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Lithium may be at the heart of the green transition, but mining the metallic element also causes damage to natural environments. In lithium-rich Portugal, modest rural communities join national outrage against governmental deals bypassing local economies and threatening livelihoods. A photo essay.

On first impression Covas do Barroso, nestled between green mountains in northern Portugal, is no more than a handful of stone houses gathered around the junction of two roads. The village, with around 150 inhabitants, has traditionally relied on livestock farming and agriculture for its local economy. But Covas do Barroso’s land is also valuable for another reason: it is rich in lithium reserves. And, since 2016, Savannah Resources, a British company with solely Barroso on its books, has been developing plans for an open pit mine in the area. The company estimates that the mine could be exploited for 12 years, would employ up to 250 workers, and supply enough lithium for 500,000 electric car batteries each year. 

An overview of Covas do Barroso. Photo by Giacomo Sini and Dario Antonelli. ©Giacomo Sini & Dario Antonelli A controversial deal  

Portugal is known as the largest and, indeed, the only significant site of lithium production in the European Union. To date, the country’s lithium has only been mined in combination with feldspar to supply the ceramic industry. But the growth of global lithium production related to the manufacture of batteries, especially for electric vehicles, has prompted the development of a specific production chain in the EU. As part of its Critical Raw Materials Act, the EU Commission stipulated that by 2030 at least 10 per cent of Europe’s demand for critical raw materials such as lithium should be met from domestic supplies. In Portugal, mining companies have received approval for new projects in areas such as Barroso, Romano, Alvarrões, and Argemela. And requests for exploration are pending in many other areas of the country.  

The Portuguese Environment Agency gave its preliminary approval for the environmental impact assessment of the Barroso project at the end of May 2023, and construction is scheduled to start in 2024. But many residents think the Savannah Resources mine should not be built. From the outset locals opposed to the project founded Unidos em Defesa de Covas do Barroso (UDCB), an association organising demonstrations, assemblies, protest camps, and legal action.  

A small stone quarry in the area near Romainho, in the Covas do Barroso area. The area is
historically an excavation zone for the construction of stone houses. ©Giacomo Sini & Dario Antonelli

The mining plan is also highly controversial with the region’s wider population. And in Portugal, mining is more than just a local issue: exploration concessions in Barroso and Montalegre were at the centre of an investigation into corruption which saw raids on parliamentary offices in November 2023 and led to Prime Minister António Costa’s resignation. The banner welcoming visitors to Covas do Barroso that states “Não às Minas, Sim à Vida” (No to Mines, Yes to Life) poses inescapable questions to the global green transition model. 

Some banners in the center of Covas do Barroso against the opening of the mine. “No to the
mine yes to life” reads the main one. ©Giacomo Sini & Dario Antonelli In defense of Barroso 

The audience contains students, professors, researchers, interested people. “It is a falsification to talk about a just green transition,” says Mariana Riquito, researcher at the University of Coimbra. “It cannot be just if it does not respect the autonomy of local populations. It cannot be a transition if, to implement it, you intensify the consumption of fossil fuels. It cannot be green if it only considers the problem of emissions and not the consequences of the mining and extraction industry.”  

A lecturer asks whether the mine project might still represent a development opportunity for the area. Nelson calmly replies that “Covas do Barroso has been a FAO World Heritage Site for agriculture since 2018. The mine is incompatible with the development of the area. They talk to us about compensation, minimisation, landscape restoration. But a relationship with nature is the only reason to live in such an isolated place. What development is possible for an area where no one would want to live?”   

On the left, Mariana Riquito, Portuguese university researcher and Nelson Gomes, president of
the association “Unidos em defensa de Covas do Barroso” during a conference organized by the
“UTAD – University of Tras os Mones e Alto Douro” in Villa Real, northern Portugal. ©Giacomo Sini & Dario Antonelli

Vila Real, north-eastern Portugal, 24 October 2023. Classroom B.02 at the University of Trás-os-Montes and Alto Douro is full. All attention is directed towards the first speaker of a public discussion organised by the Centre for Transdisciplinary Development Studies (CETRAD): “My name is Nelson Gomes and I live in Covas do Barroso.” As president of the UDCB, Nelson explains that the mines would completely disrupt the environment of the valley and the lives of its inhabitants. “They accuse us of being unwilling to sacrifice ourselves for the planet,” says Nelson, “but we already sacrifice ourselves with our way of life and farming.”  

We need to question the energy transition as a model centred on extractivism.

According to Nelson, the mining project has broad implications: “We need to question the energy transition as a model centred on extractivism. Alternatives, says Nelson, would include the development of public transport, including in rural areas, instead of simply replacing fossil-fuelled private cars with electric ones. “Bear in mind,” warns Nelson, “such an imposition could one day happen to you too, where you live.” 

Local impacts

A stream, swollen after the rains, washes over the road leading to the village of Alijò. “I come all the way here because I can use some of the pastures for grazing,” says Paolo, a farmer with 170 sheep. His business, like that of other shepherds and farmers from Covas do Barroso, is threatened by lithium mining. “Part of my land is in danger of being included in the mining area. Where will I graze the sheep then?” Paolo is worried that the valley’s sources of water will be compromised: “With the drilling, some farmers are already complaining about the lack of water in the wells. What will happen to the troughs and streams?” 

Paulo Pires, a shepherd from Covas do Barroso, grazing his flock of sheep near Alijò, a village
4 km from Covas do Barroso. Paulo is one of the local residents opposing the construction of the
Savannah Lithium mine. ©Giacomo Sini & Dario Antonelli

While recognising the need for an energy transition, Paolo feels it is important to broaden the vision: “Of course lithium is needed for batteries. But we should ask ourselves what we use this energy for. Will lithium make consumerism sustainable? And what green transition are we talking about if we destroy green spaces? Look,” he exclaims, laughing, “everything here is green!” 

“We opposed the lithium mine from the beginning,” says Mayor of Boticas Fernando Quieroga sitting at his desk in the municipal headquarters for Covas do Barroso, almost 20 km away from the village. “It is a different kind of mining activity from those that were already present in the area,” he explains. “It may affect the living conditions and health of the members of our community.” In line with Paolo, he considers that the area’s freshwater supply, specifically underground sources, are a key concern: “We are very alarmed because there is a risk that the mining will compromise the phreatic level.” 

Fernando Quieroga, president/mayor of the Câmara municipal of Boticas. The mayor is
outspoken against the construction of the Covas Lithium’s mine. In this photo is seen in the
mayor’s office in Boticas. ©Giacomo Sini & Dario Antonelli

“They say that such a sparsely populated area can only gain from such a project,” Quieroga says with a sarcastic grin, “but if we look at the lithium value chain in addition to the mining – battery production, electric car fabrication, and, finally, battery recycling – all these industrial activities will be handled elsewhere. Nothing will remain here.” On the region’s future prospects, he uses plain words: “As far as it is within our power, we will not provide authorisations. If the government decides to go ahead, it risks facing a popular uprising.” 

“When I opened, more than twenty years ago now, the village was lively,” says the elderly bartender from the only bar in Covas. “Now there are fewer and fewer inhabitants. Even the school closed down a long time ago.” In the face of inexorable depopulation, the bartender perhaps hopes that the mining project will bring development and new customers, and is less critical of it than most other locals. “My bar is for everyone, it doesn’t take sides on the lithium issue!” 

