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President Joe Biden today signed a national security memorandum aimed at putting an end to illegal fishing and the labor abuses associated with it.

The president’s memo targeted illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing and asked NOAA to step up its work to combat the use of forced labor on fishing fleets and in the seafood supply chain.

Toward that end, the White House said NOAA would issue a proposed rule that would allow the agency to broaden the scope of activities it can consider when it identifies nations that engage in illegal fishing.

Shortly after the White House announced the plan this afternoon, NOAA said it would seek public comment on a new rule.

“NOAA is committed to strengthening the suite of tools we use to combat all forms of IUU fishing and counter the use of forced labor in the seafood supply chain,” said NOAA Fisheries Chief Janet Coit.

In a statement, the White House called IUU fishing “among the greatest threats to ocean health” and “a significant cause of global overfishing, contributing to the collapse or decline of fisheries that are critical to the economic growth, food systems, and ecosystems of numerous countries around the world.”

“IUU fishing often involves forced labor, human trafficking, and other crimes and human rights abuses,” the White House said. “Left unchecked, IUU fishing and associated labor abuses undermine U.S. economic competitiveness, national security, fisheries sustainability, and the livelihoods and human rights of fishers around the world and will exacerbate the environmental and socioeconomic effects of climate change.”

Among other things, the Biden administration said the U.S. government will work with Canada and the United Kingdom to launch an IUU Fishing Action Alliance to improve monitoring and surveillance of fisheries and to “build new partnerships that will hold bad actors accountable.”

In addition, a U.S. Interagency Working Group on IUU fishing, made up of 21 federal agencies, will release its national five-year strategy by the end of July, the White House said.

The administration said its work to curtail global trade in IUU fish and fish products also involves work with a list of its “priority partners,” including Ecuador, Panama, Senegal, Taiwan and Vietnam.

“The efforts to combat IUU fishing activities and counter forced labor are complex and a broad range of governments and management organizations are involved,” said Kelly Kryc, deputy assistant secretary for international fisheries at NOAA.

Beth Lowell, Oceana’s vice president for the United States, said Biden’s memo signified “real progress in pulling together the full force of the U.S. government in the fight against IUU fishing, forced labor and other human rights abuses.” But she added more still needs to be done.

“The memorandum directs the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to expand the Seafood Import Monitoring Program to include some additional species, but it falls short from requiring the program to apply to all seafood imports, which is key to stopping illegal products from entering the U.S. market,” she said.

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In the spring of 1917 a crowd of 3,000 people gathered to watch in Memphis as a lynch mob burned and decapitated Ell Persons, a Black man who was awaiting trial after he was beaten into confessing to raping and killing a 16-year-old white girl.

Under a bill introduced by Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.), the site near the Wolf River and others near the city in Tennessee would be studied as possible additions to the National Park Service.

“Unfortunately, there are many examples of lynching violence in our country’s history,” Cohen said. “Including these sites as part of our national park system is an important step to remember the victims and to learn from the past so that it is never repeated.”

The bill would direct the Interior secretary, who oversees the park service, to study whether lynching sites within roughly 100 miles of Memphis should be added as new park sites.

“We believe the report that will come from this act will help our region openly face its history of racial violence so that we can heal and grow,” said Rich Watkins, board president of the Lynching Sites Project of Memphis, who endorsed Cohen’s bill.

A separate effort is already underway to create a national park site that would be named in honor of another lynching victim, Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Black teenager from Chicago who was tortured and killed in August 1955 after he allegedly whistled at a white woman at a grocery store in Mississippi (Greenwire, Jan. 21).

Till’s murder in the Mississippi Delta helped ignite the civil rights movement when his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, opted for an open-casket funeral to put the boy’s mutilated body on display at Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ in Chicago.

As part of the work, NPS is conducting a special resource study of civil rights sites in Mississippi that could be included in a new park site. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland went to the state in February, meeting with Till’s cousin and visiting Bryant’s Grocery in Money, Miss.

Cohen’s bill, H.R. 7912, is named after Persons, called the “Evaluating Lynching Locations (ELL) for National Park Sites Act.” Cohen, who introduced the legislation on May 31, is a member of the House Natural Resources Committee, which has jurisdiction over national parks.

A historical plaque marks the spot where Persons, a Black woodcutter, was chained to a log, doused in gasoline and burned alive on May 22, 1917. News accounts described the lynching as “a holiday atmosphere,” with vendors selling drinks and snacks as cars jammed Macon Road to watch.

Later in the day, Persons’ head and foot were dumped on Beale Street in Memphis for Black pedestrians to see, according to an inscription on the plaque.

No one was ever brought to trial in connection with the killing.

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A federal appeals court ruled that a federal land swap giving a Native American tribal holy site in Arizona to a private mining company so it could be the site of a copper mine would not violate the tribe’s religious freedoms.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in a 2-1 decision affirmed a lower court ruling that federal officials could exchange Oak Flat, a place significant to many Apaches, to become the site of a mine, without violating tribal members’ free exercise protections under the U.S. Constitution or the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a 1993 religious liberty law.

