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It’s been nearly 20 years since states and cities started adopting climate goals, setting themselves on a path toward reducing emissions and rolling out clean energy. Whether they’re actually on track to meet those goals is up for debate.
Advocates across the country have sued municipalities they say are failing on their climate commitments, like those in San Diego who alleged the city’s climate plan lacked funding and a clear timeline, and a group in Vermont that said the state wasn’t complying with its 2020 emissions law.
But in Maine, climate advocates are getting specific with their complaints, the Energy News Network reports. A pending youth-led lawsuit targets the state’s environmental protection agencies, and says they haven’t adopted strong enough regulations to propel the state’s electric vehicle rollout.
The suit centers on Maine’s 2019 climate law. In it, the state said it would focus on cutting emissions from its “most significant sources” — and transportation tops that list. But even though the state has incentivized electric vehicle adoption, it’s still far from meeting its EV goals. So advocates say the state should implement California’s strongest-in-the-nation EV standards, which go even further than federal rules.
Environmental law professor Jennifer Rushlow told ENN that narrow lawsuits like this one tend to be more successful than broad suits that “get kind of lost to politics.” — and can inspire change in public opinion, too.
Read more about Maine’s unique climate lawsuit at the Energy News Network.
💰 More federal spending is coming… Researchers estimate the clean energy transition by 2031 will demand $1 trillion in federal spending — about 15 times what has been distributed so far via the Inflation Reduction Act. (Grist)
🏭 But is it all smart? The U.S. has spent more public money on carbon capture and gas-produced hydrogen than any country, a new report finds, even though the technologies remain unproven as cost-effective climate solutions. (The Guardian)
♻️ A new spin for wind: National Renewable Energy Laboratory researchers say they’ve developed a wind turbine blade made from plant materials that can be recycled into new shapes or blades. (New York Times)
👷 Clean jobs report: The Department of Energy says clean energy jobs last year grew at twice the rate of other sectors and saw unionization rates higher than in the broader energy industry. (Reuters)
Dig deeper: The Bureau of Labor Statistics says wind energy is the country’s fastest growing field and projects 60% job growth over the next 10 years. (Axios)
🚘 More power for charging: The Biden administration announces $521 million in grants for electric vehicle charging, and says the number of publicly available chargers has doubled since 2021. (Utility Dive)
☀️ Solar’s bright future: A columnist details how increasingly cheap and widely available solar power will make once-far-fetched applications and technologies possible. (New York Times)
🇺🇲 Plus, some politics
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ELECTRIC VEHICLES: The Army Corps of Engineers will reassess the permit it awarded to Hyundai’s planned $7.6 billion electric vehicle and battery factory in Georgia because it says state and local agencies never mentioned the company’s plans to withdraw up to 6.6 million gallons per day from an underground aquifer used for drinking water. (Associated Press)
GRID:
SOLAR: Nonprofits plan to expand a solar cooperative in El Paso, Texas, even though higher inflation and interest rates dampened interest in the program this year. (El Paso Matters)
STORAGE:
OIL & GAS:
GEOTHERMAL: A Houston-based geothermal energy startup signs a deal to build a facility to eventually provide 150 MW to Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram. (Houston Chronicle)
NUCLEAR: The director of a University of Kentucky energy center tells state lawmakers nuclear companies are increasingly considering building in the state, but construction of a new nuclear reactor won’t likely occur for at least a decade. (Kentucky Lantern)
CARBON CAPTURE: A Louisiana timber company sells carbon credits for unharvested trees on 100,000 acres, including more than $100 million worth of credits through the end of 2023. (WWNO)
CLIMATE:
COMMENTARY:
ELECTRIC VEHICLES: More than a year after Tesla said it would open its Supercharger network to drivers of other electric vehicles, most chargers still remain inaccessible due to software delays and hardware shortages. (New York Times)
ALSO:
GEOTHERMAL:
OIL & GAS: Northeast states are leading the way in pursuing compensation from oil companies for economic damages from climate change. (Stateline)
GRID:
SOLAR:
CLIMATE: A study finds an increase in heat-related deaths between 2018 and 2023, with the vast majority of fatalities occurring in California, Arizona, Nevada and Texas. (Los Angeles Times)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES: Boston will be able to install at least 300 electric vehicle chargers across the city, focusing on environmental justice communities, using a $15 million federal grant, while Massachusetts park officials will install as many as 40 chargers using a $1.2 million grant. (Boston.com, WHDH)
ALSO: New York City will use a $15 million federal grant to install 600 level-2 curbside chargers throughout the city, although some criticize the plan for permanently taking away street space for other non-private car uses. (amNY, Streetsblog)
POLITICS: Maryland’s election this fall for a U.S. Senate seat could make or break federal climate action. (Inside Climate News)
RENEWABLE POWER:
GEOTHERMAL: A geothermal pilot project in Massachusetts is a rare example of gas companies and environmental activists partnering together for climate action. (Christian Science Monitor)
AFFORDABILITY:
GRID:
BUILDINGS:
TRANSPORTATION:
A pending youth climate lawsuit in Maine represents the latest iteration of legal strategies aimed at holding states accountable for emissions-cutting targets.
