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Vinyl Chloride Industry Keeps Expanding Despite East Palestine Disaster

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Saturday, February 3, 2024

When a Norfolk Southern train derailed last February in East Palestine, Ohio, igniting a chemical fire and releasing 1 million pounds of toxic vinyl chloride into the surrounding air and water, politicians rushed to express their support for the impacted community. Within a month, senators introduced the bipartisan 2023 Railway Safety Act, a crucial effort to strengthen safety regulations for the transportation of hazardous materials. In the year since the disaster, vinyl chloride has also faced heightened scrutiny. But despite a newfound focus on the chemical’s dangers, the market for vinyl products is continuing to grow. Major petrochemical companies are expanding their operations — and the vinyl industry is spending more money than ever before to lobby lawmakers on its talking points. Vinyl chloride is a key building block for the production of polyvinyl chloride, or PVC, a plastic found in a range of construction materials, medical devices, and household items. For decades, environmental advocates have sounded the alarm over PVC, calling it the “poison plastic”: In addition to vinyl chloride, which is classified as a Group A human carcinogen by the Environmental Protection Agency, PVC contains harmful additives like phthalates and flame retardants. The production process releases massive amounts of greenhouse gases, exposes workers to asbestos and the class of industrial “forever chemicals” known as PFAS, and sends toxic pollutants into front-line communities. “There’s been growing interest to regulate vinyl chloride, PVC plastic, and its additives at the state level, the national level, and the international level over the last year,” said Mike Schade, a campaign director for Toxic-Free Future, who has co-authored multiple reports on the dangers of producing, transporting, and disposing of vinyl chloride. “We’re definitely concerned that, at the same time as we’re learning more and more about the dangers of vinyl chloride and the chemicals associated with its life cycle, the plastics industry has been expanding in recent years, including the PVC plastics industry.” A towboat pushes a barge up he Houston Ship Channel on Sept. 30, 2022, in Houston, Texas. Last month, Amnesty International released a report that found the severity of toxic pollution in the Houston Ship Channel amounts to a human rights violation.Photo: Elizabeth Conley/Houston Chronicle via Getty Images Betting on More Plastic Amid growing calls to phase out fossil fuels, the industry is now betting on plastic — created using petroleum-derived chemicals like vinyl chloride — as a lifeline. In recent years, OxyVinyls — a subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum — Formosa Plastics, and Shintech have announced billion-dollar plans to expand their PVC plastic operations. Four months after the East Palestine disaster, chemical manufacturer Orbia declared its intentions to build a massive vinyl plant in the United States before 2028. Most petrochemical operations, including PVC plants, are sited in the Gulf Coast region, where marginalized communities bear the brunt of industrial pollution. Exposure to vinyl chloride is associated with an increased risk of liver, brain, and lung cancer, as well as lymphoma and leukemia. When vinyl chloride burns, it can cause even more harm, releasing a highly toxic class of chemical compounds known as dioxins. A 2023 Toxic-Free Future report noted that at least four low-income communities of color in Louisiana have been forced to relocate due to contamination from the vinyl plastics industry. This includes Mossville, one of the first towns founded by freed slaves in the South. Toxicology tests conducted by the federal government determined that Mossville residents, living in the shadow of pollution from vinyl chloride manufacturers, had elevated levels of dioxins in their bodies. That testing was completed in 1998. But the devastation wrought by vinyl chloride is ongoing: In January, the EPA released a risk assessment detailing findings of toxic emissions near a Westlake Chemical vinyl plant in Calvert City, Kentucky. After collecting air monitoring data for more than a year, the EPA determined that emissions exceeded the state’s acceptable levels of lifetime cancer risk. The findings arrive two months after Westlake made headlines for a different reason: The company is investing $134 million to expand its PVC pipe plant in Wichita Falls, Texas. Yvette Arellano, founder and director of the grassroots environmental justice organization Fenceline Watch, noted that the Houston area has also seen “massive investments” from petrochemical companies in recent years. The 52-mile Houston Ship Channel is already one of the country’s most polluted areas, home to more than 600 manufacturers of plastics and plastic feedstocks. Last month, Amnesty International released a report that found the severity of toxic pollution in the Houston Ship Channel amounts to a human rights violation. “The expansion in the Houston Ship Channel is largely fueled by the plastics industry, including PVC and vinyl,” said Arellano. “We’re talking about a public health threat that’s multiplied because of the cumulative impact of these facilities.” The Occidental Petroleum Headquarters is seen on Dec. 11, 2023, in The Woodlands, Texas.Photo: Brandon Bell/Getty Images Increased Lobbying In 2022, OxyVinyls, Shintech, Westlake, and Formosa collectively released more than half a million pounds of vinyl chloride into the air, according to an analysis of Toxic Release Inventory data by Material Research. But as members of the Vinyl Institute, the leading lobbying group for the PVC and vinyl chloride industry, the four companies are fighting hard to convince lawmakers that PVC is safe and sustainable. While the group has been active on Capitol Hill for decades, it upped its federal lobbying spend to $560,000 last year. According to disclosures, lobbyists met with lawmakers to discuss topics like the regulation of polyvinyl chloride and the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act, which seeks to reduce the production of single-use plastics. The Vinyl Institute opposes the act, rallying for unproven chemical recycling technologies over source reduction strategies. At the state level, the Vinyl Institute’s website boasts that it “worked close with state partners to slow down or stop PVC bans around the nation.” Legislation introduced in Maine, California, and New York last year in the wake of the East Palestine derailment sought to ban the use of PVC and other toxic substances in consumer packaging. Maine’s bill quickly died and California’s went dormant; New York’s was referred to the Environmental Conservation Committee earlier this month. “Our industry is committed to improving our sustainable practices. Over three decades the industry has decreased ambient emissions of vinyl chloride by 87 percent per unit,” the Vinyl Institute wrote in response to questions from The Intercept. “While many unfortunately equate the state of the industry in the 1970s to today, we have made great strides in worker safety and emissions reductions in the five decades since, and part of our state efforts is to ensure lawmakers are making decisions with up-to-date scientific data.” PVC was also challenged at the international level last year, as the United Nations Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on Plastic Pollution convened twice to discuss the proposed Global Plastics Treaty. The European Union and dozens of countries have advocated for a PVC ban. “Our team was on the ground at these meetings,” states the Vinyl Institute’s site, “to educate delegates on the positive impact that PVC products have on human rights, equity and public health around the globe.” Fenceline Watch has also been an observer at the treaty discussions, pushing for an approach to plastic management that protects human health and the environment. Arellano noted that the United States has taken a more “business-friendly approach” to the discussions — a “complete opposite stance” from small Pacific Island nations, which must contend with huge amounts of the world’s plastic washing up on their shores. “A ban on PVC would harm developing nations and undermine the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals,” the Vinyl Institute wrote to The Intercept. “We all agree with the overarching goal of eliminating plastic waste, and the Vinyl Institute is present at these meetings to educate the global community on the importance of PVC products in health care and clean drinking water.” Meanwhile, the petrochemical industry is ramping up efforts to undermine the EPA: In 2023, the Vinyl Institute sued the agency over an order it issued under the reformed Toxic Substances Control Act, or TSCA. The EPA designated 1,1,2-trichloroethane, a potentially carcinogenic chemical used to create vinyl chloride, as a “high priority” for risk evaluation and instructed companies to perform new toxicity tests on birds — something the Vinyl Institute has called “unnecessary,” “unjustified,” and “improper.” That hasn’t stopped the EPA from putting vinyl chloride itself in its crosshairs. On December 14, the agency announced it had added the chemical to its list of priorities for formal review under the TSCA, a step that could potentially lead to an eventual vinyl chloride ban. “We really need to be transitioning away from toxic petrochemicals and dangerous petrochemical plastics like vinyl, especially when we know there are viable, safer alternatives,” said Schade. “I think the tide is beginning to turn, and I think the East Palestine disaster this last year was a real wakeup call.” The post Vinyl Chloride Industry Keeps Expanding Despite East Palestine Disaster appeared first on The Intercept.