The ruling is a victory for the potential recipient of the land: Resolution Copper, a joint venture between global mining companies Rio Tinto and BHP that want to create a sprawling copper mining complex on a patch of land that includes Oak Flat.

Extraction at Oak Flat was banned until 2014, when Congress included language in a must-pass defense authorization bill requiring the government to exchange the land and allow the mine to be built.

Officials at the U.S. Forest Service, which oversees the lands where Oak Flat is located, nearly completed the land exchange at the tail end of the Trump administration. Apache Stronghold, a Native American group opposed to the mine, then sued to block the trade. Shortly afterward, Biden administration officials rescinded the approval granted for the land exchange last year and began more consultation with affected tribes (E&E News PM, March 1, 2021).

Although Biden halted progress on the exchange, attorneys for his Justice Department argued Apache Stronghold’s arguments defined “substantial burden” of religious harm in an overly broad fashion to claim protection under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (Greenwire, May 21, 2021).

In a majority opinion published Friday, Judge Carlos Bea wrote he and concurring Chief Judge Mary Murguia shared that view. Bea was nominated under former President George W. Bush and Murguia was picked by former President Barack Obama.

Bea stated the panel did “not rejoice” in its decision and “recognize[d] the deep ties that the Apache have to Oak Flat,” as well as “acknowledge[d] that the Land Exchange may impact the Apache’s plans to worship on Oak Flat.”

However, the government’s obligations to protect religious diversity do not extend to the land exchange and its potential ramifications for the future of Apache spirituality, Bea wrote, adding that if Apaches wish to eliminate the land exchange, they should push for that in Congress.

“This dispute must be resolved as are most others in our pluralistic nation: through the political process,” he added, pointing to legislation authored by House Natural Resources Chair Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) that would eliminate the 2014 language.

Judge Marsha Berzon dissented from the decision, writing the majority was too restrictive in defining an “incorrect” definition for a substantial burden under the religious freedom law. Berzon was nominated to the role under former President Bill Clinton.

Transferring the site to Resolution Copper would “make the site inaccessible and eventually destroy it, objectively preventing Apaches from holding religious ceremonies there,” she wrote.

“The majority’s flawed test leads to an absurd result: blocking Apaches’ access to and eventually destroying a sacred site where they have performed religious ceremonies for centuries does not substantially burden their religious exercise,” she said.

Apache Stronghold stated it will appeal the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court. “Oak Flat is like Mount Sinai to us — our most sacred site where we connect with our Creator, our faith, our families, and our land,” said Dr. Wendsler Nosie, Sr., a representative of Apache Stronghold, in a statement.

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Democratic lawmakers are pressing President Joe Biden to use federal lands to ensure access to abortion services after the Supreme Court overturned long-standing abortion precedent.

Both Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D) and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D) separately demanded this weekend that the Biden administration use “federal lands” to ensure abortion access in areas where services have been or will soon be barred.

The Supreme Court on Friday voted to strike down the seminal 1973 ruling Roe v. Wade, which could result in abortion bans in more than half of the nation’s states. Among those are several with significant public lands acreage, including Idaho, Wyoming and Utah (Greenwire, June 24).

Turning to federal lands to expand abortion access could theoretically entail a broad swath of government-owned properties. But public lands experts say that likely means turning to Defense and Veterans Affairs department facilities, rather than pop-up clinics at national parks or on Bureau of Land Management properties.

“There are … actions at President Biden’s disposal,” Ocasio-Cortez said Friday at a rally in New York City’s Union Square, recorded by The Independent’s Jenna Amatulli. “I’ll start with the babiest of the babiest of the baby steps: Open abortion clinics on federal lands in red states right now.”

Similarly, Warren stated in an interview on ABC’s “This Week” that Biden should “make abortion as available as possible with the tools he has, including medication abortion, including using federal lands as a place where abortions can occur.”

Neither Ocasio-Cortez’s nor Warren’s offices returned requests for additional information about their proposals.

But in a letter to Biden earlier this month, Warren and two dozen Senate Democrats outlined how the president could use “federal property and resources,” including requiring the Defense Department and Office of Personnel Management to relocate military personnel and federal employees to ensure access to reproductive health care services.

“The Department of Justice and all relevant agencies could analyze the types of reproductive health services that could be provided on federal property, especially in states where such services are limited by state law or regulation,” the letter states. “And all federal agencies — including those who retain custody or control over individuals or provide healthcare to them — could conduct a review of their regulations and policies that limit abortion care and other reproductive health services and promulgate new regulations that expand access to those services.”

In a Saturday op-ed in The New York Times, Warren and Minnesota Sen. Tina Smith (D) reiterated their call for executive actions: “These actions include increasing access to abortion medication, providing federal resources for individuals seeking abortion care in other states and using federal property and resources to protect people seeking abortion services locally.”

Public lands experts say they aren’t expecting abortion clinics to pop up on federal lands overseen by agencies like BLM or the Forest Service.

Offering abortion services on those properties would almost certainly require congressional approval, said Bill Snape, an environmental law professor at American University and senior counsel for the Center for Biological Diversity.

Redirecting money without getting approval from Congress — which holds the purse strings for the federal government — would almost certainly draw legal challenges, Snape said.

