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A federal appeals court on Wednesday axed an Obama-era moratorium on new coal mine leasing on public lands.

It did so by overturning a ruling from 2022 that revived the Obama-era freeze on auctioning off federally owned lands for coal mining.

In 2022, a lower court ruled that in ending the coal leasing pause, the Trump administration had not completed an adequate environmental impact study, and that the pause should therefore be reinstated.

But, this week, a panel of appellate judges vacated that ruling, deciding that the case was now moot.

They said the case was moot because Biden administration Interior Secretary Deb Haaland had revoked the order by Trump-era secretary Ryan Zinke that ended the moratorium.

Judges Ronald Gould, Jay Bybee and Daniel Bress told the lower court to dismiss the challenge to the Trump policy that was brought by environmental advocates, saying that their grievances are no longer the result of Zinke’s order.

“While appellees may be dissatisfied with the government’s position that the Haaland Order did not revive the … moratorium, this does not provide a basis for concluding that a challenge to the defunct Zinke Order is live,” wrote the Clinton, Bush and Trump appointees.

In 2021, Haaland rescinded the Zinke order, but stopped short of reimposing the Obama administration’s freeze. The department said at the time that it would instead continue to review a path forward on coal.

An Interior Department spokesperson declined to comment when asked by The Hill whether the Biden administration planned to hold coal lease sales in light of the ruling.

A coal and mining lobbying group cheered the court ruling.

“This is a victory for American-mined energy,” said Rich Nolan, president and CEO of the National Mining Association, in a written statement.

“With this ruling, important projects can once again advance and support the production of affordable, reliable power to the grid,” Nolan said.

In 2016, then-Interior Secretary Sally Jewell halted new coal leasing on public lands while the department sought to study whether fees charged to mining companies properly accounted for the climate impacts of burning coal.

In light of the ruling, tribal and environmental leaders who sued in an effort to get the coal leasing pause reinstated called on the Biden administration to take action.

“Now that the court has ruled that the Trump administration decision to restart coal leasing was revoked, we need the Biden administration to step up and live up to its promises to protect our climate, conduct a long overdue review of the federal coal leasing program, and make thoughtful plans for the future of public lands,” said Northern Cheyenne Tribal Administrator William Walksalong in a written statement.

Source: The Hill

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Industrial companies are searching for ways to make steel, cement and chemicals without burning fossil fuels. Some of the world’s biggest investors are betting a fast-developing battery that stores heat can solve the problem.

BlackRock , Saudi Aramco and Rio Tinto RIO -0.67%decrease; red down pointing triangle

headline a group of financiers pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into startups making heat batteries. Also called thermal batteries, they use renewable energy to heat up blocks, rocks or molten salt. That heat is released on demand to power industrial processes.

Using electricity to generate heat is nothing new. That is how toasters work. The difference is that these toasters are roughly the size of shipping containers and release steam as hot as 2,750 degrees Fahrenheit, more than a quarter of the sun’s surface temperature. The trick is keeping the batteries hot until the heat is needed.

Heating Up

Antora Energy uses low-cost renewable energy to power thermal batteries that can generate heat for industrial companies while slashing emissions.

Industrial heat accounts for about a fifth of global energy use and roughly 10% of greenhouse-gas emissions. Hundreds of industrial processes including steelmaking burn fossil fuels to generate the high heat they need.

Large manufacturers are looking at everything from green hydrogen to nuclear fusion to replace fossil fuels and cut emissions. Knowing how hard this can be, they are also looking at removing carbon directly from the atmosphere to offset emissions that can’t be eliminated.

CEO Andrew Ponec, center, and his co-founders studied several possible materials for heat batteries before landing on carbon blocks.

The latest bet on heat batteries is a $150 million investment round for a California startup called Antora Energy from backers including BlackRock, renewable energy giant NextEra Energy and Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy Ventures.

Antora uses carbon blocks that glow red like a toaster coil or an electric stove when heated up. Antora’s batteries are unusual because heat is transferred using the light from the hot blocks, eliminating the need for air or fluid to transfer energy and making the product cheaper.

“There’s not some crazy, magic technology going on here,” Andrew Ponec, Antora’s chief executive, said in an interview. “It’s something that’s very intuitive.”

