Opening Keynote at November National Conference

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All CCLers should watch these opening remarks from CCL’s Director of Research, Dana Nuccitelli

Nov 4, 2023

Climate policy has come a long way over the last year! Join Dana Nuccitelli, CCL Research Coordinator, as he shares the latest updates on federal climate legislation and how it paves the way to lower carbon emissions, record clean energy investment, good jobs, and improved infrastructure. Learn how spreading this good climate news is key to our advocacy and outreach.

[Here are the slides Dana used.]

could all benefit from hearing some good news every now and again and today I get
to be the bearer of good news so that’s pretty awesome thanks Allison for setting me up for
this uh for those of you who don’t know me hi my name is Dana and I am a data
holic uh as will become clear here in the next few minutes I am CCL research
coordinator and an environmental scientist and a climate journalist uh currently writing for a Yale climate
connections and so this is going to be an interactive session and so if you can
I’d like you guys to open up a browser window and go to pollev.com
c123 should be a link going up in the chat that you can just click on uh and once you get situated there we’re going
to do a little word cloud and I want you to answer the question given the climate crisis everything that’s happening with
climate change how do you feel about the future are you optimistic
pessimistic uh anxious hopeful uh ready to pee your pants you know all valid
emotions uh we’re just trying to get a little Baseline data on our volunteers
sentiments here um so we’re getting a lot of some pretty good hopeful and
optimistic a few anxious and worried people we have a lot of climate anxiety
that’s very common but you guys are pretty hopeful group so I’m not sure that I need to do much very much today
to make you guys feel better but we’re going to try anyway
okay so let me move on here okay so
we’re going to start by talking about our recent climate policy successes uh Mark alluded to many of these but just
in the past couple years two years ago we had the bipartisan infrastructure bill that passed uh which had a lot of
money for uh electric vehicles infrastructure for electrical transmission infrastructure we saw some
grants just go out for that which was great one of our supporting asks the scale Act was included in the bipartisan
infrastructure bill which had some resources for some carbon capture and storage infrastructure so that was great
uh we got the of course the growing climate Solutions Act passed uh which helps farmers and ranchers and Foresters
connect to carbon markets to encourage and incentivize some natural climate
Solutions uh so you guys sent over 5,000 messages in support of the growing climate Solutions act to your members of
Congress and we got that passed uh we got the chips and science act which has
some funding for some clean technology manufacturing and Innovation and then of
course we got the inflation reduction act uh which also included another of our supporting asks the hope for homes
act uh which is going to have some incentives for homeowners to Electrify and make their homes more efficient
which I’ll be talking about in the Sunday seminar on the IRA tomorrow and of course the big one as
has been talked about is the IRA the inflation reduction act uh America’s biggest ever climate Bill uh and during
the very long year that led up to its passage uh you guys had 920 meetings
with your members of Congress over 225,000 contacts to Congress uh and
newspapers around the country over 2,000 letters to the editor and 7 600 76 op
EDS so you guys really did your job uh we did our part to make sure that the inflation reduction act got over the
finish line and uh the IRA and these other
bills are going to make a big difference in what America looks like in 2030 we’re going to have much more of our electricity coming from clean sources a
lot more of our new cars and trucks are going to be electric I’ll talk about the numbers on those here shortly and we’re
going to get about a million new jobs in clean energy clean manufacturing and building retrofits and we’re already
seeing a lot of these clean manufacturing uh announcements uh this is a night nice map from a group uh
e.org you can see all around the country these new clean technology uh facilities that have been announced uh 246 new
projects in 40 States investing almost hundred billion dollars from the private sector creating almost 100,000 jobs uh
lots of them EV manufacturing solar manufacturing and battery storage Manufacturing so lots of great success
already from the inflation reduction act in terms of clean tech manufacturing right here in the United
States but um we know the challenge that we face is that if we don’t start building our clean energy infrastructure
and especially our electrical transmission infrastructure faster we’re not going to achieve uh most of the
potential climate pollution cuts from these bills and especially the inflation reduction act because we have to so
that’s why we have to get a pering reform passed to get the this infrastructure built faster and so
that’s why we lobbied in June uh in DC on clean energy permitting reform and you guys did a great job uh your members
of Congress heard you loud and clear and as a result the climate Solutions caucus had its first briefing just recently and
invited CCL to brief them on clean energy permitting reform uh so the house climate Solutions caucus is comprised of
32 Republicans and 32 Democrats in the house looking for bipartisan climate Solutions and they have identified per
reform as their top priority so we briefed them on that a little over a month ago um so that was a great success
I think uh for our lobbying efforts and uh as a result we’re pretty optimistic
that we can get a clean energy or clean uh a clean energy permitting Reform Bill