“It seems like that would strike a lawsuit from the other side if they just took money for wild horses and decided to provide abortions,” he said of federal land management agencies.

There is also the hurdle of the Hyde Amendment, the law that bars federal funding from going to abortions via programs including Medicare and the Indian Health Service, as well as the Federal Employee Health Benefits Program (E&E Daily, March 11, 2021).

Looking to agencies like BLM and the National Park Service for health care services also wouldn’t necessarily be as practical as turning to agencies like the Veterans Affairs or Defense departments, which already have the infrastructure to provide health care services, he said.

Lawmakers’ request to expand abortion access on federal lands “strikes me as a legitimate request to the president,” Snape said, adding that the VA and DOD seem like the most likely agencies the president could turn to.

“DOD clearly has the capacity in both its planning statutes and its discretion to open up facilities that the president thinks is in national interests,” he said.

The Center for Biological Diversity’s Public Lands Program Director Randi Spivak likewise questioned the feasibility of using public lands for abortion access, noting that many sites are isolated or far from population centers.

“Aside from visitor centers, they don’t have facilities to accommodate these kinds of procedures and personnel,” Spivak said.

The Interior Department referred inquiries about whether the administration is considering any plans to expand abortion services on federal lands to the White House, which did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

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The Department of Energy retained a global public relations firm with longstanding fossil fuel ties, continuing a practice that ramped up during the Trump administration.

The global firm Edelman in April signed a $500,000 contract to promote the new Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, which the Biden administration established with infrastructure law funding and billed as “a turbocharger of our net-zero future.”

The Edelman deal has drawn scrutiny from critics who have long been skeptical of the prominent firm. DOE has paid the PR firm more than $14 million since 2018, according to USAspending.gov, a public database.

Edelman, meanwhile, has long trumpeted its commitment to climate action.

“Edelman works with a broad range of clients in many industries and global markets, including clients across the energy sector,” said a company spokesperson in 2015. “As previously reported, we do not accept client assignments that aim to deny climate change.”

Such statements have made the firm a target of watchdogs and activists, who don’t hesitate to point out when they see Edelman being hypocritical. Working for the trade group American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers was one of the company’s recent infractions in the view of critics.

“Edelman is really leading the charge on protecting old energy at the same time they are promoting new energy,” said Duncan Meisel, director at Clean Creatives, a group that has petitioned public relations firms and ad agencies to cut ties with oil companies and their trade groups.

USAspending shows Edelman will promote the DOE office’s accomplishments to the media, Congress and “the American public.”

The firm will help plan events, design graphics, write copy, develop web content and help with rapid response during times of heightened need, according to a DOE official, who said the tasks would be supervised and require approval.

The new clean energy demonstrations office will help encourage clean hydrogen, carbon capture, grid-scale energy storage, small modular reactors and other emerging technologies.

Its launch has been slow-going. The office has to hire numerous employees and lacks a Senate-confirmed administrator.

The recent Edelman contract was completed under an existing deal between the firm and DOE, which accelerated the process.

David Mayorga, DOE’s public affairs director, said the department conducts “a transparent, fair, and competitive procurement process when seeking external support services that deliver the best product and value for the American taxpayer.”

“We will do the same when seeking new communications support in the future,” he wrote in an email.

Edelman review

In 2015, Edelman said it was parting ways with a proposed coal export terminal project (Greenwire, July 24, 2015).

Earlier this year, Edelman, still under fire, said it had reviewed hundreds of clients, including a closer look at 20 “emissions-intensive” companies. It said the analysis led the company to at least rethink its relationship with some interests.

“We found examples where Edelman has played a key role in helping organizations acknowledge the significance of climate change and start their journey towards action. This is the type of work we want to do, we should do, and will do more of in the future,” said a post summarizing comments from CEO Richard Edelman and Robert Casamento, the company’s climate chair.

Meisel at Clean Creatives claimed nothing has come of it — at least nothing publicly known. “They haven’t dropped any of their clients,” he said. “It appears they are sort of doing business as usual.”

In response to several questions, company spokesperson Kate Meissner wrote in an email, “We believe our industry and our firm have an essential role to play in fighting climate change.”

She declined to reveal their current clients, citing confidentiality agreements.

Meisel said Edelman’s lack of disclosure about company policies “is really hurting them and is essentially the opposite of the advice they give clients on crisis management, which is to get ahead of the story by showing how you’re changing.”

Even though the criticism goes back a decade, he said the firm has never given clear public commitments to what they are going to do differently.

“At this point there’s no reason to trust this kind of vague, secretive approach,” Meisel said.

History with DOE

During the Trump administration, Edelman was the preferred public relations outfit for DOE.

When a reporter on at least one occasion called DOE’s press office, they got a call back from the firm, which at the time had been hired to promote nuclear energy events targeted at millennials (Energywire, June 24, 2019).

DOE has since scaled back its use of Edelman, albeit only slightly, records show.

In fiscal 2022, DOE paid the firm $2.3 million. The prior fiscal years, the contracts amounted to somewhere between $1 million and $3 million. DOE spent $5.4 million in fiscal 2019.

