This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

David Janka stands at the helm of the Auklet, an 18-meter charter boat that’s traveled Alaska’s waters longer than the region has been an American state. It’s the peak of summer as he putters into Snug Harbor, a shallow curve in a shoreline of Knight Island walled by towering cliffs and stands of cedar, spruce, and hemlock. He steers toward the beach, aiming for a potato-shaped rock the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. He’s here to take its picture.

For 33 years, someone has traveled here each summer to photograph the unassuming boulder, nicknamed Mearns Rock. Collectively, the photos are an unexpected offshoot of one of the United States’ worst environmental disasters.

In 1989, the Exxon Valdez supertanker ran aground on Bligh Reef, dumping 40 million liters of thick black crude into Prince William Sound. Oil spread to Snug Harbor, 80 kilometers away. Mearns Rock and all its marine denizens were “totally painted in oil,” says Alan Mearns, the rock’s eponym, who worked on the hazmat team for the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the spill’s aftermath.

During the cleanup, Exxon crews and contractors power washed oil off shorelines into the ocean, where it was easier to corral. But the effort also ripped away marine life.

“Our concern immediately became, Is a cleanup going to be worse than leaving the oil on?” says Mearns.

In the end, Exxon washed some sections of the coast and left others untreated. Mearns Rock remained oiled. For the next decade, Mearns and a team of NOAA chemists and biologists returned to dozens of sites in the region to assess the ecosystem’s recovery from oil exposure and power washing. Mearns started photographing these research visits, using boulders like Mearns Rock as landmarks. When the larger study ended, Mearns and his NOAA colleague John Whitney secured funding to keep taking yearly photos until 2012. Since then, the project has survived on the enthusiasm of volunteers like Janka, who now consistently photograph eight of the original sites, stopping in when they’re nearby. The dedicated group has included skippers, scientists, and local coast guard volunteers.

Side by side, the 33 images of Mearns Rock look like a collection of a child’s yearly school photos. In one, the boulder boasts a thick topper of rockweed. Another year, it’s buzz-cut bare, followed by a stubbly growth of barnacles the next summer. Together, the photos demonstrate the dynamism of the intertidal zone, where mussels, barnacles, and seaweed clamor for real estate.

“There’s a lot that we can learn from a simple picture,” says Scott Pegau, a research manager at the Oil Spill Recovery Institute in Cordova, Alaska. This June, during an aerial herring survey, he’ll dock his floatplane in Shelter Bay, 20 kilometers southwest of Snug Harbor, to photograph two refrigerator-sized boulders named Bert and Ernie.

The decades-long photo series is also helping researchers understand the region’s natural variability, where the intertidal zone changes from boulder to boulder, bay to bay, year to year.

While mussels and barnacles rebounded to natural numbers within a few years of the spill, not all species were so lucky. Several populations still haven’t recovered, including a local killer whale pod. To this day, when Janka has guests on the Auklet, he can stop at certain beaches and find pockets of toxic oil just a spoonful of sand beneath the surface.

Janka has been intimately familiar with the oil spill since the night of the Exxon Valdez wreck. He shuttled journalists into the disaster zone during the five frenzied days after the spill, and he met Mearns when NOAA later hired him to ferry scientists to their sites. Though he retired from chartering this year, Janka plans to return to Mearns Rock to snap another photo this summer.

The Exxon Valdez proved to Janka the power of visual documentation. So many positive things happened because images of the spill were passed around the world, he says. The US government implemented oil spill legislation, formed citizen councils to oversee Prince William Sound’s oil industry, and legislated double-hulled tankers. “I don’t think that would have happened if there weren’t photographs,” he says.

The ongoing project feels less attached to the 1989 oil spill and more focused on the future, says Mearns, who retired from NOAA in 2018 but continues to steward the photo collection. Prince William Sound has made a tentative recovery but could be devastated again. Alaska’s waters are warming, new species are moving north, and rising seas are pushing the intertidal zone up the shoreline. A citizen council just flagged the Valdez oil terminal in Prince William Sound as an “unacceptable safety risk.” Who knows what the next 33 years will bring? The team is actively looking for volunteer photographers to keep the project running.

“I turn 80 this summer. I keep thinking, well, maybe I should back off. But I can’t. It’s fun,” Mearns says. As long as his friends keep sending photos, he’ll keep building the boulder albums, checking out each rock’s latest look as he adds another photo to the end of the line.

Correction: A previous version of this article misidentified those responsible for cleaning the beaches. Exxon hired the crews that power washed oil off shorelines, not NOAA.

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission.

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This story was originally published by Grist.

Given America’s penchant for gas-guzzling pickup trucks and SUVs, you might be surprised to learn that the country’s gasoline usage is going down, maybe for good. Even though only about 1 percent of cars on the road today are electric, some say the United States has already passed “peak gasoline” — the pivotal moment when the fuel’s use finally begins a permanent decline after a century of growth. 

Gasoline consumption has not fully bounced back to levels seen before local governments began lockdowns in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, when millions of people stopped driving to work every day. Back in the pre-pandemic year of 2018, Americans burned an average of 392 million gallons of gasoline, more than one gallon every day for every person in the country. Since that annual peak, a combination of remote work, high gas prices, and fuel economy standards that require that new cars get better gas mileage have diminished demand. To stay profitable, oil refiners have cut back on production.

Demand for gasoline this year could end up at around 366 million gallons per day, down 7 percent from 2018, according to analysis provided to Grist by the Rocky Mountain Institute, a clean energy research and advocacy nonprofit. With recent policies like the Inflation Reduction Act offering a tax credit of up to $7,500 for an electric vehicle and the Biden administration’s new emissions rules — which require two-thirds of new passenger vehicles be electric by 2031 — gasoline demand could decrease almost a quarter by 2030, according to the research group, compared to current levels.

That’s still not fast enough to hit important targets to slash greenhouse gases, says Janelle London, the co-executive director of Coltura, an organization advocating for the end of gasoline. “Scientists are saying that we have to cut emissions from all sources in half by 2030 to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, and gasoline use just is not on track,” she said. The majority of the country’s transportation-related carbon emissions come from burning gasoline in cars, trucks, and SUVs. And transportation is currently the country’s largest source of pollution. London says that the fastest way to cut consumption is to target electric vehicle incentives toward “gasoline superusers”: the 10 percent of population that drives the most and guzzles nearly a third of the country’s gas. 

That’s not who’s buying electric vehicles right now. The typical EV driver is likely to be among those who drive the least, London said. “The only way we’re going to solve this near-term problem is to get the biggest gasoline users to switch to EVs, like, now, as soon as possible.” California, for instance, is on track for a 10 percent cut in gasoline use by 2030, far from its goal of halving gasoline use by the end of the decade. If superusers in California bought electric vehicles before everyone else, it would result in a steep, 43 percent drop that would move the state much closer to its climate goals.

London says that federal tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act “could be much better designed,” and she’s not the only one who thinks so. Ashley Nunes, director of federal climate policy at the Breakthrough Institute, an environmental research center, says the credits aren’t necessarily prompting people to give up their gas-powered cars. They’re just adding another vehicle. An estimated 44 percent of households with an electric vehicle have at least two other cars, if not three — nearly all of which run on gas. “First and foremost, I think that electric vehicle incentives should not be given to people who are not turning in their gasoline-powered car,” Nunes said. “We’re not paying for you to add another car in your garage.” 

In a study published Wednesday in the journal Sustainable Cities and Society, Nunes and other researchers found that offering blanket subsidies for electric vehicles isn’t an economically effective way of reducing carbon emissions. Targeting subsidies at households with only one vehicle and toward taxi or Uber drivers produces more bang for the federal buck. “You want to target people who drive their cars a lot, because that’s where you see the real emission benefits associated with EVs,” Nunes said.

In some states, there’s new interest in getting frequent drivers to switch to EVs. A bill in Vermont, for instance, would allow the Burlington Electric Department to use funds to help gasoline superusers buy electric vehicles. It passed through the state legislature this month and is headed to Republican Governor Phil Scott’s desk. If signed, it’ll be the first legislation in the country to offer EV incentives specifically to “superusers,” a term coined by Coltura two years ago.

Coltura makes the case that converting the biggest gasoline users into EV owners means less money for gas stations and more for power providers. “Utilities have a huge interest in getting these superusers to switch to EVs,” London said. “Suddenly, they’d be using a lot of electricity, right?” Someone who uses 1,000 gallons of gasoline a year, if switched to an EV, would use about 9,000 kilowatts of extra electricity each year, according to Coltura. Using the average cost of gasoline and electricity in February 2023, that means they’d spend about $1,150 on electricity instead of $3,390 on gas, saving roughly $2,000 a year.

There’s another effort underway in California that would allow superusers to receive more funding, in addition to federal tax credits, to switch. Assembly Bill 1267 would have directed the California Air Resources Board to institute a program that maximizes the reduction in gasoline — and thus the climate impact — for each dollar spent on incentives for superusers. After passing unanimously through two committee hearings this spring with bipartisan support, the bill died last week. (London said that it will likely be reintroduced next year.) The state already has a hodgepodge of programs that help lower-income residents buy electric cars — including one that offers grants of up to $9,500 to replace a gas guzzler with a cleaner vehicle — though they have suffered from a lack of funding.

The superusers who make less than the state’s median income wind up spending 10 percent of their income just on putting gas in their car. “People say you can’t afford an EV,” London said. “If you’re a superuser, you can’t afford to keep paying for gasoline.” 

The average price of an electric car is about $59,000, higher than the $48,000 average for all cars. But London says that average EV cost is “irrelevant” since there are cheaper options on the market. “The question is, is there an EV at the price point that I can afford one?” she asks. While the cheapest EV model, the Chevy Bolt, is being discontinued, a new Nissan Leaf starts at just under $30,000, and tax credits can knock the price down further.

Clayton Stranger, a managing director at the Rocky Mountain Institute, said that there was a “compelling” economic case to target superusers with EV incentives, though the savings alone might not be enough to make people switch: The infrastructure needs to be built in rural places to make people feel comfortable driving an electric car, giving them confidence there’s a place to charge if they need it.

And then there’s the other aspect of ending the gasoline era: getting Americans out of their cars and into buses and trains, and onto bike lanes and sidewalks. “We also need to significantly reduce the amount of driving that is done,” Stranger said. “EVs alone don’t get us all the way there.”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/transportation/peak-gasoline-superusers-electric-vehicle-incentives/. Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

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Update May 25, 2023: This post has been updated with a comment from Chevron.

The already questionable $2 billion a year voluntary emissions offset market is facing even more scrutiny. An investigation by transnational corporate watchdog Corporate Accountability first reported in The Guardian found that carbon offsets from fossil fuel giant Chevron are mostly worthless—could also cause harm. The investigation found that the company relies on “junk” carbon offsets and “unviable” technologies. These actions do little to offset the company’s greenhouse gas emissions. 

The new research from Corporate Accountability found that between 2020 and 2022, 93 percent of the offsets that Chevron bought and counted towards their climate targets from voluntary carbon markets were actually too environmentally problematic to be considered as anything other than worthless or junk.

[Related: Many popular carbon offsets don’t actually counteract emissions, study says.]

Carbon offsets are tradable “rights” or certificates that allow the buyer to compensate for 1 ton of carbon dioxide or the equivalent in greenhouse gasses. These offsets are usually in the form of an investment in emissions-reducing environmental projects in other parts of the world. 

An investigation by The Guardian and Germany’s Die Zeit, and the nonprofit journalism outfit, SourceMaterial earlier this year found that the world’s leading provider of these offsets, Verra, may be making the climate worse. Verra is often used by major corporations like Shell and Disney, but over 90 percent of Verra’s most popular rainforest offset credits were discovered to be  “phantom credits” that do not result in “genuine carbon reductions.”

Carbon offsets are considered worthless or having low environmental integrity if the project is linked to a plantation, forest, or green energy project. This includes hydroelectric dams that don’t lead to any additional reductions in greenhouse gasses, or exaggerates the benefits and minimizes risks of emitting emissions, among some other factors.

Chevron often purchased offsets that focused on large dams, plantations, or forests, according to the report. It found that many of these “worthless” offsets are also linked to some alleged social and environmental harms. These harms are primarily in communities in the global south, which happen to face the most harm by the climate crisis that Big Oil helped create. 

“Chevron’s junk climate action agenda is destructive and reckless, especially in light of climate science underscoring the only viable way forward is an equitable and urgent fossil fuel phase-out,” Rachel Rose Jackson from Corporate Accountability told The Guardian.

Chevron is the second-largest fossil fuel company in the United States and its vast operations stretch north to Canada and the United Kingdom and south towards Brazil, Nigeria, and Australia. It reported over $35 billion in profits in 2022 and its projected emissions between 2022 and 2025 are equal to those from 364 coal-fired power plants per year. This is more than the total emissions of 10 European countries combined for a similar three-year period, according to the report.

[Related: BP made $28 billion last year, and now it’s backtracking on its climate goals.]

Chevron “aspires” to achieve net zero upstream emissions by 2050, largely relying on carbon offset schemes and carbon capture and storage to do this. Carbon offsets rely on environmental projects to cancel out a company’s greenhouse gas emissions.

The new report further argues that the widespread use of these worthless offsets undermines the company’s net zero aspiration. Their net-zero aspirations only apply to less than 10 percent of the company’s carbon footprint–the upstream emissions that are produced from the production and transport of gas and oil. It excludes the downstream or end use emissions that are due to burning fossil fuels.

“Any climate plan that is premised on offsets, CCS, and excludes scope 3 [downstream] emissions is bound to fail,” Steven Feit, fossil economy legal and research manager at the Center for International Environmental Law, told The Guardian. “It’s clear from this report and other research that net zero as a framework opens the door for claims of climate action while continuing with business as usual, and not moving towards a low-carbon Paris [agreement]-aligned 1.5-degree [2.7 degree] future.”

Bill Turenne, an external affairs coordinator from Chevron, added via email that Chevron believes the report is “biased against our industry and paints an incomplete picture of Chevron’s efforts to advance a lower carbon future.” The offsets reviewed in the Corporate Accountability report are “compliance-grade offsets accepted by governments in the regions where we operate,” Turenne said.

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The concept of a sailboat might conjure up thoughts of swanky sailing holidays or fearsome pirates—and some companies are hoping to bring them back into the mainstream, albeit in a modern, emissions-focused way. According to the International Maritime Organization (IMO), there are seven types of Wind Propulsion Technologies, or sails, which could potentially help the organization bring down the shipping industry’s currently massive carbon footprint. 

[Related: Colombia is deploying a new solar-powered electric boat.]

Wired reports that a Swedish company called Oceanbird is building a sail that can fit onto existing vessels. The Wingsail 560 looks kind of like an airplane wing placed vertically like a mast on a boat, and this summer the company plans to test out a prototype on land. If all goes well, next year it could be making its oceanic debut on a 14-year-old car carrier, also known as a roll-on/roll-off or RoRo shipping container, called the Wallenius Tirranna.

This is how the sail, coming in at 40-meters high and weighing 200 metric tons, works—the sail has two parts, one of which is a flap that brings air into a more rigid, steel-cored component that allows for peak, yacht-racing inspired aerodynamics, according to Wired. Additionally, the wing is able to fold down or tilt in order to pass underneath bridges and reduce wind power in case of an approaching storm. One Oceanbird sail placed on an existing vessel is estimated to reduce fuel consumption from the main engine by up to 10 percent, saving around 675,000 liters of diesel each year, according to trade publication Offshore Energy.

But, the real excitement is the idea of a redesigned vessel built especially for the gigantic sails. According to Wired, the Oceanbird-designed, 200-meter-long car carrier Orcelle Wind could cut emissions by at least 60 percent compared to a sailless RoRo vessel. The company themselves even estimates that it could reduce emissions by “up to 90 percent if all emissions-influencing factors are aligned.” However, it will still be a few years before one of these hits the high seas. 

[Related: Care about the planet? Skip the cruise, for now.]

Oceanbird isn’t the only company setting sail—according to Gavin Allwright, secretary general of the International Windship Association, by the end of the year there could be 48 or 49 wind-powered vessels on the seas. One such ship already took a voyage from Rotterdam to French Guiana in late 2022 using a hybrid propulsion of traditional engines and sails. However Allwright tells Wired “we’re still in pretty early days.”

The IMO has already set a climate goal of halving emissions between 2008 and 2050, but experts have called this goal “important, but inadequate” to keep emissions low enough for a liveable future. Currently, these goals are still not being reached, with a Climate Action Tracker assessment showing that emissions are set to grow until 2050 unless further action is taken.

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This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. It is republished with permission. Sign up for their newsletter here. 

A new report finds that methane regulations proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency  could spur job growth in Texas as oil and gas operators measure, monitor and mitigate the harmful greenhouse gas.

While Texas officials argue the methane regulations would kill jobs, the report, published today by the Texas Climate Jobs Project and the Ray Marshall Center at the University of Texas, Austin, found that new federal methane regulations could create between 19,000 and 35,000 jobs in the state. 

Oil and gas producing regions, including the Permian Basin, would need a significant workforce to detect methane leaks, replace components known to leak the gas and plug abandoned wells. Previous research shows the methane mitigation industry is already growing.

In the absence of state methane rules, the EPA’s draft methane rule, first issued in November 2021 and strengthened in a supplemental filing last November, along with a new methane fee under the Inflation Reduction Act, will have a major impact on oil and gas operations in the Lone Star state. 

“We want to show that environmental policies are not job killers,” said Christopher Agbo, research and policy coordinator for the Texas Climate Jobs Project, an affiliate of the Texas AFL-CIO. “You can create tens of thousands of good-paying, family-sustaining union jobs while also cutting back on emissions.”

Changing the Methane Narrative 

The EPA’s methane regulations, to be finalized later this year, would reduce methane emissions 87 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. The Inflation Reduction Act’s first-ever methane fee for large emitters will also start in 2024 at $900 per ton of methane and increase to $1,500 per ton by 2026.

Reducing methane emissions is one of the most effective short-term measures to slow the pace of climate change because methane traps about 80 times more heat in the atmosphere over a 20-year period than carbon dioxide.

But Texas has been a stubborn opponent of federal methane regulations. In January 2021, shortly after Biden ordered the EPA to develop new methane rules, Gov. Greg Abbott issued an executive order directing state agencies to use every legal avenue to oppose federal action challenging the “strength, vitality, and independence of the energy industry.”

After the EPA released its draft methane rule in 2021, Texas Railroad Commissioner Wayne Christian issued a statement that “anti -oil and -gas policies will kill jobs, stifle economic growth, and make America more reliant o[n] foreign nations to provide reliable energy.”

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and the Railroad Commission submitted joint public comments to the EPA, referring to provisions of the proposed methane rules as “burdensome,” “economically unreasonable” and “onerous.”

The new report, Mitigating Methane in Texas, seeks to change the narrative on methane regulations in Texas, concluding that the methane mitigation sector could grow rapidly as new regulations go into effect. 

Slashing methane emissions in Texas would be a mammoth undertaking. The effort would require the creation of thousands of new jobs, from deploying drones to measure emissions to decommissioning orphaned wells to installing flare systems on storage tanks.

The report authors found that to comply with methane regulations, Texas would need at least 19,000 workers and up to as many as 35,000, which would add between six and nine percent to the number employed in the oil and gas industry in 2022.

“We are the largest emitter of methane in the country,” Agbo said. “So all this funding and regulations toward methane mitigation are going to play a huge role in Texas.”

He and co-author Greg Cumpton, of the Ray Marshall Center for the Study of Human Resources at UT Austin, found that methane mitigation would create long-term maintenance jobs in the oil and gas sector, including leak inspection and detection, leak repair and storage tank maintenance. Short-term replacement and abatement jobs would include replacing methane-emitting components like pneumatic controllers. 

The biggest labor demand would be in the Permian Basin, where the authors estimate addressing methane emissions would require an additional 7,556 jobs. The report authors urge new jobs in methane mitigation be unionized and protected under prevailing wage laws and other high road employment practices. 

“Part of ensuring that the jobs created in areas like the Permian Basin are good-paying jobs would be implementing Department of Labor-registered apprenticeship programs,” Agbo said. “There needs to be collaboration between labor unions, local, state and local governments, and also workforce development boards in the area.”

“A Big Growth Field”

Oil and gas operators around the world are already working to reduce methane emissions. Some turn to Austin-based SeekOps, a company that pairs sensor technology with autonomous drones to measure emissions. While many of the firm’s clients are in Europe—where methane regulations have been in effect for years—SeekOps expects its U.S. clientele to grow.

“It’s a big growth field,” said Paul Khuri, SeekOps vice president of business development. “Next year is going to be a huge year, because the IRA taxes start on Jan. 1.”

SeekOps currently has 30 employees, including data analysts, atmospheric scientists, software and hardware engineers and drone pilots. The company was founded in California but relocated to Austin to be closer to potential customers in the energy industry. 

Khuri said SeekOps clients include oil and gas companies that have voluntarily committed to emissions reductions, regardless of the local regulatory framework. He said he will be watching how the federal government enforces the new methane fees to gauge how much the methane mitigation industry could grow.

“That will be a really good indicator of where the market is going to head and see whether this will be a massive growth area,” Khuri said.

A 2021 Environmental Defense Fund report found that the methane mitigation sector was already growing rapidly. The report identified 215 firms manufacturing technology or providing services to manage methane emissions in the oil and gas industry. The number of manufacturing firms had increased by 33 percent from 2014 to 2021 and the number of service firms had increased by 90 percent between 2017 and 2021.

The EDF report found that more companies mitigating methane had employees located in Texas than any other state. Companies headquartered in Texas include Solar Injection Systems in Odessa, which manufactures solar-powered chemical injection pumps; Cimarron Energy, an emissions control company in Houston, and CI Systems in Carrollton, which commercializes infrared remote sensing technology. 

Arvind Ravikumar, an engineering professor and co-director of the Energy Emissions Modeling and Data Lab at UT Austin, said that oil and gas companies are facing pressure on multiple fronts to reign in methane emissions. More buyers of U.S. natural gas in Europe and Asia are tracking supply chain methane emissions and some utilities are seeking “certified natural gas” with lower associated methane emissions.

“Even if the EPA methane regulations were not in place, the majority of these emissions detection and reduction efforts would go on,” Ravikumar said.

Because methane emissions occur through venting and leaking, not combustion, direct on-site measurements are necessary, Ravikumar said. This bodes well for job creation.

“Methane mitigation or methane emissions detection is not something you can do remotely. You have to be on the ground,” he said. “What that means is you’re going to put a lot more people in some of the most remote, rural corners of the country.”

Ravikumar said many facets of methane measurement and accounting must still be ironed out. But he agreed the economic benefits to oil and gas producing regions of Texas cannot be overlooked.

“Having a policy that’s going to create jobs exclusively in remote parts of the country is really hard to do,” Ravikumar said. “And methane is one place where you can do that successfully.”

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On May 11, the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will propose new limits on the greenhouse gas emissions from coal and gas-fired power plants. Second only to the nation’s transportation sector, the electricity sector generates about 25 percent of all greenhouse gas pollution in the US. 

[Related: Renewable energy is climbing in the US, but so are our emissions—here’s why.]

According to the EPA, the proposal for coal and new natural gas power plants would keep up to 617 million metric tons of total carbon dioxide from spilling into the air through 2042. This is the equivalent to reducing the annual emissions of about half the cars in the United States. The EPA estimates that the net climate and health benefits of these new standards on new gas and existing coal-fired power plants are up to $85 billion through 2042.

“By proposing new standards for fossil fuel-fired power plants, EPA is delivering on its mission to reduce harmful pollution that threatens people’s health and wellbeing,” EPA Administrator Michael S. Regan said in a statement. “EPA’s proposal relies on proven, readily available technologies to limit carbon pollution and seizes the momentum already underway in the power sector to move toward a cleaner future. Alongside historic investment taking place across America in clean energy manufacturing and deployment, these proposals will help deliver tremendous benefits to the American people—cutting climate pollution and other harmful pollutants, protecting people’s health, and driving American innovation.”

The new rules will likely not mandate the use of technologies that capture carbon emissions before they leave a smokestack, such as direct air capture. It will instead set caps on pollution rates that planet operators will have to meet by either using a different technology or switching to a fuel source like green hydrogen. 

The new limits represent the Biden administration’s most ambitious effort to date to roll back the pollution from the US’ second-largest contributor to climate change. It also follows the current administration’s plans to cut car tailpipe emissions by speeding up the transition to mostly elective vehicles and curb methane leaks from gas and oil wells.

The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act is adding over $370 billion into clean energy programs and the administration hopes that these new actions push the US further in the fight to constrain further human-made global warming.  

[Related: At New York City’s biggest power plant, a switch to clean energy will help a neighborhood breathe easier.]

These investments and regulations could put the US on track to meet President Biden’s pledge that the US will cut greenhouse gasses in half by 2030 and stop adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by 2050. While more policies are needed to reach the 2050 target, scientists say these goals must be met by all major industrialized nations to keep average global temperatures from increasing by 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit compared with pre industrial levels. Beyond that temperature tipping point, catastrophic flooding, drought, heat waves, flooding, species extinction, and crop failure will become significantly harder for humanity to handle. Earth has already warmed by two degrees Fahrenheit.

If these regulations are finalized, they would mark the first time that the federal government has restricted carbon dioxide emissions from existing power plants. It extends to all current and future electric plants as well. 

The plan will face steep opposition from the fossil fuel industry and Republicans and some Democrats in Congress.

Despite these proposed new regulations, Biden has also faced criticism from many environmentalists for the decision to approve the Willow oil project in Alaska this March. Environmental groups call this massive oil drilling plan by ConocoPhillips a “carbon bomb” that could produce up to 180,000 barrels of oil per day. 

Many younger voters and young climate activists say Biden broke a major 2020 campaign promise by approving Willow. With this in mind, EPA officials will announce these new regulations at the University of Maryland.

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Satellite data reveals that methane leaks from two main fossil fuel fields in Turkmenistan caused more global heating last year than all of the carbon emissions in the United Kingdom. The satellite data was produced by French energy and environmental geo-analytics company Kayrros for the Guardian.

[Related: Methane is the greenhouse gas we can no longer afford to ignore.]

The data, as reported by the Guardian, shows that the western western fossil fuel field on the coast of the Caspian Sea in Turkmenistan leaked over 2.9 million tons (2.6 million metric tonnes) of methane in 2022. The eastern field emitted almost 2 million tons (1.8 million metric tonnes) during that timeline. Because methane is so much more potent than carbon dioxide, the two fields emit the equivalent of more than 403 million tons (366 million metric tonnes) of carbon dioxide, or more than the annual emissions by the United Kingdom. China and the United States are the largest emitters of CO₂ in the world and the UK ranks at 17.

Methane is an incredibly potent greenhouse gas that is emitted during the production and transport of oil, natural gas, and coal. Emissions can also result from agriculture and livestock practices, land use, and the decay of organic waste in landfills, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency. In 2021, methane accounted for 12 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions from human activities in the US, which is especially concerning since  it is 25 percent more effective at trapping heat than CO_2.

Methane was officially added to the list of climate change priorities to address this decade by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2021. The amount of methane emitted by human activity has been underestimated in the past and emissions have surged in the past 15 years. A 2020 study by the University of Rochester found that levels of “naturally released” methane reported in the atmosphere were 10 times too high, and fossil fuel-based methane is actually about 25 to 40 percent higher than scientists previously predicted. 

“The big take-home nugget for me is they said if you look at all the warming activity done by humans over the last century … carbon dioxide has contributed 0.75 degrees Celsius, while methane has contributed to 0.5 degrees Celsius,” Bob Howarth, a professor of ecology and environmental biology at Cornell University, told PopSci in 2021. 

Previous reporting from the Guardian found that Turkmenistan is a top country for methane “super emitting” leaks and it is possible that switching from a process called flaring to venting methane might be behind the explosion in emissions. Flaring burns unwanted gas and adds CO₂ into the atmosphere, but it is an easy process to detect and has been increasingly frowned upon. Venting releases the invisible methane into the air completely unburned and has been harder to track until more recent developments in satellite technology. Since methane traps 80 times more heat than CO₂  over two decades, venting is far worse for the climate.

[Related: Everything you should know about methane as regulations loosen.]

“Methane is responsible for almost half of short-term [climate] warming and has absolutely not been managed up to now – it was completely out of control,” Kayrros president Antoine Rostand, told the Guardian.  “We know where the super emitters are and who is doing it,” he said. “We just need the policymakers and investors to do their job, which is to crack down on methane emissions. There is no comparable action in terms of [reducing] short-term climate impacts.”

Turkmenistan is currently China’s second biggest supplier of gas and the country is planning to double its exports to China. Until 2018, Turkmen citizens received free gas and electricity, but the country is also incredibly vulnerable to the impacts of the climate crisis. The likelihood of severe drought is projected to increase “very significantly” over the course of this century, and crop yields are expected to fail.

The upcoming 2023 COP28 climate change conference in the United Arab Emirates is seen by some to be an opportunity for change in the region. One source told the Guardian that diplomatic efforts are being made to urge Turkmenistan to cut its methane emissions. “We are really hoping Cop28 is a forcing mechanism,” the source said.

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This article originally appeared in Grist.

In the premier episode of Apple TV’s climate show, Extrapolations, it’s 2037 and Earth is in turmoil. Global temperatures have reached record highs. Wildfires rage on every continent. People lack clean drinking water, while a stone-faced billionaire hoards patents to life-saving desalination technology. 

People are understandably upset. Because it’s nearly a decade and a half in the future, protests now include towering holograms and desperate calls to limit global warming — which has long since blown past 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) — to 2 degrees C. One thing is eerily familiar, though: In one scene, demonstrators chant “net-zero now!” — a catchphrase with origins at the end of the last decade. 

To some, this is a surprising slogan to hear today, let alone in 2037. Although the concept of global net-zero is rooted in climate science, today’s carbon neutrality pledges from individual governments and corporations have been criticized in some quarters as a “con,” because they allow polluters to continue emitting greenhouse gases. The carbon offset projects that are supposed to neutralize all those residual emissions are often questionable, if not a sham.

“If today’s version of net-zero is still the rallying cry for climate action 15 years from now, we are in big, big trouble,” said Rachel Rose Jackson, director of climate research and policy for the nonprofit Corporate Accountability. “I hope we’re headed down a different path.”

Just what that path looks like, however, remains a matter of debate.

The concept of net-zero is rooted in the climate science of the early 2000s. Between 2005 and 2009, a series of research articles showed that global temperatures would continue rising alongside net emissions of carbon dioxide. The “net” acknowledged the role of long-term processes like deep-ocean carbon uptake, in which the seas absorb the pollutant from the air. These processes occur over decades, even centuries.

The term “net-zero” doesn’t appear in the Paris Agreement of 2015, but it was at about that time that it went mainstream. Based on recommendations from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, countries agreed in Article 4 of the accord to achieve a “balance” between sources and sinks of greenhouse gas emissions during the second half of the century.

So far, so good; this is relatively noncontroversial. “Global net-zero is nonnegotiable if you’re serious about climate targets,” said Sam Fankhauser, a professor of climate change economics and policy at the University of Oxford. Where things start to skew, however, is when individual countries and businesses adopt net-zero targets for themselves. “That’s where you leave the science and get into the realm of policy and opinion,” Fankhauser said.

Sweden became the first country to legislate a midcentury net-zero goal in 2017. Since then, that target has exploded in popularity, almost to the exclusion of other pledges. Some 92 percent of the global economy is now covered by a patchwork of such commitments, made by entities including 130 countries and 850 of the planet’s largest publicly traded companies. 

Fankhauser considers that good news. “None of those firms or organizations had any targets at all before, so they’re moving in the right direction,” he said, although he added that there’s lots of room for improvement in the integrity of those promises. A global analysis published last year found that 65 percent of the largest corporate net-zero targets don’t meet minimum reporting standards, and only 40 percent of municipal targets are reflected in legislation or policy documents.

Others, however, have harsher words for something they consider little more than “rank deception” from big polluters. With heads of state and fossil fuel companies pledging net-zero yet planning to expand oil and gas reserves, Jackson said the logic behind carbon neutrality has been “completely lit on fire” by greenwashing governments and corporations. “They have entirely co-opted the net-zero agenda,” she said. 

At the heart of the issue lies that little word, “net,” and the offsets it implies. When companies or governments can’t get their climate pollution to zero, they can pay for offset projects to either remove carbon from the atmosphere or prevent hypothetical emissions — like by protecting a stand of trees that otherwise would have been razed. Under ideal conditions, a third party evaluates these offsets and converts them into “credits” polluters can use to claim that some of their emissions have been neutralized.

The problem, however, is these offsets are too often bogus — the market for them is “honestly kind of a Wild West,” said Amanda Levin, interim director of policy analysis for the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council. For projects claiming to avoid emissions, it’s difficult to prove the counterfactual: Would a given forest really have been cut down without the offset project? And carbon removal schemes like those based on afforestation — planting trees that will store carbon as they grow — might last only a few years if a disease or forest fire comes along.

Levin said polluters too often use poorly regulated and opaque “junk offsets” to delay the absolute emissions reductions required to combat climate change. Although the IPCC includes offsets in nearly all of its pathways to keep global warming well below 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F), experts agree those offsets should be considered a last resort used only when it’s no longer possible to further cut climate pollution. 

“Net-zero does not mean that we don’t have to take steps to directly reduce our emissions,” Levin said. 

Many, many others — from environmental groups to scientists to policymakers — agree. Where opinions differ, however, is what to do about it. Many net-zero critiques are paired with suggestions for reform, like a 2022 report from a U.N. panel that blasted nongovernmental net-zero pledges as “greenwash.” It recommended tighter guidelines on reporting and transparency, as well as new measures to ensure the integrity of offsets.

Carbon Market Watch, a European watchdog and think tank, takes a slightly different approach. In a February letter to members of the European Parliament, the organization called for a total ban on “carbon neutrality” claims for companies’ products, arguing that such boasts give consumers the false idea that business as usual can continue without adverse impacts on the climate or environment. 

“To say that you neutralize your climate impact by investing in an avoided deforestation program halfway across the world? That’s not scientifically sound,” said Lindsay Otis, a policy expert for Carbon Market Watch. “It deters from real mitigation efforts that will keep us in line with our Paris Agreement goals.”

To Otis, it’s not necessarily offset projects that should be banned. Although she acknowledged that many are problematic, she said mitigation efforts like reforestation can have “a potential real-world benefit,” and it would be a mistake to stop funding them. Instead, she considers this a communication problem: Rather than allowing companies to claim carbon mitigation projects cancel out residual emissions, Carbon Market Watch favors a “contribution claim” model, in which polluters advertise only their financial support for such projects. Some carbon credit sellers like Myclimate are embracing a version of that model, as is the global payment service Klarna.

Carbon Market Watch distinguishes between “carbon neutrality” claims, which describe companies’ products and current environmental performance, and “net-zero” claims about what companies say they’ll do in the future, as in “net-zero by 2050.” It says the latter are still permissible, but only if backed by a detailed plan to quickly drive down emissions and not offset them.

On its face, this is similar to an alternative benchmark that has gained popularity in recent years: “real zero,” which involves the rapid elimination of all fossil fuel production and greenhouse gas emissions without the use of offsets. At least two major companies, the utilities NextEra and National Grid, have eschewed their own net-zero goals in favor of real zero. However, some environmental groups — including a coalition of 700 organizations from around the world — take the concept further. They see real zero as a whole new lens with which to view equitable climate action, one that rejects a single-minded, technocratic focus on greenhouse gas emissions. 

“The real zero framing puts at the center not just the urgency” of climate mitigation, “but also fairness,” said Jackson, the policy director at Corporate Accountability. She and others say real zero is an opportunity to reorient the international climate agenda around new priorities, like funneling climate finance to the developing world and protecting Indigenous land rights. It also sets faster decarbonization timelines for the biggest historical polluters and demands that they pay reparations to communities most harmed by the extraction and burning of fossil fuels.

It’s a far-reaching and ambitious agenda, and its calls for climate justice are broadly supported by experts and policy wonks. Still, some push back, returning to the idea of net-zero as a global necessity. 

“While real zero is a valuable guiding light, net-zero is still a worthy and necessary goal,” said Jackie Ennis, a policy analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council. Her modeling shows that even the most ambitious carbon mitigation scenarios will require offsets for the hardest-to-abate corners of the economy, which she defined to include waste management and animal agriculture. She pointed to work from the independent Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market to define criteria that define a “high-quality” offset — including whether it contributes to sustainable development goals and doesn’t violate the rights of Indigenous peoples.

According to Fankhauser, the “gold standard” here is geological removal, in which carbon is drawn out of the atmosphere and locked up in rock formations. This technology can’t yet handle even a tiny fraction of the planet’s overall carbon emissions, but experts say it could one day enable offsets that are less prone to double-counting and more likely to sequester carbon for the long haul.

Fankhauser suggested a sort of middle ground between real and net-zero, in which governments set different decarbonization targets for different sectors: net-zero for those like shipping and steel-making for which zero-carbon alternatives aren’t yet viable, and the total elimination of emissions for the rest of the economy. Some jurisdictions already do something like this. The economy-wide net-zero target set by New York’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act prohibits offsets for the power sector and caps them at 15 percent for the state’s overall emissions by 2050. That means 85 percent of Empire State emissions reductions must come from actually reducing emissions. 

“That’s a perfect example of how policymakers are trying to constrain the use of offsets so they’re being used where it’s most valuable,” said Levin, with the Natural Resources Defense Council.

More global efforts, however, are hard to come by, likely because there’s so much contention around the net-zero agenda. One thing people seem to agree on, however, is that the status quo is not working. Although thousands of companies and governments have pledged to reach net-zero sometime in the next several decades, the planet is still on track for dangerous levels of global warming — 2.8 degrees C (5 degrees F), to be precise. That’s more than enough to “cook the fool out of you,” as one protester in Extrapolations so eloquently put it.

“The current trajectory is one of failure,” Jackson told Grist, though she said it’s not too late to turn things around. “The money exists, the technology exists, the capacity exists — it’s only the lack of political will. If we’re brave enough to alter course and redirect toward what we know is needed, then a totally different world is possible.”

This article originally appeared in Grist. Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org.

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Last year, U.S. renewable electricity generation surpassed coal for the first time, according to newly released federal data. The report marks a major milestone in the transition to clean energy, but experts say that much faster progress is needed to reach international climate targets.

According to the Energy Information Administration, a federal statistical agency, combined wind and solar generation increased from 12 percent of national power production in 2021 to 14 percent in 2022. Hydropower, biomass, and geothermal added another 7 percent — for a total share of 21 percent renewables last year. The figure narrowly exceeded coal’s 20 percent share of electricity generation, which fell from 23 percent in 2021. 

The growth in renewable electricity was largely driven by a surge in added wind and solar capacity, the agency said. Texas was the top wind-generating state last year, producing more than a quarter of all U.S. wind generation. It was also the leading state for natural gas and coal power. Iowa and Oklahoma landed at second and third in wind generation, accounting for 10 percent and 9 percent of national wind power respectively. 

California took the lead in solar, clocking in with 26 percent of the nation’s solar electricity. Texas came in second at 16 percent, followed by North Carolina at 8 percent. Renewable generation also exceeded nuclear for the second year in a row, after surging ahead for the first time in 2021. 

But the report found that fossil fuels still dominate the country’s energy mix. Natural gas remained the top source of electricity in the U.S. — its share rose from 37 percent of electricity generation in 2021 to 39 percent in 2022. 

For 2023, the Energy Information Administration forecasts additional growth in renewables. The agency predicts wind power will increase from 11 percent to 12 percent of total power generation this year. Solar is projected to rise from 4 percent to 5 percent. Coal is expected to further decline from 20 percent to 17 percent. Meanwhile, natural gas generation is expected to remain unchanged.

Despite the encouraging news, some energy experts say the uptick in renewables still isn’t fast enough. On Tuesday, the International Renewable Energy Agency, an intergovernmental organization, announced that global annual investments in renewables need to more than quadruple to meet the Paris Agreement target of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). The assessment echoes the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s top climate science body, which called for a rapid scale-down of greenhouse gas emissions largely produced from fossil fuels. 

Melissa Lott, director of research for the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, told the Associated Press that the $369 billion in clean energy spending authorized by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act should have a “tremendous” impact on further accelerating domestic renewable energy growth. But to reach that potential, the U.S. may need new policies to remove hurdles that stand in the way of building new clean energy infrastructure. 

In the United States, rapid deployment of renewable energy has been hindered by practical barriers including delays in connecting projects to aging electric grids. At the end of 2021, thousands of wind, solar, and battery storage projects were waiting to connect to grids across the country. According to data from the Department of Energy, less than 20 percent of wind and solar projects waiting to be connected are successfully completed. And even when projects are approved, developers often discover they need to pay for new transmission lines to deliver power to residents and businesses. Those transmission lines often face further permitting delays.

“It doesn’t matter how cheap the clean energy is,” Spencer Nelson, the managing director of research at the nonprofit ClearPath Foundation, recently told the New York Times. “If developers can’t get through the interconnection process quickly enough and get enough steel in the ground, we won’t hit our climate change goals.”

This article originally appeared in Grist. Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

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Bottled water is one of the most popular beverages in the world. In the United States, bottled water has outsold carbonated soft drinks every year since 2016. Currently, the global bottled water market is worth $270 billion, and it’s projected to exceed $500 billion by the end of the decade. Only three countries combined make up almost half of the global market: the USA, China, and Indonesia.

Despite its widespread consumption, bottled water might actually slow the progress of providing universal access to safe drinking water, according to a recent report from the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment, and Health (UNU-INWEH).

Bottled water can foster distrust of and distract attention from clean tap water

The report argues that the rapidly-growing bottled water industry may have an adverse impact on the investments in long-term public water supply infrastructure development and improvement. The expansion of the bottled water market may distract governmental efforts to provide safe drinking water for all, says Zeineb Bouhlel, study author and research and communication associate at the UNU-INWEH.

“In certain countries such as Mexico and Indonesia, the industry is somehow reducing the role of the state in providing safe water for the population,” says Bouhlel. “When bottled water is popular, the government may spend less effort and less financial resources to make the public water supply available for all and of better quality.”

According to the report, the drivers of the bottled water market aren’t the same around the world. In the Global North, people drink bottled water because they don’t trust tap water and believe the former is healthier. However, individuals in the Global South are primarily motivated by the lack or absence of a reliable public water supply.

[Related: Sorting and recycling plastic is notoriously hard—but this AI could help.]

“In many places, bottled water is an important source of safe drinking water absent adequate public water supply systems,” says Sara Hughes, water policy expert and associate professor of environment and sustainability at the University of Michigan. “But the bottled water industry actively encourages distrust of tap water, which does erode public support and investment in public drinking water systems even where the water is available and safe to drink.”

The idea that bottled water is unquestionably safer than tap water must be challenged. The quality of bottled water can be compromised by the origin of the water or the industrial processes it goes through, the report says. For example, commercially-bottled water labeled “mineral water” or “spring water” isn’t guaranteed to be free of Cryptosporidium (Crypto) parasites, the second highest cause of reported waterborne disease outbreaks in 2015.

Globally, tap water is much more regulated and monitored than bottled water, with the latter having less sampling and no obligation to disclose information on the content or the process for some types and in certain countries, says Bouhlel.

The growing bottled water industry may distract attention and resources from the development of public water supply systems, when, in reality, less than half of what the world pays for bottled water every year is enough to ensure clean tap water access for millions of people without it for years to come.

The bottled water industry’s impact on the environment

The bottled water industry may have negative effects on the environment through the whole supply chain, from water extraction to packaging disposal, says Bouhlel. For instance, it contributes to the pressure on water resources and may increase water scarcity at a local level, he adds.

“Bottled water can place additional burden on aquifers, rivers, and streams, unless withdrawals are properly accounted for,” says Hughes. “In most parts of the U.S., and globally, we lack tools to accurately track and measure how an additional withdrawal—such as for bottled water—affects aquatic ecosystems, and the ability to regulate withdrawals from shared aquifers in particular.”

The production of plastics and the logistics of delivering the product to the consumer also come at the price of greenhouse gas emissions, says Bouhlel. The manufacturing of bottled water is very fossil-fuel intensive. A 2009 Environmental Research Letters study estimated the energy footprint of the various phases of bottled water production and found that it requires about 5.6 and 10.2 million joules of energy per liter, about 2000 times the energy cost of producing tap water.

[Related: Groundwater is an incredible resource. It’s time to treat it like one.]

“Environmental impacts may also be seen at the stage of disposal, where more than 80 percent of bottled water is packaged in plastic and PET containers, and where the recycling rate so far is very low at a global level,” he adds. Plastic bottles often end up in landfills and bodies of water, harming natural ecosystems and biodiversity.

Improving access to drinking water supply in the US

The United States has one of the safest public water supplies in the world. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is responsible for ensuring that public water systems meet the standards for drinking water quality. “[T]he majority of Americans do not need to purchase more expensive and environmentally harmful bottled water to meet their needs,” says Hughes. “That said, there are communities in the U.S. that do lack safe and reliable drinking water and that is completely unacceptable.”

A 2021 Nature Communications study reported that over a thousand community water systems are considered “serious violators” of the Safe Drinking Water Act. Moreover, about 48 percent of households on Indian reservations don’t have access to clean water. Residents of Jackson, Mississippi and Flint, Michigan have all been affected by a major water supply crisis in recent years as well.

According to Hughes, there are three significant drinking water supply challenges in the US, and they can all be addressed with federal investment: ensuring the old drinking water systems are maintained and kept in compliance, providing safe drinking water access in Tribal communities, and addressing drinking water quality and access problems facing rural communities.

“Communities need resources to upgrade and repair aging systems and replace lead service lines, and increasing water rates to cover these costs will not be feasible in all places,” says Hughes. “Tribal communities are in need of significant and long-overdue infrastructure investment.”

Rural communities, which face challenges related to declining water supplies and contaminated water sources, might require a mix of funding and regulatory solutions. This can include restricting agricultural runoff, exploring regionalization opportunities for rural water systems, and investing in technical capacities in these systems and their personnel, says Hughes.

In 2018, the EPA published its Drinking Water Infrastructure Needs Survey and Assessment and reported that the country needs about $472.6 billion to maintain and improve drinking water infrastructure over the next 20 years. It would be used to replace or improve deteriorating pipelines, expand infrastructure to reduce water contamination, and construct water storage reservoirs.

“Some of the most important policy changes could have more to do with how drinking water systems are funded and organized,” says Hughes, “rather than only ramping up regulatory requirements.”

The post Our bottled water habit stands in the way of universal clean drinking water appeared first on Popular Science.

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To jumpstart a paltry market for recycled plastic, governments across the globe are pushing companies to include recycled materials in their products. Last year, the United Kingdom introduced a tax on manufacturers that produce or import plastic packaging containing less than 30 percent recycled plastic. In 2024, New Jersey will begin enforcing similar rules, albeit with lower targets. California now requires that beverage containers be made of 15 percent recycled materials, and Washington will enact a similar requirement later this year. The European Commission, Canada, and Mexico are all considering comparable moves.

Currently, most plastic products are derived from freshly extracted fossil fuels, including crude oil and natural gas. Incorporating some recycled plastic could reduce emissions, and shrink pollution in waterways and landfills, experts say. But collecting, sorting, pulverizing, and melting post-consumer plastics for reuse is expensive. The new laws will potentially help recyclers find buyers for what would otherwise become waste.

But regulators may need a better way to verify that the new laws are working. While companies can enlist a third-party to certify their use of recycled content, most certifiers take a bird’s-eye view, tracking the materials across a range of products and factories. As a result, an item with a “recycled content” label might be completely devoid of recycled content.

This current approach, called mass balance, poses additional challenges for those seeking to verify recycled content. To work well, mass balance requires trustworthy and accurate data, which are not always available across a convoluted supply chain. Experts warn mass balance may also lead to inflated estimates of recycled content.

Researchers in the U.K. have developed a novel method to measure this recycled content that adds fluorescent dyes to recycled plastics at the beginning of manufacturing. By measuring the change in color, the team can determine the amount of recycled content in each individual plastic product. Through the nonprofit ReCon², the team is running pilot tests in real-world conditions and says this approach can help prevent fraud, keep costs low, and improve consumer trust.

In 2019, the world generated roughly 350 million tons of plastic, a doubling of production over the past two decades. Just 6 percent of global plastics produced came from recycled plastics, leaving most to be shoveled into landfills, incinerated, or carried into ecosystems. Recycling is not sufficient for solving the problem of plastic pollution, many researchers suggest. Instead, the issue will require some measure of reduction and re-use as well. Nevertheless, scientists say that these new laws and technologies that focus on this last option could mitigate the environmental harms of plastic production.

It’s “imperative” to be able to track materials through this recycling market in a way that makes sense, said Katrina Knauer, a researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. “If we really want to make the circular economy a reality, efficient tracking and quantifiable tracking is going to be the only way we can really do that and create trust in a system.”

Companies like Unilever, Coca-Cola, and PepsiCo have been making claims about using recycled content in their products for years. But the term “recycled content” is as flexible as the term “organic” before regulators clamped down on its use, said Knauer. Earning that badge now requires ticking several boxes determined by federal agencies in the U.S. and the European Commission in the EU. Recycled content hasn’t received the same kind of regulatory scrutiny.

As the recycling industry develops, “I think we will run into some of the same challenges that we ran into in the past with companies making claims that may not be very true,” said Knauer, who is also the chief technology officer at the Bio-Optimized Technologies to keep Thermoplastics out of Landfills and the Environment, an organization at the Department of Energy that helps companies adopt greener plastics technologies.

Right now, many companies use mass balance, which considers all of the inputs that go into making a product and then balances them with the outputs to calculate the amount of recycled material.

For example, say there are 20 plastic bottles in a recycling bin. Those enter a mass balance when they are handed over to a recycling company. A manufacturer may then buy these bottles from the recycling company, as well as the equivalent of 80 bottles from newly extracted oil or gas. Assuming the manufacturer then produces 100 total bottles, the mass balance will conclude that each bottle is made with 20 percent recycled content.

But there’s a twist: Under some certification schemes, the company can attribute its recycled material evenly across several plants, including those that haven’t been able to acquire any recycled material. As a result, you usually cannot calculate a single product’s recycled content, if it has any at all.

For Zero Waste Europe, a network of European communities and experts pushing companies and governments to reduce waste, this makes the mass balance approach “a simplistic and meaningless bookkeeping exercise.” But the problem goes beyond misleading marketing. Recycled material can be lower quality, and too much in a product may threaten the product’s integrity.

There are some benefits to mass balance’s flexible approach. With the supply of recycled plastics limited in some areas, it’s helpful to allow companies to compensate by using extra recycled content in areas with plenty to buy.

Eventually, however, consumers should be able to expect that the bottle in their hands has a specific level of recycled content. “That’s the ultimate goal, but it is a really complex system, and it takes a long time to make changes, so we’ll probably need to rely on mass balance to meet that kind of transition,” said Alix Grabowski, director of plastic and material science at the World Wildlife Fund.

That system complexity is felt in other ways, too. Tracking recycled materials along sometimes tortuous chains of purchases depends on trust between companies, said Wan-Ting Hsu, a material flow research analyst and Ph.D. candidate at University College London. Post-consumer plastic material can pass between many companies and jurisdictions with different rules about responsibility and accounting before it returns to retailers ready to sell it back to consumers.

In interviews with key stakeholders in the plastics value chain, such as brand owners and recyclers, Hsu has learned that companies struggle to verify the source of material, and often they are left to ask for data from previous owners, which can sometimes be inaccurate. Without better proof of content, companies could make misleading claims, experts say, though they could not point to public evidence of such cases.

Another issue: The methods to certify recycled content vary across certification bodies, and there is little consistency. When the Canadian government commissioned the environmental consultancy company Eunomia to consult with manufacturers, as evidenced in the 2021 report, the manufacturers said they often chose certification schemes that offered the most flexible approach. Under such schemes, the company with 20 recycled bottles in its mix of 100, for example, could claim 20 of its bottles are 100 percent recycled, even when this is not the case.

“At this point we haven’t had any real legislation for this,” said Sarah Edwards, North America CEO at Eunomia. Up until now, she added, companies have used certification more for marketing or as part of longer-term sustainability goals.

The California Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery told Undark that it requires beverage manufacturers to report data to them directly and does not use third-party certifiers at this time. It would not disclose the method to certify information reported. In a draft rule in Washington state that will be finalized later this year, the Department of Ecology said it will require that producers attest to the accuracy of their data or obtain third-party certification.

Mass balance is especially contentious when it is used to certify products created from chemical recycling, a collection of mostly new techniques to strip plastics down to their basic building blocks, called monomers. In contrast to mechanical recycling, which shreds plastic but keeps its chemical form, manufacturers can use monomers to construct many different kinds of plastics, which are made up of polymers.

As part of the chemical recycling process, a plant may burn a portion of the recycled material into fuel or other byproducts. Though this process releases greenhouse gases, some mass balance certifications allow a company to count the burned plastic towards its output of “recycled content.” The hypothetical supply chain that takes in 20 recycled bottles may still claim to produce bottles with 20 percent recycled content, even if 5 of those recycled bottles have been burnt as fuel.

In its 2021 report, Eunomia wrote that the chemical sector preferred to work with ISCC Plus, a third-party certifier in Germany that allows this kind of tabulation. In Edwards’ eyes, the chemical recycling industry is pushing for this as a temporary tool to get started.

There’s an additional point of contention: With some processes of reducing polymers down to monomers, molecules can react with ambient elements like nitrogen and hydrogen, inflating their weight with molecules that aren’t plastic. Calculating a mass balance just on weight — the typical approach for mechanical recycling — doesn’t work as well for chemical recycling and can overestimate the recycled content in materials.

A widely cited white paper published by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a charity committed to creating a circular economy, provided an example: Producing 100 pounds of polyamide, often used in textiles, would require 150 pounds of recycled material if measured with weight, or 170 pounds if measured with calorific value — a unit that quantifies an object’s energy and doesn’t change as readily.

Scientists and engineers have agreed to use more precise units, like calorific value, but “there is quite a bit of argument across the industry” about which units to use, Knauer said.

Michael Shaver, a professor of polymer science at the University of Manchester and one of the researchers involved with ReCon², said the group had “significant concerns in terms of the mass balance approach.”

“If the public believes that this is a measure of exactly how much plastic is in each package, that’s not what mass balance actually gives you, right?” he said.

Shaver wanted to develop a way to measure the recycled content in each individual product. He joined with Ph.D. student Zoé Schyns and research fellow Thomas Bennett, and together they developed a technique that adds fluorescent dye to the recycled materials during the manufacturing process. Regardless of what happens between the beginning and end of manufacturing, the ratio between fluorescence at the beginning and end reveals the concentration of recycled content in each individual product. Some of the light appears as green within the visible light spectrum, but one strategy is to keep the precise technique a secret so companies do not misuse it.

“We can show not only that everyone in your supply chain acted appropriately, but also that you have the same in all of your different bottles or film,” said Shaver. Although the public results focus on three of the most popular plastic types, the researchers say the approach can be adapted for other kinds of plastics and rules. Sponsors of a year-long trial phase include Kraft-Heinz and Reckitt, two large consumer good corporations, and the U.K.’s leading recycling label, OPRL.

The company believes roll out of the technology would require an industry-wide approach, even as others doubt that plastic producers can adapt to including tracers. Shaver expects that their nonprofit ReCon² will “shepherd” firms into the program, while it audits participating companies and gatekeeps against products with inaccurate or false recycled content claims. As a nonprofit, it would prioritize keeping the technique as low- cost as possible to promote adoption and minimize fraud through passive compliance.

On a broader scale, Knauer expects that establishing trust in measuring recycled content will take action from governments, as happened with “organic” labels. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency may be moving in this direction. In 2021, the agency laid out a national recycling strategy that includes the creation of “recycled content measures.” (A spokesperson told Undark that the EPA hasn’t started working on this yet.)

“I do not think that mass balance is the way we’re going to do it forever,” said Knauer. “I think there’s a lot to be done in this space and a lot more innovation we can certainly do.”

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

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Since taking office, the Biden administration has faced intense cross-pressure regarding the Willow Project, a ConocoPhillips venture that would open up an immense swath of public land on Alaska’s North Slope to new oil drilling. While Alaska politicians and oil industry figures have vigorously lobbied the administration to approve the project — particularly in the wake of the energy crisis stemming from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — progressives, environmental groups, and some Alaska Native communities have strenuously opposed it.

On Monday, the administration tried to placate both sides. The Bureau of Land Management announced its final approval of the project, clearing the way for ConocoPhillips to start drilling over the next few years. At the same time, the Department of the Interior said that it will restrict future drilling in other parts of Alaska as well as ban offshore oil drilling in a swath of Arctic Ocean waters.

The most recent Bureau of Land Management estimates suggest that Willow could produce some 600 million barrels of oil over 30 years, generating as much as $17 billion in revenue for Alaska and the federal government. Its projected economic impact has helped the project garner nearly universal support from elected officials in Alaska at the state and federal level, as well as the endorsement of some Alaska Native communities. Dan Sullivan, one of the state’s Republican senators, has also claimed that Willow could help counter “the dictator in Moscow” by reducing global reliance on Russian oil.

The project’s potential productivity has triggered the opposite response in environmentalist circles, with the Democrat-aligned think tank the Center for American Progress declaring Willow a “carbon disaster” when it called on the president to reject the project last year. As a candidate, Biden said that if he were elected there would be “no new drilling on federal lands, period.” The approval of the Willow Project marks the first time the president has broken this promise without being forced to by Congress or federal courts.

