This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The internationally agreed goal to keep the world’s temperature rise below 1.5 Celsius is now “deader than a doornail”, with 2024 almost certain to be the first individual year above this threshold, climate scientists have gloomily concluded— even as world leaders gather for climate talks on how to remain within this boundary.

Three of the five leading research groups monitoring global temperatures consider 2024 on track to be at least 1.5 Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) hotter than pre-industrial times, underlining it as the warmest year on record, beating a mark set just last year. The past 10 consecutive years have already been the hottest 10 years ever recorded.

Although a single year above 1.5 Celsius does not itself spell climate doom or break the 2015 Paris climate agreement, in which countries agreed to strive to keep the long-term temperature rise below this point, scientists have warned this aspiration has in effect been snuffed out despite the exhortations of leaders currently gathered at a United Nations climate summit in Azerbaijan.

“The goal to avoid exceeding 1.5 Celsius is deader than a doornail. It’s almost impossible to avoid at this point because we’ve just waited too long to act,” said Zeke Hausfather, climate research lead at Stripe and a research scientist at Berkeley Earth. “We are speeding past the 1.5 Celsius line an accelerating way and that will continue until global emissions stop climbing.”

Last year was so surprisingly hot, even in the context of the climate crisis, that it caused “some soul-searching” among climate scientists, Hausfather said. In recent months there has also been persistent heat despite the fading of El Niño, a periodic climate event that exacerbated temperatures already elevated by the burning of fossil fuels.

“It’s going to be the hottest year by an unexpectedly large margin. If it continues to be this warm it’s a worrying sign,” he said. “Going past 1.5 Celsius this year is very symbolic, and it’s a sign that we are getting ever closer to going past that target.”

“Every fraction of a degree is worth fighting for.”

Climate scientists broadly expect it will become apparent the 1.5 Celsius target, agreed upon by governments after pleas from vulnerable island states that they risk being wiped out if temperatures rise further than this, has been exceeded within the coming decade.

Despite countries agreeing to shift away from fossil fuels, this year is set to hit a new record for planet-heating emissions, and even if current national pledges are met the world is on track for 2.7 Celsius (4.8 Fahrenheit) warming, risking disastrous heatwaves, floods, famines and unrest. “We are clearly failing to bend the curve,” said Sofia Gonzales-Zuñiga, an analyst at Climate Analytics, which helped produce the Climate Action Tracker (Cat) temperature estimate.

However, the COP29 talks in Baku have maintained calls for action to stay under 1.5 Celsius. “Only you can beat the clock on 1.5 Celsius,” António Guterres, secretary general of the UN, urged world leaders on Tuesday, while also acknowledging the planet was undergoing a “masterclass in climate destruction.”

Yet the 1.5 Celsius target now appears to be simply a rhetorical, rather than scientifically achievable, one, bar massive amounts of future carbon removal from as-yet unproven technologies. “I never thought 1.5 Celsius was a conceivable goal. I thought it was a pointless thing,” said Gavin Schmidt, a climate scientist at Nasa. “I’m totally unsurprised, like almost all climate scientists, that we are shooting past it at a rapid clip.

“But it was extremely galvanizing, so I was wrong about that. Maybe it is useful; maybe people do need impossible targets. You shouldn’t ask scientists how to galvanize the world, because clearly we don’t have a fucking clue. People haven’t got a magic set of words to keep us to 1.5 Celsius, but we have got to keep trying.

“What matters is we have to reduce emissions. Once we stop warming the planet, the better it will be for the people and ecosystems that live here.”

The world’s decision-makers who are collectively failing to stem dangerous global heating will soon be joined by Donald Trump, who is expected to tear down climate policies and thereby, the Cat report estimates, add at least a further 0.04 Celsius to the world temperature.

Despite this bleak outlook, some do point out that the picture still looks far rosier than it did before the Paris deal when a catastrophic temperature rise of 4 Celsius or more was foreseeable. Cheap and abundant clean energy is growing at a rapid pace, with peak oil demand expected by the end of this decade.

“Meetings like these are often perceived as talking shops,” said Alexander De Croo, the Belgian prime minister, at the COP29 summit. “And yes, these strenuous negotiations are far from perfect. But if you compare climate policy now to a decade ago, we are in a different world.”

Still, as the world barrels past 1.5 Celsius there lie alarming uncertainties in the form of runaway climate “tipping points”, which once set off cannot be halted on human timescales, such as the Amazon turning into a savanna, the collapse of the great polar ice sheets, and huge pulses of carbon released from melting permafrost.

“1.5 Celsius is not a cliff edge, but the further we warm up the closer we get to unwittingly setting off tipping points that will bring dramatic climate consequences,” said Grahame Madge, a climate spokesman at the UK Met Office, who added that it would now be “unexpected” for 2024 to not be above 1.5 Celsius.

“We are edging ever closer to tipping points in the climate system that we won’t be able to come back from; it’s uncertain when they will arrive, they are almost like monsters in the darkness,” Madge said.

“We don’t want to encounter them so every fraction of a degree is worth fighting for. If we can’t achieve 1.5 Celsius, it will be better to get 1.6 Celsius than 1.7 Celsius, which will be better than getting 2 Celsius or more.”

Hausfather added: “We aren’t in for a good outcome either way. It’s challenging. But every tenth of a degree matters. All we know is that the more we push the climate system away from where it has been for the last few million years, there be dragons.”

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The United States’s blossoming emergence as a clean energy superpower could be stopped in its tracks by Donald Trump, further empowering Chinese leadership and forfeiting tens of billions of dollars of investment to other countries, according to a new report.

Trump’s promise to repeal major climate policies passed during Joe Biden’s presidency threatens to push $80 billion of investment to other countries and cost the US up to $50 billion in lost exports, the analysis found, surrendering ground to China and other emerging powers in the race to build electric cars, batteries, solar and wind energy for the world.

“The US will still install a bunch of solar panels and wind turbines, but getting rid of those policies would harm the US’s bid for leadership in this new world,” said Bentley Allan, an environmental and political policy expert at Johns Hopkins University, who co-authored the new study.

“The energy transition is inevitable and the future prosperity of countries hinges on being part of the clean energy supply chain,” he said. “If we exit the competition, it will be very difficult to re-enter.

“Without these investments and tax credits, US industry will be hobbled just as it is getting going.”

“This was our chance to enter the race for clean technologies while everyone else, not just China, but South Korea and Nigeria and countries in Europe, do the same.”

Under Biden, the US legislated the Chips Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and the Inflation Reduction Act, all aimed in varying degrees to deal with the climate crisis while also bolstering American manufacturing.

The IRA alone, with its major incentives for clean energy, is credited with helping create around 300,000 new jobs, with the vast majority of $150 billion in new manufacturing investment flowing to Republican-held districts.

Trump, however, has called this spending wasteful and vowed to erase it. “I will immediately terminate the green new scam,” the president-elect said shortly before his election win. “That will be such an honor. The greatest scam in the history of any country.”

Doing this may be politically fraught, even with Republican control of Congress, due to the glut of new jobs and factories in conservative-leaning areas. But should Trump’s plan prevail, planned US manufacturing projects would be canceled, according to the new report, leaving American firms reliant upon overseas suppliers for components.

“Without these investments and tax credits, US industry will be hobbled just as it is getting going, ceding the ground to others,” the report states.

Exports would also be hit, the analysis predicts, allowing US competitors to seize market share. “These plans suggest a complete misunderstanding of how the global economy works,” said Allan. “If we don’t have a manufacturing base, we aren’t going to get ahead.”

Trump has talked of forging “American energy dominance” that is based entirely upon fossil fuels, with more oil and gas drilling coupled with a pledge to scrap offshore wind projects and an end to the “lunacy” of electric cars subsidies. The president-elect is expected to lead a wide-ranging dismantling of environmental and climate rules once he returns to the White House.

These priorities, coming as peak global oil production is forecast and pressure mounts to avert climate breakdown, could further cement China’s leadership in clean energy production.

“China already feels puzzled and skeptical of the Inflation Reduction Act,” said Li Shuo, a climate specialist at the Asia Society Policy Institute. “Throw in Trump and you deepen Chinese skepticism. This is political boom and bust. When it comes to selling clean energy to third country markets, China isn’t sweating at all.”

But even Trump’s agenda is not expected to completely stall clean energy’s momentum. Renewables are now economically attractive and are set to still grow, albeit more bumpily. Solar, which has plummeted by 90 percent in cost over the past decade, was added to the American grid at three times the rate of gas capacity last year, for example.

“We will see a big effort to boost the supply of fossil fuels from the US but most drilling is at full blast anyway,” said Ely Sandler, a climate finance expert at Harvard University’s Belfer Center. “That’s quite different from demand, which is how power is generated and usually comes down to the cheapest source of energy, which is increasingly renewables. If Donald Trump eases permitting regulations, it could even lead to more clean energy coming online.”

At the UN Cop29 talks in Azerbaijan, which started on Monday, countries are again having to grapple with a bewildering swing in the US’s commitment to confront the climate crisis. The outgoing Biden administration, which is trying to talk up ongoing American action at the talks, hopes its climate policies have enough juice to outlast a Trumpian assault.

“What we will see is whether we’ve achieved escape velocity or not and how quickly the booster packs are about to fall off,” said Ali Zaidi, Biden’s top climate adviser, at the Cop summit.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The United States’s blossoming emergence as a clean energy superpower could be stopped in its tracks by Donald Trump, further empowering Chinese leadership and forfeiting tens of billions of dollars of investment to other countries, according to a new report.

Trump’s promise to repeal major climate policies passed during Joe Biden’s presidency threatens to push $80 billion of investment to other countries and cost the US up to $50 billion in lost exports, the analysis found, surrendering ground to China and other emerging powers in the race to build electric cars, batteries, solar and wind energy for the world.

“The US will still install a bunch of solar panels and wind turbines, but getting rid of those policies would harm the US’s bid for leadership in this new world,” said Bentley Allan, an environmental and political policy expert at Johns Hopkins University, who co-authored the new study.

“The energy transition is inevitable and the future prosperity of countries hinges on being part of the clean energy supply chain,” he said. “If we exit the competition, it will be very difficult to re-enter.

“Without these investments and tax credits, US industry will be hobbled just as it is getting going.”

“This was our chance to enter the race for clean technologies while everyone else, not just China, but South Korea and Nigeria and countries in Europe, do the same.”

Under Biden, the US legislated the Chips Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and the Inflation Reduction Act, all aimed in varying degrees to deal with the climate crisis while also bolstering American manufacturing.

The IRA alone, with its major incentives for clean energy, is credited with helping create around 300,000 new jobs, with the vast majority of $150 billion in new manufacturing investment flowing to Republican-held districts.

Trump, however, has called this spending wasteful and vowed to erase it. “I will immediately terminate the green new scam,” the president-elect said shortly before his election win. “That will be such an honor. The greatest scam in the history of any country.”

