Ten climate tidbits

This weekend marks the December conference of Citizens' Climate Lobby (CCL), an organization I've now been part of for close to three years. For most of that time — in fact, for most of the time it's existed — CCL has been focused on one specific policy goal: putting a price on carbon in some form or other. But since our pet policy didn't make it into the landmark Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the organization has decided to expand its approach to climate legislation. Thus, the main purpose of this conference was to unveil our new multi-pronged approach. We're planning to continue the fight for carbon pricing (perhaps at the state and local level for a while), but we're also going to be working toward three additional goals:

• Permitting reform. Remember how I said last summer that the IRA would get our carbon emissions down to about 40% below their 2005 level? Well, it turns out that number was a little fuzzy. The bill's provisions will allow us to build enough green energy infrastructure to get to that level — but whether we actually build them will depend largely on whether the projects can get the necessary permits. Right now, there's a lot of red tape holding them up. So cutting through that tape is one of our new policy priorities.
• Building electrification and efficiency. It's not enough just to make the power grid greener. There's a lot of other stuff out there that currently runs on fossil fuels, such as vehicles and home heating systems. To eliminate those emissions, we need to convert all that stuff so that it runs on electricity, while at the same time making sure the electricity it runs on is green. (Efficiency is part of this because the more energy-efficient we can make homes and other buildings, the less green electricity we'll need to power them all.)
• Nature-based solutions. Trees are an ecological two-fer: They suck up carbon, and their shade helps make it easier to survive on a hotter planet. To make the most of these benefits, we need to manage existing forests better so we don't lose so many trees to development and/or wildfires. And we need to add more trees everywhere we can: whole new forests, trees on cropland (silvopasture), and trees in cities.

This, then, is the broad overview of our agenda. But as always, God and the devil both are in the details, and it was these details that most caught my attention at the conference sessions I attended. Here, in order of appearance, is a quick rundown of the ten most interesting tidbits that I learned:

1. Most climate bills are bipartisan. Anyone who was paying attention knows that the IRA passed without a single vote from Republicans. But this actually made it an exception to the general rule. Up until now, every major environmental bill— the ratification of the Kigali Amendment, the 2021 infrastructure bill, the Murkowski-Manchin energy and water bill — has had significant Republican support. Which means there's good reason to hope that we can continue to pass climate legislation in the upcoming, closely divided Congress.
2. Permitting reform, though boring, is absolutely vital. To achieve our climate goals, we need to triple our capacity to transmit clean energy within the next 30 years. But right now, we're only expanding electric transmission at about 1% per year. If we continue at that slow rate, we will only realize about 20 percent of the emissions reductions from the IRA. In fact, U.S. emissions will actually increase, because if we can't connect cities to the wind farms and solar farms being built in rural areas, we'll need to burn more coal to make up for increased demand for electricity.
3. Fossil fuels are already on the way out. In the U.S., we've pretty much stopped building new fossil fuel plants already. About 90% of all proposed electricity capacity in the queue is wind or solar. Global demand for fossil fuels is projected to peak by 2025.
4. Weatherization is a huge money-saver — especially for low-income households, which spend a bigger share of their income on fuel. It can cut their energy bills by as much as 35%.
5. Forests sequester up to 12% of all carbon emissions in the U.S, and we could potentially boost that number as high as 22%. (The linked article says 21%, but it's from 2018, and our total emissions have fallen since then.)
6. Urban trees literally save lives. They improve air quality and help cool urban "heat islands." Neighborhoods with trees have measurably lower mortality rates than neighborhoods without them, even when you control for the fact that these neighborhoods tend to be richer and whiter.
   
7. Building with wood is a win-win. Replacing materials like steel with "durable wood" can cut the emissions from construction by 25% to 33%, while also sequestering carbon within the wood.
8. Electrifying buildings automatically makes them greener — even if the electricity comes from fossil fuels. That's because modern electric appliances are a lot more energy-efficient. Heat pumps are two to three times as efficient as a traditional heating system.
   
9. It also saves a ton of money. Replacing an old-school heating system with a heat pump can save a family anywhere from $100 to $1,300 per year. (Households with oil heat or electric resistance heaters see the biggest savings.) Electrifying everything — space heating, water heating, cooking, transportation — could cut the cost of powering our economy in half.
10. If you're not ready to go electric, you can still get your home "electric ready." This means putting in the necessary circuits so that when you are ready to replace your heating system, your water heater, your gas-burning car with a plug-in electric, you can just do it. There's information about what this entails on the Rewiring America website, which also offers a detailed guide to how the IRA can help pay for it. The Carbon Switch site also has lots of useful info on how to go electric. 

I'm sure I'll be diving deeper into these new topics (reforestation, building electrification, urban forests, permitting reform) over the coming weeks and months. But for now, these ten fun (and useful) facts are my top takeaways.