The only open bar in the small village of Covas do Barroso in northern Portugal. In this area,
designated by the FAO as world agricultural heritage, the British company Savannah wants to build
the largest lithium mine in Europe. ©Giacomo Sini & Dario Antonelli

But, standing near the door, a customer with a drink in hand expresses a different view: “Of course some have sold their land [to the mining project]. But how can you abandon everything? With that kind of money, it is not possible to move and change your life,” he says. 

Fighting back 

“Now it’s good!” Mariana, who has just finished cleaning the entrance to the former primary school in Covas do Barroso with her friend Paloma, looks pleased with their work. Closed for many years, the building has been reborn as A Sachola, thanks in part to the initiative of young people who, like them, moved here to support the struggle against mining. The banner at the entrance reads Encontro Solidario Anti-Extractivista (Anti-extractivist Solidarity Meeting). “We have to finish setting up the space,” Mariana explains, gesturing to the large room inside. “In a week’s time, we’re going to have a film screening. We want this space to be a place of aggregation and sociality for the inhabitants of the village but, at the same time, a meeting point between the local community and those from outside.”

Aida Fernandes, president of Covas do Barroso’s common land association, Baldios, is keen to protect the communal areas of land most threatened by mining projects. “Savannah has bought some land, but a lot of drilling is taking place on the commons, especially in the forests,” explains Aida. “We aim to stop the works, claiming the use of that land for the community.”  

Aida Fernandes, resident of Covas do Barroso and breeder. She is the president of the “Baldios
‘communal land – land for civic use”, and is against the construction of the lithium mine. ©Giacomo Sini & Dario Antonelli

In recent years, many people have come to Covas do Barroso to find out about the struggle of its inhabitants. Aida recounts how exchange situations are often reciprocal: “Last October we participated in an international meeting against mining in Spain, because it is important to be united in the face of such a powerful counterpart.”  

Winning the war 

Project developments for the massive exploitation of lithium reserves have provoked protests from the inhabitants of many rural areas of Portugal. As in Barroso, committees and movements have also been formed in Serra de Estrela, Argemela, and Penalva, to name but a few. A plurality of voices has united on many occasions: for unified demonstrations in Lisbon, for assemblies in Coimbra and elsewhere, in an anti-mining protest camp that was held last summer in Covas do Barroso. 

From the top of the Olhar do Guerreiro viewpoint, the entire valley can be seen. Drilling areas, partly covered by vegetation, can be seen all around. Aida points to a spot southeast of the village, an expanse of pine trees on a hillside. “Over there is the area that they are really focusing on. It seems to be the richest [in lithium],” she says. “Just think, that whole area is going to become an open pit. It will be dug down 150 meters with a diameter of 500 meters. 80 per cent of the material will be waste. The remaining 20 per cent will have to be washed, even chemically, to extract the lithium fitted there.” 

The area around Covas in Barroso, designated by the FAO as a World Agricultural Heritage
site. In the centre among the greenery the first excavation of Savannah, the British company that
has plans to build a Lithium mine in the area. ©Giacomo Sini & Dario Antonelli

Recently, the struggle against lithium extraction in Covas do Barroso has received broad support from diverse sectors of society. “This is not about slowing down the work and obtaining small results,” says Aida decisively. “It is not enough to win battles. You have to win the war!” 

The headquarters (information point) of Svannah in Covas do Barroso, in the north of Portugal. Savannah is the British company that wants to build the largest lithium mine in Europe within the Barroso area. ©Giacomo Sini & Dario Antonelli

As the sun goes down, a farmer crosses the central village square, leading his cows to the stable with a hoe slung across his shoulder. On one side is the sports field, where the protest camp against lithium mining was held, countless colourful banners are hanging on the fence. They call out against mining, for village life, for water, and for nature. Directly opposite, on the other side of the square, is the small Savannah office, hidden behind a dark door, guarded by cameras.

Every year, hundreds to thousands of megawatts’ worth of wind turbines across the United States get a facelift. These aging turbines have their rotors swapped out, their blades replaced, and key components like the generator upgraded in order to enhance the machines’ ability to produce electricity from wind. This process is known as “repowering.” Included among the components that sometimes get replaced are magnets made with rare-earth elements like neodymium and dysprosium, which also play essential roles inside smartphones, laptops, and electric car motors.

The wide range of applications for rare-earth minerals translates into a lot of potential ways to repurpose the ingredients from spent wind turbine magnets. But today, most of these magnets wind up in landfills. It’s estimated that less than 1 percent of rare earths are recycled globally — from wind turbines, dead hard drives, and everything else. 

Technicians examine a wind turbine in Tianjin, China, in 2022. Zhao Zishuo / Xinhua via Getty Images

The U.S. government, fearing a future rare-earth supply crunch that could hold back the energy transition, wants to change that. In January, the Department of Energy, or DOE, announced 20 winners of the first phase of its $5.1 million “Wind Turbine Materials Recycling Prize.” Funded by the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law, the prize seeks to develop “a cost-effective and sustainable recycling industry” for wind turbine components that aren’t being recycled commercially today, including wind turbine blades and the supersized magnets inside some generators. Each of the winning groups is receiving a $75,000 cash prize to help advance its recycling idea. If a team’s initial results are promising, it may go on to win an additional half a million dollars in cash, as well as a $100,000 voucher for technical assistance from a DOE national laboratory.

The end goal, said Tyler Christoffel, technology manager in the DOE’s Wind Energy Technologies Office, is to bring promising recycling ideas closer to commercialization “on a timeline that would impact clean energy deployment and our decarbonization goals.”

Rare-earth magnets are the strongest commercial magnets that exist today. They have a variety of uses, including electric vehicle motors and several types of wind turbine generators. Despite their importance for clean energy, mining and refining rare-earth elements is anything but green. Large volumes of earth must be moved in order to dig up these metals, and harsh chemicals are needed to concentrate and separate them. The environmental impacts of rare-earth mining, coupled with the expectation that global demand for rare-earth minerals will skyrocket in the coming decades, suggests we should be doing everything possible to recycle rare earths from old technology so they can be used again. Considering that the generators inside wind turbines can contain hundreds of pounds of rare-earth metals, it seems like a no-brainer for the wind industry to start recycling rare-earth magnets as soon as possible.

The Mountain Pass rare-earth mine in California. Ricky Carioti / The Washington Post via Getty Images

But that’s not what’s happening. 

“Right now, to our understanding, essentially no rare-earth elements from wind are recycled,” Christoffel told Grist, citing the immaturity of rare earth recycling technology, the economic challenges that come with scaling up new recycling processes, and the limited quantity of spent turbine magnets in need of recycling today. As the U.S. continues to expand its land-based wind fleet and move offshore, where rare-earth-intensive generators are favored, the dearth of magnet recycling options will “become a much more pressing issue,” he said.

The DOE is hoping to get ahead of this problem through its new recycling prize. 

