what the output of final goods and services will be at any given time, how many people will be employed in producing that output, what general level of prices or interest rates will prevail, and so on.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Macroeconomic aggregates are emergent phenomena of market processes involving the interactions of hundreds of millions of buyers and sellers, each making decisions grounded in their own local knowledge and the special, idiosyncratic circumstances of time and place. The data from which macro variables are computed after the fact are generated from the bottom up, not the top down.

Moreover, public policymakers do not choose in the same ways that individual consumers and producers do in the market. Market processes by and large allow economic actors to capture the benefits — and force them to bear the costs — of their own decisions personally, thereby creating strong incentives to economize, deploying scarce resources to their highest valued uses, catering to customers’ wants and continuously innovating. Such incentives are much weaker in the public sector because the benefits and costs of collective decision-making are shared. Politicians and bureaucrats spend other people’s money rather than their own.

Climate change, which has been underway throughout Earth’s history, originally evolved on a geological time scale, not a human one. Climate modeling remains in its infancy in part because of the inability to predict global cloud coverages. How are macroeconomic modelers to deal with that?

Those modelers similarly are confounded by unanticipated changes in public policy. Government intervention itself has a major, mostly negative, impact on the macroeconomy.

One group of public health experts (the signers of the Great Barrington Declaration) warned of the disastrous economic consequences of a prolonged shutdown of society during the COVID-19 pandemic. But no matter how sophisticated the techniques may be, macro modelers can account for policy changes only after they’ve happened. A veritable cottage industry aimed at understanding the macro effects of specific COVID-19-related public policies is active at the state, regional and national levels; we can perhaps learn something about the magnitudes of those effects ex-post, but they were not (and by definition could not be) prophesied.

Forecasting the path of the macroeconomy is fraught with errors caused by differences in assumptions about initial conditions, the variables included or excluded from the models, the precision with which the included variables are measured, the models’ specifications, and estimating techniques. No one should expect the shoehorning of poorly understood climate change into these analyses to improve predictions of the economy’s future path.

Even if it did, however, no politician would be interested in putting the economy on an optimal trajectory. The vote motive — the drive for election or reelection to office — is much more salient.

William F. Shughart II, research director of the Independent Institute in Oakland, Calif., is J. Fish Smith Professor in Public Choice at Utah State University’s Huntsman School of Business.

Last week, the BLM closed public comments on a draft rule that would place conservation “on equal footing” with grazing and energy development — reversing the agency’s long history of giving leases only for traditional commodity uses. The rule’s key provision would grant the BLM the authority to issue “conservation leases” to promote land conservation and ecological restoration. 

The proposed rule builds from a recent analysis in the journal Science authored by a team of economists (including me) and law professors. We point out that environmentalists have been precluded from federal auctions for grazing land and minerals due to “use it or lose it” stipulations common both here and around the world. Conservationists generally cannot lease public resources with the intent to leave them be. Examples include the “diligent development requirement” of the 1920 Mineral Leasing Act, requiring lessees to have an intent to produce, and the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934, which requires allotments to be grazed rather than left idle. 

Use-it-or-lose-it rules are antiquated. They were put in place more than a century ago to encourage development of the American frontier. Today, they prevent willing buyers from expressing their preferences for conservation via market bidding as they readily do on private lands.

The proposed BLM rule, if implemented to truly support markets, can modernize federal land policy. Markets would reduce land-use conflict by giving people an alternative way to pursue conservation rather than pushing for it via more regulation, top-down administration and litigation — which “is a no-win for everyone,” admits a practitioner at a large environmental group. Competitive markets are already in use on state trust land across the American West, where managers have a legal mandate to maximize revenue and thus consider all competing bids. Open bidding gives state land managers credible information about which uses are highest value rather than having to rely on lobbying pressure to gauge this, as is done in the federal arena. 

To reduce conflict and improve federal land management, the final BLM rule will need to follow two market-supporting principles. First, the agency must honor existing grazing and mineral rights. If conservation leasing is used as a political and administrative tool for undoing previous commitments, it will simply provoke more conflict. Any erosion in the security of traditional leases may prompt future efforts to erode rights created by conservation leases, leaving us with the same political football that true markets with secure rights could end.

Second, voluntary markets, not politics, must set prices for conservation leases. Auctions for leases with open participation achieve this. The final rule should also allow for voluntary agreements that use existing grazing and mineral rights as a basis for private contracting. A conservation group should, for example, have the ability to negotiate with a lease-holding rancher to alter grazing practices to benefit wildlife, reduce predator conflicts or restore wetlands.

Allowing markets to operate on federal land would put different American values on more equal footing, thereby reducing conflict. This might harm some political and special interests in the short run, but the change will be a win-win for free markets and for the environment.

Dominic P. Parker is an economist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a senior fellow at the Property and Environment Research Center, and the Ilene and Morton Harris visiting fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution.