The case is one of a growing number responding to lagging progress on state climate laws that, in many cases, have now been on the books for years. What makes the Maine case unique is its targeted approach — focused on electric vehicle policy as a way to push the state forward on climate action.
The case, filed earlier this year by the nonprofits Conservation Law Foundation (CLF), Sierra Club and Maine Youth Action, argues that the Maine Department and Board of Environmental Protection have fallen short on their legal duty to pass rules that will help achieve Maine’s required emissions reductions.
“There are countless solutions for tackling these various sources of climate-warming pollution,” said CLF senior attorney Emily Green, who is based in Portland, Maine. “But you need something more to make sure that it’s all enough, that it all adds up, and that’s where enforceable standards come in.”
The Maine Attorney General’s office declined to comment, but has moved to dismiss the case. A ruling on next steps is now pending.
The case focuses on a 2019 state law that requires Maine to lower its greenhouse gas emissions 45% from 1990 levels by 2030 and 80% by 2050.
Statutes like this are “where the rubber meets the road,” said Columbia Law School professor Michael Gerrard, faculty director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. “The regulations are the teeth, the specifics on who needs to do what.”
Such rules translate emissions goals into practical requirements for state executive agencies, processing legislative directive “into what polluters are required to do on a day-to-day basis,” said Jennifer Rushlow, an environmental law professor at Vermont Law and Graduate School.
Maine’s climate law said the state “shall adopt rules to ensure compliance” with the emissions targets, requiring those rules to prioritize reductions “by sectors that are the most significant sources.”
Transportation contributes more than half of Maine’s emissions, and Maine’s climate plan prioritized electric vehicle adoption as a result. But the state is a long way off from its EV targets. It has about 12,300 EVs on the road now, with climate plan goals of 41,000 by next year and 219,000 by 2030.
The CLF suit takes regulators to task for repeatedly failing to adopt California’s latest electric car and truck standards, which some states use as a more stringent alternative to federal rules.
Maine has used California’s Advanced Clean Cars I rule for years, but voted earlier this year against adopting Advanced Clean Cars II, which would have required increasing EV sales in the state over the next several years. It’s also chosen twice not to consider adopting the Advanced Clean Trucks rule.
CLF notes that the state’s climate law requires the adoption of rules that are “consistent with the climate action plan,” first released in 2020. A roadmap for meeting the plan’s transportation goals strongly recommended adopting Clean Cars II, calling it “the most important regulatory driver in the electrification of Maine’s light-duty vehicles in the next two decades.”
In its motion to dismiss the CLF case, the state argues that Maine’s climate law does not require regulators to adopt all climate plan recommendations, or particular ones, as rules.
The state has approved a handful of other rules under the climate law. Two focus on tracking emissions, and two others look at what Green called “narrow slices of the building sector,” the state’s second-largest emissions sector. These rules target hydrofluorocarbons and energy efficiency in appliances.
In their motion, attorneys for the state quote a Maine Supreme Court decision from a separate environmental case earlier this year to argue that it is “simply ‘too uncertain’ … whether future harms will occur that will ‘directly and continuously impact’ any of Plaintiffs’ members.”
CLF’s response lists a range of climate-linked harms that specific members of the plaintiff groups say they’ve already experienced, from increasing tick-borne illness and other health impacts to crop and flood damage.