Doing this may be politically fraught, even with Republican control of Congress, due to the glut of new jobs and factories in conservative-leaning areas. But should Trump’s plan prevail, planned US manufacturing projects would be canceled, according to the new report, leaving American firms reliant upon overseas suppliers for components.

“Without these investments and tax credits, US industry will be hobbled just as it is getting going, ceding the ground to others,” the report states.

Exports would also be hit, the analysis predicts, allowing US competitors to seize market share. “These plans suggest a complete misunderstanding of how the global economy works,” said Allan. “If we don’t have a manufacturing base, we aren’t going to get ahead.”

Trump has talked of forging “American energy dominance” that is based entirely upon fossil fuels, with more oil and gas drilling coupled with a pledge to scrap offshore wind projects and an end to the “lunacy” of electric cars subsidies. The president-elect is expected to lead a wide-ranging dismantling of environmental and climate rules once he returns to the White House.

These priorities, coming as peak global oil production is forecast and pressure mounts to avert climate breakdown, could further cement China’s leadership in clean energy production.

“China already feels puzzled and skeptical of the Inflation Reduction Act,” said Li Shuo, a climate specialist at the Asia Society Policy Institute. “Throw in Trump and you deepen Chinese skepticism. This is political boom and bust. When it comes to selling clean energy to third country markets, China isn’t sweating at all.”

But even Trump’s agenda is not expected to completely stall clean energy’s momentum. Renewables are now economically attractive and are set to still grow, albeit more bumpily. Solar, which has plummeted by 90 percent in cost over the past decade, was added to the American grid at three times the rate of gas capacity last year, for example.

“We will see a big effort to boost the supply of fossil fuels from the US but most drilling is at full blast anyway,” said Ely Sandler, a climate finance expert at Harvard University’s Belfer Center. “That’s quite different from demand, which is how power is generated and usually comes down to the cheapest source of energy, which is increasingly renewables. If Donald Trump eases permitting regulations, it could even lead to more clean energy coming online.”

At the UN Cop29 talks in Azerbaijan, which started on Monday, countries are again having to grapple with a bewildering swing in the US’s commitment to confront the climate crisis. The outgoing Biden administration, which is trying to talk up ongoing American action at the talks, hopes its climate policies have enough juice to outlast a Trumpian assault.

“What we will see is whether we’ve achieved escape velocity or not and how quickly the booster packs are about to fall off,” said Ali Zaidi, Biden’s top climate adviser, at the Cop summit.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Donald Trump’s new term as US president poses a grave threat to the planet if it blows up the international effort to curb dangerous global heating, stunned climate experts have warned in the wake of his decisive election victory.

Trump’s return to the White House is widely expected to result in the US, yet again, exiting the Paris climate agreement and may even remove American involvement in the underpinning United Nations framework to deal with the climate crisis.

While campaigning for president, Trump has called climate change “a big hoax,” scorned wind energy and electric cars, and vowed to gut environmental rules and the “green new scam” of the Inflation Reduction Act, a major bill passed by Democrats to support clean energy projects.

Trump’s agenda, analysts have found, risks adding several billion metric tons of extra heat-trapping gases to the atmosphere, further imperiling goals to stave off disastrous global heating that governments are already failing to meet. Michael Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, said that the US is now a “failed democracy” and that “we now pose a major threat to the planet.”

The election result will send shockwaves through annual UN climate talks that start in Azerbaijan on Monday. “The election of a climate denier to the US presidency is extremely dangerous for the world,” said Bill Hare, a senior scientist at Climate Analytics, who warned a Trump administration would likely “damage efforts” to keep the world from heating by more than 2.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels, a Paris target that now appears even further out of reach.

While President Joe Biden’s administration will send a delegation to the COP29 summit next week, this will be overshadowed by an incoming Trump government that threatens to disengage with other major carbon emitters, such as China, to address the climate crisis. “The nation and world can expect the incoming Trump administration to take a wrecking ball to global climate diplomacy,” said Rachel Cleetus, policy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Across Europe, climate activists and politicians who support stronger action to cut pollution reacted with despair to the news of Trump’s win. “This is a dark day in the US and globally,” said Thomas Waitz, an Austrian member of the European Parliament and co-chair of the European Green Party.

Luisa Neubauer, a German climate activist from the Fridays for Future movement, who went door-knocking for Kamala Harris, compared the feeling to a bad breakup. “A decision over parts of the near future has been made and most of us didn’t have a say in it,” she said. “And for a moment, it feels like the world is going to end. It’s not. But the heartbreak is real.”

“No matter what Trump may say, the shift to clean energy is unstoppable and our country is not turning back.”

But they also urged supporters of climate action to not give up.

Areeba Hamid, joint executive director of Greenpeace UK, said it was “an election won with corporate cash, big polluter backers, and disinformation,” but a global movement was already fighting to rein in the damage.

“We simply don’t have any more time to waste,” she added. “Whatever a Trump presidency chooses to do on global climate action, we know that damage can be contained if the grown-ups in the room speak up.”

When he was last president, Trump took several months to decide to remove the US from the Paris deal, raising fears the agreement would collapse. Countries did manage to avoid such a fate prior to Biden reentering the pact, and there is some optimism that the transition to cleaner energy isn’t something that Trump—despite his demands that the US “drill, baby, drill” for oil and gas—can reverse.

“The US election result is a setback for global climate action, but the Paris agreement has proven resilient and is stronger than any single country’s policies,” said Laurence Tubiana, chief executive of the European Climate Foundation and a key architect of the Paris deal.

“The context today is very different to 2016,” she said. “There is powerful economic momentum behind the global transition, which the US has led and gained from, but now risks forfeiting. The devastating toll of recent hurricanes was a grim reminder that all Americans are affected by worsening climate change.”

Much like after the previous withdrawal, cities and state within the US committed to climate action will try to fill the void of federal indifference, acting as de facto representatives at global summits and even engaging with other countries on how to cut emissions.

“No matter what Trump may say, the shift to clean energy is unstoppable and our country is not turning back,” said Gina McCarthy, former climate adviser to Biden and co-chair of the America Is All In coalition of climate-concerned states and cities.

“Our coalition is bigger, more bipartisan, better organized, and fully prepared to deliver climate solutions, boost local economies, and drive climate ambition,” she said. “We cannot and will not let Trump stand in the way of giving our kids and grandkids the freedom to grow up in safer and healthier communities.”

Domestically, environmental groups have said they will attempt to rally Democrats, as well as some Republicans, to oppose Trump’s tearing down of climate policies, which is anticipated to include major cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency and weakened pollution rules for coal plants, cars, and fossil fuel drilling. “President Trump will face a bipartisan wall of opposition if he attempts to rip away clean energy incentives now,” said Dan Lashof, director of the World Resources Institute.

However, Trump’s election victory has been a deeply sobering one for those concerned about the climate crisis. The issue was barely championed by Harris, the Democratic nominee, with polling showing that voters considered it a minor priority despite scientists’ warnings of record-breaking temperatures and two devastating, heat-fueled hurricanes that smashed into the Southeast just a few weeks before Election Day.

“This should be a wake-up call—the climate movement urgently needs more political power because the climate crisis is moving infinitely faster than our politics right now,” said Nathaniel Stinnett, founder of the Environmental Voter Project, which sought to turn out the vote among environmentalists in the US.

“We must work every day to build an unstoppable bloc of climate voters, because we’re running out of time.”

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Fracking has burst back on to the national stage in the presidential election contest for the must-win swing state of Pennsylvania. But for one town in this state that saw its water become mud-brown, undrinkable and even flammable 15 years ago, the specter of fracking never went away.

Residents in Dimock, a rural town of around 1,200 people in northeast Pennsylvania, have been locked in a lengthy battle to remediate their water supply, which was ruined in 2009 after the drilling of dozens of wells to access a hotspot called the “Saudi Arabia of gas” found deep underneath their homes.

The company behind the drilling, Texas-based Coterra, was barred from the area for years for its role in poisoning the private water wells Dimock relies upon and, in a landmark later move in 2020, was charged with multiple crimes. But it has now been ushered back into the area following a deal struck by the state’s Democratic leadership.

“I don’t care who you are, rich, poor, or whatever, without water and clean air and clean soil, we’re all freaking dead.”

The restarting of drilling around Dimock late last year comes as Donald Trump and Kamala Harris clamor to cast themselves to Pennsylvania voters as supporters of fracking—or hydraulic fracturing, whereby water, sand, and chemicals are injected deep underground to extract embedded oil and gas.

“If she won the election, fracking in Pennsylvania will end on day one,” Trump said of Harris, who previously supported a ban, during the duo’s televised debate last month. The former president has run a barrage of ads in the state accusing Harris of wanting to shut down the fracking industry. But during the same debate, Harris insisted “I will not ban fracking,” and boasted of new fracking leases granted during Joe Biden’s administration.

This bipartisan embrace of fracking has stirred fury among residents of Dimock whose well water is still riddled by toxins linked to an array of health problems and, most spectacularly, contains so much flammable methane that people have passed out in the shower, wells have exploded, and water running from the tap could be set on fire by match, according to official reports and accounts from locals.

“Sure as hell, I’m not voting for either of those two assholes,” said Ray Kemble, a bearded military veteran and former trucker, as he puffed on a cigar in his home. Reams of documents and photos chronicling the long fight against fracking lay on the table next to Kemble, along with a bottle of his murky tap water, three Sherlock Holmes-style smoking pipes and a briefcase filled with handguns.

Shortly after a gas well was drilled a few hundred feet from Kemble’s home, he said his drinking water turned from dark brown to green and finally jet back, with the liquid smelling like he had taken “every household chemical you can think of, dump it into a blender, take two asses of a skunk and put that in there, put it on puree, dump it out, and take a whiff.”

“I like Kamala, but I was unhappy when she said she wouldn’t ban fracking,” said Victoria Switzer, who said her water bubbled “like Alka-Seltzer” after the drilling started.

“The water is still not fixed,” said Kemble, who blames the loss of most of his teeth to the presence of uranium, along with other contaminants such as copper and arsenic, in his water.

“When a politicians’ lips are moving they are lying,” he said. “It’s a fricking nightmare. We are back to square one from before the moratorium came into effect—there’s massive drilling like crazy. I don’t care who you are, rich, poor, or whatever, without water and clean air and clean soil, we’re all freaking dead.”

Kemble, a Republican who has printed cards featuring the Gadsen flag snake coiled around a gas well, has found unlikely allies in this saga, with figures such as Yoko Ono and Mark Ruffalo voicing concern for Dimock’s plight. His neighbor Victoria Switzer, a former school teacher turned artist whose paintings adorn a soaring timber-framed home beside a bucolic creek, is a rare liberal in this staunchly conservative county but also shares Kemble’s frustration.

