©newenergybest
INFORMATION AND OPPORTUNITIES WITH NEW BEST ENERGIES
behind the news
Discover the opportunities of alternative energies
UK to quit energy treaty that ‘penalizes’ net zero
CRITICS SAY THE ENERGY CHARTER TREATY ALLOWS FOSSIL FUEL COMPANIES TO SUE GOVERNMENTS OVER GREEN POLICIES
London, politico - February 21, 2024 - The U.K. will leave an “outdated” international energy treaty after ministers concluded it could stymie efforts to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050. Energy Minister Graham Stuart will confirm on Thursday that the U.K. is following several other countries - including France, Spain, and Germany — in quitting the controversial Energy Charter Treaty (ECT). Environmental campaigners welcomed the news, saying that the treaty could undermine U.K. efforts to combat climate change. The decision in Westminster comes as the EU itself also seeks a route to withdraw, although not all countries in the bloc want to follow suit. First agreed in 1994, the ECT offers legal protections to energy investments and was designed to promote Western financial backing for projects in former Soviet states. But critics say it has exposed governments to legal action from fossil fuel companies and their investors, who have used the treaty to sue governments over clean energy and climate policies that could hit their profits.
Talks stalled
Stuart, the U.K. junior minister responsible for international climate policy, said that remaining a member of the treaty could “penalize” the U.K. for its pursuit of net zero. “The Energy Charter Treaty is outdated and in urgent need of reform, but talks have stalled and sensible renewal looks increasingly unlikely,” Stuart said in a statement shared with POLITICO. “Remaining a member would not support our transition to cleaner, cheaper energy, and could even penalize us for our world-leading efforts to deliver net zero.” The U.K. is not the first country to decide to quit the treaty, with nine EU countries already announcing plans. But the decision will hearten green campaigners who have questioned the U.K. government’s commitment to net zero under Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. Jonny Peters, chief of staff at climate change think tank E3G, which has campaigned against the ECT, said the international pact was “incompatible with our climate commitments.” “Now the government has taken this welcome decision, the U.K. needs to develop a diplomatic strategy around this and make other investment agreements compatible with net zero,” Peters said. Stuart, who is also the ministerial lead for U.K. oil and gas policy, sought to reassure investors that the country would still hold the “strongest legal protections for those who invest here.”
Timetable
The U.K.’s withdrawal will take effect after one year, the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero said, at which point the ECT’s protections will no longer apply to any new energy investments, including those supporting fossil fuel developments. However, a 20-year sunset clause means the government could still be exposed to legal action under the treaty from companies behind existing investments. Negotiations between countries to modernize the treaty so that it protects climate-friendly investments have hit a stalemate. The U.K. said last year it would leave if no deal was reached, although it missed a self-imposed November deadline to confirm its stance. Shaun Spiers, executive director at the Green Alliance think tank, said that the U.K.’s decision to quit the ECT would “strengthen global efforts to roll out cheap, clean renewable energy.”
The Quiet Diplomat Who Shaped Biden’s Global Economic Policy
MIKE PYLE, WHO WILL LEAVE THE ADMINISTRATION THIS MONTH, HELPED BROKER AGREEMENT WITH EUROPE AND OTHER ALLIES OVER CLEAN ENERGY, CHINA AND RUSSIAN SANCTIONS
Washington, nytimes – February 20, 2024 - In the fall of 2022, two top Biden administration officials met in New York with a key European diplomat. Over dinner outdoors, they strategized about how best to throttle Russia’s oil revenues in retaliation for its invasion of Ukraine.
Near the end of what had been a collegial meal, the European official, Bjoern Seibert, dropped a bombshell on his hosts, Mike Pyle of the National Security Council and Wally Adeyemo, the deputy Treasury secretary. Europe, Mr. Seibert said, had big problems with President Biden’s sweeping new climate law.