Antora has been testing its heat battery system with a pilot project near Fresno, Calif.

Pipes and process lines would be used to carry heat from the battery to industrial facilities.

Traditional batteries store and release renewable power by moving lithium ions through a liquid from the cathode to the anode, and back again. They are great when space is at a premium, as is the case inside electric cars. But they can explode or catch fire when they overheat. They are also relatively expensive and typically can only discharge energy for several hours, limiting their applications in heavy industry.

Heat-battery startups say they can cheaply store days worth of renewable energy with a different approach. To charge, Antora’s batteries run renewable electricity through an element comparable to a toaster coil to warm up the blocks. The company settled on the carbon blocks because they can store heat for a long time, and actually get better at storing energy as they get hotter. That allows them to maintain high temperatures for long periods when heat or steam needs to be used.

Other startups are making similar claims, driving significant funding into the industry for the first time. Cheap wind and solar power now make heat batteries cost competitive with heat made from burning fossil fuels like natural gas, analysts say. Tax credits from the 2022 law known as the Inflation Reduction Act are accelerating the momentum.

Many industrial companies had planned to use hydrogen made from renewable power to generate heat, but high production costs and project delays are making that less attractive. That has led companies to pursue other solutions such as heat batteries.

Heat batteries may be poised to leapfrog hydrogen for many industrial uses. They can be deployed at large scale in the next few years and keep costs down by using abundant raw materials, investors say. They are one of several technologies being unlocked by the drop in renewable-electricity prices over the past decade.

Falling prices of solar power have made Antora’s heat batteries cost competitive with burning fossil fuels.

“Antora represents the next era for wind and solar,” said Meghan Sharp, global head of Decarbonization Partners, a joint venture between BlackRock and Singapore’s Temasek Holdings that invests in clean-energy companies and led the Antora investment round. “They’re bringing renewables to industry.”

Founded in 2018, Antora turned on its first battery for a customer in September near Fresno, Calif., and opened its first manufacturing facility in San Jose, Calif., last year. The company expects to use the new funding to install larger projects for customers in the Midwest, accelerate battery production and increase hiring.

In the next few years, it hopes to start producing systems that can turn the light emanating from the blocks into renewable electricity so that the batteries can serve double duty, releasing heat and power.

Antora is also talking to an Energy Department office that loans money to rapidly growing clean-energy companies about potential funding, Ponec said. Much of the company’s initial funding came from the state of California and an Energy Department agency that funds initial research into promising ideas that are too premature for private investment.

A competitor called Rondo Energy that uses clay bricks instead of carbon blocks recently raised $60 million from backers including Rio Tinto, Aramco and Microsoft and installed its first commercial battery for a biofuel company in California last year. Also backed by Breakthrough, Rondo is working with Asian building-materials giant Siam Cement Group to open a megafactory.

“We’ve been building the company like crazy to respond to demand,” Rondo CEO John O’Donnell said.

Source WSJ

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SM Bluebird at the Sabine Pass LNG terminal (Image: Cheniere Energy)

US LNG exporting giant Cheniere reported a 39 percent drop in its 2023 revenue due to lower prices, while its net profit jumped compared to the year before.

The owner of the Sabine Pass and Corpus Christi LNG export terminals said on Thursday its full-year 2023 revenue reached $20.39 billion.

This compares to 2022 revenue of $33.4 billion, which doubled compared to $15.8 billion in the year before.

Cheniere said the drop was mainly due “$9.1 billion decrease in Henry Hub pricing, to which the majority of our long-term LNG sales contracts are indexed.”

Net income was at $9.88 billion in 2023 and compares to $1.42 billion in the year before.

Cheniere said the favorable variance of $8.5 billion for 2023 as compared to the same period of 2022 was primarily attributable to a favorable variance of $14.4 billion, from changes in fair value and settlement of derivatives between the periods.

“The majority of the variance related to derivatives was due to non-cash favorable changes in fair value of our IPM agreements as a result of lower volatility in international gas prices and declines in international forward commodity curves, which changed from a loss of $5 billion in the year ended December 31, 2022 to a gain of $7 billion in the year ended December 31, 2023,” it said.

