Ed Markey on the New Green Deal

MARKEY’S REMARKS: A decade after his push for major cap and trade legislation was derailed, now-Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) says the drive for a Green New Deal is helping boost momentum and pave the way for Congress to make major progress on climate change in 2021.
Sen. Ed Markey speaks at the Back the Thrive Agenda press conference at the Longworth Office Building on Sept. 10, 2020 in Washington, D.C.
Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey
 
Markey told Politico Pro Energy’s Anthony Adragna on Friday he is pleased with President Joe Biden’s early moves on climate change, describing them as “very consistent with the goals” of the Green New Deal resolution he and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) unveiled two years ago.

“I would say that it’s an excellent start,” he said in response to Mitch McConnell‘s recent comments that Biden’s actions amounted to a “piecemeal” Green New Deal. “Talking about Joe Biden, it’s an agenda that in my opinion is going to have climate justice built into every reconciliation package.

“The Massachusetts senator also said he wants Democrats to pursue a clean energy standard over carbon pricing in their push for climate legislation. “[M]y view is that sector-wide solutions like a clean energy standard can help enact the Biden campaign promise of moving toward 100 percent carbon-free electricity sector by 2035,” he said. “And there’s a strong case to be made that this policy proposal can be done through reconciliation. It’s effective, it’s endorsed by the Biden campaign, [and] it polls very well. And I think it should be our starting point for climate negotiations, not a carbon tax.

“He also reflected on lessons learned from the Waxman-Markey bill: “Henry Waxman and I decided to draft that bill and to finish it quickly. We passed the bill through the House of Representatives on June 26, 2009, Barack Obama had been inaugurated on Jan. 20. We started the hearings before he was sworn in as a president. So my belief is that we had the right strategy in the House in 2009, and in 2021 the House and Senate both must move quickly to implement a climate crisis response legislative package and to not allow it to slip into 2022. It must be done and it must be done quickly and we should go.”

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Disillusioned ExxonMobil Engineer Quits to Take Climate Change Action

Dar-Lon Chang, who was an engineer for ExxonMobil for more than 15 years, left his career in the fossil fuel industry in Houston and moved to the Geos Neighborhood in Arvada, Colorado with his wife and daughter. "I just wanted to go all the way and be a part of a community where my daughter could live fossil fuel-free and net-zero," he said. "So she could see it was possible." Credit: Michael Kodas/Inside Climate News

” Photo Credit: Michael Kodas/Inside Climate News


By Nicholas Kusnetz, Inside Climate News

For 16 years, Dar-Lon Chang worked as an engineer at ExxonMobil. Fresh out of graduate school, he was by all accounts exactly the type of person the company is known for hiring: smart, driven, diligent.

From his base at Exxon’s sprawling campus outside Houston, Chang helped the company maximize production at far-flung oil and gas projects, from Guyana to Qatar to America’s fracking fields.

He’d had an interest in alternative energy since his college days, and thought science and technology would blaze a path towards a future without fossil fuels. Exxon, he believed, could help lead the way. When he could, Chang tried to nudge the company along in small ways, holding out the hope that change would come.

But with each passing year, Chang watched the climate crisis grow more urgent, while the company he had devoted his career to only deepened its commitment to oil and gas. Eventually, he became disillusioned.

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So in 2019, without any prospect of future employment, he resigned, packed up with his wife and daughter, who had known no home other than Houston, and moved to a net-zero community outside Denver built around environmentally-conscious living.

He had hoped to find a job in the renewable energy sector, but meanwhile, he poured himself into his new Geos Neighborhood, where residents hold monthly meetings to discuss how to lighten their load on the planet. A small herd of goats graze on undeveloped lots, the community’s fossil-free answer to weed control. A blue Nissan Leaf and a black Tesla Model 3 sit side-by-side in his garage, plugged into chargers fed by solar panels on his roof. 

“I didn’t want the rest of my career to be wasted on something that I felt was making the world worse, when there was all the possibility to make things better,” he said recently. 

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Chang belongs to a generation of engineers, environmental scientists and computer developers who entered the fossil fuel sector just as the world was waking up to the grave threat posed by the industry’s products. While oil companies are already under pressure from investors, governments and society at large, Chang’s story reflects another emerging challenge for the industry: a younger generation of workers who are worried about climate change and their own role in determining what kind of future their children will inherit.