Proposed laws to curtail the use of PVC plastics have failed amid heavy lobbying. The post Vinyl Chloride Industry Keeps Expanding Despite East Palestine Disaster appeared first on The Intercept.

When a Norfolk Southern train derailed last February in East Palestine, Ohio, igniting a chemical fire and releasing 1 million pounds of toxic vinyl chloride into the surrounding air and water, politicians rushed to express their support for the impacted community. Within a month, senators introduced the bipartisan 2023 Railway Safety Act, a crucial effort to strengthen safety regulations for the transportation of hazardous materials.

In the year since the disaster, vinyl chloride has also faced heightened scrutiny. But despite a newfound focus on the chemical’s dangers, the market for vinyl products is continuing to grow. Major petrochemical companies are expanding their operations — and the vinyl industry is spending more money than ever before to lobby lawmakers on its talking points.

Vinyl chloride is a key building block for the production of polyvinyl chloride, or PVC, a plastic found in a range of construction materials, medical devices, and household items. For decades, environmental advocates have sounded the alarm over PVC, calling it the “poison plastic”: In addition to vinyl chloride, which is classified as a Group A human carcinogen by the Environmental Protection Agency, PVC contains harmful additives like phthalates and flame retardants. The production process releases massive amounts of greenhouse gases, exposes workers to asbestos and the class of industrial “forever chemicals” known as PFAS, and sends toxic pollutants into front-line communities.

“There’s been growing interest to regulate vinyl chloride, PVC plastic, and its additives at the state level, the national level, and the international level over the last year,” said Mike Schade, a campaign director for Toxic-Free Future, who has co-authored multiple reports on the dangers of producing, transporting, and disposing of vinyl chloride. “We’re definitely concerned that, at the same time as we’re learning more and more about the dangers of vinyl chloride and the chemicals associated with its life cycle, the plastics industry has been expanding in recent years, including the PVC plastics industry.”

HOUSTON, TEXAS - SEPTEMBER 30: A towboat pushes a barge up he Houston Ship Channel on Friday, Sept. 30, 2022 in Houston. (Elizabeth Conley/Houston Chronicle via Getty Images)
A towboat pushes a barge up he Houston Ship Channel on Sept. 30, 2022, in Houston, Texas. Last month, Amnesty International released a report that found the severity of toxic pollution in the Houston Ship Channel amounts to a human rights violation.
Photo: Elizabeth Conley/Houston Chronicle via Getty Images

Betting on More Plastic

Amid growing calls to phase out fossil fuels, the industry is now betting on plastic — created using petroleum-derived chemicals like vinyl chloride — as a lifeline.

In recent years, OxyVinyls — a subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum — Formosa Plastics, and Shintech have announced billion-dollar plans to expand their PVC plastic operations. Four months after the East Palestine disaster, chemical manufacturer Orbia declared its intentions to build a massive vinyl plant in the United States before 2028.

Most petrochemical operations, including PVC plants, are sited in the Gulf Coast region, where marginalized communities bear the brunt of industrial pollution. Exposure to vinyl chloride is associated with an increased risk of liver, brain, and lung cancer, as well as lymphoma and leukemia. When vinyl chloride burns, it can cause even more harm, releasing a highly toxic class of chemical compounds known as dioxins.

A 2023 Toxic-Free Future report noted that at least four low-income communities of color in Louisiana have been forced to relocate due to contamination from the vinyl plastics industry. This includes Mossville, one of the first towns founded by freed slaves in the South. Toxicology tests conducted by the federal government determined that Mossville residents, living in the shadow of pollution from vinyl chloride manufacturers, had elevated levels of dioxins in their bodies.

That testing was completed in 1998. But the devastation wrought by vinyl chloride is ongoing: In January, the EPA released a risk assessment detailing findings of toxic emissions near a Westlake Chemical vinyl plant in Calvert City, Kentucky. After collecting air monitoring data for more than a year, the EPA determined that emissions exceeded the state’s acceptable levels of lifetime cancer risk.

The findings arrive two months after Westlake made headlines for a different reason: The company is investing $134 million to expand its PVC pipe plant in Wichita Falls, Texas.

Yvette Arellano, founder and director of the grassroots environmental justice organization Fenceline Watch, noted that the Houston area has also seen “massive investments” from petrochemical companies in recent years. The 52-mile Houston Ship Channel is already one of the country’s most polluted areas, home to more than 600 manufacturers of plastics and plastic feedstocks.

Last month, Amnesty International released a report that found the severity of toxic pollution in the Houston Ship Channel amounts to a human rights violation.

“The expansion in the Houston Ship Channel is largely fueled by the plastics industry, including PVC and vinyl,” said Arellano. “We’re talking about a public health threat that’s multiplied because of the cumulative impact of these facilities.”

THE WOODLANDS, TEXAS - DECEMBER 11: The Occidental Petroleum Headquarters is seen on December 11, 2023 in The Woodlands, Texas. Occidental Petroleum has announced a $10.8 billion agreement to buy the West Texas energy producer, Crown Rock. Occidental claims that the acquiring of Crown Rock will add approximately 170,000 barrels of oil equivalent a day to production in 2024. (Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images)
The Occidental Petroleum Headquarters is seen on Dec. 11, 2023, in The Woodlands, Texas.
Photo: Brandon Bell/Getty Images

Increased Lobbying

In 2022, OxyVinyls, Shintech, Westlake, and Formosa collectively released more than half a million pounds of vinyl chloride into the air, according to an analysis of Toxic Release Inventory data by Material Research. But as members of the Vinyl Institute, the leading lobbying group for the PVC and vinyl chloride industry, the four companies are fighting hard to convince lawmakers that PVC is safe and sustainable.

While the group has been active on Capitol Hill for decades, it upped its federal lobbying spend to $560,000 last year. According to disclosures, lobbyists met with lawmakers to discuss topics like the regulation of polyvinyl chloride and the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act, which seeks to reduce the production of single-use plastics. The Vinyl Institute opposes the act, rallying for unproven chemical recycling technologies over source reduction strategies.

At the state level, the Vinyl Institute’s website boasts that it “worked close with state partners to slow down or stop PVC bans around the nation.” Legislation introduced in Maine, California, and New York last year in the wake of the East Palestine derailment sought to ban the use of PVC and other toxic substances in consumer packaging. Maine’s bill quickly died and California’s went dormant; New York’s was referred to the Environmental Conservation Committee earlier this month.

“Our industry is committed to improving our sustainable practices. Over three decades the industry has decreased ambient emissions of vinyl chloride by 87 percent per unit,” the Vinyl Institute wrote in response to questions from The Intercept. “While many unfortunately equate the state of the industry in the 1970s to today, we have made great strides in worker safety and emissions reductions in the five decades since, and part of our state efforts is to ensure lawmakers are making decisions with up-to-date scientific data.”

PVC was also challenged at the international level last year, as the United Nations Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on Plastic Pollution convened twice to discuss the proposed Global Plastics Treaty. The European Union and dozens of countries have advocated for a PVC ban.

“Our team was on the ground at these meetings,” states the Vinyl Institute’s site, “to educate delegates on the positive impact that PVC products have on human rights, equity and public health around the globe.”

Fenceline Watch has also been an observer at the treaty discussions, pushing for an approach to plastic management that protects human health and the environment. Arellano noted that the United States has taken a more “business-friendly approach” to the discussions — a “complete opposite stance” from small Pacific Island nations, which must contend with huge amounts of the world’s plastic washing up on their shores.

“A ban on PVC would harm developing nations and undermine the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals,” the Vinyl Institute wrote to The Intercept. “We all agree with the overarching goal of eliminating plastic waste, and the Vinyl Institute is present at these meetings to educate the global community on the importance of PVC products in health care and clean drinking water.”