The United States must lead the retaking of the commanding heights of the new energy economy. To do so, America should readjust its thinking, reassess its allies and institutions and reinvent economic statecraft. Free nations know that they must increase mineral investments beyond China’s control. But to succeed, they should establish guards to prevent China from using its market power to undercut and bankrupt mining investments at home and abroad. 

A clean energy transition requires increasing reliance on non-coal metals and minerals, like lithium for batteries, copper for transmission lines or rare earth elements for motor magnets. The global base metal mining market is valued at $551 billion. By contrast, the global oil industry generates $1.5 trillion to $4 trillion per year depending on prices. According to the World Bank, the mining industry must increase production by more than 500 percent by 2050 to achieve clean energy and climate change targets. McKinsey estimates that copper and nickel alone would require capital expenditures of $250 billion to $350 billion by 2030 to meet demand.  

Given this vast structural supply deficit and government policies super-charging demand, one would assume that we are in a great minerals exploration race. However, this is not the case. S&P Market Intelligence found that mining companies spent a meager $13 billion on exploration activities in 2022. The global oil and gas firms spent nearly $500 billion on capex development even though government policies are curbing demand for their product.  

The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) strategy included government-sponsored theft of American intellectual property, debt-trap diplomacy to secure critical metals, the shirking of human rights and environmental conventions and building megafactories at home for global export. It worked. China controls more than 80 percent of all stages of the solar industry and an estimated 75 percent of electric vehicle battery capacity.   

The Chinese Communist Party has repeatedly weaponized its control of critical minerals against free nations. In 2010, China banned the export of rare earth elements over a fishing dispute with Japan skyrocketing prices. In 2019, Party Leader Xi Jinping sent a fearful West a message by publicly touring a rare earth plant in protest over U.S. trade relations creating market turmoil. Yet, China’s real strength is not its ability to restrict supplies and increase prices, but its consistent practice of dumping products and crashing the market.   

China can use its position as the world’s clean energy swing producer to undermine a Western company’s economic thesis and survival. Securing financing to develop a mining project has always been challenging but is even more pronounced when the return on investment is premised on the value of a commodity subject to CCP manipulation.  

While Beijing banned rare earths for Japan in 2010, in 2015, it dumped rare earths onto the market, forcing America’s only mine into bankruptcy. In March, Beijing signaled that it would take greater control of cobalt supplies, and coincidentally miner Jervois announced that it would suspend construction of America’s only cobalt project that same month. China has also stepped up to control prices where it is reliant on imports. Unhappy with business-to-business contracts, the CCP formed the China Minerals Resources Group, a new state agency to buy iron ore for 20 of the country’s top steel producers.  

The United States has raised global awareness of the China challenge and advanced policies to spur the development of a secure clean energy supply chain. The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), for example, provides $370 billion in taxpayer subsidies to incentivize domestic mining, processing and clean tech manufacturing. Yet, for America to retake clean energy and security leadership, we should establish clear boundaries and prohibit U.S. taxpayer incentives from ending up in the hands of Chinese firms. These prohibitions should apply whether the firms are operating abroad or in collaboration with companies at home. Failure to do so explicitly would unjustly reward and enrich the CCP’s predatory practices and undermine any hope of competition. 

The U.S. must apply a more nuanced test in considering alliances. Free trade agreements alone are insufficient determinants in this new era of economic realpolitik. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen would like the European Union to qualify for IRA subsidies even though several European EV factories are owned by Chinese companies. Meanwhile, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz led Volkswagen and other CEOs to meet with Party Leader Xi in Beijing. Increasing dependence on a strategic threat weakens free nations’ shared security.    

America should work to strengthen traditional alliances; however, we must also be pragmatic in our economic statecraft. U.S. and European officials have discussed creating a critical minerals “buyer’s club,” but to be credible, club membership should be dependent on a more rigorous test than just geography.   

The United States has launched meaningful programs to increase our domestic clean energy capacities and encourage the diversification of mineral supply chains away from China. Yet, capital formation has not met the scale of climate goals or national security needs. America should take action to improve investor confidence and rebalance the critical minerals market playing field. The United States can act boldly and create meaningful competition or act rhetorically and entrench Chinese control for generations.   

Frank Fannon served as the inaugural U.S. assistant secretary of state for energy resources. He is currently the managing director of Fannon Global Advisors. 

While the U.S. is not a signatory to the Convention on Cluster Munitions, which regulates and prohibits the use of these weapons, the move raised serious questions about the morality of the decision — especially given Biden’s administration previously called their use a “potential war crime.” 