Of the 20 teams that won an initial tranche of prize money last month, four are explicitly focused on magnet recycling. Christoffel said these teams were chosen because their recycling solutions seemed novel and promising, and because they demonstrated they were “capable of advancing the technologies to commercialization.” Additionally, most of these groups proposed cleaner and less energy-intensive alternatives to traditional metal recycling approaches. 

“What this prize really helps to do is advance some of these recycling technologies that can offer a lower-emissions, lower-resource use [path] to a magnet,” Christoffel said.

For instance, in one process for recycling rare-earth magnets that’s previously been studied, magnet scrap is placed in a furnace at elevated temperatures and exposed to hydrogen gas in order to extract the metals. If the scrap has become highly corroded, or oxidized, an additional, emissions-intensive step called molten salt electrolysis may be required to convert those elements back into a metallic form. A phase-one prize-winning team from the University of Utah is pioneering a novel approach that relies on chemical reactions involving both hydrogen and magnesium at elevated temperatures to separate neodymium from magnet scrap and turn it back into a high-purity metal. With this process, recyclers are able to bypass molten salt electrolysis, considerably reducing both carbon emissions and energy usage.

“We have demonstrated the reaction, the concept, works” at a very small scale, project lead Zhigang Fang, a metallurgist at the University of Utah, told Grist. Over the next six months, the team plans to “scale up to a bigger quantity so that we can demonstrate … that this is a robust process that has the potential to be scaled up to a production scale.”

In another popular metal recycling approach, hydrometallurgy, recyclers often use strong acids to extract metals from scrap. Phase-one prize winner Critical Materials Recycling, Inc. is taking a greener twist on this approach with acid-free dissolution recycling, a method developed at Ames National Laboratory in which rare earths are extracted from magnets using a water-based solution. 

A resource technician prepares a generator for a wind turbine for shipping in Houston. Nick de la Torre / Houston Chronicle via Getty Images

Critical Materials Recycling’s parent company, TdVib, signed a licensing agreement for the tech in 2021 and is in the process of spinning up a pilot plant that uses it to recycle rare earths from electronic waste. With the DOE’s support, Critical Materials Recycling will now explore the logistics and economics of setting up a domestic wind turbine magnet recycling industry. Eventually, with additional funding, the company hopes to actually start recycling magnets from turbines at a pilot scale using its technology.

Partnering with the wind industry “seemed like a natural fit” for Critical Materials Recycling, company CEO Daniel Bina told Grist. Bina noted that Iowa, where the company is headquartered, is the second biggest wind producer in the nation. “We should obviously be working with those people in our backyard to reclaim rare earths from materials that we have right here,” he said.

With phase one of the competition over, teams are now working on their phase-two submissions, which include a prototype demonstration of their technology and a detailed plan to scale it up further. Up to six teams will be eligible to win $500,000 phase-two prizes, which the DOE expects to announce in late summer or early fall, Christoffel said. 

While the prize competition itself won’t result in a brand-new recycling industry, the DOE hopes to produce a suite of technologies that could serve as the foundation for commercial rare-earth magnet recycling from wind turbines. Currently, there aren’t a huge number of wind turbines that have reached the end of their estimated 30-year lifespan. But that will change in the coming decades. In the meantime, there are some magnets that could be recycled from turbines following repowering, plus additional scrap being produced during magnet fabrication.  

“Hopefully, this kind of competition will bring more attention” to the fact that there are ways to recycle rare-earth magnets from wind turbines, said Linda Wang, who’s leading another prize-winning team at Purdue University that is developing a low-carbon, hydrogen-powered rare-earth recycling process. “We have the technology. … The companies who own the wind turbines should do some long-term planning to collect them, instead of ship[ping] them to landfills.”

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How to recycle the giant magnets inside wind turbines? These scientists have a few ideas. on Feb 27, 2024.

The fossil fuel industry touches just about everything. Its most visible effects are pockmarked across the land as coalfields and oilfields, or blown into the air as smoke from factories and power plants. But its economic impacts spread across many sectors and regions. For that reason, decarbonizing the economy will affect more than miners and drillers. The changes will ripple through heavy industries that employ hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of laborers, many of whom may be dislocated by these changes and need help adapting to the post-carbon world.

When President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act into law, many communities with faltering coal mines and oil derricks realized they were poised to benefit from it. The legislation provides billions in tax incentives and grants to help “energy communities” — those towns and counties with brownfield sites, previously dependent on now-shuttered coal mines or coal-fired power plants, or otherwise having high tax revenue from fossil fuel extraction. Such places also must have an unemployment rate higher than the national average to qualify for support. The goal is to provide the incentives these areas, and the residents who live in them, need to attract new industries, particularly those in renewable energy and electrification.

According to the U.S. Department of Energy, the energy communities eligible for federal help sprawl mainly across Appalachia and the Southwest. However, research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology suggests a large swath of the country is being overlooked by these designations. 

Using a new metric, termed “employment carbon footprint” or ECF, the study presents a new method of determining a county-level economic dependence on fossil fuels, in the hope that the government uses the data to more accurately pinpoint communities in need of assistance. Though layoffs and closures of coal mines and coal-burning plants affect thousands of workers, many industrial operations heavily reliant on fossil fuels, including steelmaking, fertilizer production, and refining, may feel some pain from decarbonization, too. To determine where these places might be, researchers calculated the carbon footprint of a number of employment sectors, including agriculture, oil and gas, and construction. They found that areas with heavy manufacturing, but no direct link to extraction, still have a deep underlying dependence on the fossil fuel industry and risk being left behind by the green transition. 

According to co-author Christopher Knittel, an economist at the MIT-Sloane school of business, about half of America’s most carbon-dependent economies don’t qualify for the energy community IRA tax credit — and many of those that do qualify face relatively little economic vulnerability to the coming transition. What’s more, the federal designation does not cover those places, such as Mountrail County, North Dakota and Washington, Nebraska, that are so heavily dependent upon fossil fuels for manufacturing and other sectors that they face greater economic vulnerability than many designated energy communities. After Knittel and other researchers calculated the employment carbon footprint of various job sectors, they overlaid them on a map, showing a few surprising downstream effects of decarbonization on the job market.

“For example, if you’re making steel, you’re burning a lot of natural gas and electricity,” Knittel said. “Or it could be you’re making fertilizer, and we make fertilizer from natural gas. So those sectors are not going to be defined as energy communities because they’re not actually extracting fossil fuel.”

The “just transition,” an idea the labor movement developed in the 1970s and ’80s in response to increased environmental regulation, demands that communities facing economic disruption from the downsizing or removal of environmentally harmful industry be compensated with new investment and workforce training. While coal-producing regions of the Rust Belt and Mountain West are receiving tax credits and other benefits to help them through the green transition, large swathes of the Great Plains don’t have a single IRA-designated energy community, despite the high levels of carbon dependence in their economies, which revolve around oil, gas, construction, heavy industry, and agriculture.

“As we transition to a low-carbon world,” Knittel said, “energy costs are going to go up and these areas or sectors might be harmed, but they would be missed by the way we define energy communities.”

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That doesn’t mean there’s nothing out there for places that might be overlooked by the IRA’s efforts to help energy communities. The study refers only to the 10 percent tax credit available to new projects, facilities, and technologies located in such places. Other programs target regions experiencing declines in industrial employment. The IRA, for example, provides $48 billion to promote advanced manufacturing, much of which may benefit locales outlined in the MIT study. The government also is providing additional support to so-called Justice40 communities — those with concentrated poverty, large populations of marginalized people, and other considerations — to help them make the transition.