“Climate change is here. Mainers are feeling the effects from a warming Gulf, from climate-driven storms,” Green said, adding that state lawmakers have repeatedly made similar statements in recent years. “Each day that passes with further inaction is a day wasted.”
The state also argues that the “shifting sands” of state and federal climate policies that could affect Maine’s targets create too much uncertainty around harms from a current lack of transportation rules.
In general, Gerrard said, such factors don’t negate the need for rulemaking. “We are way behind in reducing emissions, and so the fact that other things are happening isn’t going to solve the problem.”
Green said that while Maine has made strides on expanding EV charging infrastructure, for example, “the actual standards are necessary to give that transition the push it needs.”
“Binding rules can basically act as a backstop,” she said. “They can ensure the accountability that the investment and the rebates and the education and outreach, on their own, can’t do.”
The suit’s transportation focus is notable, experts said. “I would say the energy sector is targeted more frequently, and especially the fossil fuel sector,” Gerrard said. Other climate-adjacent transportation cases have focused on vehicle emissions standards, biofuel mandates or highway projects, he said.
Rushlow sees the Maine case as a blend of a 2016 suit, also from CLF, which found that Massachusetts wasn’t fulfilling its 2008 emissions-cutting law, and a suit against the Hawaii Department of Transportation, where a recent settlement will require the decarbonization of Hawaii’s transportation sector by 2045.
Rushlow worked with CLF on the Massachusetts case, but is not involved in the Maine suit and reviewed it after being asked to comment for this story. She said the Maine case lays out why having regulations on transportation emissions is “not just a wish” of the state climate council, but a legal requirement.
“The lawsuits that get really broad can get kind of lost to politics,” said Rushlow. “These lawsuits that are more narrow and focused on the language of particular state laws, I think, can stand a good chance.”
She said there are also more “hooks” to do this at the state level than federally. Gerrard agreed that it’s easier to bring cases under specific statutes than “a constitutional provision or a common law doctrine.”
Both the Hawaii case and the landmark Held v. Montana, which is now on appeal before that state’s Supreme Court, successfully took a state constitutional approach, using their legally given rights to a clean and healthful environment to push for climate progress.
Practical legal results aren’t the only positive impact these cases can have, Rushlow said: “There’s also outcomes in the zeitgeist and public opinion.” Though Juliana v. United States failed in court, she said, it “really drew a lot of attention to the future harm we’re causing our youth — and the current harm.”
But she sees increasing potential for success among a greater share of climate lawsuits just in the past few years, as plaintiffs learn more about how courts are likely to receive different approaches.
“It feels to me like progress is being made,” she said. “But the courts are never the first place you want to go when you’re looking for rapid, systemic change. They’re slow, they’re backward-looking, they’re conservative. And so it’s a challenging forum for the kind of change we need, and yet necessary.”
In Maine, climate groups initially tried a regulatory petition to push for the passage of Clean Cars II.
“When it became entirely evident that that was not going to happen, our hand was sort of forced,” Green said.
ELECTRIC VEHICLES: Ford scraps a new electric vehicle model and pushes back the start of production from 2025 to 2027 at its BlueOval electric vehicle and battery factory in Tennessee so it can use lower-cost battery technology. (Tennessee Lookout; Commercial Appeal)
SOLAR:
COAL:
OIL & GAS:
HYDROPOWER: Duke Energy wants to further expand a South Carolina pumped storage battery project after recent upgrades that added 320 MW of capacity. (Greenville News)
POLITICS:
HYDROGEN: West Virginia U.S. Sens. Joe Manchin and Shelley Moore Capito cut the ribbon on a state office for the Appalachian Regional Clean Hydrogen Hub. (Parkersburg News and Sentinel)
BUILDINGS: Developers in Austin, Texas, increasingly build with climate change in mind and aim to partner with electric utilities given the fragility of the state power grid. (Austin Monitor)
UTILITIES:
COMMENTARY: Recent calls by West Virginia’s oil and gas industry to remove regulatory constraints disingenuously promise lower energy prices while exacerbating climate change and downplaying its effects on residents who live near projects like the Mountain Valley Pipeline, writes an environmental activist. (Parkersburg News and Sentinel)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES: Most states now charge electric vehicle owners an annual fee to fund road upkeep, though critics say improved fuel economy in conventional vehicles has had a far bigger impact on gas tax revenue than electric vehicles. (E&E News)
