State’s transport department given a 2045 deadline to fully decarbonize and achieve zero emissions under agreement
Under what legal experts called a “historic” settlement, announced on Thursday, Hawaii officials will release a roadmap “to fully decarbonize the state’s transportation systems, taking all actions necessary to achieve zero emissions no later than 2045 for ground transportation, sea and inter-island air transportation”, Andrea Rodgers, one of the attorneys representing the plaintiffs in the case, said at a press conference with the governor.
To achieve its climate goals, the city is helping finance the largest solar farm east of Mississippi River.
On her fingers, Chicago’s Chief Sustainability Officer Angela Tovar counted the city buildings that will soon source all of their power from renewable energy: O’Hare International Airport, Midway International Airport, City Hall.
[Note: This is an even huger deal than it sounds like. Chicago O'Hare International Airport is, as of 2023, the 9th busiest airport in the world.]
Chicago’s real estate portfolio is massive. It includes 98 fire stations, 81 library locations, 25 police stations and two of the largest water treatment plants on the planet — in all, more than 400 municipal buildings.
It takes approximately 700,000 megawatt hours per year to keep the wheels turning in the third largest city in the country. Beginning Jan. 1, every single one of them will come solely from clean, renewable energy, mostly sourced from Illinois’ newest and largest solar farm. The move is projected to cut the Windy City’s carbon footprint by approximately 290,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide each year, the equivalent of taking 62,000 cars off the road, the city said.
Chicago is one of several cities across the country that are not only shaking up their energy mix but also taking advantage of their bulk-buying power to spur new clean energy development.
The city — and much of Illinois — already has one of the cleanest energy mixes in the country, with over 50% of the state’s electricity coming from nuclear power. But while nuclear energy is considered “clean,” carbon-free energy, it is not considered renewable.
Chicago’s move toward renewable energy has been years in the making. The goal of sourcing the city’s energy purely from renewable sources was first established by Mayor Rahm Emanuel in 2017. In 2022, Mayor Lori Lightfoot struck a deal with electricity supplier Constellation to purchase renewable energy from developer Swift Current Energy for the city, beginning in 2025.
Swift Current began construction on the 3,800-acre, 593-megawatt solar farm in central Illinois as part of the same five-year, $422 million agreement. Straddling two counties in central Illinois, the Double Black Diamond Solar project is now the largest solar installation east of the Mississippi River. It can produce enough electricity to power more than 100,000 homes, according to Swift Current’s vice president of origination, Caroline Mann.
Chicago alone has agreed to purchase approximately half the installation’s total output, which will cover about 70 percent of its municipal electricity needs. City officials plan to cover the remaining 30 percent through the purchase of renewable energy credits.
“That’s really a feature and not a bug of our plan,” said deputy chief sustainability officer Jared Policicchio. He added that he hopes the built-in market will help encourage additional clean energy development locally, albeit on a much smaller scale: “Our goal over the next several years is that we reach a point where we’re not buying renewable energy credits.”
Los Angeles, Houston, Seattle, Orlando, Florida, and more than 700 other U.S. cities and towns have signed similar purchasing agreements since 2015, according to a 2022 study from World Resources Institute, but none of their plans mandate nearly as much new renewable energy production as Chicago’s.
“Part of Chicago’s goal was what’s called additionality, bringing new resources into the market and onto the grid here,” said Popkin. “They were the largest municipal deal to do this.”
Chicago also secured a $400,000 annual commitment from Constellation and Swift Current for clean energy workforce training, including training via Chicago Women in Trades, a nonprofit aiming to increase the number of women in union construction and manufacturing jobs.
The economic benefits extend past the city’s limits: According to Swift Current, approximately $100 million in new tax revenue is projected to flow into Sangamon County and Morgan County, which are home to the Double Black Diamond Solar site, over the project’s operational life.