“I like Kamala, but I was unhappy when she said she wouldn’t ban fracking,” said Switzer, who said her water bubbled “like Alka-Seltzer” after the drilling started. Like Kemble, she now gets bottled water deliveries each week from Coterra.

“But then the other guy [Trump] just says, ‘We’ll drill more, we’ll get rid of the regulations’—so that should scare us. People are held hostage by the fossil-fuel industry here.”

“Democrats have been foolish to give up the votes of people fighting for their lives. It’s clear they are afraid of the oil and gas industry.”

Although 1.5 million people across Pennsylvania live within half a mile of oil and gas wells, compressors and processors, not all feel as sharply affected by fracking and to win the state’s crucial 19 electoral votes, according to prevailing political thinking, means not threatening an industry that directly employs around 16,000 people, around 0.5 percent of all jobs in the state.

“Fracking has become a big part of the election but there really isn’t much opposition to it now, it’s become part of life in Pennsylvania,” said Jeff Brauer, a political scientist at Pennsylvania’s Keystone College. “A fracking ban would be very unpopular and Kamala Harris knows she can’t be against fracking if she’s going to win here. She had to clean that up.”

But how popular is fracking? Polling shows a complicated picture rather than overwhelming support, with two 2020 surveys showing slightly more Pennsylvania voters want to ban fracking than keep it, while a separate 2022 poll found the reverse. Unusually, Pennsylvania’s constitution enshrines the right to “clean air, pure water and to the preservation of the natural, scenic, historic and esthetic values of the environment,” unlike neighboring New York, which is among a handful of states to ban fracking.

“The idea you have to court some fictional rural fracking supporter with Trump signs in their yard is ludicrous,” said Josh Fox, a filmmaker and activist whose 2010 documentary, Gasland, showed people in Dimock and elsewhere holding up jars of muddy brown drinking water and turning their tap water into a roaring flame by lighting it.

“Democrats have been foolish to give up the votes of people fighting for their lives. It’s clear they are afraid of the oil and gas industry,” he said. Fox added he will still vote for Harris but that “Democrats have thrown away a chance to tell people in rural Pennsylvania they will fight to protect their children from toxins. It’s a legacy of moral failure going back to Obama.”

In Dimock, particular ire is reserved for Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor, who in his previous role as state attorney general in 2020 convened a grand jury and charged Coterra, then known as Cabot, prior to a merger, with eight felonies for endangering the town’s drinking water. “There were failures at every level,” Shapiro claimed, pointing to testimony of children in Dimock waking up with severe nosebleeds because of the pollution exposure.

Yet, the denouement of the case in a local courtroom in 2022 unveiled a deal in which all the felony charges were dropped, with Coterra pleading no contest to a single misdemeanor in return for the company agreeing to build a new $16 million water pipe for residents. Crucially, on the same day, the state department of environmental protection—which had found Coterra tainted 19 private wells and barred drilling in the Dimock area for more than a decade—allowed the company back into the region.

“I was shocked. I was a fan of Shapiro but he betrayed us. He betrayed me,” said Switzer, who took part in a press conference with Shapiro, prior to knowing details of the deal, where she praised the then attorney general.

“It’s teasingly cruel to do this to people. When you look at people in Dimock, you see pain and uncertainty in their eyes.”

“I wish I could retract that. I would’ve called out that traitor Shapiro if I’d known,” she said. “We walked into a trap that allowed the drilling to restart. I mean, when I heard he was in the mix to be vice president I almost threw up.”

A spokesman for Shapiro said he is an “an all-of-the-above energy governor, and he is taking action to invest in affordable and reliable renewable energy while continuing to support the key energy resources that have helped Pennsylvania become the leader it is today.” The settlement with Coterra is “historic,” the spokesman said, and that the governor “will never forget the people of Dimock.” Coterra did not respond to a request for comment.

The water line should emerge by the end of 2026, although construction of it, unlike the new drilling, has yet to start. Coterra is not allowed to drill directly in the heart of Dimock but can do so at its edges, and already has three towering well complexes boring 7,000 feet down into a section of the Marcellus shale, a thick formation of layered, radioactive rock, which contains about 1.3 trillion cubic feet of gas worth an estimated $3.9 billion.

From these wellheads sprout 11 drilling lines, known as laterals, that bend underground horizontally and snake for several miles underneath about 80 Dimock properties, with one running directly under Switzer’s house. “They are cutting up the valley like Swiss cheese,” she said.

The rumbling from a new oil pad two miles away keeps Switzer awake at night, as does the hundreds of trucks shuttling the vast cocktail of water, sand, and chemicals used in fracking. “I can’t sleep now, so I find it harder to take than I once did,” she said. “We came here to enjoy nature, and this has just torn our lives apart.”

This new drilling requires Coterra to monitor local water supplies, plug the older gas wells that dot this rolling landscape and provide water to residents. Still, avoiding further contamination as the drills pierce the water table, via failures in the drill casings or leaks of the substances used to pry open the shale for its gas, cannot be fully assured.

“The operations are on a much larger scale now, using millions of gallons more water, so no company can guarantee there will be no further leaks. Once wells are drilled they will leak,” said Anthony Ingraffea, an environmental engineer at Cornell University who has advised affected residents.

“The nine square miles of Dimock is a goldmine of natural gas. It’s the most productive in the world,” Ingraffea said. “Coterra will be happy getting hold of that in return for a water pipeline that I don’t think will ever be built. It’s teasingly cruel to do this to people. When you look at people in Dimock, you see pain and uncertainty in their eyes.”

“One of these wells will blow up like Old Faithful… There’s already the constant smell, nosebleeds, headaches. I eat Tylenol like they are candy.”

Much of the newly drilled gas will be shipped overseas and marketed as a “clean” fuel in a process that, in fact, emits more planet-heating pollution than coal. The fracking itself, which is exempt from certain clean water regulations, will also pose fresh health risks, with studies showing that Pennsylvanians who live near fracking are at heightened risk of childhood lymphoma, asthma, preterm births and low birth weights.

The Environmental Protection Agency, however, only regulates 29 out of more than 1,100 shale gas contaminants potentially found in drinking water, with a 2016 federal report acknowledging that wells in 27 Dimock homes contain unhealthy levels of lead, cadmium, arsenic, and copper, with 17 of these homes at risk of exploding because of the build-up of flammable gas.

For Kemble, the resumption of drilling is the final straw after years of him and his neighbors suffering cancers he believes is a result of the air and water pollution. Kemble said he has rigged up cameras at his home and fears he could be targeted for his activism.

Despite the pressure around being outspoken, Kemble said: “I’m still here…but one of these wells will blow up like Old Faithful in Yellowstone one day. There’s already the constant smell, nosebleeds, headaches. I eat Tylenol like they are candy.”

Kemble, who hauls water from a hydrant to a huge water tank that he then has to filter into his house, recently donated his home to a new research nonprofit that will test the property’s water, soil, and plants for contamination to help inform potential new laws. He will soon leave Dimock, his home of 30 years, like others have done before him, because of the water.

“This is my final fuck you to everybody; there’s going to be a scientist behind every tree here,” he said. “I’m tired of all the bullshit, all the stories and all the fucking crap. I want the hell out of here.”

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Fracking has burst back on to the national stage in the presidential election contest for the must-win swing state of Pennsylvania. But for one town in this state that saw its water become mud-brown, undrinkable and even flammable 15 years ago, the specter of fracking never went away.

Residents in Dimock, a rural town of around 1,200 people in northeast Pennsylvania, have been locked in a lengthy battle to remediate their water supply, which was ruined in 2009 after the drilling of dozens of wells to access a hotspot called the “Saudi Arabia of gas” found deep underneath their homes.

The company behind the drilling, Texas-based Coterra, was barred from the area for years for its role in poisoning the private water wells Dimock relies upon and, in a landmark later move in 2020, was charged with multiple crimes. But it has now been ushered back into the area following a deal struck by the state’s Democratic leadership.

“I don’t care who you are, rich, poor, or whatever, without water and clean air and clean soil, we’re all freaking dead.”

The restarting of drilling around Dimock late last year comes as Donald Trump and Kamala Harris clamor to cast themselves to Pennsylvania voters as supporters of fracking—or hydraulic fracturing, whereby water, sand, and chemicals are injected deep underground to extract embedded oil and gas.

“If she won the election, fracking in Pennsylvania will end on day one,” Trump said of Harris, who previously supported a ban, during the duo’s televised debate last month. The former president has run a barrage of ads in the state accusing Harris of wanting to shut down the fracking industry. But during the same debate, Harris insisted “I will not ban fracking,” and boasted of new fracking leases granted during Joe Biden’s administration.

This bipartisan embrace of fracking has stirred fury among residents of Dimock whose well water is still riddled by toxins linked to an array of health problems and, most spectacularly, contains so much flammable methane that people have passed out in the shower, wells have exploded, and water running from the tap could be set on fire by match, according to official reports and accounts from locals.

“Sure as hell, I’m not voting for either of those two assholes,” said Ray Kemble, a bearded military veteran and former trucker, as he puffed on a cigar in his home. Reams of documents and photos chronicling the long fight against fracking lay on the table next to Kemble, along with a bottle of his murky tap water, three Sherlock Holmes-style smoking pipes and a briefcase filled with handguns.

Shortly after a gas well was drilled a few hundred feet from Kemble’s home, he said his drinking water turned from dark brown to green and finally jet back, with the liquid smelling like he had taken “every household chemical you can think of, dump it into a blender, take two asses of a skunk and put that in there, put it on puree, dump it out, and take a whiff.”

“I like Kamala, but I was unhappy when she said she wouldn’t ban fracking,” said Victoria Switzer, who said her water bubbled “like Alka-Seltzer” after the drilling started.

“The water is still not fixed,” said Kemble, who blames the loss of most of his teeth to the presence of uranium, along with other contaminants such as copper and arsenic, in his water.

“When a politicians’ lips are moving they are lying,” he said. “It’s a fricking nightmare. We are back to square one from before the moratorium came into effect—there’s massive drilling like crazy. I don’t care who you are, rich, poor, or whatever, without water and clean air and clean soil, we’re all freaking dead.”

Kemble, a Republican who has printed cards featuring the Gadsen flag snake coiled around a gas well, has found unlikely allies in this saga, with figures such as Yoko Ono and Mark Ruffalo voicing concern for Dimock’s plight. His neighbor Victoria Switzer, a former school teacher turned artist whose paintings adorn a soaring timber-framed home beside a bucolic creek, is a rare liberal in this staunchly conservative county but also shares Kemble’s frustration.

“I like Kamala, but I was unhappy when she said she wouldn’t ban fracking,” said Switzer, who said her water bubbled “like Alka-Seltzer” after the drilling started. Like Kemble, she now gets bottled water deliveries each week from Coterra.

“But then the other guy [Trump] just says, ‘We’ll drill more, we’ll get rid of the regulations’—so that should scare us. People are held hostage by the fossil-fuel industry here.”