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The Ukrainian Conflict is being decided on the battlefield, not on bank ledgers, which is why CNN’s innuendo about India financially fueling Russia’s participation in its proxy war with NATO in Ukraine falls flat. That country’s domestic military-industrial complex is responsible for its battlefield successes, not the foreign profits that it reaped from oil sales to India.

CNN published a report earlier in the week about how “The Kremlin has never been richer – thanks to a US strategic partner”, which argues that a significant share of Russia’s “unprecedented amount of cash in government coffers” nowadays is due to India’s purchase of its oil. Delhi scaled up consumption by a whopping thirteen times over the past two years to total of $37 billion worth in 2023. The innuendo is that India is financially fueling Russia’s participation in its proxy war with NATO in Ukraine.

To their credit, that outlet also informed readers near the beginning of their piece that “Russian crude sales to India are not subject to sanctions and are entirely legitimate”, but then they tried to add a dramatic flair by claiming that it “might involve the so-called ‘shadow fleet’ of crude tankers”. Speculation about how $1 billion worth of Indian-refined Russian oil products might have eventually made their way to the US serves the purpose of making this otherwise boring trade newsworthy.

The reason why CNN published this report on the front page of their international edition was to smear India for purchasing Russian oil after its External Affairs Minister (EAM) Dr. Subrahmanyam Jaishankar defended this while speaking at an event with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken. They noted that the details therein were exclusively shared with them by an energy think tank that previously published on this subject, thus suggesting that they prepared for this some time ago to have time to analyze it all.

The timing wasn’t coincidental though since it was predictable that EAM Jaishankar would be asked about this during last weekend’s Munich Security Conference seeing as how journalists regularly probe him to see if his views have change as the NATO-Russian proxy war in Ukraine has dragged on. They haven’t, and he made it very clear in the abovementioned hyperlinked analysis of his remarks that it’s in India’s objective national interests to continue purchasing discounted Russian oil.

A representative of India’s Petroleum and Natural Gas Ministry added more details to their country’s strategic calculations when speaking before a department-related parliamentary standing committee in late December. They explained that the price per barrel would have surged to $120-130 due to reduced OPEC output and increased European demand following the bloc’s decoupling from Russian energy. In that scenario, a polycrisis would have unfolded, and the whole world would have been destabilized.

Global South states, already heavily indebted as it was even before the pandemic and subsequent proxy war exacerbated these economic-financial challenges, would have struggled to meet their minimum energy needs. Political crises could have quickly taken on serious security dimensions and spread throughout their respective regions, thus plunging the entire developing world into pandemonium. All of this was averted by India scaling up its import of Russian oil and therefore stabilizing the energy market.

Although CNN touched upon India’s defense of these imports by quoting its Minister of Petroleum and Natural Gas who said last week that prices would have reached $150 per barrel when they not done what they did, they didn’t make any reference to how this helped the Global South make ends meet. The only attempted analysis within the piece concerns their innuendo that India is financially fueling Russia’s participation in its proxy war with NATO in Ukraine, thus exposing CNN’s intent to smear that country.

Their effort fell flat, however, since the European Council on Foreign Relations published the results of their poll last month shortly thereafter proving that only 10% of Europeans in the 12 countries that they surveyed believe that Ukraine can beat Russia while double that at 20% think that Russia will win. By contrast, 37% believe that those two will reach a political compromise after some time, while the remainder either expect a different outcome, don’t know what will happen, or simply don’t care.

What this shows is that Europeans’ opinion towards India likely won’t change in light of CNN’s report since only a fraction of the people polled across the continent think that Ukraine will win anyhow. India’s role in serving as a valve from Western sanctions pressure on Russia certainly helped that country, but it wasn’t the reason why the West failed to strategically defeat it in Ukraine. Much more important by far is Moscow’s victory in the “race of logistics” with NATO, which doomed Kiev’s counteroffensive.

That in turn set into motion the sequence of events that recently culminated in Russia’s capture of Avdeeva and the West’s accelerated construction of “Fortress Europe” in response. Whatever “unprecedented amount of cash” that the Kremlin has in its possession is meaningless without the military strength to hold the Line of Contact and gradually push it westward. The same goes for the West’s cumulatively much larger funds that failed to decisively push it eastward last year.

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European small-scale LNG player Molgas continues to expand its LNG bunkering business with the completion of its first operations in Belgium.