uh passed hopefully relatively soon in Congress so now we’re going to do our
first little pop quiz and talk about that clean energy so going back to p.com
c123 uh answer what percent of American electricity do you think comes from low carbon sources today including solar
wind uh geothermal hydroelectricity nuclear power uh those of you who are at
our trivia uh session last night uh are having an unfair Advantage you know the answer but of course we at CCL like to
incentivize good behavior and so now everybody knows that you should join me and Britt next time at our trivia
session at the next Congress or the next con so we get the most popular answer here
is 33% I’m going to get last call here for answers and the correct answer is
actually B 43% and we’ll look at that here in a minute but keep that number in mind
because we’re going to do one more question here which is what percentage of our electricity
will come from low carbon sources in 2030 if we are reasonably successful with permitting form it’s 43% now will
it be 50 to 60% 60 to 70 70 to 80 or 80 to 90% in
2030 so it’s looking like the most popular answer is 70 to 80% with 60 7 to
70% coming in a close second last call for you guys to get your answers in here
and the correct answer uh the largest number got it right it is C 70 to 80% as
we’re going to see in this nice chart so here we’re looking at where our
American electricity has come from uh from the bottom to the top we’re looking at coal natural gas oil hydroelectricity
nuclear power in red there wind solar and bioenergy so in 2015 uh we had
onethird low carbon 2/3 fossil fuels just 6% wind and solar and today it is
up to 43% low carbon including 16% wind wind in solar so the clean stuff is
really gaining some ground there and according to our friends at Princeton uh if we succeed reasonably well with
pering reform it will be in just four years uh 60% low carbon to 40% fossil
fuels and 35% wind and solar at that point and then uh in
2030 uh if we are successful Perman re form we’ll get about 72% low carbon
sources including half of our electricity in 201 coming from wind and solar you can see especially the yellow
bar here the solar power growing very very fast in the coming years uh because
it has become very cheap and now we have these uh tax credits from the inflation reduction act for clean electricity
sources so that’s great it’s not just the United States either where solar in particular is growing really fast that’s
happening all around the world and I think this is a cool way of visualizing that solar power growth so on the left
here you can see all of the uh solar generation capacity installed around the world since the dawn of time through the
year 2020 and then on the right you can see how much we installed around the world in 2021 and
2022 and 2023 so you can see um just in the past
three years we have installed more solar energy than what is installed uh between
the uh big bang and the year 2020 uh which really blows my mind just how
quickly we’re getting all this solar energy uh built and installed and we can look at it in the
future using uh International Energy agencies projections and that’s what it will look like in 2024 and
2025 and 2026 uh doing roughly double of the
solar uh generation capacity stall installed around the world as we have in the past three years so just this really
explosive growth in clean energy and especially solar energy and you can see that from this chart from the
International Energy agency as well this is the amount of solar power generated around the world on the left you can see
it started out very slowly because solar power used to be very expensive and then solar power became cheaper and cheaper
and cheaper and it started to grow really really fast and we’re right around here now in 2023 these are the
projections out to 2027 continuing with that really rapid exponential growth uh
you can see on the right here a similar story for wind energy although wind uh started getting cheaper earlier so it
got a little bit of a head start uh and it’s also been growing exponentially although solar is now a little bit
cheaper than wind in most cases and is actually catching up uh but solar and wind currently the two cheapest sources
of new electricity in most cases around the world today as a result uh basically all of
the new uh electricity that we’re going to be installing around the world in the next few years is going to come from low
carbon sources mostly wind and solar a little bit from some countries installing some nuclear power uh very
little gas uh some additions but some retirements and coal we’re actually going to see more retirements around the
world and installations in the next few years and so as a result we’re going to see global climate pollution Peak within
the next few years according to the iea and then start to decline thereafter which is great news that’s what we need
to see so that’s our electricity sector now we’re going to switch to the
transportation sector with our next Pop Quiz question at py uh what percentage of new car sales in
the USA this September were electric including fully electric cars and plug in electric hybrids was it 2% 5% 10% or
18% average around the United States which we have a lot of variation between States but this is our average uh
Nationwide so it looks like the most popular answer is 10% uh last call here
four answers and the correct answer is is indeed 10% you guys I’m surprised so
many people got that one right that was supposed to be a tough question so you guys are pretty smart I
guess so we can see that on this chart this is the percentage of uh new car
sales in the United States that were electric uh between 2010 and the present uh you can see it’s got this exponential
curve and in fact uh it’s been rising faster than my exponential uh curve here in the past three years or so uh rising
up to just about 10% in September uh shout out to my people here in California where actually it’s over 25%