“Cities and other local governments just don’t appreciate their ability to not just support their residents but also shape markets,” said Popkin. “Chicago is demonstrating directly how cities can lead by example, implement ambitious goals amidst evolving state and federal policy changes, and leverage their purchasing power to support a more equitable renewable energy future.” ...
Chicago will meet its goal of transitioning all its municipal buildings to renewable energy by 2025, the first step in a broader goal to source energy for all buildings in the city from renewables by 2035 — making it the largest city in the country to do so, according to the Sierra Club.
With the incoming Trump administration promising to decrease federal support for decarbonizing the economy, Dane says it will be increasingly important for cities, towns and states to drive their own efforts to reduce emissions, build greener economies and meet local climate goals. He says moves like Chicago’s prove that they are capable.
“That is an imperative thing to know, that state, city, county action is a durable pathway, even under the next administration, and [it] needs to happen,” said Dane. “The juice is definitely still worth the squeeze.”
A consortium linked to the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) has built a plant at the Mannheim wastewater treatment plant that cleans generated biogas and uses the resulting CO2 to produce climate-neutral marine fuel using green hydrogen. The process could help decarbonise the shipping sector, which is currently responsible for around three percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.
The demonstration plant uses a patented process to convert biogas produced during wastewater treatment into climate-neutral methanol. The biogas is first purified and the separated CO₂ can then be used with renewably-produced hydrogen to make methanol – a raw material that can be used as marine fuel or in the chemical industry. Methanol does release the CO2 back into the atmosphere when burned. However, because the carbon comes from the treatment plant and not from additional fossil sources, it is considered climate neutral.
There are some 80,000 wastewater treatment plants in Europe that offer considerable potential for the new process, wrote KIT. "To achieve our climate protection goals, we must keep all technological options open," said Volker Wissing, federal minister for digital affairs and transport. “In addition to electrification and hydrogen-based propulsion, we need climate-friendly fuels, especially in maritime shipping." Stressing that the sector represented a future growth market, Wissing said Germany should play a pioneering role in research and development. "It's also about making our country independent of energy imports."
Vidal Vazquez, co-founder of climate tech start-up ICODOS, a spin-off from the KIT, added, "In Germany alone, wastewater treatment plants could produce several million tonnes of sustainable methanol annually." The project shows that "wastewater treatment plants can serve as the heart of sustainable fuel production – a potential that has so far remained untapped," Vazquez said. ICODOS is currently in discussions with other wastewater treatment plants to set up other production facilities.
Renewables-based synthetic fuels could be necessary to decarbonise certain sectors such as shipping, where alternatives are not available today, or extremely costly. However, producing the rare fuels is energy-intensive and expensive and they should only be used where the direct use of electricity is not an option.
I'm on a tour with my new book Enshittification: catch me next in Cambridge, MA; Washington, DC and Brooklyn! Full schedule here.
In Bill McKibben's new book Here Comes the Sun, he frequently laments activists' tendency not to celebrate our wins, a habit that sees us always feeling as though we were losing, even when we're racking up massive victories:
Here Comes the Sun is an extraordinary, beautifully told, exhaustively researched and argued book about the remarkable progress of solar energy over the past five or so years. McKibben is speaking as much to his fellow activists as he is to the people on the sidelines, trying to get them to understand the quiet, profound changes to solar, to "update their priors" about whether a solar transition is possible, and what impediments stand between us and decarbonization.
For example, you may have read that the material bill for solar is simply too large to pay – that there isn't enough copper, enough conflict minerals, enough lithium for the panels, wires and batteries we'll need for a solar transition:
First, the material bill for solarization is in freefall, with no end in sight. The amount of stuff we need to make panels, transmission lines and batteries keeps declining. Further: the efficiency gains of "clean" technology are astounding – meaning that, for example, it not only takes a lot less material to make a solar panel, the panel we make out of so much less stuff generates a lot more power. More: we keep finding ways to substitute more abundant materials for materials that are harder to find or refine (for example, swapping out lithium in batteries and replacing it with sodium, one of the most abundant minerals on Earth). Finally: we keep finding new sources of the materials that we can't readily substitute for. It turns out that when there's a lot more demand for a given mineral, people who've previously disregarded potential sources of that material suddenly pipe up with information about where (a lot) more of it can be found.