Thom Kay, of the labor-and-climate advocacy group BlueGreen Alliance, said there is plenty of funding available, but it’s all very confusing for small communities to navigate. It’s too easy for small pockets of high need to fall by the wayside in Washington. 

“The study has provided a useful map for federal agencies who want to get projects into communities that need them now,” he said. 

Even so, federal funding is targeted more generally at local and state governments to facilitate industrial development, with less emphasis on resolving the training and employment needs of workers dislocated by energy transition. There are many opportunities out there, “but no clear avenue for these workers to transfer from a fossil fuel job to any of these new jobs in manufacturing or clean energy,” Kay said. If the definition of “energy community” is widened, it may not even be quite enough: This administration, and future administrations, may need to consider what other programs might be needed to support workers, rather than simply incentivizing industries to move around and hoping they hire locally.

In fact, he said, the danger may be more that some officials may simply not recognize the need for investment. In places like the Dakotas, where oil and gas remains relatively strong, the economic pressure to change just isn’t there yet, and economic diversification may not be a priority, whereas it’s a more active conversation in Appalachia, particularly since the coal industry’s steep decline in the 2010s. The changes may not be fully present, but they’re coming, and with them, the need for some form of cushion to help workers make the transition.

toolTips('.classtoolTips2','The process of reducing the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that drive climate change, most often by deprioritizing the use of fossil fuels like oil and gas in favor of renewable sources of energy.');

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The IRA will help ‘energy communities.’ But what does that mean? on Feb 27, 2024.

Green cuts 'leave families colder and poorer' Channel News brendan 27th February 2024 Teaser Media

Glaciers atop Mount Kenya, Mount Kilimanjaro, and the Rwenzori Mountains in East Africa are shrinking at an alarming rate as the region heats up.

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Pět let poté, co se v Evropě vzedmula „zelená vlna“, dominuje politické diskusi před evropskými volbami strach a polarizace. Levice proto musí klást důraz na pozitivní hodnoty a posilovat je pomocí příběhů založených na naději.

Když se stranám zelených v roce 2018 překvapivě dobře zadařilo ve volbách v Belgii, Lucembursku a Německu, hovořilo se o „zelené vlně naděje“. Zdálo se, že zelené strany uspěly i díky tomu, že se držely svých hodnot — například se staly hlasem mnoha Evropanů, kteří si přejí vstřícnou migrační politiku.

Přestože tato zelená vlna obstála i v evropských volbách v roce 2019, následně převládly narativy pravicových populistů, zdůrazňující témata bezpečnosti a migrace. O pět let později jsou v mnoha zemích Evropské unie ve vládě krajně pravicové strany, v jiných jejich rétorika dominuje politické debatě a zelená politika vyvolává rostoucí odpor.

Pokud chtějí zelené strany nastolovat agendu pro volby do Evropského parlamentu letos v červnu, nemohou pouze reagovat na události a oponenty a kopírovat přitom pravicové narativy strachu a obviňování. Nová zelená vlna naděje je možná pouze tehdy, pokud za ní budou stát nové hlasy, hodnoty a vize.

Workshopy o naději se stovkami levicových aktivistů z celé Evropy, které pořádala na svém letním táboře v červenci 2023 Federace mladých evropských zelených (FYEG), ukázaly, že většina z nich si přeje v politice více příběhů založených na empatii, naší odpovědnosti při vzájemné péči a sdílené lidskosti. Co chybí, jsou prostředky, jak tato vyprávění uvést v život.

Naděje v temných časech

V dnešní době plné nejistoty je strach jako osobní emoce normální, instinktivní reakcí. V politice ovšem strach jako emoce může způsobit, že voliči budou ještě více tíhnout k rozdělujícímu pohledu na svět a hledání obětních beránků.

V zeleném aktivismu i levicové politice obecně jsme často vystaveni používat sdělení založená na strachu jako prostředek ke zvýšení povědomí o nějakých hrozbách. Vědecké poznatky o tom, jak funguje lidský mozek, nás ovšem učí, že strach je biologicky určen k tomu, aby nám umožnil bránit se bezprostřednímu fyzickému nebezpečí. K reakcím na systémová, existenční rizika je méně vhodný.

Z hlediska potřeb zelené politiky, která vyžaduje hluboké změny v chování a postojích, sdělení založená na strachu aktivují nesprávnou část mozku. Strach vyvolává v našem těle biologickou reakci — způsobuje například uvolnění stresových hormonů, jako je kortizol, nebo zvýšení srdeční frekvence, což nás připravuje na bezprostřední fyzické nebezpečí.

Zároveň se tím vypínají části našeho mozku, které jsou spojené s reflexivním myšlením a empatií, což nás vede k upřednostňování vlastních zájmů před soucitným, dlouhodobým myšlením ve společném zájmu. Přesně takové myšlení je přitom nezbytné pro vytváření smysluplné politiky například v oblasti ochrany klimatu.

Zelené strany by proto měly pěstovat spíše ty politické emoce, které zvýší pravděpodobnost podpory jejich cílů a jejich uskutečňování. Emoce založené na strachu, jako je hněv a znechucení, jsou trochu jako fosilní paliva: mohou nám dát krátkodobý příval energie, ale jejich znečišťující vedlejší důsledky zůstanou v našem politickém ekosystému ještě dlouho poté, co je spotřebujeme.

A protože lidé jsou vybaveni zrcadlovými neurony, které replikují pocity, jež vidíme u ostatních, hněv jedné části společnosti zákonitě vyvolává hněv i u ostatních.

Strach je pro demokratickou společnost toxickou emocí.

Filosofka Martha Nussbaumová v této souvislosti tvrdí, že strach je pro demokratickou společnost toxickou emocí. Demokratická společnost totiž vyžaduje vzájemnou důvěru, která umožňuje spolupráci. Autoritáři chtějí mít lidi vystrašené a rozdělené právě proto, aby jim mohli snáze vládnout a koncentrovat neomezenou moc.

Naděje, píše Nussbaumová, je emoce, která z nás přetéká směrem ven, zatímco strach nás nutí se od ostatních stahovat do sebe. Právě v dobách nejistoty jsou zapotřebí politická hnutí, která budou pěstovat odolnost a solidaritu, díky níž budou lidé držet pospolu, místo aby se od sebe vzdalovali.

Naděje nabízí alternativy

Naděje stojí na myšlence, že zítřek může být lepší než dnešek, pokud se o to lidé společně zasadí. Na rozdíl od optimismu a pozitivity, které by se uprostřed krize mohly jevit jako falešné nebo otravné, v sobě naděje zahrnuje strategické zaměření na to, jak temnými časy projít společně a dosáhnout potřebných změn.

Naděje je mezi „pozitivními“ emocemi výjimečná také tím, že ji jako lidé aktivujeme právě proto, abychom zvládli těžké životní okamžiky. Je zdrojem odolnosti, která nám umožňuje zachovat klid, rozvahu a odhodlání, abychom mohli lépe reagovat na zkoušky, jimž jsme vystaveni.