DOE is not alone. The Department of Health and Human Services has paid Edelman $20 million since 2018 for a national education campaign and outreach.

Executives Casamento; Deanna Tallon, climate and sustainability managing director; and John Edelman, who spearheads the company’s corporate responsibility work, said in another post they were having conversations with clients “about our principles, the commitments we have made and the actions we are taking.”

They said the company incorporated climate principles into the client acceptance process and “have decided not to pursue certain new opportunities.”

American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers may have been one of the casualties of Edelman’s review.

When Buzzfeed last year reported Edelman had $4 million in contracts with AFPM, critics pointed to the group’s opposition to certain climate action on Capitol Hill.

AFPM spokesperson Ericka Perryman told E&E News last month it “decided to let our Edelman contract expire at the end of last year.”

“We’re grateful for the support we received from Edelman over many years of work together and we wish them all the best,” she wrote.

This story also appears in Climatewire.

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ORLANDO, Fla. — Leaders in the electric utility industry converged here last week to discuss ways to address major challenges facing their sector, from increasing demand for clean power to high energy costs.

The annual meeting of the Edison Electric Institute (EEI), which represents investor-owned electric utilities in the U.S., was the first held in person since before the Covid-19 pandemic. It was significant given the outsize role electricity is expected to play in moving the country toward carbon-free energy.

Over a dozen states have set goals to achieve 100 percent carbon-free electricity or net-zero greenhouse gas emissions within less than 30 years, and many states — as well as the Biden administration — are seeking to promote electric technologies like heat pumps and battery-powered cars. A number of major utilities have also set their own goals to achieve carbon-free electricity or net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 or sooner.

Utility executives said they’re prepared to lead a transition to a clean energy economy, even as inflation and supply chain issues have slowed down solar and wind installations and as critics say the industry hasn’t done enough to get off fossil fuels. A flurry of electric trucks, cars and motorcycles were on display outside the conference center that housed the industry meeting, underscoring the connection to the decarbonization of other sectors.

“If you look at our history, there was a time when it’s fair to say the clean energy transition was held at arm’s length by the industry because we weren’t quite sure it could be pulled off successfully,” Gerry Anderson, executive chair of Michigan-based DTE Energy Co., said during a discussion at the conference. “The opposite is true now: We’re fully in, pursuing it hard and making it happen.”

The conference came at the start of what’s expected to be a hotter-than-average summer that could test the reliability of the U.S. power grid (Energywire, June 23). It also comes as many utilities are seeking to increase rates charged to consumers due to rising fuel costs and other factors, in proceedings that are generating controversy and protests in some states.

In interviews, several utility executives said their companies are investing in efforts to harden and strengthen grid infrastructure. But they suggested a more resilient grid could come with higher costs.

“We did a climate review last year, and we went decades in the past. There’s no doubt storms are getting more frequent and more severe, and we have to be ready for that,” said Nick Akins, CEO of Ohio-based American Electric Power Co. Inc.

Akins and others also said they see distributed energy resources — like residential solar and batteries, “smart” thermostats, and other localized projects — as critical for building a more reliable, modern power grid.

Environmental groups have long accused utilities of undermining the build-out of distributed energy resources, particularly rooftop solar, by opposing certain programs that incentivize them. Akins and others in the industry have said those incentive programs may be unfair to other customers.

Clean hydrogen was also discussed during the sessions, as a number of utilities are considering blending hydrogen gas with natural gas in the coming years and decades. Still, some acknowledged the uncertainty around the economics of clean hydrogen production and lingering safety questions associated with the gas.

Here’s a look at some of the issues highlighted during the conference.

Geopolitics and transition

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine earlier this year has rocked global energy markets, contributing to higher oil and natural gas prices as European countries seek to wean off Russian fuels. Uncertainty in the supply chain for renewables, meanwhile, has caused some utilities to extend the life of coal-fired power plants (Energywire, June 24).

Global energy trends haven’t pushed utilities away from decarbonization goals, but those goals could become more difficult to realize, utility leaders and analysts said during the conference.

Another lesser-known, emerging obstacle for utilities in deploying clean energy is labor shortages, according to Dan Hahn, a partner at the consulting firm Guidehouse, which works with utilities, government and other organizations.

“I don’t think it’s going to stop the goals. It could slow down the progress of them and could have a material impact to achieving those goals,” Hahn said in an interview. “I think that’s something we’re working together as an industry to figure out.”

Russia’s war with Ukraine has altered the energy landscape in Europe, as some countries have switched back to coal for their energy needs to avoid using Russian gas, said Meghan O’Sullivan, a professor at Harvard University’s Kennedy School who formerly served as deputy national security adviser on Iraq and Afghanistan.

Nonetheless, the crisis could ultimately be “compatible” with efforts globally to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions, O’Sullivan said during a keynote discussion.

In the U.S., meanwhile, lawmakers and energy industry leaders should try to learn from mistakes made during previous energy crises and focus on “long-term fixes,” said Jason Bordoff, co-founding dean of the Columbia Climate School.

Rather than seeking to ramp up coal and gas production, for example, there should be a greater focus on investing in energy efficiency and “demand-side” solutions, Bordoff said in conversation with O’Sullivan.