None of that is to say that extracting and refining these materials is without cost or risk. The realpolitik of extraction means that mining and refining companies will preferentially target poor and indigenous communities for their mines and factories. That's totally true and completely unacceptable, and it means that our task is to demand climate justice (letting those communities decide for themselves whether and how they will be a part of this). That's important work, and it's very different from endlessly parroting 15-year old back-of-the-envelope calculations about the material bill for solarization.
The material story is a really cool and exciting one. There is so much solar energy out there for the taking. A lot of the time, when we characterize high-tech products as "non-recyclable," what we mean is "it would take too much energy to recycle this device." As more and more solar comes online, we can reclaim literal tons of material from existing, superannuated tech. There's a solar-powered factory that ingests old solar panels, decomposes them into their source materials, and makes new, hyper-efficient solar panels out of them, reclaiming 99% of their materials:
Far from being an insurmountable barrier to a cleaner, better future, the material bill for solar is eminently tractable. What's more, the material bill for solar is superior in every way to the material bill for fossil fuels. The amount of stuff we need to dig up in order to solarize the planet is equal to one seventeenth of the fossil fuels we dig up every year. Remember, when you dig up a bunch of stuff to make a solar panel, that solar panel produces energy for decades afterwards, and when it finally reaches its end-of-life, we make it into another solar panel. When you dig up coal, you burn it and all that's left behind is a bunch of planet-destroying carbon dioxide and earth-and water-poisoning toxic ash.
I can't emphasize this enough. Solar is a superior substitute for fossil fuels in more ways than one. Fossil fuels need to be continuously replenished, meaning that every fossil fuel-powered system in the world requires a continuous, ongoing stream of materials to produce energy. Replenishing this fuel doesn't merely require us to dig up enough old dead shit to burn in the machine, we also have to dig up tons more old dead shit to shlep that old dead shit around. The gas and coal being set on fire all around you right now required another mountain of fossil fuel to power the mining rig, the refinery, and the ship and the truck that brought it to you.
Making more solar involves digging stuff up and moving it too – but just once. Once those panels are on your roof (or over your parking lot or irrigation canal, or between the rows in your farm's fields) they convert abundant sunshine into efficient energy, without requiring any more materials:
So it's definitely time we rethink our assumptions about the solar transition. Here's one assumption I had to jettison after reading McKibben's book: I used to assume that whenever I heard about Europe or the US or Canada lowering CO2 emissions, that was mostly because these rich countries had exported their carbon to China, by shifting carbon-intensive manufacturing there.
Back around the time of the Paris Accords, there was a raging debate about national carbon targets, with poor countries in the global south arguing that because rich northern countries were responsible for nearly all the CO2 in the atmosphere, the rich world should make the sacrifices needed to decarbonize, leaving China, India, and other poor countries to continue to enjoy the benefits of burning coal.
China made an especially pointed case, insisting that their CO2 figures were grossly inflated because they made all the stuff that the rich world consumed. The carbon emissions from the appliances, consumer goods and industrial equipment and other exports from China were really the rich world's carbon, which had been offshored to "the world's factory" – China.
This may have been true back then, but things have changed dramatically. China is running away from coal as fast as it can, and solarizing everything. China lights up a new solar generation facility with the capacity of a coal plant every eight hours. Trump can subsidize fossil fuels and throw up as many structural impediments to renewables as he can think of, and it won't change the fact that as a planet, we're on track to replace all of the embodied energy in the stuff the whole world uses with solar.
