University of Idaho Administration Building. (Photo by: Education Images/Universal Images Group via ... [+] Getty Images)

Universal Images Group via Getty Images

University of Idaho Announces New Energy Partnership — Modeled on Ohio State and University of Iowa — to Boost Endowment and Resilience

Colleges and universities are turning to public-private partnerships (P3s) to upgrade campus energy systems, bolstering schools’ financial and environmental resilience. Higher education institutions face pressures to stabilize budgets, boost endowments, and optimize facilities usage. Many public universities also face shrinking state financial support, aging infrastructure, and projected declines in enrollment due to changing demographics. The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated these challenges. In response, some universities are trying creative ways to unlock the value embedded in their existing utility systems and enlisting private partners to make their physical operations and energy use more sustainable and efficient.

The “Big Ten” Model

The latest public university to embrace this emerging P3 trend is the University of Idaho, which on November 2, 2020 announced a 50-year concession with a private company to take over the university’s centralized district energy system. The new concession shows how budget-strapped universities and colleges can optimize critical utility systems and access significant funds for endowments and other purposes without incurring new debt or losing control of capital improvement programs.

Katrina Borissova – Founder, Little Danube

Little Danube

In a speech to the CBI yesterday, the U.K.’s Business Secretary Alok Sharma calls on businesses to “build back greener”. To be fair to politicians, this is one area where the U.K. has done quite well over the last few decades. As he says: “Over the last 30 years, the U.K. economy grew by 75%, and yet we also cut our emissions by 43%. We were the first major economy to legislate for achieving Net Zero emissions by 2050.”

In the same speech, Sharma expressed his hope that businesses “take advantage of the immediate opportunities this green agenda brings, as we recover from the COVID pandemic.” But what more can the Government itself do to support this aspiration? 

As luck would have it, we have a report just out with the Enterprise Trust with twenty policy ideas of how it could do just that. It approaches the problem through the lens of economics, making the case that we need to better align incentives to overcome market failures. In essence, making polluters bear more of the responsibility for the full costs of their actions, while rewarding those who develop solutions to environmental challenges. The ideas wouldn’t cost the earth, but would go some way to helping save it.

First, the good news. Green Entrepreneurship finds that U.K. business owners are on board with the green agenda. Over three-fifths think that the move to a greener economy presents positive opportunities for businesses, with only eight per cent disagreeing. The Opinium polling also finds that most business owners report their customers and employees are demanding more action to protect the environment.

Power lines in Brazil.

BLOOMBERG NEWS

It was about 40 years ago, and I was taking Amtrak back to Washington after visiting Bell Labs in New Jersey. My head was exploding, so to speak, over the wondrous things I’d seen at the facility.

Particularly, optical fiber fascinated me; that a conduit thinner than a human hair could carry far more voice and data than a great coaxial cable was a thing of awe. “The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper,” as W.B. Yeats wrote.

On the train, I thought about the three industries that had enthralled me since childhood: railroads, newspapers, and electricity. What struck me was that they were all rooted in the 19th century. While they were all tentatively glomming onto computing and the new technologies, they remained rooted in technology of another time. These big and beautiful cats hadn’t changed their spots.

Railroads and passenger trains haven’t progressed well, retaining their 19th-century business concepts. Hundreds of newspapers are dying, having failed to adjust to the digital age.

Photo of the aftermath of Hurricane Mitch

AFP via Getty Images

Hurricane Eta is already an unprecedented storm. It represents the first time that we have used the Greek letter “Eta” in a storm name. Hurricane Eta is the fifth major hurricane (category 3 or greater) of the 2020 Atlantic hurricane season and the third major hurricane to form since October 1st. According to Colorado State University hurricane expert Phil Klotzbach on Twitter, “This is the first time on record that the Atlantic has had 3 major hurricane formations (e.g., storm first reached major hurricane strength) in October-November.” However, there is something more ominous than climatological records that worries me about Eta. A human tragedy could unfold as it makes landfall.

Hurricane Eta on Monday afternoon (November 2nd, 2020).

