Environment — Social — Governance — Opportunities

From an Article by the National Law Review (Volume XI, Number 275), Journal of Petroleum Technology, October 1, 2021

While ESG is perceived by some to be — and can be — difficult to implement, and it may seem like a profit-killer, the irony is that, for most companies that implement ESG programs, including those within the oil and gas industry, it has the opposite effect.

The institution of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) values and metrics represents a true revolution in how corporations are managed, measured, and operated. This sea change will continue to drive companies away from the familiar framework of short-term profits toward success that is defined not only by profitability but also by a sustainable and measurable contribution to the betterment of society at large.

This new paradigm brakes a long-established mold. While ESG is perceived by some to be—and can be—difficult to implement, and it may seem like a profit-killer, the irony is that, for most companies that implement ESG programs, including those within the oil and gas industry, it has the opposite effect.

According to the International Energy Association’s (IEA) 2021 Global Energy Review, renewable energy grew 3% in 2020, inclusive of a 7% increase in electricity generation from renewable sources. Logic would imply that, all things being constant, fossil fuel demand would decline. But all things are not constant, and because of an estimated 4.6% increase in global energy demand this year, a year when the world continues to feel the effects of COVID-19, the demand for fossil fuels has not diminished and will not any time soon.

Coal, driven largely by Asia, is a significant part of that demand, but natural gas is a driver across nearly all geographies. Even as we seek to supply more of our growing energy needs from renewable sources, the demise of fossil fuels — for good or for bad — is greatly exaggerated. While the industry itself is not going away, the way in which it operates and its contribution to the economy and society most certainly will be transformed.

Why is that? Certainly the societal implications of a focus on ESG represents an ethical imperative. But the truth is that money talks. BlackRock is the world’s largest investment manager, with $10 trillion of assets under management. According to S&P Global, as of February 2021, oil and gas represented 2.55% of its total investments and coal and consumable fuels accounted for 0.36%. Despite these small percentages, the investments are material and represent close to $255 billion and $36 billion, respectively, in the energy sector.

As such, when BlackRock’s CEO Larry Fink speaks, people listen, including those in the energy sector. To that end, in a 2020 letter to investors, Larry Fink warned that “Given the groundwork we have already laid engaging on disclosure, and the growing investment risks surrounding sustainability, we will be increasingly disposed to vote against management and board directors when companies are not making sufficient progress on sustainability-related disclosures and the business practices and plans underlying them.”

While BlackRock has been and is instrumental in creating the ESG imperative, it is just one of the many stakeholders pushing companies in all sectors to embrace ESG and to develop metrics to measure progress toward identified goals.

Despite all the talk about the energy transition, net-zero economy goals, and the importance of ESG overall, energy companies should not lose site of the fact that (1) it is unlikely there will be a decline in global energy demand — populations are continuing to grow — and (2) broad index funds, as opposed to actively managed funds, simply cannot abandon the sector or create stranded assets. But, a lack of an ESG strategy will ultimately affect a company’s access to public, and increasingly private, capital. And that will happen to all companies, whether publicly funded or not.

A lack of an ESG strategy will ultimately affect a company’s access to public, and increasingly private, capital.

Be sure to read the full story here.

Solar farms are growing electric power across Virginia

From an Article by Laurence Hammack, Roanoke Times, November 23, 2019

The first industrial-scale solar farm to produce electricity for Appalachian Power Co. has been approved by the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality.

Construction of the Depot Solar Center in Campbell County is expected to begin in the spring and be completed by the end of the year, according to Ryan Gilchrist of Coronal Energy, a private company that will operate the facility.

The rows of solar panels on a 150-acre site near Rustburg will provide 15 megawatts of electricity to Appalachian, which is shifting its power generation from coal-burning power plants to more renewable energy.

“Virginia is adopting solar technology at record rates, and we are building an economy that is cleaner and greener as a result,” Gov. Ralph Northam said in a statement last month that announced the VA DEQ approval of four other solar farms.

Although about 1,000 of Appalachian’s 500,000-plus Virginia customers have solar panels at their homes or businesses, a power-purchase agreement with Coronal marks the utility’s first venture into industrial-scale solar power.

Appalachian Power is considering bids from other energy companies for more large-scale projects that will add another 200 megawatts of solar to its power portfolio, spokesman John Shepelwich said.

The utility currently gets about 60% of its electricity from coal. Another 19% comes from natural gas, 11% from hydroelectric and 7% from wind turbines.

After the Campbell County Board of Supervisors granted a special use permit last year, the Depot Solar Center went to VA DEQ for consideration of its environmental impacts.

In a Nov. 5 letter to the company, VA DEQ approved the permit with several conditions, including tree-cutting requirements to protect bats, monitoring for invasive species and landscape protection measures.