Meanwhile, the petrochemical industry is ramping up efforts to undermine the EPA: In 2023, the Vinyl Institute sued the agency over an order it issued under the reformed Toxic Substances Control Act, or TSCA. The EPA designated 1,1,2-trichloroethane, a potentially carcinogenic chemical used to create vinyl chloride, as a “high priority” for risk evaluation and instructed companies to perform new toxicity tests on birds — something the Vinyl Institute has called “unnecessary,” “unjustified,” and “improper.”

That hasn’t stopped the EPA from putting vinyl chloride itself in its crosshairs. On December 14, the agency announced it had added the chemical to its list of priorities for formal review under the TSCA, a step that could potentially lead to an eventual vinyl chloride ban.

“We really need to be transitioning away from toxic petrochemicals and dangerous petrochemical plastics like vinyl, especially when we know there are viable, safer alternatives,” said Schade. “I think the tide is beginning to turn, and I think the East Palestine disaster this last year was a real wakeup call.”

The post Vinyl Chloride Industry Keeps Expanding Despite East Palestine Disaster appeared first on The Intercept.

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‘Business as usual:’ Why the $27B ‘green bank’ could survive Trump

One of the Inflation Reduction Act’s most celebrated programs — a nationwide “green bank” to help fund climate projects that struggle to secure private-sector loans — has also been one of the most reviled by Republican lawmakers. Last October, House Republicans dogged the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency over…

One of the Inflation Reduction Act’s most celebrated programs — a nationwide ​“green bank” to help fund climate projects that struggle to secure private-sector loans — has also been one of the most reviled by Republican lawmakers. Last October, House Republicans dogged the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency over its management of the program, known as the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF), calling it a “$27 billion slush fund of taxpayer money.” In January, they accused the Biden administration of directing the money to ​“favored special interest organizations.” House Republicans have also seized on a report from the EPA’s Office of Inspector General stating that the speed at which the program was moving could lead to ​“waste, fraud, and abuse.” But the green bank program appears to be well positioned to survive the next four years, despite the fact that Republicans won control over Congress and the presidency earlier this month. That’s assuming the Trump administration follows the law and regulations that established the program, however — and in any case, the administration will still have opportunities to slow the program down. “As a Democrat, of course I’m disappointed” in the election results, Reed Hundt, head of the Coalition for Green Capital (CGC), one of the entities in charge of allocating green bank funds, told Canary Media. ​“But as the CEO of CGC, there’s no change at all in what we’re going to do. It’s completely and totally business as usual.” Hundt, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission chair during the Clinton administration, is a longtime champion of a national green bank. More than a decade of work on the concept paid off in 2022 with the inclusion of a green bank program in the landmark IRA climate law. The idea is to create a nationwide version of the government-backed and nonprofit green banks now operating in 17 states, offering low-cost loans for rooftop solar, efficiency retrofits, electric heat pumps, EV charging, and similar carbon-cutting projects. The law gave the EPA $27 billion to grant to states, tribes, nonprofit groups, and public-private consortiums. Those grantees, in turn, can lend or grant funds to projects and initiatives across the country — and bring in other private-sector lenders and financial backers to boost the impact of the money. In April, the EPA picked eight coalitions to receive a collective $20 billion of this green bank capital, including $5 billion for the CGC. That month, the EPA also picked 60 recipients for its $7 billion Solar for All program. And in August, the EPA announced it had ​“obligated the full $27 billion” of its GGRF funds to selected recipients. That means that CGC now has ​“a contract with the government that tells us and our network partners what we must do,” Hundt said. ​“We have the money, and we’re going to fulfill the contract.” Having these funds ​“obligated” is important, said Adam Fischer, vice president at Waxman Strategies, a Washington, D.C.–based policy and lobbying firm founded by Henry Waxman, a former Democratic U.S. House member. Under the statutory language of the IRA, once GGRF funds are obligated, ​“EPA is now under contract with all 68 awardees” across all of its programs, he said. “As such, any attempt by the incoming administration to claw back or otherwise upend disbursement of obligated funds would be a breach of contract,” said Fischer, who led development and drafting of the GGRF while working at the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce. ​“If they do try to meddle with contracts for unjustifiable reasons, they’ll face lawsuits.” That view was echoed by Michael Catanzaro, the CEO of CGCN Group, a Republican lobbying firm, and a former special assistant for domestic energy and environmental policy in the first Trump administration. “It’s going to be difficult, I think, for an EPA to come in and claw that back,” Catanzaro said during a November 14 panel discussion hosted by the law firm Norton Rose Fulbright. ​“I think you’re going to create some serious legal problems if you try to do that. […] EPA worked pretty diligently to get the money out the door, knowing that the election could go south on them.” The future of the green bank under Trump That’s not to say that the GGRF won’t face attacks from the Trump administration or the Republican-controlled Congress, however. The program has ​“been a long-standing target of House Republicans and Republicans generally in the Congress since the IRA was finalized and EPA began work to figure out where that money would go,” Catanzaro said. Though the Trump administration may not be able to outright eliminate the GGRF program, several people who spoke to Canary Media on condition of anonymity said that the EPA under Trump could take actions to disrupt it, such as refusing to approve loans made by recipients. Those actions could be legally challenged, they said — but those disputes would take time to play out, leaving financing from the program in an extended state of limbo. In the face of that risk, the program’s best defense may be its value to communities in Republican-dominated states and congressional districts.

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Randy Newman’s Genius for Political Irony