According to an emailed statement, the group’s two inaugural truck-to-ship bunkering operations took place on the same day beginning of this week, serving “diverse clients and vessel types in Zeebrugge and Antwerp”.

The Madrid-based group, owned by French private equity firm InfraVia Capital Partners, did not provide further information regarding the operations.

Prior to these operations, Molgas secured an LNG bunkering permit valid for five years for both the port of Antwerp and Zeebrugge.

Johannes Richter, the group’s head of marine, said that the new permit “enables us to support the market development via our proven multi-truck-to-ship deliveries.”

This solution allows Molgas to unload in a range of about 80-200 metric tons in a “very good operational time as well on comparison to ship-to-ship deliveries.”

This Belgian move follows the completion of the company’s first LNG bunkering operation in France.

Molgas has significantly expanded its operations in the last three years, including the industrial sector, truck filling stations, and bunkering.

Back in 2021, the group completed a deal with LNG giant Shell to buy Norway’s Gasnor, and also acquired in 2022 a controlling stake in Greece’s Blue Grid.

Most recently, the group bought a 45 percent stake in Dutch LNG supplier Titan. This deal includes further follow-on rights from Molgas.

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Farmers from eastern European and Baltic countries – namely the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Bulgaria – joined forces on Thursday to protest against EU policies, with many of their governments either supporting the farmers or at least expressing their understanding.

In a joint memorandum seen by Euractiv, the Agrarian Chambers of these countries reject any limits on the size of agricultural production, call for the cancellation of the EU-Ukraine duty-free agreement and call for the simplification of the rules of the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).

The basic instructions of the protests are that farmers should drive tractors and other agricultural equipment to border crossings to meet colleagues from other countries.

The main focus of the action will be the Czech-Slovak border, where representatives of the Czech Chamber of Agriculture, the Slovak Chamber of Agriculture and Food and the Hungarian Chamber of Agriculture will meet and give speeches.

The protest is being supported – in any form – by farmers from Bulgaria, Croatia, Romania, and Slovenia.

“The fact that today farmers are protesting throughout the European Union is clear evidence that it is essential to address the redefinition of the terms of the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy,” the joint memorandum of agrarian chambers reads.

The farmers’ organisations agreed on several demands, mainly addressed to the European Commission.

Firstly, they reject any compulsory limitation on the scale of agricultural production and call for “the abolition of all legislation that in any way disadvantages European farmers vis-à-vis third-country farmers”. Farmers support the introduction of mirror clauses to prevent imports of goods that do not meet EU standards.

They also call on the EU Commission to carry out an impact assessment when introducing new rules.

Secondly, farmers are calling for the cancellation or substantial modification of the EU-Ukraine trade liberalisation agreement.

“An import tax must be imposed on Ukrainian production, for the duration of the war conflict, in the form of a refundable deposit to be returned to traders when goods are shipped outside European markets,” agrarian chambers claim. They also proposed to process all the surplus imported from Ukraine into biofuels.

Thirdly, farmers want simplification and a reduction in red tape. In particular, they call for a reduction in physical controls and the effective use of the satellite monitoring system. Farmers are also calling for the permanent abolition of three of the CAP’s “Good Agricultural and Environmental Conditions” (GAEC) – GAEC 6, 7 and 8 – which lay down minimum soil cover, crop rotation and the minimum proportion of agricultural land to be set aside from production.

National governments back protests

Thursday’s protests are not against governments but directly against EU policies, unlike the demonstrations in France where farmers demanded concessions from the French government.

The governments of Slovakia, Poland and the Czech Republic are even supporting the farmers in their protests, or at least expressing understanding.

“I understand Thursday’s protests and the demands of farmers in some European countries,” Czech Agriculture Minister Marek Výborný told Euractiv Czechia.

“I agree with farmers on the reduction of pointless and unnecessary bureaucracy. That is why, at the last Council of the EU meeting in Brussels, I tabled a separate point on behalf of the Czech Republic, in which we demanded that the European Commission amend the methodology for checks as soon as possible so that there would be significantly fewer of them,” Výborný said.

In Poland, too, the protests were mainly against EU policy, not the government’s agenda. Donald Tusk’s government has been very supportive of farmers, with Agriculture Minister Czeslaw Siekierski and his deputies regularly meeting with protesters.

