| By Ari Natter and Jennifer A Dlouhy The Trump administration is set to announce its plans to abolish the US government’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases, threatening to strike a deep blow at Washington’s ability to fight climate change. The Environmental Protection Agency will unveil a proposal in Indiana on Tuesday to scrap a landmark determination that planet-warming gases endanger public health and welfare, the agency’s administrator, Lee Zeldin, said in a podcast. If finalized, the move would lay the foundation to unwind a host of regulations limiting emissions from power plants, oil wells and automobiles.  EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin during a hearing in Washington in May. Photographer: Kent Nishimura/Bloomberg Rolling back the 2009 endangerment finding would be among the most far-reaching steps yet by President Donald Trump’s administration to gut US capacity to fight climate change. The finding forms the bedrock of the government’s authority to impose limits on carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases. Ending it would be squarely at odds with the scientific consensus that those gases are causing climate change that’s already leading to rising seas and more intense storms. “How big is the endangerment finding? Well repealing it will be the largest deregulatory action in the history of America — resulting in over a trillion dollars in savings,” Zeldin said during an interview on the Ruthless Podcast that aired Tuesday. The EPA’s proposal will also aim to end some automobile emission limits, according to a person familiar with the matter. Environmentalists have argued that any move to reverse the endangerment finding not only bucks scientific conclusions about the ways carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases interact with the world’s atmosphere, but also imperils the planet. Efforts to restrain emissions now are critical to restraining the world’s temperature rise and avoiding more tipping points where the consequences of climate change are magnified. Read the full story on Bloomberg.com. By Josh Saul The first US-flagged boat that can bury the undersea cables to connect offshore wind turbines to the power grid on land has started work within view of the Statue of Liberty and the New York City skyline. The Marmac 306, a 300-foot (91-meter) barge built in Louisiana by Norwegian cable company Nexans SA and operated by US maritime company Crowley Maritime Corp., started work this month. It’s digging a trench for the cables that will transmit the electricity generated by Equinor ASA’s $5 billion Empire Wind 1 project all the way to the Brooklyn power grid. The fact that the Marmac 306 was built domestically means that it can transport cables within the US and bury near-shore cable where that would be illegal for a foreign vessel. The barge is exactly the kind of ship the US needs to build its capacity to power coastal cities without warming the climate. But by the time it arrived in New York Harbor, the odds of the US doing that in the near term had crashed.  The Marmac 306 in the New York Harbor near Brooklyn, New York. Photographer: Bryan Derballa/Bloomberg In recent years, offshore wind developers have faced soaring costs due to Covid-19-caused disruptions and rising interest rates, forcing project cancellations and billions of dollars in write-downs. Then President Donald Trump, who hates offshore wind, returned to the White House and said he didn’t want to see any turbines installed while he was in office. He even halted work on Empire Wind for several weeks this spring, before letting work resume upon reaching a deal with New York’s governor. Trump’s new tax law also speeds up the phaseout of tax credits the sector has relied on. Since Trump’s re-election, BloombergNEF’s forecast for new offshore wind developments has fallen by 56%. The ship nevertheless represents a milestone for US clean energy, developers say, as work grinds along on the first offshore wind farm that will connect directly to the Big Apple. “This cable will provide power to over 500,000 homes, so it’s a huge step in renewable energy,” said Catherine Teige, a marine project engineer at Nexans who runs the day-to-day work of burying the cable. Speaking via Zoom from one of the shipping containers that serves as an office aboard the boat, she said, “A lot of tourists come to see this view, when I’m just going to work.”  The Marmac 306 is the first US-flagged boat that can bury the undersea cables to connect offshore wind turbines to power grids on land. Photographer: Bryan Derballa Assembly of the vessel involved taking a standard Marmac barge — SpaceX reportedly uses the same type to retrieve its rockets from the ocean — and attaching the cranes, vertical injector, winches and all the other necessary equipment. “It went from a flat-deck barge to this construction barge in a little over a year,” said Teige, who oversaw that work in Louisiana. The Marmac 306 is currently excavating the trench where it will later lay the cable. The vertical injector, a massive piece of machinery that looks a bit like a metal hockey stick, hangs from the side of the boat down below the waves where it shoots jets of water into the seabed to blast out a 15-foot-deep ditch. (See photos of the vertical injector at work on Bloomberg.com.) The boat travels slower than a toddler walks, and so far its top speed when it’s trenching is just 20 feet a minute. A crew of about 40 workers, from mariners to carpenters, staffs the boat for each 12-hour shift. The out-of-towners stay at a nearby Sheraton and everyone takes a crew transport vessel that boards in the Brooklyn Navy Yard and sails under the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges to reach the Marmac. While the Empire Wind farm lies 15 to 30 miles off the southern coast of Long Island, the Marmac will only lay the cable out to near Coney Island in South Brooklyn, with other vessels taking over the job in deeper water. Equinor took a $955 million write-down on Empire last week, driven by regulatory changes in the US and the fact that company is unlikely to pursue the second stage of the wind farm. There is “very little probability” that more offshore wind projects will get developed in the US in the “foreseeable future,” Equinor Chief Financial Officer Torgrim Reitan said in a Bloomberg TV interview. Read the full story with photos on Bloomberg.com. | 