So when you read that 54% of the energy in the EU is coming from renewables, that doesn't mean that they're cheating by offshoring their emissions to China. The EU is offshoring its manufacturing to China, but China has found a better way to manufacture Europe's stuff, without having to set old dead stuff on fire 24/7:
Reading Here Comes the Sun is a forceful reminder that there's a big old world out there beyond America's borders. It's true that American policy was once very important to the whole world, but that was largely down to the things that Trump is hell-bent on destroying. American dollar-clearing and the SWIFT system gave the US a massive, global structural advantage, but the weaponization of SWIFT, the deliberate weakening of the US dollar, and the destruction of American monetarism via cryptocurrency scams has put dollar clearing into terminal decline:
Even US military might is in decline. US military spending remains off the charts, but Trump and Hegseth are purging the forces, targeting Black and brown people (disproportionately represented in the US military because people from minority groups are typically poorer, and the US military recruits a lot of poor people without many other options):
American aid agendas used to give it a huge global footprint. When American evangelicals forced the government to ban aid that included birth control or helping gender minorities, countries all around the world saw surges in unwanted pregnancies and homophobic discrimination. Now that the US has cut off all that aid, the US can no longer set priorities for those countries.
America's domestic research agenda used to set the standard for the world, because the brightest scholars in the world moved here to go to university and to pursue their research. This meant that the priorities behind US federal scientific and academic grants determined what the world's best and brightest worked on. Of course, that's dead, too.
Trump hasn't just killed research funding in America – he's also singlehandedly reversed generations of work to lure the world's most talented scientists and scholars to the USA. Grad students, professors, engineers and researchers are leaving the US rather than risk being kidnapped to a gulag in El Salvador or imprisoned in Alligator Auschwitz. Our loss is everyone else's gain. It's not clear whether people will ever again aspire to come to America to pursue their research.
The point is that things are very much up for grabs right now. The planet is solarizing at rates that beggar the imagination (and warm the heart). McKibben quotes many sources who've called China "the Saudi Arabia of solar," but he is skeptical of that characterization. The sun, after all, shines everywhere and once you've got the solar installed, China can't take it away from you.
Or can they?
Solar – and the whole cleantech sector – is the first truly successful "internet of things" application. From inverters to EVs to household batteries, the new, electric world is digital and networked, and that means that it's all terribly enshittification prone.
Today, the US has the ability to remotely, permanently disable every John Deere tractor in the world and set off a global famine:
Tomorrow, Chinese soft (and not-so-soft) power could be vested in the ability to remotely update, downgrade, disable, or brick whole countries' worth of cleantech:
There's a way to prevent this, thankfully. The only reason that technologists around the world can't reverse-engineer and unlock these "smart" devices is that the US trade representative bullied every country into passing punitive IP laws that ban this practice:
Absent these laws, there could be a roaring trade in jailbreaking smart devices of all kinds – from printers to ventilators, but also all of cleantech – so that owners of these devices could always change how they work, blocking field updates and restoring functionality that had been confiscated by the manufacturer, whether due to greed or geopolitics.
The US trade rep got these IP laws passed abroad by threatening America's trading partners with tariffs. Tariffs: another source of power that Trump has vaporized. The threat of tariffs loomed over the whole world, and fear of losing access to American markets meant that policymakers all over the world kept laws on the books that allowed US tech companies to extract rent and extort their populations. But a deterrent only works if you don't use it. Now that everyone's been tariffed by Trump, the threat is dead. Happy Liberation Day, folks.
It's these US tech-protecting laws that create the conditions for an eventual mass-enshittification of cleantech. It's these laws that Chinese firms – and the Chinese state – would use to secure their ability to truly be the Saudi Arabia of the sun: not just the source of the technology that converts sunshine to electrons, but also the landlord of those sunbeams, with the power to evict whole countries from their solar arrays, at the click of a mouse.
