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THE MASSIVE TRANSITION TO KEEP WARMING BELOW 2 DEGREES: The International Renewable Energy Agency is laying out a plan to achieve the goals of the Paris climate agreement, and it prompts a huge question: Could the world even do it?

Much of the vision in the first-ever Global Renewables Outlook includes eye-popping numbers for the amount of renewable energy buildout required, the drop in fossil fuel use, and the investment needed in the clean energy sector that seem out-of-reach in today’s political environment. To reach the Paris Agreement’s more ambitious target — to keep warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius — would require even more.

Here’s just some of what IRENA lays out for a 2-degree scenario:



Greenhouse gas emissions fall 3.8% a year, to reach a 70% cut from today’s levels by 2050. (Global emissions flatlined in 2019, after two years of slight increases, per the International Energy Agency .)

.) Nearly all of those emissions cuts (90%) would come from renewable energy and energy efficiency. The world’s consumption of renewable energy increases 66% by 2050, a six-fold increase compared to today’s levels, and the rate of energy efficiency improvements reaches 3.2% per year, nearly three times the annual rate in 2019.

The world cuts fossil fuel use by 75% by 2050, to a level roughly equal to China’s current energy demand. Coal use declines 87% by mid-century. (Currently, coal accounts for nearly 40% of global electricity generation, the IEA says .)

.) Electrification would skyrocket in the transportation and building sectors. That means 1.1 billion electric vehicles on the road globally (compared to around 8 million in 2019). The world would have to meet an increase of essentially the equivalent of Japan’s entire electric generation in electricity demand each year, on top of global electricity demand that’s already expected to rise.

The world would invest $3.2 trillion in the global energy system each year through 2050, with more than 80% of that going to renewables, energy efficiency, electrification, and flexible power systems. In recent years, the world has invested about $1.8 trillion per year in the energy system.

Where governments’ efforts to recover from coronavirus come in: To IRENA, the numbers in the outlook demonstrate a path to a sustainable future, one the agency argues governments should be investing in as they craft stimulus packages to reboot their economies devastated by the pandemic.

“The crisis has exposed deeply embedded vulnerabilities of the current system,” said Francesco La Camera, IRENA’s director-general, in a statement. “By accelerating renewables and making the energy transition an integral part of the wider recovery, governments can achieve multiple economic and social objectives in the pursuit of a resilient future that leaves nobody behind.”

La Camera points to different numbers in the outlook, showing the pay-offs could be huge. Under IRENA’s 2-degree scenario, every $1 spent on clean energy has a payback of $3-$8. The transition would also increase renewable energy jobs worldwide to 42 million, four times today’s numbers.

Welcome to Daily on Energy, written by Washington Examiner Energy and Environment Writers Josh Siegel (@SiegelScribe) and Abby Smith (@AbbySmithDC). Email jsiegel@washingtonexaminer.com or asmith@washingtonexaminer.com for tips, suggestions, calendar items, and anything else. If a friend sent this to you and you’d like to sign up, click here. If signing up doesn’t work, shoot us an email, and we’ll add you to our list.

BIDEN PRESSURED TO MOVE LEFT ON CLIMATE TO GET BERNIE VOTERS: Young supporters of Bernie Sanders, a crucial group to turn out, see Joe Biden's pitch on climate change as too generic and vague, and his delivery uninspiring.

Activists aim to push Biden to add detail to his headline target of the United States using 100% carbon-free energy by 2050 and to set bolder near-term targets to make progress on weaning off fossil fuels.

“The Biden plan is the most ambitious climate plan any nominee has ever put forward, including Bernie in 2016,” said Bracken Hendricks, a former senior climate policy adviser in the presidential campaign of Jay Inslee, the governor of Washington. “With that said, the climate crisis is worse and moving more rapidly, so the urgency of the moment is changing the debate,” Hendricks told Josh.

While Biden assembled a broad primary coalition of older suburban and blue-collar voters, along with African Americans, climate activists say he’ll need turnout and enthusiasm from young voters to beat Trump.

“The Democratic Party must be responsive to young voters' desire for aggressive action on climate now," said Brandon Hurlbut, a former campaign adviser for Obama's 2008 campaign who volunteered for Elizabeth Warren in 2020 but is now backing Biden.

Timelines and targets: Activists aren't necessarily demanding that Biden's plan becomes the Bernie plan, and aren't pushing controversial risky general election ideas like banning fracking. But they want more near-term targeting on how he'd make progress in weaning off fossil fuels by 2030.

“Biden's plan talks only of a 100% clean energy economy by 2050 when he will be 107 years old and most likely dead,” said RL Miller, founder of Climate Hawks Vote. “When his plan includes a road map of how to get to that goal, with 2030 as a way station along the route, I'll take it seriously.”

Biden’s opportunity: Activists would also like Biden to lay out a more proactive vision for responding to climate change as the nation recovers from the coronavirus pandemic.

“In this moment of economic recovery, there is a lot more for Biden to say,” Hendricks said. “There is a hunger to see how the economic vision builds on his climate plan.”

Read more in Josh’s story posted this morning.

BIDEN SHOWS HE’S HEARING THE MESSAGE: Like magic, Biden on Monday pledged to expand his climate plan in the coming months with an eye towards setting new goals for the next decade.

His new statement came after the League of Conservative Voters Action Fund, the political arm of a major environmental group, endorsed Biden for president.

“The best policy work is continuous, creative, and keeps reaching for greater ambition and impact,” Biden said. “In the months ahead, expanding this plan will be one of my key objectives.”

Biden added that he’s asked his campaign to “commence a process” to engage with more voices from the climate movement, including ”environmental justice” leaders and “worker organizations” (i.e. unions), with the aim of setting “concrete goals we can achieve within a decade.