“Experts warn that the likelihood of leaving behind dangerous unexploded material is dependent on several factors and potentially much higher than the Pentagon has estimated. The reality is that there is no such thing as a safe cluster bomb — and using or transferring them for use hurts the global effort to eradicate these dangerous munitions, taking us down the wrong path,” nearly two dozen House Democrats released in a statement condemning the move. “We can and will continue to support our Ukrainian allies’ defense against Russia’s aggression. However, that support does not require we undermine the United States’ leadership in advocating for human rights around the world, enable indiscriminate harm that will only further endanger Ukrainian civilians, or distance us from European partners in the conflict who are signatories to the U.N. Convention opposing cluster munitions.”

But another fact about the decision is cause for alarm. The cluster bombs are being transferred because other forms of ammunition and weaponry are in short supply. Worse, the U.S. can’t keep stockpiles resupplied due to slow manufacturing and lack of domestic production. 

“The Ukrainians are running out of ammunition. The ammunition that is, they call them 155 mm weapons. This is a war related to munitions and they’re running out of that ammunition and we’re low on it,” Biden revealed. 

“They are using artillery at a very accelerated rate…many thousands of rounds per day. This is literally a gunfight,” National Security Council Coordinator for Strategic Communications John Kirby added. “They’re running out of inventory. We are trying to ramp up our production of the kind of artillery shells that they’re using most but that production rate is still not where we want it to be.” 

The shortfall and slow production caught the eye of Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who highlighted U.S. vulnerability to steel supply chain issues due to an outsourcing to China. 

“The fact that we do not have enough conventional artillery to send Ukraine should be a wake up call. Most of the top 15 steel producers now are Chinese & we don’t have a single one. The US urgently needs a strategy to become a manufacturing superpower,” Khanna tweeted. 

But in order to ramp up domestic production of steel for weapons to defend the United States and American allies around the world, the Biden administration and Democrats in Congress are going to have to make a choice between their climate change agenda and national security. Their crusade to decarbonize is at odds with current steel production capabilities and therefore, the ability to produce mutations and replenish stockpiles. 

“As regulatory, investor, and consumer pressures amplify the urgency for industrial decarbonization, the steel industry faces increasing demands for real plans to reduce emissions,” the Boston Consulting Group published last year. “To meet the emissions reduction targets under discussion among regulators around the world, the steel industry would have to undertake a large-scale technological transformation that would affect the entire steel ecosystem. As noted earlier, companies have by and large avoided these approaches, which are not yet perfected, seem very disruptive, and could negatively impact growth.”

The production of steel is carbon intensive, clocking it at 9 percent of total global CO2 emissions. In addition to a few other economic reasons, steel production has been outsourced to China as environmental regulations on U.S. plants have become increasingly unworkable.

“Steelmaking is a truly global industry, and raw materials (such as iron ore and scrap) and steel products are traded globally to a large extent. Today, over 70% of global steel production takes place in Asia,” the World Steel Association states. “The production of steel remains a CO2 and energy-intensive activity.”

The realities of war and what it takes to produce weapons is slamming right into climate change delusions and President Biden’s foreign policy while putting the national security of the U.S. at severe risk.

And while some may argue wind energy does contribute to steel production, wind power certainly can’t produce enough energy on its own, not to mention at a fast pace, to produce the amount of steel necessary to resupply ourselves and allies in need. Not to mention becoming a steel manufacturing “superpower.” Only the use of oil can do that. 

Pavlich is the editor for Townhall.com and a Fox News contributor.

Now, hurricane season is here again. And according to NPR climate correspondent Rebecca Hersher, even if El Niño makes this hurricane season a milder one, storms will continue to become more frequent and on average more severe with each passing season.

The science is clear: the warmer the oceans, the stronger the storms. Heat is energy, and the more of it there is in the ocean, the more fuel for increasingly destructive storms. At the same time, rising sea levels, caused by the melting of the South Pole’s ice caps and Arctic glaciers, mean higher storm surges.

I don’t have to tell you that storm surges are the deadliest part of a hurricane making landfall. They occur when a storm pushes a wall of seawater several feet high onto the land, causing lethal flooding and costly property damage. In New Orleans, I saw the city’s Lower 9th Ward all but razed by fierce ocean waters. Residents evacuated as far as other states; nearly two decades later, many have never returned.

Tragically for Louisiana, the state has 740 petrochemical plants that are vulnerable to tropical storms, according to a new report by The Times-Picayune and The Advocate. While most have weathered storms in the past, there’s no evidence to show they will be able to withstand the storm surges of the powerful superstorms that are becoming the new norm.

In additional reporting by The Advocate, it was revealed that many of these facilities could spread toxic, even lethal chemicals through the air anywhere across a 25-mile radius, were they to be damaged or destroyed in a hurricane. Chemicals like chlorine gas, once used as a chemical weapon in the First World War, could quite literally choke, burn or even kill innocent bystanders living all the way in another parish from the damaged plant.

The massive corporations that own and operate these plants claim that such potential calamities are merely worst-case scenarios that won’t happen. That’s just spin, and it’s no comfort to the 1 in 4 Louisiana residents who live within 25 miles of a dangerous chemical plant.