Creating a legal and technical framework for local control over cleantech's software has many advantages. The mere existence of a killswitch (or any remote-update facility that device owners can't override) makes devices vulnerable to shutdown by malicious hackers as well as manufacturers.
However, a world of cleantech devices that are under their owners' absolute control also poses some challenges to the solar revolution. If you want to build a virtual power plant by harnessing the batteries of thousands of homeowners, or relieve grid pressure by adjusting the thermostats and fridges of millions of utility subscribers, it's a lot easier if you know that you're communicating with devices that do what you tell them to do and faithfully communicate their operations to you.
That's a tradeoff we're going to have to make, though. The incremental reliability of designing technology so its owners can't override remote instructions is swamped by the massive risk that this power will be abused to attack individuals, regions, and whole countries.
As the US government turns its back on solar, the sun is setting on the American empire. It's not clear whether there will be elections next year. Trump says he'll use terrorism laws to arrest people who are "anti-Christian" or "anti-capitalist":
Will China step in and become the world's unipower as America shits itself to death after drinking raw milk or coughs itself to death after boycotting vaccines? I don't know. I hope we end up with a multipolar world, and that someone picks up the research agendas that Trump has destroyed. Earlier this year, Elon Musk's DOGE killed all the NIH grants that included the word "systemic" (because they're racist against the idea of "systemic racism"). Speaking as a guy whose cancer diagnosis was just upgraded from "localized" to "systemic," I really want some other well-resourced entity to do this work.
One way the EU can act as a hedge against Chinese hegemony is by turning itself to manufacturing and selling disenshittifying technology – tools to jailbreak computers, phones, consoles, and embedded systems in cars and solar inverters and medical devices. This is a giant market opportunity for the EU, and it's also key to actually moving to a "Eurostack" of technology that is independent from the American tech companies that Trump uses to project power into every company and government in the world (except China).
It doesn't matter if the EU funds an Office365 clone if there's no way to migrate data from Microsoft to that made-in-Europe alternative. No government ministry, no large firm, no civil society group is going to manually move each of their documents, messages, edit histories, directories and permissions over from a US tech product to a Eurostack alternative. To do that work, you'll need automation: scrapers, jailbreaks of virtualized devices that directly access their RAM and instruction flow.
What about America? Well, there's still the tattered remains of federalism. The states and localities have power – on paper, at least. Many of these localities (including ones in deepest, reddest Trumpland) have been able to seize control over their energy destiny. If you want to get involved in insulating your town from "the Saudi Arabia of oil" (AKA "Saudi Arabia"), check out the Institute for Local Self-Reliance's work on "Community Power":
Do that work, and maybe you'll be able to keep the lights on in the coming American Dark Ages. Practically speaking, it's unlikely that the rest of the world is going to accept 250 million American refugees fleeing the 50 million Trump diehards who've looted the country and torched its future.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
To achieve its climate goals, the City of Chicago helped finance the largest solar farm east of the Mississippi.
It takes approximately 700,000 megawatt hours of electricity to power Chicago’s more than 400 municipal buildings every year. As of January 1, every single one of them—including 98 fire stations, two international airports, and two of the largest water treatment plants on the planet—is running on renewable energy, thanks largely to Illinois’ newest and largest solar farm.
The move is projected to cut the carbon footprint of the country’s third-largest city by approximately 290,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide each year—the equivalent of taking 62,000 cars off the road, according to the city. Local decarbonization efforts like Chicago’s are taking on increasing significance as President Donald Trump promises to reduce federal support for climate action. With the outgoing Biden administration doubling down on an international pledge to get the U.S. to net zero emissions by 2050, cities, states, and private-sector players across the country will have to pick up the slack. {read}
Like these weekly compilations? Tip me at $kaybarr1735 or check out my Dandelion Doodles! (sorry for the delay, life has been kicking my ass again the past couple of weeks)
““The IL Pride Connect Legal Hotline offers free, confidential legal advice and referrals across Illinois”[...], including but not limited to access to health care such as gender-affirming care, discrimination or harassment, public benefits like Medicaid or SNAP, identity documents, and housing or safety concerns. [...] The hotline will be available at 855-805-9200 from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. GMT Monday through Thursday, offering services in both English and Spanish. It launches August 25.”