“Democrats have been foolish to give up the votes of people fighting for their lives. It’s clear they are afraid of the oil and gas industry.”

Although 1.5 million people across Pennsylvania live within half a mile of oil and gas wells, compressors and processors, not all feel as sharply affected by fracking and to win the state’s crucial 19 electoral votes, according to prevailing political thinking, means not threatening an industry that directly employs around 16,000 people, around 0.5 percent of all jobs in the state.

“Fracking has become a big part of the election but there really isn’t much opposition to it now, it’s become part of life in Pennsylvania,” said Jeff Brauer, a political scientist at Pennsylvania’s Keystone College. “A fracking ban would be very unpopular and Kamala Harris knows she can’t be against fracking if she’s going to win here. She had to clean that up.”

But how popular is fracking? Polling shows a complicated picture rather than overwhelming support, with two 2020 surveys showing slightly more Pennsylvania voters want to ban fracking than keep it, while a separate 2022 poll found the reverse. Unusually, Pennsylvania’s constitution enshrines the right to “clean air, pure water and to the preservation of the natural, scenic, historic and esthetic values of the environment,” unlike neighboring New York, which is among a handful of states to ban fracking.

“The idea you have to court some fictional rural fracking supporter with Trump signs in their yard is ludicrous,” said Josh Fox, a filmmaker and activist whose 2010 documentary, Gasland, showed people in Dimock and elsewhere holding up jars of muddy brown drinking water and turning their tap water into a roaring flame by lighting it.

“Democrats have been foolish to give up the votes of people fighting for their lives. It’s clear they are afraid of the oil and gas industry,” he said. Fox added he will still vote for Harris but that “Democrats have thrown away a chance to tell people in rural Pennsylvania they will fight to protect their children from toxins. It’s a legacy of moral failure going back to Obama.”

In Dimock, particular ire is reserved for Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor, who in his previous role as state attorney general in 2020 convened a grand jury and charged Coterra, then known as Cabot, prior to a merger, with eight felonies for endangering the town’s drinking water. “There were failures at every level,” Shapiro claimed, pointing to testimony of children in Dimock waking up with severe nosebleeds because of the pollution exposure.

Yet, the denouement of the case in a local courtroom in 2022 unveiled a deal in which all the felony charges were dropped, with Coterra pleading no contest to a single misdemeanor in return for the company agreeing to build a new $16 million water pipe for residents. Crucially, on the same day, the state department of environmental protection—which had found Coterra tainted 19 private wells and barred drilling in the Dimock area for more than a decade—allowed the company back into the region.

“I was shocked. I was a fan of Shapiro but he betrayed us. He betrayed me,” said Switzer, who took part in a press conference with Shapiro, prior to knowing details of the deal, where she praised the then attorney general.

“It’s teasingly cruel to do this to people. When you look at people in Dimock, you see pain and uncertainty in their eyes.”

“I wish I could retract that. I would’ve called out that traitor Shapiro if I’d known,” she said. “We walked into a trap that allowed the drilling to restart. I mean, when I heard he was in the mix to be vice president I almost threw up.”

A spokesman for Shapiro said he is an “an all-of-the-above energy governor, and he is taking action to invest in affordable and reliable renewable energy while continuing to support the key energy resources that have helped Pennsylvania become the leader it is today.” The settlement with Coterra is “historic,” the spokesman said, and that the governor “will never forget the people of Dimock.” Coterra did not respond to a request for comment.

The water line should emerge by the end of 2026, although construction of it, unlike the new drilling, has yet to start. Coterra is not allowed to drill directly in the heart of Dimock but can do so at its edges, and already has three towering well complexes boring 7,000 feet down into a section of the Marcellus shale, a thick formation of layered, radioactive rock, which contains about 1.3 trillion cubic feet of gas worth an estimated $3.9 billion.

From these wellheads sprout 11 drilling lines, known as laterals, that bend underground horizontally and snake for several miles underneath about 80 Dimock properties, with one running directly under Switzer’s house. “They are cutting up the valley like Swiss cheese,” she said.

The rumbling from a new oil pad two miles away keeps Switzer awake at night, as does the hundreds of trucks shuttling the vast cocktail of water, sand, and chemicals used in fracking. “I can’t sleep now, so I find it harder to take than I once did,” she said. “We came here to enjoy nature, and this has just torn our lives apart.”

This new drilling requires Coterra to monitor local water supplies, plug the older gas wells that dot this rolling landscape and provide water to residents. Still, avoiding further contamination as the drills pierce the water table, via failures in the drill casings or leaks of the substances used to pry open the shale for its gas, cannot be fully assured.

“The operations are on a much larger scale now, using millions of gallons more water, so no company can guarantee there will be no further leaks. Once wells are drilled they will leak,” said Anthony Ingraffea, an environmental engineer at Cornell University who has advised affected residents.

“The nine square miles of Dimock is a goldmine of natural gas. It’s the most productive in the world,” Ingraffea said. “Coterra will be happy getting hold of that in return for a water pipeline that I don’t think will ever be built. It’s teasingly cruel to do this to people. When you look at people in Dimock, you see pain and uncertainty in their eyes.”

“One of these wells will blow up like Old Faithful… There’s already the constant smell, nosebleeds, headaches. I eat Tylenol like they are candy.”

Much of the newly drilled gas will be shipped overseas and marketed as a “clean” fuel in a process that, in fact, emits more planet-heating pollution than coal. The fracking itself, which is exempt from certain clean water regulations, will also pose fresh health risks, with studies showing that Pennsylvanians who live near fracking are at heightened risk of childhood lymphoma, asthma, preterm births and low birth weights.

The Environmental Protection Agency, however, only regulates 29 out of more than 1,100 shale gas contaminants potentially found in drinking water, with a 2016 federal report acknowledging that wells in 27 Dimock homes contain unhealthy levels of lead, cadmium, arsenic, and copper, with 17 of these homes at risk of exploding because of the build-up of flammable gas.

For Kemble, the resumption of drilling is the final straw after years of him and his neighbors suffering cancers he believes is a result of the air and water pollution. Kemble said he has rigged up cameras at his home and fears he could be targeted for his activism.

Despite the pressure around being outspoken, Kemble said: “I’m still here…but one of these wells will blow up like Old Faithful in Yellowstone one day. There’s already the constant smell, nosebleeds, headaches. I eat Tylenol like they are candy.”

Kemble, who hauls water from a hydrant to a huge water tank that he then has to filter into his house, recently donated his home to a new research nonprofit that will test the property’s water, soil, and plants for contamination to help inform potential new laws. He will soon leave Dimock, his home of 30 years, like others have done before him, because of the water.

“This is my final fuck you to everybody; there’s going to be a scientist behind every tree here,” he said. “I’m tired of all the bullshit, all the stories and all the fucking crap. I want the hell out of here.”

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Donald Trump deliberately withheld disaster aid to states he deemed politically hostile to him as president and will do so again unimpeded if he returns to the White House, several former Trump administration officials have warned.

As Hurricane Helene and then Hurricane Milton ravaged the southeastern US over the past two weeks, Trump has sought to pin blame upon Joe Biden’s administration for a ponderous response to the disasters, even suggesting that this was deliberate, due to the number of Republican voters affected by the storms.

But former Trump administration officials have said the former president, when in office, initially refused to release federal disaster aid for wildfires in California in 2018, withheld wildfire assistance for Washington state in 2020, and severely restricted emergency relief to Puerto Rico in the wake of the devastating Hurricane Maria in 2017 because he felt these places were not sufficiently supportive of him.

“Trump absolutely didn’t want to give aid to California or Puerto Rico purely for partisan politics—because they didn’t vote for him.”

The revelations, first reported upon by E&E News, have raised major doubts over what Trump’s response to disasters would be should he win next month’s presidential election. The former president has already been criticized for his role in spreading misinformation about Helene and Milton that has allegedly slowed the disaster response and even led to online death threats against Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) staff and meteorologists.

“Trump absolutely didn’t want to give aid to California or Puerto Rico purely for partisan politics—because they didn’t vote for him,” said Kevin Carroll, former senior counselor to Homeland Security secretary John Kelly during Trump’s term. Carroll said Kelly, later the president’s chief of staff, had to “twist Trump’s arm” to get him to release the federal funding via FEMA to these badly hit areas.

“It was clear that Trump was entirely self-interested and vengeful towards those he perceived didn’t vote for him,” Carroll told the Guardian. “He even wanted to pull the Navy out of Hawaii because they didn’t vote for him. We were appalled—these are American civilians the government is meant to provide for. The idea of withholding aid is antithetical to everything you want from in a leader.”

The effort to overcome Trump’s reluctance to provide aid for California succeeded only after the then-president was provided voting data showing that Orange county, heavily damaged by the wildfires, has large numbers of Republican voters, according to Olivia Troye, who was a Homeland Security adviser to the Trump White House.

“We had to sit around and brainstorm a way where he would agree to this because he looked at everything through a political lens,” Troye told the Guardian. “There were instances where disaster declarations would sit on his desk for days, we’d get phone calls all the time on how to speed things up, sometimes we had to get [Vice-President] Mike Pence to weigh in.

“It was shocking and appalling to us to see a president of the United States behaving in this way. Basically if it doesn’t benefit him, he’s not interested. We saw this in the Covid pandemic too, when it was red states versus blue states, and it’s still evident in his demeanor now, where he’s politicizing disaster response. It’s dangerous and reckless.”

“Most human beings would feel guilt in punishing people in pain whose homes are in ashes or are under 8 feet of water. It’s a window into the darkness of his soul, frankly.”

One of the most “egregious” delays, Troye said, came after Hurricane Maria smashed into Puerto Rico, causing widespread damage and nearly 3,000 deaths. In the wake of the disaster, Trump claimed the death toll had been inflated “to make me look as bad as possible,” called the mayor of San Juan “crazed and incompetent,” and halted billions of dollars of federal support for the island.

Ultimately, FEMA covered debris cleanup in Puerto Rico, and Trump visited the US territory, throwing paper towels to hurricane survivors. But not all recovery costs for the island were paid for by the federal government, with an independent inspector general report finding that FEMA mismanaged the distribution of aid following Maria.

This came just months before Trump agreed to pay 100 percent of Florida’s costs after the state was hit by Hurricane Michael. “They love me in the Panhandle,” Trump said, according to an autobiography written by Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor. “I must have won 90 percent of the vote out there. Huge crowds. What do they need?”

While officials around Trump were able to persuade him to relent somewhat in these instances, the former president held firm in refusing to provide disaster relief to Washington after wildfires ravaged the east of the state, largely destroying the communities of Malden and Pine City, in 2020.

For months, Trump denied Washington’s request for federal help due to his dislike of Jay Inslee, the state’s Democratic governor and a prominent critic, according to an aide of Cathy McMorris Rodgers, a Republican congresswoman whose district was scorched by wildfires.