Bez jasné výzvy k akci mohou naléhavé zprávy o trudných poměrech vyvolat sklíčenost, zoufalství a únavu ze soucitu. Lidé musí vidět, že změna je možná. Proto jsou poselství jako „Yes, We Can“ Barracka Obamy nebo „Wir schaffen das“ Angely Merkelové důležitým zdrojem politické angažovanosti.

Pouze pokud lidé věří, že „to má cenu“, je pravděpodobné, že si vyhrnou rukávy a podpoří odvážnou politiku, jako je třeba přijímání nově příchozích nebo transformace městského prostoru.

Pouze pokud lidé věří, že „to má cenu“, je pravděpodobné, že si vyhrnou rukávy a podpoří odvážnou politiku, jako je třeba přijímání nově příchozích nebo transformace městského prostoru.

Když Alexandria Ocasio-Cortezová a další američtí demokraté představovali program Zelené nové dohody (Green New Deal), zveřejnili při té příležitosti také video „Poselství z budoucnosti“. To se jakoby zpětně ohlíží za zaváděním navrhovaných politických opatření, a ukazuje přitom, jak by po nich společnost vypadala, a jakou roli by při jejich uskutečňování hráli obyčejní lidé.

Video končí poselstvím „můžeme být tím, co máme odvahu vidět“ — to je další politické ponaučení z vědeckého zkoumání lidského mozku, které se běžně využívá v oblasti sportu.

Ocasio-Cortezová tak představila alternativní, nadějnou vizi budoucnosti. O něco podobného se snaží solarpunk — umělecké hnutí, které si představuje budoucnost, v níž lidstvo žije v souladu s přírodou, jako protiklad k dystopickému kyberpunku.

Zelená politika by se měla chtít připodobnit právě vizím solarpunku, protože lidé mají prediktivní mozky: potřebují si něco představit, aby toho pak chtěli dosáhnout. Evropská politika přitom v současnosti nabízí jen málo důvodů k naději.

Odvážnější politika inspirovaná solarpunkem by nabízela vize lepší budoucnosti, pro kterou stojí za to jít k volbám a občansky se angažovat. V únoru 2023 například německá strana Zelených ve volební kampani ukázala občanům Berlína, jak by její dopravní politika změnila jejich okolí: více stromů, více cyklostezek a pěších zón — ale především více sousedských vztahů.

Takové jednoduché cvičení by měly strany Zelených opakovat na evropské úrovni: jak by vypadala naše společnost s větší svobodou pohybu, důslednou reakcí na klimatickou krizi a větší rovností a rasovou spravedlností?

V USA byla Zelená nová dohoda úspěšným příkladem toho, jak může vypadat posun takzvaného Overtonova okna — rámce toho, co je v politice považováno za reálné. Jádrem konceptu Overtonova okna je idea, že radikální myšlenky se mohou dostat do hlavního proudu, pokud o nich dostatečné množství lidí začne mluvit.

Zelená nová dohoda získala příznivce a rozzuřila odpůrce, takže o ní obě strany dál mluvily. Myšlenka se stala natolik významnou, že následně inspirovala Zelenou dohodu Evropské unie.

Poučení pro letošní volby do Evropského parlamentu je jasné: pokud zelené strany chtějí dostat své nápady do středu politické debaty, musí o nich mluvit. Místo aby se snažily zvýšit svou věrohodnost přejímáním témat z mainstreamu a naskakováním na diskuse o migraci nebo zahraniční politice, měly by akcentovat své ústřední zelené a levicové hodnoty.

Naděje je radikální

Klíčem k vyvolání nové zelené vlny je tedy odvážné prosazování levicových hodnot v jakékoli oblasti: od migrace po klimatickou spravedlnost, od podpory Ukrajiny po boj proti islamofobii a antisemitismu. Radikální krajní pravici, která v politické debatě vyzdvihuje ta nejkontroverznější a nejrozporuplnější témata vyvolávající strach, může v boji o pozornost konkurovat jen zelený program, který bude radikální.

Abychom změnili dominantní politický narativ, musíme měnit to, co je v politice považováno za  rozumné — a nepřizpůsobovat svá slova tomu, co zrovna hlásají novinové titulky. Přední levicová expertka na komunikaci Anat Shenkerová-Osoriová politikům a političkám zdůrazňuje, aby se jasně hlásili ke svým hodnotám a přesvědčením: „Dobrá komunikace neznamená říct to, co je populární, ale dělat populárním to, co je třeba říct.“

Smyslem dobré politické komunikace je zvýšit pravděpodobnost, že se lidé postaví za vaše hodnoty — ne jen přesvědčivě obhajovat určitou aktuální politiku. Kognitivní lingvista George Lakoff říká, že levicoví voliči obvykle sdílí světonázor „pečujícího rodiče“, který je postaven na empatii, starostlivosti a naději.

Nadace Common Cause (Společná věc) zase zdůrazňuje, že zelené strany sdílejí společný soubor soucitných hodnot s rozmanitými hnutími za sociální spravedlnost. Pokud posílí hodnoty, na nichž stojí požadavky, jako je manželství pro všechny, může to prospět jak stranám, tak s nimi spřízněným hnutím.

Zelené strany by tedy měly svůj program obhajovat s odkazem na „vnitřní“ lidské hodnoty, jako je sociální spravedlnost, spojení s přírodou a péče o druhé, a musí se vyhnout pokušení předkládat pouze racionální, účelové argumenty, které se odvolávají na „vnější“ hodnoty typu bezpečnost a bohatství, tedy například argumenty založené na ekonomických nebo bezpečnostních dopadech změny klimatu.

Podobně je třeba vyzývat k humánní migrační politice prostě kvůli péči o druhé lidi, a ne kvůli ekonomickým argumentům, jako je poptávka po zahraniční pracovní síle na evropských trzích práce.

Vyprávění založená na vnitřních hodnotách mohou Evropany přesvědčit, že v nadcházejících evropských volbách by měla převážit empatie, naše odpovědnost starat se jeden o druhého a sdílená lidskost. Pandemie Covid-19 ukázala, jak důležité jsou pro naše přežití spolupráce, instituce podporující mezinárodní solidaritu a politika založená na péči, vzájemném respektu a sdílené lidskosti.

Zelené strany musí usilovat o to, aby byly stejně suverénní a efektivní v používání sdělení založených na „vnitřních“ hodnotách, jako jsou populisté, když používají sociální média k šíření strachu a „vnějších“ hodnot sobeckého sebezájmu.

Metodou fokusních skupin bylo před volbami do Evropského parlamentu v roce 2019 zjištěno, že jednoduché pojmy jako empatie, péče a společenství u Evropanů stále silně rezonují a dobře popisují to, co si občané přejí, když mluví o budoucnosti svých společností.

Na našich komunikačních seminářích o naději aktivisté z různých tematických oblastí i zemí instinktivně vyjadřují tytéž vnitřní hodnoty, ale jen zřídka je používají ve svých každodenních sděleních. Pokud však sdělení neustále neopakujete, nemáte šanci dostat jej do politického mainstreamu.

