Former New York City mayor and climate change crusader Michael Bloomberg faces a tougher challenge in his new goal of fighting oil and gas than he had in his successful efforts shuttering coal plants.
Bloomberg announced this week that, rather than joining a crowded 2020 Democratic presidential field, he would invest his money and influence into “organizing and mobilizing communities to begin moving America as quickly as possible away from oil and gas and toward a 100 percent clean energy economy.”
He hasn’t provided further details, but the effort sounds a lot like the “Beyond Coal” campaign that Bloomberg has partnered on with the Sierra Club and other environmental groups that has helped retire more than half the nation’s coal plants, 285 out of 530, since it began in 2010.
But while Beyond Coal has benefited from piggybacking off coal’s existing market-driven economic challenges, the oil and gas industry is thriving.
The shale boom has made America the world’s most prolific producer of oil and gas. It’s natural gas, which emits half the carbon of coal, that has mostly replaced coal in the electricity sector. And coal is still hanging on, providing nearly 30 percent of the nation’s electricity.
“Bloomberg and the Sierra Club are declaring a premature victory on coal and not recognizing the role of gas in that process,” said Paul Bledsoe, a former climate change adviser to President Bill Clinton. “Gas is by far the most valuable fossil fuel in the clean energy transition, and it will be the last fossil fuel whose role will significantly diminish.”
Still, Democrats and environmental groups welcome Bloomberg’s decision to target all fossil fuels, which the former mayor is calling the “Beyond Carbon” campaign.
Supporters and climate experts note that most forecasts, including one last year by the United Nations Climate Change panel, say the world must get off fossil fuels entirely by 2050 and reach net-zero carbon emissions by that time to avoid the worst consequences of climate change.
Josh Freed, who runs the clean energy program at the center-left think tank Third Way, said Bloomberg’s lobbying muscle is valuable in the absence of a federal policy like a carbon tax or cap-and-trade. “The mayor has shown himself to be a committed, passionate, and hard-nosed realist on what needs to be done and how,” Freed said.
Bloomberg’s staff refused to provide details about Beyond Carbon. But leaders of the Sierra Club-led Beyond Coal campaign say that effort provides a blueprint for Bloomberg’s new foray.
Sierra Club’s Mary Anne Hitt, the director of the Beyond Coal campaign, said Bloomberg has provided $110 million to that project since his first donation in 2011.
Hitt said Bloomberg brought analytics to the operation, helping to create a sophisticated data center to help project which coal plants were vulnerable and should be targeted. Beyond Coal mostly focuses its lobbying by sending members and lawyers to meetings of state utility commissions across the country, which regulate utilities and approve or reject where they generate electricity from based on cost.
“There is no substitute for federal policy, but in the absence of that, every day decisions are made in utility commissions on whether we should put scrubbers [pollution controls] on a coal plant, or retire it. Or whether we should continue running a coal plant indefinitely, or make this transition to wind or solar with storage,” Hitt said.
She said Bloomberg has not revealed whether he will formally partner with or donate to the Sierra Club to defeat oil and gas.
The Beyond Coal campaign has an existing mission to eliminate gas as well as coal by 2030. Hitt expects to discuss with Bloomberg’s team whether he will partner on that expanded mission.
Until recently, Bloomberg and the Sierra Club had differing views on the role of natural gas in the energy transition.
“We’ve wrestled with this, and there’s a definite disagreement with Bloomberg,” Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune told Politico in 2015. “We don’t see gas as an environmental fix.”
The Sierra Club and other environmental groups have begun to more aggressively contest natural gas as renewable alternatives have become cheaper and more prevalent, especially wind, solar, and energy storage technologies that carry excess power for use when the sun sets and wind is still.
Hitt noted that NIPSCO, a utility in Indiana, recently decided to retire two coal plants, and replace the power with wind, solar, and storage instead of natural gas.
Another utility, Xcel Energy in Colorado, won approval in August from a state utility commission to replace two coal units with wind and solar, again forgoing gas.
“There is a big vulnerability of gas being undercut by renewables across the country,” Hitt said. “It is a dangerous time for a utility to be going big on gas.”
But Noah Kaufman, an economist and climate policy expert at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, said renewables and storage is beating gas on price only “situationally” and it’s “not anywhere close to universal yet.”
“The economics will have to change significantly more for renewables to see a real decline in gas use,” Kaufman said.
Tackling oil in transportation is an even tougher challenge, but it may be more important for climate change reasons, because the sector generates the most greenhouse gas emissions.
Electric vehicles remain a small fraction of the car market, although the share is growing. It’s even harder to replace oil in other forms of transportation such as air travel and shipping.
“Oil should be Bloomberg’s focus, not gas,” Bledsoe said. “The Chinese are about to eat our lunch on electric vehicles. We can’t let that happen.”
Anne Hitt said Sierra Club will keep shooting for eliminating all fossil fuels — and she hopes with Bloomberg’s help.
“We recognize it is aggressive, but we also a have track record on delivering dramatic coal reductions,” she said.