McMorris Rodgers wrote to Trump to side with him in his dispute with Inslee while pleading with the president to release the funding. “Despite our governor’s bad faith personal vendetta against your administration, people in my district need support, and I implore you to move forward in providing it to those who have been impacted by devastating wildfires in our region,” McMorris Rodgers wrote.

Trump, however, did not agree to provide the help, which was only given once Joe Biden came into office. “Trump consciously and maliciously withheld assistance in a fit of juvenile pique because my state had the effrontery to question his policies,” Inslee told the Guardian.

“What’s so stunning is that Trump enjoys his authoritarian instincts in refusing to help people. Most human beings would feel guilt in punishing people in pain whose homes are in ashes or are under 8 feet of water. It’s a window into the darkness of his soul, frankly. We’ve seen with North Carolina again that he will use natural disasters for his own purposes and his fragile ego. He’s a clear and present danger.”

Carroll and Troye, former Trump administration officials, predicted there would be fewer constraints on Trump withholding disaster aid should he win another term in the White House. Several Trump allies, including those who wrote the Project 2025 conservative manifesto, have called for the Republican nominee to root out dissenters and install obedient political apparatchiks within the federal government to help enact his wishes.

“Next time you won’t have the integrity of Mike Pence: You’ll have JD Vance who will do whatever Trump wants,” said Troye, who is a Republican but has endorsed Kamala Harris for president. “It’s concerning to think about a future Trump administration with just loyalists in these positions around him in these sort of moments that should be non-partisan.

“I hope voters are paying close attention to contrast between the responsible leadership shown by Biden and Harris and the dangerous demeanor of Donald Trump.”

Just last month, Trump signaled that his dealmaking over disaster aid would not change if he were president again, warning that he would block assistance to California unless the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, agreed to deliver more water to farmers. “Gavin Newscum is going to sign those papers,” Trump said from his golf course in California. “If he doesn’t sign those papers, we won’t give him money to put out all his fires, and if we don’t give him the money to put out his fires, he’s got problems.”

Karoline Leavitt, national press secretary of the Trump campaign, did not answer questions regarding the allegations made by Carroll and Troye, and instead referenced efforts by Trump to improve forest wildfire management and repeated debunked claims that disaster relief money has been diverted by FEMA to migrants.

“President Trump visited Georgia twice in one week to tour destruction from Hurricane Helene and has encouraged his supporters to donate more than $6 million for relief efforts on the ground,” she said, and then repeated a lie: “Kamala Harris stole $1 billion from FEMA to pay for illegal migrant housing and now there’s nothing left for struggling American citizens. President Trump is leading during this tragic moment while, once again, Kamala leaves Americans behind.”

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Exported gas emits far more greenhouse gas emissions than coal, despite fossil-fuel industry claims it is a cleaner alternative, according to a major new research paper that challenges the controversial yet rapid expansion of gas exports from the US to Europe and Asia.

Coal is the dirtiest of fossil fuels when combusted for energy, with oil and gas producers for years promoting cleaner-burning gas as a “bridge” fuel and even a “climate solution” amid a glut of new liquefied natural gas (or LNG) terminals, primarily in the US.

But the research, which itself has become enmeshed in a political argument in the US, has concluded that LNG is 33 percent worse in terms of planet-heating emissions over a 20-year period compared with coal.

More than 125 climate, environmental and health scientists wrote to the Biden administration last month to defend Howarth’s research and urge a continuation of the pause on LNG exports.

“The idea that coal is worse for the climate is mistaken—LNG has a larger greenhouse gas footprint than any other fuel,” said Robert Howarth, an environmental scientist at Cornell University and author of the new paper. “To think we should be shipping around this gas as a climate solution is just plain wrong. It’s greenwashing from oil and gas companies that has severely underestimated the emissions from this type of energy.”

Drilling, moving, cooling, and shipping gas from one country to another uses so much energy that the actual final burning of gas in people’s homes and businesses only accounts for about a third of the total emissions from this process, the research finds.

The large resulting emissions mean there is “no need for LNG as an interim energy source,” the paper says, adding that “ending the use of LNG should be a global priority.”

The peer-reviewed research, published on Thursday in the Energy Science & Engineering journal, challenges the rationale for a huge surge in LNG facilities along the US Gulf coast, in order to send gas in huge tankers to overseas markets. The US is the world’s leading LNG exporter, followed by Australia and Qatar.

Previous government and industry estimates have assumed that LNG is considerably lower-emitting than coal, offering the promise that it could replace it in countries such as China, as well as aiding European allies menaced by the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, a major gas producer.

“US LNG exports can help accelerate environmental progress across the globe, enabling nations to transition to cleaner natural gas to reduce emissions and address the global risks of climate change,” Dustin Meyer, director of market development at the American Petroleum Institute, has said.

But scientists have determined that LNG expansion is not compatible with the world avoiding dangerous global heating, with researchers finding in recent years the leakage of methane, a primary component of gas and a potent planet-heating agent, from drilling operations is far higher than official estimates.

Howarth’s paper finds that as much as 3.5 percent of the gas delivered to customers leaks into the atmosphere unburned, much more than previously assumed. Methane is about 80 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, even though it persists for less time in the atmosphere, and scientists have warned that rising global methane emissions risk blowing apart agreed-upon climate goals.

“This whole process is much more energy intensive than coal…It’s wishful thinking that the gas miraculously moves overseas without any emissions.”

Howarth’s research also found that during LNG production, around half of the total emissions occur during the long journey taken by gas as it is pushed through pipelines to coastal terminals after it is initially drilled, usually via hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, from areas such as the US’s vast shale deposits.

The energy used to do this, along with the leaks, causes pollution that is exacerbated once the gas gets to the export facilities. There, it is supercooled to -162C (-260F) to become a liquid, which is loaded into huge storage containers on tankers. The tankers then travel long distances to deliver the product to client countries, where it is turned back into a gas and then burned.

“This whole process is much more energy intensive than coal,” said Howarth. “The science is pretty clear here: it’s wishful thinking that the gas miraculously moves overseas without any emissions.”

Howarth’s paper has caused something of a firestorm before its publication, with a draft of the study highlighted by climate campaigners such as Bill McKibben to the extent it was reportedly a factor in a decision earlier this year by the Biden administration to pause all new export permits for LNG projects.

This pause has enraged the oil and gas industry—prompting lawsuits—and its political allies. Last month, four congressional Republicans wrote to the Department of Energy demanding correspondence between it and Howarth over what they called his “flawed” and “erroneous” study.

Gas-friendly groups have also argued that the paper overstates emissions from LNG, an stance echoed by some energy experts. “It’s hard to swallow,” said David Dismukes, a leading Louisiana energy consultant and researcher. “Does gas have a climate impact? Absolutely. But is it worse than coal? Come on.”

Howarth said the result of this unusual scrutiny was “more peer review than I’ve ever had before,” with five rounds of review being conducted by eight other scientists. Howarth said: “I don’t consider the criticism valid at all—it feels like a political job.”

Howarth said the US has a “huge choice” to make in the presidential election, with Donald Trump vowing to undo Biden’s pause on his first day back in the White House to allow a raft of new LNG projects. Kamala Harris, meanwhile, has backed away from a previous plan to ban fracking but has promised action on the climate crisis.

More than 125 climate, environmental and health scientists wrote to the Biden administration last month to defend Howarth’s research and urge a continuation of the pause on LNG exports.

The paper’s findings are “plausible,” said Drew Shindell, a climate scientist at Duke University, who was not involved in the research.

“Bob’s study adds to a lot of literature now that shows the industry’s argument for gas is undermined by the option to go to renewables,” Shindell said. “The debate isn’t really about whether gas is slightly better or worse than coal, though. It should be about how both are terrible and that we need to get rid of both of them.”

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Exported gas emits far more greenhouse gas emissions than coal, despite fossil-fuel industry claims it is a cleaner alternative, according to a major new research paper that challenges the controversial yet rapid expansion of gas exports from the US to Europe and Asia.

Coal is the dirtiest of fossil fuels when combusted for energy, with oil and gas producers for years promoting cleaner-burning gas as a “bridge” fuel and even a “climate solution” amid a glut of new liquefied natural gas (or LNG) terminals, primarily in the US.

But the research, which itself has become enmeshed in a political argument in the US, has concluded that LNG is 33 percent worse in terms of planet-heating emissions over a 20-year period compared with coal.

More than 125 climate, environmental and health scientists wrote to the Biden administration last month to defend Howarth’s research and urge a continuation of the pause on LNG exports.

“The idea that coal is worse for the climate is mistaken—LNG has a larger greenhouse gas footprint than any other fuel,” said Robert Howarth, an environmental scientist at Cornell University and author of the new paper. “To think we should be shipping around this gas as a climate solution is just plain wrong. It’s greenwashing from oil and gas companies that has severely underestimated the emissions from this type of energy.”

Drilling, moving, cooling, and shipping gas from one country to another uses so much energy that the actual final burning of gas in people’s homes and businesses only accounts for about a third of the total emissions from this process, the research finds.

The large resulting emissions mean there is “no need for LNG as an interim energy source,” the paper says, adding that “ending the use of LNG should be a global priority.”

The peer-reviewed research, published on Thursday in the Energy Science & Engineering journal, challenges the rationale for a huge surge in LNG facilities along the US Gulf coast, in order to send gas in huge tankers to overseas markets. The US is the world’s leading LNG exporter, followed by Australia and Qatar.

Previous government and industry estimates have assumed that LNG is considerably lower-emitting than coal, offering the promise that it could replace it in countries such as China, as well as aiding European allies menaced by the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, a major gas producer.

“US LNG exports can help accelerate environmental progress across the globe, enabling nations to transition to cleaner natural gas to reduce emissions and address the global risks of climate change,” Dustin Meyer, director of market development at the American Petroleum Institute, has said.

But scientists have determined that LNG expansion is not compatible with the world avoiding dangerous global heating, with researchers finding in recent years the leakage of methane, a primary component of gas and a potent planet-heating agent, from drilling operations is far higher than official estimates.

Howarth’s paper finds that as much as 3.5 percent of the gas delivered to customers leaks into the atmosphere unburned, much more than previously assumed. Methane is about 80 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, even though it persists for less time in the atmosphere, and scientists have warned that rising global methane emissions risk blowing apart agreed-upon climate goals.

“This whole process is much more energy intensive than coal…It’s wishful thinking that the gas miraculously moves overseas without any emissions.”

Howarth’s research also found that during LNG production, around half of the total emissions occur during the long journey taken by gas as it is pushed through pipelines to coastal terminals after it is initially drilled, usually via hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, from areas such as the US’s vast shale deposits.

The energy used to do this, along with the leaks, causes pollution that is exacerbated once the gas gets to the export facilities. There, it is supercooled to -162C (-260F) to become a liquid, which is loaded into huge storage containers on tankers. The tankers then travel long distances to deliver the product to client countries, where it is turned back into a gas and then burned.