Zelené strany musí jednat z přesvědčení, že většina Evropanů sdílí jejich hodnoty, a mít odvahu držet se politického slovníku, který je odráží. Slova jako péče, empatie a láska působí v politickém prostoru těžkopádně a nesourodě, ale pokud jsou používána správně, mají moc změnit způsob, jímž lidé politicky uvažují.

Politici jako Barack Obama, novozélandská Jacinda Ardernová, turecký Ekrem İmamoğlu, slovenská Zuzana Čaputová a nejnověji český Petr Pavel znovu a znovu dokazují, že voliči odměňují ty, kdo v nich vidí dobro. Jinak řečeno, jak píše Lakoff ve své knize, „voliče zajímá v první řadě morální perspektiva a až v druhé řadě konkrétní detaily politiky“.

Aby se zeleným stranám dařilo, musí se zaměřit na prostý, ale náročný úkol formulovat základní morální hodnoty, na nichž teprve stojí praktické cíle jejich politiky. Mladí zelení, kteří tato cvičení prováděli na loňském letním táboře FYEG, dospěli ke sdílenému souboru vnitřních hodnotových přesvědčení, jako je víra ve společenství, pospolitost a harmonii s přírodou.

Tyto myšlenky se nyní FYEG snaží uvést do praxe ve svých kampaních zaměřených na migraci, mír a bezpečnost, v nichž zdůrazňují, že budoucnost máme pod kontrolou a můžeme ji sami utvářet.

Naděje znamená jednat

Abychom v lidech probudili politickou naději, musíme jim nabídnout prostředky ke tvořivému jednání. Naděje je sval, který musí být procvičován prostřednictvím činnosti, která uvádí hodnoty do žité každodenní praxe a dává lidem pocit kontroly nad vlastním osudem.

Má-li zelený politický aktivismus oslovit více lidí, měl by pracovat s lidskou touhou po spojení a sounáležitosti. To znamená využít také potenciál aktivit, které se nemusí jevit jako tradiční formy politického jednání.

Řada výzkumů například ukazuje, že pobyt v přírodě pomáhá zvládat stres a může být vhodný i pro zvládání politického strachu. Činnosti, jako je pobyt v lese, uvádějí lidský mozek do stavu, kdy je odolný vůči stresu a otevřený soucitnému a hloubavému myšlení — také proto, že spouštějí uvolňování oxytocinu, hormonu spojeného s láskou a soucitem.

Mohou také pomoci aktivovat mnoho vnitřních hodnot, které se navzájem posilují. Spojení s přírodou může například posílit naše odhodlání prosazovat hodnoty sociální spravedlnosti.

Úspěch britského kolektivu pozorovatelů ptáků Flock Together, sdružujícího lidi jiné než bílé barvy pleti, ilustruje, že má-li mít dobré politické jednání trvalý účinek, musí zasahovat do každodenního života a dávat lidem pocit sounáležitosti a schopnosti spolupracovat.

Když si aktivisté na našich tréninzích o naději často mají představit, jak lidé jednají podle svých hodnot a vizí, přicházejí často právě s takovýmito obrazy rozmanitých skupin lidí, které se setkávají a spolupracují v parcích či komunitních centrech.

Politické organizování kolem ochrany přírody může pro zelené strany představovat způsob, jak podpořit hodnoty, které dělají naše životy smysluplnými — podobně jako křesťanští demokraté pracují s náboženstvím nebo sociální demokraté s odborovým organizováním. Není ostatně náhodou, že pravicové populistické strany jako Fidesz nebo Alternativa pro Německo v posledních letech sílí především v místech, kde infrastruktura pro setkávání a vytváření společenství do značné míry chybí.

Naše společenství utváří naše hodnoty, nikoli naopak. To je zásadní poznatek, který pravicoví populisté dobře znají, ale mnozí na levici jej k vlastní škodě zapomněli. Cokoliv, co tvoří společenství, je tedy politické, a to, co se počítá jako politické, je definováno těmi nejlépe organizovanými a nejsoudržnějšími společenstvími.

Naděje je nakonec silnější než strach

Tváří v tvář vzestupu politiky krutosti a nenávisti mají mnozí aktivisté nutně pochybnosti, jak může naděje se strachem, hněvem a rozdělováním vůbec soupeřit. Tento postoj však přehlíží moc vnitřních hodnot, které stojí v jádru levicové politiky. Touha po spojení s přírodou je například vryta do každého z nás. Jen čeká na probuzení.

Je na zelených, aby probouzeli a politicky zužitkovali právě tuto vrozenou radost a vášeň pro svět kolem nás, kterou mnoho lidí projevuje také na internetu (jen pomyslete na přitažlivost videí se zvířaty) — zatímco krajní pravice těží politický kapitál z temných zákoutí sociálních sítí, plných konspiračních teorií.

Zelené politické strany by měly ve své komunikaci hledat inovativní způsoby, jimiž politicky aktivují silné emoce, jako je obdiv, vděčnost, úžas, radost a dokonce láska. Jak naznačil nedávný výzkum, že aktivace úžasu — například prostřednictvím krásy umění — může zvýšit pravděpodobnost, že lidé přivítají ve svém sousedství nově příchozí.

Právě přímé jednání, jako je pořádání večeří pro nově příchozí nebo pozorování ptáků společně s místními, může vést k příznivým výsledkům, kterých mediálními sděleními, posty na sociálních sítích, a tiskovými konferencemi nikdy nedosáhneme.

I malé akce se tak mohou stát politicky relevantními, pokud budou symbolizovat a posilovat hodnoty a myšlenky, o které nám jde. Toto strategické ponaučení by mělo být pro politické organizátory posilou — znamená, že každý z nás má moc utvářet celospolečenskou diskusi skrze příběhy, které ostatním vypráví a které vytváří svými činy.

Hluboké emocionální síle autoritářského populismu lze konkurovat jedině tím, že nabídneme alternativu, která se opírá o stejně hluboké, ale tvořivější emoce — jako je naděje — a hluboce lidské hodnoty — jako je spojení s přírodou, soucit a laskavost. Jak to pojmenoval jeden mladý zelený aktivista na semináři o naději, který se konal loni v létě pro FYEG: příběhy, které ukazují naše vzájemné propojení, jsou důležité, protože „právě to jsou věci, které nás dělají lidmi“.

According to trade records, people plucked more than 400,000 Central Asian tortoises from the wild to sell internationally between 2012 and 2021, mainly for the pet trade. About half of the animals across that decade were imported into the United States, where the going price for the reptiles — also known as Russian tortoises — is a mere $100-200.

These same tortoises, according to scientists, could have provided priceless climate benefits to the planet in the wild. A study published last year identified many animals with a high potential for protecting and enhancing carbon storage in natural landscapes. Tortoise species who make their homes in semi-arid places, such as Central Asian tortoises, were among them.

Examples like this illustrate why several organizations attending the most recent United Nations climate conference, COP28, called on policymakers to include wildlife conservation in climate action plans due to the critical role wild animals can play in climate mitigation.

International Animal Rescue, for instance, ran a COP28 campaign asking policymakers to “give wildlife a seat at the table.” Ahead of the conference, the organization’s chief executive Gavin Bruce wrote, “By conserving wildlife and their habitats, forests are protected, ensuring that millions of tonnes of carbon remain stored in the flora and deep peat below.”