Mr. Seibert, the head of cabinet for the president of the European Commission, said top officials among European Union member states feared Mr. Biden was trying to drive a competitive wedge between their countries and the United States, by lavishing subsidies on made-in-America clean energy technology. They were worried the president was trying to ensure the future of U.S. manufacturing at the expense of some of America’s closest allies.
The exchange set off months of behind-the-scenes talks, a major regulatory concession from the Treasury Department and high-level negotiations between Mr. Biden and fellow world leaders, all meant to soothe those concerns.
The officials at that dinner worked to pull together a harmonized industrial strategy among wealthy nations. It seeks to boost technology that reduces greenhouse gas emissions, limit global warming and counter China’s manufacturing might in global markets.
That effort appears to have partly repaired a trans-Atlantic rift over what Europe sees as America’s increasingly protectionist economic policies.
Leading the way for the administration was Mr. Pyle, an under-the-radar aide on the National Security Council who is leaving the administration at the end of this month after more than three years in the White House. Mr. Pyle played an outsize role in putting in place and selling Mr. Biden’s vision of global economic cooperation and confrontation to often-skeptical allies.
Mr. Pyle’s tenure as deputy national security adviser for international economic affairs included putting together some operational details of an untried effort to limit Russia’s revenues from global oil sales. It spanned a range of administration attempts to forge a global alliance to outcompete China.
And over the course of a frantic nine months, Mr. Pyle led an effort to quell fury among American allies over the Inflation Reduction Act.
“There was a wave of concern initially from partners around the world who really didn’t understand this legislation and the president’s agenda,” Lael Brainard, who heads Mr. Biden’s National Economic Council, said in an interview. Mr. Pyle, she said, “jumped into action, jumped on airplanes and did a huge amount of shuttle diplomacy.”
The deputy national security adviser for international economic affairs leads negotiations on declarations at international summits, often working months in advance to smooth over disagreements with allies.
That’s why Mr. Pyle was on the receiving end of Mr. Seibert’s warning about the Inflation Reduction Act. European leaders had initially welcomed the law, the largest investment ever by the United States in fighting climate change, through tax credits and other subsidies meant to speed the deployment of clean energy. But European officials quickly came to see some of those subsidies, like for electric vehicles, as discriminatory — they were reserved for products made and sourced in America, or within close trading partners like Canada and Mexico.
Mr. Pyle acknowledged the concerns but quickly pushed back. He told Mr. Seibert that Mr. Biden was hoping to lead a coordinated effort to subsidize manufacturing of low-emissions technology. He suggested how the administration might immediately start working to make sure companies in allies like the European Union, Japan and South Korea could benefit from the American climate law.
Mr. Pyle explained the law to allies and began “thinking through how we can design a way to work together,” Mr. Adeyemo recalled.
In meetings over the ensuing months, Mr. Pyle and his colleagues laid out steps they hoped would ease Europe’s climate-law concerns. They previewed a Treasury Department regulation — before it was announced publicly — that would allow leased electric vehicles, including from European and Asian carmakers, to essentially qualify for a full consumer tax credit under the law.
They also sketched the outlines of a new sort of limited trade deal that the European Union, Britain and Japan could sign with the United States to allow their companies to share in other tax breaks from the Inflation Reduction Act. Mr. Pyle would help to craft the template for those limited trade arrangements.
“He knows his stuff very well,” Mr. Seibert said. “He knows what’s politically possible in the United States.”
The meeting paved the way for a joint declaration on energy and climate cooperation from Mr. Biden and Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, and a declaration from Group of 7 leaders that they were taking steps to “drive the transition to clean energy economies of the future through cooperation.”
Mr. Pyle said the progress pleased him, but tensions over the law are still “a work in progress.”
Mr. Biden, he said, “is advancing a new model for today’s challenges, and one that tests old rules with new types of solutions. That’s hard.”