“This whole process is much more energy intensive than coal,” said Howarth. “The science is pretty clear here: it’s wishful thinking that the gas miraculously moves overseas without any emissions.”

Howarth’s paper has caused something of a firestorm before its publication, with a draft of the study highlighted by climate campaigners such as Bill McKibben to the extent it was reportedly a factor in a decision earlier this year by the Biden administration to pause all new export permits for LNG projects.

This pause has enraged the oil and gas industry—prompting lawsuits—and its political allies. Last month, four congressional Republicans wrote to the Department of Energy demanding correspondence between it and Howarth over what they called his “flawed” and “erroneous” study.

Gas-friendly groups have also argued that the paper overstates emissions from LNG, an stance echoed by some energy experts. “It’s hard to swallow,” said David Dismukes, a leading Louisiana energy consultant and researcher. “Does gas have a climate impact? Absolutely. But is it worse than coal? Come on.”

Howarth said the result of this unusual scrutiny was “more peer review than I’ve ever had before,” with five rounds of review being conducted by eight other scientists. Howarth said: “I don’t consider the criticism valid at all—it feels like a political job.”

Howarth said the US has a “huge choice” to make in the presidential election, with Donald Trump vowing to undo Biden’s pause on his first day back in the White House to allow a raft of new LNG projects. Kamala Harris, meanwhile, has backed away from a previous plan to ban fracking but has promised action on the climate crisis.

More than 125 climate, environmental and health scientists wrote to the Biden administration last month to defend Howarth’s research and urge a continuation of the pause on LNG exports.

The paper’s findings are “plausible,” said Drew Shindell, a climate scientist at Duke University, who was not involved in the research.

“Bob’s study adds to a lot of literature now that shows the industry’s argument for gas is undermined by the option to go to renewables,” Shindell said. “The debate isn’t really about whether gas is slightly better or worse than coal, though. It should be about how both are terrible and that we need to get rid of both of them.”

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Nestled in the bucolic Blue Ridge mountains of western North Carolina and far from any coast, Asheville was touted as a climate “haven” from extreme weather. Now the historic city has been devastated and cut off by Hurricane Helene’s catastrophic floodwaters, in a stunning display of the climate crisis’s unlimited reach in the United States.

Helene, which crunched into the western Florida coast as a category 4 hurricane on Thursday, brought darkly familiar carnage to a stretch of that state that has experienced three such storms in the past 13 months, flattening coastal homes and tossing boats inland.

But as the storm, with winds peaking at 140 mph, carved a path northward, it mangled places in multiple states that have never seen such impacts, obliterating small towns, hurling trees on to homes, unmooring houses that then floated in the floodwater, plunging millions of people into power blackouts, and turning major roads into rivers.

Helene, said Al Gore, is “a staggering and horrific reminder of the ways that the climate crisis can turbocharge extreme weather.”

In all, about 100 people have died across five states, with nearly a third of these deaths occurring in the county containing Asheville, a city of historic architecture where new residents have flocked amid boasts by real estate agents of a place that offers a reprieve from “crazy” extreme weather.

Now, major highways into Asheville have been severed by flooding from surging rainfall, its mud-caked and debris-strewn center turned into a place where access to cellphone reception, gasoline, and food is scarce. The water supply as well as the roads are expected to be affected for weeks. It is, according to Roy Cooper, North Carolina’s governor, an “unprecedented tragedy.”

“Everyone thought this was a safe place, somewhere you could move with your kids for the long term, so this is just unimaginable, it’s catastrophic,” said Anna Jane Joyner, a climate campaigner who grew up in the area and whose family still lives in Black Mountain, near Asheville. Several of her friends narrowly avoided being swept away by the floodwater.

“I never, ever considered the idea that Asheville would be wiped out,” she said. “It was our backup plan to move there, so the irony is stark and scary and it’s hard for me to emotionally process. I’ve been working in the climate movement for 20 years and feel like I’m now living in a movie I imagined in my head when I started. Nowhere is safe now.”

The damage wrought by Helene is “a staggering and horrific reminder of the ways that the climate crisis can turbocharge extreme weather,” according to Al Gore, the former vice president. Hurricanes gain strength from heat in the ocean and atmosphere and Helene, one of the largest ever documented, sped across a record-hot Gulf, quickly turning from a category 1 to a category 4 storm within a day.

Extra heat not only helps storms spin faster, it also holds more atmospheric moisture that is then unleashed in torrents upon places such as western North Carolina, which got a month’s rain in just a couple of days. Helene was the eighth category 4 or 5 hurricane to strike the US since 2017—the same number of such extreme storms to hit the country in the previous 57 years.

“I don’t know where you run to escape climate change. Everywhere has some sort of risk…We can’t just rebuild like before.”

“This storm has the fingerprints of climate change all over it,” said Kathie Dello, North Carolina’s state climatologist. “The ocean was warm and it grew and grew and there was a lot of water in the atmosphere. Unfortunately, our worst fears came true. Helene was supercharged by climate change and we should expect more storms like this going forward.”

Dello said that it would take months or even years for communities, particularly in the poorer, more rural areas of the state that have been cut off completely by the storm, to recover, compounding the impacts of previous storms such as Florence, in 2018, and Fred, in 2021, that pose major questions over how, if at all, to rebuild.

“I don’t know where you run to escape climate change. Everywhere has some sort of risk,” she said. “It’s really been quite rattling to see these places which you love be devastated, knowing they have been changed forever. We can’t just rebuild like before.”

In Asheville, the historic area of Biltmore Village has been submerged underwater while, in a gloomy irony, the US’s premier climate data center has been knocked offline.

The storm has been “devastating for our folks in Asheville,” said a spokesperson for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who said the National Centers for Environmental Information facility had lost its water supply and had shut down. “Even those who are physically safe are generally without power, water or connectivity,” the spokesperson said of the effort to contact the center’s marooned staff.

The destruction may cast a shadow over the climate-haven reputation of Asheville, much like how Vermont’s apparent distance from the climate crisis has been rethought in the wake of recent floods, but it probably won’t defy a broader trend where Americans are flocking to some of the places most at risk from heatwaves, storms, and other climate impacts due to the ready availability of housing and jobs.

“This flood will likely accelerate development,” said Jesse Keenan, an expert in climate adaptation at Tulane University, who noted that for every one person who moves away from Asheville, three people move to the city, one of the highest such ratios in the United States.

“Some people will not be inclined or unable to rebuild and their properties will be bought up by wealthy people who can afford to build private infrastructure and buildings that have the engineering resilience to withstand floods.”

“There is no truly safe place,” Keenan, who previously listed Asheville as one of the better places to move amid the climate crisis, acknowledged. But the city will “see a post-disaster boom,” he said. “This is a cycle that has happened over and over again in America.”

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The seven swing states that will decide the upcoming election have received nearly half of the torrent of clean energy manufacturing dollars unleashed by a landmark 2022 climate bill, a new analysis shows, amid stuttering Democratic efforts to translate new factory jobs into political support.

Since the passage of clean energy incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), a bill called the “most significant climate law in the history of mankind” by Joe Biden, nearly $150 billion has been announced for a flurry of new American facilities producing electric cars, batteries, and components for renewable energy.

Of this, $63 billion, or nearly half, will flow to just seven states—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—that form the battleground fought over by Kamala Harris and Donald Trump for November’s presidential election, bringing more than 50,000 new manufacturing jobs, according to an analysis carried out for the Guardian by Atlas Public Policy.

“We thought it would be a big step forward on clean energy, but honestly we never understood how quickly it would turn into a game changer.”

“The steady drumbeat of announcements over the past two years has been remarkable, and time and time again they are going to swing states,” said Tom Taylor, senior policy analyst at Atlas.

“The election will decide the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act and the election will be decided by the states that have benefitted the most from the manufacturing incentives in the law.”

Two years on, the IRA has delivered “the biggest US economic revolution in generations—and it’s all because America finally, finally decided to do something about climate change,” said Bob Keefe, executive director of E2, a nonpartisan business group.

Nearly half a trillion dollars in total public and private investment, when deployment of wind and solar farms is included, has occurred nationally, creating more than 300,000 new jobs. Clean energy now accounts for more than half of total US private investment growth, while jobs in the industry are multiplying at double the rate of the overall American economy.

“We thought it would be a big step forward on clean energy, but honestly we never understood how quickly it would turn into a game changer,” said Gina McCarthy, who was Biden’s top climate advisor when the IRA was passed. “It’s flipped the climate conversation on its head. It’s been a remarkable success.”

Yet despite this green boom being centered upon some of the most politically contested parts of the US, there is little evidence the IRA is set to deliver electorally for Democrats. The swing states remain on a knife-edge between Harris, who cast the tie-breaking vote to pass the bill but barely mentions it while campaigning, and Trump, who has called it a “green scam” and vowed to abolish its spending.

Only four in 10 American voters have even heard anything much about the IRA, polling has shown, with a minority of voters expressing any confidence it will aid the economy, their families, or them personally. “Most people don’t even know about it, so clearly there’s a communication problem, they’ve just not done a good job on that,” said Anthony Leiserowitz, an expert in public climate opinion at Yale University.

Leiserowitz said it’s “remarkable” only 49 percent of liberal Democrats, those most concerned about the climate crisis, have heard of the IRA, highlighting the struggles in selling a wonky tome of tax credits amid a fevered news cycle that lurches from one eye-popping crisis to the next.

Criticism has seeped into this vacuum—among major cable news channels in the past two years, half of all mentions of the IRA have been on Fox News, where it has been portrayed as wasteful and likened to far-left totalitarianism.

“Imagine if Trump had passed this,” said Leiserowitz. “He is a salesman, he made damn sure his signature was on those stimulus checks. Republicans are just much better at crowing about their successes than Democrats. There’s been a lack of focused messaging and the media is not inspired to do the job for them.”

Nadine Luci, a 60-year-old resident of Pennsylvania’s Rochester township who usually votes Democrat, worries about pollution and the climate but said she hasn’t “heard much at all” about the “Inflation Act.” In fact, she wasn’t even sure it had passed.

“I thought it was shut down a couple years ago by Republicans,” she said. “But if it goes through I think it would be a positive thing for Pennsylvania.”

“It’s not tree-huggers and environmentalists in San Francisco or New York that are going to get hurt if the IRA is repealed.”

When told the bill earmarked historic levels of funding for green technology, Luci said it sounded “really good.”

“We all could use it, everybody could use it,” said Luci. “But no, I haven’t heard much.”

Frustratingly for Democrats, this appears to be a trend. Leiserowitz’s polling has found that when voters are actually provided a description of the IRA an overwhelming three-quarters of them support it. “It’s just an enormous wasted opportunity,” he said.