While Siekierski is lobbying the EU Council on behalf of the farmers, Prime Minister Tusk has announced that, on his initiative, the protesters’ concerns will be discussed at the next European Council in March.

Words of support are also coming from the Slovak Minister of Agriculture, Richard Takác, who supports the protests and plans to attend them in person, despite not being invited by the Slovak Chamber of Agriculture and Food (SPPK).

“This protest is mainly aimed at the European Commission. Against the nonsense that the European Commission wants to adopt, against the various bureaucracy that turns farmers into officials,” Minister Richard Takáč said on social media a few days ago.

Slovak agrarian organisations were also in agreement. “The EU policies are too ambitious and unrealistic and have not been communicated with us in any way,” said Andrej Gajdoš, the deputy chairman of the SPPK.

Poland blames Commissioner Wojciechowski

With Poland holding the agriculture portfolio in Ursula von der Leyen’s Commission, there have been calls in both government and opposition for European Commissioner Janusz Wojciechowski to be removed from his post.

Defence Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz, who, like Wojciechowski in the distant past, led the agrarian Polish People’s Party (PSL, EPP), accused Wojciechowski of supporting the European Green Deal against the interests of Polish farmers and called on him to resign.

Wojciechowski refused to resign, arguing that commissioners should not take instructions from their national governments or parties.

He also said that no farmers’ organisation wanted his dismissal, and Euractiv’s talks with farmers generally confirmed that they were satisfied with the commissioner’s performance.

The call for Wojciechowski’s resignation is “incomprehensible”, Jacek Zarzecki of the Polish Union of Agricultural Producers told Euractiv. He recalled that Wojciechowski was the only member of the Commission to oppose the continuation of liberalised trade rules with Ukraine.

Slovak farmers make no mention of Janusz Wojciechowski. On the other hand, the SPPK criticised a former EU Commissioner for Climate Action, Frans Timmermans, saying it was he who “came up with this green mess, ran away and left it on the shoulders of the Vice-President of the European Commission Maroš Šefčovič who now needs to deal with it”.

Timmermans is often mentioned by Czech agricultural representatives, who also oppose the environmental and climate requirements of the European Green Deal.

As for Wojciechowski, the Czech agriculture minister hopes that he will push forward demands related to excessive bureaucracy.

Indeed, the EU Commission is expected to present a non-paper on simplifying agricultural policy on Thursday. However, the date of publication could be subject to change and its specific content is also unclear.

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Iran has provided Russia with a large number of powerful surface-to-surface ballistic missiles, six sources revealed, deepening the military cooperation between the two US-sanctioned countries.

Iran’s provision of around 400 missiles includes many from the Fateh-110 family of short-range ballistic weapons, such as the Zolfaghar, three Iranian sources said. This road-mobile missile is capable of striking targets at a distance of between 300 and 700 km, experts say.

Iran’s defence ministry and the Revolutionary Guards – an elite force that oversees Iran’s ballistic missile programme – declined to comment. Russia’s defence ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The shipments began in early January after a deal was finalised in meetings late last year between Iranian and Russian military and security officials that took place in Tehran and Moscow, one of the Iranian sources said.

An Iranian military official – who, like the other sources, asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the information – said there had been at least four shipments of missiles and there would be more in the coming weeks. He declined to provide further details.

Another senior Iranian official said some of the missiles were sent to Russia by ship via the Caspian Sea, while others were transported by plane.

“There will be more shipments,” the second Iranian official said. “There is no reason to hide it. We are allowed to export weapons to any country that we wish to.”

UN Security Council restrictions on Iran’s export of some missiles, drones and other technologies expired in October. However, the United States and European Union retained sanctions on Iran’s ballistic missile programme amid concerns over exports of weapons to its proxies in the Middle East and to Russia.

A fourth source, familiar with the matter, confirmed that Russia had received a large number of missiles from Iran recently, without providing further details.

White House national security spokesperson John Kirby said in early January the United States was concerned that Russia was close to acquiring short-range ballistic weapons from Iran, in addition to missiles already sourced from North Korea.

A US official told Reuters that Washington had seen evidence of talks actively advancing but no indication yet of deliveries having taken place.

The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the missile deliveries.