Offshore Wind Energy Plans Advance
in New Jersey Amid Opposition
Atlantic City, manufactoring - September 14, 2023 - Two major offshore wind power projects are taking steps forward in New Jersey as the owners of one project agreed to bring the federal government in on their environmental monitoring plans at an earlier stage than has ever been done, and federal regulators said plans for another project are not expected to kill or seriously injure marine life. They come as New Jersey continues to grow as a hub of opposition to offshore wind projects from residents' groups and their political allies, mostly Republicans. The state's Democratic governor and Democratic-controlled Legislature want to make the state the East Coast leader in offshore wind energy. Community Offshore Wind, a joint venture between Essen, Germany-based RWE and New York-based National Grid Ventures, on Thursday announced a five-year partnership with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to promote the exchange of data and expertise on environmental monitoring for offshore wind projects. The agreement will bring the federal agency into the company's planning process at a much earlier stage than is currently done in the offshore wind industry, an arrangement that could become the new industry standard, according to company president Doug Perkins. "Instead of us coming up with this on our own and getting some feedback from the agencies, we will work together to make sure that it's efficient in the data they collect," he said. "It creates the opportunity, the avenue for us to engage with them, and for them to engage with us, to make sure that our plans, how we're sampling, where we're sampling, when we're sampling, fits with what they do and with what will be required of the industry." Jon Hare, director of NOAA's Northeast Fisheries Science Center, praised the proposed collaboration. "With help from a number of collaborators and the fishing industry, our agency maintains some of the world's most comprehensive data sets on large marine ecosystems," he said. "Our goal is to bring offshore wind energy monitoring activities into this partnership. This agreement is our first chance to make these partnerships a reality and show by example that effective scientific monitoring benefits everyone." Community has leased a 125,000 acre site 60 miles (97 kilometers) off Long Island, New York, and 37 miles (60 kilometers) off Little Egg Harbor in New Jersey. Its project has yet to be designed but is likely to include at least 100 wind turbines. It could be active by 2030 or 2031, Perkins said. On Wednesday, NOAA released a letter of authorization for Denmark-based Orsted's Ocean Wind I project in southern New Jersey. It involved approval of plans for unintentional harassment or injury of marine mammals during construction of the project, which would build 98 turbines about 15 miles (24 kilometers) off the coast of Ocean City and Atlantic City. The impact is referred to by the agency as "take," which refers to harassment or injury of animals. "Ocean Wind did not request and (the National Marine Fisheries Service) neither expects nor authorizes incidental take by serious injury or mortality," the agency wrote. Opponents of offshore wind blame the deaths of 70 whales along the East Coast since December on offshore wind site preparation work. But three federal scientific agencies say there is no evidence that such work is responsible for the deaths, about half of which have been attributed to vessel strikes. NOAA is requiring Orsted to take a number of steps designed to avoid harm to whales, including a moratorium on the detonation of undersea explosives from Nov. 1 through April 30; visual and acoustic monitoring of the waters near such explosions before, during and after them; shutting down pile driving "if feasible" if an endangered North American right whale or other marine mammal enters certain prescribed zones; and noise mitigation steps including using the least amount of hammer force possible for foundation installations. David Shanker, a spokesman for the Save the Right Whales Coalition, called the decision "appalling." The group recently sent NOAA the results of a study by an independent acoustics company asserting that offshore wind survey vessels have been exceeding approved decibel levels and appear to be using other-than-approved devices. "There has been a complete breakdown in the system designed to protect marine wildlife and protect the North Atlantic right whale from extinction," Shanker said. NOAA declined comment. Earlier this week, Republicans in the state Senate called for a moratorium on all offshore wind projects. They asked for a special session of the Legislature to consider measures to prohibit further tax breaks for offshore wind companies beyond one already given to Orsted. Senate Democrats declined comment. On Wednesday, six protesters were arrested after they refused to leave a roadway in Ocean City where Orsted began onshore testing for its first wind farm project.
©newenergybest