Last week the Supreme Court declined to block lawsuits by California, Colorado, New Jersey and other states seeking billions of dollars from Exxon Mobil, Shell, Chevron, ConocoPhillips and BP to pay for carbon pollution that’s fueling higher temperatures, drought, fires and more extreme weather conditions. In its suit, California alleged that those companies had known since at least the 1960s that burning fossil fuels they supply causes climate change that’s warming the planet but suppressed that information. 

Oil and gas companies “fed us lies and mistruths to further their record-breaking profits at the expense of our environment,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said when the suit was filed in Sept. 2023. “Enough is enough.”

The court’s decision cleared the way for an initial lawsuit, Honolulu v Sunoco, and California and other states are set to follow. It’s too early to predict if this will result in tens of billions of dollars flowing to states to help repair and harden infrastructure for hotter temperatures and rising sea levels. Oil companies aim to fight the suits and the court battle could go on for years. But if any single industry bears responsibility for climate damage and also has the financial means to do something about it it’s the world’s top fossil fuel companies.

Amazon was the top corporate clean power purchaser for the fifth year in a row in 2024. What does that look like?

We’ve now procured or enabled more than 600 renewable energy projects around the world. When you put that together, the total capacity of those projects is roughly 33 gigawatts of new capacity that can generate about the equivalent amount of power to power 8.3 million U.S. homes. 

What’s a key consideration when you’re arranging these large clean energy projects?

Where you build these projects matters a lot because when you build renewable energy projects, what you're doing is ideally avoiding emissions from other sources of power generation that are emitting [carbon]. 

We're focused on not just enabling new projects to meet our decarbonization goals, but we're also focused on having these projects in locations that have a high mix of fossil fuel use. If you look at that portfolio, we've invested in more than 40 utility-scale, large-scale wind and solar projects across countries and locations that we know have high emissions–places like Australia, China, Greece, India, Poland, South Africa and here in the U.S. in states like Louisiana and Mississippi. 

For example, if you look at the projects in the portfolio we have in India, we have nine renewable energy projects in India. And to illustrate why location matters, those projects in India, if hypothetically you took those projects, picked them up and dropped them in Sweden, which has a very decarbonized grid, the carbon emissions avoided would be drastically different. By having those projects in India, we avoid roughly 55 times more carbon than if they were in Sweden. 

Working across all of Amazon's operations globally, how do you keep up? For example, data center business is a massive part of Amazon's operations and the amount of power needed for it keeps growing.

We continue to go out and procure carbon-free energy to meet our business needs and to meet our sustainability goals. Of course, as we are seeing power demands increase as our business grows but also demand for electricity increases as overall society moves towards greater electrification, whether it be for transportation or buildings or other places that need energy, we're seeing increased demand for carbon-free energy. We've been continuing to go out and procure, which is why we’re the largest corporate purchaser for the fifth year in a row. 

We’re broadening out our efforts to go after not just renewable energy, but carbon-free energy and focusing on carbon-free energy, technologies that include battery storage, offshore wind and of course nuclear power. As you see demand increase, we have not slowed our efforts.

Donald Trump said the U.S. government would no longer subsidize new windmill farms and reiterated his stance that he doesn’t “want even one built” during his administration in his latest tirade against renewable energy. (Forbes)

Can we create cows that belch less methane? Food scientists, geneticists, microbiologists and animal scientists are teaming up to answer this question. (Forbes)

Compressed-air energy storage, a decades-old technology that can store massive amounts of energy underground, could soon see a modern rebirth in California’s Central Valley owing to a $1.76 billion conditional loan guarantee from the outgoing Biden administration. (Canary Media)

Lithium prices are expected to stabilize in 2025 after two years of steep declines as shuttered mines and robust electric vehicle sales in China soak up an oversupply, although the potential for mines to reopen may cap gains, analysts and traders said. (Reuters)

Federal reservoirs could help meet the country’s solar energy needs, according to a new study published in Solar Energy. (NREL)