In recent years, VA DEQ has approved 39 permits for solar farms in Virginia. Thirteen of them have been built so far and are producing a total of about 400 megawatts, enough to power nearly 100,000 homes.

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See also: Virginia could soon have more than 2,500 MW of solar. We just need customers | Power for the People VA by Ivy Main, September 12, 2017

Hearing for Healthy Communities to Protect the Clean Power Plan

From an Article by Jessica Schueler, WVNS-TV News 59, November 29, 2017

CHARLESTON, WV — While the U.S. EPA hosted a public hearing in the Capitol Complex, the Sierra Club was also holding a hearing to discuss the potential repeal of the Clean Power Plan. The environmental conservation organization hosted a press conference, panel discussion and public hearing at the University of Charleston to send a strong message to the EPA. All testimony recorded Tuesday will be handed over to the EPA as written comment tomorrow.

From health impacts to economic concerns- experts, leaders and neighbors spent their day breaking down why they believe the Clean Power Plan has to stay.

“Who is the administration thinking about now when they try to repeal the clean power plan? They’re not thinking about their children, they’re not thinking about the next generation, they’re not thinking about our planet,” Mark Magana, CEO of Green Latinos, explained.

Alternative energy entrepreneurs touted the success of renewable resources in other countries, helping protect the earth and save money. “Every single case that I address with colleagues and fixed the pollution problem- improved the bottom line of the company we were working with,” Allan Tweedle said.

Advocates also argue the Power Plan doesn’t take away jobs. “There are now twice as many jobs in the solar industry in the United States, as in the entire fossil fuel industry combined,” Tweedle added.

One veteran physician said more than half of all doctors now believe the Clean Power Plan will improve the health of Americans. “It’s estimated that up to 90,000 asthma attacks a year would be prevented. 1,700 heart attacks would be prevented and 3,600 premature deaths would be prevented- every single year,” Laura Anderko of Georgetown University said.

The EPA required speakers to sign up ahead of time in order to share thoughts on the Clean Power Plan for the hearing, however time is being allocated in the late afternoon for anyone in the public to come in and address staff.

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Environment, jobs not an either-or question for West Virginia

Letter to Morgantown Dominion-Post, Betsy Jaeger Lawson, December 3, 2017

The Dominion-Post’s coverage of the Environmental Protection Agency’s hearing in Charleston left me with the usual sense of frustration when reading that limiting carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels and protecting jobs is an either-or situation.

Repealing the Clean Power Plan is not going to help us or bring coal-mining jobs back.

It will keep us trapped in an endless cycle of poverty and poor health. As many people at the hearing said, the Clean Power Plan does not go far enough.

More carbon and methane in the atmosphere will create much worse health problems down the road and we need even stricter limits than what President Obama’s EPA proposed.

To say that the EPA is overstepping its bounds by protecting air and water quality is nonsensical. Their job is to protect the environment and our health. Employment is the responsibility of the Department of Labor.

I attended the hearings in Charleston. The Sierra Club sponsored a well-attended hearing at the same time with an impressive panel of experts, which was never mentioned in the newspaper article.

It is not environmental regulations that are causing the coal industry to wind down. But that is a convenient excuse given by the fossil fuel barons who want to protect their wealth. We have to stop thinking of clean environment and jobs as an “either-or.” The future of West Virginia depends on it.

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See also: Sierra Club outlines opposition to repeal of Clean Power Plan

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Plan for Environment & Economy

The Clean Power Plan is the Transition Needed for the U. S. and the Earth

From a Letter by William D. Ruckelshaus and William K. Reilly, New York Times, September 25, 2016

Last year, President Obama took aim at the nation’s largest source of carbon dioxide pollution, announcing a plan that would reduce these climate-changing emissions from the country’s power plants by one-third by 2030, from 2005 levels.

It is an ambitious proposal to rein in a pollutant that has escaped regulation. But the president was absolutely right in taking this action. As he pointed out, these plants emit more carbon dioxide than our cars, planes and homes combined, and it is this greenhouse gas that is the principal culprit behind the alarming warming of our planet.

Predictably, the plan has run into a determined legal assault from businesses, industry groups and more than two dozen states, many with economies that rely on coal mining or coal-fired electricity generation, and its fate now lies with the judicial branch. On Tuesday, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia is set to hear a challenge brought by those litigants.

As former administrators of the Environmental Protection Agency who served three Republican presidents, we strongly support the president’s Clean Power Plan. It is consistent with the fundamental, longstanding approach this country has applied in the face of environmental threats. We have filed a supporting brief with the court.

Over the last 45 years, the nation has built a successful, durable legal framework to protect public health and the environment. This is the result of two factors: first, a clear, essential delineation of responsibilities between the federal government and the states; and, second, laws written sufficiently broadly to anticipate new threats to public health. Those critical elements came together in 1970 with the passage of amendments to the landmark Clean Air Act and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency by President Richard M. Nixon.

