Abstract
Projections of a sea ice-free Arctic have so far focused on monthly-mean ice-free conditions. We here provide the first projections of when we could see the first ice-free day in the Arctic Ocean, using daily output from multiple CMIP6 models. We find that there is a large range of the projected first ice-free day, from 3 years compared to a 2023-equivalent model state to no ice-free day before the end of the simulations in 2100, depending on the model and forcing scenario used. Using a storyline approach, we then focus on the nine simulations where the first ice-free day occurs within 3–6 years, i.e. potentially before 2030, to understand what could cause such an unlikely but high-impact transition to the first ice-free day. We find that these early ice-free days all occur during a rapid ice loss event and are associated with strong winter and spring warming.
A $200bn wave of new gas projects could lead to a “climate bomb” equivalent to releasing the annual emissions of all the world’s operating coal power plants, according to a report.
Large banks have invested $213bn into plans to build terminals that export and import gas that is chilled and shipped on ocean tankers. But a report has warned that they could be more damaging than coal power.
The report, by the climate group Reclaim Finance, found a sharp rise in projects to boost the global trade of gas in recent years, driven by a shift from coal to gas in developing countries and Russia’s war on Ukraine, which caused pipeline imports into Europe to dry up.
It found that there were eight liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminal projects and 99 import terminal projects completed in the past two years, which increased the world’s export capacity by 7% and the global import capacity by 19%.
In addition, LNG developers are planning 156 new LNG terminal projects worldwide to be constructed by 2030, of which 63 are export terminals and 93 import terminals, according to the report.
It warned that due to methane leaks these terminals could produce an estimated 10 gigatonnes of greenhouse gas emissions by the end of the decade, or almost as much as the annual emissions of all the coal plants in operation worldwide.
Justine Duclos-Gonda, a campaigner at Reclaim Finance, said: “Oil and gas companies are betting their future on LNG projects, but every single one of their planned projects puts the future of the Paris agreement in danger. Banks and investors claim to be supporting oil and gas companies in the transition, but instead they are investing billions of dollars in future climate bombs.”
The latest findings are expected to fuel growing fears that unchecked investments in the global gas market could lead to an oversupply of gas that would threaten the world’s climate targets.
The International Energy Agency warned last month that the global LNG markets are heading towards an unprecedented glut of gas supply that would be inconsistent with keeping global temperatures from rising over 2.4C (36.32F) above pre-industrialised levels.
It warned that the world’s LNG capacity was on track to grow by almost 50% by 2030, greater than the world’s forecast demand for gas in all three of the agency’s modelled scenarios.
This glut is expected to lead to falling fossil fuel prices, which could encourage a greater reliance on cheap gas in favour of renewable energy technologies and energy efficiency improvements, throwing climate targets further into doubt.
The IEA has predicted that the price of gas imported into the EU is expected to plunge from a record average high of more than $70 (£54) per million British thermal units (MBtu) in 2022 to $6.50 (£5) by the end of the decade, following a boom in planned gas projects in recent years.
“LNG is a fossil fuel and new projects have no part to play in a sustainable transition,” Duclos-Gonda said. “Banks and investors must take responsibility and stop supporting LNG developers and new terminals immediately.”
Although most major banks have set targets to move towards “net zero” banking, the report warned that none have a specific policy on financing LNG projects meaning that investments have been allowed to go ahead despite climate targets.
Two years ago, on a tree-lined street in Princeton, N.J., a truck-mounted drill arrived at a modest two-story home. Its goal? To dig a 500-foot hole in the front yard.
Although the contraption resembled an oil rig, it would be prospecting for a cleaner energy source: water. Forrest Meggers, an engineering and architecture professor at Princeton University, was installing a geothermal heating and cooling system for his house, which he was also gut-renovating to be a showcase for green living.
Dr. Meggers, 43, who teaches a course called “Designing Sustainable Systems,” is not your average D.I.Y.-er. Though he speaks with the drawl of a surfer and lives in what is starting to look like a gingerbread house, he is all business when it comes to lowering greenhouse emissions as society stubbornly clings to fossil fuels.
“We’re basically driving with our seatbelts off at 100 miles an hour right now,” he said.
With his curious neighbors looking on, he is making his house a live-in laboratory. The ongoing construction, which began three years ago, has tested the patience of his family of six. But when the home is also a real-time model for fighting climate change, the risks and rewards can multiply, and the projects can seem endless.