It’s also callous on the part of plant owners to dismiss the real threats their operations pose during a hurricane or other natural disaster. Storms are becoming more powerful and more frequent. The same plants that may have withstood storms in the past may not be able to survive the supercharged storms of the near future — or even the present.

It’s outrageous that chemical plant owners can put the health and safety of some 1.2 million Louisiana residents at risk. The rest of us understand we need to undertake additional precautionary measures now that hurricane season is becoming increasingly deadly. Petrochemical companies should not be able to put us in harm’s way by denying this reality.

If you live anywhere on the Gulf Coast or the Eastern Seaboard, prepare yourself this hurricane season. Make sure you have at least 1 gallon of water per person per day for at least five days. Lack of access to clean water during a disaster is the single greatest cause of disease and death. Stock up on nonperishable foods, like ready-to-eat canned meats, fruits, vegetables and other high-energy foods that won’t spoil when the power goes out. Make sure you have your prescriptions, over-the-counter medications, flashlights, batteries, nonelectric can opener, and a mess kit — and if you get an evacuation order, follow it.

Don’t wait. Prepare yourself and your family now. And while you’re at it, call your member of Congress. Tell them petrochemical companies need more stringent safety guidelines and disaster protocols in hurricane zones.

Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré (Ret.) is the former commanding officer of the U.S. First Army. He led disaster recovery efforts in New Orleans as head of Joint Task Force Katrina.

U.S. healthcare is the largest industry in the largest economy in the world; HHS should not be a cause of the climate-related health harms it reimburses the healthcare industry to alleviate. Having again failed to promulgate any regulations to mitigate industry hydrocarbons this year, and it being inconceivable to do so during the upcoming election year, HHS has in effect declared defeat.

It is mortifying to realize HHS refuses to address the fact that healthcare is a climate-destroying industry and consequently guilty of fossil fuel racism.  

This is literally true for the approximately 160 million current Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries — those whose health and well-being HHS is responsible for protecting. The climate crisis can increase the severity of over half of known human pathogenic diseases. Because they are already compromised due to higher incidence rates of co-morbidities, Medicare seniors are at even greater risk related to arthropod-borne, food-borne and water-borne diseases.

Extreme heat episodes are particularly deadly. Over the past 20 years, heat-related mortality among seniors has increased 54 percent. Children, 36 percent of whom are Medicaid beneficiaries, are uniquely vulnerable. Fine respirable particles resulting from fossil fuel use are particularly harmful because children breathe more air than adults relative to their body weight. Research published last year concluded the health effects to the fetus, infant and child include preterm and low-weight birth, infant death, hypertension, kidney and lung disease, immune-system dysregulation, structural and functional changes to the brain and a constellation of behavioral health diagnoses.

This was not supposed to be.

Immediately upon taking office, the Biden administration issued two executive orders related to the “climate crisis.” The first directed all administrative departments to take any action to “reduce greenhouse gas emissions” and to “hold polluters accountable, including those who disproportionately harm communities of color and low-income communities.” The second announced the administration would take a “whole of government” approach because the “government must drive ... [the] mitigation of climate pollution and climate-related risks in every sector of our economy.” It ordered HHS to create a climate change office to address “the impact of climate change on the health of the American people.”  

When HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra launched in August the Office of Climate Change and Health Equity (OCCHE), he promised to “use every tool at our disposal to address the climate crisis.” OCCHE immediately partnered with the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) to create an “action collaborative to decarbonize the healthcare industry. HHS also launched that month an Environmental Justice Index designed to calculate environmental burden, including substandard air quality resulting from fossil fuel combustion, that minoritized people disproportionately suffer.  

In 2022 the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) responded via proposed regulatory rulemaking. For example, the agency’s 2023 proposed Affordable Care Act payment rule asked the public “what would incentivize [ACA health plans] to take action on decarbonization?” CMS’s proposed 2023 Medicare inpatient rule similarly asked “what incentives” including “payment” “might assist” hospitals and others “in taking more action on ... emissions reduction.” CMS complimented these efforts by launching a related health equity initiative designed to reduce health disparities among minority populations in part by addressing “manmade disasters” including “climate change.”  

Though it amounted to virtue signaling, HHS Secretary Becerra also launched in 2022 a pledge initiative requesting healthcare organizations to commit to reducing their GHG emissions 50 percent by 2030 because, as the secretary stated, “every stakeholder group in America must step up, and collaboration across the public and private sector is key.”

This year, however, HHS called it quits.

This past March, Becerra failed to even mention healthcare’s GHG emissions in testimony before three congressional committees concerning HHS’s 2024 budget. While assessing the causes of disparities within CMS programming, the agency’s 40-page health equity data plan and the agency’s related March discussion failed to recognize the fact that climate crisis poses the greatest threat to health equity, as well as the fact that HHS programming is a significant contributor. Unlike last year’s proposed inpatient rule, this year’s proposed rule ignores the topic. CMS’s two proposed Medicaid rules, published in May, also ignore the topic, despite the fact that first sentence of both state they are intended to “better address health equity issues.”