Proclaiming the Inflation Reduction Act has been a challenge from its birth, which required assent from Joe Manchin, the coal baron senator and most conservative Democrat in Congress. It was bestowed a clumsy name that belies what it is—an enormous climate and energy bill with some healthcare add-ons—and has befuddled basic public recognition. “I wish I hadn’t called it that,” Biden lamented last year.

“It has been challenging because it’s technical in nature,” McCarthy said of the bill. “It’s been a little slow to energize people and for it to become a personal thing for people to grab onto. It’s a big bill but I do think we are beginning to see momentum gathering around it.”

The dense, 274-page bill outlines some Manchin-friendly measures controversial with environmental groups—mandated oil and gas drilling leases, dollops of cash for unproven carbon capture projects—but at its core was a shot of adrenaline to the heart of the climate movement and to an economy ravaged by Covid.

Uncapped tax credits for clean energy for the next decade that could top $1 trillion, grants for industrial emissions reduction, rebates for Americans to buy electric cars, incentives for people to get heat pumps or electric stoves at home—the IRA almost has it all in terms of support for clean energy, if not penalties for the fossil fuel pollution causing the climate crisis.

The benefits are set be profound. Goldman Sachs, which has said “so far at least, the reality is living up to or even exceeding expectations,” forecasts $3 trillion in clean energy spending as a result of the bill, with the US treasury coming up with an even more eye-watering figure—$5 trillion—in global economic benefits by 2050 from reduced carbon and air pollution.

Battery factories are sprouting in faded corners of St Louis, Missouri; Weirton, West Virginia; and in rural Georgia. At-risk auto manufacturing plants are being retooled for electric cars across eight states; a former paper mill in Lincoln, Maine, is being reimagined as a massive energy storage facility; solar farms are blanketing parts of Arizona and Texas and Indiana; clean aluminum production is starting in Kentucky and green steel in JD Vance’s Ohio hometown.

Many of the dozens of new projects are in “places where opportunity has left,” as Ali Zaidi, the White House climate adviser, has put it, with a vision of reinvigorated blue-collar towns helping the US close the gap on the clean energy powerhouse of China.

“We are already looking at it as a real pivotal moment,” said Dawn Lippert, chief executive of Elemental Impact, a nonprofit investor in climate tech, who added that “our portfolio companies see extraordinary opportunity in rural areas of the US” because of their manufacturing history.

Politically, Republican rural and exurban areas have received the lion’s share of the spending, a fact that’s causing growing nervousness among some GOP members of Congress over the prospect of Trump reversing new job creation in their districts, even after they voted against it.

“It’s not tree-huggers and environmentalists in San Francisco or New York that are going to get hurt if the IRA is repealed,” said Keefe. “It’s working-class people in Georgia, Michigan, and North Carolina that are going to get hurt because that’s where these these projects are going.”

If it survives intact over the next decade, the IRA could help create 9m new jobs, one analysis shows, while pushing down emissions 40 percent by 2030, putting the US within reach of its target to cut planet-heating polling in half by this point.

Young people, people of color, and suburban women do care about climate change and Harris needs to motivate them to get to the polls.”

This progress is incremental and often invisible, though, with only a fraction of IRA funding already committed. In the former steel town of Weirton, West Virginia, for instance, many residents said they have not yet seen a resulting surge in the economy.

“We’ve been made a lot of promises here [that] haven’t been met,” said Dave, a retiree of the former Weirton steel mill in an interview at Dee Jay’s barbecue restaurant, adding he is “no fan” of Bidenomics or the Inflation Reduction Act.

Carol Hrabovsky, who owns Irish Pub, one of the only remaining bars on Weirton’s Main Street, said locals are still struggling with a lack of jobs and the high “price of everything.” Once a Democrat and now a Trump supporter, she said the IRA won’t convince her to vote for the Democratic nominee, and she believes most of her neighbors feel the same.

“They shouldn’t have even called it the Inflation Reduction Act,” she said, adding that she is worried about Biden and Harris fostering “communism.”

Other lives are starting to be touched more positively—more than 3 million American families have already used tax credits to upgrade their homes with solar panels, heat pumps, water heaters or insulation, for example. The IRA may in time become a piece of the national furniture despite Republican hostility, much like Obamacare.

But can it help win Harris the election? Climate isn’t ranked as a leading priority by many voters, but Leiserowitz said there are opportunities within three climate-conscious groups that Harris badly needs in November—young people, people of color, and suburban women. They could tip the balance in a close election.

“Those demographics do care about climate change and Harris needs to motivate them to get to the polls,” he said. “I don’t understand why they aren’t doing this. She has said that Trump thinks climate change is a hoax, which is a step in the right direction, but you need to connect the dots for people.”

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The seven swing states that will decide the upcoming election have received nearly half of the torrent of clean energy manufacturing dollars unleashed by a landmark 2022 climate bill, a new analysis shows, amid stuttering Democratic efforts to translate new factory jobs into political support.

Since the passage of clean energy incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), a bill called the “most significant climate law in the history of mankind” by Joe Biden, nearly $150 billion has been announced for a flurry of new American facilities producing electric cars, batteries, and components for renewable energy.

Of this, $63 billion, or nearly half, will flow to just seven states—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—that form the battleground fought over by Kamala Harris and Donald Trump for November’s presidential election, bringing more than 50,000 new manufacturing jobs, according to an analysis carried out for the Guardian by Atlas Public Policy.

“We thought it would be a big step forward on clean energy, but honestly we never understood how quickly it would turn into a game changer.”

“The steady drumbeat of announcements over the past two years has been remarkable, and time and time again they are going to swing states,” said Tom Taylor, senior policy analyst at Atlas.

“The election will decide the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act and the election will be decided by the states that have benefitted the most from the manufacturing incentives in the law.”

Two years on, the IRA has delivered “the biggest US economic revolution in generations—and it’s all because America finally, finally decided to do something about climate change,” said Bob Keefe, executive director of E2, a nonpartisan business group.

Nearly half a trillion dollars in total public and private investment, when deployment of wind and solar farms is included, has occurred nationally, creating more than 300,000 new jobs. Clean energy now accounts for more than half of total US private investment growth, while jobs in the industry are multiplying at double the rate of the overall American economy.

“We thought it would be a big step forward on clean energy, but honestly we never understood how quickly it would turn into a game changer,” said Gina McCarthy, who was Biden’s top climate advisor when the IRA was passed. “It’s flipped the climate conversation on its head. It’s been a remarkable success.”

Yet despite this green boom being centered upon some of the most politically contested parts of the US, there is little evidence the IRA is set to deliver electorally for Democrats. The swing states remain on a knife-edge between Harris, who cast the tie-breaking vote to pass the bill but barely mentions it while campaigning, and Trump, who has called it a “green scam” and vowed to abolish its spending.

Only four in 10 American voters have even heard anything much about the IRA, polling has shown, with a minority of voters expressing any confidence it will aid the economy, their families, or them personally. “Most people don’t even know about it, so clearly there’s a communication problem, they’ve just not done a good job on that,” said Anthony Leiserowitz, an expert in public climate opinion at Yale University.

Leiserowitz said it’s “remarkable” only 49 percent of liberal Democrats, those most concerned about the climate crisis, have heard of the IRA, highlighting the struggles in selling a wonky tome of tax credits amid a fevered news cycle that lurches from one eye-popping crisis to the next.

Criticism has seeped into this vacuum—among major cable news channels in the past two years, half of all mentions of the IRA have been on Fox News, where it has been portrayed as wasteful and likened to far-left totalitarianism.

“Imagine if Trump had passed this,” said Leiserowitz. “He is a salesman, he made damn sure his signature was on those stimulus checks. Republicans are just much better at crowing about their successes than Democrats. There’s been a lack of focused messaging and the media is not inspired to do the job for them.”

Nadine Luci, a 60-year-old resident of Pennsylvania’s Rochester township who usually votes Democrat, worries about pollution and the climate but said she hasn’t “heard much at all” about the “Inflation Act.” In fact, she wasn’t even sure it had passed.

“I thought it was shut down a couple years ago by Republicans,” she said. “But if it goes through I think it would be a positive thing for Pennsylvania.”

“It’s not tree-huggers and environmentalists in San Francisco or New York that are going to get hurt if the IRA is repealed.”

When told the bill earmarked historic levels of funding for green technology, Luci said it sounded “really good.”

“We all could use it, everybody could use it,” said Luci. “But no, I haven’t heard much.”

Frustratingly for Democrats, this appears to be a trend. Leiserowitz’s polling has found that when voters are actually provided a description of the IRA an overwhelming three-quarters of them support it. “It’s just an enormous wasted opportunity,” he said.

Proclaiming the Inflation Reduction Act has been a challenge from its birth, which required assent from Joe Manchin, the coal baron senator and most conservative Democrat in Congress. It was bestowed a clumsy name that belies what it is—an enormous climate and energy bill with some healthcare add-ons—and has befuddled basic public recognition. “I wish I hadn’t called it that,” Biden lamented last year.

“It has been challenging because it’s technical in nature,” McCarthy said of the bill. “It’s been a little slow to energize people and for it to become a personal thing for people to grab onto. It’s a big bill but I do think we are beginning to see momentum gathering around it.”

The dense, 274-page bill outlines some Manchin-friendly measures controversial with environmental groups—mandated oil and gas drilling leases, dollops of cash for unproven carbon capture projects—but at its core was a shot of adrenaline to the heart of the climate movement and to an economy ravaged by Covid.

Uncapped tax credits for clean energy for the next decade that could top $1 trillion, grants for industrial emissions reduction, rebates for Americans to buy electric cars, incentives for people to get heat pumps or electric stoves at home—the IRA almost has it all in terms of support for clean energy, if not penalties for the fossil fuel pollution causing the climate crisis.

The benefits are set be profound. Goldman Sachs, which has said “so far at least, the reality is living up to or even exceeding expectations,” forecasts $3 trillion in clean energy spending as a result of the bill, with the US treasury coming up with an even more eye-watering figure—$5 trillion—in global economic benefits by 2050 from reduced carbon and air pollution.

Battery factories are sprouting in faded corners of St Louis, Missouri; Weirton, West Virginia; and in rural Georgia. At-risk auto manufacturing plants are being retooled for electric cars across eight states; a former paper mill in Lincoln, Maine, is being reimagined as a massive energy storage facility; solar farms are blanketing parts of Arizona and Texas and Indiana; clean aluminum production is starting in Kentucky and green steel in JD Vance’s Ohio hometown.

Many of the dozens of new projects are in “places where opportunity has left,” as Ali Zaidi, the White House climate adviser, has put it, with a vision of reinvigorated blue-collar towns helping the US close the gap on the clean energy powerhouse of China.

“We are already looking at it as a real pivotal moment,” said Dawn Lippert, chief executive of Elemental Impact, a nonprofit investor in climate tech, who added that “our portfolio companies see extraordinary opportunity in rural areas of the US” because of their manufacturing history.