For now, Bordoff said he was “not confident” as to whether existing clean energy goals would stay on track, given that economywide emissions both in the U.S. and the world have “gone up, not down.”

While greenhouse gas emissions from the U.S. electric power sector have been on a downward trajectory for the past three decades, emissions from power plants spiked in 2021 for the first time in the years (Greenwire, Feb. 18).

“One of the lessons or outcomes of this is going to be a recognition that for true energy security, to deliver a smoother, less volatile transition and to deliver faster decarbonization, you’re going to need government to play a bigger, not smaller role, in the energy sector in the years to come,” Bordoff said.

Hydrogen on the move

From hydrogen to electric vehicles, utility leaders made clear last week that they want to take part in all aspects of the energy transition. They also said that more support from the government — in the form of tax credits for emerging technologies — could help boost those resources.

Florida Power & Light Co. (FPL), which announced this month a goal of eliminating carbon emissions from power plants by 2045, sees hydrogen as a component of its emissions reduction strategy. By 2045, the company expects to see the economics “line up” to run natural gas power plants on hydrogen, Sunanda Behara, executive director of development programs at FPL, said during a panel discussion.

Federal tax credits similar to the ones that already existing for wind and solar would be helpful for making hydrogen economically viable faster, she added. Lawmakers in Congress are currently weighing passing a suite of clean energy tax credits, including a new “clean hydrogen” tax credit, through the budget reconciliation process.

“Hydrogen has to get to that same mix between not only our state regulators and [their] policy, but also a federal policy that could incentivize and provide a little bit of that support to move this technology further along,” Behara said.

Today, hydrogen gas is typically produced using a process that relies on fossil fuels. It’s mostly used in industrial facilities, not for residential energy consumption.

Making “green” hydrogen with renewable electricity is currently more expensive than hydrogen produced with natural gas, but green hydrogen could be cost-competitive in many countries by 2030, Bloomberg New Energy Finance projected last year. Another option for making hydrogen cleaner is to capture some of the carbon dioxide emissions released in traditional, fossil-fuel-based hydrogen production.

Louisiana-based Entergy Corp. is developing a 1,215-megawatt natural gas plant near Bridge City, Texas, that will be able to power more than 230,000 homes with up to 30 percent hydrogen capacity once it’s up and running in 2026. Still, Rod West, group president of utility operations for Entergy Corp., said he wasn’t sure at what point hydrogen will actually be flowing through pipes across the utility’s service area.

“We’re trying to figure that out with our customers and stakeholders,” West said in an interview.

Electric vehicles and equity

Leaders from EEI presented a new forecast for EVs during the conference, projecting that there will be about 26.4 million EVs on U.S. roads by the end of the decade — up from an earlier projection of 18.7 million on the roads in 2030.

By 2030, EVs will represent nearly 10 percent of the light-duty vehicles on the road in the U.S., according to the forecast, which draws on independent analyses done by Boston Consulting Group, Deloitte, Guidehouse and Wood Mackenzie.

The growth of EVs is expected to increase demand for electricity, requiring investments in traditional power grid infrastructure as well as electric charging stations. Utility executives said they are taking steps to prepare the power grid for a shift toward EVs, and some expressed interest in ensuring equitable access to those and other resources as well.

“As we go through this energy evolution, we can’t leave out segments of our communities. Equity has to play a big part in this,” Calvin Butler, chief operating officer at Exelon Corp., said in an interview.

Exelon has partnered with ride-share service Lyft Inc. to allow senior citizens on the South Side of Chicago to use free EVs for their so-called last mile of transportation, meaning the last portion of their journey from a transit station to their home, Butler added. The company has a similar initiative in place in Baltimore, he said.

Another area of focus for utilities is charging stations. Last year, EEI launched the electric highway coalition, which aims to develop fast-charging stations across the U.S. to allow the public “to drive EVs with confidence” by the end of 2023. The coalition now has more than 60 investor-owned and municipal electric utilities.

The shift to EVs has the potential to boost public health in historically disadvantaged areas that experience high levels of heavy truck traffic, given the health consequences of exposure to diesel emissions, said Terry Travis, chief disruptor and managing partner at EVNoire, a consulting firm focused on electric transportation.

But for those benefits to be realized, the transition to EVs must be done with equity and diversity in mind, from the installation of charging stations to the hiring of workers across the supply chain, Travis said during a panel discussion.

“It is my perspective that the communities that have been impacted first and worst should be prioritized in installation as well as the maintenance of this charging infrastructure,” he said.

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When Olaf Scholz took the helm as German chancellor in December, he elevated one idea to the top of his climate agenda: the creation of an international coalition that would be united in its pursuit of curbing planet-warming pollution.

And though climate change has taken a back seat to energy security at this year’s Group of Seven leaders’ summit, Scholz hasn’t abandoned his pursuit of an international climate club — so much so that the idea remained on the agenda during a working lunch yesterday at the start of the conference in Germany (Climatewire, June 24).

“Germany will certainly try to go down in history as the country that started building an international climate club,” said Simone Tagliapietra, a senior fellow at Bruegel, a Brussels-based economic think tank.