Ukraine’s top prosecutor said on Friday the ballistic missiles supplied by North Korea to Russia had proven unreliable on the battlefield, with only two of 24 hitting their targets. Moscow and Pyongyang have both denied that North Korea has provided Russia with munitions used in Ukraine.

By contrast, Jeffrey Lewis, an expert with the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, said the Fateh-110 family of missiles and the Zolfaghar were precision weapons.

“They are used to point at things that are high value and need precise damage,” said Lewis, adding that 400 munitions could inflict considerable harm if used in Ukraine. He noted, however, that Russian bombardments were already “pretty brutal”.

A Ukrainian military source told Reuters that Kyiv had not registered any use of Iranian ballistic missiles by Russian forces in the conflict. The Ukrainian defence ministry did not immediately reply to Reuters’ request for comment.

Following the publication of this story, a spokesperson for Ukraine’s Air Force told national television that it had no official information on Russia obtaining such missiles. He said that ballistic missiles would pose a serious threat to Ukraine.

Former Ukrainian defence minister Andriy Zagorodnyuk said that Russia wanted to supplement its missile arsenal at a time when delays in approving a major package of US military aid in Congress has left Ukraine short of ammunition and other material.

“The lack of US support means shortages of ground-based air defence in Ukraine. So they want to accumulate a mass of rockets and break through Ukrainian air defence,” said Zagorodnyuk, who chairs the Kyiv-based Centre for Defence Strategies, a security think tank, and advises the government.

Kyiv has repeatedly asked Tehran to stop supplying Shahed drones to Russia, which have become a staple of Moscow’s long-range assaults on Ukrainian cities and infrastructure, alongside an array of missiles.

Ukraine’s air force said in December that Russia had launched 3,700 Shahed drones during the war, which can fly hundreds of kilometres and explode on impact. Ukrainians call them “mopeds” because of the distinctive sound of their engines; air defences down dozens of them each week.

Iran initially denied supplying drones to Russia but months later said it had provided a small number before Moscow launched the war on Ukraine in 2022.

“Those who accuse Iran of providing weapons to one of the sides in the Ukraine war are doing so for political purposes,” Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Nasser Kanaani said on Monday, when asked about Tehran’s delivery of drones to Russia. “We have not given any drones to take part in that war.”

Rob Lee, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a Philadelphia-based think tank, said a supply of Fateh-100 and Zolfaghar missiles from Iran would hand Russia an even greater advantage on the battlefield.

“They could be used to strike military targets at operational depths, and ballistic missiles are more difficult for Ukrainian air defences to intercept,” Lee said.

Read more with Euractiv

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State and local governments across the country are finalizing plans and preparing applications for a $5 billion federal climate grant program under the Inflation Reduction Act.

The EPA’s Climate Pollution Reduction Grant (CPRG) program has already distributed almost half a billion dollars to participating states and metropolitan areas to develop or refine local climate action plans. Now, the agency is preparing to award $4.6 billion in competitive grants to help implement big ideas contained in those local plans.

By March 1, states and metropolitan areas must submit “priority” climate action plans, based on community input and prioritizing environmental justice. Those plans set the parameters for the competitive grants of $2 million to $500 million, with applications due April 1.

“The CPRG program is intentionally designed to be broad,” said Rich Damberg, senior policy advisor at the EPA Office of Air Quality Planning and Standards, during a January webinar. “Confronting climate change requires making progress in all sectors of the economy — electric power, transportation, industry, buildings, waste and materials management, and agriculture and natural and working lands.”

Forty-five states and nearly 70 metro areas are participating, including Milwaukee, Indianapolis, Chicago, Des Moines, Detroit, Grand Rapids, Iowa City and Cedar Rapids.

Iowa, Florida, South Dakota, Wyoming and Kentucky each declined $3 million in federal funding for climate planning and are not eligible to compete for the larger grants. Wyoming initially joined the program but then Gov. Mark Gordon decided in the fall to withdraw.

The EPA expects to award 30 to 115 implementation grants of different sizes. Tribes and territories meanwhile compete in a separate sector of the program, accounting for $300 million.

“We are in for an exciting year in 2024,” said Peter Hansel, special advisor for implementation of the EPA Office of Air Quality Planning and Standards, during a January webinar. “We encourage all applicants to collaborate and coordinate as they’re developing the (priority climate action plans).”