more than one in four new cars sold today in California are electric so the
rest of you States you got some work to do to catch up to California now let’s look out to the
Future according to the EPA what percentage of new car sales in the US will be EVS in 20130 uh bearing in mind
that it’s 10% right now will it be in 2030 10 to 20% 20 to 40% 40 to 60% or 60
to 80% uh looks like our 40 to 60% answer
is kind of dominating again we might have a lot of our trivia session people answering this question because we kind
of gave it away last night and yes indeed the correct answer is 40 to 60%
good job guys and you can see that in this chart uh where we’re looking at the epa’s
projection in gray out to the Future uh using things like auto manufacturers
projections uh so those had about 40% predicted new car sales in 2030 being
electric and then the APA uh drafted some new vehicle tailpipe pollution rules and so they said for automakers to
meet our new tailpipe pollution regulations they’ll have to sell some more EVs and so then it’ll be up to something like 60% of new car sales in
2030 in the US being electric so somewhere in that 40 to 60% range which is a really rapid increase from the just
under 10% today and just a few years ago was like 1% so EVS are really growing
very fast in the United States so next Pop Quiz question what
about around the world what percentage of new car sales around the world in August were electric uh including fully
electric and plug-in hybrid given that it’s 10% in the United States is the
rest of the world at 2% 5% 10% or 18% are
behind the US on par with the us or ahead of the US so it looks like we got mostly 18%
although the 5% are not too far behind and quite a few 10 perents as well last
call for answers and looks like the plurality is d8 which is indeed the
correct answer you guys know your stuff so you can see that in this chart uh this is EV
uh Global share of uh new car sales you can see in 2012 it was 14% right now
we’re up to 18% looking out to the Future it’s projected to be something like three4 of
new car sales globally uh in 2030 being electric so a lot of countries doing
even better than the US Here China is up to almost 40% of new car sales being electric uh Europe is over 20% uh in
fact I think the last month they were actually at 30% uh you might also remember this will
feral commercial from the Super Bowl a couple of years ago did you know that Norway sells way more electric cars per
capita than the US Norway I won’t
stand yeah so indeed Norway is the global leader with over 90% of new car
sales being EVS uh so I think if you want to take one thing away from the conference this weekend it should be
that will farell needs to work a lot harder harder because Norway is smoking us like some ludifisk on EV Car
Sales I don’t know if anybody actually smokes ludifisk but in any case let’s uh
take that same uh interesting perspective on electric vehicle sales so on the left here you can see the total
number of electric cars sold since the dawn of time through 2020 and on the right you can see how many were sold
globally in 2021 and 2022 and there’s 2023 so as of this year
uh at the end of this year three4 of all electric cars ever sold will have been
sold in just the past three years which again just blows my mind how much EVS
are just really taking over the auto market right now and so you can see that here uh this
chart from the International Energy agency there growth in these clean Technologies uh EVS are just really
taking off uh also battery storage at power plants growing very very fast you
can see solar panels growing super fast right there also uh residential heat pumps to very efficiently heat and cool
our homes uh growing very fast as well so lots of clean Technologies are taking
off as a result we are on a different path so before the Paris agreement was signed in 2015 we were on a certain path
for a certain amount of global warming by 2015 now we’re on a lower path so how
much lower is that path how much global warming have we avoided uh since the Paris agreement was signed in 2015
is it a quarter of a degre c half a degre Cel 3/4 of a degree or a full
degree celsus so in this case it looks like the
majority or about half of the answers are a quarter of a degree uh next that largest answer is half a degree I’m
going to give you guys a last call for answers here and finally you guys were
more pessimistic than reality the actual answer is D we have avoided a full
degrees Celsius of global warming uh since the Paris agreement was signed so you can see that here this
chart again from the International Energy agency the red line is the path that the world was on in terms of
emissions uh going up to 2030 we were on track for a catastrophic three and a
half degrees warming by 2100 and then you can see at the bottom here what has happened since then you can see the
pandemic right there from coid and then the rebound and then here’s where we are EXP to go by 2030 with emissions peing
and then starting to go down in terms of uh our our existing policies largely
because of deployment of solar and wind and electric cars and so now we’re on track for about 2 and a half degrees
Celsius so you know it’s not good enough yet we still are not on track to meet our Parish targets but we’ve erased a
degree celsius from where where we were headed just eight years ago so that’s some good progress now we just to have
to keep that progress moving in the right direction to get to meeting our Parish
targets and so of course we’re trying to do our parts here at CCL to make that happen uh so you can see this is the
track we’re on right now in terms of us greenhouse gas emissions here is our Paris commitment cutting emissions 50%
by 2030 that we are trying to achieve and so if we can get our permitting
reform passed unlock those emissions cuts from the IRA we’ll get to a 40% cut
or so by 2030 then we’re to pass a carbon price which in collaboration with
pering form will get us right around to our 50% Parish targets but we’re also