The climate club idea was a key piece of Scholz’s political platform for chancellor, and much of its strength would come from the combined economic might of the countries that join it.

When Scholz first presented the concept in a paper last August, it hinged on the need to set comparable standards that would protect members’ domestic industries from competitors with less stringent climate policies.

The club’s members would coordinate how they measure and price carbon and work together to decarbonize their industrial sectors. Carbon border tariffs, which put a price on high-carbon imports — could create a level playing field and keep industries from moving to countries with lower climate ambition.

Proponents say a club could offer benefits — such as trade deals — to create incentives for countries to move faster to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement, which aims to limit global temperature rise but doesn’t impose punishments on countries that fall short of their emissions-cutting targets.

Scholz sees G-7 as club ‘nucleus’

The creation of a climate club is in line with the belief that liberal democracies can change international behavior by flexing economic muscle in unison, said Kevin Book, managing director of ClearView Energy Partners.

That’s the case whether it’s “for the war in Ukraine or the war against climate change,” he said.

It also has a lot to do with protectionism, since the appetite in many industrialized nations for measures such as border adjustments has a lot more to do with ensuring economic competitiveness than climate change mitigation.

Those two things together — a united West countering autocracy and less emitting industrialized nations protecting national advantage — “set up a sweet spot” for the idea of a climate club, said Book.

But structuring a club around a common minimum-carbon price will be a challenge when the United States and Japan don’t currently put a price on carbon. And while carbon border tariffs are taking shape in Europe, they remain contentious (Climatewire, June 16).

Critics say climate clubs also operate by exclusion, and many of the countries feeling the greatest effects of climate change would not be granted access (Climatewire, Jan. 10).

Scholz sees the G-7 as the club’s “nucleus.” The world’s seven most powerful industrial democracies — the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan plus the European Union — also include some of its biggest historical emitters.

His idea also acknowledges the need to provide money and support to less wealthy countries so they can become members in the future.

A statement from different groupings of G-7 ministers last month in the run-up to the leaders’ summit called for an “open, cooperative, international climate club” with participation beyond the G-7.

The idea is there would be economic advantages for following the rules of the climate club — and that it would be open to all who did, Book said.

As part of a push to bring other countries on board, Germany invited several emerging economies to the summit that the G-7 hopes to provide with funding to transition away from coal and toward renewables.

Part of Germany’s contribution to a new $600 billion infrastructure fund launched yesterday will include €300 million ($320 million) to the first of those so-called Just Energy Transition Partnership in South Africa.

But Book said the climate club rules may not make it easier to persuade them to join up.

“For a lot of developing nations, the idea of having to conform to stricter standards might be something that makes it harder to align with the West,” he said. And while there’s value in providing economic stimulus for developing nations through investments that can create jobs and build economies, there are limits.

“What’s not so well-received is the idea that the West hands down its rules to the developing world,” Book said.

Club details forthcoming

The outlines of the climate club’s shape may emerge over the coming days.

Experts who follow the concept say Germany likely will propose the creation of a secretariat or working group with a mandate to build out the idea. The secretariat could be based within existing institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund or the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, said Tagliapietra from Bruegel.

Once the secretariat is established, there is a plan to provide scientific support and expertise on how to progress, said Susanne Dröge, a senior fellow at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.

Sascha Müller-Kraenner, head of German environmental agency Environmental Action Germany, says the club’s outline is not likely to include specifics on carbon prices or border adjustments in part because those elements exclude other countries. Another step would be making sure that such measures, if included, aren’t viewed as a tax on less wealthy countries.

Shuffling some of the money from the tariffs collected by carbon border adjustments could help, said Tagliapietra. So could the Just Energy Transition Partnership.

The idea here is that if South Africa has to pay a carbon tax at the border of Europe because it is exporting something carbon-intensive, the revenues would be given back to South Africa together with additional climate finance to support the country’s efforts to decarbonize its industrial processes, he said.

Since the goal is to reduce emissions in line with the temperature goals of the Paris climate agreement, membership could be granted to countries that have ambitious emissions-cutting targets and policies in place to achieve them, said Müller-Kraenner. Another idea is to start with cooperation on certain industrial sectors, as is being done between the European Union and the United States on steel and aluminum, said Tagliapietra.

That could include rich countries in the G-7, but potentially also some middle-income and less-developed countries. Within the club, there might also be initiatives to develop carbon benchmarks for things such as hydrogen fuel.

“That would be something where you could say, ‘Well, this is a club of those that say the Paris Agreement provides the minimum standard, but there are some countries that want to go further ahead. That group includes rich countries, poor countries, countries from different parts of the world. And they do things together. They do things together that that are more advanced,” said Müller-Kraenner.

Dröge believes that if the Germans are ready to spend money to establish a secretariat, it’s likely to move forward.

“But feeding ambition and new initiatives and probably new ideas into it is still a political task,” she added.

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The Supreme Court’s decision last week to topple decades of abortion law may signal the court is less willing to allow climate change and other environmental lawsuits into the courthouse.