NOAA and TropicalTidbits.com

Eta, which rapidly intensified to a Category 4 storm on Monday afternoon, is expected to make landfall on Tuesday. The National Hurricane Center is sounding the alarms for a multi-hazard event, which includes potentially catastrophic winds and excessive rainfall. I want to specifically focus on the rainfall amounts. National Hurricane Center estimates are as follows:

Nicaragua and Honduras: 15 to 25 inches with isolated amounts of 35 inches.Eastern Guatemala and Belize: 10 to 20 inches with isolated amounts of 25 inches.Panama and Costa Rica: 10 to 15 inches with isolated amounts of 25 inches.

One particular concern about Hurricane Eta is the forward speed. The forecast map below illustrates that the storm will not move significantly after landfall. Between now and Wednesday, the storm is still sitting over regions of Nicaragua and Honduras. Even by Thursday, the weakened storm is projected to be over the region before moving back out over water by late Friday. Eta is just one more storm in what Weather Channel expert Rick Knabb calls Category “Slow” hurricanes like Harvey (2017), Florence (2018), or Sally (2020).

Installing solar in Malibu.

Universal Images Group via Getty Images

California has some of America’s most aggressive climate change policies. But those policies are facing fierce opposition – not from big business or the oil and gas sector – but from the state’s Latino community. 

Over the past two years, California’s Latino leaders have filed lawsuits that aim to halt several climate-focused regulations due to their negative effect on low- and middle-income Californians. Those same leaders are also calling out the Sierra Club and the California Air Resources Board (CARB) for their support of regulations that are increasing the cost of energy, transportation, and housing in California, which has the highest poverty rate in America.

The Latino backlash against California’s climate policies — which has largely been ignored by state and national media outlets — exposes the growing chasm between the state’s powerful bureaucracy, which is closely aligned with California’s entrenched environmental groups, and the Latino and demographic realities of America’s most-populous state. It also presages a potential clash at the national level if federal policymakers attempt to implement California’s stringent climate measures throughout the rest of the country. 

In a recent episode of the Power Hungry Podcast, Robert Apodaca, a longtime Latino activist and the executive director of United Latinos Vote, told me that climate change is “a big issue and it needs to be addressed.” But he added that California’s regulations are coming “at the expense of poor people.” He continued, saying that the California’s regulatory agencies and the Sierra Club are promoting policies that will make it “more difficult to buy a home and more difficult to not be driven into poverty because of a higher cost of living and energy.”

The presidential election will decide the country's response to climate change

getty

The United States is at a crossroads that will shape its response to climate change, and could put on a path to cooperate, or collide, with the EU and other nations across the world that are linking their economic recovery from the pandemic with climate action. When it comes to climate change policies, the EU and the U.S. seem to be miles apart. The EU has set out the overly ambitious goal to become the world's first carbon-neutral continent by 2050, while the Trump administration has in the last 4 years weakened or wiped out, over 125 rules and policies aimed at protecting the environment. 

It hadn't always been like this. The EU and the United States worked closely to negotiate the 2015 Paris Agreement in which 195 signatories set voluntary limits on greenhouse gas emission. Now, Trump aims to withdraw the U.S. from the agreement –the withdrawal is scheduled to take effect this week. "The Paris Agreement relies on Nationally Determined Contributions from parties, meaning enhanced ambition and implementation relies largely on state-level policy," says Jale Tosun professor of political science at the Institute of Political Science at the Heidelberg University. "Most EU heads of government find it difficult to understand why the United States want to pull out of something that is already less ambitious than the previous regime [the Kyoto Protocol]," Tosun adds. 

A demonstrator holds a placard depicting a caricature of US President Donald Trump during a mass ... [+] climate march to demand urgent action on the climate crisis from world leaders that attended the COP25 summit, in Madrid, on December 6, 2019. - (Photo by OSCAR DEL POZO / AFP) (Photo by OSCAR DEL POZO/AFP via Getty Images)

AFP via Getty Images

The Trump administration’s environmental rollbacks are severe. He has “made a concerted effort to dismantle or roll back domestic federal policies aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions,” says Laura Diaz Anadon, professor of climate change at the University of Cambridge. “Some of the most important actions [apart from the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement] are replacing the Clean Power Plan by the Affordable Clean Energy Rule -which weakened the expected emission reductions from the power sector-, reducing the stringency of vehicle fuel efficiency standards and weakening rules on methane flaring,” she says. In contrast, the EU, the UK and recently Japan and China, have set net-zero targets and “are crafting COVID recovery packages with a strong Green Recovery component,” says Anadon.