going to work on some healthy Forest policies get those into the farm bill next year so I’ll be hearing more about
those as we approach uh the farm bill and everybody working on that next year
and then we’re also going to educate people about building electrification and efficiency and the incentives to do
that in the inflation reduction act again join us in our Sunday seminar tomorrow to learn more about that and so
if we’re successful successful with our whole uh CCL policy agenda portfolio uh
no offense to our friends in France no offense flanner uh but we are going to try to kick paris’s butt and get to 60%
cuts by 2030 and get this climate problem under
control so I’m going to give tony a minute to get the questions together but we’re going to do one last uh word cloud
here just answer how you feel about future now if you’re still hopeful
anxious optimistic pessimistic um and we got some betters I like that that means
we’re doing some uh good work here Allison I think we might have gotten our job done in making people feel a little
bit better and hopeful and optimistic so that’s great and if you have any
questions that I don’t get to uh please join us at the nerd corner at CCL usa.org nerdc corner and now I will stop
and see what questions we got hey Dana great presentation uh this
is Tony CNA CVP of organizational strategy and people have questions um
one I want to just reassure people that we’re going to post uh some of the data sources and and slides on on community
so you’ll get access to those but Dana um people are worried because they’re seeing stories about like EV sales
slowing and corporations maybe reducing their predictions I don’t know if you can say you know how to how to uh align
that with the statistics you’re given us yeah I mean for one thing there’s a discrepancy Between Us sales and Global
sales because Global sales as you saw in those charts were just are just exploding especially in places like China and Europe um they are still
exploding in the United States too I think maybe the automakers just got a little bit too good at making EVS too
quickly um because like the percentage of new car sales that are EVS is growing really really fast so maybe they’re a
little too optimistic thinking it it would grow even faster than that and so there are like uh more EVS they’re
sitting on car lots longer than uh a lot of fossil fuel cars are but nevertheless
like the picture is very clear that in the long term and even in the not so long term uh EV sales are going to be
going up very fast uh all over the world and the United States is going to be catching up
to great and similarly people are wondering you know with with the solar installation soaring like you show there
there’s also um some Solar Company stocks are going down I don’t know if you can speak to to some of the Dynamics
around that or if that’s outside your scope um I imagine a lot of that was because of you know we had the co
pandemic we had supply chain issues uh until the IR rape was passed there was a lot of uncertainty in these tax credits
um so now I expect at least their long-term Outlook is clearly very very good um there’s also uncertainty around
like the tariffs uh for imported uh solar panels from China and uh southeast
Asia so and those things are all going to resolve you saw like how quickly uh are the amount of solar panels that
we’re expecting to install both in the United States and globally are expected to grow super super fast so I think uh
most solar companies are probably going to be in very good shape and then someone had a question
about where are we going to get the workers that are needed to build transmission networks and Chargers Etc I
don’t know if you can say anything about you know the the supply chain for workers yeah I mean hopefully as the
demand is there then uh people will recognize that Supply wage are probably going to have to go up uh and turn into
encourage enough people to go into those careers um electricians is a big one we think that we’re going to need like a
million new electricians because we’re going to do all of this electrification of Home installing heat pumps and solar
panels and EV Chargers and upgrading electrical panels and a lot of that stuff’s all going to need a lot of
electricians uh and we so we need to train a lot more electricians so it might take a little bit of time for that
training pipeline to get up to speed but uh pretty soon I think we’re going to get there as people see the demand and
the job security and the salaries um incentivizing people to go into those
careers then people are wondering about uh energy storage I don’t know if you can speak to batteries and how that
growth is going or you know how much is needed to complement the you know intermittent
Renewables yeah I mean lithium I on battery storage of power plants is growing really really fast um especially
in places like California where we have a ton of solar energy that we’re having a hard time using it all in the middle
of the day and we would like to address like as the sun goes down then you have to meet that that energy Demand with
other sources so that’s why we’re installing a lot of batteries in places like California also Texas um so that we
can kind of store some of that energy and start to let it uh send it into the grid as the sun goes down and that
demand is is very high um so yeah battery storage uh especially from lith lithiumion batteries is growing very
very fast there’s a lot of new new uh solar facilities that have been proposed uh to be built that are being proposed
to be built in combination with uh battery storage facilities too uh and
then in the longer term we’re going to need some longer duration storage and so there’s a variety of different Technologies uh some things like thermal
batteries but uh lots of different technologies that are going to have to meet that demand uh for you know things
like longer term uh weather changes and we’re going to need more transmission of course so we can share electricity
