Offshore wind farm near Block Island, R.I.

Essay by Christine Todd Whitman and Leon Panetta, POLITICO, January 28, 2022

When world leaders gathered last fall at COP26, it was billed as the “world’s last best chance” to save the planet from the climate crisis. The conference ended with real uncertainty as to whether comprehensive action will be taken, here and abroad, to avoid catastrophe. Fortunately, one of the best opportunities for progress is all around us: the waves, wind and water along the U.S.’s nearly 100,000 miles of coastline.

As the engine of our planet’s weather and climate systems, the ocean’s potential as a climate solution is as vast as the ocean itself. In fact, ocean-based climate action can provide 20 percent of the emissions reductions needed to achieve global targets to limit climate change and its effects. According to the High Level Panel for a Sustainable Ocean Economy, “reductions of this magnitude are equivalent to the annual emissions from all coal-fired power plants worldwide or taking 2.5 billion cars off the road.”

Here are some key opportunities:

>>> Boost Offshore Renewables: Offshore renewables, like wind and wave energy, can help power the nation while cutting emissions. These sources of clean energy can serve as part of a just and equitable transition by providing economic benefits and abundant electricity to the communities that have suffered the most under climate change.

>>> Reduce Emissions from Shipping: We also need to look to the ocean to significantly reduce contributors of greenhouse gas emissions, such as maritime shipping, which generates more emissions than airlines. The administration, working with ports and the shipping industry, can implement strategies that will move us to zero-carbon shipping by 2050 to drastically reduce the climate contributions of cargo ships and freighters at sea. Infrastructure improvements at ports, fleet upgrades and alternative fuels can all be part of the effort.

>>> Rebuild Coastal Ecosystems: By protecting the ocean, we also enable the ocean to protect us through natural climate mitigation. Carbon-rich coastal environments like salt marshes, seagrass meadows and mangrove forests all naturally absorb carbon up to four times more effectively than trees on land. And when we conserve these habitats for their climate benefits, we are also protecting natural coastal infrastructure that will safeguard communities against storms and rising sea levels. This is particularly crucial for supporting marginalized communities, including low-income neighborhoods that were built in flood zones and are on the front lines of the climate crisis.

Washington has never before had a comprehensive ocean climate plan that weaves these efforts together. In order to realize the ocean’s potential to curb the climate crisis, the White House must marshal agencies across the government, so they are working in concert toward the same goals. President Joe Biden has taken a series of promising steps throughout his first year in office, but the U.S. still needs a coordinated federal strategy to turn this momentum into lasting results. The White House, to its credit, recently held itsfirst meeting of the congressionally authorized Ocean Policy Committee and made a commitment to develop a new cross-cutting strategy.

As the committee puts pen to paper, it should not waste the opportunity to map out the best strategies that embrace the ocean as a climate solution. From our time as Cabinet officials in previous administrations, we’ve been in the trenches on policymaking and know it is critical to have an overarching strategy rather than letting each agency chart its own path. A coordinated policy approach is more effective because it allows the administration to identify big picture goals and eliminate duplicative efforts.

Today, we work with a bipartisan effort to catalyze action toward meaningful ocean policy reform called the Joint Ocean Commission Initiative. Alongside over 100 ocean policy leaders — ranging from outdoor recreation brands to professional surfing organizations — we stand ready to join with the administration to advance a comprehensive ocean climate action plan.

It’s true that political disagreement has delayed climate action for far too long. While we come from different parties, we’ve found common cause on ocean policy and see it as a particularly fruitful area of bipartisan cooperation.

After all, our ocean and coastlines are vital to our economic and national security. They are also the foundation for what we call the “Blue Economy,” which acknowledges the wealth of marine resources — from sustainable fishing to aquaculture to shipping to tourism — that must be balanced sustainably to support jobs and economic growth. With the Blue Economy expected to grow at twice the rate of the overall economy, it is hard to imagine a better return on investment than securing the health and future of our ocean.

Now more than ever, we need to be taking every opportunity to avoid climate catastrophe — and the clock is ticking. From Category 5 hurricanes on the East Coast, to wildfires out West, to devastating tornadoes in the Midwest, we’re seeing the effects of climate change every day. Our country is poised like never before to advance bold climate action, and a coordinated ocean climate action plan can help turn that tide.

The ocean makes up over 70 percent of our planet. We believe it can help save the planet itself.

NOTE ~ Christine Todd Whitman is the former governor of New Jersey, former EPA administrator under President George W. Bush, and serves as co-chair of the Joint Ocean Commission Initiative Leadership Council. ALSO, Leon Panetta served as the CIA director and defense secretary under President Barack Obama, as White House chief of staff under President Bill Clinton, and was a former co-chair of the Joint Ocean Commission Initiative Leadership Council.

Mt. Storm coal-fired power plant shown with wind turbines on the ridge in Grant County, WV

From an Article by Seth Borenstein, Washington Post, January 31, 2021

[AP] Climate isn’t the only thing changing. What comes next in the nation’s struggle to combat global warming will probably transform how Americans drive, where they get their power and other bits of day-to-day life, both quietly and obviously, experts say. So far the greening of America has been subtle, driven by market forces, technology and voluntary actions.