During an April OCCHE/NAM action collaborative public meeting, CMS Director Liz Fowler could only note that the Innovation Center’s Medicare Advantage demonstration affords participating plans the option of offering undefined “climate change supports in the future.”

During the meeting, Jon Perlin, CEO of the Joint Commission, which certifies hospitals meet CMS performance standards, announced the commission was withdrawing proposed hospital accreditation sustainability standards. Though the standards also amounted to greenwashing and though it is altogether within hospitals’ financial interests to decarbonize, Perlin stated sustainability standards would be optional because hospitals responses were, to no one’s surprise, overwhelmingly critical.

The biosphere is rapidly destabilizing. Ocean heat content is at alarming record levels, the Northern Hemisphere’s summer disaster season is off to an early start made evident by heat waves worldwide, and a Canadian wildfire season that already is the worst ever recorded. Three recent publications in Nature concluded that 9 percent of the world’s population already lives outside the “human climate niche;” climate tipping points are being triggered substantially more rapidly than previously thought; and seven of eight life support earth system boundaries have already been crossed.

Yet, the world’s most powerful healthcare regulatory agency refuses to act.

David Introcaso, Ph.D., is an independent health care policy consultant specializing in climate crisis-related health care policy reform. He has conducted environmental and health care policy research for the U.S. Congress and the Department of Health and Human Services. He also is the creator and host of “The Healthcare Policy Podcast.”

Indeed, the conference president designate, Sultan Ahmed al Jaber, has already called for the global oil and gas industry to phase out methane emissions by 2030.

At the same time, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is preparing to adopt rules that codify new mandates for monitoring and detection of methane. In theory, the proposals will ensure that all drill sites are routinely monitored for leaks, with requirements based on the type and amount of equipment on site. They are also intended to prevent leaks from abandoned and unplugged wells by documenting that well sites are properly closed and plugged before monitoring is allowed to end. 

The problem with the current version of the proposed rules is that they lack flexibility and may actually inhibit the application of best-practice technologies in monitoring and reducing methane releases.

For example, the rules require oil and gas producers to employ one type of technology and standard of detection. But there isn’t a “best” way to detect methane leaks from all upstream and midstream operations. The most common technology currently used for methane detection is optical gas imaging (OGI). However, a recent study by researchers at Colorado State University found that the efficacy of leak detection depends more on the experience of the surveyor than on this technology itself.

Companies would not be prohibited from using technologies other than OGI, but under the rule, they would be required to follow up with a blanket OGI survey anyway. Because of cost duplication, this requirement would discourage oil and gas producers from adopting potentially more accurate leak detection technologies.

The EPA is essentially proposing a solution in search of a problem. According to the Energy Information Administration, over the last 20 years the U.S. has reduced greenhouse gas emissions by more than the next five countries combined. And even with a doubling of production since 2003, oil and gas sector methane emissions have fallen by nearly 10 percent. Fugitive methane from natural gas systems is down 14 percent. These reductions have come about not so much from regulation as from private initiatives.

After all, methane is a major component of natural gas. Leaks are costly and wasteful to producers. This is why, several years ago, a dozen of the world’s largest energy companies agreed to significantly lower methane leaks from oil and gas production.

The Oil and Gas Climate Initiative, a consortium that includes BP, Chevron and Exxon, is investing more than $7 billion a year to reduce flaring, electrify operations with renewable energy, and utilize the best available technologies for methane leak detection. Similarly, other industry members have created The Environmental Partnership, whose 83 members have agreed to find and fix methane leaks that could reduce emissions by as much as 60 percent.

Given the success of current reduction efforts being implemented by oil and gas companies without government intervention, it makes little sense to restrict the technologies that can be used to detect methane leaks. Instead, EPA rules should encourage producers to embrace new technologies in the rapidly evolving field of leak detection that can increase methane capture while lowering compliance costs for industry. 

Policymakers and regulators also need to be mindful of the fact that fossil fuels aren’t going away anytime soon. Record production of oil and natural gas in the U.S. has not only ensured the nation’s energy security but has also allowed Europe to wean itself off Russian energy supplies. This has been achieved in large part because the U.S. has become the world’s number one exporter of liquefied natural gas and the sixth-largest exporter of crude oil. 

In view of these economic and political realities, Congress, the EPA, and the White House need to put forward a balanced, flexible approach to methane regulation that will not handicap America’s energy producers and their ongoing success in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Bernard L. Weinstein is professor emeritus of applied economics at the University of North Texas, retired associate director of the Maguire Energy Institute at Southern Methodist University, and a fellow of Goodenough College, London.

