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likeCalifornia faces massive costs to clean up and rebuild around Los Angeles after historic wildfires destroyed thousands of homes and businesses, she and other states are targeting a new source of funding to pay for climate change-related damages: Big Oil.
Last week the Supreme Court refused to block lawsuits from California, Colorado, New Jersey and other states seeking billions of dollars from Exxon Mobil, Shell, Chevron, ConocoPhillips and BP to pay for carbon pollution that is driving higher temperatures. , drought, fires and more extreme. weather conditions. In its lawsuit, California alleged that those companies knew since at least the 1960s that the burning of fossil fuels they supply causes climate change that is warming the planet, but suppressed that information.
Oil and gas companies “fed us lies and untruths to further their record profits at the expense of our environment,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said when the lawsuit was filed in September 2023. “Enough is enough. “.
The court’s decision paved the way for an initial lawsuit, Honolulu v. Sunoco, and California and other states will follow. It is too early to predict whether this will result in tens of billions of dollars flowing to states to help repair and strengthen infrastructure for hotter temperatures and rising sea levels. The oil companies intend to fight the lawsuits, and the court battle could drag on for years. But if any single industry bears responsibility for climate damage and also has the financial wherewithal to do something about it, it’s the world’s major fossil fuel companies.
The Great Reading
Brightline West, Siemens
Brightline Raises $2.5 Billion in Private Funding for Vegas-To-LA Bullet Train
Brightline West, billionaire investor Wes Eden’s 218-mile rail project to connect Las Vegas to suburban Los Angeles with electric bullet trains, is raising $2.5 billion from private investors in a tax-exempt bond offering as it looks to launch passenger service until the end of 2028.
The funding push, backed by infrastructure bonds offered by California and Nevada, comes on top of a $3 billion grant to Brightline received by the Biden Administration last year. The company has slated construction to begin in April 2024 in Las Vegas, though the focus so far is preparatory work for the railroad adjacent to the Mojave Desert. Miami-based Brightline, which operates Florida’s only private passenger railroad, said in an investor presentation that it expects revenue of at least $1.4 billion and 8.6 million passengers by 2031.
“Full-scale construction should begin this year,” said Ben Porritt, the company’s senior vice president of corporate affairs. Forbes. It will occur simultaneously at four separate construction sites in Nevada and California.
Read more here
Hot topic
Amazon
Jake Oster, director of sustainability policy at Amazon, for promoting clean energy
Amazon was the leading buyer of clean energy for the fifth year in a row in 2024. What does that look like?
We have now procured or enabled more than 600 renewable energy projects worldwide. When you put that together, the total capacity of those projects is roughly 33 gigawatts of new capacity that could generate about the same amount of energy to power 8.3 million US homes.
What is a key consideration when organizing these large clean energy projects?
Where you build these projects matters a lot because when you build renewable energy projects, what you’re doing is ideally avoiding emissions from other sources of energy production that are emitting. [carbon].
We are focused not only on enabling new projects to meet our decarbonisation goals, but we are also focused on having these projects in countries that have a high mix of fossil fuel use. If you look at that portfolio, we’ve invested in more than 40 utility-scale, large-scale, wind and solar projects in countries and locations that we know have high emissions – places like Australia, China, Greece, India, Poland, South Africa and here in the US in states like Louisiana and Mississippi.
For example, if you look at the projects in the portfolio that we have in India, we have nine renewable energy projects in India. And to illustrate why location matters, those projects in India, if you were to hypothetically take those projects, take them and dump them in Sweden, which has a very decarbonized grid, the carbon emissions avoided would be completely different. By having those projects in India, we avoid approximately 55 times more carbon than if they were in Sweden.
Working across all Amazon operations globally, how do you keep up? For example, the data center business is a massive part of Amazon’s operations, and the amount of energy required for it continues to grow.
We continue to source and procure carbon-free energy to meet our business needs and meet our sustainability goals. Of course, as we’re seeing energy demands increase as our business grows, but also the demand for electricity increases as society as a whole moves toward greater electrification, whether it’s for transportation or buildings or other places that need power, we we are seeing increased demand for carbon. – free energy. We’ve continued to go out and procure, which is why we’re the largest corporate buyer for the fifth year in a row.
We are expanding our efforts to pursue not only renewable energy, but carbon-free energy and focusing on carbon-free energy, technologies that include battery storage, offshore wind and of course nuclear power. As you can see by the growing demand, we have not slowed down our efforts.
What else are we reading?
Plug Power received a $1.66 billion loan guarantee by the Department of Energy to build large-scale green hydrogen plants aimed at supplying industrial customers and powering non-polluting forklifts. (Forbes)
Donald Trump said the US government will no longer subsidize new wind farms and reiterated his stance that he doesn’t want “a single one built” during his administration in his latest tirade against renewable energy. (Forbes)
Can we create cows that produce less methane? Food scientists, geneticists, microbiologists and animal scientists are coming together to answer this question. (Forbes)
Compressed air energy storageA decades-old technology that can store massive amounts of energy underground could soon see a modern renaissance in California’s Central Valley thanks to a $1.76 billion conditional loan guarantee from the outgoing Biden administration. (Canary Media)
Lithium prices are expected to stabilize in 2025 after two years of steep declines as shuttered mines and strong sales of electric vehicles in China absorbed a glut, although the potential for mine reopening could limit gains, analysts and traders said. (Reuters)
Federal Reserves could help meet the country’s solar energy needs, according to a new study published in Solar Energy. (NREL)