The funding can support a new stand-alone measure, like a state agency creating a new decarbonization program, or it can expand work already underway, like a tribe adding more solar and storage to tribal buildings, Damberg explained. Applications can address any sector emitting greenhouse gases or removing carbon from the atmosphere.

Plans and proposals are also meant to reflect the Biden administration’s Justice 40 initiative, the idea that at least 40% of program benefits flow to low-income and disenfranchised communities.

While the implementation grants are meant for relatively short-term projects, the Climate Pollution Reduction Grant program also takes a long lens. Participants are supposed to develop a “comprehensive” climate action plan by fall 2025, with a status report due in 2027.

The Milwaukee area had a head start on their action plan thanks to the city of Milwaukee’s own robust Climate and Equity Plan, said Jennifer Sarnecki, principal transportation planner of the Southeastern Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission.

She called the city’s plan a “foundational document” that the regional planning commission is building on for their priority climate action plan, working with surrounding cities including Waukesha, Wauwatosa, West Allis and Mequon, and four counties. Community organizations including Common Ground, the Ethnic and Diverse Business Coalition, the Hmong American Friendship Association and the Southside Organizing Center are also involved.

“We do have decades of experience with transportation and land use planning, environmental planning,” said Sarnecki. “The strength of the program EPA created is to bring all those topics together and allow us to work between silos. I applaud it because it’s giving us an opportunity to look at short-term shovel-ready projects that have already been identified and vetted, while also looking at providing a long-term framework for transformational change. As a planner, that excites me a great deal.”

Energy efficiency is central to Milwaukee’s Climate and Equity Plan and also will likely be featured in the regional climate plan, Sarnecki said. Electrifying transportation and buildings are also priorities. Milwaukee’s plan calls for reaching net zero emissions by 2050, with 45% reductions from 2018 levels by 2030. Transportation will account for almost half of the needed emissions reductions, according to the city’s analysis, with buildings and electricity generation accounting for 17-18% each.

As part of the process, the region is cataloging its greenhouse gas emissions and doing outreach.

“The planning grant has been extremely helpful,” Sarnecki said. “At the staff level, it means being able to attend the technical forums that EPA has developed. We’re building that capacity, and it’s allowed for expanded coordination among our local municipalities. There’s opportunity to have more in-depth conversations with environmental justice populations around this topic, they provide the lived experience. And this is just the start, we’re looking forward to what comes next” with the comprehensive climate plan.

Renewable energy and Biden administration plans more generally have faced pushback in Iowa, where Republicans control both houses of the legislature and the governorship. While the state is among the five declining to participate in the CPRG program, metropolitan leaders are emphasizing cost savings, collaboration and capacity building, including in ways that benefit rural residents.

Iowa City and Cedar Rapids, just 25 miles apart, are separate metropolitan areas for the purposes of the grant, but they are collaborating on their applications with unified plans, both spearheaded by the East Central Iowa Council of Governments (ECICOG), according to project manager Jennifer Fencl.

“We obviously want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” Fencl said, “but from the planning side and our organization side, this is really all about learning, going through this process, getting connected with the types of resources that will be needed in the future to set our communities up for, say, pursuing a solar project or changing out lighting.”

Fencl said they used the $2 million total in planning grants to, among other things, work with the University of Iowa in developing and using an equitable engagement process to collect input from the more than 50 different communities that make up the area. They created a website to explain the process and ask for feedback.

The regional council has long worked with those communities on issues including water quality, solid waste management, and recycling, but they haven’t focused as much on air quality. The grant could present an opportunity to do so, she said.

They’ve used tools developed by the federal government to identify environmental justice areas, but Iowa’s rural landscape means they sometimes overlook marginalized populations since they draw on Area Median Income metrics that become less meaningful in regions with few residents. Hence, Fencl said, the planners are making sure to adequately study and reach out to rural communities and consider projects that will increase their well-being.

“We’ll focus on homeowners, renters and residents of manufactured housing,” she said, noting that leaders can work with the well-known energy assistance program LIHEAP to increase their outreach. “Very often renters and manufactured housing fall through the cracks with these kinds of programs.”