The Clean Air Act of 1970 gave the new E.P.A. the duty to set national ambient air-quality standards for six major air pollutants to protect public health. The law also deliberately and explicitly gave states the authority to devise and implement their own plans to meet the E.P.A. standards.

State responsibility was crucial to the legislative compromise that resulted in the amendments’ passage by overwhelming majorities in both houses. Congress recognized that states were closer to the problems they faced, and often had a better understanding of how solutions could be tailored in more cost-effective ways. That consideration has defined virtually all subsequent public health legislation that the E.P.A. administers.

Although states were given the primary responsibility to meet the standards, Congress gave the E.P.A. the power to implement plans of its own if states failed to act. The clear and unmistakable message from Congress to the E.P.A. was to protect the health of Americans.

We have always viewed the E.P.A. first and foremost as a public health agency. In our time running it, both of us faced unanticipated threats to public health. The broad terms of the Clean Air Act gave us authority to act sooner rather than later.

That model — federally set national standards coupled with state planning and implementation — is the bedrock of the legal structure that is now in place to protect public health. The Clean Water Act, Safe Drinking Water Act, Resource Conservation and Recovery Act and Superfund all operate under that framework.

With the Clean Air Act, the success of this approach is clear. Levels of those six major air pollutants regulated by the law — ground-level ozone, particulates, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide and lead — have declined substantially, with lead by more than 90 percent, even as the nation’s gross domestic product grew by more than 230 percent.

The current challenge to the E.P.A.’s power-plant rule once again thrusts the role of the states front and center. Principles of states’ rights and responsibilities are at the core of the agency’s approach. The E.P.A. has granted maximum flexibility to states to make the emissions reductions in ways tailored to address their specific circumstances.

Given the explicit deference to state authority embedded in the Clean Air Act, the charge by opponents that this rule amounts to “one of the most aggressive executive branch power grabs,” as one state attorney general put it, simply ignores the law and its success over 45 years.

That law, passed long before climate change had emerged as a looming catastrophe, may not be the ideal tool to address this daunting challenge. But Congress’s failure to take any meaningful action requires the E.P.A. to act with the only tool it has — the Clean Air Act. Once the agency determined that carbon dioxide posed a risk to public health, as it did in 2009, the agency was required to act to reduce that risk, under a 2007 Supreme Court ruling.

The debate about whether the climate is changing is over. The consequences will be drastic if the United States and other countries do nothing. Climate change has no boundaries. It confronts all of us with the reality that what happens anywhere on the planet can affect all of us everywhere.

The actions this country is taking to reduce greenhouse gases exemplify American exceptionalism. Our leadership is indispensable to international progress. Failure to accept and assert that responsibility guarantees that future generations of Americans will face a world markedly different from today’s and bear a cost far in excess of addressing the challenge now.

<<< William D. Ruckelshaus was administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Ronald Reagan; William K. Reilly was the agency’s administrator under President George H.W. Bush.

See also:  www.FrackCheckWV.net

Carole King speaks

Carole King Urges Clean Power, Not Global Warming

From Laurie David, stopglobalwarming.org, October 17, 2013

Carole King is the most successful and beloved female songwriter in pop music history. She is also a powerful voice for environmental protection, and as a concerned citizen is holding fossil fuel companies accountable and demanding clean power now.

Carole has added her voice at our partner NRDC’s DemandCleanPower.org, and encourages you to join her. As Carole says in her video: “We can overcome the big money interests that are keeping things the way they are. Get your friends and neighbors involved and demand clean power now.”

Watch Carole King’s video here.

For more on Carole King’s commitment to fighting climate change, read her recent blog at The Huffington Post.

Please show your support at DemandCleanPower.org. Some of the nation’s leading cultural figures, including SGW Featured Marchers Robert Redford, Van Jones, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Julia Louis-Dreyfus are joining forces to help move America beyond fossil fuels and climate chaos.

 24 Hours of Reality: The Cost of Carbon

It’s less than one week until the global broadcast of 24 Hours of Reality: The Cost of Carbon.

Beginning at 11am PST on October 22, former Vice President Al Gore andThe Climate Reality Project will focus the world’s attention on the greatest challenge of our time: climate change driven by carbon pollution.

24 Hours of Reality: The Cost of Carbon will bring together artists, scientists, celebrities, economists, and other experts to explore the many ways we’re all paying for carbon pollution in our daily lives and how we can solve this with a market price on carbon.

It will be the world’s largest conversation on carbon pollution, with millions taking part worldwide. Don’t miss out. Visit 24hoursofreality.org to learn more.

 For more tips, see “What You Can Do at Home” from the EPA.