Globe Climate: Will America vote red, blue or green?

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Good afternoon, and welcome to Globe Climate, a newsletter about climate change, environment and resources in Canada.
Rachel Ferstl here, filling in for Sierra Bein this week.
Fisheries and Oceans Canada tagged the most great white sharks it ever has in one trip since it started its tagging program in 2018.
Fifteen of the animals, which are listed as endangered under the federal Species at Risk Act, were recently tagged in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Scientists hope to use the data from the tags to find out where the sharks tend to live, what time of year they arrive in Canadian waters and how old they are.
Researcher Heather Bowlby described the tagged sharks as shy yet curious.
“You’d imagine, if they were very hurt or very stressed out by the event, they’d leave the area. But they don’t do that. Some of them stay around for hours. We’ve actually had to change tagging sites to get away from some animals, because they wouldn’t leave the boat.”
Now, let’s catch you up on other news.
The U.S. Inflation Reduction Act is powering a clean energy boom and bringing jobs to swing states, including Georgia. Now, its voters will play a crucial role in deciding whether those gains endure.
When Adam Radwanski went to Georgia, it was more quiet than he expected. Especially before an election.
The Globe’s climate policy columnist travelled to the epicentre of the American clean energy revolution mid-campaign, and just before Hurricane Helene’s reminder of increasingly frequent extreme weather caused by a changing climate.
As far as energy projects go, Georgia is a leader. The Inflation Reduction Act is a US$430-billion bill that was signed by President Joe Biden’s administration in 2022 in an effort to make the U.S. a world leader in fighting climate change. Since then, more than 30 related industrial projects cumulatively worth more than US$15-billion – primarily involving the electric-vehicle, battery and solar sectors – have been announced for Georgia. One would expect that the state has a more vested interest in the future of the IRA than most because of it.
But when Adam went to visit, few people were eager to talk about whether the historically ambitious industrial strategy behind the act will survive the presidential election.
What’s up? The answer he found: an odd combination of fear about overaligning with a strategy that the electorate may not welcome, and optimism that there actually is mounting support for the clean-energy strategy so long as it doesn’t get pulled too deeply into the culture wars.
For example, one worry is about retribution if companies or industries are perceived to align with the Democrats, and then Donald Trump wins back the White House. And why aren’t the Democrats hitting the issue harder? The green jobs may not resonate with enough people to outweigh the affordability concerns about new industry straining local infrastructure.
The more counterintuitive hope, Adam writes, is that a quiet and fragile cross-partisan consensus around clean industries may be taking hold – if it can survive election season.
Read the full story, ahead of tomorrow’s election.
Kelly Cryderman: We’re a world awash in textiles, and that’s not a good thing
Adam Sweet: It’s time for Alberta’s oil sands to land the Pathways carbon project
Why do investors become bearish when the weather gets gloomy?
There’s solid quantitative evidence, culled by numerous finance scholars over the past three decades, that weather influences investing choices. When it’s sunny, we tend to be less risk averse. On the days that are short and dreary, we tend to grow bearish, preferring to retreat from equities and, well, squirrel away capital gains in a safe place. It poses intriguing questions about the murky business of betting on (or against) climate change and, more generally, the prospect of using weather patterns to create profitable hedging strategies.
We’ve launched the next chapter of The Climate Exchange, an interactive, digital hub where The Globe answers your most pressing questions about climate change. More than 300 questions were submitted as of September. The first batch of answers tackles 30 of them. They can be found with the help of a search tool developed by The Globe that makes use of artificial intelligence to match readers’ questions with the closest answer drafted. We plan to answer a total of 75 questions.
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