Biden also said he’d be unveiling “more investments in a clean energy economy,” which seems to match the expectations of activists who want to see him link new spending to recovery from the coronavirus.

OIL PRICES REACH NEW LOW: The WTI crude oil price, the U.S. benchmark, tumbled to below $11 per barrel on Monday. That's the lowest price since April 1986, observed Javier Blas, Bloomberg’s chief energy correspondent.

The fall was for the front-month May contract, which expires Tuesday, meaning it will no longer be the most actively traded and thus not the best reflection of the market, industry sources told Josh. It dropped so much because with WTI, “you must take physical delivery of a contract you hold at the end of the month,” explained Joe McMonigle, a former chief of staff in the Energy Department of the George W. Bush administration.

With no buyers as economies are shut down from the coronavirus, and concerns about storage capacity running out, the price falls, McMonigle told Josh.

The June contract is trading higher, in the low $20s.

“But you could see a similar path downward as we get into the month,” said McMonigle, who is now president of the Abraham Group, an international strategic consulting firm. “It will be much more sensitive to plans to reopen the economy that may stimulate more demand, but [we are] still dealing with a lack of storage.”

TRUMP ADMINISTRATION BANKS ON ECONOMIC RECOVERY: The worsening price crash may seem surprising coming so soon after Saudi Arabia-led OPEC, Russia, and other oil-producing nations agreed to cut production by nearly 10 million barrels per day beginning in May. But the demand fall has overwhelmed efforts by oil-producing states to curb production to raise prices.

President Trump, touted the historic deal Saturday, claiming it would "save hundreds of thousands of jobs" in U.S. oil states. Wealthy nations in the G-20, such as the U.S. and Canada, are also expected to see their production fall by some 3.5 million barrels per day due to market forces.

Kevin Hassett, a Trump senior adviser who was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, addressed the price crash Monday morning, expressing optimism that the market would begin to return to normal as the global economy "turns back on."

"That will drive up production, drive up the demand for energy and for oil, and I think that you'll see us coming up off of these lows," Hassett said on Fox News Business. "But one of the problems right now is that the consumption of energy, because the decline of production has declined so much, that people are actually running out of places to put the oil and that's why the price is so low."

EPA ‘GREATLY SURPRISED’ BY BACKLASH TO VIRUS POLICY: The EPA didn’t expect to get such visceral criticism of its coronavirus enforcement discretion policy, especially since it isn’t much different from what a lot of state environment agencies are doing, said Susan Bodine, the EPA’s enforcement chief.

Bodine defended the policy, under which the EPA has said it typically won’t seek penalties if companies aren’t able to meet routine reporting and monitoring requirements due to the pandemic, as “entirely appropriate.” The EPA regulates about 4 million facilities, and it doesn’t have the bandwidth to approve every facility’s coronavirus staffing plan, Bodine said Friday during a webinar hosted by the American Bar Association.

Bodine also said the only difference between the EPA’s policy and policies in the states is some states are asking for “upfront notice” if facilities won’t be able to comply with routine monitoring and reporting requirements, while the EPA is looking “after the fact.”

For communities, though, routine monitoring can be critical: If some of the routine requirements covered under the EPA’s policy, such as leak detection and fenceline monitoring, aren’t completed, it increases “the risk of catastrophic chemical releases in communities and explosions in the workplace,” said Robert Verchick, an environmental law professor at Loyola University who served as a policy deputy in the Obama EPA in 2009-2010.

Vulnerable communities depend on pollution data and transparency to advocate for themselves, said Gwendolyn Keyes Fleming, a partner with Van Ness Feldman LLP who served as EPA chief of staff during the Obama administration.

Bodine, though, said her impression is most companies are still meeting their requirements, despite the virus. And the EPA isn’t letting companies off the hook if they exceed pollution limits, she added. “If a facility is saying, ‘Well, I’m going to stop my pollution controls. I could comply but I’m not going to,’ that’s criminal. That’s intentional conduct,” Bodine said. “That’s not just a civil violation anymore.”

CARPER ACCUSES TRUMP OFFICIAL OF WEAKENING PFAS PROPOSAL: Nancy Beck, a former American Chemistry Council official, used her positions at the EPA and the White House to introduce new barriers and loopholes into the EPA proposal, said Senator Tom Carper, the top Democrat on the Senate environment committee.

Carper, in a letter to EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler on Friday, said his office had obtained documents showing Beck, while one of the EPA’s top chemical officials, pushed for the agency to adopt “a complicated and time-consuming analytic barrier” that would make it harder to restrict the chemicals. Once at the White House’s National Economic Council, Beck directed the inclusion of provisions in the proposal that could grant violators a “safe harbor” and exempt some substances from the rule, Carper added. Beck is currently Trump’s nominee to chair the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

Many already want the EPA’s proposal to be strengthened: The EPA’s rule would essentially ban certain long-chain PFAS chemicals (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances), which are known as “forever chemicals.” In comments to the agency Friday, 18 state attorneys general asked the EPA to expand its proposal in a number of ways, including to cover all long-chain PFAS chemicals and to remove any carve-outs to the requirement violators notify the EPA if a product has the threshold amount of PFAS outlined.

The Rundown

New York Times Ten years after Deepwater Horizon, US is still vulnerable to catastrophic spills

Wall Street Journal Fall of natural gas prices speeds energy shift in East Asia

Reuters EU sees 'Green Deal' delays but keeps climate target plan: draft document

Bloomberg How Shell can become the first net-zero oil major

Reuters Beer may lose its fizz as CO2 supplies go flat during pandemic

Calendar

MONDAY | APRIL 20

Neither the Senate nor the House is expected to meet before May 4.