EMISSIONS:
CLEAN ENERGY:
WIND: Federal officials allow Vineyard Wind to resume construction as they undertake a “controlled cutting” of the remaining bits of the broken wind turbine blade that haven’t fallen off yet. (Nantucket Current, Utility Dive)
CLIMATE: Wharton is among top business schools launching environmental, social and governance-focused programs, where they’ll learn how climate change can impact investments and other business decisions. (Inside Climate News)
STORAGE:
UTILITIES: In an agreement with Ohio’s attorney general, FirstEnergy will avoid state criminal charges in the corruption scandal surrounding a 2019 bailout law by paying a $20 million settlement — a tiny fraction of the windfall the company continues to receive from ratepayers. (Ohio Capital Journal)
OIL & GAS:
ELECTRIC VEHICLES: Philadelphians are increasingly buying electric vehicles, but many apartment dwellers and street parkers find it hard to install home charging and use limited chargers in the city. (Billy Penn)
SOLAR: Eversource says 11,600 of its Connecticut customers, most of them residential, installed solar panels in 2023 — up 60% from 2022’s total installations. (Hartford Courant)
CLIMATE:
CLEAN ENERGY: U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announces Maine will get $4.3 million from the Rural Energy for America Program to help farmers install clean energy and make efficient building improvements. (News Center Maine)
CARBON CAPTURE: Gas industry groups celebrate a new Pennsylvania law paving the way for a carbon capture and storage industry, though some environmental groups say it will prolong the gas industry’s life, and that carbon capture wells can be dangerous. (StateImpact)
BUILDINGS:
OIL & GAS:Pennsylvania advocates celebrate a court’s ruling earlier this month that will let them challenge permits issued for a gas pipeline expansion slated to cross Monroe and Luzerne counties. (Lehigh Valley News)
GRID: A Maryland transmission project meant to shore up power reliability in the face of growing power demand becomes a point of contention in the state’s U.S. Senate race. (Baltimore Banner, WBAL)
STORAGE:
NUCLEAR: Women in the nuclear power industry gather at a Pittsburgh conference. (WTAE)
COMMENTARY: Two New York state lawmakers call on Gov. Kathy Hochul to employ the state’s public power authority to build out 15 GW of new clean energy projects by 2030. (City & State)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES: Researchers argue that the recyclability of electric vehicle battery minerals give them an environmental advantage over fossil fuels, despite the massive impact of mining for lithium and other components. (Canary Media)
ALSO:
POLITICS:
PERMITTING:
SOLAR: The Biden administration advances the proposed 5,350 MW Esmeralda 7 solar-plus-storage complex near Tonopah, Nevada, which would be one of the world’s largest such facilities. (news release; E&E News, subscription)
OIL & GAS: Georgia regulators consider Georgia Power’s request to build three new gas-powered “peaker” units totaling 1,300 MW, even as the utility keeps the cost that will be passed onto ratepayers under wraps as a “trade secret.” (Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
WIND: A federal safety agency says it intends to complete a “comprehensive and independent investigation” into the blade that snapped off a Vineyard Wind turbine and into the ocean last week. (State House News Service)
COAL: Michigan’s two largest utilities operated coal plants at a $20 million loss between 2021 and 2023 when lower cost gas and renewables could have been deployed, according to a recent Natural Resources Defense Council report. (Michigan Public)
EMISSIONS:
POLITICS: Mississippi Republicans rush to embrace an electric vehicle factory near the Tennessee state line that’s the single largest payroll commitment in state history, but which was made possible by federal legislation they opposed and which Donald Trump has promised to roll back. (Mississippi Today)
ALSO:
OIL & GAS: Dominion Energy pushes to build a natural gas-fired power plant in Virginia that’s generating resistance from local residents as the state seeks to meet both its clean energy goals and growing power demand. (Virginia Mercury)
SOLAR:
EMISSIONS: A U.S. Army fort in Georgia signs an agreement with Georgia Power to replace its diesel energy system with natural gas and make other improvements to its mechanical and lighting systems to reduce its carbon footprint. (Augusta Chronicle)
CLIMATE:
NUCLEAR: A Virginia company partners with NASA to develop fuel and components for nuclear-powered spaceships that could replace traditional chemical rockets. (Cardinal News)
COMMENTARY:
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