According to the government’s own estimate, Willow could result in the release of more than 249 million tons of carbon dioxide over three decades, after all the oil is drilled and burned — the equivalent of adding around 2 million cars to the road each year. Furthermore, an investigation published by Grist in October suggested that rapid permafrost thaw in the region could create little-understood safety risks if drilling continues as planned. Already last spring, a monthlong natural gas leak caused by Conoco’s nearby drilling led to hundreds of evacuations and panic in the Alaska Native village of Nuiqsut.

ConocoPhillips has been pursuing Willow since at least 2015, when the company’s engineers made a major oil discovery on leases that the company had owned for more than a decade. The Trump administration tried to force the project through the approval process in late 2020, but a federal court ruling kicked the decision back to the incoming Biden administration the following year. Biden’s Bureau of Land Management pushed forward a scaled-down version of the project last month, suggesting Conoco should be allowed to drill at three of its five proposed well pads on the site.

Meanwhile, the announcement from the Interior Department would protect an enormous swath of Alaska wilderness from future development, creating what one official described to the New York Times as a “firewall” against future drilling projects of Willow’s scale. In a press release on Sunday, Interior said it is drafting a rule that will prohibit oil drilling on more than half of the 23 million acres of the National Petroleum Reserve, which is the location of the Willow Project and the largest single swath of public land in the U.S. The announcement also promised to protect 3 million acres of offshore waters on the Beaufort Sea.

In a statement, the Department said the rule was intended to “ensure this important habitat for whales, seals, polar bears, as well as for subsistence purposes, will be protected in perpetuity from extractive development.” It also said the new safeguards are “responding to Alaska Native communities who have relied on the land, water, and wildlife to support their way of life.”

Climate groups do not appear appeased by the proposed safeguards, arguing that new protections don’t make up for the damage the Biden administration will cause by approving Willow. Kristin Monsell, an attorney for the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity, told the New York Times on Sunday that the split decision was “insulting.”

“Protecting one area of the Arctic so you can destroy another doesn’t make sense,” she said, “and it won’t help the people and wildlife who will be upended by the Willow project.”

This article originally appeared in Grist. Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org.

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Wastewater treatment plants are typically overlooked when it comes to reducing greenhouse gasses, but new research from Princeton University reveals the plants emit twice as much methane as previously thought.

Methane is a particularly potent greenhouse gas and the treatment plants should be part of any plan to reduce emissions, according to the study released last week. 

“Wastewater treatment plants are a major source of greenhouse gasses in cities and we need to start treating them like that,” said Mark Zondlo, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Princeton and one of the authors of the research.

Published in the Environmental Science and Technology journal, the report is the largest conducted on methane pollution from wastewater treatment plants in the United States. The scientists examined 63 facilities in California and the East Coast. Their research showed that methane from these facilities exceeded the Environmental Protection Agency’s estimates by the equivalent of 5.3 million metric tons of carbon dioxide. 

Scientists use carbon dioxide equivalence as a metric to standardize the emissions of many different types of greenhouse gasses. The previous estimate for emissions by wastewater treatment plants was 6.3 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, according to the EPA. The new study calculates that current emissions are now 11.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide. 

“We have more than a million miles of sewers in the U.S., filled with rich organic matter that may be causing methane emissions, but we have very little understanding of their scope,” said Z. Jason Ren, a professor of civil and environmental engineering, another co-author. 

While methane has long been a concern for scientists and environmentalists it is only recently that governments have focused on curbing the greenhouse gas. Cutting methane emissions as quickly as possible can drastically reduce the rate at which the planet heats up. 

The biggest culprit for methane emissions in wastewater treatment is a domed container used near the end of the process called an anaerobic digester. The digester contains small microbes, like bacteria, that can function without oxygen and help break down the harmful microbes in our waste. While this process produces methane naturally, in the past scientists underestimated the leaks in these supposedly airtight containers, an oversight that resulted in inaccurate emission counts.

The guidelines in use by the EPA were developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an organization within the United Nations that publishes reports on climate change every few years. But those IPCC guidelines failed to account for wide variations in emissions from plant to plant. The Princeton researchers discovered the most consistent factor in discovering high emissions was the use of an anaerobic digester. 

“We know urbanization is going to increase, we know centralized treatment [of waste] will increase, definitely in the US, but especially in the world. So let’s try and find a way to do this right, that’s a win for the water and a win for the air,” said Zondlo.

This article originally appeared in Grist. Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org.

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Animal feed plays a major role in the environmental impact of your diet. In dairy and beef production, it accounts for about 36 and 55 percent of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, respectively. The raw materials for animal feed typically consist of crops like soybean and wheat and animal-based products like fish meal and fish oil. But the production of these ingredients could be detrimental to the environment. 

About 33 percent of croplands are dedicated to livestock feed production, which may result in nutrient and pesticide runoff. Crops for animal feed also make up about six percent of the GHG emissions from global food production. Meanwhile, increasing demand for feed made from marine byproducts may be unsustainable for ocean ecosystems.

“When we feed these ingredients to animals that have their own environmental impact from production, the overall impact is much higher than if we just ate the ingredients themselves, “ says Caitlin D. Kuempel, conservation scientist and lecturer at the Griffith University School of Environment and Science in Australia. “The more feed required to grow an animal, the higher this overall pressure can become.” 

Global food production, including plant and animal agriculture, is estimated to make up 26 percent of the total GHG emissions around the world. Therefore, to reduce the environmental impact of animal products, it may be beneficial to look at their diets and work on making them more sustainable as well.

Animal feed production has a significant environmental impact

For many types of farmed animals, feed typically accounts for 50 to 70 percent of production costs, says Kurt A. Rosentrater, food engineer and associate professor at Iowa State University whose research focuses on improving the sustainability of agricultural-based systems. 

“Ironically, the production of feed and the ingredients that go into these feeds can often result in up to about 70 percent of the environmental impacts from eating products from these animals,” says Rosentrater. That’s not the case for all species, especially since ruminants produce significant GHG emissions during digestion. But for most animal-based products, the most significant portion of environmental impacts happen on the farm before they are even processed into food products, he adds.

[Related: Smarter fertilizer use could shrink our agricultural carbon footprint.]

For instance, animal feed given to farmed broiler chickens and farmed salmonids (including salmon, marine trout, and Arctic char) account for more than half of their respective industries’ environmental impact, according to a recent Current Biology study. Feed production accounts for at least 78 percent of the environmental pressures of farmed chicken, and over 67 percent for that of salmon.

Chicken and salmon are the largest animal-sourced food sectors on land and the sea, which makes them a fitting focus for research. “We combined data on four pressures—greenhouse gas emissions, freshwater use, nutrient pollution, and land and sea disturbance—into a single metric to get a more holistic view of the environmental footprint of these two production systems,” says Kuempel, who was involved in the study.

The findings revealed that 95 percent of the environmental footprints of chicken and salmon are concentrated in just five percent of the world, which includes some of the largest producers like the US and Chile. Knowing the spatial distribution helps give more local context. This could help identify areas that may have resource competition, and focus on location-specific policies to reduce environmental impact, says Kuempel.

Moreover, the study found that more than 85 percent of farmed chicken and salmon’s environmental footprints overlap primarily due to their shared feed ingredients. Commercial poultry feed often consists of crops like corn and wheat, but they also contain fish meal and fish oils. At the same time, salmon aquaculture requires 2.5 million tons of crops like soybean and wheat for feed, but they still eat fish meal.

“Since feed contributes such a high percentage of their environmental footprint, this is an obvious area where changes could potentially be made to lower their environmental pressures overall,” says Kuempel.

Improve the sustainability of feed production

Some actions can improve the sustainability of feed production, including changing the dietary composition of feed ingredients to include more environmentally friendly options, says Kuempel. This can be effective since the environmental impacts of feeds are primarily influenced by their ingredients.

In a 2021 study, the authors found that reducing the proportion of high-impact ingredients, like cereals and oils, while increasing the proportion of low-impact ones, like peas or fava beans, may result in eco-friendlier pig production without harming animal performance.

[Related: What the ‘B’ label on your favorite drinks and snacks means.]

The fast-growing aquaculture industry has also influenced a shift to crop-based feed ingredients to maintain sustainability in ocean ecosystems. However, for carnivorous farmed fish, plant-based diets would affect their nutritional profile, and subsequently, human nutrition. More studies are needed to understand the impact of different feed formulations on various farmed fish.

A 2020 Scientific Reports study found that reducing the fish meal component from 35 to 15 percent in the feed for the Atlantic salmon parr reduced their growth. However, partially replacing it with fish protein hydrolysate (FPH) supplementation in a high plant protein diet might result in a similar growth performance with the fish fed with a 35 percent fish meal.

Kuempel also suggests introducing novel feeds like microalgae and insects to potentially reduce environmental pressure. Microalgae could successfully replace fish meal and fish oil in aquaculture diets while also improving growth and meat quality in poultry and pigs. Feeding trials conducted on chickens, several fish species, and pigs concluded that insect meal could replace over 25 percent of soy meal or fish meal in animal feed with no adverse effects.

Overall, animal feed production has the capacity to become more sustainable. “Many researchers are hard at work trying to improve the efficiency of ingredient growth and processing, as well as improved digestibility and reduced GHG emissions during digestion,” says Rosentrater. “Many promising developments are underway that will soon reduce the impacts of feed and ingredient production, processing, and digestion.”

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Over the past 15 years, coal power has been on a precipitous decline across the United States, dropping in use by over 50 percent. The rise of cheaper natural gas and renewable energy combined with environmental regulations has led to the shuttering of hundreds of plants across the country. Between 2010 and 2021, 36 percent of the country’s coal plants went offline; since then another 25 percent shut down or committed to retiring by 2030.

But even as coal declines, it is still keeping a deadly grasp on communities across the country, according to a new report from the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign. The coal sector is responsible for 3,800 premature deaths a year due to fine particle pollution, or PM2.5, from smokestacks. 

“We know that coal plants remain one of the biggest polluters in the United States,” said Holly Bender, senior director for energy campaigns with the Sierra Club. “What the [government] data didn’t show was who was most impacted by each of these plants.”

Coal plants release heavier particles and localized pollution that can have acute impacts within a 30- to 50-mile radius, but they also release fine particulate matter that gets blown hundreds of miles away downwind from tall smokestacks. The report looked at these particles specifically, finding that they had widespread impacts, causing premature death in states that don’t even border another state with a plant.

For example, the highest number of deaths due to coal plant pollution happened in Alleghany County in Pennsylvania and Cook County in Illinois, with 63 and 61 fatalities per year, respectively. Yet Cook Country is hundreds of miles away from the nearest power plant. The Labadie plant, Cook County’s biggest coal pollution contributor, owned by the American energy company Ameren, is over 300 miles away in rural Missouri. For the average coal plant, only 4 percent of premature deaths occurred in the facility’s same county and only 18 percent occurred in the same state, highlighting the cross-regional nature of the problem of coal soot.

Particulate pollution has a well-documented and disproportionate impact on people of color and low-income communities. The report notes how these inequities are increasing over time. While as a whole coal is the only pollution source that affects white Americans more than average, Daniel Prull, the author of the report, noted that the impacts varied from plant to plant; many coal facilities examined in the study had disproportionate impacts on communities of color, depending on where they were located.

Over 50 percent of the mortality caused by coal soot could be traced back to 17 plants, the report found. The parent company with the most deaths was Tennessee Valley Authority, which has four plants, and is owned by the U.S. government. Many of the other super-polluters, such as PPL, Berkshire Hathaway, and Ameren, were investor-owned utilities — which combined were responsible for 40 percent of these coal-driven premature deaths. “This is not just a problem that’s relegated to one part of the industry,” said Bender, adding that the parent companies causing the most harm were also the ones that have failed to make commitments to retire coal plants and transition to clean energy.

In line with the Clean Air Act, the EPA is supposed to regulate particulate pollution; last month it released a draft proposal to do so under the National Ambient Air Quality Standards. While the draft standard would lower the exposure limit, the new Sierra Club report notes that it does nothing to explicitly address controlling emissions from coal power plants, over half of which lack modern pollution control technology. 

Coal continues to become increasingly uneconomic, Bender said, but it’s important to make sure the energy sector doesn’t simply move from one fossil fuel to another. “Natural gas could not be further from a climate solution,” she said. “We need to make sure we are truly on track to achieve these emission reductions that are necessary to address the climate crisis and the very real pollution burdens experienced across the country.”

This article originally appeared in Grist. Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org.

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While 2022 saw some climate victories, news of record-breaking earnings for petroleum companies such as BP, Exxon, and Shell demonstrate just how much more work lies ahead to knock out the world’s dependence on fossil fuels. Exxon earned a record-breaking amount of $56 billion in profits last year alone—that’s nearly $6.3 million every single hour for the entire year. 

For BP, which doubled its profits to an all-time high of $28 billion, it meant backtracking on what were already somewhat dubious climate change goals. Instead of lowering oil and gas production by 35 to 40 percent in the next decade, as previously stated, on Tuesday the fossil fuel giant announced that it is now setting goals back to just 20 to 30 percent reductions.

“BP is yet another fossil fuel giant mining gold out of the vast suffering caused by the climate and energy crisis,” Kate Blagojevic, Greenpeace UK’s head of climate justice told the Guardian. “What’s worse, their green plans seem to have been strongly undermined by pressure from investors and governments to make even more dirty money out of oil and gas. This is precisely why we need governments to intervene to change the rules.”

These fossil fuel companies have profited greatly from increasing energy prices due to the war in Ukraine. (European natural gas prices, for instance, have only just now fallen to pre-invasion prices.) 

[Related: Fossil fuels are causing a buildup of human health problems.]

Additionally, the goals set by companies such as BP and Shell for greenhouse gas reductions are somewhat dubious to begin with, analysts say—German group Climate Analytics found last summer that if big fossil fuel companies were to follow their own goals, the world will warm “significantly” more than the Paris Agreement limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius. According to a Goldman Sachs report, Exxon and Chevron are only on track to invest 10 percent of their capital into renewable energy.

The UK introduced an Energy Profits Levy on the gigantic profits made at fossil fuels companies, but that only applies to profits from extracting gas and oil in the UK, according to the BBC. Last night, President Joe Biden proposed quadrupling the tax on corporate stock buybacks to quell the “outrageous” profits made by fossil fuel companies and encourage investment in domestic energy.

The IPCC warns that fossil fuel emissions must be halved by 2030 in order to reach Paris Agreement goals. Support for fossil fuels almost doubled in 2021. 

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Air pollution is linked to numerous health concerns, from asthma to an increase in the amount and severity of lung and heart disease. The World Health Organization (WHO) considers air pollution a public health issue and their data estimates that 99 percent of the world breathes air with harmful levels of pollutants. 

Government regulations are a major tool in improving air quality. A study published February 1 in the journal Environmental Science & Technology finds that stricter clean heating policies put in place by China may have reduced 23,000 premature deaths in 2021 compared to 2015.

[Related: Coal and transportation fueled a surge in US carbon emissions last year.]

China has historically utilized  a centralized winter heating strategy that provides free or heavily subsidized heating to cities from about mid-November to March. Biomass burning, or burning wood and other vegetation for warmth, iswas also often used for heating in rural areas. This combination of biomass and coal burning is often associated with haze during China’s winters. 

In 2013, China introduced the Air Pollution Prevention and Control Action Plan which accelerated the use of a centralized heating district and encouraged a switch to cleaner fuels. Coal still accounted for 83 percent of total heating in 2016, but the Chinese central government issued its Clean Winter Heating Plan for Northern China the following year. 

[Related: Why China just can’t seem to quit coal.]

Between 2015 and 2021, Beijing, Tianjin, and 26 surrounding cities (known as the “2+26” cities) saw concentrations of fine particulate matter (PM_2.5) reduced by 41.3 percent. Other northern Chinese that did not enact the same heating policy saw a 13 percent decrease. The team found that the premature deaths from poor air quality fell from 169,016 in 2015 to 145,460 in 2021.

“Our research demonstrates the effectiveness of China’s clean winter heating policies on reducing PM_2.5  – with particular success for the stricter clean heating policies in ‘2 + 26’ cities, which also led to a reduced impact of heating emissions on sulfur dioxide (SO2),” said study co-author and atmospheric biogeochemist Zongbo Shi, from the University of Birmingham, in a statement. “These results demonstrate clear air quality benefits from the stricter clean heating policies in ‘2 + 26’ cities.”

According to the study, evaluating the effectiveness of clean heating policies is difficult due to complicated chemical and physical processes in the atmosphere and socioeconomic factors. The team from Nankai University in Tianjin and the University of Birmingham in England used a new method that combined machine learning and a synthetic control method, which evaluates an intervention’s effect.

“Using a novel approach combining machine learning with causal inference, we showed that heating in northern China was a major source of air pollution,” said Shi. “However, clean heating policies have caused the annual PM_2.5 in mainland China to reduce significantly between 2015 and 2021, with significant public health benefits.”

Further decarbonizing measures will continue to help clean the air, according to the study. 

[Related: Tiny air pollutants may come from different sources, but they all show a similar biased trend.]

“Clean heating policies in northern China not only reduced air pollution but also greenhouse gas emissions, contributing to China’s push for carbon neutrality. However, we found that heating remains an important source of air pollution in northern China, particularly in cities that are not part of the ‘2+26’ cluster,” said Robert Elliot, study co-author and applied economist from the University of Birmingham, in a statement. “Decarbonizing heating should remain a key part of China’s carbon neutrality strategy that not only reduces air pollution but also provide[s] significant public health benefits.”

China still has a steep hill to climb to decarbonize as a whole. It aims to hit peak carbon emissions by 2030 and become carbon-neutral by 2060. While it is installing renewable energy rapidly, it still built 33 gigawatts of new coal plants in 2021 and hit a record-breaking 4.07 billion tonnes of coal output that same year.

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This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

Plastics produced from plants are often considered less environmentally damaging than plastics made from petrochemicals. But scientists are warning that we should be careful making such assumptions.

A new literature review examining the results of around 20 scientific papers has found that bio-based plastics, most of which are made from cornstarch, can be just as toxic as their conventional cousins when dumped in coastal environments. The review also shows that plastics marked as biodegradable often fail to break down in these environments.

The paper highlights the lack of research into the environmental toxicity of bioplastics. The authors write that, for now at least, regulations on bioplastics need to be as tight as those for petroleum-based polymers.

Bioplastic production has boomed in recent years on the back of concerns around plastic waste and the carbon footprint of plastic production. According to European Bioplastics, an industry association, 2.4 million tonnes of bioplastics was made globally in 2021—a number expected to triple to around 7.5 million tonnes by 2026. This represents less than two percent of global plastic production.

The term bioplastics is quite broad. It covers both bio-based plastics, which are made from plants or other non–fossil fuel organic matter rather than petroleum, and biodegradable plastics, whether bio-based or made from fossil fuels.

Bioplastics also aren’t necessarily different from conventional plastics, says Martin Wagner, an environmental toxicologist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology who was not involved in the review but whose work was included in the analysis. While some bioplastics are new chemical compounds, others are chemically identical to conventional plastics, just produced from carbon derived from plants rather than fossil fuels.

While acknowledging that there is not a lot of data available, and that much of it focuses on the same few bioplastics (such as polylactic acid and polyhydroxyalkanoates, which are mainly produced from starch from plants such as maize, sugar cane, and soybean), the review’s authors suggest that the toxic effects of bioplastics on marine and estuarine life can be of a similar magnitude as those from conventional plastics.

For instance, some of the studies included in the review show that both conventional plastics and bio-based plastics can affect how well mussels attach to rocks. They can also affect the activity of enzymes in the mussels’ digestive systems and gills, and provoke an immune response and kick-start detoxification mechanisms.

However, bioplastics also come with their own unique problems. Bio-based plastics, the review shows, can affect the marine environment in different ways than conventional plastic. For instance, two studies showed that plastic bags derived from cornstarch decrease the level of dissolved oxygen in marine substrates. The cornstarch plastic also causes the seafloor substrate to heat up. The authors of one paper suggest that the bioplastic had a sealing effect on the sediment.

The failure of plastics certified as biodegradable or compostable to break down under marine conditions is not particularly surprising. Degradable bioplastics are designed to break down and convert at least 90 percent of their material into carbon dioxide under specific composting, industrial, and laboratory conditions, not on the beach or the seafloor. But the reviewed studies found that in realistic marine conditions, degradation rates vary hugely depending on the thickness and type of bioplastic. While some items completely degraded or disintegrated in a few months, others could take years to completely degrade.

Wagner says the attitude that some people hold that everything that is biological is better is problematic and based on wishful thinking. “I think the underlying assumption that just because it is bio-based or biodegradable that makes it safer needs to be challenged because there is just no logical reasoning why that should be,” he explains.

Elena Fabbri, an expert in plastic toxicity at the University of Bologna in Italy who also wasn’t involved in the review, agrees: “It’s not correct to say that bioplastics are necessarily safer.”

Bioplastic development has focused on renewable feedstocks and sustainability, Wagner claims, but neglected the products’ sometimes unique safety issues. He says his work on bioplastics, such as starch-based and bamboo-based plastics, has shown that they contain toxic chemicals comparable to those in petroleum-based plastics. These toxic compounds could be either additives used to improve the functional performance of plastic, or substances added unintentionally, such as byproducts created during manufacturing, he explains.

Fabbri echoes Wagner, highlighting that many bioplastics contain thousands of additives. She adds that a large part of the problem is that manufacturers do not have to list the additives they use. This makes it challenging for researchers to identify these chemicals, she adds, as they do not know what they are looking for.

While Fabbri believes bioplastics are a good innovation, she says we need to be certain they are safe and sustainable—and this includes the products of their degradation.

“If you produce bioplastic as a safer plastic, you should also ensure that everything coming out from those plastics—the microplastics, the fragments, and the leaching compounds—are safer as well,” Fabbri explains.

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission.

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It’s been a pretty volatile couple of years for the world’s energy market. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), the economy rapidly rebounding after COVID-19 lockdowns and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine caused record breaking spikes in the price of natural gas and oil prices hit their highest level since 2008 last year.

Three sites in Qatar are home to over 20 percent of global liquefied natural gas exports. But these site should monitored especially closely, because if an oil spill were to happen, an even more serious energy crisis would be eminent, according to a new study.

[Related: Yemen’s defunct oil tanker could set off a public health crisis.]

The study published January 12 by an international team of researchers in the journal Nature Sustainability pinpoints the location of a “high vulnerability zone” in the peninsula where an oil spill could shut down liquified natural gas export facilities and desalination plants on the coast for several days. 

To identify the offshore areas of the Qatar Peninsula that are vulnerable, the team used advanced numerical modeling to corollate data measured over the past five years on maritime data transports, circulation in the atmosphere, ocean currents, waves, and seafloor topographic map data.

They found that shutting down activity due to an oil spill in the most vulnerable area would almost certainly disrupt the global gas supply chain. A spill-induced shut down would also cause a significant water shortage for one of the world’s most at-risk countries for water scarcity. Qatar has used desalination to balance out its limited supply of groundwater for its growing population, but the process consumes a huge amount of energy.

According to the team, awareness of these vulnerability is imperative, especially since Qatar’s export capacity is expected to increase by approximately 64 percent over the next five years. Thus, this key port will continue to be a crucial hotspot in the global energy supply chain. An increased number of tanker incidents in the Gulf is also a concern, since these accidents could impact critical coastal infrastructure like the needed desalination plants.

[Related: What a key natural-gas pipeline has to do with the Russia-Ukraine crisis.]

Tanker ships—one of which can carry about enough energy to heat all of London for one week—crossing this area are the main risks for oil spills, not the oil rigs in the northern part of the Peninsula. The study finds that Qatar would only have a few days to contain an oil spill before the slicks would reach the country’s main liquefied gas export facility and desalination plant. Disruptions or a total shutdown of the desalination plant for just a day would force Qatar to rely on a small groundwater reserve and would increase liquified natural gas prices.  

To prevent the worst from happening, the study suggests increasing remote sensing in the Gulf’s most vulnerable areas with satellite and airborne images to increase warning times for spills and track how they evolve.

The study argues that the current vulnerability to environmental hazards in the Middle East is largely underestimated. Threats to water resources due to climate change was listed as the biggest threat to the Arab countries in the most recent Arab Barometer Report, a survey of 26,000 people in 12 countries conducted from October 2021 to July 2022.

“Global containment of major oil spills has always been challenging, but it is even harder in the shallow water of the Gulf where any intervention has to account for the complex circulation currents, a harsh operational environment, and the presence of highly-sensitive ecosystems on which three million humans rely for drinking water,” said co-author Essam Heggy from the University of Southern California Arid Climate and Water Research Center, in a statement. “I hope serious resources are put into resolving this vulnerability.”

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Last December, the Environmental Protection Agency finalized its emissions standards for heavy-duty vehicles as part of its Clean Trucks Plan, clean air regulations that aim to reduce greenhouse gasses (GHG) and pollutants from the transportation sector. This new rule is the first time pollution standards for buses, semi-trucks, and commercial delivery trucks have been updated in more than 20 years.

The main focus of the new standards is nitrogen oxides (NOx), irritant gasses released by gasoline and diesel engines. Regulations tackling the reduction of other GHG emissions (like carbon dioxide and methane) would follow in the spring, EPA Administrator Michael Regan told The New York Times. Revised GHG standards for all heavy-duty vehicles might not start until the model year 2030.

When heavy-duty vehicles emit NOx, they “react in the atmosphere to form pollutants like fine particulate matter and ozone,” says Noelle Eckley Selin, professor in the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society and the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “These pollutants are damaging to human health, as they lead to cardiovascular and respiratory issues.”

[Related: The EPA wants more ‘renewable’ fuel. But what does that actually mean?]

Heavy-duty vehicles contribute about 23 percent of GHG emissions from the transportation sector, making them the second-largest contributor only behind light-duty vehicles like cars. New vehicles, starting with the model year 2027, are required to comply with the updated clean air standards. The EPA says the new regulations are more than 80 percent stronger than the current ones, which also cover a broader range of the vehicle’s operating conditions.

For instance, NOx emissions are high when vehicles idle or operate in stop-and-go traffic—so-called low-load conditions that aren’t subject to current emission standards. Yet these low-load operations are estimated to account for most of the vehicle’s NOx emissions during a typical workday, which is why the scope of the new standards will include them as well. The new rule also requires manufacturers to make sure that emission control systems function properly and aren’t prone to tampering by the drivers.

According to the EPA, the new rule can reduce the NOx emissions of heavy-duty vehicles by 48 percent in 2045. By then, the agency expects the pollution reduction to have provided substantial health benefits, resulting in 18,000 fewer cases of childhood asthma, 3.1 million fewer cases of asthma and allergic rhinitis symptoms, and 78,000 fewer lost days of work.

Emission reduction in the transportation sector would not only reduce health burden, but also support environmental justice and equity, says Eri Saikawa, associate professor of environmental sciences at Emory University. Heavy-duty diesel vehicles cause a disproportionate impact on people of color and low-income communities because they are more likely to live or attend school near major roadways, resulting in greater-than-average exposures to these pollutants.

[Related: Urban sprawl defines unsustainable cities, but it can be undone.]

To mitigate air pollution and climate change, Saikawa emphasizes the need to also reduce emissions of black carbon, a short-lived but potent climate pollutant that heavy-duty vehicles produce as well. It is not yet clear if black carbon emissions would be addressed in the updated EPA regulations to come.

Even though air pollution in the US has significantly improved over the past decades, Selin says it remains harmful at current levels. Additional policies, especially those striving for net zero goals, would have plenty of potential to reduce other aspects of air pollution. “Efficiency improvements and emissions reductions will be important, but ultimately addressing the impacts of climate change and air pollution together will require zero-emission alternatives,” she adds.

The White House has major federal actions in place that will accelerate and advance the use of clean heavy-duty vehicles. The production of new technologies like zero-emission heavy-duty trucks is also expected to increase in the near future, helping support the effectiveness of the Clean Trucks Plan.

“This is a difficult sector to decarbonize, and this will require innovations in technology as well as new policy actions,” says Selin. Coordinated efforts to tackle the sector’s environmental impacts, she adds, will be vital to ensure those affected by air pollution receive the “greatest possible benefit.”

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For a while now, gas stoves have come under heat for their health and environmental impacts. However, after Biden-appointed US Consumer Product Safety Commissioner Richard Trumka Jr. called gas stoves a “hidden hazard” and remarked that “any option is on the table” to regulate them during a recent interview with Bloomberg, the White House jumped quickly to respond.

A White House spokesperson told CNN on January 11, “The President does not support banning gas stoves – and the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which is independent, is not banning gas stoves.”

Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) Chair Alexander Hoehn-Saric also clarified that he is “not looking to ban gas stoves and the CPSC has no proceeding to do so.”

[Related: Gas stoves could be making thousands of children in America sick.]

“CPSC is researching gas emissions in stoves and exploring new ways to address health risks. CPSC also is actively engage in strengthening voluntary safety standards for gas stoves. And later this spring, we will be asking the public to provide us with information about gas stove emissions and potential solutions for reducing any associated risks,” he added.

Gas stoves can produce and emit dangerous levels of carbon monoxide, methane, benzene, and nitrogen dioxide, especially if they are used in poorly ventilated spaces and aren’t properly maintained. According to a study published in January 2022, they can leak methane (a planet-warming gas) even when they are turned off.

They have also been linked to asthma and other worsening respiratory conditions. A study published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health in December 2022 found that 12.7 percent of cases of childhood asthma in the United States could be due to gas stoves in the home. The study estimates that 650,000 people under 18 could be affected.

Multiple politicians including Democrats Cory Booker from New Jersey, Ted Lieu of California, and Elizabeth Warren from Massachusetts, also signed a letter to the CSPC saying that adverse reactions from gas stoves are more likely to occur in Black, Latinx, and low-income households since they are either more likely to live closer to a coal ash site or waste incinerator or have poor ventilation in the home.

Gas Stoves have recently become a cultural flash point. Republicans and fossil fuel allies are rallying behind the kitchen appliances, claiming government overreach and pledging to defend the stoves currently in about 40 million homes in the US.

Texas Republican Ronny Jackson tweeted, “I’ll NEVER give up my gas stove. If the maniacs in the White House come for my stove, they can pry it from my cold dead hands. COME AND TAKE IT!!” He also encouraged his followers to sign a Republican National Committee petition to protect gas.

[Related: Your gas stove could be hurting everyone around you.]

In addition, 21 states have passed laws that prevent cities from prohibiting gas use in buildings and the gas industry has also paid influencers on Instagram to chalk up the benefits gas stoves in cooking to try to get younger consumers hooked.

Experts still contend that the stoves are hazardous to health and should be phased out in new homes and other buildings. On January 11, New York’s governor called for the country’s most aggressive ban on using fossil fuels in new buildings. Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul urged the state legislature to phase out selling fossil fuel heating equipment in existing residential buildings in 2030 and in 2035 in commercial structures. She also proposed a requirement that all new buildings (residential and commercial) by 2025 and 2030.

The changes will also face an uphill climb from powerful industry groups representing fossil fuels.

“Industry groups will push back and fight any proposal to ban gas stove use. Consequently, it will likely be difficult for the commission to ban it outright immediately, but there are other things they can – and should – do,” said University of Massachusetts Lowell researcher David Turcotte in a statement. Turcotte is part of a government initiative studying how the pollutants emitted from gas stoves are affecting asthma rates in those living in public and subsidized rental housing. The research is funded by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Some of the ways to reduce risks from gas stoves are opening windows when stoves are in use, using an exhaust hood, using the stove less often (electric tea kettle instead of a traditional stove top one), and using an air purifier.

Correction (1/25/23): An earlier version of this post incorrectly listed Ted Lieu as a senator from Hawaii. He is a congressperson from California.

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In 1896, Swedish physicist and chemist Svante Arrhenius predicted that an increase of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere would lead to a temperature increase. Five years later, his colleague Nils Gustaf Ekholm coined the term “greenhouse effect.” But it took over 80 years for people to seriously begin paying attention to their findings.

In the background, though, researchers were still projecting and collecting data on climate change. Studies published in the 1960s and ‘70s examining carbon dioxide’s relationship to the Earth’s average surface temperature led to the United Nations forming the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988 and worldwide awareness of the issue.

Unfortunately, not all that data was used for the greater good. In 2015, Inside Climate News and the Los Angeles Times published an investigative report together detailing oil giant Exxon’s expansive knowledge of the potentially catastrophic effects of global warming way back in 1977. According to the account, the company funded research into carbon dioxide emissions and rising temperatures for about a decade before dramatically curtailing the program and beginning its strategy of climate denial.

ExxonMobil (the two oil companies merged in 1999) responded to the paper with a statement: “We unequivocally reject allegations that ExxonMobil suppressed climate change research contained in media reports that are inaccurate distortions of ExxonMobil’s nearly 40-year history of climate research. We understand that climate risks are real. The company has continuously, publicly and openly researched and discussed the risks of climate change, carbon life cycle analysis and emissions reductions.”

[Related: ExxonMobil’s ‘net-zero’ goals don’t address its biggest source of carbon emissions]

But a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University wasn’t convinced. In 2017, Geoffrey Supran, now an associate professor of environmental science and policy at the University of Miami, and his advisor, science historian Naomi Oreskes, published a paper in the journal Environmental Research Letters examining those documents. Supran found just the opposite—that Exxon funded climate change research in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s behind closed doors but questioned the findings publicly.

Five years later, Supran and Oreskes have published a follow-up review outlining exactly what Exxon learned about climate change, regardless of their public statements. It’s the first systematic analysis of any fossil fuel company’s climate projections and was published in the journal Science on January 12. Here are four of the bombshells they found.

1. Exxon’s models on fossil fuels and climate change were super accurate 

Supran says he was taken aback when he first overlaid Exxon’s climate projections with the actual data. “I had this moment of pause when I actually plotted it, and you see all these lines land so tightly around the red line of reality,” he explains.

Over the last 40 years, the company’s models accurately predicted the increase in global surface temperature over time at an average of 0.2 degrees Celsius per decade. It was also on the ball with projections on the increase in global temperature with radiative forcing, a metric that measures how much of the sun’s energy remains in Earth’s atmosphere. In fact, Exxon’s models performed better than average when compared to other climate projections from that era.   

2. The researchers correctly rejected the global cooling hypothesis, even as the company promoted it

Of the 14 Exxon climate projections that Supran examined for his paper, not a single one was massively wrong. “They all excluded the possibility of no human-caused warming,” he says. “The curves always went up. The only question was exactly how quickly they rose.”

One chart Supran analyzed was a long-term look that tracked global temperature over the last 150,000 years. This graph was presented to Exxon executives in 1977 and accurately mapped the average global temperature. At the meeting, company scientists warned the executives that emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere could have catastrophic results. Yet, over the following decades, the company publicly pushed the myth of global cooling.

3. Exxon knew when the world would first notice the effects of climate change

In 1995, the IPCC announced it had irrevocable proof that human activities were fueling climate change, a fact it’s reiterated in each new study. Supran analyzed 10 internal reports and one peer-reviewed publication to find Exxon’s estimate: Eight of the 11 predicted the world would detect changes by 2000. But publicly, ExxonMobil executives only acknowledged human-made climate change in 2007.

4. The commissioned studies correctly described the amount of carbon dioxide that would lead to catastrophic climate change

Climate scientists measure atmospheric carbon dioxide in parts per million, which measures the mass of a particular substance compared to the mass of the mixture it’s a part of. For most of human history, carbon dioxide has remained below 300 parts per million. While the Paris Climate Agreement, which resolved to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius by 2050, did not set a limit on parts per million of carbon dioxide, another United Nations report found that a level of 450 parts per million would give humanity a 50 percent chance of staying under the Paris temperature threshold.

[Related: Renewable energy is climbing in the US, but so are our emissions—here’s why]

When Exxon scientists wanted to know how much carbon dioxide they could reasonably emit, they opted to use an upper limit of 550 parts per million for 2 degrees Celsius. They calculated that somewhere between 251 and 716 metric gigatons (the world emitted 37 metric gigatons total in 2021) was the most humanity could burn before crossing that threshold. More recent estimates have narrowed that range to between 442 and 651 metric gigatons, showing that yet again, the world’s largest oil and gas company understood climate science as well as anyone.

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Government incentives might encourage you to add another goal to your new year’s resolutions in 2023: reducing your carbon footprint. Starting this year, Americans can take advantage of a stream of tax credits to make their homes, cars, and businesses more sustainable thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).

The new legislation narrowly passed Congress after a lengthy political battle in the Senate last August. Considered one of President Biden’s signature achievements, the $440 billion package provides money for clean energy and lowers drug costs for older people, among other things. The government plans to pay for the credits through raising taxes on corporations that make over $1 billion in profit per year, taxing stock buybacks and investing in the Internal Revenue Services to catch tax cheats. If all works out as planned, the package will actually bring in $300 billion extra dollars, which will go towards paying off government debt.

Climate policy experts like Rachel Cleetus, the policy director for the climate and energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, see the IRA as the stimulus the country needs to make America’s energy infrastructure more sustainable, even if it’s just an initial step to meeting emission reduction goals. Cleetus says the law is the culmination of years of work.

“It’s a moment of relief, more than anything else,” she says. “Clean energy is already so competitive in the marketplace, here in the US and around the world, and this will really tip the scales in favor of accelerating that momentum around renewable energy, wind, solar, etc.”

With a receipt and tax form, consumers can save up to thousands of dollars on everything from electric cars to solar panels to two-pane windows. As you take stock of your sustainability resolutions this year, review how to apply for IRA credits.

“By being proactive, consumers can have a plan to make the most cost-effective upgrades for their specific housing and local policy circumstances once IRA funding is made available,” says Dan Esposito, a senior policy analyst at the an energy and climate policy think tank, Energy Innovation.

What are the tax credits?

There are two main buckets of credits you might qualify for: electric vehicle credits and home improvement credits. The first is purchasing an electric vehicle. To reap maximum benefits from the credits, you’ll want to make sure that it complies with a long list of technical and trade manufacturing requirements, like making sure the vehicle’s final assembly was in a US facility. 

Consumers should pay special attention to electric vehicle credits because they will most likely give buyers “the biggest bang for their buck,” Esposito wrote in an email to PopSci. A new electric vehicle can qualify for up to a $7,500 credit and used vehicles could be $4,000. (You can find more details about IRA tax credits from electric vehicles in our guide.) 

“The tax credits for electric vehicles are generally most impactful in terms of reducing one’s climate footprint, as the average US passenger vehicle emits roughly 60 percent more greenhouse gases than the average US home using natural gas,” he says. “However, the [exact] climate benefit depends on several factors, such as the vehicle you currently have (hybrid vs. gas guzzler), how often you drive, the climate you live in, and your home’s insulation,” Esposito writes.  

[Related: Check before you buy: Here are the new EVs that qualify for the clean vehicle tax credit]

The second bucket of IRA credits can be collected by reducing your home’s emissions through switching to renewable energy and making it more energy efficient. Consumers can save money on a range of products designed to reduce their home’s reliance on fossil fuels. You can get money for putting a solar panel on your roof. You can also get money from buying energy efficient products like two-pane windows that better insulate your house. You can also receive a $300 tax credit for purchasing a heat pump, instead of the typical furnace or energy inefficient air conditioners that most Americans own. 

If you plan to replace both the furnace and an air conditioning unit, then the tax credit for heat pumps could be worthwhile as well. How much you actually get back in credits, however, will vary from house to house—wiring might need to be upgraded or a heat pump designed to tolerate colder climates. “The timing of when these credits will become available will vary by state, with state energy offices set to play the dominant role in facilitating their rollout,” Esposito writes. “In the meantime, homeowners can assess the state of their house to determine which upgrades to seek out in the coming years.”

While renters might be locked out of some credits that require home ownership, they are still eligible for many incentives. It might be worth it to make the long-term investments if they plan to stay in their rental space for a year or more, Cleetus says.

[Related: How heat pumps can help fight global warming]

“The question for renters is obviously, how long are you going to be in a place? And is that something that you and your landlord want to split the cost?” she says. “In some cases, you can recoup the cost within a year, so even if you’re renting for just a year, it might make sense to do it.”

For example, it might make sense to purchase a more energy efficient air conditioner that will save you money on heating and cooling bills in the long run. And with the insulation-related tax credits, you can recoup the cost faster, perhaps in a year or two, than you would otherwise, according to Cleetus.

What to know before filing for the credits

Consumers should research what tax credits they can take advantage of before they buy any green products, says Susan Allen, senior manager for tax practice and ethics with the American Institute of Certified Professional Accountants (CPA). 

The amount of money you get will differ depending on your income, the number of dependents you have, and if you rent or own your home, so it’s important to do your research before buying anything that could have a tax credit or an upfront discount, Cleetus and Allen say.

“Planning before you buy helps you make the most informed decision on the ultimate savings you can accomplish,” Allen says. “If you can work with a CPA tax or financial planner, wonderful. They can help guide you and maybe save a lot of time and headache while you might be trying to navigate it.”

One of the best ways to make sure you can cash in on the credits is to ask the manufacturer before you make a purchase, Allen says. Car dealers will be aware of which vehicles qualify for the credits and appliance companies that manufacture electric stoves or other green products will likely know how much you can save. 

Cleetus says stores should start adopting labels that indicate if a product is eligible for tax credits. “That’s the kind of thing that will be really impactful, so that people don’t have to search,” she says. 

[Related: The Inflation Reduction Act and CHIPS could kick US climate policy back into action]

If you don’t have an accountant, you can also take advantage of a number of government guides, Allen and Cleetus say. Consumers can refer to the White House’s interactive clean energy website, which helps users determine what credits are available to them. The Department of Energy published a list of the credits people can save specifically on green energy and energy-efficient household appliances. The Internal Revenue Services details the cars eligible for electric vehicle credits. For those who want a more thorough breakdown of the credits, the White House also published a 183-page guidebook. And further guidance is still coming out, Cleetus says. 

And while the tax credits can help you save money on clean energy investments, the IRA doesn’t quite live up to what the country promised during global climate negotiations.The US pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 50 to 52 percent by 2030. The package aims to reduce emissions by about 40 percent. “It’s not enough, for sure. From a science perspective, we know we have to go further, faster,” Cleetus says. 

Still, the IRA is a vital step in accelerating the nationwide transition to clean energy infrastructure. “It’s important to think about this in a holistic way,” Cleetus says. “These tax credits will go a long way towards many, many households lowering their carbon footprint. But they’re also part of a broader system that has to shift.”

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Despite increases in renewable energy, a report from the Rhodium Group released on January 10 finds that greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the United States rose by 1.3 percent last year compared to 2021.

GHGs like carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide trap some of the Earth’s outgoing energy and cause the atmosphere to retain heat. The excess heat can alter climate and weather patterns around the world, causing stronger hurricanes and more droughts among other destruction. Reducing the amount of GHGs emitted into the air is necessary to avoid some of the most catastrophic effects of climate change in the future.

[Related: Greenhouse gases, sea level rise, and ocean acidification all broke records in 2021.]

“While this is the second year in a row that emissions have increased, it nonetheless marks a change from 2021, when emissions rebounded faster than the economic growth rate,” the group wrote in a statement. “This reversal in 2022 was largely due to the substitution of coal with natural gas—a less carbon-intensive fuel—and a rise in renewable energy generation.”

According to the report, renewable sources of energy like wind, solar, and hydropower generated 22 percent of the country’s electricity, compared to 20 percent from coal, but it was still not enough to curb the rise in emissions.

This new estimate reflects a continued rebound in emissions from the lows seen when the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020. Emissions plummeted more than 10 percent during the initial outbreaks of the virus and rebounded 6.2 percent in 2021.

For 2022, Rhodium cited economic challenges, uncertainty, and a spike in oil and natural gas prices from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a source of concern for the economy.

Homes and businesses saw the most significant increase in emissions in 2022. These spaces burn fossil fuels such as natural gas in appliances like hot water heaters and furnaces. Emissions in these spaces rose six percent and hit pre-pandemic levels. The report cites colder than average temperatures at the beginning of 2022 driving up heat use as a possible reason for the jump.

This increase puts this US further away from its emission reduction goals. In 2021, President Biden set a goal of reducing GHG emissions at least 50 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. This amount that is believed to be consistent with limiting global warming to the 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit threshold set in the Paris Agreement. Rhodium’s analysis finds that the US is not on track to meet this target. Rhodium called The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 a significant turning point for reducing emissions, but the legislation is also likely to fall short of closing the gap by 2030.

[Related: The US ban on hydrofluorocarbons is a climate game-changer.]

“In 2023, federal agencies can close this gap further by proposing aggressive regulations that drive down emissions. These actions, together with additional policies from leading states as well as action from private actors, can put the target within reach—but all parties must act quickly,” the report says.

The estimates in the report’s sector-by-sector analysis do not include emissions from two major sources of GHGs: agriculture and wildfires. Wildfires emit carbon dioxide into the air when trees and grasslands burn and farming activities made up about 11.2 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions in the US in 2020.

One piece of good news from the report is that economic growth actually outpaced emissions growth. Separating fossil fuel consumption from economic growth is a critical component to a more sustainable path towards removing carbon from the economy.

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Gas stoves have been used to cook food in American homes since the 1800s, so they are nothing new. An estimated 40 million homes still use them over a century past their introduction. However, scrutiny over the popular appliances for their environmental and health impacts has been steadily building over decades.

A new study published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health in December 2022 finds that 12.7 percent of cases of childhood asthma in the United States could be due to gas stoves in the home. The researchers from the US and Australia estimate 650,000 people under 18 could be affected. Gas stoves can produce and emit dangerous levels of carbon monoxide, methane, benzene, and nitrogen dioxide, especially if they are used in poorly ventilated spaces and aren’t properly maintained. According to a study published in January 2022, they can leak methane (a planet-warming gas) even when they are turned off.

[Related: Your gas stove could be hurting everyone around you.]

Brady Seals, manager of the carbon free buildings program at RMI and a co-author of the study, told The Guardian that the prevalence of asthma due to gas stoves is similar to the amount of asthma caused by secondhand smoke. She called these findings “eye popping,” adding, “We knew this was a problem but we didn’t know how bad. This study shows that if we got rid of gas stoves we would prevent 12.7 percent of childhood asthma cases, which I think most people would want to do.”

The study used 2019 US Census data to determine the proportion of children exposed to pollution from gas stoves, borrowing this method from a 2018 analysis that found that gas cooking ranges in Australia could be attributable for 12.3 percent of childhood asthma cases. The team also used data from an analysis in 2013 that found children in homes with gas stoves were 42 percent more likely to have asthmatic symptoms.

“It’s like having car exhaust in a home,” Seals told The Washington Post. “And we know that children are some of the people spending the most time at home, along with the elderly.”

With this analysis, the authors do mention that their findings are based on multiple assumptions, so there is a possibility that the dangers might be either understated or overstated and that principal axis factoring (PAF) analysis does have limitations.

[Related: Gas stoves are bad for the environment—but what if the power goes out?]

The gas industry has also pushed back against this study, with the American Gas Association saying it used a “headline-grabbing approach” that lacked scientific rigor and that “the claims made in this paper are clearly driven by simple advocacy-based modeling and hypotheticals over the deep and sophisticated analysis we should see in sound science.”

Industry lobbyists and Republican led legislatures have also pushed back hard against plans to phase out the use of gas stoves. Some states and cities like New York have banned the use of gas hookups in new buildings, while others have prevented these changes.

In December 2022, US Consumer Product Safety Commission head Richard Trumka announced that the agency will put out a formal request for information on hazards associated with gas stoves and possible solutions by March.

“We need to be talking about regulating gas stoves, whether that’s drastically improving emissions or banning gas stoves entirely,” Trumka said. “And I think we ought to keep that possibility of a ban in mind, because it’s a powerful tool in our tool belt and it’s a real possibility here.”

The move aligns with efforts to help lower income households and those who rent replace gas stoves. The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 does include a rebate of up to $840 for the purchase of new electric induction cooking appliances.

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Last month, the US Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Justice announced more than a million dollars in penalties against companies for polluting local waterways. The culprits? Four solar farms in Illinois, Alabama, and Idaho.

“The development of solar energy is a key component of [the Biden] administration’s efforts to combat climate change,” said Larry Starfield, an administrator at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), in a press release on November 14. “These settlements send an important message to the site owners of solar farm projects that these facilities must be planned and built-in compliance with all environmental laws.”

Each of the large-scale solar projects, which shared a common contractor, violated construction permits and mismanaged storm water controls, causing harmful buildup of sediment in waterways. As private companies race to build renewable capability, the EPA’s case with the four solar farms illustrates a central challenge: While gleaning energy from the sun might be a panacea to overconsumption of fossil fuels, building a clean power grid that can harness solar energy is often more complicated.

[Related: Solar power got cheap. So why aren’t we using it more?]

Experts say a path to net zero emissions will almost certainly require solar energy—and that calls for a hard look at the challenges these sweeping facilities face with clean construction and more ethical production of panels.

Building and recycling solar panels

Most solar panels used in the US today start out as sand. Scientists purify the grains into almost pure crystalline silicon, but the process requires a large amount of electricity. Almost 80 percent of a solar panel’s carbon footprint can come from this purification process alone, according to Annick Anctil, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Michigan State University.

“Where that electricity is coming from is really important,” Anctil says. “If you’re making solar panels in a place where electricity uses coal or natural gas, that makes your solar panels not as green as if you’re able to produce it from solar energy.”

Solar panels are built to last about 30 years. At the end of their lifecycle, installers can either throw them into a landfill or recycle them, but there isn’t much infrastructure for reusing the materials in the panels since the industry is new. 

Government agencies, organizations, research groups, and companies worldwide have begun developing technologies and creating recycling programs to break down solar panels and materials. The US-based Solar Energy Industries Association, for instance, has been creating a network to help consumers identify where they can recycle their solar panels and installers find a place to purchase recycled modules, Anctil explains. The association reports it’s processed over 4 million pounds of solar panels and related equipment since its recycling program launched in 2016. Luckily, if panels wind up in landfills, the glass and silicon materials are not toxic, Anctil says. (She does note that the metal frame needs to be broken down, too.)

There isn’t comprehensive data about how many solar panels are recycled versus thrown away in the US. Large-scale production of solar panels only began about 10 years ago, so it’s likely that most haven’t reached the end of their life cycle yet.

Grading land for solar farms

Solar panels are easier and cheaper to install on leveled ground, which often requires companies to mow down trees and local vegetation. Leveling, or grading, the land can lead to soil erosion and eventually sediment runoff, where storms force eroded soil to travel downhill, sometimes into waterways. Too much soil in bodies of water can disrupt local ecosystems, hurt the plants and animals that live in them, and damage drinking water treatment systems.

In the recent settlement, the EPA and Department of Justice charged the four solar farms with violating the Clean Water Act by failing to prepare for the sediment runoff created during construction. The agencies alleged that two of the farms in Idaho and Alabama even discharged sediment illegally into nearby waterways.

Dustin Mulvaney, an environmental studies professor at San José State University in California whose research focuses on solar energy commodity chains, says these violations appeared to be “really manageable problems” that the companies should have had under control. “Where [solar farms often] go wrong is they assume they understand the landscape,” Mulvaney says. But when building starts, “they run into endangered species conflicts, stormwater issues, and air pollution issues.”

Grading the land for solar farms “is like any other road construction project,” Anctil says. “It’s just unfortunate that some companies in the construction [process] just didn’t care or weren’t careful.” The runoff from building these recent solar farms could have been avoided by, say, planting vegetation to catch some of the soil and water.

Anctil and Mulvaney say that regulations can help prevent these kinds of water and pollution issues from construction projects. While the bidding process for projects varies from state to state, stronger government assessments could ensure that solar companies preserve the environments they’re otherwise capitalizing on.

Since farmland is already flat and offers room to scale up, it’s been a prime candidate for solar projects—with energy companies incentivizing farmers with financial returns. But converting this land into solar farms also presents cultural and wildlife issues. Farmers may be reluctant to see their land converted from rows of crops to rows of synthetic panels. 

While the construction process has the potential to cause significant land disturbance, solar farms do offer some immediate benefits to farmers and the environment, David Murray, director of solar policy for American Clean Power, wrote in a statement to Popular Science. In some setups, growers can plant crops between or alongside the panels. “Ecosystem services are an understated benefit of large-scale solar sites and once operational, solar facilities yield less nutrient runoff and require far less pesticide and herbicides compared to row crop agriculture,” Murray writes. 

Accountability from start to finish

The four solar farms that violated the Clean Water Act are all subsidiaries of international finance and investment companies. But Mulvaney argues that what’s even worse are inexperienced solar developers that build a single arm and then soon disband. He’s seen “quite a few projects” handed to these temporary companies.

“When you have these entities that do one-offs and then vaporize, there’s absolutely no accountability at all,” he says. “That’s a structural problem.”

[Related: Dams show promise for sustainable food systems, but we should tread lightly]

While public and private groups might feel the urgency in building renewable energy systems, it’s important to be cautious about how the systems themselves are built and sourced, Anctil says.

“The problem is people tend to just look at how much electricity is going to be produced,” she explains. “We need to plan and choose panels considering not just the electricity production but the full lifecycle.”

A more environmentally conscious process is needed from start to finish. Sand should be legally and ethically mined, Anctil says. Developers also need to consider how to build sustainable  solar arrays that minimize the impacts on the local habitat. Better recycling plans should be in place for the solar panels once they reach the end of their lives. And like with any other major construction project, renewable energy companies should take heed of state and federal environmental regulations.

“I’m not trying to kill solar,” Anctil says. “It’s making sure that in 5 or 10 years from now, we don’t find out there’s a new environmental disaster.” 

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It’s hard to look around and not see it. Maybe if you’re in the middle of the woods, or high up on a mountain. But even then, plastic is everywhere. 

Each year, companies produce billions of pounds of plastic waste., and the majority of single-use plastics are produced by just a handful of groups. Still, corporate accountability isn’t always robust. Even in the cases where companies do make commitments to reduce plastic consumption, in actuality, the burden often falls on the consumer, and promises frequently don’t reduce virgin plastic consumption, a new study published Friday in One Earth shows.

“We need to turn off the tap of plastic pollution,” Zoie Diana, author of the study and PhD candidate at Duke University tells PopSci. “The transparency has to start from the companies.”

The team at Duke studied commitments from 974 of the world’s largest companies, including  Amazon, ExxonMobil, and Johnson & Johnson, and found that instead of reducing virgin plastic, corporations opted for promoting recycling or lightweighting their packaging. These options are not good solutions for several reasons, Diana says. 

Currently, only nine percent of plastic waste is actually recycled globally, and it may be even lower in the US. “And of that nine percent, only ten percent has been recycled more than once in the past 50 years,” Diana says. When we put plastic in the recycling bin, very little of what we intend to recycle actually end up reused. “Recycling just delays plastic disposal,” Diana says. 

The other big commitment the researchers observed is lightweighting—where companies make their products or packaging using less plastic. You may have noticed Coca-Cola bottles lining shelves become less heavy or smaller over time. Or, packaging for products found in Walmart stores may have become lighter too. These companies are just some of the groups who have opted to lightweight their products in an attempt to reduce plastic pollution.  

[Related: A close look at the Great Pacific Garbage Patch reveals a common culprit]

While making individual bottles less plastic-intensive may sound good in theory, but isn’t as sweet as it sounds. “If you’re producing more and more plastic bottles overall, or reinvesting any cost savings from lightweighting into new products that are made of plastic, then that’s an insufficient response. That’s not going to get us to reduce plastic pollution overall,” Diana says. 

Beyond deficient strategies, the researchers also found ambiguity to be a challenge. Although 72 percent of the companies studied did make a commitment to reducing plastic use, their commitments often involved insufficient strategies like these or were too vague to be assessed for progress. “89 percent made at least one commitment that was neither time-bound nor measurable,” Diana says.

On top of this, the majority of companies studied did not link plastic pollution with climate change. Beyond killing wildlife, accumulating in our food, and being linked to cancer and hormone disruption, plastic uses a lot of fossil fuels. Virgin plastic is quite literally made out of fossil fuels—crude oil is heated and distilled to turn into the material. And as fossil fuel use, which is the primary cause of climate change, continues to increase, commitments by companies considering their impacts on climate change are important, Diana says.

But there is hope in the form of legislation, Diana says. The United Nations Environment Assembly is working to have an international plastics treaty in place in 2024, which Diana hopes will work to target virgin plastic production. “I do think we need more emphasis on the ties between plastic pollution and climate change,” she says. “There’s a lot of overlap there. The treaty is definitely making me hopeful and excited.”

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On Sunday, the United Nations’ annual climate change conference came to a close in Sharm el-Shieth, Egypt, following two weeks of meetings and talks by over 200 countries. Issues ranging from funds for climate justice to maintaining the goals set by the 2015 Paris Climate Accords were on the to do list, and the conference was attended by more than 45,000 people.

Here are three of the main takeaways following year’s meeting.

A climate justice fund is finally in motion

After years of debate and resistance from wealthier countries, a deal was signed to create a fund to help developing countries pay for damages and losses due floods, storms, and drought that are made worse by climate change. The decision, called the Sharm el-Sheikh Implementation Plan, calls for a committee with representatives from 24 countries to figure out what form the fund should take, the countries should contribute, and where the money should go over the next year.

Countries primarily from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, South Pacific, and Latin America fought to add this fund on the formal agenda, and maintained a pressure campaign on the matter of climate justice. Developing countries do little to contribute to the climate crisis, while facing the worst effects of it.