It’s that interaction between wildlife and habitat that makes a difference for the climate. As ecologist Simon Mustoe put it in his 2022 book Wildlife in the Balance, it “takes two to tango” when it comes to the functioning of ecosystems. Accordingly, “lose wildlife, you lose the basis for any environmental remediation to work,” he tells me by email.

In other words, Mustoe says that to weather the environmental crises of our time, we must protect and restore wild animal populations.

To achieve this, experts say the legal trade in wild species needs an overhaul.

Exploiting Climate-Valuable Species

“The exploitation of wild animals is one of the greatest threats to the survival of species,” says biologist Sandra Altherr, cofounder of the nonprofit Pro Wildlife.

In 2023 Altherr teamed up with other researchers to study the sustainability of the legal wildlife trade. Their paper stressed that trade can be sustainable if it’s well managed. But they found little proof of sustainability in most trade.

Their paper highlights 183 cases of legal yet seemingly unsustainable trade, including the blacktip reef shark. Exploited for meat, fins, and public aquariums, the shark’s population has plummeted by an estimated 30-49% over three generations. This is bad news for the climate, as the carbon storage study named blacktip, lemon and tiger sharks as key species in enhancing the uptake of CO2 in reef ecosystems.

Photo: Hannes Klostermann / Ocean Image Bank

Likewise, corals and reef fishes are heavily exploited for the aquarium trade. Research suggests these animals are important for both climate mitigation and adaptation, with herbivorous reef fish enhancing carbon storage and coral infrastructure providing storm protection amid extreme weather events.

Legal Doesn’t Mean Sustainable

Altherr warns the examples in the paper may only scratch the surface.

“Our case studies are only the indicative tip of the iceberg,” she says. “We assume that far more wildlife species, probably thousands, are utilized on a non-sustainable scale.”

Understanding the full scale and impact of the wildlife trade is difficult. Illegal trade is, by its nature, hard to quantify, while the legal trade in species is mostly understudied despite being gargantuan in scale.

Moreover, the legal trade is subject to varying oversight. Most countries are party to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, which regulates international trade in some 6,610 animal species, along with tens of thousands of plants. The treaty separates species into different categories — the Appendices — based on their known risk of extinction, and trade rules vary accordingly.

Altherr says the legal wildlife trade is often assumed to be sustainable. But she and her co-authors argued this assumption is flawed, as most trade lacks the supportive evidence to demonstrate sustainability.

“Of particular concern is the lack of data on export volumes, wildlife populations utilized and the lack of evidence-based impact assessments of the trade,” says Altherr.

Strengthen Records and Assessments

The study’s authors identified several policies on legal trade that are ripe for strengthening. Those who profit most from the trade should fund improvements, they argued, which would place the burden of costs at the feet of importers, largely in richer nations.

The recommended reforms include instituting rigorous monitoring of exploited animals’ populations in the wild to inform decision-making. The authors also called for the creation of a centralized database for all international trade in wildlife — CITES and non-CITES species — structured toward enhancing traceability, transparency and, ultimately, sustainability.

CITES already maintains a database for the trade it regulates, but it frequently contains discrepancies and can fail to align with other data sources, such as customs records.

CITES also requires countries to produce “non-detriment” findings for species before trade occurs — which means assessing the impact of the trade on wild populations. However, the current system doesn’t provide for mandatory scrutiny of all assessments, nor is there an obligatory format. As a result, non-detriment findings do not exist in some cases and where they do, they vary from complex to extremely rudimentary.

Although it’s impossible to quantify, Wildlife Conservation Society vice president of international policy Susan Lieberman says she suspects that non-detriment findings are lacking in a “significant proportion” of cases.

Countries’ non-detriment findings face scrutiny if importing nations request to see them and when CITES selects states for a review of their trade in particular species. Research indicates that these probes can fail to lead to clearly improved sustainability.

Lieberman says the process is “slow, it’s bureaucratic and it works,” although not enough species are subject to reviews.

The paper suggested that the centralized database could involve formalizing countries’ reporting of non-detriment findings, allowing them to be better examined and studied. Lieberman believes more scrutiny is essential. “The only way the system can really work is if countries would have to share their NDFs,” she says.

Protect Threatened Species

CITES is also slow at bringing at-risk species under its regulatory wing. It takes over 10 years on average for CITES to list species in its Appendices after the International Union for Conservation of Nature identifies them as threatened by international commerce, according to analysis released in 2019. The researchers found that 28% of 958 threatened IUCN Red List species likely jeopardized by global trade lacked CITES protections as of 2018.

Since then, other research has identified hundreds of animals and plants on the Red List, which itself can contain outdated and incomplete information, that appear to warrant CITES protections.

Skins confiscated from the illegal wildlife trade. Photo: Bill Fitzpatrick/FWS (public domain)

CITES parties are working to better identify candidates for listing, with varying views on what measures are necessary. The authors of the listing gap research called for the creation of a “near- automatic pathway” that would ensure CITES promptly considers protecting species the Red List has identified as threatened by international trade. Co-author Eyal Frank, an environmental economist, says “At a minimum, every species that is threatened with extinction should be brought up for discussion and potentially a vote for inclusion in Appendix I or II” where global commerce is a contributing factor.

The inclusion of species in CITES’ Appendices leads to various outcomes, such as bans on commercial trade in highly endangered species taken from the wild. Vast amounts of trade — commercial and non-commercial ­— continues under the treaty but it is subject to some controls, such as permit requirements. Critically, the listing of species in CITES makes trade in those wild animals visible to a certain extent.

Frank believes closing the listing gap is a pressing issue, along with “transitioning as soon as possible to a digital system of export and import certifications.” Currently, most CITES parties use a paper-based permitting system that is highly susceptible to fraud and error, despite the availability of an electronic system.

Scrutinize Wildlife Farming

Other issues include illegality and unsustainability in wildlife farming. Trade in animals alleged to be born or bred in captivity makes up a significant proportion of CITES-regulated commerce.

In principle, wildlife farming is meant to limit extraction of animals from the wild. But a recent paper found that captive breeding operations commonly put pressure on wild populations. Although examples of sustainable farming exist, unsustainable practices include supplementing captive-bred populations with wild-caught individuals and fraudulently laundering wild animals through operations.

The authors highlighted evidence suggesting large-scale laundering of wild birds took place from the Solomon Islands between 2000 and 2010. This included hornbills, another group of animals the carbon storage study identified as important for nature-based climate mitigation.

Similarly, the captive breeding of tigers has been mired in allegations of illegality and concerns that it further imperils wild individuals. According to a 2023 study, tigers can also provide climate benefits when safeguarded in the wild. It found that India’s establishment of protected forest reserves for tigers helped the country to avoid more than a million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions between 2007 to 2020.

Caged tigers at a tiger farm. Photo: Karl Ammann / The Tiger Mafia. Used with permission.

The wildlife farming paper’s authors called for increased oversight of captive-breeding operations by regulatory authorities. Among other things, they recommended that CITES create a database of farmed species, spotlighting which ones are arduous to breed in captivity. When it is cheaper and easier to capture individuals of a species from the wild than breed them, the risk of illegal and unsustainable practices is higher. A database — and its use in decision-making — could help root out wrongdoing.

