What we're reading about, 5/10/24
Climate, energy, and sustainability coverage we've been following around the web
(1) Last month, representatives from 175 countries met in Ottawa for talks on a proposed treaty to cap global plastic production. Negotiations on the proposed treaty began in 2022, “with the ambition of completing [the] work by the end of 2024,” so the clock’s ticking. The NYT’s Hiroko Tabuchi reported on the latest round of talks from a Vinyl Institute reception on the sidelines of the meeting.
The plastics industry’s messaging focuses on the importance of single-use plastics in delivering medical care and sanitary food and water supplies - cleverly pitting one set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) against another:
Modern medicine relies heavily on single-use plastics, for example. Bags made of PVC can preserve blood for up to 42 days, a sign at the Vinyl Institute cocktail party pointed out. Industry groups have also highlighted the role plastics play in preventing food waste and delivering clean tap water.
“When you think about the bigger problems of access to clean water, access to good health,” Mr. DeCaria said from Ottawa on Tuesday, “we’re part of the solution.”
Plastic waste per capita ranges from ~221 kg per person, per year, in the United States (!) to around ~14 kg per person in India and Sub-Saharan Africa. Global trade in plastic waste is relatively small compared to overall plastic consumption (~6 MT per year of exports versus ~460 MT of plastic used each year), but, net/net, trade flows route waste from OECD countries (North America, Europe, and Japan) to the rest of the world.
And the vast majority of plastics recycling in non-OECD countries happens in the informal sector - where it’s harder to track and mitigate the impact of plastic pollution on workers and communities. That environmental justice angle has come up in the plastics treaty talks, too, with representatives from the Global South highlighting the dangerous conditions that plastic pickers work in.
(OECD)
In much of the world, the task of collecting, sorting and recycling plastics often falls to informal waste pickers who work among fires and toxic vapors for little pay. In a landmark move, the agreement in Nairobi for the first time formally recognized the importance of waste pickers in the plastics economy.
“We waste pickers have to be involved in this process,” said Silvio Ruiz Grisales of Bogotá, Colombia, who began working at dump sites at the age of 12. Now he is a leader in the Latin American and Caribbean Network of Waste Pickers, a group that advocates for better pay, working conditions and recognition.
“We work the trash 12, 14 or 16 hours a day,” he said. “It’s a poverty trap.”
(New York Times)
(2) In the near term, the pace of decarbonization is going to be dictated by the electric power sector. But, longer-term, emissions from “hard to decarbonize” industries - especially those that rely on high heat or chemical reactions that inherently produce GHG emissions - are going to become a bigger part of the remaining emissions reduction challenge (this would obviously be a high-quality problem to have).
Modeling shop Rhodium projects that industry will be the single biggest source of US emissions by 2035 - assuming, of course, that the emissions intensity of the grid continues to fall and EV sales continue to grow.
(3) A new mapping tool from the Department of Labor highlights the job-creation benefits of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). As the DOL notes:
The IRA includes enhanced tax incentives for taxpayers that pay workers prevailing wages and use registered apprentices for the construction, and in some cases the alteration or repair, of qualified clean energy facilities, property, projects, or equipment.
The tool provides a rough estimate of the construction jobs generated by specific projects eligible for IRA tax incentives. It’s maybe unsurprising that vast majority of projects on the list are solar, wind, and battery installations - the number of projects in more nascent or challenging verticals (nuclear, hydrogen, advanced geothermal) is still de minimis. For example, it only lists one hydrogen project (at San Diego Gas and Electric’s “Dark Sky Energy Center”) that is expected to create “less than 25” construction jobs. The only nuclear project listed is the Vogtle plant in Georgia, which, obviously, was under construction well before the passage of the IRA. One takeaway might be that it’s simply going to take longer to get shovels in the ground for these projects than for renewables, which are more of a known quantity.
(4) New emission regulations from the EPA will require newly built gas plants to abate 90 percent of their CO2 emissions by 2032. As HeatMap’s Emily Pontecorvo observes, that’s a goal that “can only be achieved with the use of carbon capture equipment.” The Energy Information Administration regularly commissions the engineering firm Sargent & Lundy (S&L) to prepare estimates for the construction cost of new generators across a range of technologies. In the most recent edition of the S&L report, the consultants calculated that the cost to build a combined-cycle gas plant with 95 percent carbon capture would be $2,365 per kW. Compare that to an average construction cost for gas generators today of < $1,000 per kW.
It’s hard to say whether the new rule will survive the upcoming election - but, if it does, the outcome is going to be some combination of (i) delayed fossil-plant retirement, (ii) higher costs for ratepayers, and (iii) additional investment in “clean firm” generation. The exact balance of each - and therefore, the “climate balance sheet” of the EPA’s move - is hard to gauge off the cuff, and it seems likely that different utilities (and state regulators) will land on a range of different answers.
(5) There’s been a flurry of reporting in the wake of the Senate and House investigation into the energy industry’s public relations strategy. Some of that reporting has highlighted the role that oil and gas “majors,” like BP, in funding academic research on climate change and energy system modeling.
There’s no real smoking gun in the e-mails that have turned up (i.e. evidence that the funding directly influenced the conclusions reached by academics) but they shed an interesting light on how big companies think through their philanthropic activity, spending on lobbying, and government relations (and the sometimes fuzzy boundaries between all three).
For example, from a BP spreadsheet with notes on the company’s relationship with the Harvard Kennedy School:
(Parenthetically, it’s also interesting that the same teams at BP track university recruiting relationships and academic research funding).
(Drilled)
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