The Dose

Citizens of the Silver State may soon be able to go solar once again. A bill going to Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval’s desk next week would restore net metering, which the state’s utility regulators phased out in 2015. Net metering allows households to sell their excess solar energy back to utilities, making solar panels more affordable. Several solar companies stopped adding new Nevada customers after net metering was shut down. Now Tesla and Sunrun say they plan to come back if the bill is signed. 

An Obama-era rule to reduce ground-level ozone has been delayed by one year, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt announced Tuesday. The National Ambient Air Quality Standards were supposed to identify cities that currently have ozone levels above 70 parts per billion. The EPA itself calls ground-level ozone “bad ozone” and says it has been linked to numerous environmental and health effects, including “chest pain, coughing, throat irritation, and airway inflammation,” which can lead the asthma or other problems. The announcement about this delay, however, claims the EPA does not “fully understand the role of background ozone levels.” 

In a move that should surprise nobody, President Trump today announced that the United States would withdraw from the 2015 Paris climate accord, an agreement between 195 countries to reduce worldwide greenhouse gas emissions. Trump did not provide details about the withdrawal, a process that according to the original agreement will legally take about four years. The president did proclaim that the U.S. would immediately cease implementation of the accord’s non-binding elements, including withdrawing from the U.N. Green Climate Fund, and offered to rejoin the accord or some future agreement under different, to-be-negotiated terms. 

Anyone who has ever spent a summer in a city knows the pain of the heat island effect. Buildings and roads absorb heat and sunlight and emit it as heat at night, causing temperatures to soar as much as 22 additional degrees. Well, according to new research, climate change will make this an economic hardship for most cities, costing them up to 10.9 percent of their gross domestic products. That’s compared to 5.6 percent for rural economies. The costs come from spending more on cooling plus worker health effects from decreased air and water quality. Installing “cool” pavements and roofs, the authors say, could help reduce those costs — not to mention the risks. 

A planned $12.3 billion coal mine in Australia has been “deferred” for now, a major victory for climate activists and conservationists trying to protect the nearby Great Barrier Reef. The Carmichael coal mine would have reportedly created as many as 5,000 construction jobs, but a study published last week found that it would have doubled Australia’s carbon emissions. The Queensland government had offered Indian billionaire Gautam Adani a “royalties holiday” subsidy that would have saved his company hundreds of millions of dollars, making it a potentially lucrative endeavor, but growing resistance to that tax scheme seems to have paved the way for Adani to pull out—at least for now.