“The announcement offers hope to vulnerable communities all over the world who are fighting for their survival from climate stress, and gives some credibility to the COP process.”” said Sherry Rehman, Pakistan’s minister for climate change. Pakistan lead a group of 134 developing nations pushing for loss and damage payments, following the country’s devastating flooding over the summer. The devastating floods pushed one-third of the country under water and was exacerbated by global warming. It was responsible for 1,500 deaths and caused roughly $30 billion in damages, all as Pakistan contributes less than 1 percent of the world’s emissions.

Fossil fuel presence is seen on the ground and in the agreements at COP 27

Roughly 636 representatives from fossil fuel companies were part of representative delegations and trade teams, much to the frustration of climate activists. A final deal brokered by the host Egyptian delegation did not explicitly put phasing down fossil fuels in the final text of this year’s agreement. The final agreement instead encourages “efforts towards the phase down of unabated coal power and phase-out of inefficient fossil fuel subsidies.”

The deal also calls for the phasing down of unlimited fossil fuel powers and some fossil fuel subsidies, but the use of fossil fuels was affirmed for the near future, with United Arab Emirates President Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan saying the UAE would continue to deliver oil and gas “for as long as the world is in need.” The UAE, which produces an average of 3.2 million barrels of oil per day, will host next year’s climate summit (COP28) in Dubai.

The tepid language and incomplete fossil fuel reduction was seen as not enough by many attendees.

“Over the past year, our climate leadership has been tested in many ways,” said Dan Jorgensen, acting climate and energy minister for Denmark. “We are not calling for any sudden disruption of energy supplies, but we must equally recognize that the energy crisis is driven by the dependency on fossil fuels.”

[Related: Three nations pledge to reverse decades of destruction in the rainforest.]

Many countries are still committed to the 2.7 Fahrenheit (1.5 Celsius) target

Desipe a 50/50 chance that the world will exceed the 2.7 Fahrenheit (1.5 Celsius) of warming over the next five years, many more developed countries showed a commitment to strengthening the promise to keep that goal set in 2015 alive.

However, the final agreement did not include a reference to the phasing out of all fossil fuels, which many scientists believe is necessary to advance the decision made during COP26 in 2021 to phase down the use of coal.

“The current text is not enough. But we’ve shown with the loss and damage fund that we can do the impossible. So we know we can come back next year and get rid of fossil fuels once and for all,” said Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, the Climate Envoy of the Marshall Islands, who along with other island states fear near total destruction if temperatures rise above this threshold.

Commitment and belief in this temperature threshold appears to be a difference between different major players. China has several concerns about the 1.5 goal. Li Shuo, a policy adviser for Greenpeace based in Beijing told The New York Times that the goal would put pressure on the Chinese government to implement a more stringent target for cutting greenhouse gases in China, which the government wants to avoid. Meanwhile, representatives from the United States and the EU both said that any final agreement must underscore the importance of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees.

[Related: Why the 1.5-degree-Celsius climate goal still matters.]

Other key moments include the US and China re-kindling cooperation around climate change and Brazil’s president-elect Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva declaring “Brazil is back” in the global climate fight. Lula defeated right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro, who refused to hold the 2019 climate summit that was originally planned for Brazil and presided over mounting destruction of the rainforest.

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This article was originally featured on Undark.

Wild Alaskan salmon are a gold standard for American seafood. The long journey from the river to the ocean and back builds the muscle mass that gives the fish their distinct texture and flavor, and the clean rivers of the north produce seafood with very low levels of mercury and other contaminants. Indigenous communities have been harvesting salmon in Northwestern North America for more than 10,000 years and some still depend on subsistence fishing for survival. In southeastern Alaska, salmon fishing and processing adds an annual total of about $70 million to the local economy.

But 21st-century salmon face many stressors, including habit loss, climate change, and overfishing. As a result, salmon populations are declining across the United States. The fish still thrive in some parts of Alaska, but local residents and scientists are increasingly concerned about an additional stressor: the mining industry. Active mines, proposed mines, and dozens of exploratory projects span the transboundary region of southeastern Alaska and British Columbia, which includes three major salmon-bearing rivers. One of these proposed mines, the Kerr-Sulphurets-Mitchell project in Canada, will extract ore from what is reportedly the largest undeveloped gold-copper deposit in the world.

For decades, scientists have been trying to understand the impact of mining on salmonids, a family that includes salmon, trout, and other closely related fish. In July, the journal Science Advances published a review study evaluating more than 100 research papers and documents, concluding that the earlier research has underestimated the impacts of mining operations on Pacific salmonids. Mining activities are of special concern today, the authors wrote, because demand for metals is rising as manufacturers seek raw materials for low-carbon technologies like electric car batteries.

Even under normal circumstances, mining can release contaminants like heavy metals into nearby watersheds, threatening the health of salmon. And mine tailings — the slurry of silt, fine sand, clay, and water that’s left behind after ore is extracted — need to be carefully stored beyond the life of the mine. Without proper environmental mitigation, scientists say, current and proposed mining activities could have devastating effects on Alaskan salmon and their watersheds.

In interviews with Undark, several mining representatives underscored the industry’s efforts to keep watersheds free of contaminants. But many scientists and locals remain skeptical, and they worry about losing the region’s salmon. The nonprofit Salmon Beyond Borders was created to protect transboundary rivers and ways of life. “Wild salmon are at the center of my life,” said Heather Hardcastle, a campaign adviser for the organization, “as they are at the center of most people’s lives in this region.”

Northwestern North America represents a convergence of natural resources, wrote the July paper’s 20-plus authors, most of whom are affiliated with the region’s universities, First Nations, or environmental nonprofits. Northwestern North America holds substantial reserves of coal and metals. It is also home to “some of the most productive and least disturbed salmonid habitat remaining on Earth,” the authors wrote. These fish are unique for their large home ranges and for their tendency to use all of the accessible parts of the watershed. For these and other reasons, it can be difficult to assess and mitigate the risks of mining.

The review was comprehensive, analyzing not only peer-reviewed studies, but also government databases and reports, and industry disclosure documents and technical materials. The results were sobering: Mining operations often fail to meet their own water quality goals, the review found. Further, few studies have compared the predicted impacts of mining with the industry’s actual impacts. Cumulative effects of multiple mines and other stressors are often underestimated. Mitigation strategies aren’t always based on proven technology, and they rarely consider the effects of climate change in years to come.

Lead researcher Chris Sergeant said the July paper is the first of its kind to comprehensively review and summarize the impact of mining on salmon and provide guidance on how to improve the science that supports mining policy. The scale of the review allowed researchers to see a big picture, which can be difficult to visualize based on individual datasets, especially when the data comes from the mining companies themselves.

“It’s nearly impossible with the data we’re given by mining operations these days to do a kind of pre-project assessment of risk,” Sergeant said. “The data quality is so non-transparent and not done systematically.” Sergeant also said he wasn’t surprised by his paper’s findings, given that there are so many individual examples of how mining operations can affect watersheds. Having those examples all together in one place, though, makes the extent of the problem clearer.

Jonathan Moore, a professor at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia who worked on the July review, noted that salmon also help support the overall health of local watersheds. More than 100 species are believed to have some kind of relationship with salmon, whether direct or indirect. Trout eat salmon eggs and young salmon, for example, and bears eat the spawning adults. When salmon die, their bodies contribute nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus to the watershed and the forests that grow nearby.

The ecological impact of these nutrients is sometimes visible to the human eye. A 2021 study found that the “greenness” of vegetation along the lower Adams River in British Columbia increased in the summers following a productive sockeye salmon run. Another study found that the presence of dead salmon in spawning grounds influenced the growth rate of Sitka spruce trees not just close to the riverbank but also farther into the forest, where researchers said “bear trails and assumed urine deposition were prevalent.”

Environmental activists and scientists are wary of new mining projects, in part, because mining disasters are still happening, even though modern infrastructure is supposed to be robust enough to prevent them. During a 2014 dam failure at the Mount Polley Mine in British Columbia, for example, 32 million cubic yards of wastewater and mine tailings spilled into a nearby lake. From there, the mine waste traveled down a creek and into a second lake, which supports one of the region’s most important salmon habitats.

The mining company, Imperial Metals, maintains that the tailings from the Mount Polley spill did not cause largescale environmental damage. The tailings contained very little pyrite, a mineral that can generate sulfuric acid when exposed to air and water, wrote C.D. Anglin, who worked as the company’s chief scientific officer in the aftermath of the Mount Polley accident, in an email to Undark. Sulfuric acid is one of the most environmentally concerning consequences of mining. When the compound enters a watershed, it doesn’t just threaten the health and survival of fish and other animals, it can also dissolve other heavy metals like lead and mercury from rock it contacts. But, Anglin wrote, “the Mount Polley tailings are considered chemically benign.”

Still, a 2022 study found that the dam failure did have environmental consequences. The study, which was not included in the July review, was led by Gregory Pyle, a researcher at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada. Pyle and his colleagues took water, sediment, and invertebrate samples from sites impacted by the spill and from a nearby waterbody, Bootjack Lake, that was not impacted by the spill. In the areas most affected by the spill, Pyle’s team found elevated copper levels in the sediment, as well as high concentrations of copper in the bodies of invertebrates living in those areas. Notably, the researchers also found elevated copper levels in Bootjack Lake, which suggests that the environmental impact of the Mount Polley mine predates the spill itself.

Anglin said the study’s results are misleading. “While the copper levels are slightly higher than in some of the organisms in unimpacted areas,” she wrote, “they are not at a level of environmental concern.”

Pyle disagrees. In an interview with Undark, he pointed to a follow-up study in which his team exposed freshwater scuds (a shrimplike mollusk) to contaminated and uncontaminated water and sediment collected four years after the Mount Polley spill. “When they were in contact with the sediments for as little as 14 days,” he said, “it impaired their growth and survival.” The results of Pyle’s study have implications for salmon since scuds and other invertebrates are an important food source for these fish.

Copper can also build up in the bodies of salmon, as well as their prey, impacting their growth and survival. Studies have found that even sub-lethal copper levels can harm salmon’s olfactory system, which may make it harder for them to avoid predators and orient themselves in their habitat. “Copper has these really insidious effects in terms of salmon’s ability to navigate,” said Moore. “Salmon might not be able to find their way home, for example, in a system that has excess copper.”

Even when contaminants are taken out of the equation, scientists say, the sheer volume of material entering the watershed during a spill like the one at Mount Polley can have physical consequences. “These big disasters like Mount Polley, they transform these systems,” said Moore. For example, the slurry of fine sediment and waste material can cover the gravel where salmon would otherwise lay their eggs, making it useless as spawning habitat.

The lingering effects of past mining have activists and scientists concerned about new projects like the proposed Kerr-Sulphurets-Mitchell mine, which is expected to begin construction in the summer of 2026. Hardcastle said Salmon Beyond Borders wants the region to take a precautionary approach to new mining projects.

“What’s the point otherwise of trying to decarbonize and get to a clean energy future,” she asks, “if all we’re doing is swapping the big oil and the fossil fuel industry for big mining?”

Christopher Mebane, assistant director for hydrologic studies at the U.S. Geological Survey, studies metals, toxicity, and mining and jokingly describes himself as “a dirty water biologist.” He called the July study, in which he was not involved, “a fair assessment” of the problems that mining activities can create for salmonids. “I can’t find a single misstatement or error,” he said. “But you know, if this were written by a group of mining engineers, it would have a very different tone and probably conclusions.”

Indeed, mining industry representatives say the mistakes of the past won’t be repeated. “Mines with tailing storage facilities are required by law to implement new design and operational criteria using best available technology,” said Michael Goehring, president and CEO of the Mining Association of British Columbia, a trade group. And Brent Murphy, senior vice president of environmental affairs at Seabridge Gold, the company that will operate the proposed KSM mine, said the KSM tailings management facility won’t drain into Alaskan waters. Although the mine itself will be located in a watershed that drains into a transboundary river, Murphy said the tailings facility will drain only into Canadian waters and does not require water treatment.Salmon are believed to have a relationship, direct or indirect, with more than 100 different species. In Alaska, brown bears famously fish for adult salmon as they swim upstream to spawn. Visual: RooM via Getty Images

Murphy added that the tailings facility will be in a confining valley, closed off by two large dams. “We’re containing all of the potential acid-generating material, which is only 10 percent of the total volume of the tailings produced, within a lined facility,” he said. That part of the facility will be surrounded by more than 1.8 miles of compacted sandy material. The design, Murphy said, was implemented to address the concerns of local First Nations.

To satisfy agency and community concerns over the long term, mining operations may also propose water treatment plans that span centuries. Seabridge Gold said water treatment will continue for 200 years after the KSM mine closes, though Murphy told Undark that the water at the site is already naturally contaminated with copper, iron, and selenium and won’t be further contaminated by mine operations.

Christopher Sergeant, who led the July review, said he’s skeptical. “I don’t know of any successful examples of anyone treating water for 200 years,” he said. “And my understanding of corporate structure is that there’s not really a motivation once the project is not creating profit anymore. That’s a big concern of mine: Who is going to be on the hook for making sure that that water is treated in what’s basically perpetuity?”

Goehring said the cost of ongoing water treatment is paid for upfront. British Colombia already holds 2.3 billion Canadian dollars ($1.7 billion ) from the mining industry for the express purpose of containing mine waste, he said. This ensures that after the KSM mine closes, he added, “water treatment, if required, will continue to take place.”

Even so, the future effects of climate change could threaten infrastructure at KSM and other mines. “A lot of the calculations that are made for engineering are based on what the current environment looks like,” said Sergeant, adding that there’s really no way to predict how different the environment will be 10 or 20 years into the life of a mine. Destructive weather events are becoming more common, he noted, and they “aren’t necessarily considered in engineering designs.”

For now, environmental groups like Salmon Beyond Borders aim to convince agencies and policymakers to put a pause on new and expanding mines in shared watersheds until Canadian law can be revised to include provisions for downstream stakeholders. More significantly, Salmon Beyond Borders said it also wants a permanent ban on tailings dams near transboundary rivers. But because mining is so lucrative, permanent bans may not be practical or possible.

Moore said the July paper showcases the key challenges to protecting salmon populations in a region touched by the mining industry. He hopes the research points toward “a productive path forward,” he added, in which the mining industry can coexist with thriving salmon systems and the communities that depend on them.

UPDATE: A previous version of this piece incorrectly stated that the KSM tailings management facility will be located in a watershed that drains into a transboundary river and that wastewater will be piped to a treatment facility miles away. While the mine itself is located in such a watershed, the tailings management facility drains only into Canadian waters and does not require water treatment. The piece also originally referred to Heather Hardcastle as the campaign director for Salmon Without Borders. She is a campaign adviser.

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This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

Fifteen-year-old Brianna K. (known as Kū) loves listening to her family tell stories about the wildlife they grew up with along the shores of west Maui, Hawaiʻi. The stories describe diverse, vital ecosystems. They tell of things that have been lost.

“Older generations will talk about different seaweeds or different fishes that they used to see in places that I swim in now. And when I go out there with my dad or my parents or my cousins, you don’t see too much of it,” Kū says.

In just the past few years, Kū has watched her father’s farm produce fewer crops. Fishermen are bringing in smaller hauls, too, and her family’s household patches of kalo—a Hawaiian staple crop—are shrinking. In school, Kū says, she learned that these are the signs of climate change and how it’s affecting her community.

Now Kū, alongside 13 other young people, is suing the Hawaiian government for its failure to protect her constitutional right to a clean and healthful environment. Their lawsuit, filed in June and supported by the US nonprofits Our Children’s Trust and Earthjustice, is challenging the state’s Department of Transportation for operating a transportation system that the youth claim prioritizes fossil fuel–powered cars over mass transit and other environmentally friendly alternatives, contributing to greenhouse gas pollution. Their goal is to force the department to fully decarbonize by 2045.

Over the past two years alone, nearly 500 climate change–related lawsuits have been brought to courts around the world, according to a report by the London School of Economics’ Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment.

But where most of these lawsuits pitch climate change as a problem that has yet to unfold—either by challenging government carbon targets and policies, or by accusing fossil fuel companies and other high-polluting industries of spreading misinformation or cutting their emissions too slowly—Kū and her co-plaintiffs’ lawsuit is just one of many recent legal challenges that is taking a new approach to try to force governments to reckon with climate change.

In addition to arguing that Hawaiʻi’s carbon emissions are affecting Kū and her co-plaintiffs’ right to future livelihoods and culture, they are suing over the harm that has already been done.

To Kim Bouwer, a legal expert focused on climate and energy at Durham University in England, the case follows in the spirit of one of the first lawsuits to explicitly link climate change to contemporary damage.

In 2008, the residents of Kivalina, an Alaska Native village on the edge of the Chukchi Sea, sued ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel companies for the damage the community had already felt from climate change–induced flooding and coastal erosion. The Kivalina residents documented very clearly the impacts the community had felt, says Bouwer. “The problem there,” she adds, “was the courts didn’t want to hear them.”

The Kivalina lawsuit was dismissed. The judge overseeing the case, US district judge Saundra Brown Armstrong, wrote in her decision that regulating greenhouse gas emissions is a political, rather than a legal, issue. As such, she wrote, it had to be resolved by the US Congress. A last-ditch attempt to take the case to the US Supreme Court also failed.

Over the past 14 years, however, judges, at least in some jurisdictions, seem more willing to accept that people who are suffering the worst impacts of climate change have the right to make those arguments in front of a court.

Something else important has changed since those in Kivalina filed their lawsuit in 2008; scientists have vastly improved their ability to directly link real-world events to climate change.

A report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), published in February, for instance, pulls no punches in its conclusion that climate change has unequivocally disrupted human and natural systems. It says anthropogenic warming has already caused substantial damage to ecosystems, water security, food production, and peoples’ health and well-being. Climate change is already disrupting cities, settlements, and infrastructure—especially in low-lying small-island developing states and atolls, which are particularly vulnerable to sea level rise.

While broad, extensive reports like the IPCC’s have helped build a scientific basis for explaining climate change’s effects, they’re not always enough to satisfy a court that a specific change in a particular place, or a specific extreme event like a storm, heatwave, or flood, was caused directly by global warming.

That’s where the fast-moving field of attribution science comes in.

Scientists, like those involved in the World Weather Attribution initiative, are now adept at cutting through the noise to show the extent to which climate change has made a particular extreme weather event more likely or more potent. Some recent examples, among many, show how climate change increased the chance of devastating bushfires in Australia in 2019 and 2020 by at least 30 percent. It exacerbated heavy rainfall in South Africa in April 2022, making the devastating flooding that killed hundreds of people and displaced tens of thousands heavier and more likely. And global warming amplified a long-running heatwave in India and Pakistan that killed dozens and ravaged crops.

“We know so much more now about the science,” says Bouwer. “It is now possible to have sufficiently persuasive scientific evidence that both links the behaviors of corporates or national governments to climate change and, to some extent, can attribute specific events or specific impacts to climate change.” When it comes to winning a lawsuit, Bouwer says, that’s what you need to succeed.

Against this backdrop, litigants like Kū are moving ahead.

While the lawsuit against Hawai‘i’s Department of Transportation was filed just a few months ago, roughly 7,500 kilometers to the southwest, Torres Strait Islanders are fighting a similar fight—though theirs is much further along.

Situated between the northern tip of Queensland, Australia, and Papua New Guinea, the Torres Strait Islands are mostly populated by Torres Strait Islander peoples with their own distinct cultures, languages, and identities. The islands are extremely low-lying and are some of the most vulnerable places in the world to climate change. Data from the Torres Strait Regional Authority shows that sea level around the islands is rising by six millimeters each year—twice the global average.

For years, Torres Strait Islanders have mobilized against climate change, including a three-year effort to take Australia to the United Nations to accuse it of breaching the Torres Strait Islanders’ fundamental rights to culture and life by failing to adequately cut national carbon emissions. In September, the UN Human Rights Committee agreed with them and said they should be compensated.

Two Torres Strait Islander people are taking a different route. Much like Kū in Hawaiʻi, Guy Paul Kabai and Pabai Pabai sued the Australian government. They argue that Australia breached its legal obligations to prevent the loss of their communities to climate change. According to their lawyers, Kabai and Pabai’s case is unusual in being brought by people suffering from the impacts of climate change against their own state—a state which is one of the world’s big per capita carbon dioxide emitters.

In their filing, Kabai and Pabai outline the range of harms Torres Strait Islander peoples are already experiencing: higher average temperatures, more frequent and severe heatwaves, coastal erosion, and more potent storm surges. Even cemeteries are at risk. The documents describe how, on land, salt water has contaminated freshwater ecosystems. In the ocean, warming and acidification have led to visible coral bleaching and are disrupting the marine food web.

Kabai and Pabai do not hesitate to describe climate change as an existential threat to their communities. “Our ancestors have lived on these islands for more than 65,000 years,” says Kabai in a press release. “If you take away our homelands, we don’t know who we are. We have a cultural responsibility to make sure that doesn’t happen and to protect [our] country and our communities, culture, and spirituality from climate change.”

In yet another case, in Indonesia, four residents of Pulau Pari are hewing closer to the playbook laid out by the residents of Kivalina in 2008.

Pulau Pari, an island a few dozen kilometers northwest of Jakarta, has already seen flooding and extensive damage to houses, streets, and businesses. But rather than taking action against the Indonesian government, the residents of Pulau Pari are suing Holcim, a Swiss company that manufactures cement, concrete, and other building materials.

The islanders argue that because Holcim is one of the 50 biggest carbon dioxide emitters in the world it bears a proportionate responsibility for the resulting climate change. They want the company to slash its carbon emissions to limit future harm, and are asking for compensation and money to build new flood defenses.

Whether the courts will rule in favor of Kū and the other Hawaiian youth, Kabai and Pabai, the residents of Palau Pari, or any of the plaintiffs in other similar cases remains to be seen. But unlike the residents of Kivalina, who tried and failed to secure a judgment in 2008, many of the cases underway now are standing on a stronger legal footing.

The Hawaiian claimants, in particular, are optimistic. Leinā‘ala Ley, a senior associate attorney at Earthjustice and co-counsel in the lawsuit, says the basics of climate science are well established in Hawaiian politics and law. The state’s supreme court has already concluded that climate change “harms present and future generations” and that Hawai‘i is “vulnerable to the ecological damage caused by an unhealthy climate system.”

Ley adds that many harms are readily visible on the island, from drought conditions to roads crumbling into the sea. “We don’t have to look to the future here. We can just look unfortunately to the present to see the kind of havoc that climate change is wreaking.”

For Nikki Reisch, director of the climate and energy program at the Switzerland-based Center for International Environmental Law, the growth in lawsuits like these reflects the deep geographical and social injustices of climate change.

“It’s no surprise that many of these cases are being brought by islanders or island populations, because they’re among the most vulnerable … to the truly existential threat that climate change poses,” she says. “As the devastation caused by climate change becomes increasingly apparent, it will only become easier to connect the dots between polluting activity and the failure to reduce and regulate it—and ever harder to deny responsibility for the consequences of that action.”

And it’s only appropriate, Reisch adds, that the lawsuits are being brought against the high-emitting wealthy countries and biggest polluters “that are responsible for the lion’s share of the planet-warming emissions to date.”

Back in Maui, Kū has a keen sense of what is at stake. “It would be cool to see the same thing that my grandpa got to see when he was growing up, or be able to work in my family’s land up in the valley and be able to restore a bunch of other kalo patches up there.”

Kū is no stranger to going to court, having already testified in local lawsuits about water resources. But if the lawsuit ever gets to that stage, she is excited about the idea of making a stand on climate change. “Hopefully, it would make a huge impact on not just my island or our community, but like the whole entire state. It would be amazing.”

The post Some climate activists aren’t suing over the future—they are taking aim at the present appeared first on Popular Science.

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Google often touts its commitment to sustainability and tackling climate change head-on, but a new study courtesy of the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) reveals the Big Tech giant won’t hesitate to take oil corporations’ money in exchange for diminishing their role in our ongoing planetary crisis. According to the CCDH’s new report, Google has accepted nearly $24 million for top search ad spots from oil giants over the past two years alone. Of that amount, almost half was spent on advertising specifically targeted for sustainability search terms like “net zero” and “eco-friendly,” presenting users with advertising and sites that skewed climate science in the companies’ favor, explained Reuters earlier this week.

In October 2021, Google pledged to “prohibit ads for, and monetization of, content that contradicts well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change,” but in the ensuing months has routinely failed to live up to its promise. This often takes the form of accepting fossil fuel companies’ “greenwashing” campaigns, a term referring to advertising and PR that makes businesses seem more environmentally conscious and active than they truly are.

[Related: Are ‘water positive’ pledges from tech companies just a new kind of greenwashing?]

“Big Oil’s deception is by design. It is a tried and true business plan for the world’s largest polluters to make public promises about sustainability, whilst lining their pockets with the largest profits in decades,” explained CCDH CEO Imran Ahmed in the report’s introduction. The study shows, for example, that when users search phrases like “pros and cons of the paris climate agreement [sic]” or “what are greenhouse gases” they invariably see ads sold by companies like ExxonMobil at the top of the page. Because previous studies indicate studies only a small fraction of Google searchers click links on a second page of search results, Google “is allowing fossil fuel companies to dominate the information ecosystem to peddle their deception.”

To remedy the situation, CCDH recommends Google immediately cease its flagrant hypocrisy when it comes to advertising clients, as well as  “create a public and transparent ad library” for organizations, government officials, and general users to see where funding originates. In September 2022, the House Committee on Oversight and Reform’s Subcommittee on the Environment released its own initial investigatory findings regarding Big Oil tactics, finding that companies like ExxonMobil, Chevron, and Shell admitted in their own words within internal documents to “gaslighting” the public.

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From federal to local races, conservation can either get a boost or backslide with the results of any Election Day. But this year’s important issues—national auctions for oil and gas leases, wildfire prevention and mitigation, the sheer acreage of protected lands and waters, to name a few—all come down to the same factor: whether Democrats or Republicans have control of Congress after the midterms. 

“We really believe the Biden administration and Congress are just getting started taking action on these issues,” says Leah Donahey, the federal advocacy campaigns director for the League of Conservation Voters, a non-partisan environmental lobbying group that has endorsed and run ads supporting Democratic candidates this election. “We’ve never seen change at this level, and from our perspective, whether it can continue comes down to Congress and a bunch of critical House and Senate races across the country.” 

Right now, Democrats have majorities in the House of Representatives and the Senate, and have passed legislation seen as steps in the right direction by environmental scientists and policy experts. Foremost among these is the Inflation Reduction Act, which contains numerous climate provisions as well as funds for sustainable forestry programs, including ever-important wildfire prevention. 

[Related: The future of American conservation lies in restoration]

The Biden administration has also taken a number of pro-public lands executive actions that haven’t yet been challenged or opposed by Congress. These encompass the America the Beautiful Challenge, which directs $1 billion in federal funds towards conservation projects, executive orders restoring thousands of undeveloped acres to the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments in Utah, and the recent creation of the 50,000-acre Camp Hale National Monument. The White House has also restored the Endangered Species Act to full strength, an important tool for protecting threatened wildlife and habitat that was weakened under former President Donald Trump.  

The major criticism of the Biden administration—besides the question of whether its actions go far enough—are its leases for oil and gas companies to drill on public lands and waters, a reversal of a campaign promise to end the practice. New leases were part of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), but auctions for parcels in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Wyoming, and the Gulf of Mexico were held before the legislation was passed this summer. 

Right now, Democrats hold a majority in Congress by a very narrow margin, and close races across the country this election cycle mean it’s possible that either party could win control of the House and the Senate. If Democrats come out with more seats, executive action should be able to proceed and new Congressional legislation supporting conservation and public lands projects could be possible. But if Republicans win a majority in one or both houses of Congress, it might be a very different picture. 

“When [Republicans] have had the majority in the past, we’ve seen lots of bills to expand drilling, leasing, and development on public land,” says Donahey. Measures enacted through executive orders like establishing national monuments would still be possible, she adds, but a Republican-controlled Congress could bog momentum down with oversight investigations and other administrative holdups. “The Biden administration will likely have less capacity to move forward with their proactive programs if we see a suite of oversight investigations,” a tactic that was used by the Republican majority in the legislature during the Obama administration, Donahey explains.

In addition to holding up the executive branch’s conservation agenda, Donahey notes that a Republican-controlled Congress could try to restrict funding for public lands management, something they’ve done in the past. Opening up more oil and gas leases, similar to the ones in the IRA, would likely also be a priority. 

It’s not all-or-nothing, however. Regardless of the outcome of this election, the president will still be a Democrat and be able to carry out at least some of his agenda. The Department of the Interior has also engaged and empowered Indigenous people in land management decisions, something that has not been a priority under previous administrations. 

[Related: Stronger pollution protections mean focusing on specific communities]

As ever, important issues like carbon emissions targets, air, water, and land pollution, and access to natural spaces are also on the ballot at the state, county, and municipal level. The shape and scope varies from place to place, but voters will have the chance to make meaningful choices for their region. With local ballots, conservation issues mostly take the form of bonds or levies, which establish a tax to fund public parks and other lands. People in Salt Lake City, for example, are voting on a Parks, Trails, and Open Spaces bond, which would raise $85 million for recreational areas and greenways. 

It can be difficult to see the on-the-ground impacts of voting each year. But the outcomes of the 2022 midterms will ripple through massive government systems that manage endangered species, essential resources, and livable landscapes for humans and nature alike. Whether it’s funding for your local parks or huge swaths of remote forests, environmental progress is most definitely on the ballot this election. 

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It’s not just New York and California passing major measures to stifle and eventually stop new gas-powered car sales recently—just today the European Union announced their own version on Thursday. This step is just the first part of the bloc’s current climate legislation dubbed the  “Fit for 55” package, which is meant to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 55 percent over the next decade. 

The first step in the new deal is to reduce emissions of new cars by 55 percent of 2021 levels by 2030, with vans requiring a 50 percent cut in that time. This is higher than the existing target set by the EU in 2018 of 37.5 percent reductions by 2030

The EU additionally aims to require car companies to cut emissions from their cars by 100 percent by 2035, effectively banning gas and diesel engines. This would make it impossible to sell new fossil fuel powered cars across all 27 EU countries. 

[Related: Car owners: here’s when experts say you should switch to an EV.]

The proposal faced resistance when it was first presented back in July 2021. Reuters reported at the time that the European car industry association ACEA argued that banning one type of technology was “not a rational way forward.” 

Some industry voices have expressed support for Thursday’s decision. “This extremely far-reaching decision is without precedent,” Oliver Zipse, the CEO of BMW, tells CNBC. “It means that the European Union will now be the first and only world region to go all-electric … Make no mistake, the European automobile industry is up to the challenge of providing these zero-emission cars and vans.”

However, not all car executives are on board. “I think there is the possibility—and the need—for a more pragmatic approach to manage the transition,” Carlos Tavares, the CEO of Stellantis, told CNBC earlier in October.

[Related: Thousands of EV chargers will soon line America’s highways.]

On the other end of the spectrum, some activists argue that this phase out isn’t quick enough, and setting targets for 2028 would make more sense. 

“The EU is taking the scenic route, and that route ends in disaster,” Greenpeace EU campaigner Lorelei Limousin told the AP. She also described the deal as “a perfect example of where politicians can bask in a feel-good headline that masks the reality of their repeated failures to act on climate.”

Some details are yet to be decided, for example, allowing vehicles that run on carbon-neutral fuels to be sold in Europe after 2035. In 2026, the Commission must also thoroughly assess any progress made on the goal.

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It’s not in your head. Traffic congestion really is getting worse. According to a 2020 report from the US Department of Transportation, the average person living in 1982 in one of the 75 largest cities in U.S. faced seven hours of travel delay per year. By 2001, that figure jumped up to 26 hours of delay per year.

Traffic congestion is more than just an annoying time suck. It can have negative impacts on health due to the air pollution emitted from cars idling, with one study estimating that the emissions from passenger vehicles spike by as much as 200 percent during rush hours which raises the concentration of air pollutants in areas surrounding highways. It affects a lot of people, with more than 11 million Americans estimated to live within 150 meters of highways.

[Related: Why congestion pricing reduces traffic better than new highway lanes.]

“Traffic delay has steadily increased across the United States since the 1980’s, yet we know very little about the unique influence that traffic delay may have on population health,” Mary Willis an assistant professor in epidemiology at Boston University told PopSci.

Willis is the lead author on a study published today in Science Advances that examines the role that traffic congestion could play in a specific health scenario: birthweight. “While there are many health outcomes that we could have examined, low birthweight is a particularly important one as it can lead to immediate consequences, like trouble breathing, and long-term issues across the life course, like cardiovascular disease, cognitive impacts, and premature mortality,” said Willis. For the first time, the team was able to draw a link between traffic congestion and pregnancy outcomes in nearby neighborhoods in the U.S.

Willis and her colleagues examined the relationship between traffic congestion and the outcomes of 579,122 births in addresses within 500 meters of road segments in Texas, from 2015 to 2016. In this data, they found a strong correlation between traffic congestion and lower birth weights, with birth weights on average 9 grams lower in the highest quintile of exposure to traffic delay. The study notes that more research is needed to determine whether other socioeconomic influences (nutrition, income, access to prenatal care, etc.) not included in this research have any affect on this association between air pollution and adverse birth outcome. These results show a correlation between air pollution and low birthweight, but not that the pollution is the direct cause, since other forces could also be at play.

“A 9-gram decrease alone isn’t a clinically significant result, but this result indicates that some sort of biological impacts may be happening, which will push some babies into a clinically relevant adverse impact,” Willis said. “When you multiply that by 27 percent of all births being in high congestion areas, that small decrease in birthweight does translate into a substantial potential impact at the population level, affecting up to 1.3 million babies per year.”

According to Willis, one of the surprising results of this study is a whole new way to measure exposure that was separate from tailpipe emissions from a vehicle. Instead, this metric focused on the process of delay on the road. “Traffic engineers and urban planners can parse this data to figure out where vehicle speed is slower than expected, which indicates traffic congestion and delay. In our analysis, we used the aggregated connected vehicle and device data to examine ‘traffic delay,’ the total person-hours of delay on the roadways near maternal residences,” Willis explained.

[Related: Pollution kills 1 in 6 people worldwide.]

Tailpipe emissions are largely regulated by the federal government. However, solving traffic congestion relies on much more local policy changes. While this study doesn’t look at how to do that, some studies show that small steps such as putting up sound barriers or vegetation barriers and updating zoning laws to keep schools or daycares from being built near highways can help.

One solution that won’t help is building bigger highways. In an interview with PopSci in August, Nicholas Klein, an assistant professor of city and regional planning at Cornell University said, “For many decades in the US, people foolishly tried to solve this problem adding more lanes,” he explains. “It does not work because of induced demand. Any time you add capacity, it causes people to change their behavior.” Klein says that people will change their behavior by deciding to drive rather than taking public transportation if they see more lanes available.

Exposure to traffic is also not distributed equally. “We’re in the process of diving deeper into the socioeconomic and racial disparities in exposures to traffic congestion,” said Willis. “In particular, we’re interested in considering how patterns of disparities may have changed over time as other processes like urbanization and gentrification happened in metropolitan areas.”

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The International Energy Agency’s (IEA) World Energy Outlook 2022 claims that the world is at a “historic turning point” in regards to transitioning away from fossil fuels. The report says that while the war in Ukraine led to a global energy crisis, the shortage is spurring long-lasting changes that will speed up the transition to more sustainable and secure energy.

Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February, an energy crisis spread around the world as natural gas and gasoline prices surged. Since then, governments around the world have been working to find additional sources of energy to make up for the deficits due to the war. Early on, some worried that this fear could hamper efforts to transition to renewable energy, and the United States and the United Kingdom both pledged to encourage more fossil fuel extraction to ease prices.

However, according to a statement from IEA executive director Faith Birol, the current energy crisis, “is in fact going to accelerate the clean energy transition.” Birol also added that, “We are approaching to the end of the golden age of gas,” in a press conference following the report’s publication.

[Related: What a key natural-gas pipeline has to do with the Russia-Ukraine crisis.]

The report also finds that commitments to clean energy contributed to the run-up in energy prices and more renewable energy was were correlated with lower electricity prices. Additionally, more more energy efficient homes and electrified heat have been an important financial buffer for some customers, but it is not enough. “The heaviest burden is falling on poorer households where a larger share of income is spent on energy,” the report says.

The planned investments in green energy in response to the crisis means that government policies would lead to demand for polluting fossil fuels peaking in 2025, according to the report. The IEA referenced the European Union’s emissions reduction package, the US Inflation Reduction Act, Japan’s Green Transformation (GX) Program, and the ambitious clean energy targets in India and China, and others as notable responses to the energy crisis.

“Energy markets and policies have changed as a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, not just for the time being, but for decades to come,” said Birol, in a statement. “Even with today’s policy settings, the energy world is shifting dramatically before our eyes. Government responses around the world promise to make this a historic and definitive turning point towards a cleaner, more affordable and more secure energy system.”

[Related: Europe’s energy crisis could shut down the Large Hadron Collider.]

This increased clean energy investment will cost Russia $1 trillion in lost fossil fuel revenues by 2030, according to the report. Previously among the world’s largest exporters of fossil fuels, Russia would have a, “much diminished role in international energy affairs” as the world’s reliance on burning methane gas for power falls, Birol added.

The report also makes the case that cleaner technologies are now more economically feasible and are part of creating stronger energy security in the future. However, more financial investment in clean energy is still needed to meet these goals. In order to reach net zero emissions by 2050, more than $4 trillion in investment is needed. It also highlights the need to attract more investors to the clean energy sector.

“Amid the major changes taking place, a new energy security paradigm is needed to ensure reliability and affordability while reducing emissions,” Birol said. “And as the world moves on from today’s energy crisis, it needs to avoid new vulnerabilities arising from high and volatile critical mineral prices or highly concentrated clean energy supply chains.”

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When the Clean Air Act was passed 52 years ago, it was revolutionary for making a framework for hazardous air pollutants. And since then, it has made a huge impact on pollution in the United States. 

In 2020, the Clean Air Act prevented more than 230,000 deaths, around 85 percent of which are linked to reductions in ambient particulate matter that have caused premature mortality rates to decline. According to the EPA, benefits from the act exceed costs by an average factor of 30 to one. 

However, while air contaminants have fallen across the entire country, disparities in the populations most exposed to pollution still very much exist. And, as successful as the Clean Air Act has been, it does not contain elements for a targeted approach needed to remove these disparities, according to a new study published October 24 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 

In January 2022, research in Nature found that the average fine particulate matter (PM 2.5) concentration for the Black population was 13.7 percent higher than that of the white population and 36.3 percent higher than that of the Native American population. The study also found higher concentrations of pollutants among lower income populations than high income populations. 

[Related: Tiny air pollutants may come from different sources, but they all show a similar biased trend.]

Research from 2021 found that most emission source types (which include industrial, coal, gas vehicle, agricultural, and more), representing around 75 percent of exposure to PM 2.5 in the US, disproportionally affect minority populations. This holds true across states, rural and urban divides, and income levels. 

“Our findings regarding relative disparities indicate the importance of strong, targeted air-pollution-reduction strategies, not only to reduce overall air-pollution levels but also to move closer toward the EPA’s aim to provide all people with the same degree of protection from environmental hazards,” Abdulrahman Jbaily, a former postdoctoral researcher at Harvard Chan School and first author of the Nature study, said in a statement.

The Clean Air Act is made up of multiple different policy tools and components that have lowered emissions country-wide since its implementation. Yet they all fall short of knocking out the disproportionate impact of pollution on minority communities. In the newest work, researchers from multiple universities and organizations created intervention models of three different policies—two from the Clean Air Act and one that would target pollutants affecting minority populations—and found that the third policy option would make a huge dent in bringing down disparities. 

The researchers first zeroed in on one CCA policy that addresses pollution concentration standards, similar to the National Ambient Air Quality Standards. This kind of standard basically sets a level of pollutants like articulate matter, ozone, nitrogen oxides, sulfur oxides, carbon monoxide, and lead that can be present without “harming human health.” This approach, apparently, doesn’t do very much at all, according to the research. “It’s not very efficient or effective,” says study author Julian Marshall, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Washington. 

The team also modeled another Clean Air Act policy, which is designed to bring down emissions by industry or economic sector on a wide scale. This, the study authors found, also leaves disparities between affected populations. 

[Related: Low-carbon energy minimizes racial disparities in neighborhoods with air pollution.]

The third policy investigated wasn’t in the federal law. Instead, it targets specific locations—something that activists and experts have been pushing for across the world for many years. What they found was that using the third policy idea could reduce these disparities rapidly. “Not overnight,” adds Marshall, “but not so far from it.” 

So, why isn’t this kind of policy everywhere? Well, Marshall says, back in the early days of the Clean Air Act, people weren’t focusing on racial disparities in air pollution—air pollution was considered a problem plaguing the entire country, and the policies in place were geared that way. 

But nowadays, we are even more clued in to how environmental and health issues affect different groups in gigantic ways, whether it be the Flint water crisis, recovery after natural disasters, or even COVID-19 responses. It’s becoming clearer and clearer that what works for one group might not work for another, and expanding the lens to include and center disadvantaged populations is a must for environmental policy that actually works.

Luckily, the policy that Marshall and colleagues studied has taken off in a few places, with Marshall citing examples of policies in California, Washington state, and New Jersey. But even making more people aware of how strong the disparities are between different places, even in the same city, when it comes to pollution is a necessary step towards larger change. 

“Now, that’s not the same as making real change,” he says. “But it’s a necessary first step.”

Correction: a previous version of this post stated that the Clean Air Act in 1970 set federal standards on 187 hazardous air pollutants. This happened in a later version of the act.

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Rooftop gardens are a great way to make urban communities more sustainable, economical, and enjoyable for residents. That said, there’s a reason they aren’t as ubiquitous as many would expect—because of issues such as increased solar radiation and higher wind speeds, the conditions generally aren’t as favorable for plants as they are at ground level. Thanks to recent breakthrough developments, however, rooftop yields could dramatically increase thanks to some ingenious rerouting of buildings’ typical carbon dioxide emissions.

According to a paper published last week in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, researchers constructed a new ventilation system reliant on a Boston University building’s normal carbon exhaust system to act as fertilizer for both spinach and corn crops. Meanwhile, control plants grown nearby employed their own fan system to ensure airflow sans building emissions. The resulting yields were noticeable, to say the least.

[Related: The complete guide to building a rooftop garden.]

“Spinach grown next to the exhaust vents had four times the biomass of spinach grown next to a control fan,” explains the paper’s announcement, adding that, “even when high winds decreased the size advantage, the plants were still twice as large as the controls.” Interestingly, even though the corn was predicted to benefit less from the extra CO2 than spinach (whose photosynthesis pathways are more influenced by CO2 levels), its yield was still two-to-three times larger than the control crops.

CO2 exhaust occurs both naturally and artificially in buildings, including sources like humans’ everyday exhalations and HVAC systems. To maintain healthy air quality—less than 1000 parts per million (ppm)—the toxic gas is usually released into the outside air via those same HVAC systems and ventilation. The research team’s reroute funnels some of what would otherwise become wasted and generally harmful emissions towards the rooftop gardens, where it can then be absorbed by plant life.

“We are hoping this could lead to the further development of this system and eventual implementation in rooftop gardens and farms,” said research lead Sarabeth Buckley in the announcement. “If that happens, then hopefully more rooftop farms will be installed. They could provide a multitude of environmental and social benefits such as energy savings for the building, carbon drawdown, climate mitigation, urban heat reduction, local food production, community building opportunities, and aesthetic and mental health benefits.”

A few hurdles remain before city residents can expect to see similar systems on their own roofs, including optimizing air application design and addressing adverse wind speeds. Still, the breakthrough system’s benefits are already stark enough that they provide a promising lead for creative solutions to improving urban sustainability programs. And in any case, we all could probably benefit from a bit more spinach in our diets, anyway.

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Global carbon emissions rose in 2021, bouncing back up an estimated six percent following months of slowed emission during the COVID-19 shutdowns. It was a sobering reminder of just how much work remained ahead of us to if we are to ensure a sustainable future for ourselves, but according to a new report from the International Energy Agency released earlier this week, this year’s numbers are thankfully much lower. The latest data analyzed by IEA experts indicates global CO2 emissions are on course to increase by nearly 300 million tons in 2022 compared to last year’s levels, putting the total amount around 33.8 billion tons. Any increase isn’t exactly great, but it’s a far cry from the almost 2 billion ton leap made between 2021 and the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The key to this heartening alteration is, perhaps unsurprisingly, the rapid rise in renewable energy sources. The IEA notes that, were it not for “major deployments” of renewable energy tech alongside increased demand for electric vehicles (EVs), we would have likely seen almost triple that number. This even figures the ongoing geopolitical crisis in Ukraine, which has had dramatic effects on the global supply of natural gas and oil. “Even though the energy crisis sparked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has propped up global coal demand in 2022 by making natural gas far more expensive, the relatively small increase in coal emissions has been considerably outweighed by the expansion of renewables,” notes the IEA in its summary.

[Related: This space-adapted solar panel can fold like origami.]

The report notes that solar and wind systems led the rise in renewable energy generation in 2022, producing over 700 terawatt-hours(TWh)—the largest annual rise ever measured—accounting for two-thirds of all renewable power. Additionally, “despite the challenging situation that hydropower has faced in several regions due to droughts this year, global hydropower output is up year-on-year, contributing over one-fifth of the expected growth in renewable power.”

Of course, it rarely is all good news when it comes to our fight against climate change. A minuscule rise in emissions is certainly wonderful to hear, but humanity needs to massively reduce our total amount if we’re to stave off the worst effects of eco-catastrophe. A recent study showed that, were we to continue on pace at our current trajectory, nearly 90 percent of all marine life could be wiped out by the end of the century. Still, seeing the measurable effects of increased renewable energies is certainly encouraging news, to say the least. With any luck, we’ll see similarly low numbers—if not even lower—this time next year.

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Authorities in Denmark, Sweden, and Germany are investigating three separate leaks in two gas pipelines that run under the Baltic Sea from Russia to Germany. Both Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines experienced a sudden drop in pressure Monday morning around 2 a.m. local time, raising concerns among European leaders on Tuesday about possible sabotage. According to The New York Times, neither of the pipelines had been active when the drop was first registered Monday morning, but both were filled with natural gas when they experienced the sharp drop in pressure.

In a statement, the Danish Energy Agency said it had found two leaks on the Nord Stream 1 pipeline located northeast of the Danish island Bornholm. The agency spotted a third in the Nord Stream 2 pipeline located in Swedish waters southeast of Bornholm. According to the Associated Press, the second blast was stronger than the first and was the equivalent of a magnitude-2.3 earthquake and seismic stations in neaby Norway and Finland also registered the explosions.

A five-mile exclusion zone for shipping was set up around the island earlier today, and flights below 3,280 feet (1,000 meters) are banned in the area.

“Breakage of gas pipelines is extremely rare”, Danish authorities said in a statement. “Therefore we see reason to raise the preparedness level as a result of the incidents we have seen over the past 24 hours.”

The Danish Defense command released footage on Twitter that shows a swirling mass of methane bubbling up onto the surface of the Baltic Sea.

[Related: The EU is struggling to phase out Russian oil and gas.]

Nord 1 and 2 have been a focal point of the broadened confrontation between Russia and Europe following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February. The European Union imposed economic sanctions on Russia following the invasion, and the oil and gas producing country began withholding natural gas. Europe has relied on Russian natural gas for decades, and damage to these pipeline threaten the continent’s energy supply as winter looms.

Already, statues and historic buildings are going dark at night. In parts of eastern Europe, people are stocking up on firewood. Residents in Germany are waiting six months to buy, energy-saving heat pumps, according to the AP. Relief programs and plans to shake up electricity and natural gas markets have begun across the continent.

Earlier this month, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz praised the early preparations, saying that the actions mean Europe’s biggest economy is, “now in a position in which we can go bravely and courageously into this winter, in which our country will withstand this.” It is uncertain yet if these efforts are enough to avoid government-imposed rationing and rolling blackouts in the months to come.

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Europe is now suffering an energy crisis. The fallout from the invasion of Ukraine, resulting in the Russian government choking gas supplies, has pushed the continent’s heating and electricity prices up to a much higher order of magnitude.

In the heart of Europe, along the French-Swiss border, the particle physics laboratory at CERN is facing the same plight. This month, it’s been reported that CERN officials are drawing up plans to limit or even shut down the recently rebooted Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

If the LHC, the largest and most expensive collider in the world, does shut down for a short stint, it wouldn’t be out of the ordinary for particle accelerator research. But if it has to go into hibernation for a longer period, complications might arise.

[Related: The green revolution is coming for power-hungry particle accelerators]

Some say that CERN uses as much electricity as a small city, and there’s some truth in that. By the group’s own admission, in a year, its facility consumes about one-third the electricity as nearby Geneva, Switzerland. The exact numbers do vary from month to month and year to year, but the lab’s particle accelerators can account for around 90 percent of CERN’s electric bill.

For an observer on the ground, it’s very easy to wonder why so much energy is going into arcane physics experiments involving subatomic particles, plasma, and dark matter. “Given the current context and as part of its social responsibility, CERN is drawing up a plan to reduce its energy consumption this winter,” Maïlys Nicolet, a spokesperson for the group, wrote in a press statement.

That said, CERN doesn’t have the same utility concerns as the everyday European as its energy strategy is already somewhat sustainable. The facility draws its power from the French grid, which sources more than two-thirds of its juice from nuclear fission—the highest of any country in the world. Not only does that drastically reduce the LHC’s carbon footprint, it also makes it far less reliant on imported fossil fuels.

But the French grid has another quirk: Unlike much of Europe, which relies on gas to heat its homes, homes in France often use electric heaters. As a result, local power bills can double during the cold months. Right now, 32 of the country’s 56 nuclear reactors are down for maintenance or repairs. The French government plans to bolster its grid against the energy crisis by switching most of them back on by winter. 

[Related: Can Europe swap Russian energy with nuclear power?]

But if that doesn’t happen, CERN might be facing a power supply shortage. Even if the research giant stretched its budget to pay for power, there just might not be enough of it, depending on how France’s reactors fare. “For this autumn, it is not a price issue, it’s an availability issue,” Serge Claudet, chair of CERN’s energy management panel, told Science.

Hibernation isn’t exactly out of the ordinary for LHC, though. In the past, CERN has shut down the particle accelerator for maintenance during the winter. This year is no exception: The collider’s stewards plan to mothball it from November until March. If Europe’s energy crisis continues into 2023, the LHC pause could last well into the warmer months, if not longer.

CERN managers are exploring their options, according to the facility’s spokesperson. The French government might order the LHC not to run at times of peak electric demand, such as mornings or evenings. Alternatively, to keep its flagship running, CERN might try to shut off some of the smaller accelerators that share the site.

But not all particle physicists are on board with prioritizing energy for a single machine “I don’t think you could justify running it but switching off everything else,” says Kristin Lohwasser, a particle physicist at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom and a collaborator on ATLAS, one of the LHC’s experiments.

On the other hand, the LHC has more to lose by going dark for an indefinite amount of time. If it has to power down for a year or more, the collider’s equipment, such as the detectors used to watch collisions at very small scales, might start to degrade. “This is why no one would blankly advertise to switch off and just wait five years,” says Lohwasser. It also takes a fair amount of energy to keep the LHC in a dormant state.

Even if CERN’s accelerators aren’t running, the particle physicists around the world sifting through the data will still have plenty to work on. Experiments in the field produce tons of results: positions, velocities, and countless mysterious bits of matter from thousands of collisions. Experts can still find subatomic artifacts hidden in the measurements as much as a decade after they’re logged. The flow of physics studies almost certainly won’t cease on account of an energy crisis.

For now, the decision to power LHC’s third run of experiments still remains up in the air. This week CERN officials will present a plan to the agency’s governing authority on how to proceed. That solution will, in turn, be presented to the French and Swiss governments for consultation. Only after will the final decision be made public.

“So far, I do not necessarily see a big concern from [physicists] about these plans,” says Lohwasser. If CERN must take a back seat to larger concerns, then many in the scientific community will accept that.

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On the heels of the the hottest summer ever recorded in Europe, a record breaking heatwave and river-drying drought in China, a continuing famine in east Africa, a “monsoon on steroids” that left a third of Pakistan underwater, and the worst megadrought in the United States in 1,200 years, health organizations around the world are sounding the alarm on climate change. It’s killing us, they say.

On Wednesday, a letter endorsed by over 1,000 health professionals and 175 health organizations around the world are calling on governments to urgently develop and implement a legally-binding Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty to end the global dependence on fossil fuels in an effort to protect global public health.

“The modern addiction to fossil fuels is not just an act of environmental vandalism. From the health perspective, it is an act of self-sabotage”, said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organization, in a press release.

[Related: Severe droughts are bringing archaeological wonders and historic horrors to the surface.]

The letter has three major tenants. First, the authors call for an immediate end to any new fossil fuel exploration, production, and infrastructure, in line with the best available science. Next is the phasing out of existing fossil fuel production in a “fair and equitable manner,” in line with the 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) goal laid out in the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement. Finally, the authors demand fast-tracking real solutions to ensure a just transition and sustainable future for all communities, that respects the rights of all indigenous and local communities.

“We know that emissions have to be slashed to limit warming to safe levels, we know fossil fuels are the greatest driver of emissions, and we know that phasing out fossil fuels is the only way to reap many of the health co-benefits of climate mitigation—so why then are governments permitting new drilling, new mining and new pipelines?” said Liz Hanna, Chair for Environmental Health of the World Federation of Public Health Associations, in a press release. “The science on this is clear: new fossil fuel development is completely incompatible with a healthy climate and a healthy future”.

A treaty of this kind is not unprecedented. The World Health Organization (WHO) Framework Convention on Tobacco Control in 2003 is the “first international treaty negotiated under the auspices of WHO.” Developed in response to the tobacco epidemic worldwide, it is an evidence-based treaty that reaffirms the right of all people to the highest standard of health, and has become one of the most rapidly and widely embraced treaties in United Nations history. The most famous example of a UN treaty is the 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) which has limited the spread of atomic weapons, but has not completely stopped it.

[Related: Doctors unite to say climate change is making us sick.]

The World Health Organization, the International Pediatric Association, the World Medical Association, the Alliance of Nurses for a Healthy Environment, and the World Federation of Public Health Associations are also among the signers of this letter. Additionally, it is supported by the Dalai Lama and 100 other Nobel laureates, the Vatican, several cities, and Hawaii was the first state and Pacific Island to join.

In a commentary on this clarion call to action in The Lancet, the authors write, “From nuclear disarmament to tobacco control to mercury phase-out, the health sector has a history of advocating for healthy public policy on behalf of its patients. We are privileged to bear responsibility for health at a moment when action taken to leave fossil fuels in the ground can play a definitive role in improving health not only now, but for all future generations. It is time for the planetary health community to apply time, money, and talent to the support of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty.”

According to a study published in The Lancet in May, air pollution linked to fossil fuel uses causes over 6.5 million deaths globally each year, with more 90 percent of these deaths occurring in rapidly developing countries in Africa and Asia. Additionally, almost 99 percent of the world’s population lives in places where the air exceeds quality limits set by the global body, according to the WHO. A study published in Environmental Research found fossil fuels claimed 8 million lives prematurely in 2018.

“For decades we’ve depended on the capacity of fossil fuels to provide energy,” Jeni Miller, Executive Director of the Global Climate and Health Alliance, said in a press release, “but we now have alternatives that are cleaner and more sustainable—and compatible with the healthier future we want.”

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The western US has faced historic drought month after month, and the water levels at Lake Powell and Lake Mead are dangerously low. Those reservoirs provide much-needed water to millions of Americans and feed the agricultural industry in the region. The drought also reduces the ability to render hydroelectric power from these crucial water sources. 

But, the US is far from the only place experiencing extreme dryness. Countries like China are also struggling, as well as parts of Europe and Africa. China has turned to cloud seeding as a potential solution to its drought problems. It’s also being more regularly utilized in the United Arab Emirates. 

Cloud seeding is more or less a technological way to make it rain, even when the weather is anything but rainy. Planes fly over a region, releasing a compound like silver iodide into clouds to cause condensation. The silver iodide causes condensation by giving water vapors a particle to cling to. 

[Related: Mini desalination plants could refresh the parched West.]

As water vapor clings to the silver iodide particle, it gets heavier and eventually drops to the earth as rain. Research has shown cloud seeding may increase precipitation by 5 to 15 percent, which may not seem like much, but anything helps during a drought. In China, results are mixed, but one study did show it did help produce enough precipitation to decrease air pollution near Beijing in 2021.

Cloud seeding requires the use of planes, which means the process relies on fossil fuels. That’s not ideal when you’re fighting the growing effects of climate change. However, drones and rockets also work to drop those rain-bringing particles. 

Cloud seeding already happens across states like Arizona and California, but interest in the technology appears to be increasing. But not everyone is on board. Critics say it’s expensive, and it’s unclear if it’s that effective. 

Michael Mann, a distinguished earth and environmental science professor at the University of Pennsylvania, tells Popular Science that he doesn’t believe cloud seeding will be that helpful. “It’s another example of an attempted techno-fix… that at best can only help at the margins,” Mann says.

Mann says there’s increasing “desperation” for a quick fix to the effects of climate change, but climate change doesn’t have any quick fixes. He compares cloud seeding to other geoengineering methods, like reflecting sunlight before it hits the earth using sulfate aerosols or ocean fertilization with phytoplankton, proposed to solve climate change. 