The renovation has gone $40,000 over its $300,000 budget so far. For a year, the professor and his wife, Georgette Stern, also 43, had to move their bedroom and makeshift kitchen to the basement, where Ms. Stern cooked for the family using a hot plate and a slow cooker. “It was rough,” she said.
“Forrest is a little bit non-compromising with his ideals,” said Ms. Stern, who got her engineering Ph.D. along with her husband, but left academia when the couple’s first of four daughters was born. “He pushes you beyond what you thought was possible,” she continued. “But sometimes I have to draw a line.”
As an undergraduate at the University of Iowa studying mechanical engineering, Dr. Meggers originally wanted to design bicycles for environmental reasons, he said. But then he learned more about the effects of climate change. “I realized, ‘Oh, my god, buildings are terrible,’” he said. Gradually, he switched his focus to architecture and engineering.
At his lab at Princeton, called C.H.A.O.S., which stands for Cooling and Heating for Architecturally Optimized Systems, Dr. Meggers and his students are developing heating and cooling techniques that he often tests at home. A self-taught builder, the professor has incorporated both cutting-edge technology as well as more traditional conservation methods.
Geothermal, a centuries-old technique to harness energy that is experiencing a resurgence across the country (including on college campuses like Princeton), was just the beginning for him.
There are various ways of using geothermal energy, but Dr. Meggers’s system taps into deep underground water that retains a constant temperature of about 50 degrees. Then, a heat pump distributes the water through the home via a network of pipes under the floor, in what is known as a radiant heating system. (In the summer, the heat pump can be reversed to extract heat from the house, keeping it cool.)
Other aspects of the project have centered on maximizing the space of the family’s house without making it bigger. The concept is important to the professor, who eschews hulking American homes and their elevated energy demands. But it was the practicality of the plan that appealed to Ms. Stern. “We have four kids and a small house,” she said.
Now, each daughter — ranging in age from 9 to 13 — has her own room on what used to be a cramped, two-bedroom second floor. The demolition of the upstairs involved a new roof and floors, under which Dr. Meggers installed the pipes for the radiant system. This allowed air ducts to be removed, opening up more space and making way for the girls’ private bedrooms.
The floors covering the pipes are reclaimed wood from ash trees killed by invasive insects. There is also a bedroom door made from a local red oak that had to be cut down, insulation courtesy of sheep’s wool from the professor’s family farm in Iowa and a sink atop a toilet that reroutes water from washing hands to flushing.
There are other green houses in Princeton, said Abel Smith, a local sustainable builder who has helped with the renovation and co-organizes annual tours of the homes. But the Meggers house “is a standout,” Mr. Smith added, because it is so comprehensive in its sustainability features. “He did it all,” Mr. Smith said.
But it hasn’t all gone smoothly. Ms. Stern had to tap the brakes on her husband’s seemingly boundless energy when he turned to the kitchen. “This made me crazy, since I’m the one who cooks,” Ms. Stern said. And when Dr. Meggers insisted on pricey cedar shakes for the roof, Ms. Stern negotiated a compromise. They ended up putting cedar on the dormers and asphalt everywhere else. Asphalt shingles are cheaper but not as environmentally friendly.
The family has also questioned the professor’s cooling system, which depends on cold water under the floors, monitored by sensors that keep the sub-floor temperature above the dew point, when condensation occurs. But during a New Jersey summer, the dew point can exceed 70 degrees, which means the floors can grow warm.
“I know he’s trying to make our house more eco-friendly and stuff,” said one of the twin daughters, Maelin Meggers, 11, on a balmy day in October. “But it’s not as cold as other houses.” In the interest of keeping his wife and daughters happy, Dr. Meggers has built a system of coils and fans that cool the air on sweltering days.
The exterior of the home incorporates another design element that allows for natural heating and cooling: passive solar shading. On the south side of the house, Dr. Meggers built hooded windows. A low winter sun hits beneath the ledge to warm the house while the high summer sun hits the ledge, which shades the home.
“It’s what people have been doing since the Anasazi Cliff dwellers built their caves on the sides of the mountain,” Dr. Meggers said.
The to-do list for the house includes solar panel installation. Once that is complete and the home goes off the grid, two 530-gallon “water bladders,” an unconventional spin on thermal storage tanks, will reduce the need for battery power. These small, malleable bags, which are stuffed into a crawl space in the basement, allow for heating and cooling to be distributed without the electrically-intensive heat pump.