Here’s an uncomfortable truth: Most musicians on the left write songs that lack a decent sense of humor about serious matters, whether past or present. Earnest idealists abound: Think of Woody Guthrie warbling about “Pastures of Plenty” or Pete Seeger musing what he could do “If I Had a Hammer.” The radical movements of the 1960s and ’70s did spawn blunt satirists, such as Malvina Reynolds, who scorned suburbanites who lived in “Little Boxes,” and Phil Ochs, who spitefully pleaded, “Love Me, I’m a Liberal.” Yet even the best of such creations, like Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” are hard to appreciate now with any emotion save nostalgia. If a revolution ever occurs in the United States, it will most certainly be seen and heard on billions of screens of every conceivable size.Randy Newman has been a great exception to this unhappy norm. He has never explicitly identified with any ideological tendency, preferring to let his music express his thoughts, he tells Robert Hilburn in the new biography, A Few Words in Defense of Our Country: The Biography of Randy Newman. But for nearly 60 years, Newman has been churning out wise and witty lyrics, set to genres from rock to blues to country, about a stunning variety of topics and individuals, political and historical. Among them are slavery, empire, racism, nuclear destruction, religion, patriotism, apartheid, environmental disaster, homophobia, Karl Marx, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin, Ivanka Trump, and the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. To list them so baldly obscures the imagination behind his best political songs. In many of them, characters talk about and for themselves, voicing odious sentiments that Newman recognizes are vital to making the United States the intolerable yet alluring mess it has always been. He “inhabits his characters so completely,” a New York Times critic once wrote, “that he makes us uneasy, wondering how much self-identification he has invested in their creation. His work achieves its power by that very confusion.”Take “Political Science,” a novel ditty he wrote during the early 1970s, when demonstrators on multiple continents were raging against the carnage the United States was perpetrating in Indochina. The song takes up the voice of the U.S. foreign policy establishment. “No one likes us, I don’t know why, / We may not be perfect, but heaven knows we try,” sings Newman with a casualness that quickly segues to a most ghastly of all solutions: “Let’s drop the big one and see what happens.” Think of the glorious result: “There’ll be no one left to blame us.” And “every city the whole world round / Will just be another American town. / Oh, how peaceful it will be, / We’ll set everybody free.” “Political Science” is a hymn to American exceptionalism as imagined by a genocidal innocent: After the nuclear holocaust, no one will be alive except Americans. Well, he would spare Australia: “Don’t wanna hurt no kangaroo / We’ll build an all-American amusement park there / They got surfing, too.”Unlike popular songs by leftists that seek to spark outrage or exultation or urge listeners to get out in the street and march, Randy Newman’s political music nudges you to reflect on the roots of your own beliefs and prejudices, and appreciate the power of characters you despise. “I believe in not hurting anybody,” he has said. That simple line is a version of the motto of PM, a left-wing daily paper published in New York City during the 1940s: “We are against people who push other people around, just for the fun of pushing, whether they flourish in this country or abroad.” Randy Newman has fun getting under such people’s skin.The irony about this virtuoso of political irony is that his best-known works are entirely apolitical. Born in 1943, Newman began his career in the early 1960s writing for such artists as Bobby Darin and Irma Thomas, as well as recording his own pop and rock songs. But since the 1970s, Newman has written music for 29 films, including such animated blockbusters as Toy Story (1, 2, 3, and 4), Monsters, Inc., and A Bug’s Life, as well as The Natural, the dark drama about an ill-fated baseball star, played by Robert Redford. When I ask students if they have heard of Newman, most draw a blank. But nearly all can recite a few lines from “You’ve Got a Friend in Me,” which he wrote for the first Toy Story, a staple of kids’ cinema since Pixar released it in 1995. He has won two Oscars for his music and been nominated for many others.Newman was to the film business born: Three of his uncles wrote acclaimed scores, and his physician father wanted his son to be a musician more than he did. Newman shed that reluctance when he discovered he had a gift for writing songs. Shortly after he graduated from high school, the Fleetwoods, a pop trio with a brace of No. 1 songs to their credit, recorded his ballad, “They Tell Me It’s Summer,” in which a teenager laments, “it just can’t be summer / When I’m not with you.” The banal, if catchy, tune climbed as high as No. 36 on the Billboard chart.Over his long career, Newman has written far better, if similarly painful, songs about longing and depression, covered by the likes of Nina Simone, Ray Charles, Bonnie Raitt, and Neil Diamond. In “Guilty,” recorded back in 1974, he captured with perfect pith the forlorn mood of a man on drugs: You know, I just can’t stand myselfAnd it takes a whole lot of medicineFor me to pretend that I’m somebody elseSuch songs appear on the same albums as do the overtly political creations, and Newman would probably object to the idea that there is a fundamental difference between them. “I’m interested in this country,” he told one interviewer, “geography, weather, the people, the way people look, what they eat, what they call things … maybe American psychology is my big subject.”In his political songs, however, Newman deploys satire in deft and original ways to highlight a horrific aspect of the nation’s past. Perhaps the greatest example is “Sail Away,” recorded in 1972. As the strings of an orchestra swell behind him, a slave trader eager to dispatch people in bondage across “the mighty ocean into Charleston Bay” speaks to a gathering of unwitting Africans. His offers them a P.R. pitch for the American dream, laced with condescending clichés: In America you get food to eatWon’t have to run through the jungleAnd scuff up your feetYou’ll just sing about Jesus and drink wine all dayIt’s great to be an American…In America every man is freeTo take care of his home and his familyYou’ll be as happy as a monkey in a monkey treeYou’re all gonna be an AmericanSail away, sail awayWe will cross the mighty ocean into Charleston BaySail away, sail awayWe will cross the mighty ocean into Charleston BaySo climb aboard that big ship and don’t pay any heed to any chains you may see laying around. For you will soon be on your way to the promised land, like those Europeans who came before and will come after you. The despicable con job underlines a sober truth: To be proud to “be an American,” one should be able to enjoy “the fruits of Americanism,” as Malcolm X put it. “A secret ambivalence of four hundred years” of life in this country “finds a voice in this song,” wrote the critic Greil Marcus. “It is like a vision of heaven superimposed on hell.”Newman’s best-known commentary on white supremacy in America was also his most controversial song. “Rednecks,” the lead track on the 1974 album Good Old Boys, scores white liberals’ hypocrisy about racism. The song’s protagonist is a white dude from Dixie who freely admits to “keepin’ the n—s down.” He defends Lester Maddox—the one-term governor of Georgia and unabashed segregationist who threatened to attack any Black people who tried to eat in his fried chicken restaurant—as one of his own (“he may be a fool but he’s our fool”) while sneering at “some smart-ass New York Jew” who ridiculed Maddox in a TV interview show. Newman’s “redneck” embraces a slew of stereotypes about uncouth figures like himself: “We talk real funny down here / We drink too much and we laugh too loud”; “We don’t know our ass from a hole in the ground.” Up to this point in the song, one might scoff at the benighted fellow’s easy acknowledgment of his racism and his other faults, too.Then the lyric takes a sharp turn away from mocking such not-so-good old boys. Up North, the redneck points out, white folks claim they “set the n— free” and call him a “Negro.” But oppression reigns there too. Black people are “free to be put in a cage / In Harlem in New York City” and “in the South Side of Chicago / And the West Side” and in Hough in Cleveland, in East St. Louis, in San Francisco and in Roxbury in Boston, the song goes on. To accuse one’s adversary of committing the same sins, without realizing it, is one of the oldest moves in ideological combat. It should have stung liberals who didn’t take responsibility for their own share of injustice. But the song may have been too clever for some. Newman stopped performing it in public when white audiences in the South began singing right along to it, n-word and all.For Newman, the meaning of Americanism always swings between elegiac hope and justifiable rage. He loves his countrywomen and men, but it’s the affection of a brutal realist. In the 2006 song Robert Hilburn chose as the title of his biography, “A Few Words in Defense of Our Country,” Newman contrasted President George W. Bush’s misgoverning of the nation with the muddled decency of its citizens:I’d like to say a few wordsIn defense of our countryWhose people aren’t badNor are they meanNow, the leaders we haveWhile they’re the worst that we’ve hadAre hardly the worstThis poor world has seenNewman then ticked off the regimes of bloodthirsty tyrants, like King Leopold of Belgium, whose minions caused the deaths of millions of Congolese, and the Spanish monarchs who oversaw the Inquisition that lasted for centuries. He wasn’t apologizing for the debacle of the invasion of Iraq, motivated by lies, but warning that the United States could be rushing toward the same fate that befell such once mighty domains:The end of an empire is messy at bestAnd this empire is endingLike all the restLike the Spanish Armada adrift on the seaWe’re adrift in the land of the braveAnd the home of the freeThe New York Times published an abridged version of this casual message of terminal decline as an op-ed. Yet, in cold type and pixels, it fails to capture the power of a satirist whose laid-back vocals assail the myopia and cruelties of U.S. history.Newman always conveys that critique with the affection of an artist who will never abandon the place that, in another song, he embraces: “This is my country / These are my people / And I know ’em like the back of my own hand.” I think Newman would nod in agreement with the American protagonist of Rachel Kushner’s new novel, Creation Lake, an undercover spy in France, who remarks, “I miss being at home in a culture.… Our words, our expanse of idioms, are expressive and creative and precise, like our music and … our passion for violence, stupidity, and freedom.”Hilburn’s biography does not explain how this rather shy fellow from a well-to-do Jewish family managed to create such provocative music about a cornucopia of subjects and the characters who embody them. He dispenses a surfeit of details about Newman’s personal life, but few bear on the content of his works, political and otherwise. Having conducted many hours of interviews with his subject, Hilburn can dwell at length on the highs and lows of Newman’s prolific career and two marriages. But to learn which of his albums made lots of money and which flopped or why he split from his first wife but is happily married to the second reveals almost nothing about what inspired his songs. Hilburn even fails to make clear why Newman has always sung with a gentle Southern drawl—although he spent just two infant years in New Orleans and has long lived in the leafy comfort of West L.A. The result is a biography seemingly intended for readers who already adore Newman’s music but might enjoy having a chronological reference book around as they listen to it.To his credit, Hilburn reprints all the words to a remarkable Newman song from 1999 that fans of classics like “Sail Away” may have missed. “The Great Nations of Europe” is something quite rare in popular music: a witty critique of empire inspired by a book written by a distinguished historian. In Ecological Imperialism, published in 1986, Alfred Crosby argued that adventurers from the Old World were able to subjugate the inhabitants of the New because they not just had plenty of “guns for conquest” but, without being aware of it, also carried in their cargo and bodies “infectious diseases for decimating indigenous populations.” Newman lifted a few shocking details from Crosby’s influential book and tied them together with a catchy chorus:The great nations of EuropeHad gathered on the shoreThey’d conquered what was behind themAnd now they wanted moreSo they looked to the mighty oceanAnd took to the western seaThe great nations of Europe in the sixteenth centuryHide your wives and daughtersHide the groceries, tooGreat nations of Europe coming throughThe Grand Canary IslandsFirst land to which they cameThey slaughtered all the canariesWhich gave the land its nameThere were natives there called GuanchesGuanches by the scoreBullets, disease, the Portuguese, and they weren’t there anymoreNewman offers no hope for collective liberation in this or any other song. They could never serve as the soundtrack for a left-wing gathering as “Solidarity Forever” or “This Land Is Your Land” once did. But the skeptical humor of his best creations may be more valuable to the left than the romantic uplift in such radical standards. Just as Mr. Burns in The Simpsons has probably taught more Americans to ridicule corporate moguls than have reams of Marxian essays, so “Sail Away” debunks the ideal of American exceptionalism with a panache no leftist scholar has equaled. “The common discovery of America,” Norman Mailer once wrote, “was probably that Americans were the first people on earth to live for their humor; nothing was so important to Americans as humor.”Now in his eighties, Newman has not performed in recent years and may never mount a stage again. But I will never forget the times I saw this small, froggish man sit down at a piano and drawl out doses of grim reality that made me grin and think about this land that’s our land—for better and for worse.