The primary effort that needs to happen, he says, is reducing carbon emissions so that things don’t get worse. Mann also says there’s also potential for international conflict when countries manipulate the environment to deal with the effects of climate change. 

“What makes matters worse are the governance and political impacts. What if China starts doing cloud seeding, and a drought occurs in Korea?” Mann says. “Will Korea blame China and seek reparations? Or sanctions? It’s a hornet’s nest.”

[Related: Lake Powell’s drought is part of a growing threat to hydropower everywhere.]

Luckily, this high-tech but seemingly high-stakes method isn’t the only way to get much-needed water to the driest parts of the planet. For example, Mann estimates that there will likely be an increase in desalination technologies in the West, which could help deal with water shortages. Desalination technologies can filter saltwater from the ground and the ocean to become usable as drinking water and for watering crops. However, he notes the technology is typically expensive to utilize.

Mann adds that these droughts and heat waves aren’t in line to get any better, so these problems aren’t going away anytime soon. Research indicates drought could affect three-quarters of the planet by 2050. 

“There will certainly be year-to-year variability due to things like El Niño,” he adds, “but the trend line will only get worse—more widespread and intense heat and drought, in the absence of concerted climate action.”

Cloud seeding may have a small impact on the drought, but governments will need to do everything they can to address climate change and deal with these long-term problems. That could mean continuing to implement expensive desalination projects, increasing water use efficiency, and especially moving towards carbon emissions goals rapidly. 

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The California Air Resources Board is expected to vote today on strict a strict set of rules that will ban the sale of new gasoline powered cars by 2035. In an interview with CNN, California Air Resources Board member Daniel Sperling said he was “99.9 percent” positive that the measure will pass. The new rule will require that in 13 years, 100 percent of new car sales sold in the state will be “zero-emissions” vehicles, or vehicles that do not produce exhaust or pollutants (primarily greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide) from their onboard source of power. If it passes, California will be the first state in the United States to pass such a rule.

Quotas will likely be used to phase in the ban. Starting with 2026 models, 35 percent of new cars, SUVs, and small pick-up trucks sold in the state would be required to be zero-emission vehicles. This quota would annually increase and is expected to reach 51 percent of all new car sales in 2028 and 68 percent in 2030. The quotas also would allow 20 percent of zero-emission cars sold to be plug-in hybrids, which utilize electricity and gasoline. The state also plans to boost its current consumer incentives and expand charging stations.

Twelve percent of cars sold in California in 2021 were plug-in electric vehicles. According to the Office of Governor Gavin Newsom, the transportation sector is responsible for more than half of the state’s carbon pollution, 80 percent of smog-forming pollution, and 95 percent of toxic diesel emissions. Additionally, communities in the Los Angeles Basin and Central Valley are home to some of the dirtiest and most toxic air in the United States.

[Related: FedEx is charging up its electric vehicle fleet.]

“California has been a driver of innovation, including in the automobile pollution space, since the 1960s, and this new directive will continue that tradition,” says Stanford University environmental law professor Deborah Sivas in an email to Popular Science. “It is likely that a dozen or more other states will follow suit, as they are currently permitted to do under the Clean Air Act, potentially affecting more than one third of the new car market.”

The move builds on the executive order issued by Governor Gavin Newsom in 2020 that announced the phase out of gasoline powered cars to help fight climate changes. “This is the most impactful step our state can take to fight climate change,” said Governor Newsom, in a 2020 press release. “For too many decades, we have allowed cars to pollute the air that our children and families breathe. Californians shouldn’t have to worry if our cars are giving our kids asthma. Our cars shouldn’t make wildfires worse—and create more days filled with smoky air. Cars shouldn’t melt glaciers or raise sea levels threatening our cherished beaches and coastlines.”

[Related: GM wants its cars to be fully electric by 2035. Here’s what that could mean for auto emissions.]

In February, the Biden administration reinstated California’s ability to set limits on car emissions to fight climate change, after they were rolled back by the Trump administration three years ago. Similarly, lawmakers in the European Union voted in June to support a ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars beginning in 2035. The vote upholds a key part of the EU’s plans to cut net planet-warming emissions 55 percent from 1990 levels by 2030. This  target that requires faster reductions from  the industry, energy, and transportation sectors. The law is not yet final, and Germany has already rejected the proposed ban. According to reporting from Reuters, Germany’s Finance Minister Christian Linder said that a ban was the wrong step, as there would continue to be “niches” for combustion engines.

Meanwhile, Hainan island in the South China Sea has announced that it will become the first region in China to ban sales of gasoline– and diesel-powered cars, in an effort to curb carbon emissions. According to the province’s Carbon Peak Implementation Plan, sales of fossil fueled-powered cars and electric vehicles will be promoted with tax breaks and more charging stations by 2030.

In an email with The New York Times, president of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation John Bozzella, said that these new electric vehicle sale mandates would be “extremely challenging” to meet. He called on the state and federal government to do more to help car manufacturers meet the regulations. Some major automakers like Toyota have also recognized the state’s ability to set vehicle emissions standards.

“Even if California’s ambitious goal is not strictly met,” Sivas adds, “it has the near-term benefit of increasing regulatory certainty for the automobile and aligned industries that will drive the necessary transition to non-fossil fuel transportation. And that increasing certainty creates powerful incentives for innovation.”

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On September 1, the only coal power plant in the state of Hawaii will be closing its doors for good. The AES Hawaii power plant located on the western side of the island of Oahu has been running on fossil fuels since 1992 and generates energy for up to 20 percent of the island. The plant is also one of the island’s largest emitters of the greenhouse gases linked to climate change. 

“This is a critical turning point in the long-term transition of Hawaii’s energy landscape. Unfortunately, the timing has converged with global events that are currently increasing the cost of electricity,” said Shelee Kimura, president and CEO of Hawaiian Electric in press release. “We know that paying more for an essential service like electricity will impact many households and businesses particularly at a time when other costs are rising. We wanted to let customers know the situation in advance so they can plan and we can help them with options. We’re also seeing some encouraging signs that oil prices are declining and we’re hopeful this will help lower rates in the coming months,” Kimura added.

To close the energy gap, Hawaiian Electric plans to have 14 renewable energy power plants utilizing everything from geothermal to solar energy up and running by 2024, with nine in Oahu alone. The first of the solar energy projects, Mililani I Solar, is online and generating 39 megawatts of electricity as of August 11.

[Related: Why China just can’t seem to quit coal.]

The Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs (DCA) and Hawaiian Electric forecast that bills for typical Oahu homes will rise by $15 or 7 percent by discontinuing the use of coal. They expect the price increase will be on most customer’s October bills. The original cost increase was projected to be only about $2 more per months, but the Russian invasion of Ukraine changed the calculations by surging the price of oil to near record highs. The state received its final shipment of coal from Indonesia on July 27.

In 2015, Governor David Ige signed HB623, a bill setting a goal for state utilities to generate 100 percent of their electricity sales from renewable energy resources by 2045.  This made Hawaii the first state to fully commit to 100 percent clean energy. In a statement after the bill passed, Governor Ige said “as the most oil dependent state in the nation, Hawaii spends roughly $5 billion a year on foreign oil to meet its energy needs. Making the transition to renewable, indigenous resources for power generation will allow us to keep more of that money at home, thereby improving our economy, environment and energy security.”

[Related: Coal and transportation fueled a surge in US carbon emissions last year.]

The legislature followed up by signing Senate Bill 2629 into law in 2020, which banned utility companies from building new coal-fired power plants or lengthening already existing agreements with those that use coal after this year.

Currently, 20 states plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico have made similar commitment to clean energy. Most of the United States relies on fossil fuels as the dominant source of energy, despite the negative impacts on the environment and health. While coal power is primarily the least expensive form of energy, power plants are the highest emitters of mercury, acid gases, and toxic metals, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

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From The Fishermen and the Dragon by Kirk Wallace Johnson, published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2022 by MJ + KJ, Inc.

In 1993, the new Formosa plant finally went online in Point Comfort, Texas. Diane Wilson, fired from the fish house, was shrimping as much as she could, but her nets kept coming up light.

One day, she drifted in the SeaBee over the newly constructed 2,100-foot‐long pipe that ran from the plant into the bay, thinking about the nine million gallons of contaminated wastewater sloshing into the estuary each day through a diffuser at the end of the pipe, just north of where Alcoa’s mercury was interred in sediment.

That was just the legal discharge, allowed by the plant’s state and federal permits. What spilled accidentally— those she knew about— was even more concerning. A faulty flange leaked twenty‐ seven hundred gallons of ethylene dichloride into the water. Seven hundred gallons of hydrochloric acid were spilled when bolts sprung loose from a valve. The Texas Water Commission filed a suit against the company after an inspection found a host of violations in how Formosa was storing wastewater, which had contaminated the groundwater. When news leaked that the plant also exceeded its permitted limits on discharging copper into the bay, Formosa claimed it was harmless, prompting Wilson to dig up a 1956 study by a pair of scientists in England demonstrating that copper mixed with mercury rendered water lethal for crustaceans.

By then, she had learned of a then‐ obscure concept codified in the Clean Water Act known as “zero discharge”— the goal of capturing and treating all waste before any of it was discharged into the environment. She knew a firm in Texas with effective technology that could help Formosa achieve zero discharge, but it was a long shot. The technology was expensive, she had little leverage against the company, and Blackburn was out of the picture.

She was out of allies to help push zero discharge. Apart from her cousin Wally, who kept dropping by to chat, the white shrimpers and crabbers were too worried about blowing their chance at a job in the offseason to stand with her. Even her brothers and uncles groaned when they saw her, ducking behind a net or pretending not to have seen her.

So she went to the Vietnamese.

She walked into the net shop of a Vietnamese fisherman named Joe Nguyễn, who had been a young man when he arrived in Texas after the fall of Saigon in 1975. He found a job patching shrimp nets up the coast in Palacios for an elderly White owner of a net shop. When the owner died, Joe took over the business. Just up the way, Bằng “Cherry” Nguyễn, the first Vietnamese crabber of Seadrift, was running a shop of his own.

Wilson asked whether he thought the Vietnamese shrimpers would support her.

“Support on what?” Joe asked.

“Keeping the bay clean.”

Joe thought they might go for it; they didn’t like Formosa, and they respected Wilson as a fellow shrimper.

“Do you think they’d demonstrate?” she asked.

“Be a hippie?” Joe asked, a twinkle in his eye.

“Sure,” she said, laughing. “Something like that . . . out on the water.”

Joe showed up at Wilson’s with three other shrimpers, the elders of the community, who agreed to help. The following morning, at 4 a.m., the Vietnamese shrimpers were out on their boats, tuned to the VHF channel through which Catholic prayers were transmitted out into the bay. After the benediction, Wilson’s plea was put forward.

She was shocked by the response. She soon had 200 Vietnamese shrimpers and crabbers and their families marching with signs protesting Formosa’s pollution of the bay. They marched outside Formosa in T-shirts and white rubber fishing boots, South Vietnamese and American flags waving amid posters demanding zero discharge. Formosa corporate officers in suits glowered at them.

The company soon agreed to meet with the Vietnamese at their community center in Palacios to explain why zero discharge was an unreasonable ask.

The night of the meeting, on July 27, 1993, hundreds of Vietnamese filed into the community center. News crews came down from Houston to film interviews while Wilson’s children raced around the auditorium alongside Vietnamese kids, all wired on soda.

Jack Wu, Formosa’s vice president, looked out over the audience and professed surprise. For ten years, he said, Formosa hadn’t had any bad experiences with Vietnamese shrimpers. Suddenly, they were protesting about pollution. Why? Joe Wyatt took to the podium. Back when he was a congressman, he had instructed his staff to “tell me the truth. I’ll do the lying.” In front of the Vietnamese, he exclaimed that zero discharge was a myth: “We know there is this woman in Calhoun County, Diane Wilson, who claims there is a method of treating water with zero‐discharge technology. I am here to tell you there is no such system!”

At this Joe Nguyễn stood up and silenced Wyatt with a raised hand. He gestured to Wilson and asked her to address the audience. As she approached the microphone, she saw Jack Wu jump to his feet, and wondered if he was going to start a fight.

As she spoke, Formosa’s boosters shouted out, “Lies!” and the meeting devolved into chaos. She was thrilled to have new allies in the Vietnamese community, but she knew that Formosa would weather the bad press. The company had allies of its own, after all. That same month, a group of six hundred—many of them fishermen— had gathered in Port Lavaca to voice their support for the corporation. “We were in such bad shape we didn’t know where we were going to get our next meal,” said Howdy Hartzog, who had moved on from his role at the bank to become county judge. Now, he added, the county was even thinking about building a golf course. “I would rather eat the shrimp, oysters and redfish out of Lavaca Bay than have to digest the Houston Chronicle’s pro‐ union articles,” blasted Port Lavaca mayor Tiney Browning, clearly referring to Wilson’s efforts to support Formosa’s workers in her negotiations with the company.

A month later, Wilson and a number of Vietnamese shrimpers drove up to Austin to protest the dumping, calling for the revocation of the plant’s permits. They hauled a coffin filled with shrimp nets to the office of Governor Ann Richards, asking for a meeting. Denied, they abandoned the coffin in the capitol hallway.

Soon, Wilson was summoned for a meeting with Chairman Wang at a house owned by Formosa near the plant. For three hours, they sparred. When Wang spoke to her, he locked eyes with her. When she fought back, he turned away.

“I can tell you this,” she told a reporter after the unproductive meeting, “I have seen the eye of the dragon and it is green.”

Buy The Fishermen and the Dragon by Kirk Wallace Johnson here.

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At first glance, you might think the structure tucked away in a Madrid suburb is a solar power plant. Perched in an industrial park, the facility features an audience of solar reflectors—mirrors that concentrate blinding sunlight to the top of a tower.

But this plant isn’t for generating electricity. It’s for generating jet fuel.

For the past several years, researchers from several different institutions in Switzerland and Germany have been using it to test a method to create propellant—normally a carbon-intensive process involving fossil fuels—using little more than sunlight and greenhouse gases captured from the atmosphere. They published their results in the journal Joule today.

What happens inside their tower is a bit of chemistry known as the Fischer-Tropsch process. Under certain conditions, hydrogen gas and carbon monoxide (yes, the same toxic gas from vehicle exhaust) can react. They rearrange their atoms into water vapor and hydrocarbons. Those carbon compounds include diesel, kerosene, and other fuels that you might otherwise produce by dirtying your hands and refining petroleum.

Though the tower is new, the underlying process isn’t a recent invention; two chemists—named, naturally, Fischer and Tropsch—pioneered it in Germany nearly a century ago. But it’s historically been something of an afterthought. You need some source of that carbon monoxide: typically coal, natural gas, or their byproducts. It’s useful if you have limited access to petroleum, but less helpful if you’re trying to clean up the transport sector.

[Related: All your burning questions about sustainable aviation fuel, answered]

Now, with the intensifying climate crisis kindling interest in cleaner fuels, there’s growing demand for alternate carbon sources. Biological waste is a popular one. This plant takes a different approach: capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. 

That’s where 169 solar reflectors beam sunlight into the picture. Atop the 50-foot-tall structure, their light—on average, 2,500 times brighter than the sun—strikes a porous ceramic box made from cerium, the rare-earth element number 58. That draws water and carbon dioxide from the air and splits their atoms into hydrogen gas and carbon monoxide.

“We have been developing the science and technology for more than a decade,” says Aldo Steinfeld, an engineer at ETH Zürich in Switzerland and one of the paper authors. Steinfeld and his colleagues had first demonstrated the box method in the lab in 2010. By  2017, they’d begun building the plant.

In that plant, the newly created gases sink to the bottom of the tower, where they enter a shipping container that carries out the Fischer-Tropsch reactions. The end result is fossil-fuel-free kerosene, produced by pulling carbon dioxide from the air. The researchers say it can be pumped into fuel tanks, today, without issue.

Before the global pandemic, aviation accounted for less than 3 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. Land vehicles, in contrast, spewed out more than six times as much. But, while we’ve already started to replace the world’s road traffic with electric cars, there just isn’t a viable alternative for aircraft yet.

So the aviation industry—and governments—are trying to focus on alternative sources, such as biofuels. Though their exact timeline is still up in the air, European regulators may require non-fossil-fuel sources to provide as much as 85 percent of the fuel pumped at European Union’s airports by 2050.

In this environment, the Fischer-Tropsch process has entered the stage. Last year, a German nonprofit named Atmosfair opened a plant near the Dutch border that produces synthetic kerosene. It relies on a complex interplay of solar electricity and waste biogas to get its chemical components. Since the Atmosfair plant opened, it has produced eight barrels of kerosene a day: barely a drop in the 2.3-billion-gallon bucket that the world used in the year 2019.

The solar kerosene planet in Spain follows in its footsteps, though Steinfeld says the sun makes getting hydrogen and carbon monoxide much simpler. Still, just like Atmosfair’s plant, it’s only an early drop. “The facility is relatively small compared to a commercial-scale one,” says Steinfeld. But he and his colleagues believe that it’s an important demonstration.

[Related: Floating solar panels could be the next big thing in clean energy]

According to Steinfeld, meeting the entire aviation’s sector would require solar kerosene plants to cover an area of around 17,500 square miles, roughly the size of Estonia. That does sound large, but Steinfeld looks at it differently: A relatively small parcel of a sparsely inhabited hot desert could supply all the world’s planes. 

(There’s precedent for something like it: Sunny Morocco has already become a solar power hub, and the country is planning to export some of that power to relatively cloudier Britain.)

For now, Steinfeld says the next steps are to make the process more efficient. Right now, a meager 4.1 percent of the solar energy striking the ceramic box actually goes into making gas. The researchers think they could considerably boost that number.

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This post has been updated with a statement from EPA administrator Michael Regan.

The Supreme Court of the US finally handed down one of its largest climate change decisions to date. Today, the court voted 6-3 to limit the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s ability to regulate carbon emissions from power plants. In 2020, the US electric power industry emitted 1.71 billion short tons of carbon dioxide: 99 percent of that came from coal, natural gas, and petroleum fuels, despite them only making up 62 percent of the US electricity supply.

The case brought before SCOTUS, West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, essentially questioned the EPA’s authority to pass major regulations across the power sector. Back in 2015, the agency issued the Clean Power Plan, which set standards for states to reach clean energy goals with limits on carbon emission introduced in 2022 and to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 32 percent by 2030. 

This plan was blocked by the Supreme Court in 2016 and then fully repealed in 2019 by the Trump administration. Opponents argued that the EPA was stepping out of their bounds granted to them by the Clean Air Act, which regulates air pollutants from stationary buildings as well as mobile sources. Since climate change and its link to carbon dioxide emissions weren’t as publicly well understood at this time, the act fails to mention the potent greenhouse gas. Following this, former President Donald Trump proposed the lax Affordable Clean Energy rule that would have led to a growth in emissions from power sources. However, last year an appellate court tossed out the proposed policy, opening the door for more effective regulations like the Clean Power Plan to come back in and provide structure to a climate overhaul of US-produced power.

What today’s SCOTUS ruling essentially does is slam that door back shut. Nineteen states and multiple power companies, led by West Virginia, argued that the EPA doesn’t have authority to enforce a clean energy transition or set a “cap and trade” program that would set a ceiling on how much carbon dioxide an industry can emit and financially punish those who go overboard. Opponents of the Clean Power Plan believe these types of decisions should be left to US Congress. 

[Related: There’s more carbon dioxide in the air than ever before in human history.]

However, this decision could have a major domino effect on federal environmental regulations, and keep the EPA from doing its main job.

“As a public health agency, EPA’s number one responsibility is to protect people’s health, especially those who are on the front lines of environmental pollution,” EPA administrator Michael Regan wrote in a statement following the decision.

“Ambitious climate action presents a singular opportunity to ensure U.S. global competitiveness, create jobs, lower costs for families, and protect people’s health and wellbeing, especially those who’ve long suffered the burden of inaction. EPA will move forward with lawfully setting and implementing environmental standards that meet our obligation to protect all people and all communities from environmental harm.”

Climate and conservation groups described the ruling as logically inconsistent. “The Supreme Court’s illogical decision to hamstring the EPA’s ability to limit carbon pollution from power plants makes it much harder for the agency to achieve its core mission to protect human health and the environment,” Dan Lashof, director of the World Resources Institution United States, said in an email statement to Popular Science. “The ruling ignores the interconnected structure of the power sector and imposes unnecessary limits on the pollution reduction options EPA can consider, which will result in higher costs and worse air pollution across the United States.”

Moreover, activists warned that failing to act on climate change will hobble technological innovation in the United States. “The decision also threatens to put the United States further behind our international counterparts, who are stepping up the pace of domestic action to meet international climate commitments and reap the benefits of the transition to a net-zero emissions economy,” Nathaniel Keohane, president of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, told PopSci in an email statement.

Throughout 2021, the Biden administration pushed Congress to pass a bill called the Clean Electricity Performance Plan, which would have rewarded electricity providers that switched to solar, wind, and nuclear—and punished those that didn’t. But the bill was killed, along with the majority of the Senate’s climate legislation, after opposition from West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe Manchin, whose personal wealth comes in large part through ownership of a coal power plant.

In the absence of legislation, the White House has been forced to pursue emissions reductions through the existing regulatory authority of the EPA. By removing that authority, the Supreme Court decision carries foreboding implications on the Biden administration’s climate change goals.

Mathematically, some experts say that these goals will be impossible to achieve without regulatory assistance from the EPA. It almost seems like the Biden administration is running out of options to press on for climate change policy, Richard Lazarus, a professor of environmental law at Harvard University told the New York Times. “A lot of the optimism that everyone had a year ago is being replaced by pessimism,” he said.

This vote could have overarching impacts on who makes the final call on climate change, as well as regulations from other agencies on weighty issues like net neutrality, food safety, and vaccine mandates.

“The Court appoints itself—instead of Congress or the expert agency—the decision maker on climate policy,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent. “I cannot think of many things more frightening.”

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People use natural gas every day in their homes with kitchen stoves, furnaces, and heaters. The powerful fuel behind all of these appliances? Methane.

When methane leaks, which it often does, it can have a hefty impact on the environment. The gas has around 80 times the warming power of carbon dioxide for its first 20 years in the atmosphere, and methane emissions from oil and gas basins can be seen from outer space. Methane leaks can also pose a serious health hazard, as they sneak toxic pollutants and gasses like toluene, benzene and hydrogen sulfide into the air.

But exactly what pollutants are natural gas appliances spreading around people’s homes? That has been a bit of a mystery. 

“It’s a really potent climate pollutant because it’s leaking everywhere, and everywhere we look, it seems to be leaking more than we think,” says Drew Michanowicz, a visiting scientist at Harvard University’s Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment. “We just kind of wanted to know what else is in this natural gas considering it is so widely used.”

Michanowicz and other researchers from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health recently discovered that unburned natural gas from leaks contains nearly 300 unique chemical compounds—21 of which are federally designated as “hazardous air pollutants.”  For the study, which was published today in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, the team surveyed around 70 different kitchen stoves and building pipes in Boston, Massachusetts. What they found was that these samples contained varying amounts of hazardous air pollutants, including benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, xylene, and hexane. The levels varied based on the time of year, with winter typically having the most pollution.

[Related: Gas stoves are bad for the environment—but what if the power goes out?]

The authors further concluded that the average person probably can’t smell every gas leak, especially the small, slow seeps. Natural gas is naturally odorless, so to help warn residents of leaks, gas companies often mix in an odorizer like methyl mercaptan (a separate compound from methane). This chemical is what gives gas leaks their fart-y, rotten-cabbage smell. 

Still, the researchers found that leaks with up to 10 times the amount of naturally occurring methane inside a building can still be hard to sense. “We don’t have anything [for methane] like a carbon monoxide detector or a smoke detector or sometimes a radon detector. Really, our line of defense for knowing there’s a leak in and around us are those odoring chemicals that they add,” says Michanowicz.  

What this means for human health is still up in the air—but Michanowicz notes that some of the harmful substances such as benzene are already in people’s homes because of other fuel sources and products. The next step for researchers is to calculate the baseline levels of everyday exposure with and without gas leaks, and see what toll that may have on human health. Too much benzene, for example, can lead to short-term symptoms like dizziness or vomiting and long-term illnesses like anemia.

Meanwhile, for folks using natural gas appliances, this study is just another reminder to keep your home as well-ventilated as possible. Opening windows and turning on an exhaust vent while cooking are both ways to make sure potentially hazardous air is continuously flushed out. If you’re interested in moving away from natural gas in your home, electric stoves and other appliances can be an option. Cities across states such as California, Massachusetts, and New York are already starting to ban new gas hookups in buildings. 

[Related: Two new bills could help pump up a climate-friendly system for heating and cooling homes]

“If climate change is vastly approaching, we already have really good reasons to try to reduce leakage of the methane that’s in natural gas,” Michanowicz says. “Here’s another reason to get us moving and thinking about different ways that our energy system may be harming us that we aren’t aware of.”

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China is currently the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide, more than doubling that of the United States and adding up to more than the combined emissions of the developed world. 

To address this, the country has set goals to hit peak emissions by 2030 and become completely carbon-neutral by 2060. China is installing new renewable energy rapidly, expecting to hit about a third of its total grid energy use from renewables by 2025. Despite these goals, the country continues to build 33 gigawatts of new coal plants—three times more capacity under construction than the rest of the world. 

Coal has long been a vital energy resource for China, and it is the largest consumer, producer, and importer of coal worldwide. Not to mention, around half of the world’s coal operating capacity exists in the country.

 Roughly 60 percent of the country’s energy comes from coal plants. Unfortunately, coal is also the worst fossil fuel to burn, regarding greenhouse gas emissions. It has been difficult for China to move away from long-standing energy industries in favor of generating energy solely from renewables since coal is one of the largest employers in China, employing 2.58 million people as of April 2022. In 2020, China exported around 436 million dollars worth of coal. 

A lot of coal is needed to power China’s gigantic economy, even more so recently. A series of power cuts across China at the end of 2021 showed how reliant China still remains on coal to keep up industry. Other countries that export coal to China have also been feeling pressure. Indonesia banned exports of coal for energy security purposes in January—which could lead to even more digging for coal on Chinese soil.  Throughout 2021, China hit a record-breaking 4.07 billion tonnes of coal output.  

The fear of dropping coal as an energy source, says Joanna Lewis, an associate professor of energy and environment at Georgetown University, is the risk of economic and political instability. “I think there’s this fear of moving away from the status quo and into this new realm of clean and advanced energy technologies, even though they’re extremely well positioned to do so,” she says. 

Still, these developments could be extremely challenging for climate change goals. The country’s government announced plans to boost coal production capacity by 300 million tons by the end of the year in April, which would amp up already heavy emissions for power generation that aren’t even needed. According to Li Shuo, a senior global policy adviser for Greenpeace, most of China’s coal plants currently operate at half capacity, but building more creates economic activity, either way, he told NPR in April. “This mentality of ensuring energy security has become dominant, trumping carbon neutrality,” he said.

[Related: There’s more carbon dioxide in the air than ever before in human history.]

On the other hand, China is the largest global leader in renewable energy production and is likely to stay that way for the next five years. As of 2021, China had a capacity of over 1,000 gigawatts of renewable energy potential, nearly triple that of the US, the next runner-up. 

“This is an important moment, in many ways, in China’s future energy trajectory. Now that they’ve reached the technical sophistication with a lot of the clean energy technologies—that’s taken them essentially two decades to build up expertise—they could really lead the world in a low carbon transition and domestic energy model that could really be quite ambitious or they could just sort of stick to the old coal-based model,” Lewis says.

As the world’s largest carbon emitters, the US and China have been working to address these problems. The countries announced a plan to cooperate on accelerating the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions during the COP26 meetings last year. The plan includes sharing policy and technology developments, setting climate goals, and “reviving” a climate working group. But the program has been criticized as vague, and even US climate envoy John Kerry has admitted that this agreement isn’t enough to meet Paris goals.

Still, in recent years, it has been difficult to get China and the US to work together on just about anything, adds Lewis. 

“I think it’s meaningful that climate is sort of the one area right now where China and the US have some kind of cooperation happening,” Lewis says. “It’s probably the most active area of cooperation. That’s not saying a lot, though.”

The United States and China have long competed economically, but tensions have recently flared. Human rights concerns abuses against the Uyghur Muslim population, which have led to US sanctions on specific Chinese officials, as well as recent developments in China’s relationship with Russia. These controversies are straining the relationship between the two countries, with climate change as the lone “bright spot,” writes Carnegie Endowment’s Paul Haenle. 

China has the renewable energy power to be a leader in climate action. But rapid coal development is a vast, counterproductive hurdle standing in the way of meeting their lofty but necessary climate goals.

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The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is moving to restore power to states and tribes to veto energy infrastructure projects that could pollute local rivers and streams. 

The Clean Water Act has guaranteed the ability for states and tribes to have a final say on projects like oil and gas pipelines for half a century. But the Trump administration weakened this authority two years ago, stripping local governing entities of their power to protect their region’s clean water supply. Now, the Biden administration is reversing the Trump-era rule.

“One pipeline may be fine, but multiple pipelines may not be,” says Lara Fowler, assistant director of Penn State Institutes of Energy and the Environment. “This ruling gives states a process to actually look at the local conditions and take them into consideration.”

Because of its long, skinny nature, pipeline infrastructure has a large footprint on the land, Fowler says. Depending on where a pipeline is being installed, the project can require the clearing of forests and other wildlife habitat. The construction also often infringes on wetlands and bodies of water that serve as communities’ drinking supply. If a pipeline leaks and pollutes the region’s freshwater, either while it’s being built or once it is operating, it could pose a health and safety hazard for local residents.

[Related: Climate change disasters cost the world over $100 billion this year]

The potential environmental harms of pipelines have long been proven. In 2018, a portion of the 40.5-mile Revolution Pipeline in Pennsylvania exploded after heavy rains caused a landslide. The resulting fire destroyed a nearby home, damaged power lines, and burned several acres of surrounding woodland. Energy Transfer, owner of the pipeline, was charged with nine counts of environmental crimes related to construction of the natural gas system this February.

In a more recent case, the 350-mile-long Mariner East Pipeline spilled more than 20,000 gallons of drilling mud into Pennsylvania’s Marsh Creek Lake. The August 2020 disaster was just one of several issues with the natural gas pipeline, also owned by Energy Transfer. Throughout its construction, the project caused dozens of drilling mud spills into wetlands and waterways, dangerous sinkholes, and drinking water contamination at 22 sites in 11 counties across Pennsylvania. Energy Transfer was charged with 48 crimes related to the construction of the pipeline in October 2021. But construction was able to continue, and the pipeline was completed this February.

These cases in Pennsylvania showcase why states and tribes should be able to conduct their own environmental impact analysis and veto potentially harmful projects. Section 401 of the Clean Water Act gives states and tribes the power to “prevent, reduce, and eliminate pollution of their waters,” says Jennifer McKay, policy director at Tip of the Mitt Watershed Council, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting water resources throughout the Great Lakes Basin. The Trump-era revision of this section “severely curtailed the ability for states and authorized tribes to carry out their duties,” she adds. “Ultimately, it threatened the ability for states [and tribes] to protect their own water quality.”

Specifically, the revision limits the time states and tribes have to review a project to one year. It also confines these non-federal governments from considering anything other than water quality when judging permits. These restrictions aimed to “curb abuses of the Clean Water Act that have held our nation’s energy infrastructure projects hostage, and to put in place clear guidelines that finally give these projects a path forward,” said then-EPA administrator Andrew Wheeler when he first announced the ruling back in June 2020. 

Although Section 401 does not explicitly target fossil fuel projects, some states have used their authority to stop or delay such developments. In 2017, Gov. Jay Inslet of Washington used the power granted by the Clean Water Act to deny a permit for a coal export terminal on the Columbia River, citing the risk of significant spills and negative effects on air quality. In 2020, then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York used the same authority to reject a natural gas pipeline project, citing the company’s inability to demonstrate that it could comply with state’s water quality standards.

“The Trump administration had an order to promote economic development and encourage pipeline development, and they felt this particular rule—which had not been changed in 50 years—stood in the way,” McKay says.

[Related: Pollution kills 1 in 6 people worldwide]

The polluting of clean waterways is not the only concern around pipeline projects. The installation of such infrastructure can cause significant damage to nearby ecosystems, harming crucial wetland habitat and displacing threatened or endangered species. Pipeline projects can also detract from farmland health and tribal resources like wild rice. Several studies have found that in areas where pipelines are laid out, soil health deteriorates and crop yields decrease.

Once the EPA’s new rule is finalized, states and tribes will have the opportunity again to analyze the potential environmental impacts of energy infrastructure projects. Fowler says she is “heartened” to know that states will have that power back; in many cases, states have stricter environmental standards than those of the federal government. She also notes the importance for tribes to have this veto power, as they are considered to be sovereign governments by federal law.

The pipeline issue is one that pulls in the interests of many stakeholders, ranging from domestic to international, public to private, public health to wildlife conservation, and state to federal. “No state is blind to energy needs,” Fowler says. “Where we draw the line is a hard question, but one we need to be really creatively thinking about. How do you balance the various concerns and values that are at play for something like this? How do you facilitate energy production and development while minimizing impacts?”

The proposed rule still needs to go through a 60-day period of public comment and review before it is finalized. The plan is to have it finalized by spring 2023, McKay says. After that, the people living closest to pipelines and other disturbances would finally have the power of choice again.

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When you think of climate change-fighting technology, your first thought might be glittering solar panels or futuristic vehicles that run without combustion. But some of the most important pieces of eco-friendly tech are relatively understated. 

One of the biggest problems to solve is what to do about all the carbon dioxide spewed by fossil fuel plants. Loads of ideas have come about on how to capture and sequester carbon dioxide from both the air and from energy production, with mixed reviews. The latest notion is that the fix could be as simple as a revved-up piece of cotton cloth. 

Using a cotton textile and an enzyme called carbonic anhydrase—which exists in the human body and helps us regulate carbon dioxide—North Carolina State University’s Jialong Shen and Sonja Salmon created a piece of fabric that can effectively scoop up and capture emissions. They published their new findings in the journal ACS Sustainable Chemical Engineering earlier this month. 

The material is wrapped into a roll which is then put inside a tube, almost like wet paper towels inside of a glass funnel. As leftover gas from fossil fuel production seeps in through the bottom, the carbonic anhydrase works to convert the carbon dioxide and water into bicarbonate. A mix of water and bicarbonate then drips out of the funnel, and can be used to create more energy or reacted with calcium to create limestone. 

[Related: Tech to capture and reuse carbon is on the rise. But can it help the world reach its climate goals?]

“We chose cotton deliberately because it can carry a lot of water and can spread the water out into a really thin film,” says Salmon, an associate professor of textile engineering, chemistry and science at NC State. “That allows the gas to react or interact very closely with the water.”

The material was able to capture 52.3 percent of carbon dioxide with a single filter, and 81.7 percent with a double layer, when air was pushed through the contraption at a rate of four liters per minute. Even after washing and reusing the fabric five times, the researchers still saw a high level of performance. 

While some carbon capture technologies may utilize rarer materials or trickier methods, the process of making cotton fabric is about as old as time. Not to mention, we already produce and make a ton of it, whether for clothes or industrial purposes, which means the supply chain that would create these filters more or less already exists. 

“The production rate is not a bottleneck at all,” says Shen, a textiles postdoctoral research scholar. “That’s the main advantage over other kinds of materials. People have been working on making carbon capture material on a grand scale … for textile-based materials we can leverage already existing textile manufacturing facilities and create new applications for companies.”

Capturing carbon from the air won’t solve all of our problems: We need to drastically reduce our use of fossil fuels and change the way we consume energy if we want to avoid the worst case climate scenario. But as emissions rise and efforts to lower them become more crucial, all sorts of technologies need to be considered, says Salmon. Simple solutions like this one could be small pieces of the puzzle, and help us make some progress in protecting the planet while we focus on more radical endeavors. 

“We want energy. We all love our cell phones. We all love driving our cars. We all love our hot showers,” she says. “Unless we’re prepared to all give that up right away. We have to do this. It’s an all technology must be deployed situation. It’s not one technology not going to save us. We have got to do them all.”

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Before the Industrial Revolution, carbon dioxide levels sat consistently at around 280 parts per million (ppm) for around 6,000 years. The human-friendly level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is estimated to be around 350 ppm, which was first breached in May 1986. But on May 2022, the CO₂ readings at NOAA’s Mauna Loa Baseline Observatory in Hawaii peaked at 421 ppm, up by around 1.8 ppm from last year. 

That means two things: first that CO₂ levels in the atmosphere have skyrocketed around 50 percent since the late 19th century or so; and second, that they match the balmy conditions of the Pliocene Climatic Optimum, a prehistoric period between 4.1 and 4.5 million years ago when sabertooth cats and giant sloths ruled the planet. According to the American Society of Meteorology, during this time, sea levels were around 35 meters higher than they currently are, the Arctic and Antarctic ice caps all but melted, and southern Florida was fully underwater. The difference, however, is that these climatic changes happened over the course of millions of years instead of just a few decades. 

“The science is irrefutable: Humans are altering our climate in ways that our economy and our infrastructure must adapt to,” National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Administrator Rick Spinrad said in a statement last week. “We can see the impacts of climate change around us every day. The relentless increase of carbon dioxide measured at Mauna Loa is a stark reminder that we need to take urgent, serious steps to become a more Climate Ready Nation.” 

[Related: An ancient era of global warming could hint at our scorching future]

This data follows news from earlier this year that global CO₂ emissions in 2021 were the highest ever in history, up 6 percent from 2020 pandemic-lockdown measurements to around 36.3 billion tonnes. Coal accounted for around 40 percent of this jump with an all-time high of CO₂ emissions totaling 15.3 billion tonnes. At the same time, renewable energy set a new record in 2021 with 8,000 terawatt hours of electricity produced around the world.

“It’s depressing that we’ve lacked the collective willpower to slow the relentless rise in CO₂,” geochemist Ralph Keeling of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography said in the NOAA release. “Fossil fuel use may no longer be accelerating, but we are still racing at top speed toward a global catastrophe.”

The spike in carbon emissions has been even more noticeable in recent decades, especially since the 1950s, says Pieter Tans, senior scientist with NOAA’s Global Monitoring Laboratory. But a look at ice cores in Greenland or Antarctica with millions of years worth of climate data shows we’ve never experienced rates like this. Even as CO₂ concentrations have varied through Earth’s history, it’s “just since 1950, really, that we’ve seen [their] explosion in geologic time,” Tans explains. 

Dave Keeling of the Scripps Institute in California was the first to record annual rises in CO₂ emissions in the planet’s atmosphere. In the first years of the Keeling Curve, which dates back to 1958, increases stood at about 0.7 ppm. Today, it shows increases of around 2.4 to 2.5 ppm year on year. 

But the CO₂ jumps aren’t the end of it. The greenhouse gas pileup has multitude effects on the planet: rising sea levels, dangerous heat, and worsening flooding and droughts on all sides of the globe. Even if emissions were to drop suddenly, it would still take hundreds of years for the Keeling Curve to decline. The oceans and atmosphere would likely be filled with more carbon dioxide than normal for thousands of years into the future. 

[Related: New satellites can pinpoint methane leaks to help us beat climate change]

That said, curbing greenhouse gas emissions remains just as important— and the solutions already exist. “It’s a political problem, not a scientific problem,” says Tans. While some countries are rapidly moving away from fossil fuels, giants like India have recently decided to reopen coal plants. Additionally, nations continue to pollute the air with another powerful greenhouse gas, methane; the largest emitters won’t even pledge to decrease their methane levels by 30 percent. 

There’s no telling where the planet’s headed if emissions keep rising at the rates they’re at now. “It imperils humanity, because climate change of this nature really makes the Earth look like a different place in the near future,” Tans says. “Will it still be inhabitable? We actually don’t know. So we could be killing ourselves collectively.”

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For many Nigerians, the deadly practice of illegal oil refining rings familiar. The siphoning, the “cooking,” and the accidental fires have been ongoing since 1958, when fossil fuel corporations began extracting crude oil and gas from the Niger Delta. But after an explosion on April 22 rocked the Abaeze forest and killed 100 people in the southeastern part of the country, it drew attention.

As news of the explosion in Imo state disseminated across various media platforms, the nation was thrown into what Nigeria’s president called “shock and trauma.” He said the incident was catastrophic and described it as a “national disaster.”

Illegal oil refining—popularly known as oil bunkering or oil theft—involves the siphoning off of crude fuel from pipelines often belonging to foreign companies, then transporting it to makeshift refineries hidden in bushes and forests several miles away by. The stolen goods are boiled in large metal containers by local refiners and distilled into products such as kerosene, diesel, and petrol. Once cleaned, it is sold around the country or exported abroad. Sometimes, however, the flames used to cook the crude oil get out of control, causing explosions.

[Related: The EU is struggling to phase out Russian oil and gas]

Philip Jakpor, a Nigerian environmental activist, says illegal oil refining is common and remains a major issue for Nigeria, despite the outcry every time there are casualties. “Many people are benefitting from the illegal business of oil bunkering including government and security officials, and communities in the Niger Delta region, and that’s why it has persisted,” the director of programs at Corporate Accountability and Public Participation Africa explains.

Explosions are not uncommon at illegal refining sites in communities in the Niger Delta, the country’s petroleum-rich region. But the consequences don’t end there. The practice has dealt a big blow on the national economy—crude oil accounts for approximately 90 percent of Nigeria’s revenue source—costing the country and its people billions of dollars in losses. “Apart from the lives lost in explosions, the Nigerian economy is also deprived of revenue,” Jakpor says.

Between January 2021 and February 2022, Nigeria lost more than 115,000 barrels to oil bunkering, totaling $3.27 billion worth of crude oil, according to the Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission. A review of the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, Oil and Gas industry report also showed that more than $270 million was lost to theft between 2016 and 2020. According to another report by the local media outlet Dataphyte, in 2020, the country lost more that 39 million barrels and at least $1.6 billion to crude oil theft and sabotage.

Despite its obvious implications on the economy, people’s lives, and the environment, illegal oil refining remains difficult for the Nigerian government to prevent. A number of factors feed into the dangerous practice, including unemployment, limited access to socio-economic opportunities, and tensions between oil companies and residents of the region over environmental disasters caused by the extraction of oil and gas. “These are poor people whose communities have oil, but do not enjoy any benefits and lack development so they engage in it,” Jakpor says. “They’re also the victims of the impact.”

A 2020 study by researchers at Newcastle University, UK, and Niger Delta University, Nigeria, shows how host communities are severely harmed by the activities of local illegal oil refiners, with the highest impacts on farmlands, estuaries, and rivers. “They ignore principles of environmental protection in refining the crude oil and empty the residue after cooking the crude into nearby rivers and water bodies,” says Oyinkepreye Lucky Bebeteidoh, a lecturer at the Department of Marine Engineering, Niger Delta University, and co-author of the study.

Bebeteidoh who lives in Yenagoa, Bayelsa, a major oil-producing state, worries that the decades of environmental damages caused by oil activities in the Niger Delta region may be difficult to reverse. But he encourages Nigerian leaders to incentivize the public to stop refining oil illegally and educate people on the environmental consequences. “The government must also provide basic amenities, including schools, roads, and hospitals in the communities,” Bebeteidoh says. He also adds that it should create policies and open up space in the Niger Delta for local refineries to participate in legal production. This would create more jobs and ensure proper regulation in the sector.

Jakpor, on his part, says that the Nigerian government must work seriously toward identifying the perpetrators of illegal oil refining and addressing the environmental impact on the Niger Delta communities. “It is a grim situation, and something drastic has to be done,” he notes.

A government spokesperson told PopSci that they are committed to cracking down on illegal oil refineries in the country. But they did not share any specific action plans.

[Related: Yemen’s defunct oil tanker could set off a public health crisis]

Jakpor thinks changing the decades-old system would be a good way to start. “Nigeria must block the loopholes that allow the groups that siphon oil to operate unchecked. The political will of the government is key because stealing and cooking oil is not a business for the poor—the common people are only the foot soldiers,” he says.

Although foreign governments are aware of oil bunkering, they haven’t directly intervened in the illegal business, even after large-scale disasters like the one in Imo state. In recent years, international regulators have shown some interest in supporting Nigeria—but they need better intelligence and information on oil theft to step in. Meanwhile, multinational oil companies like Shell, which still holds billions of dollars in assets in the country, haven’t contributed much in ways of solutions. If the industry can engage with communities in the Niger Delta and provide them with more socioeconomic opportunities, then maybe it can start to mend its long history of neglect in the region.

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The European Union has entered the process of phasing out the use of Russian oil throughout the continent by the end of the year in response to the invasion of Ukraine. The bloc is also working on plans to phase out Russian gas. Before the conflict, Russia supplied the EU with over a third of its oil and gas. 

Russia’s state-owned energy company Gazprom recently cut off gas to Poland because the country wouldn’t pay for the gas in Russian rubles. Poland has found other ways to get access to it through Italy and France, and Russia has announced it may retaliate against countries that are supplying Poland with Russian gas.

All of this turmoil has caused energy costs in Europe to surge, which is causing major problems for Europeans who now sometimes can’t afford their utility bills. It’s also not clear when costs will go down again. 

Gazprom has stated that, in general, it will keep selling natural gas in Europe for the foreseeable future. Russia’s economy is suffering due to widespread sanctions that reportedly could last for years. 

One would think a powerhouse like the EU could just decide to find fossil fuels from elsewhere, but that’s easier said than done. James Glynn, a senior research scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, tells Popular Science that one of the big problems is the continent’s existing infrastructure.

“The urgency right now is around natural gas,” Glynn says. “The problem is the ability to move it around. A lot of the consumers in Europe that are using Russian gas are on the eastern borders of Europe, and a lot of the spare capacity is in the west.” 

[Related: What the bans on Russian fossil fuels actually mean.]

Without pipelines to get natural gas from the west to the east, the EU has to figure out how to transport it to countries that need a steady supply, Glynn says, especially if Russia starts cutting off even more countries. That could mean more pipelines in the long-term and transporting gas on roads or rail in the short-term.

Countries like Germany are highly reliant on Russian gas to generate electricity and heat homes. The country currently relies on Russia for 12 percent of its oil and 35 percent of its natural gas. And to some experts, the Poland cut-off is just a hint that Germany, the most populated country in the EU, could be next.  That would cause major problems for the German economy and could lead to an energy crisis.

This dilemma with oil and gas supplies ideally could accelerate the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy, and that is happening to some degree. The EU now hopes to meet 45 percent of its energy needs with renewable energy by 2030. However, Glynn noted that some countries are looking for quick fixes, like increasing the use of natural gas and coal, that could create a worse situation for the environment. 

“It’s not clear if this will drive a long-term or medium-term energy transition or whether it will be a retreat to natural gas and maybe even a resurgence in coal,” Glynn says.

As gas prices soar around the world, countries are buying and burning more coal to produce electricity. Instead of buying Russian coal, suppliers like the U.S. and Colombia can help fill the gap. Coal is the dirtiest fossil fuel there is—natural gas produces 40 percent fewer greenhouse gas emissions.

Climate activists in Europe are pushing EU leaders to accelerate the transition off of fossil fuels as much as possible. There have been major climate protests across the continent over the past couple of months. 

Many argue that countries’ energy independence and reliance on self-produced renewables could soften these kinds of concerns over international conflicts and energy. If you can get most or all of your energy needs covered with solar and wind, you don’t need to worry about importing fossil fuels. 

The conflict between Russia and Ukraine remains unpredictable, so many situations EU leaders are dealing with today could look a lot different in the coming months. What seems clear is that this move away from Russian oil, gas and coal will likely need to be a permanent one for many European countries.

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With the world’s eyes on Europe during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, energy has become a big topic of conversation. Roughly a quarter of Europe’s oil and 40 percent of its natural gas comes from Russia. The Russian army has also seized Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, which is the largest in Europe.

European countries are developing plans to transform their energy grids as their long-standing reliance on fossil fuels becomes untenable—the escalation of decarbonization efforts are already underway. The European Union has announced it intends to cut Russian gas imports by as much as two-thirds by the end of this year. But when it comes to nuclear power’s role in the transition, nations remain split on what role it should or should not play. Roughly a quarter of Europe’s energy currently comes from nuclear power.

Jacopo Buongiorno, a professor of nuclear engineering at MIT, says the volatile energy source has long been a point of contention in Europe. Opinions on nuclear power, he adds, vary from government to government.

“It’s a checkerboard situation, in that there are some countries that are clearly negative about nuclear, others that are very positive, and also some newcomer countries that are seeking to develop a nuclear program for the first time,” Buongiorno says.

When it comes to countries that are against nuclear power, Buongiorno notes that Germany leads the way. The country decided to phase out its nuclear power plants after the Fukushima meltdown in 2011, and its three remaining plants will be shut down by the end of the year. The country is increasing its renewable energy capacity with new solar and wind facilities to try to make up for the loss of nuclear power.

“They remain steadfast that they don’t want nuclear,” Buongiorno says.

Spain intends to phase out its nuclear power plants by 2035. In 2017, Swiss citizens voted in favor of a referendum to start closing up their plants. Countries like Austria, Denmark and Portugal oppose nuclear power but don’t have any plants. Safety is a major concern across the board for these nations. 

As for the pro-nuclear countries, the UK is a big supporter of nuclear power. The country has one nuclear plant under construction, and plans to build multiple new ones in the coming years. The Netherlands is planning on building at least two more nuclear power plants, and France is right with them with a goal to set up 15 new plants by 2050. Finland recently completed a large nuclear power plant that will soon be operational. Meanwhile, Buongiorno says most of Eastern Europe is also pro-nuclear.

“Either they already have it and want more, or they don’t have it and they want it,” he explains. Almost a quarter of Ukraine’s energy comes from nuclear power, for example.

[Related: In 5 seconds, this fusion reactor made enough energy to power a home for a day]

Buongiorno says nuclear power will be an important part of Europe’s transition off of Russian oil and gas—and the transition off of fossil fuels generally. However, there are some issues. As in the US, the construction of nuclear plants has faced significant problems. New projects regularly encounter long delays and significant cost overruns—only one has been completed in the states in the past few years.

“The industry must show that they can deliver new nuclear plants on time and on budget. In the past 10 years, they have not been able to do it,” Buongiorno says. He says a lot of plants end up costing around three times what was promised, and taking longer than a decade to finish.

Buongiorno says one of the main problems is that many of the companies have been focused on servicing, not new construction. Most of Europe’s plants, including Zaporizhzhia, were completed in the late 1980s. He adds that these companies don’t have good project management practices, and that there could be supply chain issue due to the long pause in building new reactors. 

“The industry has definitely got to change to make it happen,” Buongiorno says.

Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Penn State, says he’s “skeptical” about Europe’s focus on nuclear power for its energy transition. He says existing plants should be kept running, but building out more nuclear power won’t solve the continent’s problems in an acceptable amount of time.

“It is not plausible that new nuclear construction … could possibly receive the short-term demand on energy caused by the present crisis,” Mann says.

[Related: Why Los Alamos lab is working on the tricky task of creating new plutonium cores]

One way for Europe to bring on more nuclear power without such high costs and delays would be with small modular nuclear reactors. As the name implies, these reactors would be as much as 90 percent smaller than traditional ones, could be relocated if needed, and should be easier and cheaper to build overall. However, the designs are all still in the development phase, so they’re not ready to be deployed yet. In the states, only the company called NuScale has received design approval from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

As much countries want it, it’s clear it’s not going to be easy for Europe to quit Russian oil and gas as quickly , Buongiorno says. It’s going to be a process that will take time and large investments.

“Nobody can snap their fingers and replace 40 percent of their gas overnight,” Buongiorno says. Energy transitions are exactly that, a transition—and that’s become especially true with nuclear power.

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The conflict in the Ukraine is barreling on—with Russia’s invasion spurring human rights atrocities and nuclear site takeovers. Allies in Europe, Asia, and the US have already put up massive sanctions against Russian businesses and oligarchs, but this week, President Joe Biden initiated a fossil fuel ban that could hit the Siberian oil giant hard.

“The United States is targeting the main artery of Russia’s economy. We’re banning all imports of Russian oil and gas and energy,” Biden said at the White House on Tuesday. “That means Russian oil will no longer be acceptable at US ports, and the American people will deal another powerful blow to Putin’s war machine.”

Following suit, the UK and EU have announced similar plans to phase out dependence on Russian fossil fuels in the near future. “This shifts the EU’s global energy priorities,” says Lisa Fischer, Clean Economy Program Lead at climate think tank E3G.  “Securing efficient use of energy globally and scaling renewables should now be a priority to support European interests and to support allies who are impacted by soaring fossil prices.” 

The oil and gas sanctions, however, will likely have a different impact on the US. Let’s look at why.

How dependent on Russian oil is the US, really?

According to the White House, the EU imports around six times as much oil from Russia as the US does. Currently, the EU gets 90 percent of its oil imported—with 45 percent of that coming from Russia. Nearly 40 percent of EU gas comes from Russia as well. 

On the other hand, the US only imports about 8 percent of its total oil from Russia. America is the world’s largest producer of oil: The nation extracted 10 million barrels a day in 2018, and is expected to hit 12.6 million barrels a day by 2023. 

While the US isn’t necessarily dependent on Russian oil (Biden is already potentially turning to politically ostracized countries like Venezuela to replace some of the imports), this move has a chance to have a substantial splash on the market. 

“The oil market is an international market,” says Ken Gillingham, a professor of economics at the Yale School of the Environment. “Because of that, if the US and other countries cut off supply from any country, the price is going to be impacted.”

[Related: The oil and gas industry knew about climate change in the 1950s]

America’s sanctions make Russia’s oil harder to sell across the board, Gillingham explains. So in a sense, disrupting the sale of oil anywhere is going to financially disrupt everyone, no matter where in the globe you are. “It provides a very clear lens into the vulnerability that our economy has with fossil fuels,” Gillingham says.

A similar thing happened during the 1970’s oil crisis—but the main difference between back then and now is that the world really didn’t have much of a choice but to use fossil fuels, says Clark Miller, associate director of the Future of Innovation in Society, at Arizona State University. Fifty years ago, for example, people needed petroleum cars to drive around. In today’s world, there are plenty of options for electric vehicles—though the infrastructure to support them is still catching up. 

How will the US substitute Russian oil?

The quickest option for the US is to replace oil with more oil. But even with the stash that’s squirreled away in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, that would take a significant amount of time. 

“Suppose we drill more oil,” says Gillingham. “We have to open up federal lands to leasing.  We have to hold the leases with auctions, clear the leases, hold the leases, and then go and get down there and start drilling. We’re not going to have [that] oil for another year.”

The more sustainable option, of course, is to lower the demand for fossil fuels. “If we really want to insulate the economy from these types of price swings, we’re not going to be able to drill our way out of it,” says Robbie Orvis, senior director of energy policy design at the climate policy think tank Energy Innovation. “That’s the nature of oil markets, they’re not going to change.”

If the US and the EU truly want to reduce conflicts with Russia, they need to switch to more renewable energy and electrification. “It is time we tackle our vulnerabilities and rapidly become more independent in our energy choices,” Frans Timmermans, executive vice-president for the European Green Deal, says. “Renewables are a cheap, clean, and potentially endless source of energy; instead of funding the fossil fuel industry elsewhere, they create jobs here. Let’s dash into renewable energy at lightning speed.” 

[Related: The US could reliably run on clean energy by 2050]

A full transition can’t happen overnight—but the groundwork is there to get started. US lawmakers are already working on ways to replace Russia’s oil contributions with renewables: Just last week, Senator Edward J. Markey (D-MA) introduced the “Severing Putin’s Immense Gains from Oil Transfers (SPIGOT) Act” with bipartisan co-sponsorship to “develop a comprehensive strategy to replace oil imported from the Russian Federation with domestic carbon-free energy sources.”

“We’re really that potential tipping point,” says Miller.

Can ordinary people do anything to help?

US and EU residents also have to play a role in lowering their countries’ dependence on foreign oil. The two main tips? Travel less and travel smarter. “For petroleum, the biggest uses are driving and flying,” Gillingham says.

As for natural gas, a big source of Russia’s imports to Europe, it’s a bit trickier. People can consider replacing furnaces with electric heat pumps and swapping out gas stoves for electric ones, says Kyri Baker, an assistant professor of civil, environmental, and architectural engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder. “For US households to reduce reliance on natural gas, a couple things they can do are the obvious things like buy rooftop solar, get an electric vehicle, but also things like electrify,” she says.

At the end of the day, making climate-friendly choices can only help improve a country’s economy and security. That could extend to the war in Ukraine, or to the pandemic downturns here in the states. “It’s not just a matter of cutting off fossil fuels or even the climate benefit, which of course, is important as well,” says Orvis. “This is a way to grow the economy and to grow our manufacturing base so that we can produce these things and save everyday Americans money.”

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In an effort to “stabilize” global oil prices in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Biden administration, along with a number of European and Pacific Ocean countries, announced plans this week to sell 60 million barrels of petrol from national stockpiles.

The US will contribute 30 million barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, a massive cache of federal fuel established after the oil crisis of the 1970s. The reserve sits in a series of underwater caverns along the petrochemical corridor of the western Gulf of Mexico, and allows the US Department of Energy to squirrel away crude oil to dispense when supplies are disrupted.

The US tapped the reserve in November, as pandemic turmoil drove the price of a barrel of oil above $85, after years of hovering around $50. But following the Ukraine invasion in late February, global panic that Russia’s massive oil reserves would be closed down sent prices climbing again. Currently, a barrel of oil costs more than $100. 