The ominous sign for environmentalists in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization comes 63 pages into the 79-page opinion as Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, argues that earlier abortion cases have “diluted” the law and “ignored the court’s third-party standing doctrine” — which generally requires parties before the court to have some proof of injury (Greenwire, June 24).

Environmentalists have worried the court would use the standing doctrine to determine who can be heard. Alito took a narrow approach to standing when he was a federal appeals court judge, and his reference to the provision in a draft copy of Dobbs that was obtained last month by POLITICO set off alarms (Climatewire, May 6).

“The difference now, of course, is that the language appears in an opinion for the court, authored by Justice Alito and joined in full by four other justices,” said John Echeverria, a professor at Vermont Law School. “Dobbs can be read as a signal that the new conservative majority is poised to embrace a once minority viewpoint on third-party standing, making it harder for environmental advocates and other public interests to pry open the courthouse door.”

Alito’s reference to the standing doctrine cites, among other cases, the 2020 decision June Medical Services v. Russo, in which the court struck down a Louisiana law that would have limited access to abortions. In that case, which split the court 4-1-4, Chief Justice John Roberts agreed that abortion providers had third-party standing.

Echeverria noted that while three justices joined in Alito’s dissenting opinion in the June Medical case, Justice Brett Kavanaugh did not join in the part of the opinion that addressed third-party standing.

But with Dobbs, Echeverria said, “whatever qualms Justice Kavanaugh had (or might still have) about Alito’s restrictive view of standing, Justice Kavanaugh chose not to stake out an independent position on the standing issue in this case.”

Josh Gellers, a professor at the University of North Florida who studies environmental politics, predicted the court would further narrow the standing doctrine, rather than clarify it.

“Restricting third-party standing, which is a major tool for civil society groups in environmental litigation, is clearly within the court’s sights,” Gellers said.

Some legal experts have expressed fears that the Supreme Court’s conservative wing could seize on the opportunity to revisit a climate-related standing doctrine that was established in the 2007 case Massachusetts v. EPA. That may happen if the justices were to eventually review the “youth climate case” filed against the government, Juliana v. United States.

The Massachusetts case split the justices 5-4 over a ruling that said EPA has authority to regulate greenhouse gases as air pollutants under the Clean Air Act. It also said states have “special solicitude” for standing in court.

Jonathan Adler, director of Case Western Reserve University’s environmental law center, said Dobbs “underscores that substantive due process rights are disfavored,” which he said could have implications for arguments like those in the Juliana case.

Still, other observers suggested environmental advocates may be reading too much into the wording.

“The majority opinion’s passing reference to third-party standing doesn’t imply there should be a tightening of standing for environmental cases,” said Jonathan Brightbill, who served as principal deputy assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s environment division under former President Donald Trump. “To the contrary, the majority was observing that the standing principles that are applied in other cases — like environmental cases — were ignored in the context of abortion.”

He said the Dobbs decision “reaffirms the high standard traditionally applied before the Supreme Court will recognize a ‘fundamental liberty’ protected by the Fifth or 14th amendments of the Constitution.”

Yet Brightbill added that the language “further calls into question the decision of the Oregon district court in Juliana v. United States to recognize a constitutional ‘right to a climate system capable of sustaining human life,’“ and he argued that the “Juliana opinion expressly relied on Roe.”

That’s a reference to a 2016 ruling from Judge Ann Aiken of the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon that found the young challengers had a fundamental right to a healthy climate. A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, however, “reluctantly” scrapped the case in 2020. The challengers are now awaiting a ruling from Aiken on whether the lawsuit can proceed (Climatewire, Nov. 2, 2021).

Andrea Rodgers, co-counsel in the case and senior litigation attorney at Our Children’s Trust, which represents the young challengers, said the reference to third-party standing in Dobbs has no bearing on the case.

She said Juliana instead involves individual harm to the youth plaintiffs and that neither the 2020 9th Circuit opinion, “nor any forthcoming opinion from Judge Aiken, will discuss third-party standing.”

Rodgers said the Juliana plaintiffs allege their lives are being harmed by the federal government’s support for fossil fuels, and she argued that Dobbs “emphasizes the fundamental importance of protecting life, a right explicitly enumerated in the Constitution. No matter how hard the current Supreme Court’s conservative majority may seek to curtail fundamental rights, you simply can’t read or interpret ‘life’ out of the U.S. Constitution.”

She said Aiken cited Roe to support the legal theory that some rights only can be exercised when other rights exist, adding, “Much of what came out of the Dobbs decision … actually reemphasizes the need for a trial in Juliana. No court should make judgments on fundamental rights without hearing and considering the facts and evidence.”

Democrats have long questioned Alito’s views on standing in environmental cases, quizzing him during his 2006 Supreme Court confirmation hearings.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California cited Alito’s position on standing when she voted against him for the high court seat, saying she was troubled that he had adopted a narrow reading of standing in a case in which environmentalists unsuccessfully fought to sue a chemical company over water pollution.

Friends of the Earth echoed her argument, writing at the time that it opposed Alito because he had held that Friends of the Earth and “other environmentalists lacked standing to sue a polluter — even though it was uncontested that the company had violated the Clean Water Act 150 times.”