Here’s an uncomfortable truth: Most musicians on the left write songs that lack a decent sense of humor about serious matters, whether past or present. Earnest idealists abound: Think of Woody Guthrie warbling about “Pastures of Plenty” or Pete Seeger musing what he could do “If I Had a Hammer.” The radical movements of the 1960s and ’70s did spawn blunt satirists, such as Malvina Reynolds, who scorned suburbanites who lived in “Little Boxes,” and Phil Ochs, who spitefully pleaded, “Love Me, I’m a Liberal.” Yet even the best of such creations, like Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” are hard to appreciate now with any emotion save nostalgia. If a revolution ever occurs in the United States, it will most certainly be seen and heard on billions of screens of every conceivable size.Randy Newman has been a great exception to this unhappy norm. He has never explicitly identified with any ideological tendency, preferring to let his music express his thoughts, he tells Robert Hilburn in the new biography, A Few Words in Defense of Our Country: The Biography of Randy Newman. But for nearly 60 years, Newman has been churning out wise and witty lyrics, set to genres from rock to blues to country, about a stunning variety of topics and individuals, political and historical. Among them are slavery, empire, racism, nuclear destruction, religion, patriotism, apartheid, environmental disaster, homophobia, Karl Marx, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin, Ivanka Trump, and the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. To list them so baldly obscures the imagination behind his best political songs. In many of them, characters talk about and for themselves, voicing odious sentiments that Newman recognizes are vital to making the United States the intolerable yet alluring mess it has always been. He “inhabits his characters so completely,” a New York Times critic once wrote, “that he makes us uneasy, wondering how much self-identification he has invested in their creation. His work achieves its power by that very confusion.”Take “Political Science,” a novel ditty he wrote during the early 1970s, when demonstrators on multiple continents were raging against the carnage the United States was perpetrating in Indochina. The song takes up the voice of the U.S. foreign policy establishment. “No one likes us, I don’t know why, / We may not be perfect, but heaven knows we try,” sings Newman with a casualness that quickly segues to a most ghastly of all solutions: “Let’s drop the big one and see what happens.” Think of the glorious result: “There’ll be no one left to blame us.” And “every city the whole world round / Will just be another American town. / Oh, how peaceful it will be, / We’ll set everybody free.” “Political Science” is a hymn to American exceptionalism as imagined by a genocidal innocent: After the nuclear holocaust, no one will be alive except Americans. Well, he would spare Australia: “Don’t wanna hurt no kangaroo / We’ll build an all-American amusement park there / They got surfing, too.”Unlike popular songs by leftists that seek to spark outrage or exultation or urge listeners to get out in the street and march, Randy Newman’s political music nudges you to reflect on the roots of your own beliefs and prejudices, and appreciate the power of characters you despise. “I believe in not hurting anybody,” he has said. That simple line is a version of the motto of PM, a left-wing daily paper published in New York City during the 1940s: “We are against people who push other people around, just for the fun of pushing, whether they flourish in this country or abroad.” Randy Newman has fun getting under such people’s skin.The irony about this virtuoso of political irony is that his best-known works are entirely apolitical. Born in 1943, Newman began his career in the early 1960s writing for such artists as Bobby Darin and Irma Thomas, as well as recording his own pop and rock songs. But since the 1970s, Newman has written music for 29 films, including such animated blockbusters as Toy Story (1, 2, 3, and 4), Monsters, Inc., and A Bug’s Life, as well as The Natural, the dark drama about an ill-fated baseball star, played by Robert Redford. When I ask students if they have heard of Newman, most draw a blank. But nearly all can recite a few lines from “You’ve Got a Friend in Me,” which he wrote for the first Toy Story, a staple of kids’ cinema since Pixar released it in 1995. He has won two Oscars for his music and been nominated for many others.Newman was to the film business born: Three of his uncles wrote acclaimed scores, and his physician father wanted his son to be a musician more than he did. Newman shed that reluctance when he discovered he had a gift for writing songs. Shortly after he graduated from high school, the Fleetwoods, a pop trio with a brace of No. 1 songs to their credit, recorded his ballad, “They Tell Me It’s Summer,” in which a teenager laments, “it just can’t be summer / When I’m not with you.” The banal, if catchy, tune climbed as high as No. 36 on the Billboard chart.Over his long career, Newman has written far better, if similarly painful, songs about longing and depression, covered by the likes of Nina Simone, Ray Charles, Bonnie Raitt, and Neil Diamond. In “Guilty,” recorded back in 1974, he captured with perfect pith the forlorn mood of a man on drugs: You know, I just can’t stand myselfAnd it takes a whole lot of medicineFor me to pretend that I’m somebody elseSuch songs appear on the same albums as do the overtly political creations, and Newman would probably object to the idea that there is a fundamental difference between them. “I’m interested in this country,” he told one interviewer, “geography, weather, the people, the way people look, what they eat, what they call things … maybe American psychology is my big subject.”In his political songs, however, Newman deploys satire in deft and original ways to highlight a horrific aspect of the nation’s past. Perhaps the greatest example is “Sail Away,” recorded in 1972. As the strings of an orchestra swell behind him, a slave trader eager to dispatch people in bondage across “the mighty ocean into Charleston Bay” speaks to a gathering of unwitting Africans. His offers them a P.R. pitch for the American dream, laced with condescending clichés: In America you get food to eatWon’t have to run through the jungleAnd scuff up your feetYou’ll just sing about Jesus and drink wine all dayIt’s great to be an American…In America every man is freeTo take care of his home and his familyYou’ll be as happy as a monkey in a monkey treeYou’re all gonna be an AmericanSail away, sail awayWe will cross the mighty ocean into Charleston BaySail away, sail awayWe will cross the mighty ocean into Charleston BaySo climb aboard that big ship and don’t pay any heed to any chains you may see laying around. For you will soon be on your way to the promised land, like those Europeans who came before and will come after you. The despicable con job underlines a sober truth: To be proud to “be an American,” one should be able to enjoy “the fruits of Americanism,” as Malcolm X put it. “A secret ambivalence of four hundred years” of life in this country “finds a voice in this song,” wrote the critic Greil