The world hasn’t imposed direct energy sanctions on Russia, although the country’s fuel exports have slowed because of other restrictions. So, the released oil won’t directly replace missing supplies. But it does represent a first step in what could either be an embrace of more oil production, or a retreat from volatile fossil fuels.

“It’s better than what [Biden]’s done in the past—he did not call for an increase in production,” says Kassie Siegel, director of the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute.

According to calculations by the Center’s climate science director, the 30 million barrels represent about the same greenhouse gas emissions as four coal-fired power plants running for a year. But more importantly, says Siegel, it’s a Band-Aid on massive swings in the oil market. “Left to its own devices, the industry is going to try to open up new reserves. Then inevitably, prices are going to crash down again.”

Why the US relies on stored oil

In theory, American fossil fuel companies have the reserves they need to produce more oil in response to high prices. Over the past two years, the Biden administration has issued more federal oil and gas drilling permits than the Trump administration did in the same time period. But companies have said that they either can’t, or won’t, increase oil output in response to rising prices.

In a February interview with Bloomberg, Scott Sheffield, CEO of one of the US’s biggest fracking firms, Pioneer Energy, said that it intended to grow relatively slowly—5 percent at most—over the next several years, in spite of rising prices. Sheffield said that Pioneer would “stay with our plan … regardless of whether it’s $150 oil, $200 oil, or $100 oil.”

“I just don’t see US production contributing the amount of barrels as it has over the last several years,” he said. (He said in a later interview that the company could be open to changing its plans as part of an industry-wide strategy.)

That’s partly because drillers can’t get steel tubing, drilling materials, and workers because of the labor shortages and shipping problems during the pandemic. But it also goes back to longstanding trends in US oil and gas production. From 2014 to 2020, American fracking companies tapped a massive amount of fossil fuels, turning the nation from an oil importer to an exporter. But during that time, the industry as a whole wasn’t profitable, says Clark Williams-Derry, an energy analyst with the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, which studies the transition to renewables. It cost more to frack than companies could make selling the product, and whenever they drove down costs, the price of oil dropped, too.

[Related: What a key natural-gas pipeline has to do with the Russia-Ukraine crisis]

By the beginning of the pandemic, when oil buyers were paying others to take unwanted barrels off their hands, 600 American companies had gone bankrupt, incurring a total of $70 billion dollars of debt.

Now, says Williams-Derry, “[the remaining companies] absorbed the lessons of the great shale financial meltdown, and they are not increasing production.”

If anything, they can make good money drilling oil while prices are high—Bloomberg reported that fracking groups were already on track to make record profits before oil prices topped $100 a barrel. “I don’t want to call it profiteering, but this is the moment they’ve been waiting for,” says Williams-Derry.

In spite of those oil industry statements, global analyst Rystad Energy predicts that US fracking output will grow by about 2 million barrels per day over the next year, noting that ExxonMobil and Chevron have both signaled plans to expand in the oilfields of West Texas and New Mexico.

The limits of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve

For the moment, that leaves the US with the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

The caverns of the reserve are something of a geological marvel. They begin with salt-domes, the remains of a buried Jurassic seabed that have pushed through the rock above like mushrooms on a forest floor. The domes happen to be the source of much of the Gulf’s fossil fuel deposits—oil and gas pool under awnings in surrounding rock. But the reserves themselves were carved out by humans by blasting water straight down into the salty cores.

According to the Department of Energy, the average cavern is 2,500 feet tall, big enough that temperature differences between the top and bottom cause the liquid fuel to circulate constantly. The largest of them could hold the One World Trade Center with room to spare.

When oil is plentiful, the Department of Energy slowly fills the caverns with unrefined crude. (Oil companies sell to the reserve directly, or send fuel in lieu of payment for drilling on federal land.) When supplies are disrupted, often by a hurricane, it can pump water into the caverns, sending petroleum to the surface for refining.

Across four sites on the Texas and Louisiana coast, the caverns hold close to 600 million barrels of crude oil—more than half of the country’s total crude oil stocks. So while the 30 million barrels that the Department of Energy plans to release is just a fraction of the total, it’s also the maximum that the US is allowed to sell at once. Last November, 50 million barrels were pumped from the reserve, but the majority were loaned out, rather than sold.

Currently, the US produces around 10 million barrels of oil a day, which means the latest release will be less than a percentage point of annual output. But Williams-Derry says oil prices tend to respond to relatively small shifts in supply. “Small percent changes in storage drive prices—you’d think it would be, oh, we’re 10 percent short, but no. If we’re a little bit short, traders start bidding up the price.”

The future of US oil

Still, experts don’t think that the release will make a huge difference for the price of oil, given the massive uncertainty with Russian oil supplies.

“I think that this 30 million barrel release was largely symbolic,” Siegel says. “The only way to get rid of oil and gas volatility and to protect people from price spikes or suffering is to get off oil and gas.”

Not every climate advocate thinks that the release was a bad decision. “We’re supportive of President Biden’s actions to ease everyday Americans’ energy burden in the short term,” Kelly Sheehan, the Sierra Club’s senior director of energy campaigns, writes in a Twitter direct message. But, she adds, “this step should be paired with actions to address the broader problem of our reliance on risky, volatile fossil fuels. The fossil fuel industry and their supporters in Congress are seeking to exploit the current crisis to justify a massive, long-term buildout of fossil fuel infrastructure that would lock in dependence on oil and gas for a generation.”

[Related: How publicly-owned power could shape the future of clean energy]

Siegel points out that there is another immediate approach: The Biden administration could tackle the immediate harms of high oil prices from the demand side, rather than supply. “Give people direct relief as Congress did during the pandemic,” she says, referring to the stimulus checks. But, she says, the only way to shield customers from further volatility in the long term is “a bold plan to get off oil and gas as quickly as possible.”

That would mean rapidly weatherizing buildings, accelerating the transition to electric vehicles, and pushing manufacturers to produce more heat pumps and other replacements for fossil-fuel infrastructure. That’s the direction Europe is taking as it scrambles to reduce its reliance on Russian gas. And while it’s true that all those steps take time, so does building more fossil fuel capacity.

“This week with the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is not determinative of the future,” says Siegel. She also says that investors and oil companies have sunk money into enough fossil fuel production to overshoot the targets of the Paris Agreement. Whether the US doubles down on oil production, or moves to alternative energy routes of energy—that could be the fork in the road.

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On Tuesday, Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany announced the country would rescind certification of Nord Stream 2, a gas pipeline from Russia that has been in development for about a decade. The move came after Russian President Vladimir Putin recognized the legitimacy of two separatist republics within the borders of Ukraine. 

The rescinding of the pipeline’s certification comes following an expansive territorial claim made by Putin on behalf of the separatist areas in Ukraine. It also follows a decade of debate and negotiation between some countries in Europe about how best to secure the energy they need at present, while designing future policy that is resilient to both market and political challenges. Russian forces, which have been massing along the borders of Ukraine since October, are now moving into the country, with the imminent possibility of greater open warfare between Russia and Ukraine.

To understand how a pipeline fits into this crisis, it is important to understand the exact nature of Nord Stream 2, the relationship between pipelines and energy policy, and how energy security relates to climate policy. By rescinding the certification of the pipeline, Germany is using energy policy to punish Russia’s foreign policy.

What is Nord Stream 2?

Nord Stream 2 is a project of several European energy companies and Gazprom, an energy company that is majority-owned by the Russian government. It is a pipeline that will transport natural gas, an extracted fossil fuel mixture that is primarily, though not exclusively, methane. Nord Stream 1, built in 2011 and 2012, travels from Russia’s Baltic coast underwater to Germany. Nord Stream 2, which was constructed between 2018 and 2021, follows mostly the same path, with its origin further into Russia itself.

[Related: How electronic warfare could factor into the Russia-Ukraine crisis]

Consumption of this gas for energy in Europe peaked in 2010, and has trended downward somewhat unevenly ever since. Nord Stream 2, which was first considered in 2012, was delayed in part because Nord Stream 1 was used at only half capacity in 2015. In part, consumption of the piped-in gas from Russia was down because of sanctions the United States placed on Russia in 2014, following its annexation of the Crimean peninsula in Ukraine.

So what does a pipeline that doesn’t travel through Ukraine have to do with Ukraine?

In 2014, the US Energy Information Administration estimated that 16 percent of the natural methane gas from Russia, and consumed by Europe, passed through older, non-Nord Stream pipelines in Ukraine. The Nord Stream 1 pipeline cut this flow by about half, but the pipelines through both Ukraine and under the Baltic combined to keep European nations regularly supplied with gas. 

The year 2014 also saw the Russian occupation of Crimea and the start of a still-ongoing war between Ukraine’s national government and two self-declared separatist republics in Eastern Ukraine. 

In the early months of 2009, during a dispute between Gazprom and Ukrainian gas company Naftogaz, Gazprom cut off the flow of gas to Europe through Ukraine. This shortage, coming in winter, was part of what led to the creation of the European Energy Union, as a way for the countries to coordinate energy policy together in the face of future shut-offs. 

[Related: The tanks, rockets, and other weapons that Russia has in its arsenal]

Anders Åslund, an economist at the Atlantic Council think tank in Washington, DC, cheered the founding of the European Energy Union in 2015 as an alternative way for countries in Europe to ensure reliable gas supply. If all natural gas was routed through Russian-owned pipelines, Aslund said, Nord Stream 2 would give Gazprom “control of the gas market in the heart of Europe.” 

Both the Obama and Trump administrations opposed the construction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. In March 2021, Biden’s Secretary of State Antony Blinken said “this pipeline is a Russian geopolitical project intended to divide Europe and weaken European energy security,” though the Biden administration later reached an agreement with Germany to support the completion of Nord Stream 2 under conditions including German investment in renewable energy in Ukraine.

Methane is a greenhouse gas. What’s the climate connection?

Methane, the primary component in natural gas, is a greenhouse gas. It leaks at every stage of the production process. Even discounting leaks, while gas may burn cleaner than coal, it doesn’t outright burn clean. Pipelines, like power generators, are infrastructure, with big investments up-front that are often paid back over time, in profit or continued utility or ideally both.

If Nord Stream 2 stays decertified, it removes one route for natural gas into Germany and the rest of Europe. Compensating for that lost energy likely means spurring countries to keep investing in renewables like solar and wind, and batteries to store power for peak demand. The cost of renewables has fallen sharply over the past decade. Designing new infrastructure for energy that arrives on the air and with daylight means planning for energy that cannot be cut off by wars several countries away. 

It remains to be seen if Germany’s decertification of Nord Stream 2 will stick. With the pipeline already built, the obstacles to using it appear largely political, not operational. The environmental and energy independence arguments against Nord Stream 2 have been made, and debated, since the project was conceived a decade ago. 

What finally brought about the change in Germany’s policy was Russia’s move to violate the sovereignty of another nation. So long as Germany’s government feels the need to sanction the Russian government for its actions, Nord Stream 2 will likely sit empty and unused.  

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Slimming down America’s dependence on fossil fuels is crucial for a multitude of reasons. The one we hear about most often is slowing the toll of catastrophic climate change. But climate change policy has the potential to do a lot more than slash greenhouse gases—if done right, these policies can help build equitable and resilient communities, protect biodiversity, and improve human health. 

Climate scientists from the independent research group Resources for the Future (RFF) recently came out with an analysis forecasting how much health would improve in the coming years if the US met their lofty 2030 climate goals. The goals, outlined by President Biden, would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by around 50-52 percent of 2005 levels by 2030.

The RFF scientists specifically dove into the impacts of secondary particulate matter emissions from fossil fuels and how they impact health and death rates across the US. These pollutants, like sulfur dioxide, nitrous oxide, and ammonia, combine in the atmosphere when fossil fuels are burned and can cause health impacts from aggravated asthma to premature death in heart and lung disease patients. Each year, around 50,000 Americans die from exposure to these pollutants.

[Related: Better vehicle emissions standards may have saved thousands of Americans.]

They found that thousands of lives, and millions of dollars, could be saved when it comes to public health.

“What this tells us, in a nutshell, is that we could see up to 3,800 lives saved per year by 2030 as a result of these climate actions that are not even targeting public health, but have these benefits as well,” says author Maya Domeshek, senior research analyst at RFF.

These benefits would most heavily impact fossil-fuel reliant states across the Midwest and East Coast, with an estimated $33 billion saved in healthcare costs country-wide. “If you had a scenario like the one that we envision where you target reductions in the electricity sector, particularly from reducing emissions from coal plants, you’d expect to see a lot of those health benefits accruing in areas of the country that currently have coal,” Domeshek says. 

The vast majority of the healthcare benefits would come from decarbonizing the power sector—removing 2.7 million tons of carbon dioxide would result in 2,645 deaths avoided, according to the study. But the researchers also looked at the transportation, commercial and residential, and industrial sectors. Health benefits per unit of carbon dioxide emissions were the highest for transportation and industrial sectors. 

We’ve known for a while that reducing greenhouse gas emissions will likely have positive effects on public health, but this study shows a direct link to an administrative goal that would cover multiple sectors. Still, the report says that their numbers are likely an underestimate and these benefits are likely to accumulate over the years.

[Related: One way to cut down air pollutants: call an Uber.]

However, the study does not fully address issues of environmental justice, such as the inequitable impacts of pollution on vulnerable communities. Research has found that the particular pollutants studied in this paper disproportionately and systematically affect people of color and continue to persist even as hazardous fine particulate pollution decreases country-wide. 

Looking at the country as a whole, the air quality benefits of 2030 greenhouse gas emissions reductions don’t appear to differ greatly across demographic and income levels, thanks to the giant scale of this analysis. However, pollution impacting different demographics may appear if future research zooms in on certain states and communities.

“Although our analysis gives some information about that, the sort of spatial scales of our analysis is too large to really answer that question,” Domeshek adds. “So yeah, a lot of the environmental racism and environmental injustice more broadly that people are concerned about happens at a very fine spatial scale up to the sub-county level, based on who lives on one side or another on a highway.”

Nevertheless, if climate change isn’t a strong enough reason to lay off fossil fuels, saving thousands of lives in the next decade is another motive to go green. 

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This last week came with good news for the planet—and not so great news for the American oil industry. Back in November, merely days after pledging to cut fossil fuels across the country, the Biden administration opened up the biggest oil and gas lease sale in history, to the distress of environmental activists and scientists. 

The leasing, which covered over 80 million acres of open waters in the Gulf of Mexico, could have released more than 600 million tons of greenhouse gases if fully developed within four years, according to the Guardian. Luckily, only about 1.7 million acres were actually bid on by oil and gas companies, but the sale still brought in more than $190 million from companies like Exxon Mobil and Chevron.

“This administration went to Scotland and told the world that America’s climate leadership is back, and now it’s about to hand over 80 million acres of public waters in the Gulf of Mexico to fossil fuel companies,” Natural Resources Committee Chair Raúl M. Grijalva said in a release in November. “This is happening under the same lax environmental and safety requirements and inadequate financial assurances that have put Americans in harm’s way for decades. Regardless of when we hold lease sales, nothing prevents [the US Department of Interior] from informing the public about how it plans to reform and improve the federal leasing program.”

But, just last week, a federal judge blocked the controversial decision—ruling that the president didn’t fully take into consideration climate change impacts. 

[Related: To prevent catastrophic global warming, we need to leave fossils fuels in the ground.]

“This is a victory for all Gulf communities impacted by the onshore pollution from offshore drilling in the Gulf,” Cynthia Sarthou, executive director of local environmental justice/activism organization Healthy Gulf, said in a release. “Today, we can look forward to the day when we stop selling off our public waters for pennies on the dollar when a just transition to a clean energy future is critical to our very survival. Now, the Gulf can be seen as a viable field for offshore wind energy that will power our future.”

The battle over leasing land for oil and gas began long before November, however. Last year Biden signed an executive order to slow down and rigorously review any future programs related to fossil fuels. This met the ire of oil producing states—more than a dozen of which filed a lawsuit against the administration that blocked the executive order by claiming the move would hurt oil-producing states. 

The nail in the coffin for the leasing process, however, was the use of a questionable Trump-era climate assessment that argued that limiting preventing oil drilling in the Gulf would lead to higher emissions due to dependence on foreign fossil fuels. “That’s central to the court’s decision,” senior attorney Brettny Hardy of environmental law nonprofit Earthjustice told CNN. “Essentially, what the court determined is that the Interior Department was relying on totally flawed greenhouse gas emissions modeling, so they substantially underestimated the greenhouse gas impacts that would result from development on these leases that had sold.”

Of course, not everyone is happy with the outcome, especially the oil and gas industry. Erik Milito, president of the National Ocean Industries Association, a group representing the offshore energy industry, called the offshore region “vital to American energy security” and called leases “essential in keeping energy flowing from this strategic national asset” in a release Thursday. 

The Interior Department must now do more research and analysis to determine the true environmental cost of the leases, which will determine whether or not another auction will be held. 

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Last year, the world saw record declines in greenhouse gas emissions—largely due to COVID-19. At the time, there were plenty of warnings about how the change wouldn’t stick and that when the economy came roaring back in the new year, so would emissions. Now, research shows that this is pretty much exactly what happened.

A new report out today from independent research organization Rhodium Group shows how the country’s emissions have shot back up 6.2 percent relative to 2020. In 2020, emissions were 22.2 percent below 2005 levels, but in 2021 those rose to 17.4 percent compared to 2005. At the same time, the economy only grew an estimated 5.7 percent—meaning our fossil fuel footprint outgrew even a restarting economy.

“We need to repeat 2020 in terms of emission reductions while achieving economic growth,” Kate Larsen, a partner at Rhodium Group and a co-author of the report, told CNN. “We really need to escalate annual emissions reductions; we can’t have any more years of emissions growth.”

[Related: Did the dip in carbon emissions during the pandemic really help the atmosphere?]

While emissions remained beneath 2019 levels, the country is still woefully off track to meet President Biden’s lofty climate change and emissions goals. At COP26 in Glasgow this fall, he promised to drop emissions by a gigaton by 2030, while making energy bills lower and renewable energy more accessible to the average American. 

Emissions increased in four major sectors—transportation, industry, power, and buildings—this past year. However, transportation and power, with increases of 10 and 6.6 percent respectively, took the cake for sending emissions upwards. 

Freight transportation roared in 2021

In 2020, it didn’t seem like anyone was going anywhere—and that was reflected in emissions. Between 2019 and 2020, transportation sector emissions dropped a massive 15 percent. This year saw a rebound, but not for travel. Air travel still remained significantly below 2019 levels thanks to the risks and trickiness of traveling in a pandemic, and gasoline demand didn’t hit 2019 levels until late in the year.   

What did go up significantly was demand for road freight. As people demanded more and more ecommerce over the course of the year, diesel demand rose around 9 percent above 2020, which is about half a percentage point higher than our pre-COVID days. 

Coal came back—in a big way

Coal, by far the nastiest of fossil fuels, has been on its way out for quite some time as utility coal plants retire left and right in favor of cheaper natural gas. Throughout 2020, electricity use slowed down overall, and often those coal plants were run less (which even made 2020 a monumental year for renewable energy). But, 2021 saw some dramatic upturns in the prices of natural gas. Thanks to a long, cold winter and the fact that nowadays everyone is vying for a coal alternative, gas prices nearly doubled by the end of 2021. 

Back in October, the US Energy Information Administration predicted that this past year would be the first time since 2014 that coal-fired generation would increase. 

[Related: Countries aren’t moving aggressively enough toward climate goals.]

“It really illustrates how much we’ve depended on cheap natural gas prices to keep coal in decline,” Larsen told the New York Times. “Overall, we still expect coal to decline further in the years ahead, but unless there are new policies put in place to clean up the power sector, the coal industry could see a bit of a lifeline if there are big swings in the gas market.”

While natural gas is heralded as a “cleaner” fossil fuel alternative, it has plenty of problems of its own, such as emitting super-potent methane gas and the destruction that comes along with fracking. 

However, not all hope is lost, the authors write. While current climate goals will put us below 2005 levels at a rate of 17-25 percent in 2030, there are still ways to reach a Paris Agreement-approved drop of 50 percent. Passing climate-fighting packages in Congress, building on regulations and standards in federal agencies, as well as companies and states making their own emissions cuts could bring the country where it needs to be, according to Rhodium researchers. But this year’s emission jump is another reminder of how much work needs to be done—even when the pandemic still rages on.

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It seems like a lot of folks have a bone to pick with Rep. Joe Manchin [D-WV] who has just this week single-handedly “torpedoed” the Build Back Better bill. The BBB could have been the “the most significant climate legislation in US history,” Megan Mahajan, the manager of energy policy design at the think tank Energy Innovation, told PopSci in October. The plan would put billions of money into developing low-carbon energy technologies and building a national network for electric vehicles. 

Still, Manchin, who has received around $400,000 in donations from fossil fuel companies and made millions off of a coal brokerage firm he founded himself, couldn’t get on board even after resisting the Clean Electricity Performance Program (CEPP), which would give utilities $150 billion plan to install increasing amounts of clean electricity. “If I can’t go home and explain it to the people of West Virginia, I can’t vote for it,” Manchin told Fox on Sunday. “I’ve tried everything humanly possible. I can’t get there. This is a no.”

When this bill dies, so do the chances for the country to reach its lofty and aggressive climate change goals. “There’s still a yawning gap between where we are today and where we need to be to hit President Biden’s climate targets,” Jesse Jenkins, an energy systems engineer at Princeton University who has led an effort to model the effects of the bill on US-wide emissions, told the New York Times. “Without either this bill or a climate bill that’s similar in scope, it’s really hard to see how those goals will be met.”

Unsurprisingly, left-leaning members of the Democratic party and the president himself have voiced frustration with Manchin’s choice. But a more surprising group is speaking out against Manchin’s decision, too—coal miners, including some he represents. 

[Related: Biden’s infrastructure act bets big on 3 types of ‘green’ energy tech.]

On Monday, the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) issued a statement urging Manchin to “revisit his opposition to this legislation.” Just last year, the organization named Manchin an “honorary member” of the UMWA.

The BBB, along with all of its proposed clean energy benefits, provides a significant boost to coal workers by extending fees paid by coal companies to fund treatments and benefits of workers suffering pneumoconiosis, or Black Lung, which affects thousands of miners across the country. According to the statement, without BBB, that fee will be chopped in half and put the burden of healthcare payments back on individuals and taxpayers. Further, the bill provides tax incentives for companies to build new business on coalfields to employ out-of-work miners. 

Additionally, the BBB provides language that would help workers unionize. “This language is critical to any long-term ability to restore the right to organize in America in the face of ramped-up union-busting by employers,” Cecil Roberts, the union’s president, said in a statement. “But now there is no path forward for millions of workers to exercise their rights at work.”

UMWA already released a plan for the energy transition earlier this year stating that “change is coming, whether we seek it or not.” The coal industry saw employment losses of around 50 percent between 2011 and 2020, which will likely continue as the country moves toward a cleaner energy mix. Proposals that include supporting miners and their families by incentivizing alternative jobs in coal country are crucial in protecting these already vulnerable communities. 

“We’re likely to lose coal jobs whether or not this bill passes,” Phil Smith, the chief lobbyist for UMWA, told the Washington Post. “If that’s the case, let’s figure out a way to provide as many jobs as possible for those who are going to lose.”

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HORTICULTURISTS, like theater directors, work behind the scenes. They don’t sign up to get booed. But during the summer of 2019 at Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery, its director of horticulture, Joe Charap, was chewed out by lot owners time and again. His offense? He had decided to stop mowing half of the site’s 400 acres of turf to reduce carbon emissions and check the spread of invasive plants.

“The headstone was shrouded in weeds and covered in tall grass,” one person said of their father’s plot. “It’s disrespecting our family.” Another wrote: “The area looks terrible. It is not mowed and looks disheveled.” And another: “I couldn’t help but feel I was looking onto the Serengeti plains with grassland growing out of control in a manner that I feel desecrates the final resting place of all lying in eternal [sic] slumber. What’s next, controlling the growth with grazing sheep and cattle?”

A life-long New Yorker, Charap expected some shock. For a cemetery, not mowing was a radical step, but the complaints still stung. After all, his job was to care for Green-Wood’s most valuable feature: its landscape. The glacier-carved hills, valleys, and ponds were the reason a group of wealthy Brooklynites chose it for one of America’s earliest rural cemeteries in 1838. Since then, New Yorkers of all stripes have visited the roughly 500-acre grounds to mourn, or get their fill of fresh air and nature.

But those grounds, as Charap learned over the first few years in his role, were changing for the worse. The main culprit was Bermudagrass, a fast-growing, warm-season invasive which had been introduced to the southern US, likely from Africa, more than two centuries ago. At Green-Wood, Bermudagrass was growing unabated due to some of the energy-intensive practices used to tend cemeteries and yards across the US.

It was a model that Charap walked into when Green-Wood hired him out of horticulture school in 2015. Rejecting it wasn’t going to be easy. There are upwards of 144,000 cemeteries and graveyards in the US, according to one NASA cartographer; they cover 4,300-plus acres of New York City alone. With all that ground, there’s plenty of room to test out lawncare techniques that break with the century-and-a-half tradition of over-pruning, overwatering, and over-fertilizing open spaces. A strategic, yet laissez-faire approach, as more research is finding, can save resources and help mitigate human impacts on local wildlife and climate change.

To put it more bluntly, by scaling back mowing, Charap wanted to change Americans’ perceptions of landscaping, one cemetery—or tiny burial plot—at a time.

HOWEVER BERMUDAGRASS ended up at Green-Wood in the 20th century (perhaps from ship ballasts or Southerners who buried it at the gravesite of a loved one), by 2019 it had taken over 10 percent of its grounds, thanks in large part to Brooklyn’s warming seasons.

Aesthetically, the plant was a disaster. Straw-like and brown when dormant, it only turned green after Mother’s Day, an important holiday at any cemetery. The more frequently it was cut, the faster it grew: By mid-summer, it was creeping up over the gravestones by about two inches per week. What’s more, the growing season was reaching into November due to climate change. The result was an intractable monoculture.

As landscaping crews battled the Bermudagrass, Green-Wood’s annual mowing bill ballooned to $1.2 million. The use of herbicides was also proving costly and ineffective.

Charap had once looked at these expenses as one would their utility bill—annoying but unchangeable—until he began assessing the true cost of conventional lawn care. The weedwackers and ride-on mowers burned 12,000 gallons of gasoline a year, equivalent to 235,000 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions. As an accredited arboretum, Green-Wood boasts more than 7,000 trees, but the canopy is well short of the forest it would take to offset such pollution. Decades of weekly mechanical mowing had also left visible scars, like pockmarked monuments and eroded slopes, as well as invisible ones, like the native flora unable to survive the blades.

Charap knew that most lot owners expected cemeteries to be neatly manicured, but he wanted to do better. So he turned to Cornell University’s Frank Rossi, a straight-talking, Bronx-born turfgrass scientist who advises major golf courses and sports teams like the Packers and Yankees. They convinced Green-Wood’s trustees to invest in a three-year partnership with Cornell to tackle the effects of Bermudagrass and climate change on the cemetery’s landscape. If it all went according to plan, Green-Wood would become the leader in this fight among all urban grasslands.

Nobody at the cemetery had studied these effects before. In 2018, Charap and Rossi flew a dozen drone missions over its core to uncover the biggest problem areas. They buried three microclimate sensors in different areas to learn where Bermudagrass was growing fastest, and outfitted 20 mowers with trackers to record their activity and fuel use. The two experts also brought in new seed mixtures and topsoil for landscaping, and laid out more careful burial procedures to keep invasives away from fresh gravesites. But their main hurdle was that Bermudagrass thrives in disturbed soil—an existential crisis for an active cemetery with more than a thousand burials each year.

In June 2019, a fluke in the landscape showed them a way forward. Rossi and two colleagues were walking through a quiet corner called the Hill of Graves when they stumbled on a patch of little bluestem, a well-known native prairie grass, rising out of a spot the mowers had missed. So there was a chance that underdogs could grow here, and maybe even beat out the Bermudagrass. Why not let certain areas go a little wild and see what happened, Rossi asked?

He and Charap decided to try. They removed a hundred acres of Green-Wood from the mowing rotation entirely, and set aside another hundred to be mowed monthly. With that, they charged into a cultural firestorm—and very quickly those comparisons to the Serengeti plains. “We started having this institutional conversation about reimagining the American lawn,” Rossi says. But that conversation became painfully one-sided. Charap, who discoursed with lot owners in person and over email, faced the brunt of it. “We underestimated the emotional connection that many people have with turf,” he says. While some told him they agreed with his mission, they also demanded, “but don’t do it on my lot, do it on that other lot.”

Within two months, a disappointed Charap had all the grass mowed, and he and Rossi returned to the drawing board.

ALMOST TWO YEARS LATER, on an unnervingly warm late-spring morning, Rossi bounds up the gently sloping Hill of Graves with grass lapping at the top of his black leather boots. “Where’s that little bluestem, Joe?” he shouts behind him to Charap, who is not about to give chase in 90-degree heat.

There’s nobody else around. And it’s otherwise quiet save for a mockingbird imitating a car alarm from a dogwood on the hillside. The sweet fragrance of a flowering linden fills the air. The grass hasn’t been cut in three weeks, and what looks like a meadow has grown in. The Hill of Graves, like most of Green-Wood, used to be cropped within two inches of the soil almost every week outside of winter. Now it’s mowed to five inches only six times a year.

“It’s never looked this good, Joe,” Rossi says. “If this is what six mows looks like, we could do this for the whole cemetery.”

That’s Charap’s goal, and after the initial setback of 2019, this is a more carefully plotted step in that direction. Last year, he and Rossi set aside 43 acres of what they’re calling perpetual meadows, and the roughly 12-acre Hill of Graves is the largest one. Still, Charap carries the scars—and lessons—of that earlier summer. “We thought that no one was going to notice when we stopped mowing 100 acres, which in hindsight is just ridiculous,” he says. “You can slowly adapt people to a change in the landscape, but you have to prepare them for it.”

Turf grass is a deeply rooted social construct, Rossi says, pointing to the fact that US households spend around $30 billion annually on landscaping. Most of it is devoted to lawncare, which itself adds to ecological problems. Lawns are considered the most widely irrigated landscape in the country, and the Environmental Protection Agency reports that 5 percent of the country’s air pollution comes from two-stroke mowers. The explosion in lawns has also been connected to a decline in native insects and other wildlife.

But a countermovement is emerging. From suburban yards to historic cemeteries like Green-Wood, there’s a growing push to reckon with the unsustainable consequences of this obsession. “The impact that cemeteries can have by changing the way they’re managing their lawns is significant,” says Sara Evans, Green-Wood’s manager of horticulture operations. Reducing soil disturbances like mowing and digging helps cut down the amount of greenhouse gases released; so does strategic rewilding with meadows and other ground cover.  

Indeed, natural grasslands act as major carbon sinks—even more so than trees in places where wildfires are common, given that most of the carbon is stored underground. What’s more, 90 percent of the world’s grasslands have been grazed, cleared, or otherwise corroded, making them one of the most endangered habitats. 

Other historic cemeteries are seeing how they can reduce their carbon emissions, too. Cincinnati’s Spring Grove opened seven years after Green-Wood and became the home of the first “lawn plan,” a design that emphasized open spaces and clean lines and was adopted throughout the country. But now, according to Dave Gressley, its director of horticulture, they plant sedge, which requires little mowing, wherever possible, one plug at a time. They’re also working to rebuild their canopy after the loss of hundreds of mature trees to disease and storms. As for meadows, though, Gressley says, “Cincinnati is on the conservative side, so that wouldn’t fly here.”

At Green-Wood, the free-growing patches were chosen in large part by visitation and the contours of the ground. Areas with newer graves were avoided. The Hill of Graves, for instance, is mostly made up of 19th-century public lots. Grass there now reaches halfway up simple flagstones. Fields of clover rise after spring rains, and Green-Wood puts on small classical-music concerts under a sprawling European beech tree at the slope’s crest.

This and the other meadows look unplanned—a little wooly in parts, tidier in others—but Charap and Rossi say they require more attention and foresight than simply mowing. Weed control is still employed twice a year to keep invasives at bay. Instead of a monoculture, Bermudagrass now blends in with native grasses like fescue, bluestem and Kentucky bluegrass. Once on the Hill of Graves, they used a tractor-trailer outfitted with blowtorches to try to regenerate those grasses through fire, as a way to recreate the natural fire cycle that once existed in tallgrass prairies of the Great Plains and upper Midwest. Heating up the soil releases nutrients from decaying plant material that feed the growth of new grasses and flowers. “We’re working with the landscape as opposed to trying to bend it to our will,” Rossi says.

Working with Rossi, who began mowing lawns in New York’s suburbs as a kid and briefly studied to become a Catholic priest, has converted Charap into a turfgrass obsessive. When he began working at Green-Wood, he says, the only thing on his mind was its “charismatic megaflora.” The grass was a place to rest his eyes between trees.

“But now when I look at the landscape,” he says, “all I see is grass.”

Rossi laughs, as Charap continues. “We can plant trees here till the cows come home, but in terms of climate change, that would be a drop in the bucket compared to what we can accomplish with managing the turf better.”

Indeed, Green-Wood has reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by nearly a quarter since 2018. They’ve continued to track environmental data throughout the cemetery—on microclimates, burials, mowing, soil movement—and used that to keep the grass at a taller height, but one that is largely uniform. Rossi and Charap believe that consistency (and the presence of fewer weeds) has led to fewer complaints.

[Related: It’s time to rip up your lawn and replace it with something you won’t need to mow]

Less mowing has created a healthier, often surprising ecosystem. For the first time in memory, Charap and his team found a patch of the delicate pink wildflower springbeauty. A two-year wildlife survey turned up 62 native bee species, most of them in the new meadows. And a male bobolink, a small grassland specialist in decline that migrates between South and North America, recently turned up on the Hill of Graves. During that extraordinary journey, bobolinks seek out weedy fields or tall grass, of which Green-Wood once had very little. In spring, the males look like they’re wearing a backward tuxedo, but their song is their calling card, a robotic, R2D2-like mashup which this one sang from atop wind-blown cedars.

“We call that proof of concept,” Charap says of the discovery.

THE THIRD AND FINAL YEAR of the Green-Wood and Cornell partnership was a busy one in unexpected and tragic ways. The early months of the COVID-19 pandemic halted all non-burial work. Charap’s eight-person crew of gardeners and arborists assisted with burials, and the restoration staff helped run the crematorium, where workers alternated 16-hour, seven-day shifts. In the pandemic’s first year, almost 5,600 people were cremated, buried, or entombed at Green-Wood—up 38 percent from the previous 12 months.

At the same time, the cemetery offered relief during crisis. As the city went into lockdown, access to greenspace felt like a boon. It was as if Green-Wood, which had been the model for New York’s first parks and was said to rival Niagara Falls as America’s most popular destination, was reborn—a refuge for the living as much as the dead. Roughly 110,000 people came through its four gates in May 2020, almost triple the same month in 2019. The cemetery extended its hours and has continued to keep all those gates open daily. Around 600,000 individuals visited Green-Wood in 2020, up 82 percent from 2019.

For many of these visitors, the meadows became Instagram-worthy favorites. Buoyed by this reception, Green-Wood leaned into them. They turned the lawn in front of its famous Gothic arches into a two-acre meadow. Charap had never seen so many kids playing in it. “This is right in front of the cemetery and we’re saying, ‘This is who we are now.’”

Education has become central to their work. Rossi, though technically off the hook at the end of last year, is beginning a new chapter at Green-Wood. He and Charap are planning an Urban Grasslands Institute that will occupy space in a restored, landmarked greenhouse, where they’ll share land-management techniques with climate-change researchers, city parks managers, homeowners—a place to continue rethinking the American lawn.

I met Charap again on a cloudy spring morning in front of his residence at Green-Wood—a brownstone-clad, slate-roofed Gothic Revival gatehouse where he lives with his wife and their two young children—and we walked a short distance to the ridge that marks the southernmost reach of the last glacier in these parts. From there, we looked out upon the flatlands of Brooklyn and the rides of Coney Island along the Atlantic Ocean.

This choice vista had been claimed long ago by Stephen Whitney, the second richest man in New York, when he was laid to rest here in 1860. Whitney wouldn’t recognize the spot now, though; thickset oaks and poplars surround his gabled mausoleum, and seedlings of sweetgum and black cherry sprout from a leaf-strewn understory. In his day, Green-Wood’s official view of nature was benign, then later to be controlled. But never quite as hands off as this. “I have to resist the temptation to make Green-Wood a forest,” Charap said.

As Green-Wood runs out of burial space, Charap’s work is part of its evolution into a cultural institution overflowing with history, art, music, and social events. His goal, he told me, is to help Green-Wood reclaim its origins “as a public garden for the people.” But it seems more like a clean break from the past, in which the landscape now possesses a voice on par with its many private owners.

Below Whitney’s gravesite, Charap brought me to a colony of sassafras trees that had taken over the hillside. He snapped off a branch to expose its aromatic bark, which historically has been used for soaps, teas, root beer, and medicines. Sassafras, with its mitten-shaped leaves, typically moves into forest clearings and old fields—or an unmowed slope in a cemetery reimagining itself as it reaches its 200th birthday. Charap decided to run with this happenstance, so his crew trimmed openings through the flora to allow access to the headstones and tombs. These hardy trees would now attract dozens of butterfly and moth species, and the likes of robins and catbirds would feed on their deep blue berries. Left alone, they will sequester carbon for decades.

“Once you stop mowing, you don’t have to do much land management except for figuring out what’s native and what’s not native and deciding what to keep,” Charap said. “We didn’t choose this. But the landscape can occasionally speak for itself.”

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The $1 trillion infrastructure bill, passed late last week in a frenzied night vote, is not the Biden administration’s marquee climate package. That’s still being debated in the Senate. But it still reshapes American environmental policy: The bill takes unprecedented steps to address pollution from industrial sites, abandoned mines, and orphaned oil and gas wells.

The bill will inject billions of dollars into the federal government’s Superfund program, which cleans up the most polluted areas in the country. Superfund sites include former aluminum smelters that left the ground contaminated with arsenic, military bases that spilled jet fuel, benzene, and mustard gas into the soil, and even a plume of chlorine chemicals under Brooklyn. By the end of 2020, the Environmental Protection Agency had cleaned just over 1,500 sites.

In theory, the company that created the pollution is supposed to pay for the cleanup of a Superfund site. But in about one in three cases, those parties have gone bankrupt or otherwise disappeared by the time remediation begins, and the EPA foots the bill.

To pay for those instances, the new infrastructure bill revives a tax on imported toxic chemicals and metals, like benzene, chlorine, and cobalt. That tax expired in the 1990s, but bringing it back is projected to raise $14 billion over the course of a decade, E&E News reports.

“By renewing the Superfund tax, the industries that had a hand in creating the problem—not taxpayers—will once again be held accountable for cleaning it up,” said one of its sponsors, Representative Earl Blumenauer of Oregon, according to the American Bar Association.

After the tax expired, the EPA ran out of money to begin cleanups and seek reimbursement from polluters, the Center for Public Integrity wrote in 2010. The trust fund it used to pay for cleanups dropped from $4.7 billion to $173 million between 1997 and 2007, and work on new sites dropped by two thirds in the early 2000s. A February report from the Public Interest Research Group found that in 2020, 34 construction projects could have begun, but didn’t because of lack of funding.

That’s left communities vulnerable to the toxic effects of the remaining sites. In 2019, the US Government Accountability Office reported that 187 high priority sites were vulnerable to being flooded in a major hurricane, which can make pollutants circulate widely through floodwaters and seep into a wider stretch of land. Communities of color are especially at risk; 26 percent of Black Americans and 29 percent of Hispanic Americans live within 3 miles of a Superfund site. 

It wasn’t just environmental-justice focused senators who supported reinstating the tax. Republicans like Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, one of the country’s chemical manufacturing hubs, who says it’s worthwhile alongside the infrastructure bill’s other provisions. “Oh, it’s going to be huge. It is going to encourage expansion of chemical plants and all the service industries that work with those plants,” he told Baton Rouge TV station WAFB.

Orphaned well cleanup

The infrastructure bill also does something new: it orders the Department of Energy to develop a program to clean up oil and gas wells that were “orphaned” when the companies that leased them went out of business. According to an estimate by Reuters, there were between 3 and 9 million such abandoned wells in the United States in 2018.

These wells can leak for decades, spewing toxic gas and liquid poisoned with oil or fracking chemicals. The pipes that serve them are also often abandoned—about 97 percent of abandoned pipelines in the Gulf of Mexico have remained in place, according to the GAO. This year, an abandoned pipeline off the Louisiana coast broke after Hurricane Ida, producing a miles-long spill.

Abandoned oil and gas infrastructure also emits methane, which warms the planet 80 times faster than CO2 during its first 20 years in the atmosphere. The EPA estimates that altogether, orphaned wells are responsible for the equivalent of around two coal-fired power plants each year.

Orphaned wells are the result of boom-and-bust cycles in oil and gas. In boom years when oil prices are high, small companies jump into drilling. When the market goes belly up, they go bankrupt. In some cases, big companies even sell their leases to smaller operators who can’t afford to pay for cleanup. Drilling companies often have to pay upfront costs to cover well closures, but those payments aren’t high enough to cover the full cost, according to an analysis by the think tank Carbon Tracker.

That means taxpayers are left footing the bill for historic drilling. In one case, the city of Beverly Hills paid $40 million to plug abandoned wells on school district property that an oil company had been leasing for just $1 million a year. 

The infrastructure bill sets aside $4.7 billion to begin the process of cataloguing and closing those wells. The Biden administration touts the program as a job-creator in oil country: oil and gas workers will likely be the ones removing pipelines, pouring cement caps into the wells, and restoring the surrounding soil. The bill also gives the closure program the authority to go after the company “associated with the orphaned well” to cover the costs, although it’s unclear how effective that will be. But as the Guardian reported, the bill could end up creating an incentive for oil companies to neglect cleanup on the expectation that the federal government will take care of costs.

Carbon Tracker estimates that it will cost somewhere around $280 billion to cap all of the wells on the continental US, and dealing with offshore infrastructure will be even more expensive. And as the global economy shifts away from fossil fuels, that number is likely to grow significantly as wells close. The billions of dollars are the start of a new push to address the problem, but they almost certainly won’t be the end.

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The FSO Safer, a 45-year-old oil tanker, is floating aimlessly on the Red Sea that borders the shores of countries like Egypt, Jordan, Sudan, Djibouti, and Yemen. The rotting oil tanker was abandoned out in the sea back in 2017 filled with about 1.1 million barrels of oil poised to spill into the waters at any moment according to The New Yorker, worsening an already dire humanitarian crisis in the region. 

The more than 1 million barrels equal four times the amount of oil released by the massive Exxon Valdez spill in the Gulf of Alaska in 1989 polluted over 1,000 miles (more than 2,000 kilometers) of shoreline. The spill was so severe that in 1990 Congress passed the Oil Pollution Act, which created procedures for responding to future spills and established the legal liabilities of responsible parties following oil spills, in response. 

The tanker is moored off the coast of Yemen, a country that is in the throes of a humanitarian crisis due to an ongoing six year civil war. According to UNICEF, more than 20 million people are in need of help, including more than 11 million children. More than 2 million children under the age of five are experiencing acute malnutrition and more than 8 million do not have access to safe water. 

[Related: Citizens of Mauritius are cleaning up a major oil spill themselves.]

And if the deteriorating oil tanker spills more its contents of over 40 million gallons of oil, more than 8 million people will be cut off from safe running water and the region’s fishing stock will be destroyed, The Guardian reported. 

Researchers from the Stanford University School of Medicine published a study earlier this month on  how the highly likely spill could lead to public health effects in Yemen and neighboring countries in Nature Sustainability. The researchers found that when the oil spill happens, the risk of cardiovascular and respiratory hospitalizations for theYemeni population will increase by about six percent to more than 40 percent. Cleanup workers could experience a more than 500 percent increased risk of “cardiovascular and respiratory hospitalizations due to inhalation of fine particulate matter.” 

“We knew of course that there would be some negative impacts of an oil spill, but were surprised by how many people would be impacted in the majority of our scenarios,” David Rehkopf, an associate professor of epidemiology and population health and co-director of the Stanford Center for Population Health Sciences told Stanford Medicine News Center. 

Benjamin Huynh, a public health researcher and one of the study authors explains that the humanitarian crisis is going to make avoiding a spill harder as well as complicating clean up processes. Neither scenario will go well for people in the region.

[Related: Oil-eating bacteria can survive in frigid Canadian waters.]

“The most surprising thing to me was how ineffective  [clean up efforts] are,” he says. “If you look at previous times like the big major ones, like Deepwater Horizon, or Exxon Valdez, like, only like 10 to 15 percent of the oil ever gets cleaned up or recovered. Most of it just lingers in the ocean and it just stays there and nature just has to do with it.” 

Using data from previous spills and historical environmental data of tides in the Red Sea, Huynh and other researchers deduced that even in an optimistic scenario, the spill will affect millions of people’s health and livelihoods. The spill will further hurt access to food for Yemen, which could compound already existing humanitarian issues, in turn stressing nearby countries that will need to accommodate their own water and food supplies in response to the incoming spill, he says. 

“[The largest takeaway was] how striking the human toll of this will be in most scenarios,” he says. “The scale of it was pretty staggering. Being like, my number, nearly 10 million like losing water, like 6 million losing food… in the larger context of the war [the spill] is almost like an inevitability.”

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Benjamin Franta is a PhD candidate in History at Stanford University. This story originally published on The Conversation.

Four years ago, I traveled around America, visiting historical archives. I was looking for documents that might reveal the hidden history of climate change—and in particular, when the major coal, oil and gas companies became aware of the problem, and what they knew about it.

I pored over boxes of papers, thousands of pages. I began to recognize typewriter fonts from the 1960s and ‘70s and marveled at the legibility of past penmanship, and got used to squinting when it wasn’t so clear.

What those papers revealed is now changing our understanding of how climate change became a crisis. The industry’s own words, as my research found, show companies knew about the risk long before most of the rest of the world.

On October 28, 2021, a Congressional subcommittee questioned executives from Exxon, BP, Chevron, Shell, and the American Petroleum Institute about industry efforts to downplay the role of fossil fuels in climate change. Exxon CEO Darren Woods told lawmakers that his company’s public statements “are and have always been truthful” and that the company “does not spread disinformation regarding climate change.”

Here’s what corporate documents from the past six decades show.

Surprising discoveries

At an old gunpowder factory in Delaware—now a museum and archive—I found a transcript of a petroleum conference from 1959 called the “Energy and Man” symposium, held at Columbia University in New York. As I flipped through, I saw a speech from a famous scientist, Edward Teller (who helped invent the hydrogen bomb), warning the industry executives and others assembled of global warming.

“Whenever you burn conventional fuel,” Teller explained, “you create carbon dioxide. … Its presence in the atmosphere causes a greenhouse effect.” If the world kept using fossil fuels, the ice caps would begin to melt, raising sea levels. Eventually, “all the coastal cities would be covered,” he warned.

1959 was before the moon landing, before the Beatles’ first single, before Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, before the first modern aluminum can was ever made. It was decades before I was born. What else was out there?

In Wyoming, I found another speech at the university archives in Laramie—this one from 1965, and from an oil executive himself. That year, at the annual meeting of the American Petroleum Institute, the main organization for the U.S. oil industry, the group’s president, Frank Ikard, mentioning a report called “Restoring the Quality of Our Environment” that had been published just a few days before by President Lyndon Johnson’s team of scientific advisers.

“The substance of the report,” Ikard told the industry audience, “is that there is still time to save the world’s peoples from the catastrophic consequences of pollution, but time is running out.” He continued that “One of the most important predictions of the report is that carbon dioxide is being added to the earth’s atmosphere by the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas at such a rate that by the year 2000 the heat balance will be so modified as possibly to cause marked changes in climate.”

Ikard noted that the report had found that a “nonpolluting means of powering automobiles, buses, and trucks is likely to become a national necessity.”

As I reviewed my findings back in California, I realized that before San Francisco’s Summer of Love, before Woodstock, the peak of the ’60s counterculture and all that stuff that seemed ancient history to me, the heads of the oil industry had been privately informed by their own leaders that their products would eventually alter the climate of the entire planet, with dangerous consequences.

Secret research revealed the risks ahead

While I traveled the country, other researchers were hard at work too. And the documents they found were in some ways even more shocking.

By the late 1970s, the American Petroleum Institute had formed a secret committee called the “CO2 and Climate Task Force,” which included representatives of many of the major oil companies, to privately monitor and discuss the latest developments in climate science.

In 1980, the task force invited a scientist from Stanford University, John Laurmann, to brief them on the state of climate science. Today, we have a copy of Laurmann’s presentation, which warned that if fossil fuels continued to be used, global warming would be “barely noticeable” by 2005, but by the 2060s would have “globally catastrophic effects.” That same year, the American Petroleum Institute called on governments to triple coal production worldwide, insisting there would be no negative consequences despite what it knew internally.

Exxon had a secretive research program too. In 1981, one of its managers, Roger Cohen, sent an internal memo observing that the company’s long-term business plans could “produce effects which will indeed be catastrophic (at least for a substantial fraction of the earth’s population).”

The next year, Exxon completed a comprehensive, 40-page internal report on climate change, which predicted almost exactly the amount of global warming we’ve seen, as well as sea level rise, drought and more. According to the front page of the report, it was “given wide circulation to Exxon management” but was “not to be distributed externally.”

And Exxon did keep it secret: We know of the report’s existence only because investigative journalists at Inside Climate News uncovered it in 2015.

Other oil companies knew the effects their products were having on the planet too. In 1986, the Dutch oil company Shell finished an internal report nearly 100 pages long, predicting that global warming from fossil fuels would cause changes that would be “the greatest in recorded history,” including “destructive floods,” abandonment of entire countries and even forced migration around the world. That report was stamped “CONFIDENTIAL” and only brought to light in 2018 by Jelmer Mommers, a Dutch journalist.

In October 2021, I and two French colleagues published another study showing through company documents and interviews how the Paris-based oil major Total was also aware of global warming’s catastrophic potential as early as the 1970s. Despite this awareness, we found that Total then worked with Exxon to spread doubt about climate change.

Big Oil’s PR pivot

These companies had a choice.

Back in 1979, Exxon had privately studied options for avoiding global warming. It found that with immediate action, if the industry moved away from fossil fuels and instead focused on renewable energy, fossil fuel pollution could start to decline in the 1990s and a major climate crisis could be avoided.

But the industry didn’t pursue that path. Instead, colleagues and I recently found that in the late 1980s, Exxon and other oil companies coordinated a global effort to dispute climate science, block fossil fuel controls, and keep their products flowing.

We know about it through internal documents and the words of industry insiders, who are now beginning to share what they saw with the public. We also know that in 1989, the fossil fuel industry created something called the Global Climate Coalition—but it wasn’t an environmental group like the name suggests; instead, it worked to sow doubt about climate change and lobbied lawmakers to block clean energy legislation and climate treaties throughout the 1990s.

For example, in 1997, the Global Climate Coalition’s chairman, William O’Keefe, who was also an executive vice president for the American Petroleum Institute, wrote in the Washington Post that “climate scientists don’t say that burning oil, gas and coal is steadily warming the earth,” contradicting what the industry had known for decades. The fossil fuel industry also funded think tanks and biased studies that helped slow progress to a crawl.

Today, most oil companies shy away from denying climate science outright, but they continue to fight fossil fuel controls and promote themselves as clean energy leaders even though they still put the vast majority of their investments into fossil fuels. As I write this, climate legislation is again being blocked in Congress by a lawmaker with close ties to the fossil fuel industry.

People around the world, meanwhile, are experiencing the effects of global warming: weird weather, shifting seasons, extreme heat waves, and even wildfires like they’ve never seen before.

Will the world experience the global catastrophe that the oil companies predicted years before I was born? That depends on what we do now, with our slice of history.

Editor’s note: This article was updated Oct. 28, 2021, with quotes from the hearing.

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The following is an excerpt from Thicker Than Water: The Quest for Solutions to the Plastic Crisis by Erica Cirino.

Cancer Alley snakes 85 miles along both banks of the Mississippi, forming a patchwork of sugarcane plantations and petrochemical complexes, the former with a legacy of slavery and soil degradation and the latter with a legacy of spills, explosions, and widespread pollution. As industry has closed in, breathing room has been hard to come by. Many people who live on the industrial fenceline are fearful for their lives.

At one fenceline, in Welcome, St. James Parish, Louisiana, I met Sharon Lavigne, who recently won a Goldman Environmental Prize for her environmental justice activism. Lavigne founded a Christian faith–based activist organization, called RISE St. James, in 2018 to stand against a $1.25 billion plastic plant proposed by Chinese chemical company Wanhua. RISE spoke out. The plant was never constructed.

Most recently, Lavigne has spoken out against the planned construction of a $9.4 billion plastic and petrochemical complex in Welcome, a predominantly African American community. So far, she and RISE have succeeded in staving off the completion of this latest industrial development—owned by FG LA LLC, a company related to major Taiwanese manufacturing conglomerate Formosa Plastics—to buy up land in St. James Parish, through an assortment of justice-seeking community actions and other campaigns. Formosa Plastics is the world’s fourth-largest producer of petrochemicals and plastic.

Earlier this year, United Nations human rights experts called for an end to racism in Cancer Alley, a place where communities of color bear disproportionate risk to industrial hazards. This month, a new report on Formosa Plastics runs through the company’s messy environmental, economic, and legal track records. One of experts’ top recommendations: rescind Formosa’s permits in St. James, Louisiana; get the company out.

Some may believe that, in a region already replete with chemicals, stopping Formosa—one plastic plant—would provide only trivial benefits to public health. In reality, such a victory would not only spare the residents of St. James from additional exposure to pollutants but would also be a win in the fight against climate change—another massive crisis we are now facing. 

Scientists agree we must now wean ourselves off substances that contribute to climate change when extracted, processed, and burned—namely, oil shales, bitumens, tar sands, coal, petroleum, natural gas, and heavy oils—and we must stop continued industrial development.

[Related: Will we ever be able to recycle all our plastic?]

As Peggy Shepard, co-founder and executive director of WE ACT for Environmental Justice in New York and newly appointed co-chair of the White House’s first environmental justice advisory council told me: “It is essential to dismantle these institutions, because they are not going to concede power on their own. We must transition away from an economy based on fossil fuels, and that includes plastics. Our future depends on that.” 

And as we build up a new, renewable-powered world, “We need to ensure that it serves everyone—not just those currently in positions of power,” Shepard added. Focusing on equity, rather than equality, she said, and prioritizing underserved communities’ transition from fossil fuels and plastic production to renewable energy sources and materials is a good place to start. “Decades of disinvestment driven by racism has put communities of color at a massive disadvantage. This is our opportunity to fix that.”

Our collective attention to climate change continues to grow as its deleterious effects—warmer air and seas, widespread wildfires, more intense and frequent storms, and species extinction, among them— become more apparent to us all. But humanity has collectively struggled to take the necessary step of shutting down the fossil fuel and plastic industries, because we have become entirely reliant on fossil fuels to navigate our hyperconnected, super-fast modern human society. 

Recently, we got a glimpse of what leaning less heavily on fossil fuels could mean for us—and the industries we must disassemble: those dealing in oil, gas, petrochemicals, and plastic. 

By April 2020, the coronavirus pandemic ground daily life to a halt for many people around the world. During the pandemic’s peak, our carbon footprints were smaller than they’d been in a long time. Lockdowns, travel bans, business shutdowns, quarantines, and curfews forced people to stay local and make do. As a result, the world’s collective carbon dioxide emissions dropped by 17 percent from 2019 levels.

This is a not-insignificant number when you consider that the world’s top climate scientists say global emissions must fall by at least 7.6 percent annually until 2030 in order for humanity to even slightly reduce the disastrous, rapidly accelerating consequences of climate change.

Consequently, as the pandemic hit and demand for and values of oil and gas dropped precipitously, some smaller petrochemical companies were forced to shutter while a few larger companies issued temporary plant shutdowns and employee furloughs. 

Meanwhile, residents of some of the world’s largest cities—at least, those not living in wildfire zones—collectively reported that the air they breathed seemed cleaner than usual, even in some notoriously smoggy urban centers.

As soon as regulations implemented to quell the pandemic were eased later that spring, global emissions began rising and air quality plummeted again, especially in industrial areas. By June 2020, lifting and uneven restrictions on travel and work pushed the world’s greenhouse gas emissions back up to a measly 5 percent below 2019 levels, according to a report by the World Meteorological Organization.

Although the slowdown in emissions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic was temporary, some experts, including climate activist Bill McKibben—author of The End of Nature, the first popular book written on global warming, published in 1989—have posited that petrochemical companies are finally losing some of their political and economic clout. “It’s not a spent force by any means, but, even in the past few weeks, events have shown it to be waning where for a century and a half it has waxed,” McKibben wrote in The New Yorker in 2020. In his article, he cites grassroots efforts protesting petrochemical development, university divestment campaigns, and the development of affordable renewable energy as major contributors to the fossil fuel industry’s downshift in power. 

But the fossil fuel corporations have a last ditch plan to counteract diminishing demand: make more plastic. “It’s no surprise to see that fossil fuel corporations have turned to plastics as a lifeline as climate change concerns reduce the demand for fuel,” John Hocevar, Greenpeace’s Ocean Campaigns director, told me. 