What we know from past conflicts is that war has a serious impact on things like carbon emissions, pollution, toxic water supplies and other environmentally damaging materials. As we watch the war in Ukraine unfold and ponder future conflicts like Taiwan that might involve American troops, we must start thinking more seriously about war and the environment.

Research by Brown University is shedding light on the impact of the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and other conflict zones, finding that the U.S. military, among others, contributes significantly to climate change, becoming one of the world’s top greenhouse gas emitters through the fighting of battles.

According to Brown’s Watson Institute, air pollution from military vehicles and weaponry has adversely affected public health among civilians in the war zone and U.S. service members. “Heavy military vehicles have raised more dust than usual, particularly in Iraq and Kuwait, and service members’ exposures to inhaled toxins from that dust have correlated with respiratory disorders that often prevent them from continuing to serve and performing everyday activities such as exercise.”

The report examines everything from the destruction of military base garbage in burn pits to the deforestation in Afghanistan to cancer, birth defects and other conditions associated with war-related toxins. “The water supply in the war zones has been contaminated by oil from military vehicles and depleted uranium from ammunition. Along with the degradation of the natural resources in these countries and a radical destruction of forest cover, the animal and bird populations have also been adversely affected.”

Iraqi medical doctors and health researchers have called for more research on war-related environmental pollution as a potential contributor to the country’s poor health conditions and high rates of infections and disease.”

Now think about Russia and Ukraine.

As Ukraine struggles with its counteroffensive against Russia in a brutal war that has raged for 17 months, policymakers are paying close attention to the environmental damage of the war and the potential for Ukraine seeking reparations once the conflict ends. We think of reparations as related to slavery or human rights, but more and more small countries are asking larger nations to pay for the ecological impact of their advanced economies.

Measuring the damage takes effort. Thousands of miles of Ukrainian nature preserves have become endangered conflict zones with rare species lost forever and conservation progress undone. It will be expensive to measure and reverse the process.

Russia’s targeting of Ukraine’s energy grid has been particularly damaging, as oil depots and gas power plants explode, releasing carbon and methane into the air. Reports suggest that ordinary Ukrainians are feeling the impact, forced to rely on dirtier fuels to keep warm.

The Russians dismiss any talk of environmental damage by its invasion of Ukraine as propaganda, but there is good data from European scientists on the impact of the war. A recent report by GHG, a Dutch firm examining the war’s greenhouse gas impact, found that each explosion of a missile or projectile causes pollution of air, water and land with toxic substances, and that Russian bombing of industrial infrastructure in Ukraine has led to uncontrolled chemical releases.

But it is not just Ukrainians who could feel the impact of war on climate. The war is deepening concerns about a Chernobyl-like event if there is an explosion at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. That could produce radioactive clouds for miles.

Air is a shared commodity. We have seen what fires in Canada can do to Americans, reinforcing the notion that we are all in this together, and many nations are contributing to a major health crisis.

Even nations that don’t agree with one another, like China, Russia and the United States, are willing to have conversations about climate. (Currently, China leads the world in annual atmospheric carbon dioxide emissions, followed by the United States, India, the Russian Federation, and Japan.) China is making transitions to a low-carbon economy by shifting resources and technologies to meet the moment.

Understanding the environmental impact of war and communicating those dangers loudly should push nations toward shared goals of reducing climate destruction. It could be the issue that brings about what I call a “new values alignment” that is both positive and within every nation’s self-interest.

As for Ukraine, it did not invite an ecological disaster. Russia started the war. In addition to support from the West, Russia should share in the costs of re-building Ukraine, including addressing the environmental degradation. That is the price of invading a sovereign nation. Maybe in the future we all will consider climate before using military might.

Tara D. Sonenshine is the Edward R. Murrow Professor of Practice at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.

Many of these companies hid the risks of PFAS, an abbreviation for perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, from their workers and their regulators. The lethal impacts of PFAS might still be a secret if not for the efforts of legendary environmental attorney Robert Bilott, who I was proud to portray in the movie “Dark Waters.”

Now that the scope of this environmental crime has been revealed, many companies are seeking exemptions from our federal cleanup laws.

Congress and the Biden administration must not let PFAS polluters shirk their responsibility to clean up their mess. Exempting some polluters from sharing the cost of cleaning up Superfund sites, as some members of Congress have proposed, will leave other companies and taxpayers bearing the cost. These PFAS “polluter holiday” bills will also undermine the “polluter pays” principle that encourages polluters to think twice before they dump their toxic wastes on the rest of us.

None of us volunteered to have a toxic forever chemical in our blood. We’ve all been victims of the polluters who hid the risks of PFAS and the victims of the regulators who have looked the other way.