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Grilled on camera in a hearing room on Capitol Hill, Supreme Court nominees over the years have extolled the value of stare decisis, the legal principle of keeping prior rulings in place.

But in a colossal 5-4 ruling issued Friday, a majority of the conservative justices on the high court overturned Roe v. Wade, which since 1973 had granted the constitutional right to an abortion (Greenwire, June 26).

The apparent contradiction has infuriated some lawmakers who are accusing justices of hypocrisy during their testimony delivered under oath to the Senate.

It’s also raising doubts about the integrity of the Senate confirmation process and concerns that judicial nominees will simply tell senators what they want to hear in order to secure lifetime appointments to federal courts.

Questions about the integrity of the confirmation process could also extend to would-be justices’ responses to questions about environmental law, which often come up during Supreme Court confirmation hearings.

“How about those justices coming before the senators and saying that they respected stare decisis, the precedent of the court, that they respected the right of privacy in the Constitution of the United States?” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Friday in a news conference excoriating the court’s abortion ruling. “Did you hear that? Were they not telling the truth, then?”

Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) speaks with reporters Friday. | Francis Chung/E&E News

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), on NBC’s “Meet the Press” yesterday, accused justices of lying under oath and said they should be impeached.

“There must be consequences for such a deeply destabilizing action and the hostile takeover of our democratic institutions,” she said.

During his 2018 confirmation hearing, Justice Brett Kavanaugh called Roe “important precedent of the Supreme Court that has been reaffirmed many times.”

Justice Neil Gorsuch, another appointee of former President Donald Trump, said during his 2017 confirmation hearing, “all precedent of the U.S. Supreme Court deserves the respect of precedent, which is quite a lot. It is the anchor of law. It is the starting place for a judge.”

Sen. Susan Collins of Maine said the decision the court reached Friday is “inconsistent” with what both Kavanaugh and Gorsuch said in their testimony and in private meetings with her.

In 2018, Collins gave a speech on the Senate floor to explain why she — a GOP lawmaker who supports abortion rights — would provide the key vote to confirm Kavanaugh, who had faced allegations of sexual misconduct and whom Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska had opposed.

“To my knowledge, Judge Kavanaugh is the first Supreme Court nominee to express the view that precedent is not merely a practice and tradition, but rooted in Article III of our Constitution itself,” Collins said at the time.

“He believes,” Collins went on, “that precedent ‘is not just a judicial policy … it is constitutionally dictated to pay attention and pay heed to rules of precedent.'”

In a Friday statement, Collins said Kavanaugh and Gorsuch had been “insistent on the importance of supporting long-standing precedents that the country has relied upon.”

Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, the sole Democrat to vote to confirm Kavanaugh in 2018, issued a similar statement Friday.

“I trusted Justice Gorsuch and Justice Kavanaugh when they testified under oath that they also believed Roe v. Wade was settled legal precedent,” he said, “and I am alarmed they chose to reject the stability the ruling has provided for two generations of Americans.”

Super precedent?

Justice Samuel Alito, a George W. Bush appointee who authored last week’s opinion overturning Roe, told senators in his 2006 hearing that stare decisis is “a very important doctrine.”

He called it a “fundamental part of our legal system” because it “limits the power of the judiciary” and reflects “the view that courts should respect the judgments and the wisdom that are embodied in prior judicial decisions.”

Alito also said, “Roe v. Wade is an important precedent of the Supreme Court. It was decided in 1973, so it has been on the books for a long time.”

The justices’ willingness to reverse course and upend precedent in this instance is “very problematic,” said Bill Snape, an environmental law professor at American University and senior counsel at the Center for Biological Diversity.

“They have further legitimized the idea of expanding the court and/or changing the process,” Snape said.

Supreme Court demonstrators.
Protesters demonstrate at the Supreme Court following its abortion ruling. | Francis Chung/E&E News

A commission appointed by President Joe Biden on Supreme Court reform said expanding the bench would be divisive (Greenwire, Dec. 8, 2021). The president himself has been hesitant to call for such a move.

Alito was joined in his abortion ruling by justices Clarence Thomas, Amy Coney Barrett, Kavanaugh and Gorsuch.

The majority held that stare decisis “plays an important role” but is not an “inexorable command.” Some of the court’s “most important constitutional decisions have overruled prior precedents,” the opinion says.

Barrett — Trump’s third pick for the nation’s highest bench and the nominee who tipped the court’s ideological balance from a 5-4 to a 6-3 conservative majority — took a different tack than Kavanaugh, Gorsuch and Alito on stare decisis during her 2020 confirmation hearing.

At one point during the marathon proceedings, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat, asked Barrett whether Roe was “super precedent” safe from future dismantlement — a topic Barrett had previously explored in an academic paper.

“Okay, well, people use ‘super precedent’ differently,” Barrett replied. “The way that it’s used in the scholarship and the way that I was using it in the article that you’re reading from was to define cases that are so well-settled that no political actors and no people seriously push for their overruling.”

She continued: “And I’m answering a lot of questions about Roe, which I think indicates that Roe doesn’t fall in that category.”

Senate Judiciary Chair Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) said the committee will hold a hearing soon “to explore the grim reality of a post-Roe America.”

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