Indeed, sensing a global shift in climate change policy, and reacting to new emissions agreements, Big Oil and Gas is banking on turning ancient carbon stocks—particularly shale gas—into plastic, instead of continuing to produce fossil fuels primarily to be burned for energy. In the US alone, major petrochemical companies like ExxonMobil, Saudi Aramco, and Shell have put more than $200 billion into several hundred natural gas plastic and chemical facilities since 2010, according to the American Chemistry Council.

[Related: To prevent catastrophic global warming, we need to leave fossils fuels in the ground.]

Plastic production reached 311 million metric tons globally in 2014. That number is expected to double before 2030 and quadruple by 2050. Sales of petrochemicals, including those used to make plastic, regularly earn the world’s top fossil-fuel dealers annual revenues in the tens of billions of dollars. These super wealthy corporations continue to target their development in underserved communities. In the US, plastic production is ramping up along the Louisiana and Texas Gulf Coast and in Cancer Alley, where so much petrochemical infrastructure already exists in communities of color. It’s also expanding in the rural Ohio River Valley and Appalachia, where fracking wells brimming with natural gas are polluting thousands of low income neighborhoods. 

Plastic can be made from either oil or gas, and so are most of its additives. Plastic’s main ingredients are pulled from freshly extracted fossil fuels in oil refineries and gas processing plants: naphtha, a crude oil–based substance; and ethane, a liquid natural gas. 

Extracting fossil fuels from the earth and turning them into plastic requires not only massive amounts of petrochemicals but also energy—and currently, this energy comes from burning more fossil fuels. Petrochemicals—including those used to make plastic—are set to become the biggest driver of growth for the global oil industry by 2050. And petrochemicals are expected to become a significant driver of gas industry growth: By 2030, global production of petrochemicals will require an additional 56 billion cubic meters of gas—approximately half of all of Canada’s present level of natural gas consumption. Greenhouse gas emissions linked to plastic production now hover around 900 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year. That number is expected to surpass 1.3 billion metric tons, the equivalent annual carbon output of nearly three hundred coal fired power plants, by 2030. Those numbers exclude greenhouse gas emissions emitted during recycling and incineration, which also require energy, as well as landfills, which emit high levels of potent greenhouse gases, and from plastic itself. 

Many of the people worst affected by the climate crisis are also affected by environmental racism. Like Sharon Lavigne and her neighbors in St. James. Southern Louisiana has proven among the regions hardest-hit by severe weather such as high temperatures and humidity, and rising and warming seas. Katrina, Rita, Harvey, Laura, Delta, Ida…. The storms are rolling in faster, harder, more devastatingly each time.

It’s clear: The more plastic people choose to put on the planet, the more forcefully humanity condemns itself to life on a dangerously warming planet—unfairly burdening some more than others.

Excerpted from Thicker Than Water: The Quest for Solutions to the Plastic Crisis by Erica Cirino; Copyright © 2021 by the author. Reproduced by permission of Island Press, Washington, D.C.

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It’s no secret that oil spills are a pain and burden to clean up. As infrastructure continues to wear down and storms rage harder, spills may become even trickier to manage (just look at the 2,000 reports of pollution left behind in the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Ida). Generally speaking, there are an average of 1.8 “large” spills worldwide  each year, but thousands of smaller ones pop up as well. 

The particular oil spill that’s been in the headlines this month is a 144,000-gallon oil leak off the shore of Southern California’s Huntington Beach. (That number is still very much in debate and some officials place that number under 30,000). While that’s still much smaller than Exxon Valdez, which let out 11 million gallons of oil back in 1989, and Deepwater Horizon, which released more than 134 million gallons just over a decade ago),even a modest spill can cause irreparable damage to wildlife in a region—like immediate death to fish and birds and long-term impacts of contaminated food supplies and ecosystems. 

“It’s not in the range of Exxon or that kind of thing, but that doesn’t mean it won’t have localized impacts,” says Nancy Kinner, a professor of civil, environmental, and ocean engineering at the University of New Hampshire.

A known timeline of the spill

The San Pedro Bay Pipeline is owned by Houston-based Amplify Energy, and has been in operation since 1980. Ironically enough, it was up for inspection by the end of the month, according to California Governor Gavin Newsom.

The EPA’s National Response Center was first alerted to the spill on October 1 after it received a report of a mysterious sheen atop the water. That same evening, however, some locals noticed the stench of gas in the air. 

The next day around 2 a.m., Beta Offshore, a subsidiary of Amplify, finally noticed a low-pressure alarm and shut off the pipeline at around 6 a.m. Three hours later, Beta Offshore finally notified state and federal authorities. 

“If that’s true, then that’s pretty terrible for what’s going on, because that means there could have been less oil that would be leaking if they had turned it off sooner,” Orange County Supervisor Katrina Foley told the local CBS station. Meanwhile, 1.5 million people were out on the beach watching the Pacific Airshow, which started at 10 a.m. the same day. Coast Guard officials believed the oil spill would reach the coast Monday, but by early Sunday afternoon, oil was already surrounding anchored boats. The beach was shut down and swimmers were required to get out of the water by Huntington Beach itself at 5 p.m. By 7 p.m. the oil was lapping up the shoreline. 

On Sunday, the city released a statement discussing clean-up efforts, which included 2,050 feet of protective booms in seven locations set up by local response efforts. Clean-up efforts were also headed by the Coast Guard and Amplify Energy.

Further exploration by divers discovered the root of the problem: a 13-inch split in the pipeline and a 4,000-foot section that had shifted out of place by more than 100 feet, possibly after being hooked by an anchor. On Tuesday, Governor Newsom declared a state of emergency for Huntington Beach. As of Friday, tar balls possibly linked to the spill have been found as south as San Diego county.

Waves upon waves of lawsuits

So who is responsible for the spill and the continued cleanup? Authorities were notified about the leaked oil 12 hours before Amplify reported anything, meaning that it could’ve theoretically been contained hours before it actually was. And as stress from incoming weather approached early this week, the timeline for the cleanup was even more crunched. Huntington Beach itself has not filed a lawsuit yet, but there’s still no estimate for when the beach will reopen, and could possibly take weeks or months to recover. 

[Related: The environment won’t be helped by oil producers declaring bankruptcy]

Within days, lawsuits started springing up against Amplify Energy, starting with Peter Moses Gutierrez Jr., a local DJ who said he could lose business due to the company’s sow reaction to the spill.

Property owners have also filed lawsuits against the energy company, stating “it appears that defendants did not promptly act to respond to signs of the pipeline’s failure or notify relevant government agencies,” according to the local Fox station. The Banzai Surf School in Huntington Beach filed another suit Thursday. 

On Thursday, the Orange County District Attorney’s office launched a criminal investigation against Amplify Energy. 

Bigger implications for oil in California

While many think of California as a safe haven for renewable energy—it’s installed the most solar energy capacity out of any other state and has been leading the charge on EV policy—it’s still far from environmentally perfect. Though it hasn’t issued a new offshore-oil-drilling lease in five decades, it hasn’t shut down any of its underwater pipelines either. There are still 19 oil and gas agreements in California’s coastal waters and 1,200 active wells; in 2020, the state produced 394,000 barrels of oil daily, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

[Related: To prevent catastrophic global warming, we need to leave fossils fuels in the ground]

Recent surveys, however, show that Californians don’t support these pumping operations. A survey from July found that nearly three-quarters of Californians oppose developing new offshore drilling. Not to mention, back in 2018 the state committed to 100 percent renewable and zero-carbon energy by 2045, which would call for an end to offshore oil pipelines.

The dangerous and potentially criminal oil spill could be the last straw for many—including powerful Californians like the governor himself. “We need to grow up, grow out of this dependency and this mindset that we can’t do more and do better,” Newsom said about fossil fuels during a press conference in Huntington Beach this week. Volunteers are still being recruited to clean up the beach and affected areas. Still, there will be more research and investigation before anyone knows the full scope of the damage the spill will have on the people and wildlife in the area.

“Where we are at right now is the early days,” Kinner says.

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As the climate crisis rages on, banks and investors are starting to reckon with the effects of the crisis on the banking system. Banks are losing trillions of dollars worth of assets from both the physical threat of climate change and ever-changing policies, Reuters reports. Not to mention, the financial industry isn’t faultless when it comes to their own footprints. Dozens of major banks invested several trillion dollars in risky fossil fuel investments during the five years following the Paris Agreement. Still, large businesses, banks, and universities are starting to divest from fossil fuels and high-carbon emitting industries. 

But there’s another way for  companies and institutions to follow a more sustainable standard by putting money in the system instead of taking it out—ESGs. The buzzy term stands for “environmental, social, and governance” and is a set of standards for a company’s operations used to screen potential investments. For an individual investor, a typical ESG could look like opening an online brokerage account and checking off settings for a portfolio that is low risk and high in social responsibility. For a company or institution, it means putting ​​”capital in corporations that proactively govern and operate in an ethical and sustainable manner,” according to Nasdaq. 

Etienne Cadestin, the founder and CEO of Longevity Partners, an environmental consulting firm based out of the United Kingdom, calls ESGs “housekeeping” for companies that are concerned about their environmental impact and managing risk for businesses. 

[Related: How to find a bank that shares your commitment to the environment.]

“ESG investments are considered as a separate asset class but it shouldn’t be,” Cadestin argues. “ESG should be incorporated in every business’s modus operandi … it’s a best practice. It’s all about running a responsible business.” 

He is hopeful about the use of ESGs in current and future investments, and is excited to witness how quickly businesses are discussing responsible investing. Companies like his, as well as well known consulting firms like Deloitte and McKinsey & Company have come out of those conversations to guide others into sustainable and responsible investing. 

Cadestin started his career in 2009  working at the United Nations Environment Program on building a green economy, something unheard of at the time, he explains. The green economy is “low carbon, resource efficient and socially inclusive,” and growth in this economy is driven by reducing pollution and investing in sustainable energy, he says. 

“Climate change is accelerating and the sort of physical risks associated with climate change are real and we see it everyday, we’ve seen the floods in Germany, the fires everywhere,” he says. “Over the last two years I think there’s a huge state of consciousness that has risen.” 

Rebecca Greenan, Senior Vice President of Finance & Operations at software company Crux OCM says that ESGs are becoming more widely used across different industries to become more transparent about the impact of their investments or products. 

“(ESGs) are the three key tenets in measuring the sustainability and societal impact of a company,” she says.  “By analyzing how a company contributes to sustainable development, we can better determine the future financial performance of that company.”

[Related: Your retirement account can also help protect the planet.]

Greenan also explains that ESGs are also a vehicle for companies to align with their shareholders’ values. But there, as with many “sustainability” movements, there  is concern that ESGs can easily become another way for companies to greenwash their practices. According to a report from MarketWatch, “with the rise of consumer and investor interest in ESG comes the rise in greenwashing.” Greenan says investors should keep an eye out for how transparent a company is about their funds. 

“A genuine ESG program includes going to your supply chain and augmenting every single metric to ensure it is meeting ESG targets,” she says.  “[An] ESG has the potential to touch every single aspect and department of a company. Everything from infrastructure that they are building, to field operations, to transportation to internal systems and corporate culture. When you can ask any employee of any rank within the company what the company is doing to fulfill their ESG strategy and they can come up with an answer, you have a genuine ESG program.” 

She explains that if a potential investor or customer wants to ensure that a company they are interested in is not just greenwashing, they should ensure that the company’s ESG is transparent about the metrics used to measure impact. 

“When compensation is tied to ESG metrics with third party auditing, the company is showing that they are serious about implementing their ESG strategy,” she said. 

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Carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels must nearly completely cease in the next couple decades to have a chance at keeping climate warming within a relatively safe level for humanity.

As last month’s IPCC report made clear, even if global emissions move to a very low carbon track, we’ll likely hit 1.5ºC of surface warming by midcentury, passing a target that global leaders have set as a goal to limit the worst effects of climate change. But, in a near future world of net-zero emissions, this could be a temporary “overshoot”, and we might be able to wrangle the atmosphere back within that boundary by 2100. 

So, what do these warnings mean for the actual reserves of these hydrocarbons—coal, oil, and natural gas—that countries sit on top of? A new study, published Wednesday in Nature, estimates how much of fossil fuel reserves must be left in the ground for a 50 percent chance of limiting warming to 1.5ºC. “This is a very important study because it provides updated estimates which are specific to the [1.5ºC] target of the Paris agreement,” Mathew Barlow, a climate scientist at the University of Massachusetts Lowell who wasn’t involved with the paper, told PopSci in an email. 

Right now, the majority of the world’s energy is still harvested from hydrocarbons, though their use seems to be leveling off in some cases. Global coal production peaked in 2013 and coal plants are increasingly retiring. Oil extraction seems to have plateaued in recent years. But fossil gas (AKA “natural gas”) has yet to crest (apart from a pandemic-related dip in 2020), having become a major supply to meet increased energy demand and a fuel viewed by the industry as a “transition fuel”—or perhaps a way to buy time as the climate crisis grows ever more pressing. 

According to the most recent UN Emissions Gap Report, the climate mitigation policies that countries around the world have pledged are not enough to meet the international Paris Agreement goals of 1.5 or, less ideally, 2ºC warming. The fossil fuel production that countries have planned is 120 percent higher than what’s acceptable for staying within 1.5ºC of warming.

[Related: The 4 biggest lessons from the latest IPCC climate report]

To further illustrate how much reserves we should be leaving in the ground, the Nature study authors, all researchers at University College London, used a global energy system model. By working backward from an emissions trajectory that results in keeping temperatures within the 1.5ºC target, they calculated what proportion of current identified fossil fuel reserves could be mined within that emissions budget. They found that, globally, 58 percent of oil, 59 percent of fossil gas, and 89 percent of coal needs to stay in the ground for a 50-50 shot at limiting warming this century to 1.5ºC. (In a press briefing, coauthor James Price, an energy and climate change researcher, said that 50-50 chance is “essentially at the very limit of what our model can solve for” given assumed constraints such as global energy demand).

Their analysis included economic factors that determined the most cost-effective approach countries could take. That means that nations in which it’s both expensive and carbon-intensive to mine hydrocarbons would need to leave a greater amount in the ground. In Canada, for example, where oil sands represent an abundant but difficult and dirty resource to extract, would need to leave 82 percent of its reserves alone. This global cost-benefit analysis could be helpful for thinking about how countries could collaborate for the greater good of limiting carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere, says Jean-François Lamarque, a climate scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research. “That’s one of the issues, the degree of cooperation between countries.”

To reach the level of reduced extraction required, many countries would need to peak fossil fuel production in the next few years. Fossil fuel production would need to decline by a global average of 3 percent every year to 2050.

After 2050, in the model, only a few hard-to-decarbonize sectors would continue to use hydrocarbons. These include the petrochemical industry, for uses like manufacturing plastics. Airplane engines may also prove tricky to switch to zero carbon fuels. 

“This has wide implications for businesses and countries who are not accounting for these large needed changes and highlights the stark contrast between what needs to be done to meet the 1.5C target and what is actually being done,” says Barlow. “For instance, any new or continued development of fossil fuel infrastructure like oil or gas pipelines is clearly not consistent with limiting warming to 1.5ºC or 2ºC and is very likely a huge financial risk as well, as such projects will likely become “stranded assets” in the near future.”

“Further investment in fossil fuel extraction is not compatible [with mitigating climate change], as shown by this research,” coauthor and energy systems researcher Steve Pye said in the press briefing. “And this is particularly important for climate leaders who are looking at projects in their own backyard and overseas.” Countries that have historically benefitted from fossil fuel extraction should take the lead on leaving their remaining reserves in the ground, write the authors in the paper, and support other countries that rely on hydrocarbon production for their economy and have limited ability to transition.

[Related: Offshore wind has huge potential. Here’s how it could change the US.]

The authors also emphasize that—while they’ve made a thorough effort to estimate what needs to stay in the ground—it’s probably an underestimate. For one, we’re talking about a 50-50 chance; if we want better odds, we have to scale down production even faster. There’s also the looming uncertainty around earth system feedback loops that could lead to accelerated warming, as well as the scalability of technologies like direct carbon capture, which is currently very expensive. 

The window for this action is small, but still technically feasible. “It really is a case of having the political will to resist the temptation of extracting every last bit of fossil fuels and focusing on really pushing hard on the low carbon economy,” Price said in the press briefing. “It really comes down to the politics of the situation.”

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Over 40 major oil spills—each over 10,000 barrels or 420,000 gallons—into United States waters since the late 1960s, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The largest one being the 2010 Deepwater Horizon well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico. The explosion killed 11 people and more than ten years after the major spill, scientists are still unsure about the long-term environmental impacts.

Oil spills are a result of human activity, including deep sea or offshore oil drilling. Still, marine environments have a  mechanism to break down the oil that ends up in the water—bacteria. New research recently published in Applied and Environmental Microbiology, outlines that marine bacteria found in chilly Canadian seas are capable of biodegrading oil and diesel fuel in response to oil spills.

In the past, researchers have looked at bacteria blooms in warmer waters at around 30 degrees Celsius and found oil dissolving bacteria in warmer waters like the Gulf of Mexico. This new research, conducted at around only 4 degrees Celsius, looked at the frigid waters in the Labrador Sea and confirmed that oil biodegrading bacteria is found internationally. 

[Related: The 4 biggest lessons from the latest IPCC climate report.]

“The study also confirmed that providing nutrients can enhance hydrocarbon biodegradation under these low temperature conditions,” says coauthor Casey Hubert, an associate professor of geomicrobiology at the University of Calgary in a press release. 

This means that the bacteria can be supported in their cleanup work according to the study’s findings. These findings are especially timely as interest in maritime shipping and offshore oil off the coast of Canada has grown. In 2018, the Newfoundland and Labrador government published a plan that envisioned drilling “over 100 new exploration wells” and basins that would produce “over 650,000 barrels of oil per day” by 2030. 

Sean Murphy, a Newfoundland native, environmental consultant, and aquatic scientist, also assisted in the research. According to Murphy, a team member took some bacteria samples from the Labrador Sea off the Canadian East Coast in around 2015 and genomic sequencing revealed the potential for hydrocarbon bioremediation or pollution breakdown. The captured bacteria lineages including Paraperlucidibaca, Cycloclasticus, and Zhongshania, which have been spotted in other marine environments previously but not the icy waters of the Labrador Sea. 

“This is the first time that [Paraperlucidibaca has] ever shown any sort of ability to degrade oil which is pretty exciting that we’re still discovering new microbes and new environments that have these capabilities,” Murphy says. 

[Related: Methane is the greenhouse gas we can no longer afford to ignore.]

He also says that this study reinforces the concept that providing the bacteria with more nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus helps increase the bacteria’s ability to break down oil spills and diesel in water. Fertilizers rich in both nitrogen and phosphorus are often added near an oil spill to boost the naturally occurring bacteria’s metabolism, Murphy says, which facilitates a quicker breakdown of the oil. 

“We can help to sort of boost their metabolism by adding nutrients which is one of the things that we tested in this study so biostimulation is one approach … nutrients are quite limiting in the [ocean] environment and if you provide bacteria with nutrients in a certain ratio to the oil … it allows them to kind of bloom and use the oil more efficiently,” he says. 

Murphy suggests that in the future, identifying bacteria in marine environments could be part of resilience plants for mitigating potential future spills. Understanding what bacteria is present in all kinds of waters, including towards the Arctic, could ensure better oil cleanup. 

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You may have heard the story of the tortoise and the hare, and how the lesson is that slow and steady wins the race. But what happens when the race changes from a marathon to a sprint?

For years, climate scientists have seen carbon dioxide as our tortoise—the slow, steady enemy we need to wrestle back to prevent climate change. And it’s true, CO₂ has a half life of somewhere between 19 to 49 years, meaning it stays in the Earth’s atmosphere anywhere from 300 to 1,000 years. That’s why over the past century or so, it’s been the key culprit in the greenhouse gas effect. 

Now comes the hare in this climate fable. Methane, the second-most emitted greenhouse gas on the planet, is at least 25 times more effective than carbon dioxide at keeping heat locked in the atmosphere. But it also has a much shorter half-life, lingering in the air for less than a decade. So, it’s been somewhat overlooked as a catalyst for a warming world.

The IPCC report last week finally corrected the record by adding methane emissions to the list of climate change priorities to tackle in the next decade. 

[Related: You can’t escape climate change by moving to New Zealand]

“The big take-home nugget for me is they said if you look at all the warming activity done by humans over the last century … carbon dioxide has contributed 0.75 degrees Celsius, while methane has contributed to 0.5 degrees Celsius,” says Bob Howarth, a professor of ecology and environmental biology at Cornell University.

This new focus on methane calls for even more serious changes to the way the world is powered, fed, and cleaned up.

Where does methane come from?

The first thing people might think of when it comes to methane pollution are cows—and for good reason. Agriculture is one of the biggest contributors to CH₄ emissions, largely because of how livestock digest their food and have their waste disposed. But methane can come from pretty much anywhere food or plants decompose without oxygen, like marshes, landfills, and fossil fuels.

In the past, we’ve underestimated how much methane is emitted by human practices. According to a 2020 study by University of Rochester scientists, levels of “naturally released” methane reported in the atmosphere were 10 times too high. On the flip side, fossil fuel-based methane is actually about 25 to 40 percent higher than previously predicted. The researchers discovered this after doing a deep dive into different carbon-14 isotopes, many of which traced back to natural gas. 

[Related: New satellites can pinpoint methane leaks to help us beat climate change]

Strangely enough, natural gas has slid by posing as a “bridge fuel”—the ticket to help low- and middle-income countries get from a fossil fuel-run energy system to a more renewable one. But the switch hasn’t even happened in wealthier nations: Nearly 40 percent of the US’s electricity comes from natural gas, and only 20 percent from renewables like solar, wind, and hydroelectric.

“The question is: Is this a bridge fuel, or is it going to be around for a very long time?” environmental economist Sheila Olmstead told National Geographic last year. “The market is telling us it’s probably going to be around for a long time.”

How do we scrub methane from our lives?

The IPCC report makes it clear that even if it only lurks in the atmosphere for a little while, methane has influenced the deadly impacts we’ve seen from climate change. To keep the world from going off the cliff, methane emissions must be capped, just like carbon dioxide is.

“I think what happens over the next decade is critical,” says Howarth. “We’re already seeing bigger fires, bigger droughts, losses in potential agricultural production, and more floods.”

Now that the IPCC has laid out the projections for the race, managing the contenders will be the most important task. US policy seems to be headed in the right direction, as Obama-era methane rules for the oil and gas industries are back on the table. Meat and dairy producers are experimenting with new techniques to slim down their CH₄ output, and international groups are working to combat food waste. We have our work cut out for us; in this case, slow and steady won’t get it done.

Correction: This post originally stated methane is at least 25 percent more effective at trapping heat than carbon dioxide. Methane is actually 25 times more effective than carbon dioxide at trapping heat.

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For all our talk of an online future unbounded by physical limits, life in our increasingly global economy still requires the movement of actual people and things, often over long distances. And without a steady supply of prehistoric hydrocarbons, that movement would come to a halt. More than 95 percent of the vehicles on Earth–from cars to trucks to freighters to jumbo jets–run on oil products, and without them we’d be hard-pressed to commute to the office or import our gadgets, much less till our fields or get food from the farm to our kitchens. For now, we must have oil.

Our dependence on oil is driven less by the political might of the oil industry than it is by the fact that oil itself is a terrific source of power. It packs more energy into less space than any other commonly available resource, and it requires much less energy to produce. In the Middle East, where “easy” oil remains most plentiful, drillers need only invest a single barrel’s worth of energy to produce a full 30 barrels of crude. That is among the highest ratios of energy returned on energy invested, or EROEI, for any widely available source of power on the planet. (That same barrel’s worth of production energy, for instance, would get you fewer than two barrels of corn ethanol.) Oil’s amazing efficiency is one reason it remains in such high demand, especially for transportation, and it’s also why finding an alternative will be so difficult.

We face some complex choices, not just about where to extract what kind of oil, but also about when to extract it.But find one we must. We have already burned our way through most of the world’s easy oil. Now we’re drilling for the hard stuff: unconventional resources such as shale and heavy oil that will be more difficult and expensive to discover, extract, and refine. The environmental costs are also on the rise. Oil production remains a significant local ecological hazard—as we were reminded by the disastrous failure of the Deepwater Horizon well in the Gulf of Mexico last year–even as oil’s large carbon footprint threatens the global environment as a whole.

Bridging the gap between our current oil economy and an as-yet-undefined clean-energy economy will not be easy. Alternative systems, such as hybrid cars powered by biofuel drawn from oceanic algae farms, may be vastly more sustainable someday. But “sustainability” is an economic concept as much as it is an environmental one. People will always prefer cheap energy to expensive energy. (Indeed, many people in less-wealthy nations require cheap energy simply to survive.) And the process of making alternative energy systems affordable will be long and uncertain, in part because the oil-based systems they must compete against (internal combustion engines, for instance) will themselves become even more efficient and alluring.

Steam Heat

Even if we were ready to mass-produce a new generation of, say, biofueled plug-in hybrid electric cars by 2020, and even if we–in an absurdly best-case scenario–started cranking out those new cars as fast as we now make gas guzzlers (about 70 million a year, worldwide), we would still need another 15 years to swap out the fleet. In the meantime, oil consumption will continue to rise, as demand from fast-growing economies in Asia outweighs any green gains by Western nations.

David Victor, an international energy policy specialist at the University of California at San Diego, says consumption won’t even begin tapering off for another 20 years. At that point, daily consumption, now at 85 million barrels a day (mbd), will have topped 100 mbd. Realistically, says James Sweeney, director of the Precourt Energy Efficiency Center at Stanford University, cutting global oil consumption to a more economically and environmentally tolerable level (say, 30 mbd) will probably take at least four decades. Before then, he says, “we will use a lot of oil.”

How much? At the rate Victor suggests, we’ll need something like a trillion barrels of crude to get us to the peak of oil consumption sometime in the 2030s–and, in all likelihood, another trillion barrels to get us down the other side, to a point where oil is a vastly smaller part of the energy economy. Just to bridge the gap, then, we’ll have to extract about two trillion barrels of oil during the next four decades–almost double the 1.2 trillion barrels we’ve already burned through since Pennsylvania wildcatters launched the oil age in 1859.

Hossein Kazemi, a professor of petroleum engineering at the Colorado School of Mines, says that about half of those final two trillion barrels have already been discovered and are waiting in “proven” reserves that can be exploited profitably using today’s technology. The other half won’t come so easily. By some estimates, the Earth contains up to eight trillion more barrels of oil, but that oil exists in many forms, some of which, such as shale oil, can be extremely expensive to extract or refine. And as we work our way through the easiest oil, we will also be confronted by increasing external costs—real costs that nonetheless aren’t accounted for at the gas pump. A desperate rush to extract oil from unstable nations can topple regimes, for instance, even as extracting it from environmentally fragile spots can do major harm to the land or the sea.

Which means that we face a series of complex choices, not just about where to extract what kind of oil, but also about when to extract it. Going after everything at once may seem wise, especially to oil entrepreneurs invested in specific resources or policymakers unconcerned about external costs. But as engineers develop new extraction and refinement techniques, oil that is expensive or environmentally harmful now may be cheaper or cleaner in the future. With that in mind, what would happen if we considered how best to extract our two trillion barrels not from the short-term perspective of a politician or a businessman, but from the longer view of a petroleum engineer? Which oil would we save for last, and which would we go for first?

Resources to Save for Last

Shale

Total reserves: 3 trillion barrels of oil equivalent (BOE)
Given the political anxiety surrounding the prospect of importing oil, U.S. policymakers will be understandably tempted to reach first for the closest, richest oil resource. For many, that would suggest shale oil. The vast deposits located beneath Colorado, Utah and Wyoming alone could generate up to 800 billion barrels of oil. But policymakers should resist that urge.

Oil shale is created when kerogen, the organic precursor to oil and natural gas, accumulates in rock formations without being subjected to enough heat to be completely cooked into oil. Petroleum engineers have long known how to finish the job, by heating the kerogen until it vaporizes, distilling the resulting gas into a synthetic crude, and refining that crude into gasoline or some other fuel. But the process is expensive. The kerogen must either be strip-mined and converted aboveground or cooked, often by electrical heaters, in the ground and then pumped to the surface. Either process pushes production costs up to $90 a barrel. As all crude prices rise, though, the added expense of shale oil may come to seem reasonable–and it is likely to drop in any case if the shale oil industry, now made up of relatively small pilot operations, scales up.

Policymakers should resist the urge to go hunting shale oil.The problem is that the external costs of shale oil are also very high. It is not energy-dense (a ton of rock yields just 30 gallons of pure kerogen), so companies will be removing millions of tons of material from thousands of acres of land, which can introduce dangerous amounts of heavy metals into the water system. The in-ground method, meanwhile, can also contaminate groundwater (although Shell and other companies say this can be prevented by freezing the ground). Both methods are resource-intensive. Producing a barrel of synthetic crude requires as many as three barrels of water, a major constraint in the already parched Western U.S. With in-ground, the kerogen must be kept at temperatures as high as 700°F for more than two years, and aboveground processes use a lot of heat as well. Those demands, coupled with kerogen’s low energy density, yield returns ranging from 10:1 (that is, 10 barrels of output for every one barrel of input) to an abysmal 3:1.

Coal

Total reserves: 1.5 trillion BOE
Coal can also be converted into a synthetic crude, as the German army, desperate for fuel, demonstrated during World War II. The method of transformation is simple: Engineers blast the coal with steam, breaking it into a gas that can then be converted, by the Fischer-Tropsch process, into gasoline and other fuels. Many energy companies are promoting various coal-to-liquid processes (CTL) as a way to replace oil, especially in the U.S. and other coal-rich nations.

The appeal is obvious. At a conversion rate of just under two barrels per ton, the world’s 847 billion tons of recoverable coal theoretically represent roughly 1.5 trillion barrels of synthetic oil, or a substantial piece of the final trillion.

Like shale oil, however, CTL has significant shortcomings. Its energy return is unimpressive; a barrel’s worth of invested energy nets just three to six barrels of CTL. Moreover, coal contains about 20 percent more carbon than oil does, and converting it to liquid raises the ratio even further. CTL fuels have a carbon footprint nearly twice as large as that of conventional oil–1,650 pounds of CO2 per barrel of CTL, versus 947 pounds per barrel of conventional.

Even if producers installed a vast and expensive system to capture and sequester the CO2 produced during the conversion process, says Edward Rubin, a professor of environmental engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, coal production uses so much energy that CO2 emissions from CTL fuels would still be as great as those of conventional oil. At best, making fuel from coal would get us no closer to a more climate-compatible energy system.

All of that aside, even the supply of coal is not infinite. Researchers at the Rand Corporation concluded in 2008 that replacing just 10 percent of U.S. daily transportation fuel with CTL would take 400 million tons of coal annually, which would mean expanding the American coal industry, which is already straining environmental limits, by 40 percent. Although such an undertaking might be politically feasible in China or other nations, Rubin says, “I have a hard time seeing that in this country.”

A Better Bite

Resources Better Later Than Now

Heavy Oil

Total reserves: 1 to 2 trillion BOE
Other unconventional resources may, despite having many shortcomings, become somewhat more attractive as new extraction methods come online. One of these is “heavy oil,” which ranges from the molasses-like crude in Venezuela to the bituminous oil sands of Alberta. For decades, oil traders saw heavy oil as inferior to light crude, which is easier to extract and whose smaller-chain molecules are more readily refined. Heavy oil’s bigger molecules, in contrast, were suited mainly to low-profit products, such as ship fuel or asphalt. But new refining techniques are making heavy oil more renderable into gasoline, and new extraction methods are making it easier to get out of the ground.

At a heavy-oil field outside Bakersfield, California, for instance, Chevron deploys computer-guided steam injection to thin the oil sufficiently to pump out. Even more promising are oil-sands operations in Alberta, where companies are now separating the brittle bitumen from sand and clay and cooking it into synthetic crude. At a conversion rate of one barrel for every two tons of sand, Alberta’s oil sands alone may contain up to 315 billion barrels of crude. As refining costs have dropped, output has reached 1.5 mbd and could more than quadruple, to 6.3 mbd, by 2035.

That said, heavy-oil production also has plenty of external costs. As with the kerogen in shale, the bitumen is processed either in-ground or by strip-mining. Both processes consume up to 4.5 barrels of water for every barrel of oil they produce and yield an unimpressive EROEI of about 7:1. And because heavy oils are carbon-rich, the CO2 footprint of crude from bitumen is up to 20 percent higher than that of conventional crude—not as bad as coal, but not exactly friendly to the environment either. Carbon-capture and -sequester techniques can only keep so much of that CO2 out of the atmosphere. Oil-sands operations are sprawling, and as a result, very little of the total CO2 emissions can be captured (one study suggests we might trap just 40 percent by 2030).

If carbon-capture techniques improve, though, heavy oil could make up a substantial share of the final two trillion barrels for a carbon penalty substantially below that of either CTL or shale oil. A further advantage (from the U.S. perspective) is that a lot of heavy oil is located in a politically stable country that’s right next door.

Digging Deep

Ultra-Deep Offshore

Total reserves: 0.1 to 0.7 trillion BOE
The “deep” in ultra-deep refers to the depths plumbed by floating oil rigs (typically, anything beyond 5,000 feet). But the more important depth is the distance from the ocean floor to the oil itself. It’s not easy to start an excavation a mile or two underwater, much less one that continues on for several more miles underground (the current record, set in 2009 in the Gulf of Mexico, is nearly seven miles). But an ever-expanding drilling fleet is deploying new techniques in horizontal drilling, sub-sea robotics and “four-dimensional” seismology (which geologists use to track oil and natural-gas deposit conditions in real time) to rapidly expand output. Although fewer than half the world’s ultra-deep provinces have been fully explored, deepwater output in the past decade has more than tripled, to 5 mbd, and it could double again by 2015.

As the Deepwater Horizon disaster made clear last year, though, tapping this resource can involve significant external costs. The pressure in ultra-deep reservoirs can reach up to 2,000 times that at sea level. The oil within can be extremely hot (up to 400°F) and rife with corrosive compounds (including hydrogen sulfide, which when in water can dissolve steel). And the pipes that rise from the seafloor are so long and heavy that the platforms supporting them must be extraordinarily large simply to stay afloat. The biggest discovery in decades, Brazil’s “pre-salt play,” meanwhile, is defended by a 1.5-mile-thick ceiling of salt, which had the beneficial effect of absorbing surrounding heat and keeping the oil from breaking down—but which also, in doing so, congealed the oil into a paraffinic jelly that drillers must now thin with chemicals before they can extract it.

There is little chance that the transition to a clean-energy economy will be entirely clean. It will require compromises.Not surprisingly, ultra-deepwater oil is some of the most expensive in the business. A single drilling platform can cost $600 million or more (especially if the deepwater is in the Arctic, where rigs must be armored to withstand Force-10 winter storms and hull-crushing ice floes), and companies can easily spend $100 million drilling a single ultra-deepwater well. The result of all this effort is a modest EROEI–from 15:1 all the way down to 3:1.

Thus, even as companies scramble to improve safety, most of the research and development in the ultra deep will focus on saving money and energy. Remotely controlled, steerable drill heads, for example, allow companies to drill multiple bores from a single platform (thus lowering costs and the aboveground footprint) and to follow the path of narrow oil seams, greatly increasing oil output. (The record for a horizontal bore, set by Exxon near Russia’s Sakhalin Island, is also about seven miles.) To further cut drilling costs, companies will steadily boost rates of penetration with more-powerful drill motors, drill bits made of ever-harder materials and, eventually, a drilling process that uses no bits at all. Tests at Argonne National Laboratory suggest that high-powered lasers can penetrate rock faster than conventional bits, either by superheating the rock until it shatters or by melting it.

Costs will further recede as companies develop more-accurate “multi-channel” seismic prospecting techniques that will, by combining up to a million seismic signals, help them avoid the ultimate waste of drilling into empty rock. And to better measure the oil reservoirs themselves, companies are creating heat- and pressure-resistant “downhole” sensors (similar to devices NASA developed to monitor rocket engines) that communicate to surface computers via optical fiber.

As the volume of data rises, the industry will also create more-powerful tools to analyze it, from monster compression algorithms (courtesy of Hollywood animators) to entirely new computing architectures. “If we go to a million channels [of seismic data], then we need petaflop computation capability, which we currently do not have,” says Bruce Levell, Shell’s chief scientist for geology. To get that capability, oil firms are working with Intel, IBM and other hardware firms. In the future, Levell says, the oil business “is really going to drive high-performance computing.”

Deep Water

Resources to Tap Now

Natural Gas

Total reserves: 1 trillion BOE
Natural gas, or simply “gas” in industry parlance, has long been oil’s biggest potential rival as a transport fuel. Gas is cleaner than oil–it emits fewer particulates and a quarter less carbon for the same amount of energy output–yet today it powers less than 3 percent of the U.S. transportation fleet (mainly in the form of compressed natural gas, or CNG). This proportion is poised to grow, though, in part because the overall supply of gas keeps growing.

With advances in a drilling technique called hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” companies can now profitably extract gas from previously hard-to-reach shale formations. Worldwide reserves of shale gas currently stand at 6,662 trillion cubic feet, the energy equivalent of 827 billion barrels of oil. And that doesn’t include the gas that is routinely discovered alongside oil in oil fields and that is sure to be found in some of those yet-to-be-explored deepwater basins.

Gas is so plentiful that, in energy-equivalent terms, its price is a quarter that of oil–a bargain that is already transforming CNG from a niche fuel, used mainly in bus fleets, to a product for general consumption. The Texas refiner Valero, for instance, will soon begin selling CNG at new stations in the U.S.

What happens if we consider how best to extract our two trillion barrels not from the short-term perspective of a politician or a businessman, but from the longer view of a petroleum engineer?A gas-powered future could still have some high external costs, though. Fracking can be extremely hazardous to the local environment. The method uses high-pressure fluids to break open deep rock formations in which gas is trapped, and these fluids often contain toxins that might contaminate groundwater supplies. But such risks, which have received substantial media coverage and are now the focus of a new White House panel, may be controllable. Gas deposits are typically thousands of feet belowground, while groundwater tables are much closer to the surface, so most contamination is thought to take place where the rising bore intersects with the water table–a risk that could be minimized by requiring drillers to more carefully seal the walls of the bore.

That said, allocating too much natural gas to transportation might have surprisingly negative consequences. First, it would most likely increase demand for natural gas so much that prices would rise, thereby undermining the current cost advantage. Second, shifting a large volume of gas to the transportation sector would mean pulling that volume away from the power sector, where it is more constructively displacing coal, whose carbon content is far higher than oil’s. But converting specific sectors of the transportation system (delivery fleets, for instance, or buses) could simultaneously cut CO2 emissions and reduce oil demand.

Salt Layer

Enhanced Oil Recovery

Total reserves: 0.5 trillion BOE
The resource that comes with the lowest external cost might be the oil we left behind, back when energy was a lot cheaper. Drillers typically end up extracting just a third of the oil in a given field, in part because when they drain reservoirs they also decrease the pressure that pushes oil to the surface, making it more expensive to extract the remaining barrels. In the U.S., abandoned oil fields may still contain a staggering 400 billion barrels of residual oil; worldwide, the figure is probably in the trillions. Extracting all of it is economically impossible, but advances in enhanced oil recovery, or EOR, could boost extraction rates to as high as 70 percent.

EOR could add perhaps half a trillion “new” barrels worldwide. And it could also carry a substantial environmental bonus. One of the most promising EOR methods involves “flooding” oil reservoirs with CO2, which dissolves into the oil, making it both thinner and more voluminous, and thus easier to extract. Once the oil is extracted, the CO2 can be separated, re-injected into the field, and sequestered there permanently. An aggressive strategy in which CO2 is captured from single-point sources (such as power plants or refineries) and pumped into oil fields could increase U.S. oil output by as much as 3.6 mbd while sequestering nearly a billion tons of CO2. And depending on the method, EOR can have an EROEI as high as 20:1.

EOR can’t entirely bridge the gap–but in a perfect world, we would at least begin by tapping those barrels, along with the oil–equivalent barrels of natural gas. That way, we would be using the least damaging resources first and saving the worst barrels for later, when (if all goes well) future engineering innovations will let us extract and consume them more safely and efficiently.

But of course, we don’t live in a perfect world. For now, oil producers will do what they have always done, which is to extract oil as cheaply as they can. And oil consumers will follow suit, buying the cheapest energy they can. We may eventually ask the market to take the true costs of production into account, perhaps by way of a carbon tax or some kind of climate regulation. Or we may not. Energy policy has never been particularly far-sighted. There is little chance that the transition to a clean-energy economy will be entirely clean. It will require trade-offs and compromises, and the cost of those trade-offs and compromises will rise with every year that we wait to get serious about moving away from oil.

Paul Roberts is the author of The End of Oil: On the Edge of a Perilous New World_._

The post The Last Drops: How to Bridge the Gap Between Oil and Green Energy appeared first on Popular Science.

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The footage provided by local journalists looks like something out of a fantasy film, but the situation is real: On Friday, the surface of the ocean west of Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula burst into flames.

According to Petroleos Mexicanos (Pemex), Mexico’s state-owned oil company, the fire was due to a gas pipeline rupture close to its Ku-Maloob-Zaap oil drilling fields, and was brought under control using water pumps and hoses after about five hours. Reuters reports that the company also used nitrogen to fight the flames.

[Related: Solar power got cheap. So why aren’t we using it more?]

Ángel Carrizales, executive director of Mexico’s oil safety regulatory agency, tweeted that the incident “related to a gas line” did not “generate any spill,” however experts are skeptical of the claim. Simon George, a professor of organic geochemistry at Macquarie University in Australia, tells CNET that for such a dramatic and sustained flame to persist on the ocean, a continuous stream of natural gas must have been making its way to the surface from the leak. Still, he notes, the fire may have kept some of the leakage from dissipating into the ocean by burning it up on site.

According to a Pemex incident report obtained by Reuters, “The turbomachinery of Ku-Maloob-Zaap’s active production facilities were affected by an electrical storm and heavy rains.” The company is reportedly working on investigating the incident further. Bloomberg reports that while the cluster of fields at Ku-Maloob-Zaap produces around 40 percent of Pemex’s oil, its output has declined each year for more than a decade. At the end of 2020, the company was more than $113 billion dollars in debt.

The post Videos show a surreal ‘eye of fire’ in the Gulf of Mexico after gas pipeline ruptures at sea appeared first on Popular Science.

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Popular pickup

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt recently announced his intention to repeal Obama-era standards on vehicle emissions. While we don’t have specific details about the new requirements, we do know they would be less strict—or ambitious—than the current standards set to start with the 2022-2025 model year. This could mean more greenhouse gas emissions, less fuel-efficient vehicles, and the possibility of cheaper automobiles. It all depends on who you ask.

But it’s likely that the actions of the Trump-era EPA here won’t be the final say in this emissions-regulating saga, which draws heavy influence from the political powers in charge at a given moment. Instead, it’s going to set up an epic lawsuit with Pruitt and the EPA on one side, and California and a host of other states — all of which are blue and represent around a third of the country’s new car market according to Bloomberg — on the other. And that’s where the real showdown will take place.

How we got here

After President Trump’s surprise electoral victory in November 2016, the Obama-era EPA pushed through a “midterm evaluation” (MTE) of vehicle emissions regulations originally proposed in 2012. The MTE was scheduled for completion in April, 2018 and was meant to examine whether the proposed 2022-2025 standards were fair. The Obama EPA finalized its evaluation more than a year early, publishing its decision on January 17, 2017—three days before the Trump administration took over. Obama’s EPA found, perhaps unsurprisingly, that the 2022-2025 regulations were just fine, and could remain in place.

The impending requirements call for the fleetwide average fuel economy of cars and trucks to rise to 51.4 miles per gallon by 2025, up from 35.5 mpg in 2016. Similarly, tailpipe carbon dioxide emissions will fall 31 percent to 173 grams per mile. It’s the averages that matter — car companies that sell lots of efficient hybrids and electric cars will be able to offset fuel-hungry pickup trucks to meet goals. Companies that don’t achieve the standards are able to purchase credits from companies that overachieve — making a useful revenue stream for EV-only companies like Tesla (and this is happening already).

The downside here is that whenever you increase capability — horsepower, towing capacity, or fuel efficiency — things get more expensive, and the strict regulations could force companies to change their product mix to something less profitable (or less desired by consumers).

Companies like GM and Ford make a ton of money off heavy, fuel-inefficient pickup trucks. The top-three best-selling vehicles in the US last year were the Ford F-series (_{900,000), Chevy Silverado (}600,000), and Ram Pickup (~500,000) — and the segment continues to grow. Everything else takes a distant second and showcases the difficulties with trying to regulate fleetwide emissions standards. For reference, the stock model 2018 Ford F-150 has a fuel efficiency of around 26 mpg—roughly half of the 51.4 number the fleet will need to average. Higher fuel economy standards could put significant pressure on those sales by forcing carmakers to sell more small, fuel-efficient cars that consumers are less interested in.

Popular pickup

Big oil change

This week, when the midterm evaluation was originally supposed to take place — and perhaps also unsurprisingly — the Trump EPA thought differently.

“The Obama Administration’s determination was wrong,” said EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt in a statement. “Obama’s EPA cut the Midterm Evaluation process short with politically charged expediency, made assumptions about the standards that didn’t comport with reality, and set the standards too high.”

Politics plays a big role in many things at the EPA, and that’s perhaps even more true with former Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt (who is a close ally of the fossil fuel industry and repeatedly sued the EPA as Oklahoma AG) at the helm. The Trump administration has been rolling back regulations all over the place, environmental and otherwise, including on so-called clean coal, financial institutions, and, of course, net neutrality.

This is just the latest volley in what they consider cutting red tape. Revising proposed regulations on how much greenhouse gases autos can emit into the atmosphere is par for the course — but what’s really interesting is what happens next.

“There’s going to be incredible litigation over this,” says Emil Frankel, senior fellow at the Eno Center for Transportation and a former Assistant Secretary for Transportation Policy under President George W. Bush. And that litigation is where Pruitt’s real fight is.

Under the Clean Air Act, the EPA is charged with setting national standards for vehicle tailpipe emissions of certain pollutants. But the EPA also has the authority to grant a waiver to the state of California, allowing that state (as well as the 13 states and Washington DC, which follow its requirements) to set their own, stricter standards. Those states, for example, mandate that 15 percent of all vehicles sold in 2025 to be zero-emission, a requirement that probably won’t exist in the rest of the country. But Pruitt’s statement suggests that he might not allow California to continue to determine its own emissions standards.

ABOVE: Listen to the Last Week in Tech podcast in which we discuss the EPA’s proposed roll-back. The fuel talk starts around the 12 minute mark.

“EPA will set a national standard for greenhouse gas emissions that allows auto manufacturers to make cars that people both want and can afford — while still expanding environmental and safety benefits of newer cars. It is in America’s best interest to have a national standard, and we look forward to partnering with all states, including California, as we work to finalize that standard.”

In our highly charged world of political gamesmanship, them’s fightin’ words. And this is consistent with the Trump administration’s aggressive posture towards California’s sovereignty, on everything from sanctuary cities to federal land transfers.

And California, naturally, is prepared to fight back. “We’re prepared to do everything we need to defend the process,” Xavier Becerra, California’s attorney general, said in an interview with The New York Times.

Environmental advocacy groups are readying for a fight, too. “The current standards have helped bring back, secure, and create jobs nationwide; they have reduced pollution; saved consumers billions at the pump; and have been integral to growing and sustaining America’s manufacturing sector over the past decade,” said a statement by the BlueGreen Alliance, a group of labor unions and environmental groups. “Weakening the rules — which is indicated to be the intent of today’s decision — could put American jobs at risk today and in coming years, and would threaten America’s competitiveness in manufacturing critical technology.”

The long road ahead

Expect the battle over this repeal to take a long time. The courts move slowly, and this is a complicated issue on which billions of dollars in car-industry R&D budgets are resting. Do automakers need to plan to meet the Obama-approved regulations in 2022, or are the forthcoming Trump/Pruitt-proposed regs going to be locked in?

It also has the potential, environmental advocates say, of perhaps putting the US on the back foot when it comes to international emissions regulations. If the EU and China end up with stronger emissions requirements, they could set the tone for car development in the rest of the world. If the US adopts weaker standards, the auto lobby could use that fact to encourage other countries to adopt weaker emissions and fuel economy standards as well. What automakers want, more than anything, is worldwide consistency so they don’t need to make different cars for different markets.

The Obama administration was trying to be the first mover on this and set the tone for everyone else, as Europe and China are just starting the standards-making process. By undoing the aggressive Obama EPA regulations, the Trump administration may lower worldwide standards at the same time. The regulations that Pruitt and the EPA want to overturn are still a few years away — but given lengthy development cycles, automakers are already well into the planning of cars that will be released in a few years. This means any uncertainty (especially around whether stronger regulations will go into effect or not) could be an expensive proposition.

In the end, many car companies are focusing on developing so-called “global cars” — vehicles that are equipped largely identically all around the world. This reduces costs through economies of scale, but also restricts cars to the lowest common denominator between all countries. If China or Europe has stricter requirements, companies (especially those who sell more cars in those markets) may choose to build to stricter requirements from those countries regardless of what the US does.

The automakers, at least publicly, are supportive of whatever the EPA decides. In reality, they’re walking a delicate line between the economic reality of tougher regulations (which would likely drive up costs) and environmental impacts. Carmakers also express a need for a single national emissions standard, not dual requirements for California and then the rest of the US.

GM and Ford both sent us boilerplate statements that don’t add much to the conversation. There isn’t, however, a single “automaker” position on the topic. Carmakers, like Ford, that have more advanced engine and manufacturing technology, are already on track to achieve the current Obama-era standards. In that case, the high standards are a competitive advantage. While others, like Fiat Chrysler, who declined to provide a standalone statement, may find meeting the Obama standards extraordinarily difficult — if not impossible.

The Auto Alliance, a trade group that represents most of the major automakers, is perfectly happy to take sides. It’s openly supportive of Pruitt’s move — and has been quietly lobbying for this sort weakening of the standards:

“This was the right decision, and we support the Administration for pursuing a data-driven effort and a single national program as it works to finalize future standards. We appreciate that the Administration is working to find a way to both increase fuel economy standards and keep new vehicles affordable to more Americans.”

Arriving at a destination

To revise the Obama-era regulations, Pruitt’s EPA will need to go through a formal rulemaking process, which would include a public notice (which should be coming later this month) and an open comment period. This means a public and lengthy fight — and likely will include lawsuits from multiple players including environmental groups and states opposed to the EPA’s proposed changes. It could be years, even beyond the 2020 election, before this is all over.

With the potential implementation of these requirements more than three years away, nothing will need change immediately. But with both sides making hay out of the need for more (or fewer) regulations on the environment, expect the dueling press releases to continue indefinitely. And, soon enough, dueling lawsuits too.

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The final nail in the coffin for the nearly-dead Keystone XL pipeline was hit yesterday—TC Energy Corp, the developer behind the controversial oil pipeline, officially canceled the project. This comes just a few months after President Biden revoked the permit for Keystone XL to pass over the US-Canada border in January, which brought the 13-year-long-development to a screeching halt. The $8 billion pipeline was supposed to pump 830,000 barrels of Alberta crude oil sands to Nebraska every day, which would then be sent down to Texas.

Environmental groups and activists, who have protested the development of the pipeline for more than a decade, are calling the official end of the pipeline a victory. 

“When this fight began, people thought Big Oil couldn’t be beat,’’ Bill McKibben, the founder of 350.org, told the Wall Street Journal. “But when enough people rise up, we’re stronger even than the richest fossil-fuel companies.”

President Obama first rejected the pipeline in 2012, and later vetoed a bill approved by the Senate to build the pipeline in 2015. Still, TTC was able to build the southern leg of the pipeline that ran between Oklahoma and Texas which did not require State Department approval. Two years later, Trump signed the project back into life.  

The pipeline was envisioned to be a “green” pipeline, as PopSci has previously reported, but in reality, the pipeline operations would produce 1.44 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide per year, about as much as the annual emissions from 300,000 passenger cars. Not to mention, the thick Canadian oilsands being used for fuel required immense energy to extract in the first place.

“Building projects like Keystone XL incentivizes the greenlighting of new Tar Sands production projects,” Anthony Swift, the director of the Canada Project for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) told PopSci in February. “These would have to be shut down within a few years if we are to meet our climate goals.”

TC Energy has stated that the decision was made after a “comprehensive review of its options,” and expressed gratitude for its partnerships with the Government of Canada, pipeline building trade unions, local communities, and Indigenous groups, amongst others. Indigenous people have been some of the most prevalent voices against the building of the pipeline, as it would disrupt tribal lands and harm vulnerable people. 

“We took on a multi-billion dollar corporation and we won!” tweeted Dallas Goldtooth of the nonprofit Indigenous Environmental Network. “The People made this happen!”

Still, as protests broke out earlier this week against Enbridge’s Line 3 project in Minnesota, it’s clear that the battle between environmentalists and oil companies is far from over.

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This story originally featured on Field & Stream.

On June 1, the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) announced it was suspending “all activities related to the implementation of the Coastal Plain Oil and Gas Leasing Program in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR).” The Coastal Plain Oil and Gas Leasing Program was enacted by Congress and approved by the Trump Administration in 2017. It opened a vast area of 19.6 million acres of Alaska tundra to future oil drilling.

The Interior Department’s move is the result of Executive Order 13990, which President Joe Biden signed on his first day in office. The order directed the DOI to review oil and gas activity in the Arctic Refuge. After completing this preliminary review, the DOI decided to suspend oil drilling.

The action is the latest in a string of disputes over how land is managed in one of the last truly wild areas of the U.S. The ANWR is a sportsman’s paradise for those willing to make the trip to the remote, undeveloped area in Northwest Alaska. It’s home to polar bears, migratory birds, and snowy owls, and it serves as the primary calving ground of the 197,000-strong Porcupine caribou herd. The area, which is managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, also harbors a reserve of over 11 billion barrels of oil. 

The presence of both pristine wilderness and rich oil and natural gas reserves has made the ANWR a flashpoint between conservationists and potential developers dating back to the Bush administration. Those who support energy production have led the push to open the refuge to development. Environmental groups have fought to block oil-and-gas drilling. 

“The Biden administration’s actions are not unexpected but are outrageous nonetheless,” Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska said in a press release. “This action serves no purpose other than to obstruct Alaska’s economy and put our energy security at great risk. Alaskans are committed to developing our resources responsibly and have demonstrated our ability to do so safely to the world.” 

In contrast, conservation group Backcountry Hunters & Anglers lauded the move. “Some places are too important—to fish and wildlife, to hunters and anglers, and to our nation’s unique outdoor legacy—to drill. The ANWR is one of those places,” says BHA President and CEO Land Tawney. “[It] is a bucket-list destination for hunters all over North America, me included.”

The current oil and gas drilling moratorium is considered temporary until the DOI completes a comprehensive analysis under the National Environmental Policy Act. In the meantime, some conservationists and environmental groups are hoping for further action to declare the ANWR off-limits to fossil fuel development for the long haul.

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In the immediate aftermath of the international climate conference in Paris last December , there was widespread celebration around the world. The agreement reached by the representatives of 187 nations, one could argue, signaled that politics had finally caught up to science, and that there is now a global consensus that climate change is a “Big Problem.”

But the truth is that the agreement amounts to little more than a gentleman’s handshake. The terms are entirely unenforceable, for one thing. And though the goals are laudable, it’s ultimately too little, too late.

There’s also no framework that explains how the various countries are going to meet their targets. (What technologies or cuts will they use? This is mostly left up to the imagination, for now.) And it’s unrealistic, given that the global energy supply, while generally moving in the right direction toward clean tech, is doing so at a dangerously slow pace.

To reach the agreement’s goal of holding the average global temperature to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, we’ve placed a lot of our bets on unproven, uncommercialized, or yet unknown future tech. This means the climate agreement is banking on blanketing the Earth in renewables and other fossil fuel-free energy sources, while deploying large-scale, emissions reductions technologies. And fast. It’s not going to happen.

So really, what the Paris agreement provides humans with is a big psychological nudge. As a species, we tend to not get serious about addressing predicted, preventable problems until they’re directly upon us, and therefore no longer preventable.

On climate change, we’ll have to start fighting against our nature to ignore problems until they are too big to avoid. Perhaps the agreement will spark this type of proactive thinking—and lead to greater action. NPR’s Adam Frank summed it up well when he described it as a “first step in developing a new set of behaviors for human civilization.” No big deal, right?

Simultaneously, we’re also going to need more energy overall, not less. Experts predict that the population will swell to more than nine billion people by the middle of this century, and the International Energy Agency predicts that energy demand will grow by 37percent by 2040. So while cutting back on usage is a critical part of the equation, the larger question is: how do we build a smart energy portfolio?

What that portfolio looks like is yet to be seen, but we’ll certainly want cheaper and more efficient renewables like solar and wind, while replacing evils such as coal with lesser evils such as natural gas. There will likely be carbon taxes and economic incentives, too. And we need tremendous investment in and public support for new clean tech.

A City in the Clouds

In fact, the U.S. might want to consider taking a page from pollution-plagued China. In 2015, China invested a whopping $110.5 billion on clean energy, whereas the U.S. spent about half that. China, at least, is throwing lots of options at the wall to see what sticks. No one would argue that it’s the most efficient strategy, but you have to applaud the tenacity. It’s an investment in the future, a future that sits out beyond the latest election cycle and political gridlock. It certainly doesn’t hurt the case for clean-tech in China that Beijing has been blanketed in dangerous levels of smog multiple times over the past several years.