2. Rewilding project aims to restore resilience to fire-prone Spain via wildlife
“Rewilding Spain says Przewalski’s horses, taurus and wild horses could help regulate the severity of fires in an age of climate crisis. But how? Simply by filling their ecological roles — in some cases, roles lost for tens of thousands of years. Despite all of these animals being herbivores, each of them, combined with local deer, plays a unique role in the ecosystem, creating ecosystem heterogeneity and niches for greater diversity.”
3. Waste-to-energy project could boost Brazil’s decarbonization goals
“[The Brazilian state of Amazonas] has one of the highest rates of landfill use, with almost 92% of its cities disposing of their garbage this way. […] The facility will process waste from human activities into biomethane, known as “green gas,” for its high decarbonization potential. […] “A cubic meter of biomethane reduces 90% of carbon dioxide emissions if it replaces natural gas.[…]””
4. When bison have room to roam, they reawaken the Yellowstone ecosystem
“Unlike traditional bison conservation efforts focused on small, fenced areas and controlled numbers based on grazing management principles, [new research suggests that…] "The return of a large-scale bison migration provides clear benefits to the ecosystem[…. Grazed] plants grow as much as they would if they weren't grazed but, strikingly, are 150% more nutritious. […] Plant communities changed in some areas, but productivity was maintained, and the biodiversity of plants increased across the migration corridor.”
5. Self-assembling electrolyte enables rapid disassembly for easier EV battery recycling
“To simplify the recycling process, the researchers decided to make a more sustainable electrolyte. For that, they turned to a class of molecules that self-assemble in water[....] When they immersed the battery cell into organic solvents, the material immediately dissolved, with each part of the battery falling away for easier recycling.”
And a bonus article that I found too late for last week's news: Rice, two curries and dal: The Indian cafes where you can pay in rubbish
August 15-21 news here | (all credit for images and written material can be found at the source linked; I don’t claim credit for anything but curating.)
🏭🌍💚 A South African court halted a fossil fuel power plant in light of the country’s climate commitments! The court cited that the natural gas-fired power plant proposal failed to consult local communities, consider renewable energy alternatives, and account for the environmental impact. While the power plant company has said it will continue to pursue gas in its energy strategy, the ruling reflects South Africa’s larger commitments to decarbonization and fighting climate change!
A South African court has nullified the environmental authorization for state-owned electricity utility Eskom’s proposed 3,000-megawatt gas-
I just don’t see how anyone can be against decarbonizing the electricity grid.
Like, petroleum is an extremely useful chemical. I’m not even talking about fuels. I mean, petroleum has some extremely important uses in everyday items such as soaps, machinery greases, medications, etc. Petroleum is a finite chemical. One day, we will run out of it…
So like… wouldn’t it make sense if we used this very limited, very important chemical to its maximum potential while we still have it? Instead of… you know… burning it.
There is a big flaming ball of radiation in the sky that beams free energy down on this planet 24/7, and instead of trying to recapture it in the many ways it manifests… we’re just burning precious chemicals instead!
Instead of taking the free energy we’re given all day, every day… we’re burning a chemical which will be hell to replace once’s it’s gone… and we’re poisoning ourselves and flooding our homes in the process.
Like that’s so fucking stupid, man. We can recapture the suns energy via solar and wind. We can convert gravity’s passive forces into energy via hydropower. We can capture our own planet’s free radiation via geothermal. There are so many non-wasteful and gluttonous ways to power this planet, and yet… we’re still burning a chemical which we can’t directly, universally replace, while also poisoning ourselves and everything we love… just to do the same thing a spinny turbine or reverse LED can do. Wtf.