Politically, Republican rural and exurban areas have received the lion’s share of the spending, a fact that’s causing growing nervousness among some GOP members of Congress over the prospect of Trump reversing new job creation in their districts, even after they voted against it.

“It’s not tree-huggers and environmentalists in San Francisco or New York that are going to get hurt if the IRA is repealed,” said Keefe. “It’s working-class people in Georgia, Michigan, and North Carolina that are going to get hurt because that’s where these these projects are going.”

If it survives intact over the next decade, the IRA could help create 9m new jobs, one analysis shows, while pushing down emissions 40 percent by 2030, putting the US within reach of its target to cut planet-heating polling in half by this point.

Young people, people of color, and suburban women do care about climate change and Harris needs to motivate them to get to the polls.”

This progress is incremental and often invisible, though, with only a fraction of IRA funding already committed. In the former steel town of Weirton, West Virginia, for instance, many residents said they have not yet seen a resulting surge in the economy.

“We’ve been made a lot of promises here [that] haven’t been met,” said Dave, a retiree of the former Weirton steel mill in an interview at Dee Jay’s barbecue restaurant, adding he is “no fan” of Bidenomics or the Inflation Reduction Act.

Carol Hrabovsky, who owns Irish Pub, one of the only remaining bars on Weirton’s Main Street, said locals are still struggling with a lack of jobs and the high “price of everything.” Once a Democrat and now a Trump supporter, she said the IRA won’t convince her to vote for the Democratic nominee, and she believes most of her neighbors feel the same.

“They shouldn’t have even called it the Inflation Reduction Act,” she said, adding that she is worried about Biden and Harris fostering “communism.”

Other lives are starting to be touched more positively—more than 3 million American families have already used tax credits to upgrade their homes with solar panels, heat pumps, water heaters or insulation, for example. The IRA may in time become a piece of the national furniture despite Republican hostility, much like Obamacare.

But can it help win Harris the election? Climate isn’t ranked as a leading priority by many voters, but Leiserowitz said there are opportunities within three climate-conscious groups that Harris badly needs in November—young people, people of color, and suburban women. They could tip the balance in a close election.

“Those demographics do care about climate change and Harris needs to motivate them to get to the polls,” he said. “I don’t understand why they aren’t doing this. She has said that Trump thinks climate change is a hoax, which is a step in the right direction, but you need to connect the dots for people.”

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

A hulking steel plant in Middletown, Ohio, is the city’s economic heartbeat as well as a keystone origin story of JD Vance, the hometown senator now running to be Donald Trump’s vice-president.

Its future, however, may hinge upon $500 million in funding from landmark climate legislation that Vance has called a “scam” and is a Trump target for demolition.

In March, Joe Biden’s administration announced the US’s largest ever grant to produce greener steel, enabling the Cleveland-Cliffs facility in Middletown to build one of the largest hydrogen fuel furnaces in the world, cutting emissions by a million tons a year by ditching the coal that accelerates the climate crisis and befouls the air for nearby locals.

In a blue-collar urban area north of Cincinnati that has long pinned its fortunes upon the vicissitudes of the US steel industry, the investment’s promise of a revitalized plant with 170 new jobs and 1,200 temporary construction positions was met with jubilation among residents and unions.

“It felt like a miracle, an answered prayer that we weren’t going to be left to die on the vine,” said Michael Bailey, who is now a pastor in Middletown but worked at the plant, then owned by Armco, for 30 years.

“America needs “a leader who rejects Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s green new scam and fights to bring back our great American factories,” Vance said.

“It hit the news and you could almost hear everybody screaming, ‘Yay yay yay!’” said Heather Gibson, owner of the Triple Moon cafe in central Middletown. “It showed commitment for the long term. It was just so exciting.”

This funding from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the $370 billion bill to turbocharge clean energy signed by Biden after narrowly passing Congress via Democratic votes in 2022, has been far less thrilling to Vance, however, despite his deep personal ties to the Cleveland-Cliffs plant.

The steel mill, dating back to 1899 and now employing about 2,500 people, is foundational to Middletown, helping churn out the first generations of cars and then wartime tanks. Vance’s late grandfather, whom he called Papaw, was a union worker at the plant, making it the family’s “economic savior—the engine that brought them from the hills of Kentucky into America’s middle class,” Vance wrote in his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy.

But although it grew into a prosperous All-American city built on steel and paper production, Middletown became a place “hemorrhaging jobs and hope” as industries decamped offshore in the 1980s, Vance wrote. He sees little salvation in the IRA even as, by one estimate, it has already spurred $10 billion in investment and nearly 14,000 new jobs in Ohio.

When campaigning for the Senate in 2022, Vance said Biden’s sweeping climate bill is “dumb, does nothing for the environment and will make us all poorer,” and more recently as vice-presidential candidate called the IRA a “green energy scam that’s actually shipped a lot more manufacturing jobs to China.”

America needs “a leader who rejects Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s green new scam and fights to bring back our great American factories,” Vance said at the Republican convention in July. “We need President Donald J. Trump.”

Republicans in Congress have repeatedly attempted to gut the IRA, with Project 2025, a conservative blueprint authored by many former Trump officials, demanding its repeal should Republicans regain the White House.

Such plans have major implications for Vance’s hometown. The Middletown plant’s $500 million grant from the Department of Energy, still not formally handed over, could be halted if Trump prevails in November. The former president recently vowed to “terminate Kamala Harris’s green new scam and rescind all of the unspent funds.”

“The soot covers everything, covers the car, I have to Clorox my windows…It gives you an instant headache.”

Some longtime Middletown residents are bemused by such opposition. “How can you think that saving the lives of people is the wrong thing to do?” said Adrienne Shearer, a small business adviser who spent several decades helping the reinvigoration of Middletown’s downtown area, which was hollowed out by economic malaise, offshored jobs, and out-of-town malls.

“People thought the plant was in danger of leaving or closing, which would totally destroy the town,” she said. “And now people think it’s not going anywhere.”

Shearer, a political independent, said she didn’t like Vance’s book because it “trashed our community” and that he had shown no alternative vision for his home town. “Maybe people who serve with him in Washington know him, but we don’t here in Middletown,” she said.

Climate campaigners are even more scathing of Vance. “It’s no surprise that he’s now threatening to gut a $500 million investment in US manufacturing in his own hometown,” said Pete Jones, rapid response director at Climate Power. “Vance wrote a book about economic hardship in his hometown, and now he has 900 new pages from Trump’s dangerous Project 2025 agenda to make the problem worse so that Big Oil can profit.”

Local Republicans are more complimentary, even if they differ somewhat on the IRA. Mark Messer, Republican mayor of the neighboring town of Lebanon, used the vast bill’s clean energy tax credits to offset the cost of an upcoming solar array that will help slash energy costs for residents. Still, Vance is a strong running mate for Trump and has “done good for Ohio,” according to Messer.

“My focus is my constituents and doing what’s best for them—how else will this empty floodplain produce $1 million for people in our town?” Messer said. “Nothing is going do that but solar. I’m happy to use the IRA, but if I had a national role my view might be different. I mean printing money and giving it away to people won’t solve inflation, it will make it worse.”

Some Middletown voters are proud of Vance’s ascension, too. “You have to give him credit, he went to [Yale] Law School, he built his own business up in the financial industry—he’s self-made, he did it all on his own,” said Doug Pergram, a local business owner who blames Democrats for high inflation and is planning to vote for Trump and Vance, even though he thinks the steel plant investment is welcome.

This illustrates a problem for Democrats, who have struggled to translate a surge of new clean energy projects and a glut of resulting jobs into voting strength, with polls showing most Americans don’t know much about the IRA or don’t credit Biden or Harris for its benefits.

Ohio was once a swing state but voted for Trump—with his promises of Rust belt renewal that’s only now materializing under Biden—in the last two elections and is set to do the same again in November. Harris, meanwhile, has only fleetingly mentioned climate change and barely attempted to sell the IRA, a groundbreaking but deeply unsexy volume of rebates and tax credits, on the campaign trail.

“Democrats have not done well in patting themselves on the back, they need to be out there screaming from the rooftops, ‘This is what we’ve done,’” said Gibson, a political independent who suffers directly from the status quo by living next to the Middletown facility that processes coke coal, a particularly dirty type of coal used in steel production that will become obsolete in the mill’s new era.

“The air pollution is horrendous, so the idea of eliminating the need for coke, well, I can’t tell you how happy that makes me,” said Gibson. The site, called SunCoke, heats half a million short tons of coal a year to make coke that’s funneled to the steel plant, a process that causes a strong odor and spews debris across the neighborhood. Gibson rarely opens her windows because of this pollution.

“Last year it snowed in July, all this white stuff was falling from the sky,” Gibson said. “The soot covers everything, covers the car, I have to Clorox my windows. The smell is so bad I’ve had to end get-togethers early from my house because people get so sick. It gives you an instant headache. It burns your throat, it burns your nose. It’s just awful.”

“Somewhere in there, JD changed. He’s allowed outsiders to pimp him. This guy is embarrassing us. That’s not who we are.”

The prospect of a cleaner, more secure future for Middletown is something the Biden administration tried to stress in March, when Jennifer Granholm, the US energy secretary, appeared at the steel mill with the Cleveland-Cliffs chief executive, union leaders and workers to extol the new hydrogen furnace. The grant helps solve a knotty problem where industry is reluctant to invest in cleaner-burning hydrogen because there aren’t enough extant examples of such technology.

“Mills like this aren’t just employers, they are anchors embedded deeply in the community. We want your kids and grandkids to produce steel here in America too,” Granholm said. “Consumers are demanding cleaner, greener products all over the world. We don’t want to just make the best products in the world, we want to make sure we make the best and cleanest products in the world.”

Lourenco Goncalves, chief executive of Cleveland-Cliffs, the largest flat-rolled steel producer in North America, followed Granholm to boast that a low-emissions furnace of this size was a world first, with the technology set to be expanded to 15 other company plants in the US.

Republicans elsewhere in the US have jumped onboard similar ribbon-cutting events, despite voting against the funding that enables them, but notably absent among the dignitaries seated in front of two enormous American flags hanging in the Middletown warehouse that day was Vance, the Ohio senator who went to high school just four miles from this place. His office did not respond to questions about the plant or his plans for the future of the IRA.

Bailey, a 71-year-old who retired from the steel plant in 2002, said that as a pastor he did speak several times to Vance about ways to aid Middletown but then became alarmed by the senator’s rightward shift in comments about women, as well as his lack of support for the new steel mill funding.

“JD Vance has never mentioned anything about helping Middletown rebound,” said Bailey, who witnessed a “brutal” 2006 management lockout of workers during a union dispute after which drug addiction and homelessness soared in Middletown. “He’s used Middletown for, in my view, his own personal gain.”

“Somewhere in there, JD changed,” he added. “He’s allowed outsiders to pimp him. This guy is embarrassing us. That’s not who we are.”