Marcus. “It is like a vision of heaven superimposed on hell.”Newman’s best-known commentary on white supremacy in America was also his most controversial song. “Rednecks,” the lead track on the 1974 album Good Old Boys, scores white liberals’ hypocrisy about racism. The song’s protagonist is a white dude from Dixie who freely admits to “keepin’ the n—s down.” He defends Lester Maddox—the one-term governor of Georgia and unabashed segregationist who threatened to attack any Black people who tried to eat in his fried chicken restaurant—as one of his own (“he may be a fool but he’s our fool”) while sneering at “some smart-ass New York Jew” who ridiculed Maddox in a TV interview show. Newman’s “redneck” embraces a slew of stereotypes about uncouth figures like himself: “We talk real funny down here / We drink too much and we laugh too loud”; “We don’t know our ass from a hole in the ground.” Up to this point in the song, one might scoff at the benighted fellow’s easy acknowledgment of his racism and his other faults, too.Then the lyric takes a sharp turn away from mocking such not-so-good old boys. Up North, the redneck points out, white folks claim they “set the n— free” and call him a “Negro.” But oppression reigns there too. Black people are “free to be put in a cage / In Harlem in New York City” and “in the South Side of Chicago / And the West Side” and in Hough in Cleveland, in East St. Louis, in San Francisco and in Roxbury in Boston, the song goes on. To accuse one’s adversary of committing the same sins, without realizing it, is one of the oldest moves in ideological combat. It should have stung liberals who didn’t take responsibility for their own share of injustice. But the song may have been too clever for some. Newman stopped performing it in public when white audiences in the South began singing right along to it, n-word and all.For Newman, the meaning of Americanism always swings between elegiac hope and justifiable rage. He loves his countrywomen and men, but it’s the affection of a brutal realist. In the 2006 song Robert Hilburn chose as the title of his biography, “A Few Words in Defense of Our Country,” Newman contrasted President George W. Bush’s misgoverning of the nation with the muddled decency of its citizens:I’d like to say a few wordsIn defense of our countryWhose people aren’t badNor are they meanNow, the leaders we haveWhile they’re the worst that we’ve hadAre hardly the worstThis poor world has seenNewman then ticked off the regimes of bloodthirsty tyrants, like King Leopold of Belgium, whose minions caused the deaths of millions of Congolese, and the Spanish monarchs who oversaw the Inquisition that lasted for centuries. He wasn’t apologizing for the debacle of the invasion of Iraq, motivated by lies, but warning that the United States could be rushing toward the same fate that befell such once mighty domains:The end of an empire is messy at bestAnd this empire is endingLike all the restLike the Spanish Armada adrift on the seaWe’re adrift in the land of the braveAnd the home of the freeThe New York Times published an abridged version of this casual message of terminal decline as an op-ed. Yet, in cold type and pixels, it fails to capture the power of a satirist whose laid-back vocals assail the myopia and cruelties of U.S. history.Newman always conveys that critique with the affection of an artist who will never abandon the place that, in another song, he embraces: “This is my country / These are my people / And I know ’em like the back of my own hand.” I think Newman would nod in agreement with the American protagonist of Rachel Kushner’s new novel, Creation Lake, an undercover spy in France, who remarks, “I miss being at home in a culture.… Our words, our expanse of idioms, are expressive and creative and precise, like our music and … our passion for violence, stupidity, and freedom.”Hilburn’s biography does not explain how this rather shy fellow from a well-to-do Jewish family managed to create such provocative music about a cornucopia of subjects and the characters who embody them. He dispenses a surfeit of details about Newman’s personal life, but few bear on the content of his works, political and otherwise. Having conducted many hours of interviews with his subject, Hilburn can dwell at length on the highs and lows of Newman’s prolific career and two marriages. But to learn which of his albums made lots of money and which flopped or why he split from his first wife but is happily married to the second reveals almost nothing about what inspired his songs. Hilburn even fails to make clear why Newman has always sung with a gentle Southern drawl—although he spent just two infant years in New Orleans and has long lived in the leafy comfort of West L.A. The result is a biography seemingly intended for readers who already adore Newman’s music but might enjoy having a chronological reference book around as they listen to it.To his credit, Hilburn reprints all the words to a remarkable Newman song from 1999 that fans of classics like “Sail Away” may have missed. “The Great Nations of Europe” is something quite rare in popular music: a witty critique of empire inspired by a book written by a distinguished historian. In Ecological Imperialism, published in 1986, Alfred Crosby argued that adventurers from the Old World were able to subjugate the inhabitants of the New because they not just had plenty of “guns for conquest” but, without being aware of it, also carried in their cargo and bodies “infectious diseases for decimating indigenous populations.” Newman lifted a few shocking details from Crosby’s influential book and tied them together with a catchy chorus:The great nations of EuropeHad gathered on the shoreThey’d conquered what was behind themAnd now they wanted moreSo they looked to the mighty oceanAnd took to the western seaThe great nations of Europe in the sixteenth centuryHide your wives and daughtersHide the groceries, tooGreat nations of Europe coming throughThe Grand Canary IslandsFirst land to which they cameThey slaughtered all the canariesWhich gave the land its nameThere were natives there called GuanchesGuanches by the scoreBullets, disease, the Portuguese, and they weren’t there anymoreNewman offers no hope for collective liberation in this or any other song. They could never serve as the soundtrack for a left-wing gathering as “Solidarity Forever” or “This Land Is Your Land” once did. But the skeptical humor of his best creations may be more valuable to the left than the romantic uplift in such radical standards. Just as Mr. Burns in The Simpsons has probably taught more Americans to ridicule corporate moguls than have reams of Marxian essays, so “Sail Away” debunks the ideal of American exceptionalism with a panache no leftist scholar has equaled. “The common discovery of America,” Norman Mailer once wrote, “was probably that Americans were the first people on earth to live for their humor; nothing was so important to Americans as humor.”Now in his eighties, Newman has not performed in recent years and may never mount a stage again. But I will never forget the times I saw this small, froggish man sit down at a piano and drawl out doses of grim reality that made me grin and think about this land that’s our land—for better and for worse.