Their climate action plans — while not yet finished — are likely to prioritize energy efficiency and access to electrification, building on new ideas submitted by communities and existing successful programs, Fencl said. Iowa City, for example, has a pilot program helping renters access electric vehicle chargers.

“This is not about any kind of strings attached or mandates or requirements, this is capacity-building,” Fencl said. “There are smaller communities that are interested but just don’t have the resources and connections to do what they want to do. This is a great opportunity to build that capacity.”

The agency spearheading the process for the Indianapolis area released its updated priorities in January, following a series of public events and online surveys.

The list includes repurposing industrial sites for renewable energy, creating more parks, restoring degraded land, increasing energy efficiency of industry, and electrifying government buildings.

Such priorities have not been embraced by Indiana state lawmakers, who have in recent years proposed legislation to bar municipalities from electrification-related measures and to protect the state’s coal industry.

The dichotomy is an example of how federal grants like CPRG can help municipalities and state leaders do work that is not supported by the state’s legislature. Wisconsin — with a Democratic governor and sustainability-focused agencies, but a Republican-dominated legislature — faces a similar situation. The federal grant program can push climate-friendly directions that the legislature has refused to fund, noted Maria Redmond, director of the Wisconsin Office of Sustainability and Clean Energy.

The Indianapolis area’s preliminary greenhouse gas emissions inventory showed that a third of emissions came from commercial electricity generation, a third from mobile combustion (like vehicles), and almost a quarter from stationary combustion. It also showed that Marion County, which includes most of Indianapolis, accounted for 45% of the emissions among 11 counties.

The Central Indiana Regional Development Authority, which is leading the effort, emphasized creating high-quality and high-wage jobs and attracting “high caliber talent” as priorities, as noted in a presentation.

The regional agency has convened stakeholder working groups focused on agriculture and open space, transportation and recreation, electricity and heat, and industrial and technological advancement. In September, representatives did outreach at farmers markets, the Indiana Latino Expo and Car Free Day Indy.

A survey of 480 residents asked what actions by the government would be most valuable in helping reduce emissions. Twenty-four percent asked for funding for increasing home energy efficiency, and 23% wanted funding for residential solar panels. Significant numbers also prioritized composting service and increasing electric vehicle charging infrastructure.

The survey found slightly different top investment priorities among the general public and environmental justice communities. The EJ respondents ranked improving public transit first by a comfortable margin, and renewable energy third. The general public ranked renewables first and public transit second.

As in Milwaukee, the Chicago area’s climate plan will build on the city of Chicago’s 2022 Climate Action Plan as well as the Metropolitan Mayors Caucus’ 2021 Climate Action Plan for the Chicago Region, the third such regional plan in the country. The mayors caucus is leading the process for the Chicago region, which includes the cities of Naperville and Elgin; Kenosha, Wisconsin; and part of Northwest Indiana.

The 2021 regional plan calls for decarbonizing energy generation, electrifying and increasing the efficiency of buildings, expanding electric vehicle charging infrastructure, building transit-oriented development and generating electricity from wastewater biogas, among other measures. The plan was developed in collaboration with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and with guidance from the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate & Energy, which in 2019 chose the mayors caucus’ Greenest Region Compact as a pilot program on the potential of regional collaboration.

Mayors Caucus director of environmental initiatives Edith Makra echoed other planners in noting that there are different and sometimes contradictory ways that communities can qualify for Justice 40 credit.

“We looked at four tools that identify environmental justice communities in Illinois, and they don’t agree with one another,” said Makra, noting one estimate counted 151 while another said 113.

By all definitions, the Chicago area is home to many neighborhoods struggling for environmental justice. Making sure the climate action plan and grant proposals reflect their needs and hopes requires significant effort and outreach.

“You can’t just call them up and say, ‘We have funding for you, take it,’” Makra noted. “You have to do the preparatory work.”

While environmental justice issues in Chicago are well-known, the federal climate grant program has the potential to serve areas that get less attention and funding.

“It has to be understood to be inclusive of regions beyond the city of Chicago,” said Makra. “There are huge regions in the South suburbs, Lake County, some of our older industrial cities like Elgin and Joliet that are all qualified disadvantaged communities. We’re really excited about the opportunities for further sharpening our knowledge and engaging the environmental justice communities. It’s a huge opportunity.”

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