Overnight Energy & Environment — UN sounds dire warning on climate change

by Rachel Frazin and Zack Budryk - 02/28/22 6:49 PM ET

Welcome to Monday’s Overnight Energy & Environment, your source for the latest news focused on energy, the environment and beyond. Subscribe here: digital-staging.thehill.com/newsletter-signup.

Today we’re looking at the International Panel on Climate Change’s latest report, the Supreme Court hearing arguments for and against the EPA’s powers and another oil giant divesting from Russia.

For The Hill, we’re Rachel Frazin and Zack Budryk. Write to us with tips: rfrazin@digital-staging.thehill.com and zbudryk@digital-staging.thehill.com. Follow us on Twitter: @RachelFrazin and @BudrykZack.

Let’s jump in.

Report warns of deadly climate consequences

Climate advocates are seen during a press conference on Wednesday, December 1, 2021 to discuss climate change provisions in the Build Back Better Act.

A new report from a United Nations climate panel is warning of the deadly effects of climate change both now and in the future — and finding that they are currently worse than scientists had believed they would be.

The report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned of health risks from climate change, including from heat exposure, disease and mental health issues.

What does it say? Globally, extreme heat events have already resulted in deaths, according to the report. And it said that since the last time the IPCC issued an equivalent report in 2014, there have been more extreme events, including “heat-related human mortality,” that have been attributed to human-caused climate change.

The panel’s report described major additional risks in the decades to come, particularly between the years 2040 and 2100.

“Climate change and related extreme events will significantly increase ill health and premature deaths from the near- to long-term,” said a summary of the findings.

In particular, the panel raised concern about exposure to heat waves as well as food-borne and water-borne disease risks and disease from pests like mosquitoes. It particularly warned of increases in the risk of diseases from a certain type of mosquito, “potentially putting additional billions of people at risk by the end of the century.”

And it warned of increased mental health issues such as anxiety and stress.

What else? The report also warned that some of the effects currently being seen are worse than previously projected.

“The extent and magnitude of climate change impacts are larger than estimated in previous assessments,” the summary said, particularly highlighting “substantial damages” and “increasingly irreversible losses” to ecosystems and “shifts in seasonal timing.”

“We’re seeing adverse impacts being much more widespread and being much more negative than expected in prior reports than expected at the current 1.09 degrees that we have,” Camille Parmesan, one of the report’s authors, told reporters, referring to the current level of warming compared to pre-industrial levels.

Parmesan added that the world is seeing impacts that it previously did not expect to see at the current level of warming, such as “diseases emerging into new areas” and “the first extinctions of species due to climate change.”

Read more about the report here.

SCOTUS wrestles with EPA’s reach

The Supreme Court on Monday struggled with how to define the reach of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in a case with profound implications for the agency’s power to address a main contributor to climate change.

At issue during Monday’s argument was the scope of the EPA’s authority to regulate air pollution from power plants and whether it extends beyond the confines of plant sites to encompass broader aspects of the U.S. energy sector.

The 6-3 conservative majority court did not clearly telegraph an outcome in the case, but several of the court’s conservative justices seemed concerned about whether the more sweeping interpretation of EPA authority went beyond the power granted to it by Congress.

Some conservatives, including Justice Samuel Alito, raised the so-called major questions doctrine. The judicial interpretative method holds that agency actions with transformative political or economic effects require a clear delegation of power by Congress. Some conservatives seemed to indicate that such an explicit statement from lawmakers was absent in the case.

Alito suggested that if the EPA were deemed authorized to regulate climate change writ large, it would be difficult to conceive of any limit to its power.

“This statute requires EPA to take into account several factors … and they are incommensurable [with climate change],” Alito said to U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar. “What weight do you assign to the effects on climate change, which some people believe is a matter of civilizational survival, and the cost and the effect on jobs?”

On the other side of the aisle: The court’s liberal justices appeared generally skeptical of arguments for a narrower reading of EPA authority that were advanced by a number of states, led by West Virginia, as well as the coal industry.

The state and companies argued that since the statute directs the EPA to issue performance standards for pollution sources, it is limited to only regulating within the power plants themselves — so-called inside the fence measures — rather than reshaping the entire power sector and promoting a shift toward cleaner energy sources.

Justice Elena Kagan countered that regulations within the power plant could very well have the same effect of changing the makeup of our power system by making coal generation too expensive or otherwise unfeasible.

“If that’s what EPA wanted to do, I have a basket full of source-by-source regulations that would allow them to get their way on all of those questions. It just has no necessary relationship to this fence, non-fence way of thinking of things,” Kagan said.