Business
Culture
Food

This seaside town will power thousands of homes with waves

A test site off the Oregon coast could be key to unlocking wave power in the United States. Surprisingly, residents aren’t opposed.

NEWPORT, Ore. — At a moment when large offshore wind projects are encountering public resistance, a nascent ocean industry is showing promise: wave energy.It’s coming to life in Newport, a rainy coastal town of nearly 10,500 people located a couple of hours south of Portland. Home to fishing operators and researchers, Newport attracts tourists and retirees with its famous aquarium, sprawling beaches and noisy sea lions. If you ask anyone at the lively bayfront about a wave energy project, they probably don’t know much about it.And yet right off the coast, a $100 million effort with funding from the Energy Department aims to convert the power of waves into energy, and help catch up to Europe in developing this new technology. The buoy-like contraptions, located several miles offshore, will deliver up to 20 megawatts of energy — enough to power thousands of homes and businesses.As federal officials look to shift America’s electricity grid away from fossil fuels, they are seeking alternatives to solar and wind, which can only deliver energy when the sun shines or the wind blows. Waves — constant and full of untapped energy — have emerged as a promising option. And because wave energy projects are relatively unobtrusive, they’re far less controversial than offshore wind, which has generated fierce opposition on both U.S. coasts. In September, the Biden administration announced up to $112.5 million would go toward the development of wave energy converters, the largest federal investment in marine energy.There’s enough energy in the waves off America’s coasts to power one third of all the nation’s homes, said Matthew Grosso, the Energy Department’s director of the water power technologies office.Spanning 2.65 square miles and located seven miles out from shore, the PacWave test site is expected to be a “game changer for marine energy,” he said in an interview.Under the water, subsea connectors are waiting to be plugged in like extension cords to wave energy converters developed by teams around the world. With deep-sea offshore testing, companies will see how much power these energy converters can produce, whether they can hold up in rough ocean conditions, what environmental impacts they might have and how the devices will interact with each other.PacWave, a project of Oregon State University (OSU), represents a necessary step for commercializing wave energy, experts said.“The research that’s been done in the past 15 years is reaching the point of what we can do just in labs or in theory,” Grosso said. “We’ve got to start testing some of this stuff out and see what works and what doesn’t.”How wave energy worksUnlike other forms of renewable energy, engineers have not yet settled on a single model of wave energy converters. While wind turbines have converged into the three-blade turbine shape, there’s many types of wave energy converters in development, turning the motion of the wave into electrical energy in different ways.You can feel the energy in the waves, when it laps at the shore or when it rocks your boat. Created by wind over the sea, it’s one part of the ecosystem of renewable energy that’s available to us. But since waves don’t move in a linear motion, they’re harder to capture energy from than the flow of wind over a turbine, for example.One wave energy converter may not work in all environments, either — models can vary based on the depth of water and conditions the converter will operate in. Some use rotating cylinders; some are buoys that move up and down with the waves; others look like snakes with joints that move when waves roll through.But all of these devices use the oscillating or orbital motion of a wave to generate an electrical current, explained PacWave Chief Scientist Burke Hales, in the same way that turbines use rotations to generate a current.With four different berths, the site can host devices by multiple developers at once. The cables carrying the electricity are buried under the seafloor, running 12 miles diagonal to the shoreline to avoid a rocky reef. On land, an operating site measures the energy output and sends the energy to the Central Lincoln power utility.Because there’s no wave energy converters plugged in yet, there’s still a clear view of the horizon from Newport’s beaches. But even the larger devices are unlikely to be visible to the naked eye once they’re there in the new year.Coexisting with fisheriesThe PacWave site sits where crabbers set out their pots to catch Dungeness crab, one of the West Coast’s most important seafood species. And yet, unlike an offshore wind project a hundred miles down the coast that sparked strong opposition, most residents are either unaware of the wave energy project or support it. The fact that the project is limited, and unlikely to spur commercial activity offshore that could damage the town’s fishing economy, has helped its cause.When deciding where to locate the project, Newport won out for its proximity to OSU’s main campus in Corvallis and the local fishing fleet’s openness to the idea. The town also hosts the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Marine Operations Center for the Pacific, which has its own research fleet.PacWave also brought the promise of jobs, said Belinda Batten, who conducted outreach for PacWave when she directed the Energy Department’s Northwest National Marine Renewable Energy Center. Many here remember how NOAA’s move to Newport in 2011 created employment opportunities.Perhaps most importantly, OSU already had a strong relationship with the community given the marine center in town, according to Charlie Plybon, who lives in Newport and is the Oregon senior policy manager for the nonprofit Surfrider Foundation.It took years of outreach and many town hall meetings for Batten, who now serves as a senior adviser to the OSU provost, and Kaety Jacobson, Lincoln County commissioner and a fisherman’s daughter, to cement their trust with the community. When they assembled some fleet members to decide the site, it took all of 10 minutes for the crabbers to draw a plot on a map of the ocean for a location that could work for everyone involved.That area was important fishing grounds for the fleet, said crabber Bob Eder. In his button-down shirt and sneakers, Eder knows he doesn’t look like a stereotypical fisherman, but he’s one of the most well-respected crabbers in the fleet and still goes out in the waters every season at the age of 73. The PacWave site could represent a loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars for the fleet every crabbing season, he said. On the navigation system in his boat, he pointed to a map that showed he had previously crabbed in the area that was now off limits.But the operators agreed to give it up for the sake of the experiment.Eder, a representative of the fishing community during the process, said that the agreement with Oregon State was a show of goodwill from the fishing community, whose members care about the environment and want to preserve their livelihood.“[Climate change] definitely affects those of us whose work is directly involved with the environment,” he said. “And so every fishery is at an environmental risk.”Where wave energy could thriveIn states like Oregon, where an abundance of renewable energy has lowered the price of electricity to around 3½ cents per kilowatt hour, wave energy isn’t a competitive option. The first large-scale commercial wave energy project, by contrast, is expected to produce electricity costing 12 to 47 cents per kilowatt hour.But in small, remote communities that depend on more expensive diesel fuel, wave power could ease energy woes.“There’s remote communities in Alaska where everyone is running on diesel generators, they’re not on the grid, they have no electrical system,” said PacWave Director Dan Hellin.The wave industry first has to overcome several challenges. The consensus in the industry is that wave energy’s development is 20 years behind that of wind. But Tim Ramsey, the Energy Department’s marine energy program manager, pointed out that wind began to take off at that point, in the early 2000s.In addition, putting something into offshore waters usually requires extensive federal permitting, which can take years. That’s why this test site is important for developers — PacWave’s operation offers a site that has already earned the necessary approvals.In order for wave energy to be economically viable, developers need to lower its cost. Technological advancements can help, and just as solar and wind energy have received government subsidies, federal support could help get wave energy off the ground.Members of the Newport fishing fleet — even those who aren’t fans of the project — have hope that this renewable energy offers possibilities.Crabber Bob Kemp, 75, said he isn’t thrilled that he won’t be able to fish for crab in that part of the ocean anymore, but he’s counting on the researchers to make good use of the space they’ve taken.“I want to make sure the project has some kind of pressure on it to keep going and not just [move on] like a contractor moves on to a new house,” Kemp said. “I want them to stay on that.”

Business
Climate
Energy

Little sign of rain to alleviate drought and wildfire risks in US north-east

Ongoing dry conditions threaten to aggravate blazes in New York and New Jersey as wildfire seasons grow in intensityWildfires continue to ravage parts of New York and New Jersey, fueled by high winds and record low precipitation and, despite some rain over last weekend, there is no immediate relief in sight for the historic drought in the region, with ongoing dry conditions exacerbating the risk of spreading fires.Last month was the driest on record in New York City, with only 0.87in (2.2cm) of rain compared with the historic average of 4.12in for October, and forecasts predict the deficit between normal levels of rain and this autumn in the region will grow before the end of the season. Continue reading...

Wildfires continue to ravage parts of New York and New Jersey, fueled by high winds and record low precipitation and, despite some rain over last weekend, there is no immediate relief in sight for the historic drought in the region, with ongoing dry conditions exacerbating the risk of spreading fires.Last month was the driest on record in New York City, with only 0.87in (2.2cm) of rain compared with the historic average of 4.12in for October, and forecasts predict the deficit between normal levels of rain and this autumn in the region will grow before the end of the season.The state of New York is currently under a burn ban and a drought watch, meaning that residents and businesses are encouraged to reduce their water usage.“We’re seeing extreme weather manifest itself,” said Zach Iscol, New York City’s commissioner of emergency management. “It’s important that we start conserving water now.”Earlier this week, New Jersey declared a drought warning, with mandatory water conservation issued in parts of the state and limiting all non-essential water usage like outdoor watering.The total water usage by over 8 million New Yorkers amounts to about a billion gallons a day. The last time New York City experienced a drought was over 20 years ago, lasting from 2001 to 2003, with the city’s water storage dropping below 42% during the worst of it. As of Thursday, the city’s water reservoir levels were sitting at around 62%, compared with typical 79%.Firefighters are continuing to battle the Jennings Creek wildfire that broke out last Saturday and scorched nearly 5,000 acres in both states, killing at least one person. Dariel Vasque, an 18-year-old parks and recreation aide with the New York state parks department, was killed last Saturday while battling the blaze.Dense, urban areas are not spared from the ongoing bush fires. New York City saw more than 229 brush fires in the two week period between 31 October and 12 November. Officials are still investigating the fire that burned 2 acres of Prospect Park in the borough of Brooklyn last Saturday, and on Thursday fire officials contained a 4-acre (1.6-hectare) fire in Manhattan’s Inwood Hill Park.“It is a more extreme fire season that we’ve had in recent history,” said Capt Scott Jackson, a forest ranger for the New York department of environmental conservation, at a press conference on Monday.New York state generally has two major fire seasons, a larger one in spring and a more abbreviated autumn season.“We did have a relatively light spring fire season this year, so I think we’re making it up for it in the fall,” Jackson said. “That’s the time when we have a lot of dead leaves off the trees, and grass on the ground, so you get that sunlight direct to the ground to dry out those forest fuels.”Wildfire seasons are getting longer and growing more intense, especially across the western United States, according to analysis by non-profit Climate Central. The climate crisis is shifting weather patterns, with warming temperatures and drier air increasing wildfire risks across the country.skip past newsletter promotionThe planet's most important stories. Get all the week's environment news - the good, the bad and the essentialPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotion“We have seen a little increase in how early and late the seasons are going,” Jackson said. “So far, the changes are occurring at a slow enough rate that I think we’re adapting to those changes as they happen.”Farmers across New York and New Jersey are bracing for the impact of the drought on crop production and water resources.“I feel like it’s still the early days, and we haven’t seen the worst of it yet,” said Emily Eder, farm director at Poughkeepsie Farm Project. “We’d usually be watering our crops with just a small amount of rainfall, instead we’re moving irrigation around, which we typically wouldn’t this time in the season.”Eder said that although the region had experienced unusually warm temperatures and record low rainfall for several months, some people were starting to realize the full extent of the drought only recently.“A lot of us have had interactions with people where we’ll talk about how it hasn’t rained in so long and people will say: ‘Oh, really, I didn’t even notice,’” Eder said. “It’s this sort of semi-invisibility of climate change, despite the fact that these disasters are happening. There’s still a level of it that a lot of people are not seeing and those who work with the land and rely on it for their living are really seeing.”