The U.S. doesn’t have the same energy needs as China, nor its problems with air pollution. . But it’s not China’s approach that should necessarily be emulated, but the government’s attitude of urgency.

It’s making a difference: China’s 2015 coal imports dropped 30 percent from 2014, and the country plans to close 1,000 mines this year, as well as halt approval of new ones. Research into clean coal, better solar, and safer nuclear is getting the big bucks, and innovators from all over are hungry to collaborate.

For example, the Chinese government signed an agreement with Bill Gates’ TerraPower in October to advance nuclear power that would be safer, far more efficient, more cost effective, and have easier waste disposal. That kind of thing doesn’t often happen in the U.S. due to regulation and lack of public support.

“Out of a sense of desperation in China, there’s a great energy revolution going on,” says Michael Shellenberger, a founder of the Breakthrough Institute. “We’re all going to need that kind of revolutionary thinking to get serious about a zero-carbon future.”

Indeed, a recent report from the IEA emphasized the need for “new, groundbreaking” cleantech, going as far to say that it’s the “only way the world can meet its climate goals.” Big time innovation is currently too slow and underfunded—the report dramatically called for tripling public spending on clean energy R&D. Whether cash can substitute for time is another matter to be seen.

Even techno-optimists allow that wholesale innovations such as armies of carbon-eating nanobots, and say, fusion, take time. Lots and lots of time. “Energy technology evolves more slowly than any other tech in our society,” says Shellenberger, “The transition from wood to coal started in the 16th century, and it’s still going on.”

That’s why major names in the worlds of climate science and tech (Columbia University’s James Hansen and PayPal founder Peter Thiel, for example) are advocating for improving—and using—tools we already have, such as nuclear power. The idea is that we need to embrace nuclear, make it better, and implement it more cheaply and safely.

Perhaps the millennial generation, who weren’t around for the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl disasters, will be more open to improving nuclear energy instead of writing it off entirely. Just ask MIT’s Leslie Dewan and Mark Massie, who are working a molten salt reactor that will burn 75 times the electricity per ton of uranium and be virtually accident-proof.)

Continuing to push back with ideological blockades means we’re making zero progress toward reducing our dependence on fossil fuels, as more humans need more energy. And stalling until we find a perfect solution is a tactic that has long run out of time.

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Cars as we know them simply aren’t great for the environment. As we slowly steer towards a future with a substantial number of driverless cars on the road, some researchers say it is about time to consider some of the impacts flocks of new autonomous vehicles could have on the environment. 

In a new study, researchers from the University of Wisconsin Madison asked over 800 local residents in the Madison metropolitan area to assess their attitudes towards using autonomous vehicles in the future and found that study respondents would be interested in using a driverless car about 31 percent of the time, a significant chunk more than taking the bus. Wissam Kontar, a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin Madison and lead study author, says that with growing popularity and industry investment in autonomous vehicles, that this “excitement” may be “overshadowing potential environmental impacts.”

Previous research on the environmental impact of autonomous vehicles shows that there are a number of potential positive and negative energy tradeoffs from autonomous vehicles, making for a very uncertain future. While automation could make driving more energy-efficient, a single autonomous vehicle can’t transport as many people as the bus or subway. But since they could make it super easy to get from point A to point B without bumping elbows with other public transportation users, that could mean more people on the road.  More cars on the road means more energy use and traffic congestion in the short term–especially with a mix of autonomous and regular cars speeding down the highway.

[Related: How self-driving vehicles of the future could curb carsickness.]

The researchers expected that the presence of autonomous vehicles would compete with public transit, which in Madison is the bus system. In the survey, when people could choose between private vehicles, autonomous taxis, buses, and bicycles, they responded that they would use autonomous vehicle taxis 31 percent of the time. People with their own private vehicles were not interested in swapping that for a ride in an autonomous taxi. Instead, as researchers expected, people who usually rely on public transit could be swayed by the self-driving Ubers of the future. 

Kontar found that people are willing to ditch the bus for an autonomous vehicle mostly to save time and for the convenience of door-to-door drop-off.  Walking to and from the bus stop may be free, and fares tend to be cheaper than a taxi ride. Still, if autonomous vehicles have a lower wait time and a reasonable price, that provides a pretty sweet alternative. “And this is where the environmental impacts reside, as buses are generally the more environmentally desired modes of transportation.”

They were able to quantify the increase in impacts in certain environmental categories from the survey response. More people using autonomous vehicles than public transit would correspond to a 5.93 percent increase in energy consumption and a 5.72 percent increase in greenhouse gas emissions in the Madison area. 

[Related: GM wants its cars to be fully electric by 2035. Here’s what that could mean for auto emissions.]

The technology behind vehicle automation, sensors and software, can be mounted on any type of vehicle–so electric, hybrid and fossil fuel-powered cars can all become driverless, says Kontar. Right now, the breakdown of how many electric or traditional autonomous cars will be available is unclear. 

There are ways to mitigate environmental impacts of autonomous vehicles, though. “We have shown that electric AVs can alter the environmental tradeoffs of AV adoption,” Kontar says, but where the electricity comes from is important. After all, an electric vehicle powered by electricity from fossil fuels is still impacting the environment quite a bit. 

“How we generate our electricity, be it from coal energy or wind energy, yields different environmental impacts,” he says. “And thus, if we are to adopt E-AVs, is it important to plan for a sustainable energy infrastructure.”

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Earlier this month, Louisiana—one of the country’s largest oil producers and refiners—became the first Deep South state to sign on to an interstate climate compact to achieve the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement.

The move is the latest in a series of steps by Democratic governor John Bel Edwards to develop a climate plan for a state battered by 2020’s record-breaking Atlantic hurricane season. Last year, he used an executive order to set a goal to be net-zero by 2050, and assembled the state’s first climate task force. This most recent agreement, called the US Climate Alliance, also includes goals to cut net emissions 25 percent from 2005 levels by 2025, and 50 percent by 2030.

Those short-term plans might be the most ambitious. In effect, Louisiana has said that it aims to cut its net emissions by a quarter in under 5 years. The state hasn’t done a comprehensive inventory of its carbon emissions since 2010, but according to David Dismukes, an economist at Louisiana State University who is developing an inventory for later this year, “we’re pretty steady at 210 million tons of CO₂.”

That means Louisiana will need to cut about 50 million metric tons of emissions—more than its entire transportation sector. “The problem is that Louisiana doesn’t have this long institutional history of doing things that get you to a clean carbon future,” Dismukes says. “To get to 2025 is going to be a bit of a hurdle.”

Louisiana’s emissions come from very different sources than the rest of the country, meaning that decarbonization would have to work differently. Two-thirds of the state’s emissions come from the industrial sector—the huge petrochemical and liquefied natural gas factories along the Mississippi River and southwestern coast—versus about 13 percent nationally.

[Related: The US is tropicalizing, and you’ve probably already noticed the change]

Right now, a quarter of Louisiana’s GDP is related to oil and gas. The state has a fifth of the US’s total oil refining capacity, and exports more than half of the country’s liquefied natural gas. (Not all of that industry is counted in Louisiana’s carbon budget, though, because much of the drilling happens in federal waters, and the fuel itself is burned elsewhere.)

“A lot of people hear ‘[decarbonize],’ and they immediately think solar and wind,” Dismuke says. “And that would be true in a lot of places. But that ain’t our deal here. Of that 200 [million tons of carbon], about 30 to 35 is power—so you could replace every power plant in the state and still not get to 50 million.”

Without a comprehensive inventory, no one knows exactly where the state’s carbon savings will come from, though Dismuke thinks that the state will get a big bang for its buck through carbon capture at certain industrial plants.

There are some relatively cheap ways to do that, he says. Ammonia and liquefied natural gas processors both emit large amounts of nearly pure CO₂ when manufacturing ‘feedstock’ chemicals, the raw materials for productions, and Dismuke has estimated that capturing those streams could reduce emissions by about 30 million metric tons.

But other carbon capture technology, especially after fuel is burned, is incredibly expensive, and no one has figured out where to store the CO₂ itself. Meanwhile, efficiency gains over the past decade have been cancelled out by an expanding number of facilities.

Still, all the lofty goals don’t mean that Louisiana is ready to abandon fossil fuels. In front of Congress last week, Edwards made a more complicated pitch: more investment in green industry, but also an end to the pause on federal oil leasing.

“I urge this Congress and the Biden Administration to pursue a responsible and balanced approach to adapting to the impacts of climate change,” Edwards testified, “while still pursuing safe and responsible oil and gas exploration.”

Not only is the state’s economy heavily dependent on oil and gas, but it also relies on the industry to fund climate adaptation. Louisiana gets a cut of federal revenue from offshore oil production, which it pumps back into its comprehensive coastline protection program, a decade-long “master plan” to shore up fast-eroding wetlands. (Other funding for the program comes from BP’s settlement following the Deepwater Horizon disaster.)

The governor’s climate task force itself contains representatives for the oil and chemical industries, as well as a group that helped develop a Gulf South for a Green New Deal platform.

So the state seems to be pursuing both green industry and oil. In front of Congress, Edwards asked the federal government to begin evaluating the Gulf for offshore wind installations, and touted the announcement of a $700 million biodiesel refinery.

It’s possible that coastal restoration itself might figure prominently in its plans. Marshland sequesters carbon, but the Environmental Protection Agency has only recently begun quantifying those savings. Since the state is already creating marshland, it might be able to count those acres towards its carbon goals, like another state might count a reforestation project.

[Related: We may finally know where young turtles spend their ‘lost years’]

There are good reasons to think that Louisiana could become a hub for green jobs. The heavy engineering jobs of the oil and gas sector have similar skill sets to renewable energy and coastal restoration.

“Whenever you talk about this, people think you’re going to destroy jobs, or create new kinds of jobs,” says Robert Habans, an economist at the Data Center, a New Orleans-based think tank. They think “all these oil and gas jobs are just going to disappear if we go net-zero, or that we’ll create all these very specialized jobs we haven’t even thought of yet. But the truth is that most of these changes affect existing jobs a lot more than creating new categories of job.”

Habans has written about the poorly defined industry that has formed in part around the state’s enormous coastal restoration projects, called the “water management cluster,” and which employs thousands. “At the core, mostly these are science, design, engineering, and construction activities, but they include a broader set of activities that are related to adapting to environmental change.”

These are growth markets, as other coastlines begin to face the same erosion and encroachment that has chipped away at Louisiana for decades. And no matter how slowly the state winds down its fossil fuel industry, its long-term prospects as an industry don’t look good. “Ultimately,” Habans says, how Louisiana is shaped by the coming energy transition will depend heavily on “whether we are able to capitalize on this kind of spending that we assume is going to happen for renewable energy and what we know is happening in coastal protection and restoration.”

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In 1974, the mayor of Hammerfest, Norway declared that his small fishing community—the northernmost town in the world—would one day become the center of the oil and gas industry in the Barents Sea. At that time, the oil and gas executives laughed. Today, the town of 10,000 people is fulfilling the prophecy.

Hammerfest is home to the first oil and gas operation in the Barents Sea. The gas gets pumped 89 miles southeast from the gas fields of Snøhvit through an underwater pipeline. It arrives at a processing plant, which occupies pretty much the entire island of Melkøya—one of the handful that comprise the municipality of Hammerfest.

Walking among the massive structures with a guide and a few fellow journalists, I can assure you that it is an impressive operation. My neck almost hurt from the strain of looking up at its towers.

The plant has been in operation since 2007, and produces enough fuel to fill a tanker ship every five or six days. That means that it produces the same amount of energy every week that the hydroelectric power plant in the nearby town of Alta produces in 1.3 years.

What is Liquefied Natural Gas?

LNG is mostly methane (CH₄) that is compressed and cooled to a liquid state. That way it’s easier to transport and store. Because LNG burns cleaner than oil, and produces less CO₂, some say it’s the most environmentally friendly fossil fuel there is.

It is also said to have half the environmental footprint of coal. By replacing coal with LNG, it’s estimated that Europe could eliminate 450 megatons of CO₂ from the atmosphere per year. Not bad for a fossil fuel.

How the Plant Works

After navigating through multiple security checkpoints with badges and PIN codes, we gathered for a talk with Knut Gjertsen, the director of operations, over coffee and traditional Norwegian potato pancakes called lefse. He says the plant functions like a big refrigerator. Once the gas arrives via pipeline, the CO₂, water, and mercury are removed. It is then pre-cooled and liquefied. As a liquid, it takes up only 1/600 the volume it takes up as a gas. But to keep it that way, the LNG has to be stored at -261 degrees F. That’s really cold, even for the Arctic.

For this reason, being located on the Barents Sea is a real advantage. The cold waters can cut the time and cost for cooling down the gas significantly.

To make the operation more eco-friendly, the CO₂ extracted from the gas gets injected into the seafloor. This on-site carbon capture and storage is unique among LNG plants, and prevents some 650,000 tons of CO₂ a year from entering the atmosphere. That’s the same as taking 400,000 cars off the road.

The Snøhvit plant is one of the most energy-efficient there is, but that doesn’t mean it’s emissions-free. It is still producing fossil fuel, after all. Norwegian legislation now requires the company to pay high fees on all its CO₂ emissions. Since their global competitors don’t have such fees, they are a real incentive to be efficient in order to stay competitive. “They don’t pay a dime,” Gjertsen says. “We pay a lot.”

A Rocky Start

Long before this efficiency and environmental mindset kicked in, though, the decision of whether or not to build the plant was hotly contested. Over a lunch of open-faced sandwiches in the city hall, Alf Einar Jakobsen, Hammerfest’s current mayor, described how it took 22 years for Hammerfest to finally pull the trigger and get the project rolling.

Over the years, as the fishing industry continued to decline and the local population started dropping off, a deal was eventually struck between the city and Statoil, a Norwegian oil and gas company. “Even the fishermen said yes to Snøhvit,” he says.

The Big Refrigerator

Despite the protests of national environmental groups, construction began on the plant in the early 2000s. The city’s deputy mayor, Marianne Sivertsen Næss, remembers seeing fires at the site, and ash raining down on Hammerfest. Having just given birth four days before, Næss was questioning the impact this new industry would have on the blueberries she imagined her daughter picking in the nearby mountains, or the snow for forts she would one day build.

“At the beginning, people asked, ‘God, what have we done?!’” says Roger Kristoffersen, who works in the city’s planning and development department.

But Mayor Jakobsen says the plant cleaned up its act and has since contributed immensely to the town. And not just in the form of jobs. Starting in the 1980s, Statoil paid for special vocational classes to be taught at the local high school. They wanted to prepare their future workforce, of course, but education also improved in the process.

Næss, who, in addition to being the deputy mayor is also the principal of the secondary school in Hammerfest, says the students trained in the chemical process line program are now the most skilled in the country. That may be in part because they have on-site training once a week at Snøhvit.

Today, the city of Hammerfest collects 193 million Norwegian Krone ($22 million) a year from Statoil’s property taxes, which has translated to major investment in the city’s schools, housing, and other infrastructure as well.

A Surprising Success

Back at Snøhvit, Gjertsen says the plant is doing even better than expected. The gas reservoir turns out to have 100 billion cubic meters more gas than predicted. And the market is paying higher prices than anticipated.

Back when the idea of the plant was conceived, all of its gas was intended for U.S. markets, but since the discovery and exploitation of America’s own natural gas deposits, not a single boat of LNG has been shipped there.

This major shift in the market highlighted another benefit of LNG: its delivery is not dependent on pipelines. It can go wherever the market is. The main customers today are in Europe: the Netherlands, Spain, France, Italy, Lithuania, and others. An LNG tanker can unload at any port with the infrastructure to receive it.

Cold Storage

The fuel is used to power ferries, factories, and even the tankers that carry it.

Another bonus with gas is that spills are not an issue. Unlike with oil, spills simply can’t happen with gas. That’s not to say that gas leaks aren’t risky. A security guard had to check the condition of my camera battery before I was allowed into the plant, and I was not allowed to bring my cell phone due to the fire hazard. But avoiding an oil spill is always a good thing.

The opening of the plant has also brought other happy surprises, in this case environmental. The kittiwake was an endangered species of bird, with only 40 nesting pairs left on Melkøya when construction began. But the excavation during the construction process created ideal nesting habitat on newly exposed rock faces. Now there are 2,000 pairs of the birds. “This red-listed species is really a pain in the ass for us,” Gjertsen says, laughing.

Long-Term Vision

Both Statoil and the city of Hammerfest are aware that LNG is not a forever thing. Snøhvit should have enough gas to produce LNG through 2050. And then what?

By the time the gas runs out, Hammerfest hopes to have moved on from fossil fuels. “In the end, we want to get to a renewable state,” says Kristoffersen, from the planning department. “We don’t want to be dependent on oil and gas, but they’re financing that transition.”

They’re actively working toward renewables, too. A team of researchers in Hammerfest developed a tidal energy system that powered the grid here for five or six years, says Mayor Jakobsen. It has since been exported to Scotland where the tides are more powerful.

The municipal government has also tried to get wind energy on the hills surrounding the city. But the proposal was turned down since the native Sami people graze their reindeer on those grasses in the summer.

Statoil is investing heavily in offshore wind energy too. And that’s important to Gjertsen. “I’m home free, but my kids are not,” he says. “It does actually matter to me. The world needs energy, and it does make a difference how and where we get it.”

Disclaimer: Travel, accommodation, and tours to report this story were paid for by a grant from the Royal Embassy of Norway.

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Sometimes companies don’t tell the whole truth. A magical ingredient doesn’t cure all your woes or a fabulous new workout doesn’t turn you into an Olympic athlete overnight. But when a company misleadingly labels a practice or product as environmentally friendly or sustainable without following through on any of these promises, that’s called greenwashing. 

Now, three environmental accountability groups say the largest fossil fuel company in the US is doing just that. Earthworks, Global Witness, and Greenpeace USA, represented by the law firm Richman Law and Policy, jointly filed the first-ever greenwashing complaint to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on March 16 against Chevron, an energy company with a market value over $136 billion. They claim that the company “is consistently misrepresenting its image to appear climate-friendly and racial justice-oriented, while its business operations overwhelmingly rely on climate-polluting fossil fuels, which disproportionately harm communities of color,” according to a press release from Earthworks. In a statement to PopSci, Chevron refuted the grievances outlined by the groups. The FTC declined to comment on “complaints or letters from external parties.”

Greenwashing can come in many forms, but this is the first time that a fossil fuel company has come under fire with an FTC complaint. Environmental marketing claims can be vague, false, or unsubstantiated. In 1992, the FTC released the Green Guides that provide guidelines to “help marketers avoid making misleading environmental claims,” by, among other things, avoiding broad claims that a product is “environmentally friendly” or “eco-friendly.” The Green Guides were last revised in 2012, and include sections on certifications and seals of approval that cover renewable materials claims and non-toxic claims. These are guidelines rather than laws, and the FTC ultimately makes the call about how unfair or deceptive the claims are.

[Related: Solar power got cheap. So why aren’t we using it more?]

The FTC has disciplined some companies for disregarding Green Guides in the past, including when Nordstrom, Bed Bath & Beyond, J.C. Penney Company, and Backcountry.com had to pay a combined $1.3 million of civil penalties for misrepresenting textiles made from rayon as bamboo back in 2015. In 2019, Truly Organic was ordered to pay $1.76 million to settle an FTC complaint because the company’s uncertified beauty products were falsely labeled as 100-percent organic.

Earthworks keeps a list of Chevron’s alleged greenwashing on their website with screenshots of the company’s tweets and advertisements. The three organizations behind the complaint call Chevron’s media campaigns about addressing climate action and renewable fuels “false and misleading,” and says the energy giant misleads consumers with “deceptive jargon.” 

Josh Eisenfeld, the corporate accountability campaigner at Earthworks, said in a press statement that “[t]he world’s second biggest polluter shouldn’t be allowed to advertise that they’re good for the environment.” Meanwhile, in its press statement, Chevron said it’s investing more than $3 billion now through 2028 to “advance the energy transition.”

The complaint also calls out Chevron’s Black Lives Matter Twitter post from last June. “In reality, Chevron’s business operations exacerbate racial inequalities and disproportionately harm people of color,” the Earthworks site reads. One example includes when more than 15,000 people were hospitalized for respiratory distress after a 2012 fire at a Chevron refinery in Richmond, California, a city with a roughly 40 percent Latinx and 20 percent Black population, sent a plume of black smoke into the air. The same refinery accidentally dumped around 750 gallons of fuel into San Francisco Bay this February. 

Chevron called the complaint “frivolous” in an email statement to PopSci. “We engage in honest conversations about the energy transition. We believe the future of energy is lower carbon and are working to help the world achieve that goal,” it read. The company also said it’s “taking action to reduce the carbon intensity of [its] operations and assets, increase the use of renewables and offsets in support of [its] business, and invest in low-carbon technologies to enable commercial solutions.” The company has put money behind renewable start-ups, but the sum is only a minuscule percentage of the company’s total capital expenditures.

[Related: Keystone XL was supposed to be a green pipeline. What does that even mean?]

Right now, the Green Guides are the only greenwashing guidelines set forth by a US government agency. That leaves some serious gaps in federal regulations on how companies and sellers market environmentally friendly purchases. Several law professionals argue that more robust rules would curb instances of false and misleading labels that often trick consumers.

Until this point, none of the FTC’s Green Guides cases have centered around a fossil fuel company’s industrial practices. The accountability groups wrote in their statement that they’re “calling on the FTC to require that Chevron remove these ads, refrain from releasing similar ads in the future, and face any relevant penalties as just and proper.” 

Now that the complaint has been filed, though, the ball is in the FTC’s court. Eisenfeld tells PopSci that the next steps may take a while. “This process can really vary from a couple months to years,” he says. “We really have high hopes that the FTC will do everything in their powers to quickly protect American consumers.”

The post Chevron just got hit with an official greenwashing complaint. Here’s what that means. appeared first on Popular Science.

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Raj Tawney is an essayist and journalist in New York, covering big business’ impact on our culture.

This op-ed originally featured on Undark.

On Sunday, December 22, 2019, a barge holding 600 gallons of diesel fuel overturned after being struck by a crane and descended into the waters off the coast of San Cristóbal Island, one of the 19 Galápagos Islands off the coast of Ecuador. Although it’s unclear how much fuel leaked, the Galápagos National Park Service and Ecuador’s Coast Guard instantly began efforts to clean up the environmentally delicate area, sharing photos on Twitter of their swift response. Raúl Ledesma, Ecuador’s Minister of Environment, reposter the National Park Service’s photos, further stating that immediate actions were being taken to reduce environmental risks. By that Monday, Ecuador’s president, Lenín Moreno, tweeted that the situation was under control. Nevertheless, the accident renews concerns that excessive human development and industrial imposition are taking a toll on one of the world’s most storied and fragile ecosystems.

The Galápagos Islands are home to some of the world’s most unique species, attracting researchers and observers from all over the globe. Discovered by humans in the 16th century, when a Spanish ship happened upon it after having drifted off course en route to Peru, the archipelago famously inspired Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. In 1978, it was declared a protected Unesco World Heritage Site. Among its rare and exclusive wildlife are giant tortoises, marine iguanas, penguins, finches, crakes, and species of mice found nowhere else in the world. And of course there is the blue-footed booby—a favorite of Darwin’s—which has declined significantly in population over the past 20 years as one of its main prey, sardines, have diminished.

Ever since humans set foot there nearly 500 years ago, efforts to study and preserve the Galápagos Islands have been met with attempts to exploit and profit from them too. Due to their location near trade routes, the islands almost immediately became a haven for pirates looking to attack merchant ships traveling to and from the Spanish Empire. Whalers also flocked to the islands’ shores, a breeding ground for sperm whales, when merchants realized in the 18th century that blubber could profitably be converted to fuel.

More recently, the Galápagos Islands’ historical significance, biodiversity, picturesque landscapes, and affordable airfare have made it a tourist destination, attracting more than 275,000 visitors annually. Tourism adds tens of millions of dollars to the local economy and employs a significant portion of the islands’ more than 25,000 residents, many of whom work at the more than 300 hotels spread throughout the islands.

Scientists have warned that the trail of human visitors could hurt the islands’ delicate natural habitats. Since the inception of colonization and the rise of tourism, more than 1,700 invasive species, including former farm animals left behind by colonizers, have infiltrated the Galápagos’ ecosystems. By the late 1990s more than 100,000 feral goats roamed free on Isabela and other islands, eating so much vegetation that they nearly drove the giant tortoise to extinction. The crisis prompted the Ecuadorian government and the Charles Darwin Foundation to eradicate the goat population through designated aerial hunting, allowing the dead carcasses to decompose and return nutrients to the land.

Another threat is the islands’ location along heavily trafficked shipping routes. In 2001, an oil tanker ran aground a half mile from San Cristóbal Island, spilling almost 800,000 gallons of diesel and bunker fuel and killing sea lions, pelicans, and boobies as a result. Although it was considered a low-level spill, the incident proved so severe that the Ecuadorian government declared a national emergency. Within a year, the spill had caused the island’s native iguana population to fall by 62 percent—from 25,000 to 10,000—according to a Princeton University study. The researchers determined that the iguanas died of starvation, after the oil killed beneficial microorganisms that lived inside their guts.

In 2005, the International Maritime Organization declared the Galápagos Islands a Particularly Sensitive Sea Area, a designation that affords the area special safeguards from vessel traffic. But those measures have failed to extinguish the threat posed by shipping. In 2014, a freighter carrying over 15,000 gallons of diesel fuel and several tons of cargo collided with San Cristóbal Island’s rocky coast. Although no leakage into the waters was reported, the Ecuadorian government took the matter seriously enough to declare a state of emergency. Now, with last month’s oil spill, history has repeated itself yet again. Officials have launched an investigation to determine how the recent spill happened. The accident was small by most measures, but the possibility of a future, larger-scale disaster remains.

Between industrial hazards and the encroachment of tourists, what will become of the Galápagos Islands’ vulnerable habitats? Decreasing our dependence on oil and transitioning to alternative, low-carbon energy solutions would be one step toward protecting the islands from human interference. And although tourism dollars are vital to the Galápagos’ National Park Service and the Ecuadorian government has attempted to limit the number of visitors in recent years, even stricter travel limitations may be called for. After all, the Galápagos Islands’ most threatening invasive species may well be us.

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The following is an excerpt adapted from The Story of More by Hope Jahren.

Once upon a time, there was a broad and fathomless ocean. Beneath the waves swirled the currents that flushed saltwater in magnificent gushes. Deep in the dense, cold darkness, the seafloor waited with perfect patience to embrace the corpse of every living thing above

This was called the Panthalassa Sea, and I am certain that the creatures swimming in it believed their watery world to be the entire Universe, extending forever in every direction. The creatures of the Panthalassa were different from the ones we recognize in our oceans: jawless fish writhed in great schools, their wormy bodies streaming behind them as they searched for places to attach. Innumerable cartilage forms swam, forever in motion, their gill slits pumping as they moved. Spiral-shelled squids jetted back and forth, contracting and squirting their way along. Sea lilies swayed, tethered to the bottom by their roots, their animal petals filter-feeding on the small and weak that floated by.

The Panthalassa Sea was enormous—far bigger than our Pacific Ocean—but it did not extend forever. On the other side of the planet lay the Tethys Ocean, a thick, salty soup of green algae and the tiny animals that grazed upon it. Within this green slime, bubble-encased amoebas drifted from meal to meal and spongy coral sat anchored, waiting for dinner to pass through. Each tiny alga opened itself to the sun and was fertilized by sloughage from faraway mountains.

Between the Panthalassa and the Tethys there stood a vast continent, drained by rivers, pocked by volcanoes, and home to a different sort of life. Near the middle of this continent stood the Forest of Ruhr, which was altogether unlike the forests we know.

The trees of Ruhr stood thirty feet tall, crowned with fern fronds, spilling seeds from their base. Taller still stood tufted starbursts of needles atop hundred-foot trunks. None of these trees were made of wood: each one contained a hollow cavern of pith. Nor were they covered in bark: their rinds were marked by a paisley pattern of scars. Stranger still, no flowers could be found anywhere—not a one—nor the fruit that follows the bloom, nor the pollen that precedes it.

A mossy carpet lined the forest floor of Ruhr, and within it great millipedes chawed dead foliage and expectorated into the soil. Creatures strange and naked, turtles without shells, mucked their way through the fallen leaves, while dragonflies big as seagulls hovered above in the humid air. Like the sediment at the bottom of the oceans, the mud beneath this boggy forest quietly accumulated, accepting and incorporating the dead year after year, without judgment or prejudice.

The story above, for all its romance, is not a fairy tale. The Panthalassa Sea, the Tethys Ocean, and the Forest of Ruhr are all real places that existed between two hundred million and three hundred million years ago on planet Earth. There is not a drop of fiction in my descriptions, for ample evidence has been preserved in museums. There, you can wander through the history of this long-ago world, examining its stones and bones.

The Forest of Ruhr grew lush for millions of years; it was one of the earth’s first tropical rain forests. Eventually, it was buried under the accumulating sands of time. Crushed and rotted, the sludge descended into the deep, where heat and pressure transformed what had once been leaves and stems into black, blocky coal. All the while, the entire continent was pushed and pulled until its heaving journey stranded it far from home, on the other side of the globe.

Similarly, the Tethys Ocean was folded down into the earth, and over tens of millions of years, the plants and animals that had died were cooked and pressed into a rich black broth that bubbled in seeps between sandy layers, until a thick crude oil was all that remained of the life that had been. The plants and animals of the Panthalassa Sea followed a similar fate, but their oily remains were abused further, until whole molecules cracked under the strain to produce bubbles. The bubbles slid along the rock layers and merged into great pockets of natural gas.

The plant and animal corpses of the Forest of Ruhr, the Tethys Ocean, and the Panthalassa Sea now constitute the coal deposits of Germany, the petroleum crude oil of Saudi Arabia, and the natural gas deposits of North Dakota, respectively. The largest coal reserve in western Europe was once a tropical forest; the crude oil that gushes from the world’s most productive oil wells once lined a shallow ocean; the natural gas collected during today’s fracking boom once anchored a deep abyssal sea.

A fossil is everything, or it is nothing, or it is something in between. An insect trapped in amber and a dinosaur’s footprint—they both count as fossils, remnants from a time gone by. The bulk of life on land and in the ocean is plant life, and it has been for billions of years. Coal, oil, and natural gas are the pressed, cooked, and cracked remains of the plants and animals (but mostly plants) that lived hundreds of millions of years ago. All of them—solid (coal), liquid (oil), and gas (natural gas)—qualify as fossils. Because they are also flammable materials and can be burned as fuel, we know them as “fossil fuels.”

Oil is mostly burned in the combustion engines of automobiles, coal is mostly burned in order to generate electricity within power plants, and natural gas is mostly burned in the furnaces that power factories. Burning fossil fuel is not the only way to power an engine and to generate electricity and heat, but it is far and away the most common method in use today. Almost 90 percent of the energy used on Earth—to drive, to cook, to light, to warm, to cool, to manufacture—comes from the burning of fossil fuels.

The world’s reliance on oil versus coal versus natural gas is split pretty evenly: of all the fossil fuels burned each year, 40 percent is oil, 30 percent is coal, and another 30 percent is natural gas. The reason for this has to do with infrastructure: more than 99.9 percent of motor vehicles were designed to burn refined oil, the majority of the world’s power plants were designed to burn coal, and a great part of the equipment in modern factories is powered by natural gas. Switching between fossil fuels is sometimes possible but incurs cost, as the amount of energy released, as well as the type of byproducts emitted, differs between fuel types.

As we have seen, the last fifty years is a Story of More— more cars, more driving, more electricity, and more manufacturing; because of this, it should come as no surprise that it is also a Story of More fossil fuel use. During the last five decades, global fossil fuel use has nearly tripled.

Fossil fuels are also known as “nonrenewable” fuels because the amount of time required to transform living tissue into coal, oil, or natural gas is tens of millions of years at a minimum. When we pull oil, coal, and natural gas from the earth and then burn it inside our vehicles, power plants, and factories, it is not being replaced. Because it is easy to envision a world with a growing population translating into a growing use of fossil fuels, we are left wondering: How much fossil fuel is still out there?

Geology is a centuries-old science, and the last hundred years have been devoted largely to locating, mapping, and accessing the rocks that contain oil, coal, and natural gas. Based on this work, the “proven reserves” (that is, the for sure accessible deposits) of fossil fuels have been tallied and made public by British Petroleum (BP). More could always pop up—most of Venezuela’s known oil reserves have been discovered since 1980—but for the most part, the BP databases give a pretty good idea of what’s in the ground.

The world’s total proven oil reserves constitute a fifty-year supply, given today’s rate of oil use; similarly, the total proven reserves of natural gas would also last fifty years if burned at today’s rate. The world’s proven coal reserves are much larger: they would take about 150 years to burn through at the current rate of use. Of course, all of those numbers are much too high if fossil fuel use continues to increase each year, as it has done during the last several decades. Inciting panic over fossil fuels running out has never really paid off, and scientists have been accused of crying wolf since 1939, when the director of the Naval Petroleum Reserves informed Congress that America’s oil reserves would not outlast a second world war.

It is true that the total amount of known oil and gas reserves has doubled since 1980, but global fossil fuel consumption doubled right along with it. We may not know exactly when, but at some point something will have to give: there is no second Panthalassa Sea that four generations of geologists missed when they mapped the plains, mountains, and ocean floor. If we want human society to outlast the finite resource that it is dependent upon, then any movement away from fossil fuels is a step in the right direction, and one that can’t happen too soon.

Excerpted from The Story of More by Hope Jahren, published by Vintage Books. Reprinted with permission. All other rights reserved.

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On Tuesday night the Keystone Pipeline bled 383,000 gallons of crude oil into the North Dakota wetlands, contaminating 22,500 square feet of land near the small town of Edinburgh by the time Canadian gas and oil company TC Energy intervened. This is the pipeline’s second significant leak since it began operations in 2011. TC energy reports that the unrefined petroleum is now contained, but the company won’t know exactly how much escaped until they’ve finished their cleanup efforts.

TC Energy, formerly known as TransCanada, reported the accident just hours after the U.S. State Department held a public hearing on the environmental impact of the company’s proposed Keystone XL Pipeline. Keystone XL would help funnel petroleum from Alberta, Canada to refineries near the Gulf of Mexico, creating an estimated 16,000 to 42,000 jobs—and passing over the Ogallala Aquifer, one of the world’s largest groundwater resources, where many fear it could leak. It is also anticipated to pass through the Missouri River, which is the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s water supply. As many as 10,000 people participated in protests against the project near the Standing Rock reservation from April 2016 to February 2017, but President Donald Trump approved its construction in 2017. TC Energy is expected to break ground next year.

According to TC Energy spokeswoman Sara Rabern, human and environmental safety are the company’s “top priority.”

“We will take the learnings from this incident, like we do with anytime we have any incident, and use them to improve our pipeline integrity,” Rabern told The Washington Post, adding that TC Energy spends “millions of dollars each year to ensure we operate [a] safe pipeline system.”

But indigenous organizations, Midwestern residents, and environmental activists fear that the existing pipeline’s two major spills (and steady stream of smaller leaks) are just the beginning. Stretching 2,147 miles from the tar sands in Alberta, Canada to Oklahoma, the Keystone Pipeline is capable of propelling 590,000 barrels of crude oil a day. The XL Pipeline will have a daily capacity of 830,000 barrels.

“Given TC Energy’s track record, and now another spill, it’s upsetting they can continue to put these non-reliable, dirty, and polluting pipelines in the ground,” says Kandi White, the native energy and climate campaign coordinator for the Indigenous Environmental Network, a nonprofit addressing environmental and economic justice issues. “There is no doubt that these new pipelines will spill. They are going to leak.”

TC Energy plans on employing vac trucks, backhoes, and other specialized equipment to recover the spilled oil, some of which has leaked into wetland areas. Wetlands are important natural landscapes that act as water filters, control flooding and erosion, and provide food for wildlife. Oil spills interrupt these functions by damaging plants and potentially contaminating nearby water sources—most notably groundwater that Americans rely on for crop irrigation and drinking. Crude oil is a known toxin that can cause skin rashes, irregular breathing, and long-term organ damage in humans.

“I fear people will become apathetic about spills because they occur so often,” says White, whose family lives on the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota. “But it should not become the norm because it’s devastating.”

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This story originally featured on Outdoor Life.

President Donald Trump has evidently undergone an election-year conversion on the topic of the Land & Water Conservation Fund (LWCF), pumping new energy into the campaign for full and permanent funding of this critically important access and habitat conservation tool.

This week, Trump used his favorite platform—Twitter—to express his enthusiasm for LWCF. He wrote: “I am calling on Congress to send me a Bill that will fully and permanently fund the LWCF and restores our National Parks. When I sign it into law, it will be HISTORIC for our beautiful public lands.”

He goes on to thank Sens. Cory Gardner and Steve Daines, whom he called “GREAT Conservative Leaders.”

In this highly partisan era, LWCF is one of the relatively few government programs that consistently receives support on both sides of the aisle. Even so, it has critics among those who frown upon the idea of government owning land in the first place. Full funding for the LWCF has received pushback because some lawmakers argue the massive $12 billion backlog in national parks maintenance needed to be addressed first.

It seems the president and the Senate are ready to tackle both issues with one deal. This week, Senate leaders announced a bipartisan deal that would spend about $2.2 billion per year on conservation and outdoor projects and national park maintenance across the country, according to the New York Times.

Of that $2.2 billion, $900 million would go to the LWCF, which is nearly double the $485 million Congress approved this year and 60 times larger than the $15 million Trump proposed in his 2021 budget last month. More than a $1 billion per year would be used to address the national parks maintenance backlog.

Trump’s change of heart has surprised conservation policy observers on two levels. For one, LWCF has hardly been front-page news lately, given the election, coronavirus outbreak, and the ups and downs on Wall Street.

Secondly, Trump has been mostly negligent of the LWCF in the past. In fact, his previous budgets have effectively zeroed out LWCF funding.

Frequent readers of this site know that LWCF is one of the most powerful funding mechanisms for conservation that Congress has. Since 1965, LWCF has taken some money from royalties paid for off-shore energy development and directs it towards habitat conservation, access projects and urban parks and recreation.

LWCF can be funded up to $900 million annually, but Congress often raids that piggy bank for other purposes. Over the decades, Congress has funded LWCF at about half its potential. Right now, Congress is considering legislation to fully and permanently fund LWCF at the $900 million level. That bill passed the House of Representatives, is being considered in the Senate, and evidently has the support of the White House.

It’s probably no coincidence that Trump’s tweet heaped praise on Daines and Gardner. Both are Trump allies who are up for re-election in November and both represent states that highly value hunting, fishing, and the outdoors. Gardner is said to be one of the most vulnerable Republican senators facing the voters this cycle. Some outlets, including Politico and The New York Times, say Daines may see a surprise challenge from Montana Governor Steve Bullock, a Democrat who has branded himself as a champion of public lands.

No matter the motivation, LWCF stock is going up in Washington D.C., and odds have to be increasing that legislation to provide full and permanent funding will actually pass into law.

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It’s time we started talking about the principal opponents to action on climate change: fossil fuel industries. If history has taught us anything, it’s that when oil, gas, and coal industries oppose policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, those policies fail.

And make no mistake, they do oppose in force. Revelations this year that mining giant Glencore spent millions of dollars globally to bankroll a pro-coal campaign are just the latest example.

My research, however, shows that there are specific strategies policymakers can use to help overcome the resistance from incumbent fossil fuel companies, including exploiting the divisions within and between them.

I have spent the past few years studying the behavior of these firms and industries in the United States—the center of fossil fuel resistance. After all, the U.S. is now the largest producer of oil and gas, with the largest reserves of coal on the planet, and it is the home of companies such as ExxonMobil that have known about climate change for 40 years and have been denying its existence for almost as long.

To get to know the way they work, I spent countless hours in the offices of major coal corporations and their lobbyists. I also met with executives from oil and gas corporations in Houston, and their lobbyists in Washington D.C.

Finally, I spoke with small renewable startups and billion-dollar companies running endless battles to preserve tax subsidies for wind and solar, which they claimed are only fair given the subsidies to fossil fuels.

So what are the lessons for policymakers seeking to advance a clean energy transition? Three stand out.

Support clean energy industries

First, governments need to entrench and build existing interests in support of clean energy. Targeted policies, such as subsidies to the solar industry or tax rebates to households for solar power, both boost the industry and build a specific political constituency in support of solar power.

For example, US investment tax credits for solar power helped drive a boom in recent years, growing into an industry measured in the billions of dollars. As industry revenues have increased, so has the industry’s power to defend the investment tax credit and oppose fossil fuel companies.

Indeed, the Solar Energy Industries Association in the U.S. is now a vocal advocate for clean energy in Washington, just as the Solar Council is here in Australia. Both groups have helped offset the tide of fossil fuel lobbying that regularly washes against the shores of government.

Split fossil fuel industries

Second, policymakers should seek to exploit divisions within and between fossil fuel industries. When incumbent industries are divided or politically weak, green coalitions are easier to build.

For example, if the aim is to regulate coal, policies are more likely to succeed if they exploit the natural divisions between coal mining companies and the electric utilities that burn it to generate electricity.

In this case, the best bet is to target politically weak industries less able to mount a resistance campaign.

In the U.S., the obvious example is the coal industry. It’s in structural decline, with production and revenue falling steadily. In fact, between 2012 and 2015, more than 50 firms representing 50 percent of US coal production filed for bankruptcy protection, including three of the largest: Peabody Energy, Alpha Natural Resources, and Arch Coal, all of whose share prices have plummeted.

Coal’s decline has been manifest in a shrinking lobbying presence, with key coalitions reducing their operations, and with it the industry’s capacity to oppose policies that support clean energy.

Shift interests

Third, policymakers should not only seek to entrench existing commercial interests and exploit divisions, but also to shift commercial interests.

Policies, such as renewable energy targets that compel utilities to invest in renewable energy, will shift the commercial interests of these firms towards policies supporting renewable energy over time.

Indeed, repeat signals demonstrating to business the regulatory landscape is changing can create a tipping point, when a critical mass of affected companies stop opposing a specific policy such as emissions trading.

This was the view of many electric utilities during the Obama administration who decided to support climate policies. As the CEO of Duke Energy, Jim Rogers put it at the time, “if you’re not at the table, you’re going to be on the menu.”

Of course, none of this will be easy. BHP shareholders last week voted to remain a member of the coal lobby Minerals Council of Australia, showing the fossil fuel industries are far from toothless.

But with the science showing a third of the world’s oil reserves, half the world’s gas reserves, and 90 percent of global coal reserves must be left in the ground to meet the Paris targets, governments urgently need effective action.

Otherwise, no matter what administration is in power, climate action will continue to be delayed and even derailed by the industries that stand to lose.

Christian Downie is an Australian Research Council DECRA fellow at Australian National University.

This story originally featured on The Conversation.

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It’s impossible to imagine modern life without plastics. From the moment the day begins, we are using plastic. It’s in our toothbrushes, our shower curtains and our phones. We use it on on the way to work in bus seats, car dashboards, and bicycle helmets. We see it at lunch in takeout containers and disposable utensils. Whether you’re in your living room controlling the TV with a plastic remote or on the top of Mount Everest wearing cold-weather gear made with plastics, it’s there.

We rarely think about where it all comes from, but we should. According to a new report on the full life cycle of the world’s plastic production, the long-term environmental results are nothing short of a catastrophe. The report from the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) finds the production of plastics — from extraction to manufacture to disposal and steps in between — is a significant source of carbon pollution and set to become a major driver of climate change.

Plastics are made from fossil fuels. It takes energy to dig those fuels out of the ground, to process them, to ship them and, at the end of their lives, to dispose of them. The report estimates that current emissions from the production, manufacturing, transport, incineration, and degradation of plastic are roughly equivalent to the yearly emissions of around 200 coal-fired power plants this year. If trends hold up, by 2050, pollution from plastics will be closer to the yearly output of around 600 coal-fired power plants.

Humanity can only put so much carbon into the atmosphere and still meet the Paris Agreement’s long-term goal of limiting the global average temperature increase to well below 2 degrees Celsius. That volume of carbon is known as the carbon budget. The study calculates that if the growth of plastics continues at its current pace, plastics will have eaten up around one-eighth of the carbon budget by 2050.

“We need to cut emissions by 45 percent by 2030,” says Carroll Muffett, president of CIEL, which produced the report. “Plastics are poised to do almost exactly the opposite.” He adds, “Once the plastics are released into the environment, they continue to impact the climate in perpetuity. Unless they are recycled, which the vast majority are not.” According to the EPA, only about 9 percent of plastic waste in the United States is recycled.

While other studies have calculated emissions from plastics at various stages of production and disposal of plastics, this report is the first of its kind to estimate the impact of plastic across its full life cycle. Most carbon emissions associated with plastics comes from the production phase of the life cycle, but even at the end of the cycle, plastics are a source of pollution.

Most of the plastic ever produced has been released into the environment and persists in some form. What happens next is known. Turtles wind up with straws in their noses, dead whales wash ashore with almost 100 pounds of plastic in their stomachs, divers swim through currents of plastic pollution. Even at this stage, plastics are a source of carbon pollution.

When plastic particles like microplastics are exposed to sunlight, they continue to emit greenhouse gases. “And they never really stop,” says Rachel Labbé-Bellas, science programs manager at 5 Gyres, a nonprofit working to curb the use of plastics, and co-author of the report. “In relation to other parts of the life cycle, the contribution of ocean plastics to greenhouse gas emissions is small, but what is concerning is that plastic emits and never stops emitting.”

A growing hunger for plastics

Recently, 187 countries agreed to include plastic waste in the Basel convention — a global convention that regulates hazardous waste material — which the United States has never ratified. Over the last ten years, we have produced more plastic than during the entire last century and production isn’t slowing. Despite recent bans on plastic bags and plastic straws in many places, analysis from the World Economic Forum suggests plastic production will continue to grow in the coming decades.

“We are seeing rapid growth for plastics globally,” says Frederic Bauer, who studies energy systems at Lund University in Sweden and was not involved in the report. “Petrochemicals — and in particular, plastics — is the market segment that is driving growth in petroleum the most, according to several sources. There is nothing that seems to be slowing down that trend.”

This is bad news for the climate. “The impacts might look different depending on where you are in the life cycle,” Labbé-Bellas says. “But the problem of plastic pollution and climate change derives from the same source — the extraction of fossil fuels.”

Fracking and plastics

While the report looks at emissions from plastic production worldwide, it focuses on the United States, and for a good reason: Nowhere is the plastic industry development as fast as it is here, where new plastic plants are predominantly designed to use natural gas, as opposed to the oil-based production favored by much of the rest of the world. “We are seeing a rapid export of plastics technology based on natural gas that is linked to the plastics boom,” Muffet says.

The “shale rush” in the United States has not only supplied the country with massive amounts of fracked gas, it has also opened a market for the hydrocarbon ethane, which can be made into plastic. Between 2008 and 2017, ethane production in the US more than doubled, from around 700 thousand barrels a day of ethane to almost 1.5 million. By 2021, it is expected to reach 2 million barrels a day.

In 2016, Shell announced it would be building a multi-billion dollar “cracker” plant — a facility that breaks ethane into ethylene, which is used to make plastic like polyethylene. Polyethylene is the most common type of plastic used in single-use plastic packaging, the sector that makes up around 40 percent of global production and is the largest and most rapidly growing segment of the plastic economy.

Terrie Baumgardner is a 71-year old retired school teacher who lives six miles from the plant’s site. It’s being built in Potter Township, Pennsylvania, near major fracking sites at the center of the Utica shale basin. This natural gas won’t provide heat or propel engines. It will be turned into plastic. Baumgardner attended some of the first community meetings when Shell announced the plant. A representative, she says, “held up a small teddy bear and said, ‘We are going to be making the plastic that fills these.’” Baumgardner adds, “At that time, I don’t think anyone there had woken up to the threat that plastics posed to our environment.”

Baumgardner recently learned of four other ethane plants planned for her region, and she’s worried. “You have fracking feeding this on the one hand, including all the health and safety impacts that go along with that.” she says. “On the other hand, you have the climate change impacts along the entire line and the extensive pollution and human health impacts at the end — the injection wells, diesel trucking, mass transport, compressor stations. It is everywhere you turn.”

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — a United Nations body responsible for assessing the science related to climate change — concluded last year that keeping warming to no more than 1.5 degrees C is both necessary and achievable, but emphasized that to do so requires rapid and dramatic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

The new CIEL report puts a spotlight on the plastics industry’s massive infrastructure buildout happening at precisely the moment countries are waking up to the vast environmental damage caused by plastic. Much of the focus on the long-term impacts of plastics has been on the threat to wildlife, especially in oceans. As this report shows, plastics are also a growing threat to the climate.

Sarah Sax is a journalist based in Brooklyn. You can follow her @Sarah2theSax. Nexus Media is a syndicated newswire covering climate, energy, policy, art and culture.

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The following is an excerpt from the new book “Humans: A Brief History of How We F****d It All Up” by Tom Phillips.

In 1944, the genius engineer, chemist and inventor Thomas Midgley Jr., a man whose discoveries had helped shape the modern world to a remarkable degree, died at home in bed at the age of 55.

Dying at home in bed sounds quite peaceful, you’d think. Not in this case. Paralyzed below the waist due to a bout of polio some years earlier, Midgley disliked the indignity of being lifted in and out of bed, and had put his talent for innovation to good use, building himself an elaborate system of pulleys so he could do it himself. Which was all going terribly well until that day in November, when something went a bit wrong and he was found strangled to death by the ropes of his own device.

The manner of his death is grimly ironic enough—but that’s not the reason Tom Midgley is in this book. He’s in this book because, incredibly, being killed in bed by his own invention doesn’t even make it into the top two biggest mistakes of his life. In fact, by pretty much any standard, he has to rank as one of the most catastrophic individuals who ever lived.

In the 1910s and 1920s, he was working on the problem of car engines “knocking”—a persistent problem where engines would stutter and jerk, especially when put under strain. Midgley and his boss Charles Kettering suspected that knocking was down to the fuel used burning unevenly, rather than a fundamental flaw in the design of engines. So they set about trying to find an additive that would reduce this effect.

The substance they finally settled on was lead (specifically, a liquid compound called tetraethyl lead, or TEL). And lead is a deadly poison. It causes, among other things, high blood pressure, kidney problems, fetal abnormalities and brain damage. It particularly affects children.

Midgley’s story is often told as an example of “unintended consequences,” which … No, not really. Granted, “poisoning entire generations of people all across the globe” wasn’t actually his goal. But equally, nobody involved in the production and popularization of leaded petrol gets to play the “oh no, what a horrible and unforeseen surprise” card.

Lead’s toxic nature wasn’t a new discovery—it’s been known for literally thousands of years. William Clark of the U.S. Public Health Service wrote in a letter that using tetraethyl lead presented a “serious menace to public health” and predicted—entirely accurately—that “on busy thoroughfares it is highly probable that the lead oxide dust will remain in the lower stratum.”

Midgley’s team had come up with loads of effective anti-knock agents. One of which was impressive in its simplicity: ethanol. A viable fuel in its own right, your basic drinkin’ alcohol isn’t just good for sterilizing physical wounds and temporarily cleansing emotional wounds, it also works well as an anti-knock additive—with the added benefit that it’s incredibly easy and cheap to produce on a mass scale.

So why did they drop that in favor of a substance that everybody knew was toxic as hell? The trouble was that ethanol was simply too easy and cheap to produce. And, crucially, it wasn’t patentable.

In just over a decade, tetraethyl lead gasoline—under the brand name Ethyl, cunningly not mentioning the “lead” bit—had actually captured 80 per cent of the US market. All the way, General Motors and Midgley insisted it was safe, despite plenty of what you might call “warning signs.” Huge flashing neon warning signs. Like the fact that in February 1923, when Ethyl first went on sale, Midgley himself had to take the whole month off work due to ill-health caused by the lead fumes. Or like the fact that workers at the factories that made the fuel kept on dying a lot. Five workers died from lead poisoning at the Bayway plant in New Jersey, and 35 were hospitalized, many of them driven insane by the neurological effects of lead—”the patient becomes violently maniacal, shouting, leaping from the bed, smashing furniture and acting as if in delirium tremens” one report recorded.

The thing about lead is that it doesn’t break down. While some toxins will become less dangerous with time, lead builds up—in the air, in the soil and in the bodies of plants and animals and humans. The World Health Organization estimates that hundreds of thousands of people die annually world-wide from lead-poisoning illnesses, such as heart disease. Beyond the physical health effects, lead also damages children’s neurological development – it causes a drop in IQ levels among affected populations, and is estimated to be the cause of over 12 per cent of developmental intellectual disabilities around the world.

Midgley himself did not hang around after inventing leaded petrol. Ever the tinkerer, he quickly moved on to other areas of investigation—and he still had his second catastrophic mistake to make.

The goal was simple: to find a cheap, non-flammable, non-toxic substance that would do the same job as the current refrigerants. General Motors had recently bought a refrigeration company, which they renamed Frigidaire, and they knew that if they could crack the problem, they’d make a mint.

Studying the chemical properties of known refrigerants, he quickly identified fluorine as a likely candidate, ideally in a compound with carbon to neutralize its toxic effects. And he pretty much nailed it out of the gate, as one of the initial substances his team created to test was dichlorodifluoromethane. These days, it’s better known by the brand name they gave it: Freon.

Midgley demonstrated its safety to great acclaim at a meeting of the American Chemical Society, theatrically inhaling a lungful of it and using it to blow out a candle. Non-toxic, non-flammable and an excellent refrigerant. Perfect. Indeed, he hadn’t just discovered a new compound, he’d discovered a whole new class of them, all of which had similar properties. They became known as chlorofluorocarbons—or, to use the common abbreviation, CFCs.

Unfortunately, in the early 1930s, nobody even really knew what the “ozone layer” was, or just how important that thin band of oxygen molecules in the stratosphere was in shielding the surface of the earth from the sun’s harmful ultraviolet rays. They certainly didn’t know that CFCs, entirely harmless at sea level, would become far more dangerous when they got into the upper atmosphere, where that same ultraviolet radiation would cause them to break down into their constituent elements—and that one of those elements, chlorine, would destroy the ozone, robbing the planet of its protective shield.

The good news here is that this time humanity realized the problem before it could cause death on a massive scale. Woo-hoo! Score one for humans! In the 1970s (just as the first moves to phase out leaded petrol were beginning), the growing hole in the ozone layer was also discovered, along with the link to CFCs. With that came the warning: if ozone depletion carried on at the current rate, humans would be exposed to more and more damaging UV radiation, and within a matter of decades cancer cases and blindness would soar.

And so from the 1970s to the 1990s, the world set about unwinding Thomas Midgley’s legacy, as both of his major inventions were either banned or phased out in most countries around the world.

Midgley’s reputation, meanwhile, is set: he was a “one-man environmental disaster,” as New Scientist described him; a man who in the words of historian J. R. McNeill (in his book Something New Under the Sun) “had more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in earth’s history.”

Adapted from HUMANS: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up by Tom Phillips © by Tom Phillips 2019, used with permission from Hanover Square Press/HarperCollins.

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I have eagerly awaited the final season of Game of Thrones, and its strange blend of fictive medieval Britain, supernatural monsters, and pornography. Over the seasons the plot has gained speed and focus while the pornography has vanished and—incredible as it seems—we can also detect that George R.R. Martin’s fantastic story has a message. Perhaps we can explain its enormous success by considering how, at a subconscious, dreamlike level, it deals with humanity’s most profound problem.

I want to believe that my interpretation is more than a pathetic attempt to legitimize all those hours of passive TV-watching. Just as the great anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss was able to expose central problems of specific Amerindian peoples by analyzing their myths, we can analyze our own tales in order to discern the contradictions and apparently unsolvable dilemmas that torment our subconscious.

What Lévi-Strauss called “mythemes” are abstractions of central elements of stories—the basic themes which express their essential messages. Using his method for dissecting myths, we can unearth submerged meanings in fantasy and science fiction. And these dreamy worlds tell us more about ourselves than we generally realize.

Film director James Cameron’s blockbusters Aliens (1986) and Avatar (2009), for instance, reflected a fundamental transformation in the predominant worldview of movie audiences. In the quarter of a century that separated the two movies, the signs had been reversed regarding nature, diversity, and technology. In the final scene of Aliens, Sigourney Weaver—inside a machine which gives her superhuman strength—battles with a monstrous organism from another planet. With the help of technology, she defeats evil Nature. The monster from outer space symbolizes an untamed and threatening biological diversity. Only with the help of the machine can humankind survive.

Two decades later the roles were reversed. The final scene in Avatar instead shows an evil male capitalist, dressed in similar technological armor, being defeated by a benevolent Nature. The entire ecosystem of the planet Pandora is mobilized in the battle against the human exploiters. Now it is the machines, rather than the monsters, who come from another planet. In this story, technology loses the battle against nature. Only by stopping the machine can nature survive.

Fossil energy is at war with life itself

A similar analysis reveals the real threat against the warring medieval kingdoms in Martin’s imaginary continent of Westeros. The White Walkers’ army of dead beings threatening to destroy the world of humans, accompanied by ongoing climate change (“winter is coming”), is an allegorical representation of fossil fuels. Today, the energy that propels our technological civilization derives from countless billions of dead organisms whose extinguished sparks have been buried in the Earth’s crust. The metaphor is not at all far-fetched: in both cases, fossil energy is at war with life itself.