The Biden administration is about to change that. In a flurry of executive actions in his first eight days in office, the president is trying to steer the U.S. economy from one fueled by fossils to one that no longer puts additional heat-trapping gases into the air by 2050.

The United States is rejoining the international Paris climate accord and is also joining many other nations in setting an ambitious goal that once seemed unattainable: net-zero carbon emissions by midcentury. That means lots of changes designed to fight increasingly costly climate disasters such as wildfires, floods, droughts, storms and heat waves.

Think of the journey to a carbon-less economy as a road trip from Washington, D.C., to California that started about 15 years ago. “We’ve made it through Ohio and up to the Indiana border. But the road has been pretty smooth so far. It gets rougher ahead,” said climate scientist Zeke Hausfather, climate and energy director at the Breakthrough Institute. “The Biden administration is both stepping on the gas and working to upgrade our vehicle,” Hausfather said.

The end results of some of Biden’s new efforts may still not be noticeable, such as your power eventually coming from ever-cheaper wind and solar energy instead of coal and natural gas that now provides 59% of American power. But when it comes to going from here to there, that you’ll notice.

General Motors announced Thursday that as of 2035 it hopes to go all-electric for its light-duty vehicles, no longer selling gas cars. Experts expect most new cars sold in 2030 to be electric. The Biden administration promised 550,000 charging stations to help with the transition to electric cars.

“You will no longer be going to a gas station, but you will need to charge your vehicle whether at home or on the road,” said Kate Larsen, director of international climate policy research at the Rhodium Group. “It may be a whole new way of thinking about transportation for the average person.”

But it will still be your car, which is why most of the big climate action over the next 10 years won’t be too noticeable, said Princeton University ecologist Stephen Pacala. “The single biggest difference is that because wind and solar is distributed you will see a lot more of it on the landscape,” said Pacala, who leads a decarbonizing America study by the National Academy of Sciences that comes out next week.

Other recent detailed scientific studies show that because of dropping wind, solar and battery prices, Biden’s net-zero carbon goal can be accomplished far cheaper than feared in the past and with health benefits “many, many times’’ outweighing the costs, said Pacala, who was part of one study at Princeton. Those studies agree on what needs to be done for decarbonization, and what Biden has come out with ”is doing the things that everyone now is concluding that we should do,” Pacala said.

These are the type of shifts that don’t cost much — about $1 day per person — and won’t require people to abandon their current cars and furnaces, but replace them with cleaner electric vehicles and heat pumps when it comes time for a new one, said Margaret Torn, a senior scientist at the Department’s of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, who co-authored a peer-reviewed study Wednesday.

Part of the problem, said study co-author Ryan Jones, co-founder of Evolved Energy Research, is that for years people have wrongly portrayed the battle against climate change as a “personal morality problem” where individuals have to sacrifice by driving and flying less, turning down the heat and eating less meat.

“Actually, climate change is an industry economy issue where most of the big solutions are happening under the hood or upstream of people’s homes,” Jones said. “It’s a big change in how we produce energy and consume energy. It’s not a change in people’s day-to-day lives or it doesn’t need to be.”

One Biden interim goal — “a carbon pollution-free power sector by 2035” — may not be doable that quickly, but can be done by 2050, said study co-author Jim Williams of the University of San Francisco.

Biden’s executive orders featured plans for an all-electric federal fleet of vehicles, conserving 30% of the country’s land and waters, doubling the nation’s offshore wind energy and funding to help communities become more resilient to climate disasters. Republicans and fossil fuel interests objected, calling the actions job-killers.

“Using the incredible leverage of federal government purchases in green electricity, zero-emission cars and new infrastructure will rapidly increase demand for home-grown climate-friendly technologies,” said Rosina Bierbaum, a University of Michigan environmental policy professor.

The next big thing for the administration is to come up with a Paris climate accord goal — called Nationally Determined Contribution — for how much the United States hopes to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. It has to be ambitious for the president to reach his ultimate goal of net zero carbon emissions by 2050, but it also has to be doable.

His administration promises to reveal the goal, required by the climate agreement but nonbinding, before its Earth Day climate summit, April 22. That new number “is actually the centrally important activity of the next year,” said University of Maryland environment professor Nate Hultman, who worked on the Obama administration’s Paris goal.

Getting to net zero carbon emissions midcentury means about a 43% cut from 2005 levels — the baseline the U.S. government uses — by 2030, said the Rhodium Group’s Larsen. The U.S. can realistically reach a 40% cut by 2030, which is about one-third reduction from what 2020 U.S. carbon emissions would have been without a pandemic, said Williams, the San Francisco professor.

All this work on power and vehicles, that’s easy compared with decarbonizing agriculture with high methane emissions from livestock and high-heat industrial processes such as steel-making, Breakthrough’s Hausfather said. “There’s no silver bullet for agriculture,” Hausfather said. “There’s no solar panels for cows so to speak, apart from meat alternatives, but even there you have challenges around consumer acceptance.”

>>>>>…..>>>>>…..>>>>>…..>>>>>…..>>>>>

See also: America Must Reclaim the Global Lead on Climate Change, Chris Murphy, Foreign Policy, January 19, 2021

Five places to start undoing the Trump administration’s damage and rebuilding U.S. leadership.