Business
Climate
Conservation

State EV mandates touch off panic among automakers

Regardless of how President-elect Trump changes the Biden administration's long-term climate policies, automakers are already panicking about state-level electric vehicle mandates just around the corner.In California and 11 other blue states that follow its lead, 35% of new cars must be electric starting with 2026 models — some of which will be in showrooms as early as next spring.Why it matters: Carmakers are not even close to meeting those requirements.In many states. they would need to double or triple their EV sales in just one year — an unrealistic goal given the average $57,000 price of an EV and the lack of charging infrastructure, companies tell Axios.It's all likely to come down to a bitter fight between Trump and California's Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has presidential ambitions of his own.The stakes are enormous — not just for automakers and car dealers, but also for consumers.Funneling more EVs into markets that don't want them is "unnatural" and will "distort" the business, says Jack Hollis, president of Toyota Motor North America."It's going to limit a customer's choice of the vehicles they want," he told reporters Friday.Automakers, meanwhile, fear they'll have to choose between swallowing bigger losses on EVs or sacrificing profits on gasoline vehicles — neither of which is palatable.State of play: The 1967 Clean Air Act gave California a waiver to set its own greenhouse gas emissions standards, which typically outpace federal standards set by the Environmental Protection Agency. The law allows other states to choose whether to adopt California's standards or stick with the federal rules.In 2022, California's Air Resources Board (CARB) adopted the strictest rules yet, ratcheting up the percentage of zero-emission vehicles from 35% for the 2026 model year to 100% by 2035, effectively eliminating gasoline cars. Eleven states, plus Washington, D.C., have adopted California's latest rules, representing nearly 40% of the nation's vehicle market. Where it stands: EV sales have been growing steadily, but currently make up only about 9% of U.S. auto sales. In California, EVs account for nearly 26% of new car sales — putting that 35% goal by 2026 potentially within reach.Many of its blue-state allies, however, lag far behind, according to the Alliance for Automotive Innovation.Washington, Colorado and D.C. are around 19% EV share, while others, including Massachusetts, Vermont and Maryland are closer to 11%. Of all the CARB-following states, New York is farthest off the pace at less than 10% EVs.Alarm bells are ringing across the industry as each automaker calculates its own compliance risk. Between the lines: Automakers basically have three options, none of them good for business: They can dump more discounted EVs into those 11 states to lure buyers. But that would just widen their billion-dollar losses on EVs. They could instead throttle back sales of gasoline trucks and SUVs in the affected states to make the EV sales ratio easier to meet. But that would choke off badly needed profits to fund their EV investments. They could buy compliance credits from Tesla, a pure-play EV manufacturer. But as the rules tighten, demand for those credits will increase, making them more expensive.What to watch: The situation between Trump and Newsom.In 2019, Trump revoked California's waiver to set its own emissions standards, triggering a chaotic legal battle which ended when Biden later reinstated the waiver. This time around, California has taken steps to "Trump-proof" its clean air strategies, including voluntary agreements with industry, Politico reported.Other states, which adopted California's tailpipe standard without enacting other policies to support EV growth, might opt to revert to the federal standards.While new rules set by the EPA under Biden would also compel carmakers to sharply accelerate EV sales in the coming years, industry leaders expect Trump to ease those requirements. The bottom line, Bozzella tells Axios: "You can't get ahead of the customer; the customer is in charge."

Regardless of how President-elect Trump changes the Biden administration's long-term climate policies, automakers are already panicking about state-level electric vehicle mandates just around the corner.In California and 11 other blue states that follow its lead, 35% of new cars must be electric starting with 2026 models — some of which will be in showrooms as early as next spring.Why it matters: Carmakers are not even close to meeting those requirements.In many states. they would need to double or triple their EV sales in just one year — an unrealistic goal given the average $57,000 price of an EV and the lack of charging infrastructure, companies tell Axios.It's all likely to come down to a bitter fight between Trump and California's Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has presidential ambitions of his own.The stakes are enormous — not just for automakers and car dealers, but also for consumers.Funneling more EVs into markets that don't want them is "unnatural" and will "distort" the business, says Jack Hollis, president of Toyota Motor North America."It's going to limit a customer's choice of the vehicles they want," he told reporters Friday.Automakers, meanwhile, fear they'll have to choose between swallowing bigger losses on EVs or sacrificing profits on gasoline vehicles — neither of which is palatable.State of play: The 1967 Clean Air Act gave California a waiver to set its own greenhouse gas emissions standards, which typically outpace federal standards set by the Environmental Protection Agency. The law allows other states to choose whether to adopt California's standards or stick with the federal rules.In 2022, California's Air Resources Board (CARB) adopted the strictest rules yet, ratcheting up the percentage of zero-emission vehicles from 35% for the 2026 model year to 100% by 2035, effectively eliminating gasoline cars. Eleven states, plus Washington, D.C., have adopted California's latest rules, representing nearly 40% of the nation's vehicle market. Where it stands: EV sales have been growing steadily, but currently make up only about 9% of U.S. auto sales. In California, EVs account for nearly 26% of new car sales — putting that 35% goal by 2026 potentially within reach.Many of its blue-state allies, however, lag far behind, according to the Alliance for Automotive Innovation.Washington, Colorado and D.C. are around 19% EV share, while others, including Massachusetts, Vermont and Maryland are closer to 11%. Of all the CARB-following states, New York is farthest off the pace at less than 10% EVs.Alarm bells are ringing across the industry as each automaker calculates its own compliance risk. Between the lines: Automakers basically have three options, none of them good for business: They can dump more discounted EVs into those 11 states to lure buyers. But that would just widen their billion-dollar losses on EVs. They could instead throttle back sales of gasoline trucks and SUVs in the affected states to make the EV sales ratio easier to meet. But that would choke off badly needed profits to fund their EV investments. They could buy compliance credits from Tesla, a pure-play EV manufacturer. But as the rules tighten, demand for those credits will increase, making them more expensive.What to watch: The situation between Trump and Newsom.In 2019, Trump revoked California's waiver to set its own emissions standards, triggering a chaotic legal battle which ended when Biden later reinstated the waiver. This time around, California has taken steps to "Trump-proof" its clean air strategies, including voluntary agreements with industry, Politico reported.Other states, which adopted California's tailpipe standard without enacting other policies to support EV growth, might opt to revert to the federal standards.While new rules set by the EPA under Biden would also compel carmakers to sharply accelerate EV sales in the coming years, industry leaders expect Trump to ease those requirements. The bottom line, Bozzella tells Axios: "You can't get ahead of the customer; the customer is in charge."

Business
Climate

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