More esoteric projects, which are being developed in the C.H.A.O.S. lab, include fine-tuning the zoned sensors and trying out different desiccants to take humidity out of the home. Both initiatives contribute to cooling a house without air-conditioning, which Dr. Meggers described as a wasteful process.
“I’ll be done as soon as I stop having ideas,” Dr. Meggers said. But the house is already a home, he added, especially since the daughters have their own rooms and there are working bathrooms and a kitchen.
Earlier this year, a mechanical engineering class from Princeton visited the house. Helena Frudit, a senior, was impressed with how much sustainable work had been completed on a street so close to town, as opposed to “off the grid in the middle of nowhere,” she said.
“He showed us that you don’t have to be in the middle of the forest to have a cleaner house,” she said.
Money is the mother’s milk of politics, but the outcome of elections also determines where it flows — and last month’s was especially crucial for the energy industry.
Clean investment — including renewable energy as well as the manufacturing of electric vehicles, batteries and solar panels — has boomed since the passage of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, championed by President Biden. In the third quarter of 2024, it reached a record $71 billion, according to a tracker maintained by the Rhodium Group, an energy-focused research firm, and M.I.T.
The big question looming now on Wall Street: Will President-elect Donald J. Trump, who called Mr. Biden’s policies the “green new scam” during the campaign, pull back enough of those subsidies and regulations to meaningfully change the economics of investing in decarbonization?
Market reactions right after the election seemed clear. Clean energy stocks dropped sharply, while shares of oil companies bounced, indicating a divergent view of how the two sectors will fare in the coming years.
Near the top of Mr. Trump’s agenda next year is extending his 2017 tax cuts. He will most likely need to reduce spending elsewhere to do that. Clean energy tax credits — worth about $350 billion over just the next three years, according to the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation — would be a tempting target. The more those subsidies are pared, the more projects would no longer make financial sense.
Since the election, renewable energy backers have drawn some hope from the knowledge that funding leveraged by the 2022 law has disproportionately flowed toward Republican states, potentially shielding it from cuts. Energy demand has also started rising for the first time in a generation with the growth of electric vehicles, heat pumps, new factories and artificial intelligence, bolstering the case for an expansive approach to energy sources. And solar energy, in particular, is now one of the cheapest forms of power available.
“Renewable energy has a certain bipartisan support,” said Nils Rode, the chief investment officer of Schroders Capital, a Swiss firm that manages $97 billion, including wind farms in the United States. “Even though there might be risks, we don’t believe it will lead to major changes.”
Subsidies aren’t the only policy with the potential to affect the flow of money, however. Mr. Trump and his team have made it clear they wish to ease the path of fossil fuel projects in ways that could make them more attractive to investors.
His candidate for interior secretary, Doug Burgum, has promised to open up more federal lands to oil and gas drilling. Chris Wright, the fracking company chief executive whom Mr. Trump picked to lead the Energy Department, could redirect the agency’s vast research agenda and loan programs away from low-carbon electricity. At the Environmental Protection Agency, the president-elect intends to nominate Lee Zeldin, who has discussed rolling back rules on power plant emissions, which would weaken incentives for utilities to shift to cleaner sources of electricity.
All of those actions would increase the return on fossil fuel investments relative to renewable ones.
“The fundamental thing that changes is just the economics,” said Ben King, an associate director of the climate and energy practice at the Rhodium Group, who has counted $435 billion in renewable energy projects that have been announced but not yet started. “Even today, wind, solar and batteries are competing with natural gas, on the margins. A slowdown in deployment of those technologies just leaves more room for gas on the grid.”
In addition, Mr. Trump’s promise to impose big new tariffs would hit the components needed to build solar fields, wind farms, car batteries and long-duration energy storage systems. And a decrease in the corporate tax rate could weaken the market for tradable tax credits that renewable energy developers use to take advantage of many of the Inflation Reduction Act’s subsidies that must be claimed against taxable income.
The prospect of such changes has caused some banks and investors to pause new renewable energy deals until the landscape in Washington becomes more clear. Financial firms are also making sure that new contracts include provisions that protect them against policy changes that could lower their returns.
“They will not invest when it’s unclear what the economics of the projects are, unless you’ve adjusted the pricing for the worst case and the deal still works,” said Keith Martin, a lawyer with Norton Rose Fulbright who has long handled complex financing for banks investing in renewable energy projects.