Fear of the Night King’s murderous corpses could, of course, be interpreted simply as the existential fear of death which might unite all people. But the connection between the dead army and climate change is sufficiently distinct to make a more political allegory convincing. The forces animating the dead beings threaten to lead to the collapse of civilization as a whole, beyond the lives of individual humans. As smuggler-turned-knight Davos Seaworth points out to Daenerys: “If we don’t put aside our enmities and band together we will die. And then it doesn’t matter whose skeleton sits on the Iron Throne.”

Although the intuition that the approaching White Walkers’ winter could be seen as a metaphor for climate change may be fairly widespread among followers of Game of Thrones, the literal identification of dead (fossil) energy as a lethal threat to humanity appears to have escaped most analyses. The army of zombies evokes modern society’s stock of machines animated by long-dead inorganic energy in the form of coal, oil, or gas. Like pre-modern people confronted with such technical contraptions, the inhabitants of Westeros are shocked by the magical capacity of dead objects to move and to wage war on the living.

George R.R. Martin’s message is that the continuous human competition for power must be set aside in a joint effort to defeat the threat from the army of the dead. The message from Game of Thrones appears familiar and urgent at a time when humanity is subconsciously struggling with its paradoxical ability to sweep the climate crisis under the carpet while preoccupying itself with everything else. As in a dream, we try to make sense of the contradiction between our awareness of the approaching catastrophe and our remarkable capacity to ignore it. Dreams and fantasies prompt us to reflect on matters that we suppress. In that sense, Game of Thrones is a tale for our times.

Alf Hornborg is a Professor of Human Ecology at Lund University. This article was originally featured on The Conversation.

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Skipping rush hour traffic by hopping in a flying taxi may seem like science fiction, but a number of corporations and startups are currently working on prototypes. In October, Cora—a company testing electric, autonomous flying cars—partnered with Air New Zealand in a step toward commercialization. And Boeing tested out their own self-driving air taxi in January. Even Uber has unveiled plans to launch a flying vehicle service by 2023.

These prototypes are electric and don’t give off any planet-warming greenhouse gases during flight, but mining and producing the electricity to charge their batteries is still an environmental cost. But the flying air taxis of the near future, which can both hover like helicopters and glide like airplanes, might be more energy efficient than you’d think—provided you carpool and only use them for long-distance travel.

That’s according to scientists at the University of Michigan, who recently considered the energy costs of these vehicles compared to ground-based cars.

“I was surprised by how competitive [the flying cars] were in these scenarios that we explored because of the energy intensity to lift the vehicle,” says Gregory Keoleian, an author of the study and director of the university’s Center for Sustainable Systems. Flying cars rely on distributed electric propulsion, which is basically a series of small propellers along the vehicle’s wings. With this system, they can avoid runways and move about much like a drone, with vertical take-off and landing.

To understand what energy these flying vehicles would require, the scientists used available data from other scientific and industry reports. The model vehicle they considered had one pilot and four passenger seats, flew at an altitude of 1,000 feet, and could zoom around at up to 150 miles per hour. They compared this example to two cars: one, gasoline-powered, driving 34.1 miles per gallon, and another, electric-powered, which drove the equivalent of 108.5 miles per gallon based on its energy use. The scientists compared efficiency between the three vehicles at distances from three to 155 miles.

For short trips of less than 22 miles, both gasoline and electric cars beat out the airborne vehicles in efficiency, according to the study, published Tuesday in Nature Communications. Short trips make up most of Americans’ driving—the average commute distance is 11 miles. Over short distances, air taxis would mostly hover, using up a lot of energy in the process.

But over long distances, air taxi efficiency improved. For a 62-mile, nonstop trip, air taxi use led to 35 percent fewer greenhouse gas emissions compared to the gas-burning car. But compared to an electric car travelling the same distance, the air taxi had 28 percent more emissions. This scenario ignores passengers, however. If you load up the air taxi with four people and compare it to the other cars with average occupancy—1.54 people—it looks even greener. On the basis of emissions produced per passenger across these 62 miles, the full-capacity air taxi has 52 percent fewer emissions per trip than the gas car, and 6 percent less than the electric car.

This implies that there’s a sort of ideal niche for these flying cars: carpooling over long distances. They also could be helpful in congested areas or those without a straight path to your destination. “If you’re flying from Detroit to Cleveland the [air taxi] can go right over the water,” says Keoleian. “Whereas the ground-based vehicle has to go around Lake Erie.”

You could use them to save time in commuter nightmares like Southern California. Driving from Irvine to Malibu during rush hour can take up to three and a half hours, but an air taxi can breeze through the trip in just 27 minutes—assuming air taxis don’t grow so rapidly they create their own traffic. “You save up to 80 percent of travel time flying versus going on the ground,” says Akshat Kasliwal, the study’s first author and graduate student in sustainable systems. Plus, “it’s a lot more pleasant to just cruise over at a 1,000 feet and and not be stuck behind big trucks on the highway.”

It pays off for air taxi companies to incentivize carpooling, too. “It is very important that you have high-occupancy levels similar to how a commercial airline is operated—the more you can fill the seats, the more revenue and the higher your profitability,” says Jim Gawron, a co-author of the study and graduate student in business sustainability. So, the business model would tend to favor the more sustainable carpool trips.

The researchers hope that tech companies use their framework to evaluate prototypes. Since some of these air taxis might take off by 2023, it’s important to consider what their impact—positive or negative—might be. From a sustainability standpoint, Keoleian hopes that this new service doesn’t make it easier to live further from work: “We don’t want for [air taxis] to encourage something like sprawl.”

There are many other factors other than greenhouse gases to consider.

While the study compared energy-related emissions—from mining, production, and transport to using fuel—of different vehicles, it didn’t show the complete picture by including the environmental impacts of making and disposing the machinery. The aircraft the team modelled was lighter than a typical sedan, and, generally, less material means less of an environmental impact. However, the types of materials matter. Carbon fiber, often used in light aircraft, is environmentally costly to produce, adds Keoleian.

Implementing regulations to ensure safe travels will also be key to reducing negative side effects of this new technology. “If these are flying around like The Jetsons, that’s a lot of visual pollution,” says Keoleian. As tech companies like Uber Elevate move forward with their designs, the team hopes they consider such impacts. “It’s really important for companies like that to understand the findings and recommendations of our studies,” says Keoleian.

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The bad news about coal-burning plants doesn’t stop at air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. This week, a new study found that 91 percent of coal plants surveyed across the United States were contributing unsafe levels of pollutants to groundwater as well.

The pollutants—which include arsenic and lithium—seep into the ground from piles of toxic waste scrubbed from the stacks, called coal ash. This tainted groundwater poses a health risk for any drinking water wells nearby.

It’s an example of how producing and burning fossil fuels is more than just a seemingly distant, incremental concern posed by a warming climate. With that in mind, here are five other hazards posed by oil, natural gas, and coal.

Particulate matter

Even though we’ve made a lot of progress with our vehicles, air pollution is implicated in four to seven million deaths each year. Particulate matter, comprised of soot and other particles less than 10 micrometers in diameter, are some of the worst pollutants. The smaller, the scarier: the tiniest particles lodge in the lungs, and continued exposure can reduce lung function and cause asthma and cancer. Diesel-powered vehicles, such as semi-trucks, are some of biggest emissions culprits. Living within 200 meters of a highway elevates your risk of health impacts from the finest of the fine particles, less than 2.5 micrometers across, known as PM 2.5.

Airborne metals

Coal-burning power plants are the largest single source of airborne mercury, an acutely toxic heavy metal that can cause neurological damage, especially in children and unborn babies. Based on the EPA’s most recent data, 22.9 tons of the total 55 emitted in 2014 came from coal plants.

Earthquakes

From 1973 to 2008, an average of 24 earthquakes annually, of magnitude 3 or greater, rumbled across the central U.S. That average jumped to 193 from 2009 to 2014. In 2014, the same region had 688 of these earthquakes. The uptick coincides with a boom in hydraulic fracturing or “fracking,” a natural gas mining process. Geologists have found that some of these earthquakes coincide with the timing and location of underground fracking waste disposal, which is thought to change the stresses on nearby faults. In a 2018 study, scientists concluded that fracking-caused earthquakes were “pervasive” in Oklahoma.

Other polluted waters

It’s not just burning coal—extracting it pollutes water, too. Fracking uses a mix of 750 chemicals, including some known to be toxic, to pry open underground cracks in order to extract natural gas. If not carefully discarded, this wastewater can be hazardous. In Appalachia, mining companies literally blow apart mountaintops to reach coal deposits. It’s as destructive as it sounds, and the exposed rock leaches chemicals like selenium and sulfate into nearby waters. Though it didn’t find a causal link between these practices and health impacts, a 2015 review concluded that “people who live near coal mining in Appalachia experience a wide range of health problems,” including “forms of cancer, cardiovascular and respiratory disease, kidney disease, developmental problems, depression, poorer health-related quality of life, and a wide variety of illness symptoms.”

Explosions

Natural gas is the cleanest-burning fossil fuel. But it’s also very flammable. The pipelines and reservoirs that move and store gas pose a risk if they’re leaky. In February, a natural gas explosion killed a girl at her home in Texas, and another explosion burned five buildings in San Francisco. The largest gas leak in history happened at the Aliso Canyon, near Los Angeles. Residents nearby reported feeling ill and 97,100 tons of methane—a greenhouse gas that warms the planet even more than CO2—spewed into the atmosphere before the Southern California Gas Company was able to close the leak.

A happier story: acid rain

Acid rain forms when sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides react in the atmosphere to form sulfuric acid and nitric acid. Then, the acids mix with rain, snow, fog, and even dust before traveling to the ground, where they can erode structures and harm plants and wildlife.

But this is one of the rare success stories on this list.

You may feel like you haven’t heard about acid rain in a while, and that’s because we’ve actually done a great job at stopping it. In the 90s, the U.S. launched a sulfur cap and trade program, which put a “cap” on the total permitted emissions and gave out a certain amount of “allowances,” which polluting coal plants could either use and sell off. The program cut emissions by more than 4 million tons annually.

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Jeremy Deaton writes for Nexus Media. You can follow him @deaton_jeremy. This story was published in partnership with Nexus Media, a syndicated newswire covering climate, energy, policy, art, and culture.

Experts disagree about how fast the US can replace coal and gas-fired power plants with zero-carbon electricity. Some say we can shift to 100 percent clean power by 2050 with little friction and minimal cost. Others say that’s unrealistically optimistic. Scientists on both sides of the argument agree that it’s possible to get to 80 or 90 percent clean power. The debate centers on that last 10 or 20 percent.

Researchers tried to get around this sticking point in a new analysis from UC Berkeley. Instead of asking, “how much?” they asked “how fast?”—specifically, how fast we could get to 90-percent zero-carbon power with wind, solar, hydropower and nuclear power—at no extra cost to consumers. Thanks to rapidly falling costs for wind turbines, solar panels, and batteries, the answer is 2035.

“We’re spending too much time stressing about the last 10 percent and not enough time thinking about the first 90 percent,” said Ric O’Connell, executive director of GridLab, a clean energy consulting firm, and co-author of the report. “So let’s focus on the first 90 percent.”

When utilities build a new power plant, they pass the cost on to ratepayers. By 2035, ratepayers will have paid off most gas-fired or coal-fired power plants running today, meaning consumers won’t lose money if utilities shut those plants down early. That’s what researchers mean by “no extra cost.” Ratepayers will be funding new, exclusively carbon-free power plants after they have paid off the old ones. Cutting pollution will help people breathe easier, reducing health care costs and making it cheaper overall to move to shift away from fossil fuels.

By building out wind, solar, and battery storage, the authors say, we can take every coal-fired plant offline, as well as a number of gas-fired plants. We would use the remaining facilities to supply electricity when needed. Fossil fuels would only account for 10 percent of the power supply, while nuclear power and hydropower, which generate no carbon pollution, would account for around 20 percent. The remaining 70 percent will come from wind and solar paired with battery storage—meaning 90 percent of our electricity would come from zero-carbon sources.

The cost of renewable energy has fallen precipitously over the past decade, consistently outpacing expert projections. From 2009 to 2019, the cost of wind power fell 70 percent, while the cost of large-scale solar fell close to 90 percent, according to Lazard. From 2010 to 2019, the cost of batteries also dropped close to 90 percent, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. The falling costs of batteries is a game changer, because batteries can store power for when the sky is dark and the wind is idle.

“The pace of technology development has typically been underestimated,” said Amol Phadke, an energy research scientist at UC Berkeley and lead author of the report. “In my career, all my projections have been conservative.” He said that experts have grown more and more optimistic about how fast costs will drop in the years to come.

Authors considered the fact that Americans are embracing battery-powered cars and buses, which will put added strain on the power grid. They say that utilities can meet the rising demand at the same cost with wind and solar as they would with coal or gas.

None of this is likely to happen, however, without the help of lawmakers. The cost of fossil fuels by and large does not account for the toll they take on human health. To account for this fact, and to help overcome inertia in the energy system, experts call for several measures in an accompanying policy paper, such as a national clean power standard and tax credits for renewable energy.

The study makes use of the latest models from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and software developer Energy Exemplar. It finds that moving to 90-percent zero-carbon power, a labor-intensive endeavor, could generate upwards of half a million jobs a year, which authors say could help the US overcome the current economic slump.

The shift to clean power would also be a boon to public health at a time when the country is battling a deadly respiratory disease. The report finds that a shift to 90-percent clean power could save as many as 85,000 lives by 2050 by sparing Americans from toxic pollution. Experts unaffiliated with the study commended the report, including its focus on public health.

“Climate and environmental impacts fall disproportionately on communities of color and low-income communities,” Patrick Brown, a researcher at the MIT Energy Initiative, said in an email. “It’s always important to be clear about the human cost of fossil energy when it’s included in such models, so I was glad to see these costs included.”

Mark Jacobson, a professor of environmental engineering at Stanford University, believes the report wasn’t ambitious enough, saying, “I am confident their goal can be met, but I think we can go even further.” His own research, which has been the subject of vigorous debate, found it would be possible to power the country entirely with wind, solar, and hydropower by mid-century.

O’Connell believes that researchers should focus on getting to 90-percent zero-carbon power rather than arguing about the feasibility of reaching 100 percent. Just as scientists 20 years ago couldn’t have predicted how cheap wind and solar would be today, scientists today can’t predict how much new technologies will cost 15 years from now. He listed several that could get the US to 100 percent zero-carbon electricity, such as green hydrogen, next-generation nuclear power, and home appliances that interact with the electric grid. But, he said, technology has already advanced to the point where the United States can overhaul the power grid right now.

“A lot of the focus has been on 2050,” O’Connell said. “We said, ‘Let’s look at the near-term runway and what we can do in the next 15 years.’ ”

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Our northern neighbors have invented a quintessentially-Canadian way of transporting oil from tar sands: They’re forging it into solid, hockey-puck-like briquettes. Dubbed ‘CanaPux,’ these bitumen-based blocks patented by the Canadian National Railway might make transporting oil by rail safer, cheaper, and more environmentally friendly—or at least as friendly as viscous petroleum can be.

The amount of oil transported by rail within Canada drastically increased this past year, partly as a result of several pipeline proposals being blocked, including the controversial Trans Mountain and Keystone XL. That also means that more Canadian oil is now being exported via rail to the United States, and with it a host of safety concerns.

Moving oil via rail is riskier than pushing it through a pipeline: Spills are more than twice as likely, according to a 2017 report by the Fraser Institute, a Canadian think tank. The chance of a spill is still low (less than one incident per 5 million barrels), but the aftermath of an accident can be devastating. In the summer of 2018, a train derailed in Iowa, spilling an estimated 230,000 gallons of crude oil into flooded fields alongside the track and raising concerns about drinking water being contaminated downstream. In 2013, a train carrying 72 tanks of oil exploded in a small town in the northeastern Canadian province of Quebec, killing 47 people.

Since 2014, Canadian National Railway has been working on a technique to solidify heavy oil, or bitumen—the dark-colored sludge that comes out of Canada’s oil sands—that they say will make oil transport safer.

“Think of it as molasses,” says James Auld, who is leading the CanaPux project. To ship bitumen in pipelines or in railcar tankers right now, you have to heat it up or dilute it with a lighter hydrocarbon to make it flow, he explains. But that sticky, thick quality is also the reason it’s possible to turn the stuff into a puck. Researchers working with Canadian National Railway make palm-sized CanaPux by mixing shreds of recyclable plastics into heated bitumen and shaping the mixture into pucks about the size of a bar of soap. They encase each block in a thin layer of plastic to stop them from sticking together when stacked into train cars. When the bitumen bricks reach their destination, they are heated to separate the oil from the plastic, which floats on top of the oil so it can easily be scooped off and re-used.

Best of all, the pucks are also inert. They’re less flammable than diluted bitumen, they’re weather-proof and they don’t leak. In the event of a spill, they could just be picked up.

Canadian National Railway has tested the technology in a lab in Edmonton, where they have a machine that can build CanaPux one at a time. They’re now working with partners to build a commercial-scale pilot plant in Alberta that could process 10,000 barrels of bitumen per day. Because the resulting pucks are lighter and provide more efficient storage than traditional barrels, they’ll be able to load each tanker car with more weight—and therefore more oil. The company hopes to start using CanaPux for transportation by the end of 2020.

While the technology may reduce oil spills, it leaves a bigger problem unresolved. Environmental activists point out that more oil sands production is not what we need right now. Although emissions from Canada’s oil sands only make up about 0.15 percent of global emissions, they are the country’s fastest growing source of greenhouse gases. If the oil sands are further developed, “it will be game over for the climate,” writes former NASA scientist James Hansen in a 2012 New York Times op-ed responding to comments from then-President Barack Obama that Canada would develop its reserves “regardless of what we do.” CanaPux or not, the impact of oil sands development remains the same.

For the foreseeable future, however, there will be a demand for bitumen, Auld says. “Even if we all switch to electric vehicles, we still need roads to drive on,” he says. And, as an essential component of asphalt, bitumen is used to pave those roads. CanaPux could at least make it possible to move heavy oil in a safer, more environmentally-friendly way.

The question remains: Can you play hockey with these pucks?

“They’re not the most ideal shape,” Auld says, but there’s no reason why you couldn’t. “They’re solid.”

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Despite the current administration’s continued moves to grind away at foundational environmental laws, advocates are claiming major victories in courthouses. This week, less than 24 hours apart, two high-profile oil pipelines have been crushed—at least temporarily.

On Sunday, energy companies scrapped their proposal for a 600-mile pipeline carrying natural gas from West Virginia into North Carolina and Virginia, which would cross forested lands with rivers and wetlands. The Atlantic Coast Natural Gas Pipeline has faced fierce opposition from environmental advocates ever since it was announced in 2014. 

The CEOs of the companies responsible for the project, Dominion Energy and Duke Energy, announced they were cancelling the pipeline. “A series of legal challenges to the project’s federal and state permits has caused significant project cost increases and timing delays,” they wrote in a press release. The companies cited “increased legal uncertainty” and the cost of fighting litigation as reasons for giving up on the project.

Then, on Monday, a federal judge declared that the Dakota Access Pipeline must cease its flow of oil in 30 days, by August 5th. The decision is a follow up to a March ruling that required the Army Corps of Engineers, the government agency overseeing the project, to prepare an environmental impact statement, but left open the question of what to do with the pipeline in the interim.

The Dakota Access Pipeline project became a high-profile environmental justice case in 2016, when the Standing Rock Sioux and other Native American tribes filed a lawsuit about the pipeline on religious freedom and historic preservation grounds. In particular, activists and indigenous people were concerned about a portion of the pipeline that routes under Lake Oahe, a reservoir on the Missouri River at the border of North and South Dakota. They argued that the risk of oil leaking into water supplies, along with the destruction of indigenous burial sites, had not been adequately considered. 

The Obama administration blocked construction of the disputed segment of the pipeline in late 2016.  But early the next year, President Trump quickly revived the project, allowing oil to start flowing soon after. Later in 2017, the Standing Rock and Cheyenne River tribes brought a new case arguing that the Corps should have prepared an environmental impact statement before proceeding with the pipeline. Under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), this thorough environmental review document is required for projects that could have “significant” environmental impacts. 

In March of this year, the court found that because the pipeline’s effects were “likely to be highly controversial” based on “concrete objections to the Corp’s analytical process and findings,” and the Army Corps needed to go back and prepare an environmental impact statement. Judge James E. Boasberg announced at the time that he would hear out both sides on what to do in the interim—it would take the Corps about 13 months to prepare the necessary report, but oil was already flowing. Now, the court has ruled that at least until the report is ready, the pipe must cease operations. “When it comes to NEPA, it is better to ask for permission than forgiveness: if you can build first and consider environmental consequences later, NEPA’s action-forcing purpose loses its bite,” wrote Boasberg in the court decision.

“The Court does not reach its decision with blithe disregard for the lives it will affect,” Boasberg wrote. “It readily acknowledges that, even with the currently low demand for oil, shutting down the pipeline will cause significant disruption to DAPL, the North Dakota oil industry, and potentially other states. Yet, given the seriousness of the Corps’ NEPA error, the impossibility of a simple fix, the fact that Dakota Access did assume much of its economic risk knowingly, and the potential harm each day the pipeline operates, the Court is forced to conclude that the flow of oil must cease.”

Robin Kundis Craig, an environmental law professor at the University of Utah, says that the decision is a consistent application of environmental law, and Dakota Access doesn’t seem to have sufficient legal grounds to appeal. “To conclude that [the pipeline] was going to have no impacts was probably clearly erroneous,” says Craig. “Shutting down the pipeline until a proper environmental impact statement is drafted is the standard NEPA response.”

Oil and gas pipelines seem to be under close scrutiny these days, and the two pipeline shutdowns demonstrate the increasing legal challenges that energy companies face. In the case of the Atlantic Coast pipeline, the statement released by the company specifically cited recent court decisions that froze the use of Clean Water Act nationwide permits allowing the dredging and filling of wetlands. Because of the increased legal pressure, the energy companies would have to pay for the preparation of an individual permit under the Clean Water Act, which is more costly. “The prospect of having to go through an individual form or permit process was a significant factor in deterring the project,” adds Craig, “which perhaps suggests that some of these projects are operating on a pretty razor thin cost benefit analysis to begin with.” 

As for Dakota Access, it’s future will likely now be decided in 2021, when that environmental impact statement gets published and whoever’s in the Oval Office then decides whether to grant the energy company permits to proceed. There may also be reason to worry about the impacts of rollbacks to NEPA, which could make it easier to push through projects without review. For now, it seems, activists can breathe a small sigh of relief. 

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Earthquakes East Of the Rockies, 1973-2014.

Mark Crismon and I were sitting outside his Oklahoma house, looking at the day lilies that lined his pond, when our conversation was interrupted by a distant boom. “Did you feel that?” Crismon asked. “Just be quiet. Sit still.” He’s a lanky 76-year-old, retired from an electronics career, with gray hair combed straight back from his ruddy face. The booms continued, once or twice per minute; I felt them under my skin. “That’s a small earthquake,” he said, seconds before the sound recurred. “There it was again. We’ll go and look on the seismometer—I’ll show you what it looks like.”

We walked into his garage. It was July and approaching 100 degrees in the countryside north of Stillwater. The building was filled with freezers where Crismon and his wife store the food they grow, catch, shoot, and smoke. Deer and coyote tails covered corrugated-tin walls. On a desk in the corner, beside a hand-labeled bottle of peach brandy, sat a Dell laptop connected by a cable to a buried seismometer. Oklahoma State University scientists had given Crismon the seismometer in 2014, as part of a project to monitor the state’s current rash of earthquakes.

He took a drag from his cigarette, then turned his attention to three parallel bars scrolling across the screen: blue on the bottom, red in the middle, green on top. They were mostly straight but had become jagged for the several minutes we had felt the tremors. “How’d you like to put up with that day and night?” he asked.

Earthquakes in Oklahoma

Crismon sits at this desk, on and off, for 14 hours a day. He arrives at six in the morning and takes pictures of the spikes with a digital camera to document what he calls a growing menace (even though the data gets recorded regardless). There’s plenty to photograph: Oklahoma, which historically has had few earthquakes of magnitude 3.0 or higher, started rumbling regularly in 2009. The Oklahoma Geological Survey recorded 35 such quakes in 2012, 109 in 2013, and 584 in 2014. (The prior annual average was fewer than two.) By late October, the 2015 figure had already exceeded 700.

Scientists have figured out the reason: the oil-and-gas industry’s practice of injecting wastewater deep underground.

The granite basement that underlies the continent, a mile below Oklahoma’s wheat and alfalfa fields, is full of faults. Usually, natural stresses clamp the rocks and keep them from moving—like “a vise that’s slammed on the east and west side, and someone’s turning the screw,” says Todd Halihan, a hydrogeophysicist at Oklahoma State University. Inject fluid deep enough, he says, and it travels into the fractures in the granite, in effect lubricating the rock and causing faults to slip.

Halihan compares this to tabletop air hockey. “When it’s off, the puck doesn’t move particularly well,” he says. “Turn on the air, and it’s like you’re injecting. That puck moves real well.”

It’s not only in Oklahoma where we’re giving the proverbial puck more room to slide. Our species, unintentionally, keeps finding new ways to unleash earthquakes. We have rattled the ground by impounding reservoirs, excavating mines, testing nuclear weapons, tapping geothermal power, and pushing carbon dioxide underground to slow global warming.

Sometimes these quakes arrive as jolts like those Crismon and I felt outside his house. Sometimes they topple buildings and claim lives. Whether they hit the Midwest, California, Switzerland, India, or China, some of those who feel the shocks are asking: Can we control the tremors, or are damaging quakes an inevitable feature of the future?

***

We first recognized the problem of man-made earthquakes around the turn of the 20th century, as they began hitting the regions around South Africa’s gold mines and Europe’s coal mines. The release of gravitational energy, when the rock above the mines sagged, triggered them.

It took until the 1930s for Americans to notice man-made quakes beneath our own soil. When engineers created Lake Mead behind the Hoover Dam, the sudden addition of 12 billion tons of water apparently set off hundreds of small tremors along the Arizona-Nevada border.

“This was an ‘aha moment,’ an important benchmark in the science,” says Bill Ellsworth, an emeritus seismologist with the U.S. Geological Survey and geophysics professor at Stanford University. Since then, reservoirs have been linked to devastating quakes around the world: definitively to a magnitude-6.3 quake that killed 200 people in 1967 near India’s Koyna Dam, and more speculatively to the 2008 Sichuan quake, a magnitude-­­7.9 colossus that flattened schools and hospitals in China, and left more than 80,000 people dead or missing. The Sichuan quake was triggered less than 6 miles from the Zipingpu Dam reservoir, says natural-hazards researcher Christian Klose, who has linked water levels there to tremor frequency.

The most ominous precursor to Oklahoma came in the 1960s, when a series of earthquakes walloped the normally quiet Denver area. During two particularly lively days in 1962, the shocks broke windows, cracked plaster, and left electrical outlets hanging by wires. “Children cried with fright,” read a federal field report from Dupont, a town just north of the city.

Earthquakes in Oklahoma

Scientists traced this seismic uptick to the Rocky Mountain Arsenal, an Army facility that manufactured chemical weapons and rocket fuel. Weeks before the trembling began, the arsenal had started injecting wastewater 2 miles down into the crystalline basement rock. After the injections stopped, in 1966, it took a year for the shaking to cease: A magnitude-5.3 quake knocked bricks from chimneys in 1967 and caused more than $1 million in damage.

A geologist named David Evans found an association between the amount of fluid injected at the arsenal and the number of earthquakes, and suggested cause and effect. (To demonstrate how lubricated rocks slip, Evans reportedly would perform the “Coors experiment”: He perforated the bottom of a beer can, and then showed how the seeping liquid eased its slide down an incline.) The Army disputed Evans’ hypothesis, but he was vindicated by USGS researchers, who triggered seismicity soon after by methodically injecting fluid into Colorado’s Rangely oil field.

Since then, scientists have grown more sophisticated about documenting changes in earthquake activity. About 200 miles south of Rangely, in Colorado’s Paradox Valley, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation has been injecting briny groundwater into a deep limestone formation in order to keep it from contaminating a river. “Somebody had the foresight to say, ‘Let’s see what kind of seismicity’s out there before we start injecting,’” says bureau geophysicist Lisa Block. Six years of baseline data showed almost no natural activity. By contrast, the agency has recorded 6,200 quakes, most of them small, since underground disposal began in 1991.

By the time Oklahoma starting ramping up its own wastewater injection—now more than a billion barrels a year—the notion that humans can induce earthquakes by putting fluid underground was already familiar. Still, Sooner State residents were caught off-guard when that geologic principle hit home.

***

Th e Surge in Shaking

A decade ago, this part of North America experienced just 14 tremors a year. In 2014, 650 quakes hit the area, most of them clustered around wastewater injection wells.

***

Todd Halihan was standing in the hallway of his Stillwater home one night in November 2011 when he noticed glasses starting to rattle. As the building shook, the hydrogeophysicist flashed on his sleeping 6-year-old. “Should I get my kid out of bed and run out of the house?” he recalls thinking. “Should I get him under a table?”

Halihan was feeling the effects of a magnitude-5.7 quake—Oklahoma’s largest, it turns out. Its center was near Prague (rhymes with “vague”), almost 50 miles away, where it buckled a highway and destroyed 14 homes. In one living room, rock from a fireplace and chimney struck a woman as she watched TV. The earthquake also toppled a historic turret at St. Gregory’s University in nearby Shawnee. A team from the University of Oklahoma, Columbia University, and USGS determined the source: a fault rupture that began about 650 feet from active injection wells.

“That’s when a lot more people started paying attention,” says Austin Holland, Oklahoma’s state seismologist until this past summer.

The idea that the oil-and-gas industry could be producing these quakes was a touchy subject, both for companies and for the administration of Gov. Mary Fallin. One study shows the industry has created one-fourth of Oklahoma’s new jobs since 2010. Emails obtained by the EnergyWire news service paint a picture of a government that, in the words of Fallin chief of staff Denise Northrup, tried to “make this go away.” Shortly after the Prague earthquake, Fallin aides contacted Devon Energy, an oil-and-gas producer, and obtained talking points to use with constituents. Among them: “There is no current evidence that oil-and-gas operations had anything to do with the recent large earthquakes in Oklahoma.” When Fallin addressed a National Governors Association forum on shale-energy development in 2013, a reference to underground injection wells was deleted from her speech. “We had other issues we wanted to highlight,” says Alex Weintz, Fallin’s communications director until this past November.

Weintz says Fallin’s personal views were always more nuanced than Devon Energy’s talking points, even if those points were used by her staff. Her own reticence to blame disposal wells, he says, reflected the state of the research when she took office in 2011. “It was only the beginning of a spike in seismic activity,” he says. “Since then, the science has evolved.”

Even the Oklahoma Geological Survey, a university-­affiliated state agency, was slow to acknowledge the disposal-well connection. In a 2013 statement, it noted that the Prague earthquake appeared to be the result of “natural causes.” Holland, who worked for the survey, says, “Oil-and-gas is a very important industry, and so . . . some of the public statements saw a lot of wordsmithing.”

As scientists dug into data, a consensus emerged that fluid injection was indeed behind the spike in earthquake activity. Even Fallin has come around. “We all know now there is a direct correlation between the increase of earthquakes that we’ve seen in Oklahoma and the disposal wells,” she said at an August meeting of her administration’s Coordinating Council on Seismic Activity.

In fact, new research shows earthquakes now pose a risk to the oil- and-gas industry itself. The largest crude-oil storage facility in the world sits in Cushing, Oklahoma, right above a fault recently acti­vated by injection. Continued injection could produce a magnitude-5.7 earthquake, large enough to rupture oil tanks and pipelines.

The problem doesn’t stop at Oklahoma’s borders; man-made earthquakes have hit other midcontinent states too. On New Year’s Eve 2011, a magnitude-4.0 tremor in Youngstown, Ohio, shook buildings and led to the shutdown of a disposal well that was deemed the likely culprit. Waste injection has also been linked to quakes in Arkansas, Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, and Texas.

“Oil-and-gas is a very important industry, and so . . . some of the public statements saw a lot of wordsmithing.”

If the same quakes had happened overseas, they might have caused far more damage. “The technologies that have been pioneered primarily in the U.S.—to unlock gas from tight shale and to produce oil from unconventional reservoirs—have the potential to be applied around the world,” says Ellsworth, the USGS seismologist. “Many countries will find it irresistible to produce their own resources. Unfortunately, in many of these countries, the building standards are not what they are in the United States, and the potential for severe damage and loss of life is really high.”

***

As we keep using the earth as a vault to stash our waste—and as a tappable resource—we’re creating a global-­energy system that will likely increase the risk of small and potentially large earthquakes. Engineers will need to weigh every resource, looking at how much power it provides, how green it is, and what type of seismic risk it poses.

In some cases, the technologies we’ve engineered to ease our impact on the environment have proved likely to shake the ground. In a pilot project in Decatur, Illinois, carbon dioxide captured from an ethanol plant is being injected, in liquidlike form, almost 7,000 feet down into a sandstone formation. The goal is to slow climate change by keeping the greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere (a tactic also advanced by proponents of “clean coal”).

So far, the injections have caused only the smallest of tremors, too faint to be felt. But Stanford University geophysicist Mark Zoback and hydrogeologist Steven Gorelick have argued that for underground carbon storage to benefit the climate, it must happen at a “massive scale”—one that will likely trigger more seismicity, and therefore potentially defeat its own purpose by discharging the carbon into the atmosphere. “Even small to moderate earthquakes threaten the seal integrity of a CO2 repository,” they wrote in a 2012 journal article. For that reason, they concluded, carbon injection will be “an extremely expensive and risky strategy” to reduce greenhouse gases.

Ole Kaven—a USGS geophysicist involved in the Illinois project—says that if researchers can map faults, fractures, and fluid pathways using sophisticated instruments, they can reduce the hazard, though not eliminate it entirely. “If one factors in the cost of greenhouse-gas emissions, and what effect CO2 sequestration can have on reducing some of the long-term effects, this conversation changes,” he says. “Some of these risks might be tolerated.”

Earthquakes in Oklahoma

That’s a critical point: A technology might produce earthquakes, but what harm might come from not using it? Take geothermal production, a reliable and underused source of electricity that causes little environmental damage. “If we could tap all the heat in the earth, we wouldn’t need anything else,” says Ernest Majer, a geophysicist affiliated with both the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories.

That was no comfort in Basel, Switzerland, where in December 2006 operators of the Deep Heat Mining project began injecting cold water into the naturally hot granite below the city. The following week, a magnitude-3.4 shock rattled windows and cracked plaster. Injection was halted. A government study projected a 15 percent chance of a man-made earthquake causing more than $500 million in damage if production resumed. In 2009 the project was scrapped entirely.

Geothermal production continues in rural areas—most notably at the Geysers, north of California’s Bay Area, where locals have routinely endured minor quake damage. “Sometimes it feels like a big truck just bumped into the house,” says Jeff Gospe, who sits on a seismic-­monitoring advisory committee there. Neighbors have reported cracked windows and a retaining wall that crushed a van.

Majer believes that the hazard posed by geothermal fields is minor compared with their potential to produce clean energy. (He says the Geysers alone could power all of San Francisco.) “There’s no such thing as zero risk,” Majer says. “Driving to the grocery store is a risk. Everybody risks when they get out of bed in the morning.” Compare that, he says, with the cost of carbon emissions: “If you start looking at the health impacts, the climate impacts—all the nasty things coming out of the fossil-fuel economy—well, maybe we better do something else. Induced seismicity associated with putting carbon into the ground, associated with geothermal: Those are minor, minor things compared with all these other risks facing us.”

***

Assuming we’re not going to shut down energy production, scientists now face a more complex question: whether it’s possible to minimize the hazard.

After the experiments in Colorado’s Rangely oil field in the 1960s and ’70s, which showed that we could control induced seismicity by varying the pressure of injected fluid, scientists were bursting with hope. Not only might they reduce damage from man-made quakes, the thinking went, but maybe they could control natural ones. Rather than waiting for the next bridge-toppler to hit California, USGS scientists suggested drilling wells along the San Andreas Fault, injecting water, and releasing the accumulated stress in a series of small, harmless quakes.

The idea never got traction. Not only would it take thousands of mini quakes to offset a major one, but it is also too risky. More than a century has passed since San Francisco’s deadly 1906 quake, which means the city is sitting on highly stressed rock. Inject water underground, says Oklahoma’s Halihan, and “you might not release 100,000 small ones. You might release a big one.” Even if the experiment did work locally, he says, “you might set off the next segment of the fault. It’s 3D and it’s complicated: ‘Hey, we didn’t cause an earthquake in San Francisco.’ ‘Well, you just knocked down LA.’ ‘Sorry.’ ”

Today, nobody’s talking about setting off micro­tremors in Oklahoma in order to avoid the next Prague earthquake. But scientists are talking about more-­modest ways to manage seismicity.

“The toolbox is growing,” says Austin Holland, who now works for USGS in New Mexico. It includes avoiding known faults, scaling back the volume and rate of fluid injected into the rock, injecting at a shallower depth, improving monitoring, and preparing to abandon wells altogether if seismicity can’t be stopped. This past year, the Oklahoma Corporation Commission—which regulates the industry—ordered volume reductions for some wells, as well as “plug backs” to limit how deep some wastewater is injected. The state’s “traffic light” system, instituted in 2013, allows regulators to scale back or halt drilling in response to seismic activity.

Earthquakes in Oklahoma

Still, eight magnitude-3 and -4 quakes struck northern Oklahoma during a 24-hour period as this story went to press. There’s a lot we haven’t yet learned about what happens underground—and that knowledge gap stymies us from managing the earthquakes we do create.

“Probably the greatest unknowns are the properties and processes deep within the earth, things that are very difficult to measure directly,” Holland says. “How is pressure being communicated? Do faults act as seals or as conduits? What are the actual stress states deep within the earth? That’s where science has to spend a significant amount of effort and resources.”

***

Back in Stillwater, Todd Halihan understands both sides. He wants his students to find work in the energy industry when they graduate. But he also doesn’t want to have to dive for his son the next time an earthquake shakes his house.

“We’re going to make some decisions, and none of them are going to be super-simple or super-pleasant,” he says. Ideally, that means talking levelheadedly about both the value of oil-and-gas production and the threat of earthquakes—how to balance those competing concerns and how much uncertainty we’re willing to tolerate.

It’s not easy to talk, though, when the ground is rattling. Each side retreats into a corner. Some industry and political leaders refuse to acknowledge the emerging science. Some quake-zone residents, feeling ignored and outgunned, pull out the only weapon they have: their rhetoric. The conversations grow polarized rather than solution-oriented.

Technology, Halihan says, often carries harm. “The Titanic’s a nice example,” he says. “We were developing big ships, and we sank them. Developed airplanes; we crashed them.” Addressing unintended consequences doesn’t necessarily mean scrapping innovations. Nor does it mean pretending the consequences don’t exist.

With seismicity, as with addiction, the first step is admitting we have a problem that’s not fully within our control. “The government, as well as these companies, should be upfront,” says Leonardo Seeber, an earthquake geologist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. “You want to drive your car. It takes gasoline. To produce that, you have to make wells. You have to pump in here and pump out there. And when you are doing that,” he says, “you are changing the stress in the subsurface. Sometimes there could be earthquakes that we can’t predict. There could be consequences. But we’re all in it together.”

This article was originally published in the January/February 2016 issue of Popular Science, under the title “Earthquake Nation”

The Case for Human-Caused Earthquakes, in Charts

Do injection wells really cause earthquakes?

Are the recent quakes throughout the U.S. also caused by injection?

…and it’s not just in Oklahoma

Can oil and gas companies prevent future earthquakes?

The post Can We Stop The Surge Of Man-Made Earthquakes? appeared first on Popular Science.

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Alan Burns breaks the surface with a huge grin on his face, his baggy black wetsuit hanging off his body like walrus skin. It’s a scorching February afternoon, and we’re floating in the clear blue water of the Indian Ocean. To our left is the Australian resort island of Rottnest. To our right—just beyond Burns’s dazzling white yacht—is several thousand miles of open sea. And beneath us, the kelp forest where we had been diving moments before is swaying to the rhythm of the waves. “Can you feel the power down there?” Burns asks as we bob in the water, his sunburned cheeks puckered up behind a dripping diving mask. “This is what made me think of it, really.”

Burns is a prodigious inventor and a staunch supporter of clean energy, but he’s no sentimental environmentalist. He’s an oilman. He made his first fortune in the mid-1970s with oil and gas discoveries off Australia’s northwestern coast. In 1987 he founded the exploration company Hardman Resources, which, after an extremely profitable series of finds off the coast of Africa, was sold in 2006 to another oil company for more than $1 billion. Today the 67-year-old entrepreneur is among the wealthiest men in Perth, the tropical, seaside capital of Western Australia. And although he still runs a mineral-exploration company, he spends 90 percent of his time nurturing the wave-power-generation system he first sketched out some 30 years ago.

Burns named his invention CETO, after a Greek sea goddess. For many years, it was a back-burner project for him, a design he worked on along with myriad others, including a puncture-proof industrial tire, a supersonic, steam-driven jet drive, and a shark-repelling wetsuit that’s still in top-secret development. (“I have 500 ideas a day,” he says. “But there’s no point in inventing a pair of stilts for a red ant. It’s got to address a major global problem.”) About 10 years ago, Burns started devoting serious time and resources, including $5 million of his own fortune, to the wave-energy project. Unlike other wave-power systems, it rests on the ocean floor, completely hidden from view. Like the kelp that Burns has dived and fished in for decades, his CETO units are designed to sway slowly and gently in time with the waves. The motion drives a piston that pumps high-pressure seawater to shore and powers a generator to make electricity.

Multimedia Mogul

Burns is one of an increasing number of oil entrepreneurs turned clean-energy advocates who are challenging the idea that there’s some great divide between how the old energy regime is run and how the new one will be. Like T. Boone Pickens, the Texas oilman who is building the world’s largest wind farm in the Texas Panhandle, Burns is confident that the market for renewable energy will be far bigger than the oil industry, and that the developers who overcome the technical hurdles to economical large-scale clean-energy systems will see huge profits. And he’s among those who suspect that the people best equipped to develop those markets and tackle those challenges are not academics or government researchers or young idealists with little real-world business experience. Rather, they’re people like him—people who know how to run a global business with huge inherent risks, serious engineering challenges, and markets that are growing larger by the day. His Perth company, Carnegie Corporation, now has about 40 employees, a power-generating prototype installed just off the coast of the nearby port town of Fremantle—and plans, Burns says, to become the world’s biggest clean-energy company.

FIRST TO THE BOTTOM

Around the world, dozens of wave-energy systems are under development. Some are fastened to vast cliffs at the water’s edge and harness the power of enormous waves pounding against the land. Others are laid across the ocean surface like giant water snakes, sucking in the power from moving surface waves, and still others are more like mechanical buoys that bob up and down in one spot on the water, anchored to the seafloor below. Like many other clean-energy technologies, these designs are slowly moving from prototype to commercial stages. None, so far, have proved themselves to be cost-effective on a large scale. But there are plenty of companies vying to be the first.

On paper, at least, wave power has several advantages over the current leader in renewable power, wind. Water is 800 times as dense as air, so in theory, more power can be produced with smaller farms. There’s more available open space in the ocean than on land, where wind farms are often competing with other development for space. Finally, whereas most wind farms have harvestable wind conditions about half the time, ocean waves never stop their movement toward shore. According to Philip Jennings, the head of the energy-studies department at Perth’s Murdoch University, “wave power has the potential to be as big as, or bigger than, wind power once the technology matures.”

In California last December, the Pacific Gas and Electric Company made the first commitment by an American utility company to buy wave power. The Aquabuoy system will be installed off the coast of Eureka in Northern California and should produce two megawatts by 2012; each megawatt can power about 750 homes. In May, the U.S. Department of Energy announced $7.5 million in federal funding to support the development of other water-power projects in this country, with the money to be distributed by year’s end. Wave power is up and running in Portugal and in Scotland. But worldwide, the industry is still in its infancy compared with wind power, and is riddled with mishaps. Last fall, for example, one of those $2-million Aquabuoys sank off the Oregon coast.

The single biggest problem facing existing wave-power designs is long-term survivability in harsh seas. “The reason we’re not all using wave energy today is because no one’s built something that can stay out there long enough,” says Carnegie’s managing director, Michael Ottaviano. “You can’t have something that’s going to work today and not work tomorrow.”

Installation

The ocean’s energy is concentrated at its surface, so every system now in use is designed to work there. Yet being on the surface exposes the systems to the incredible power of the ocean in a storm. The CETO system is explicitly designed to avoid this danger. “Imagine you’re at the beach, swimming in the surf, and a huge wave is crashing toward you,” Ottaviano says. What do you do? Duck down, right? “The best place to be in a storm is under a wave.”

A full-stage CETO wave farm, Burns explains, will be like a piece of chain mail laid down on the bottom of the ocean. Each balloon is attached to the next in a grid-like pattern; if a surge attacks one balloon, the rest will hold it in place. Even in a tsunami, the force would just press the CETO balloons down toward the ocean floor. “What we’ve found in the oil business is that the more we can put on the seabed, the better. Quite a lot of offshore production now isn’t from platforms, but actually on the seabed. It’s safer down there. It doesn’t get raked by the waves.”

Yet a bottom-mounted design has drawbacks. “The problem with getting energy from waves underwater is that most of the energy from waves is at the surface,” says Walt Musial, the head of the ocean renewables program at the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory. “If they’re using the wave energy [from below], they’re going to have to have a fairly low-cost system to be economical.”

That, Burns says, is exactly the idea. He plans to use many of the tricks he’s learned in the oil business to make the system cheap to test, cheap to build, and cheap to operate: “I learned from the oil industry how to run a business on the bottom of the ocean. You apply the same sort of science and surveys [in clean tech]. You do an economic analysis. You’re recruiting top scientists and engineers. The analogue is extremely good.”

Over the course of his career, Burns explains, computer advances have transformed the way engineers search for minerals under the Earth’s crust. Computer modeling has replaced expensive real-world excavation. Now Burns gives his CETO engineers a blank checkbook to upgrade to the latest machines and software every few months. “The first task was to build a virtual ocean, which we’ve done,” Burns says. “It enables us to begin at any depth of water, any current, any wave condition and test the model inside the computer. We’re the only company in the world ever to have achieved that.”

Great Balls of Fire

At Carnegie’s office in West Perth I sit down with Matthew Keys, head of the small team of computer engineers responsible for writing the software to test and tinker with CETO designs. Keys turns on his computer, and a 3-D animation of a yellow CETO balloon swaying in a virtual ocean appears on a white screen that fills the wall on the opposite side of the room, next to a small stack of supercomputers. As Keys moves his mouse, the depth of the water increases, the strength of the swells fluctuates—and the balloon moves slightly differently in response. The movie-screen projection is realistic enough to make me feel slightly seasick. The computational-fluid-dynamics software they used to build the ocean is the same as that used by the engineers who design Formula One racecars, Keys says. Computer processing power has improved so much that calculations that took 11 days a couple years ago now take just three.

Survivability in these ever-turbulent seas, Burns had told me, is the single biggest advantage CETO has over other wave-energy systems. But it’s far from the only one. Unlike designs that generate their power at sea and transmit the electricity to land, CETO simply pumps that high-pressure water to shore. All the complicated, high-maintenance parts of the system are on dry land, where repair is cheaper and easier. There is no oil or polluting lubricant of any kind in the submerged system, he says. He knows they’re getting the materials right because the offshore oil industry has already done all that testing; everything they use will have a proven 30-year life span, the same as that of a typical fossil-fuel-driven power plant. The balloon-like design will allow Burns to mass-produce the 20-foot-tall CETO units at a single large factory and ship them deflated around the world at relatively low cost.

Finally, Burns says, being concealed below the waves allows CETO to dodge the practical and aesthetic criticisms that have derailed other wave (and offshore wind) projects. CETO doesn’t interfere with recreational fishing or sailing. It won’t kill birds or knock out migrating whales. And unlike other systems, it wouldn’t mar the landscape. “You wouldn’t see it,” Burns says. “You wouldn’t even know it was there.”

A single large-scale CETO wave farm right here off Rottnest, Burns tells me, could in theory provide enough electricity to power all of Western Australia. Six months later, Carnegie would announce that its first commercial-scale demonstration plant would in fact be built in Albany, a port city further south. By 2010, construction will begin on a farm of 300 balloons that will ultimately generate 50 megawatts of electricity. That’s enough, the company estimates, to power 30,000 households. The first plant won’t be cheap to build—around $300 million. But once it’s in operation, the ongoing costs will be about the same as those at a wind farm. Future plants will be about the same or cheaper to operate than a traditional power plant. Waves, after all, are free.

THE CLEAN-WATER CONUNDRUM

Although Burns is confident that CETO will someday generate thousands of megawatts of emission-free electricity, he’s relying on a far more immediate need in the fossil-fuel-rich desert state of Western Australia to get his project started: water.

Pump Power

Australia is in the midst of a decade-long drought, one of the worst in the country’s recorded history. In Western Australia, the streamflow running into water-storing dams is now a quarter of what it was in the early 1970s. At the same time, average temperature, population and water demand are all rising. Perth today is a boomtown; mining in the state is at an all-time high and is driving development. Fortunately, the region has tried to prepare for a hotter, drier future.

Two years ago, Australia’s first large-scale desalination plant opened in the town of Kwinana, 25 miles south of Perth. Like all reverse-osmosis facilities, this $400-million plant forces seawater at enormous pressure through a series of salt-filtering membranes. It takes 24 megawatts of power to generate the requisite pressure, which is why desalination plants are most popular in energy-rich, water-poor locations like the Middle East. The plant supplies 16 percent of Perth’s drinking water. Along with a series of solid conservation policies, the facility has left the state with a more stable water supply than other areas of the country (like Sydney, for instance, where last year a conflict between neighbors over water use ended in murder).

“Western Australia has been suffering from climate change more than any other area in the world,” says Ben Jarvis, the manager of water efficiency at the state’s Water Corporation. “We’ve adapted fast. We’ve realized that it’s climate change, we’ve revised our planning estimates, and we’ve built new sources.”

In the next few years, at least five more desalination plants will be built in Australia, including a second one in Western Australia. That plant, to be erected 100 miles down the coast from Perth, will be powered entirely with renewable energy when it opens in 2011. Wind farms will probably be the main source. To support the development of new energy sources, however, the Water Corporation will run 20 percent of the plant on experimental technologies. In April the agency announced several finalists, CETO among them, from an original pool of 18 power-plant designs. The winner will get both a long-term contract to supply power and the legitimacy that comes with a public utility’s backing.

Of course, Australia is not alone in its water problems. From southern Europe to the American West, a combination of population growth and changing weather patterns has forced governments to struggle with the decision to invest in huge reverse-osmosis desalination plants like the one near Perth. A system that could do the same job, for a similar cost, without the greenhouse-gas emissions that are driving the need for the plants in the first place? It would be in demand across the globe.

ENERGY OPPORTUNITIES

Burns’s friendly crew of tanned, uniformed deckhands help us haul ourselves onto the stern platform and quickly hang up our sopping wetsuits. Within a few minutes, Burns has changed back into a polo shirt and white linen pants and is sunk into an overstuffed couch, cellphone pressed to his cheek. The night before, he had received some disturbing news. A representative for his oil company had been arrested and jailed overseas. Now he was on a conference call, working to diffuse the situation from halfway around the globe.

Latch On

Soon Burns walks out onto the deck, settles into a chair, and orders up some freshly brewed iced coffees from the crew. The oil business has gotten tougher, he says. New sources are harder to find and more difficult to extract. Foreign governments aren’t as welcoming as they used to be. And the business itself isn’t as much fun as it was in the 1970s and ’80s. “You sense that a lot of people are no longer proud to be in the oil industry,” he says. “They feel it’s socially unacceptable.”

For him, though, the motivation to expand into renewable energy is mostly a pragmatic one. “We all know that we’re running out of oil. It’s an argument as to when,” he says. Yes, new sources of fossil fuels will be mined from shale and sand, and we’ll find ways to extract deposits that were too deep or expensive to get at with old technologies. Still, Burns says, that won’t be enough. “The growth of energy consumption is so huge that everything is needed. Clean tech has to be far bigger than the oil industry is today. It has to happen. There is no other solution.”

The numbers back him up. According to the International Energy Agency, the world now consumes 87 million barrels of oil a day. That’s projected to rise by a third, to 116 million barrels, by 2030. Yet many oil-industry experts think it’s basically impossible to extract more than 100 million barrels a day. Add to this a worldwide population expected to hit nine billion by 2050 (from 6.7 billion today), together with rising living standards in the developing world, and $4 gasoline may begin to seem like a bargain.

Burns is far more concerned with this supply-and-demand curve than he is with climate change. He’s not a skeptic, exactly; he thinks global warming is real, and anthropogenic. He doesn’t think the worldwide effects will be nearly as bad as predicted, though. Burns acknowledges that climate change will probably be bad for Australia. It will make the country even hotter and drier. But in Greenland and Canada, more carbon dioxide could have many benefits. “Yeah, the weather’s bad,” he says. “It’s not as bad a problem as running out of energy.”

Sun Swim

And so Carnegie is exploring just about every new way to make energy that Burns can think of. It’s late in the afternoon when he suggests that we take a drive to the newest of his company’s operations, a location I had heard referred to several times before as the Skunk Works. In a few minutes, we reach a nondescript storefront. Inside are half a dozen engineers, mostly new hires, working on the next stages of Carnegie’s clean-tech initiative. There’s a guy focused on a novel solar-thermal technology, and two devoted to improving on aerofoil-wing design. The place has the high-spirit, high-intensity atmosphere of an Internet start-up.

Standing amid his new staff and his new equipment, Burns looks pleased. Both the solar and wing research are building on his own inventions, again with the best brains and processing power money can buy. “There are major advances to be made in all fields of renewable energy,” he says. “Using the same engineering team and the same management team, we can cover the whole lot.”

He doesn’t seem concerned that his technologies may soon be competing against one another. In the fossil-fuel business, he says, no one begrudges someone else’s discovery. “It’s not like, ‘Oh hell, I just found another billion barrels—what’s going to happen to the market?’ The oil business doesn’t think that way at all. They think, terrific. Every bit of oil in the world could be sold, and it’ll be exactly the same with renewable energy. Exactly. The world needs every bit that it can get, no doubt about it.”

Earlier, when Burns learned that I live in California, he turned to his assistant and asked her to print out a news article for me, an account of a recent speech Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger had made to United Nations officials about how the clean-energy economy will drive California’s future. “He thinks exactly the same as me,” Burns said, article in hand. “I thought his speech was brilliant. I thought, what a guy! You need leaders to have that sort of positive outlook, rather than just doom and gloom. Don’t go ‘Woe is me, let’s turn the lights off.’ These things are opportunities.”

Underwater Wave Farms

Contributing editor Kalee Thompson last examined one company’s efforts to slow global warming [“Carbon Discredit,” July].

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Ever since Russia planted a flag under the North Pole last year, the issue of sovereign rights under an increasingly slushy arctic has tensed. In a race to claim ownership of some of the arctic seabed, a two-ship caravan of Canadian and U.S. scientists is sailing around the Arctic Ocean right now. Their mission, which will last from September 6th to October 1st, is to measure the seabed and the continental margins in an attempt to solidify our possible rights over the far north—an area that will become accessible to oil drilling and mining as the earth warms and arctic ice melts.

PopSci reported a few months ago on a map from Durham University researchers, showing the complicated web of conflicting arctic claims. At least six nations could own part of the arctic. Under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (what a mouthful), nations own the rights 200 meters out from the edge of their continental shelf—not the exposed coast, but the undersea lip of the continent. Unfortunately, there is no geophysical consensus on where those shelf edges are, hence this joint voyage.

The U.S. ship, the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Healy will use a multi-beam echo sounder to map the sea floor, sending out sound pulses, which return at different times depending on the depth. The Canadian ship, the_ Louis S. St. Laurent_ will follow doing complementary measurements of the sub-sea floor. The hope is that the whole of the arctic does not in fact belong to Russia, and that we, or Canada might own a piece of the pie as well. Go team.

Worth a Look: Jessica Roberston, a USGS PR rep onboard the Healy is keeping a log of the mission with notes and photos, along with an updated map of the ship’s location at usgs.gov/journals/arctic

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You might guess that magma or tumbling rocks fill the void, but the truth is much more prosaic: water. Petroleum deposits, which are naturally mixed with water and gas, lie thousands of feet below the earth’s surface in layers of porous rock, typically sandstone or limestone. (Contrary to what you might imagine, drilling for oil is more like sucking oil from a sponge with a straw than from a giant pool of liquid.)

At such depths, these liquids are under very high pressure. Pump petroleum out, and the pressure in the well drops. Water in the surrounding rock, which is also packed under high pressure, then pushes its way into this low-pressure pocket until the pressure reaches equilibrium. “It’s just like digging a hole at the beach, where water in the sand around it flows into the lower pressure zone of the hole,” explains Chris Liner, a professor of petroleum seismology at the University of Houston.

Unless you drill in a volcanically active region (which would be unwise), magma typically flows miles below the deepest oil wells, which tap out around 30,000 feet down. And although some shifting of rock and deep sediment can occur, it wouldn’t spur a major earthquake. Typical drilling-induced quakes register between –2 and –4 on the Richter scale, which is one thousandth as forceful as the rumble of a tractor-trailer driving by.

The post What Fills the Space Left in Wells When Oil is Extracted From the Ground? appeared first on Popular Science.

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