But thanks to heroes like Bilott, millions of us now know that we’ve been poisoned without our knowledge or consent. We know that PFAS are building up in our blood and organs. We know that PFAS have contaminated the drinking water of more than 200 million Americans. We know that some of the most contaminated sites are in our defense communities, which have been disproportionately impacted by toxic chemicals for too long.

But sounding the alarm is not enough. We need to hold PFAS polluters accountable. We can’t allow favored industries — regardless of how sympathetic they may be — to escape their responsibility.

Fortunately, President Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has made clear that only the real polluters will be required to help pay for the cost of cleaning up the most contaminated sites. No administration has done more to address the PFAS contamination crisis than the Biden administration. In particular, the Biden administration has proposed a first-ever national drinking water standard for six PFAS, which would be toughest in the world when finalized.

The Biden EPA has also proposed to designate the two most notorious PFAS — PFOA and PFOS — as hazardous substances. But that designation, which triggers responsibility for cleanup costs under Superfund, has also set off a rush by some in industry to weaken our landmark cleanup laws.

Now, Biden faces an important challenge: to face down the polluters and their lackeys in Congress. Since enacting the Superfund law, Congress has never exempted favored industries from Superfund. Creating first-ever loopholes in the law for PFAS polluters will open a Pandora’s box of exemptions for other polluters and their toxic wastes.

Biden should not wait to tell Congress he will reject bills that create polluters holidays for PFAS makers and users. No bill, no matter how important, deserves his signature if it includes this poison pill.

Mark Ruffalo is an acclaimed American actor and producer. A longtime environmental and political activist, he portrayed environmental attorney Rob Bilott in the 2019 legal thriller “Dark Waters.”

This phenomenon is not only impacting citizens dependent on the Colorado River but stretches across the United States and the world. Over the past two years, Europe, China, Brazil, Iraq and the Horn of Africa have experienced the worst droughts in (sometimes hundreds of) years.

Importantly, the water-to-energy relationship also runs the other way: Water production and delivery are themselves dependent on energy. Moreover, the need for water services for energy is likely to increase, driven by growing populations, rising prosperity (notably in developing countries) and novel uses of energy for water in desalination plants and elsewhere.  

As we feel the impact of increasingly intense heat waves and droughts, the time has come to revisit the challenges of the water-energy nexus.

The dependence of energy production on water has long been recognized by energy experts but has surprised many others. Beyond very visible hydropower plants, like the Hoover Dam, water is used to cool down nuclear power plants (through the cooling towers emitting steam that many may have noticed, without perhaps always identifying the purpose), as well as in natural gas and coal-fired plants. Water is also used in various stages of the energy supply chain, including for production and processing.

Climate change is expected, through its impact on water supply and availability, to increase vulnerabilities in energy production. For example, changing rain patterns will create uncertainties for hydropower production, which represents about 15 percent of global power generation, even if the overall level of rainfall doesn’t change. Heat waves have reduced water levels and raised water temperature above the levels at which water can be discharged back into rivers, restricting the operation of many nuclear power plants. And in a completely different dynamic, various coal power plants dependent on barge transport for resupply have seen their operations imperiled by low water levels. These are aspects that have received some, but altogether inadequate, attention to date.

Both hydroelectricity and nuclear generation, two low-carbon sources of electricity, are expected to increase significantly over decades to come under various government programs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Moreover, even as the need for water to cool down coal-fired plants is eventually expected to drop as countries transition from this carbon-intensive fuel source, new uses for water are emerging, including the production of hydrogen through electrolysis.

What has attracted less attention is the impact of the growing demand for energy from developments in water systems. The United Nations projects that the world’s population will increase by more than 1.2 billion by 2040, with most of that increase occurring in emerging economies and other developing countries. These nations are also projected to see rising income levels, increasing the ability of their populations to access water services, at home, at the office or for pleasure. Moreover, the demand for food is also similarly projected to increase, and with that, the need for more water irrigation services that are inevitably powered by energy.

These factors are helping to drive an increase in the demand for energy. For example, the International Energy Agency (IEA) projects that the amount of energy required by the water sector will more than double within 20 years. The major driver under the IEA’s modeling is the demand created by desalination plants. These are no longer confined to the dryer climates of the Middle East and North Africa, but also in regions that once thought that their water supplies were ample, such as  Europe and Asia. Another important growing demand for water is coming from wastewater treatment plants and the supply of clean drinking water and sanitation services to both the billions of poor who currently lack it and the other more prosperous billions across the developing world whose consumption is projected to increase.

Unfortunately, efforts to meet this demand will be exacerbated by climate change. For example, droughts are likely to require the transport of water over greater distances to satisfy the needs of populations suffering from water scarcity, an effort that will require more energy. Similarly, over the past year, droughts have heightened the possibility of water restrictions for millions of people in Southern Europe, including drinking water, which might in turn require more desalination.