But some of Mr. Trump’s proposals and ideas could cut in opposing and unexpected directions. For example, encouraging the export of natural gas would tend to raise its price domestically and make the building of new U.S. gas power plants less appealing to investors, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Speeding up permitting of new electricity transmission could help some renewable energy projects. Mining for the minerals used in battery production might become easier, too.
Also, losing some of Mr. Biden’s climate rules may not make that much of a difference. The Securities and Exchange Commission’s recent rule requiring public companies to disclose certain carbon emissions is tied up in court, and the new administration may simply drop it — but many companies already have to do similar reporting to comply with European Union regulations. And Europe is phasing in a “border adjustment mechanism,” or a kind of tariff for goods produced using a lot of carbon.
“They’re not going to be able to hide from it if they want to keep doing business in Europe,” said Jason Britton, president of Reflection Asset Management, a socially responsible investment consulting firm.
Europe isn’t just a substitute regulator, however. It’s also a competitor for young companies looking for the most friendly place to scale up operations, offering research assistance and other incentives.
Dan Goldman is the managing partner of Clean Energy Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm with portfolio companies that have frequently been supported by federal loans and grants. If those funds are choked off, he said, they could look elsewhere.
“We want our companies to ultimately be global,” Mr. Goldman said. “That was certainly true before the election, and, if anything, now we would say it’s important to accelerate those initiatives.”
One thing that is clear: Financial firms will most likely stop trumpeting their investments as being about “climate” or “sustainability” or “E.S.G.” — which stands for environmental, social and governance — a trend that has been underway since Republican state officials started targeting asset managers like BlackRock that professed such ideals.
Instead, the monikers have changed to words like “transition finance,” “resilience” and even “critical technology.” The argument for supporting low-carbon electricity will shift even more toward “energy security” and staying ahead of companies based in China.
Banks and asset managers had already been leaving international alliances set up in recent years to collectively advance commitments to divest from fossil fuels and fund decarbonization. But it doesn’t appear that those alliances were propelling institutions to do much that they weren’t already planning. Some experts think the climate movement is better off without them.
“They have been talking out of both sides of their mouths for the past five years, saying, ‘We’re partners in financing the energy transition,’ and then saying, ‘No, we’re agnostic,’” said Lisa Sachs, director of the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment. “They created a perception that something useful was happening when nothing useful was happening.”
Ultimately, macroeconomic factors may matter more than policy. Oil and gas companies won’t pump more unless global prices are high enough to justify doing so. And renewable energy investment rose even under the last Trump administration, largely because interest rates were so low that investors could make money even without deep subsidies.
That’s why the news last week that the Federal Reserve was not expecting to cut interest rates as much as it had planned to in 2025 was bad news for the sector. If the cost of capital remains high, new tariffs would increase the cost of construction. And if the energy law is entirely repealed, the future for clean energy investment will look much dimmer.
“That, I think, is a tough situation,” said Quinn Pasloske, a principal with Greenbacker, a fund manager focused on clean energy infrastructure. “If any one of those three legs of the stool doesn’t fall, you’re in a fine spot because the fundamentals are still there.”
By Stephen Lezak
Dr. Lezak is a researcher at the University of Oxford and the University of California, Berkeley, who studies the politics of climate change.
In the 1930s, a terrible drought plunged farming communities across the United States into catastrophe. As millions of Americans abandoned their homes, President Franklin D. Roosevelt created something remarkable: the Resettlement Administration, which sought to move entire communities to newly built towns such as Greendale, Wis., and Greenhills, Ohio.
Almost a century after the Dust Bowl, America is on the cusp of another displacement crisis, this one caused primarily by climate change. At the end of 2022, the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center, an international nonprofit, counted 543,000 Americans who fled their homes to escape a disaster and had not yet returned. As the country’s 20th-century infrastructure becomes increasingly incompatible with the 21st-century climate, this number will grow. When it does, the fates of entire regions, and particularly coastal areas, will fracture along economic fault lines.
With the Resettlement Administration long gone, no federal agency bears responsibility for helping the most threatened and remote communities relocate if they wish to do so. Policymakers have essentially abandoned those Americans who need to move to safety in the wake of losing their land to rising seas and worsening storms.
This failure is especially striking because since the middle of the 20th century, the United States has almost always offered some form of compensation (however paltry) when its citizens’ land is taken. But most rural communities on the front lines of climate change are not granted the same consideration. While climate change is not eminent domain, the distinction hardly matters from the perspective of a displaced community.