between regions that have different weather so there’s going to be a lot of different Technologies we have a training page on this uh on uh CCL
Community uh it’s something about how we’re going to create a clean stable electric grid so you can go check that
out for more information great and then people are asking um some questions about like
permitting reform and whether you know uh the question of like the push back like are we going to see fossil fuel
firms pushing back against that um you know are we seeing support for that in in local areas what can you say about uh
permitting reform and transmission lines yeah I mean the nice thing about transmission lines is that everybody
benefits from them they’re sort of a techn or a technology neutral solution because like every Power Plant needs uh
transmission lines to connect to the grid um it’s definitely beneficial for clean technology especially solar and
wind um because as we build those out in kind of rural areas uh where there’s affordable available land then we need
to connect and send that electricity to population centers and so it’s very important for solar and wind especially
given the huge demand for clean energy due in part to the IRA tax credits and
in part due to their costs falling very fast but really it’s all sources of clean energy and all energy in general
that need transmission lines to connect to the grid so um in terms of transmission like the only opposition is
potentially local utilities that already have a monopoly on transmission and they want to keep being in charge of it and they don’t want anybody messing with
their uh with their Authority there um but other than that like there’s a lot of support for uh Transmission in
general and lots of different priorities in terms of pering Reform and what should go into a pering reform package
so it’s just a matter of finding uh the right balance of packages and and um
components that can get everybody on board so that they have something that they want and nothing that they really
dislike and so we can get enough bipartisan support and bipartisan votes to get it package passed uh through
Congress right great and then there’s some questions uh you know they’re they’re a
little bit uh different but there’s people asking about hydrogen and geothermal and you know some other
things I just wonder if you can speak to like the need for like clean firm power and and how that integrates with the
with a clean energy grid yeah I mean the more uh we call it variable or intermittent power that we
get from all these uh solar panels and wind turbines that we’re going to be installing then the more kind of backup
support you need for when the weather is different when there’s uh when it’s either nighttime or there’s cloudy
weather for example then you’re you have less uh solar power available and so you need some kind of backup for it uh so
again there’s lots of different solutions there again the more transmission lines we can get that’s why we like the big wires act that we’re
going to be lobbying on because that adds re transmission between regions so if you have you know somewhere in
California is cloudy and we need some more uh backup support we can get that from like Nevada neighbor our neighbors
to the east for example um and then you know geothermal power is really cool because it’s just heat beneath our feet
that’s always there um so that’s a nice uh stable Source uh nuclear power hydroelectric power there’s lots of
different sources batteries um so again it’s just a matter of figuring out what the the best mix is in terms of the most
efficient and most cost- effective Solutions um so a carbon price would be a great thing there just to incentivize
whatever the most coste effective low carbon solution is uh or the mix of solutions are and so that’s why we’re
pushing for the policies that we’re ad for yeah and one more question about
wonder if you can speak to like people are concerned about the need for critical minerals and how that might slow down some of this energy trans
transition and like how that the balance of critical minerals uh or other mining is going to affect this
transition yeah I mean we’re definitely going to need a lot more critical minerals to build all these solar panels
and wind turbines and batteries and electric cars like these require a lot of things like lithium and copper and
Cobalt and all these different minerals and so um ideally we would get more of
these minerals uh domestically because we have very good uh environmental and
health and safety regulations in the United States and so you know it’s better than getting it from a country that has some lack standards and might
have some worse impacts on the environment or on workers um so we’re working on that like that could be
potentially some components of a permitting reform package could uh Excel could make the permitting process for
critical minerals more efficient although we still have to make sure like we’re not cutting people’s voices out of
the process a lot of critical minerals in the United States are located on or near tribal lands um so we want to make
sure we’re not uh taking advantage and uh exploiting um indigenous people in
the process we want to make sure they uh their voices are heard and their input is provided as well so it’s a
complicated issue uh we want to make we need to make sure we have a bigger supply of critical minerals but we’re
not doing it in in a environmentally damaging way um so we just have to do that in the best way we
can great thank you so much Dana there are still 85 unanswered questions in the
in the Q&A so um please everyone uh post post those questions on the nerd corner
on uh CCL Community there’s a link in the chat uh Dana loves answering questions there and I’m sure we can keep
him busy uh with all of these excellent questions thank you for listening to this episode of citizens climate Lobby
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