But though tensions are inevitable, actions can be taken to, if not avoid the problems, dampen their impact. Actions lie in the water or energy sectors and, often, at the intersection of the two. In the water sector, these include reducing water losses, allowing the construction of rainwater collection tanks for agricultural use, increasing wastewater facilities and fast-tracking the installation of desalination plants. In energy, transitioning to solar irrigation pumps is something that can help everywhere, in rich and poor countries alike. At the intersection, actions include hydropower plant design and management that are better adapted to the changing rainfall patterns of the future, building more efficient water-based cooling systems for other plants, and even greater use of artificial intelligence.

The energy-for-water dimension will become increasingly fraught, driven by climate change, growing populations and increasing prosperity. Not only do we need to redouble our efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, we also require stronger concerted actions on adaptation and resilience. Much like energy, we need to be more efficient at using water, whether for household needs, industrial processes, agriculture or energy; meanwhile, concerted action and discussion between those sectors will be needed. 

The recent events along the Colorado River serve as an important wake-up call. Water is at the essence of our quality of life, and energy is an integral part of that story. We need to do a better job of managing our thirst for water and the energy required to satisfy that demand, and we need to do this in the face of a changing climate.

Philippe Benoit is the research director for Global Infrastructure Analytics and Sustainability 2050 and previously held management positions at the World Bank and the International Energy Agency. He is also an adjunct senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.

Anne-Sophie Corbeau is a global research scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University and a visiting professor at The Paris Institute for Political Studies (Sciences Po).

Scientists and those who believe in the science of climate change have been passionately arguing their position for so long they may not have noticed the ground has shifted.  Most Americans already agree climate change is a threat — even across party lines.  

As message strategists and pollsters, we have often advised clients that the most effective way to motivate voters is to talk about the disastrous impact climate change will have on the world we are leaving behind for our children and grandchildren. But our recent polling on climate attitudes makes it clear that voters also see climate change as a serious problem right now.  

Even before the recent apocalyptic scenes of New York and New Jersey’s blood-red skies and air quality alerts causing school closures and other disruptions, 7 in 10 registered voters agreed with the statement: “With recent wildfires, drought, flooding, and storms, climate change is already having a serious impact on the country.”

Climate change has become personal, with slightly more than 4 out of 10 registered voters agreeing with the statement: “I or my immediate family have been negatively impacted by strange weather.” One can only assume that number has risen after recent events.  

It’s a message Republicans don’t seem to have heard. With their new majority, congressional Republicans made the decision to pick a high-profile fight over energy and climate change right out of the gate with H.R. 1., their pro-fossil fuel energy bill. They proposed in their debt ceiling bill to roll back the clean energy components of the Inflation Reduction Act.

Republicans clearly think this is a winning political issue for them. The National Republican Congressional Committee recently circulated a memo signaling its intention to use votes against H.R. 1 to go after vulnerable Democrats. Meanwhile, Republicans such as Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) continue to blithely dismiss the threat of climate change. 

But Republicans are leading with their chin. Majorities of voters across the political spectrum —including Republicans — believe that climate change is a major problem and have an unfavorable view of lawmakers who deny that it is a threat. A huge majority want to see a shift toward clean energy. Most problematic for Republicans, the political swing voters who will decide the 2024 election are strongly pro-climate and clean energy.  

Our research also shows voters have little patience for leaders who brush off climate change or oppose clean energy — for example, 63 percent of voters have an unfavorable view of lawmakers who deny that climate change is a threat. Among swing voters, these lawmakers’ favorability is underwater by a whopping 50 points. This tells us that voters are connecting their frustrations around climate to their political decisions. That's not exactly great news for the Ron Johnsons of the world.

Not only is there a political price to pay for Republicans who hinder progress on climate, but there is also a political benefit for Democrats who do talk about their party’s accomplishments on this issue. Our research shows the IRA’s climate and clean energy provisions are very popular, with 63 percent supporting them and 27 percent opposing them. And after we simulate a balanced debate between the two parties’ approaches to energy, the swing voters who will decide the 2024 election prefer the Democrats’ approach by an overwhelming 26 points, even though they lean Republican on party identification by 14 points. Moreover, this debate causes voters to trust Democrats more on broader economic issues such as jobs and energy prices.  

The recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change underlined the desperate need for strong climate action now and even indicated that this may be our last shot.

Meanwhile, since the IRA became law, clean energy companies have already announced new projects that will create more than 142,000 clean energy jobs, helping reinforce the argument that the clean energy transition will boost the economy (something voters already believed).

The policy case for Democrats to engage in this fight is clear. As recent polling tells us, now more than ever, the political case is just as strong. If this is a fight Republicans want to have at the ballot box, especially in difficult swing districts, Democrats should be more than happy to oblige.  

Andrew Baumann is a Democratic strategist and leading expert on public opinion on climate change. Melissa Bell is a Democratic strategist and leading expert on public opinion and vote choice. They both work with candidates and top environmental organizations at Global Strategy Group.