“We as an industry underestimate the intense pressure that oil and gas employees are under,” said Tisha Schuller, founding principal at Adamantine Energy and the former head of the Colorado Oil and Gas Association. Schuller has argued that the industry needs to engage with its growing workforce of millennials, who, she noted, are more likely to be concerned about climate change and are facing peer pressure over their work. 

“I feel confident that more than half of the millennials working in the oil and gas industry are interested in seeing our industry take on an assertive, solution oriented role,” Schuller said.

Exxon has become the corporate embodiment of the industry’s intransigence. It has remained committed to a future of expanding oil and gas production and was the last of the major multinational oil companies to adopt corporate-wide emissions reduction targets, announcing the pledge only in December. And while the company’s finances have crumbled in recent years, it remains by some metrics the largest of the Western investor-owned oil companies.

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Some Philly fans may be rooting for (gasp) Tom Brady in tonight’s Super Bowl

#BILLYPENNGRAM OF THE DAY
Memories of beating Brady
(photo by @billy_penn)
A week before the Eagles won Super Bowl 52, muralist Meg Saligman painted this inspiration/prediction on her Bella Vista (Philadelphia) studio. Though Tampa Bay Buccaneers are led by a former Temple football coach with a half-dozen Owl alum on staff, the anti-Tom Brady vibes are still strong in Philly. Plus, the Bucs are up against the the Kansas City Chiefs, who have former Birds head coach Andy Reid at the helm. May the most Philly team win.
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Attention all New Jersey – New York commuters

PABT Advisory Council Image

As part of our continued initiative to enhance public outreach, the Port Authority of NY & NJ is pleased to announce the formation of the Port Authority Bus Terminal Advisory Council (PABTAC). This new volunteer advisory council – which launched in July as a 12-month pilot program – is tasked with providing input to facility management on operations, customer service issues and community impacts from operations. The PABTAC consists of individuals who commute regularly through or live near the midtown bus terminal.

Bus terminal council members will meet every two months either in person or via teleconference.

The public is welcomed to submit suggestions for future PABTAC agenda topics by emailing PABTAC@panynj.gov.

Bus terminal council members will meet every two months either in person or via teleconference.

The public is welcomed to submit suggestions for future PABTAC agenda topics by emailing PABTAC@panynj.gov.

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California Bill Seeks Additional Greenhouse Gas Disclosures from Major Public Corporations

Image result for report images

By K&L Gates attorneys Robert M. Smith, Buck B. Endemann, Ankur K. Tohan and Matthew P. Clark

State Senator Scott Weiner recently introduced the Climate Corporation Accountability Act (SB 260 or the Bill) on the California Senate floor. If enacted, SB 260 would create mandatory reporting of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for large corporations that do business in California.

While California regulations currently encourage private entities to volunteer GHG emissions information regarding their inventories, goals, and agreements, SB 260 would make this disclosure mandatory for large corporations and would require those entities to produce a comprehensive, publicly available report detailing a wide array of GHG emissions directly generated by the company or incidental to business operations. Companies would also be required to adopt GHG emissions targets and employ measures to reduce those emissions.

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SB 260 would apply to all publicly traded, domestic and foreign corporations with annual revenues in excess of US$1 billion that do business in California. The Bill envisions a two-prong approach, mandating (1) accurate and science-based reporting of all associated GHG emissions from covered entities and (2) a measured approach to reduce those emissions starting in 2025. Each covered entity under the Bill would be required to provide GHG emissions data in three scopes:

  • Scope One – All direct GHG emissions from sources that an entity owns or directly controls, such as fuel combustion;
  • Scope Two – Indirect GHG emissions related to electricity that is purchased and consumed by an entity; and
  • Scope Three – Indirect GHG emissions the entity does not directly control or own, which may include emissions associated with supply chain, business travel, water usage, employee commuting, and waste.

All three sources of emissions would need to be verified by a third-party auditor, approved by the California Air Resources Board (CARB), and publicly disclosed on widely available digital platform at the beginning of each calendar year, starting 1 January 2024. By the time the first reporting period ends, the Bill would require CARB to have developed and adopted regulations setting reduced annual emissions targets for each entity, derivative of the entity’s reported emissions.

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