Wealthy, dense cities such as New York, London and Venice have spent billions on elaborate infrastructure that will shield many residents (but by no means all) from extreme weather. But rural towns and villages generally lack the resources to build enormous sea walls or levees to hold back storms and the rising tide. Many of these communities will have no choice but to relocate. They could either do so on their own terms (if the government would help them), or wait until disaster renders their homes unlivable and their options much more dire.
The village of Shaktoolik, Alaska, where I’ve conducted research since 2022, is one such place. Its 250 residents, almost all of whom are Inupiaq, live on a blush of land barely more than a sandbar on the storm-prone Bering Sea. There is no road along which residents could evacuate, nor a harbor where boats could safely dock during a storm. Instead, a short gravel airstrip is the primary connection between this community and the rest of North America.
A 2009 government report described Shaktoolik as “imminently threatened” by coastal erosion and flooding. In 2022, a typhoon barreled out of a record-hot Pacific Ocean and destroyed the gravel levee that was the village’s only defense against being swept out to sea. The disaster confirmed what many elders and engineers had said for years: The people of Shaktoolik must relocate to higher ground, and quickly.
When displacement is unplanned, it can shatter communities, with residents scattering to distant cities, unable or unwilling to return. For Native communities in particular, giving up a homeland endangers language, culture, sovereignty and traditional hunting, fishing and harvesting.
Planned relocation, by contrast, allows communities to remain intact as they move collectively to safety. For Shaktoolik, that safe place would likely be the low-lying hills 12 miles away, set back from the eroding coastline but still within the tribe’s homeland.
Because there is no one agency that coordinates relocations, communities must patch together funding from as many as 12 separate entities in Washington, often by applying to dozens of competitive grant programs run by the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Housing and Urban Development and others. When evaluating proposals, federal officials often require that applicants undertake a cost-benefit analysis that places poor communities at a disadvantage. Villages can tally up their modest housing stock and limited infrastructure, but the cultural and spiritual value of remaining intact is excluded from the final balance sheet.
In the last 25 years, just two American communities, both of them Indigenous, have cleared these hurdles. The first, Isle de Jean Charles in Louisiana, took 20 years to complete the process. The second, Newtok in Alaska, is in the final steps of its relocation, after more than 30 years of planning and fund-raising. While Shaktoolik’s leaders have applied for relocation funding from various federal agencies, the community hasn’t yet raised enough. Some of its proposals have been funded; many have been denied.
In December, the Biden administration recommended changes to the bureaucratic morass hindering community relocation. But it stopped short of instituting these recommendations, or taking the critical step of designating a single agency to lead on climate relocation.
Under the second Trump administration, leadership on community relocation will be a tough sell for Republican lawmakers looking to pay for tax cuts. But conservatives who are enthralled with the notion of efficiency should remember that it generally costs less in the long run to act than to wait until the damage is done. A study commissioned by Louisiana, for example, projected that coastal protection efforts would spare the state $11 billion to $15 billion annually in climate-induced damage.
To date, the general response to climate-vulnerable communities has been the policy equivalent of a shrug. But by failing to ensure that rural Americans can relocate, their futures become collateral damage in the political gridlock that haunts the climate crisis, while most government officials are safe behind sea walls and sophisticated flood defense systems.
Americans deserve better. What was clear to policymakers during the Dust Bowl should not be a matter of controversy or inaction today. Those communities that wish to relocate must be able to move to terra firma while remaining whole.
Exodus from target-setting group is attempt to head off ‘anti-woke’ attacks from rightwing politicians, say analysts
The six biggest banks in the US have all quit the global banking industry’s net zero target-setting group, with the imminent inauguration of Donald Trump as president expected to bring political backlash against climate action.
JP Morgan is the latest to withdraw from the UN-sponsored net zero banking alliance (NZBA), following Citigroup, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs. All six have left since the start of December.
Analysts have said the withdrawals are an attempt to head off “anti-woke” attacks from rightwing US politicians, which are expected to escalate when Trump is sworn in as the country’s 47th president in just under a fortnight.
Trump’s vows to deregulate the energy sector, dismantle environmental rules and “drill, baby, drill”, were a big part of his campaign platform and are expected to form a key part of his blueprint for governing the US, the world’s biggest oil and gas producer.
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