The Future Is Wildlife

Overall, Altherr insists that authorities need to start acting with much more caution. Rather than conservationists having to sound the alarm about issues with trade when it is already occurring, she says “we need a reversal of the burden of proof.”

“Instead, only what can be proven to be traded sustainably should be authorized for trade,” says Altherr.

Limiting trade in this way would help to tackle excessive exploitation — a major driver of the biodiversity crisis — and have climate benefits. It would also reduce harms to the world’s species as they grapple with other pressing threats, such as habitat loss, pollution and global warming.

As several researchers have argued, ensuring trade is sustainable would also benefit people who depend on it for their livelihoods by protecting their incomes into the future.

For ecologist Mustoe, people the world over have a lot to gain — or lose — from how wild animals fare moving forward.

“It’s the interaction between animals that drives all ecosystem services and life support,” he says. He highlights that wild animals operate across the planet at every level ­— from the microscopic to the megafauna — providing invaluable environmental benefits alongside climate upsides, such as purified water sources, pollinated food crops and reduced disease risk.

“The single simplest thing we can do to pave the way for a future that’s more comfortable for humanity on all levels — food security, water security, climate security, disease security, everything — is rebuilding wildlife,” says Mustoe.

This story was produced with support from Internews’ Earth Journalism Network.

Previously in The Revelator:

Reptile Trade Blues

 

 

The post Out-of-Control Wildlife Trade Is Shackling a Key Climate Solution appeared first on The Revelator.

The Cop28 UN climate summit in December secured agreement from almost 200 nations to “transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems in a just, orderly and equitable manner” – a decision hailed by world leaders as “historic”.

But, while lots of countries are trying to reduce their use of planet-heating fossil fuels, only a handful have so far taken measures to produce less – particularly when it comes to oil and gas.

Last year, a United Nations report found that governments plan to produce more than double the amount of fossil fuels in 2030 than they should if global warming is to be limited to 1.5C. So they need to cut back. 

The International Energy Agency (IEA) says no more new fossil fuel production projects are required, yet we will still need fossil fuels for the next few decades to keep economies running. That raises the question of who should get to drill, pump and sell those last supplies – and why?

Indonesia turns traditional Indigenous land into nickel industrial zone

Climate Home looked at three key criteria for the production of oil and gas. Unlike the other dirtiest fossil fuel – coal – they tend to be located together and so are produced in the same regions by the same nations. And the IEA predicts that their use will outlive that of coal.

We’ve looked at whose oil and gas is the cleanest, whose is the cheapest, and whose economy could most handle losing out on oil and gas revenue. Depending on the metric, the results differ wildly.

The cleanest oil and gas comes from Norway and the Arabian Gulf, the cheapest is in the Gulf. But when global economic justice is considered, the fairest is in smaller nations in the developing world – the likes of Libya, Trinidad and Tobago, and Turkmenistan.

Cleanest production?

Given the world will be using oil and gas for some time to come, shouldn’t we use that which causes the least damage to the planet?

While all oil and all gas is equally damaging to burn as fuel, the process of pumping it up from the ground can be more or less harmful to the climate.

Norway and the United Arab Emirates make this argument, arguing their oil and gas is the cleanest – and a November 2023 report by the IEA backs them up. 

It found that Norway’s oil and its gas were the cleanest in the world to produce, measured by emissions intensity, while supplies from the UAE and other Gulf nations like Saudi Arabia and Qatar were also among the least damaging.

Norway’s oil and gas are cleaner because it has strict rules in place, requiring oil and gas producers to capture any methane gas that leaks during the production process. This prevents it from reaching the atmosphere and making climate change worse. 

On top of this, much of the machinery used to produce the oil and gas doesn’t run on fossil fuels itself but on clean electricity.

A handful of Gulf states – including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and the UAE – have lower-intensity operations in part because of their “easy to access” reserves. As the oil is nearer the surface, less energy-guzzling machinery is needed to pump it up.

But the emissions from producing the oil and gas need to be put in perspective. It is the use of those fuels that has the biggest consequences. Just 5-20% of oil and gas companies’ total emissions are from production, according to energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie.

Cheapest energy?

Or should we use the cheapest oil and gas? The cheaper those fuels are to produce, the cheaper it should be to use our power plants, polyester and petrol. Those savings should be passed onto consumers around the world when they fill up their vehicles or switch on their lights.

This was an argument deployed by Amin Nasser, the head of oil giant Saudi Aramco, who told reporters at Davos in 2019: “There will continue to be growth in oil demand … We are the lowest-cost producer and the last barrel will come from the region.”

Gulf nations like Saudi Arabia again score well on this. As their oil and gas is near the surface, it’s cheaper to pump.

In the IEA’s “low cost” scenario, in 2040, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Iran increase their oil and gas production the most. More expensive producers like Canada, Australia and China have to cut down how much they pump.

Fairness and capacity?

Or should the governments that cut back on oil and gas output first be the historically large emitters that can most afford to go without the money they get from selling fossil fuels? 

It’s an argument made by many African nations. Ahead of Cop28, African negotiators unsuccessfully proposed a ban on developed countries exploring for fossil fuels “well ahead of 2030, whilst affording developing countries the opportunity to close the global supply gap in the short term”.

Climate Analytics analyst Neil Grant argues we must take “capacity to transition” into account when thinking about who should be the last producers. A Carbon Tracker report found at least 28 oil and gas-reliant economies would lose half of their expected revenues under just a “moderate-paced transition” – so there is a lot at stake.

US trade agency backs oil and gas drilling in Bahrain despite Biden pledge

Greg Muttitt, from the International Institute of Sustainable Development, told Climate Home that if the transition is left to market forces, “a lot of people” in oil and gas-dependent economies will “get hurt”, either by losing their jobs, or experiencing a breakdown in public services. 

At Cop28, a network of civil society groups published a report assessing which countries should be the last to extract fossil fuels, accounting for both economic dependence, and climate equity. 

Using a measure of financial “capacity”, defined as surplus income above “what is required to meet people’s needs”, the report found that Libya, Iraq and South Sudan should be among the last countries extracting oil, while Algeria, Trinidad and Tobago, and Turkmenistan are among the last extracting gas. The likes of Norway, Canada and Qatar should stop first for both, it concluded.

Whichever answer you chose, Michael Lazarus, co-author of the UN report and U.S. director for the Stockholm Environment Institute, told Climate Home he was pleased that “we have finally gotten to the point in the global conversation where folks are asking the question…of what that ultimate transition looks like.”

The post Clean, cheap or fair – which countries should pump the last oil and gas? appeared first on Climate Home News.

When reports emerged in late December that the Israeli military planned to pump seawater into the underground tunnel networks used by Hamas fighters in Gaza, scientists and advocates around the world raised alarm over the prospect of an environmental disaster. Flooding the tunnels threatened to permanently salinate the land, making it impossible to cultivate crops. Seawater could also seep underground and into an aquifer that the majority of Gazans rely on for water. Palestinian rights groups and protesters around the world were already accusing the Israeli government of committing genocide against the Palestinians, with more than 20,000 killed by Israeli bombings on Gaza since Hamas’ attack on southern Israel last October. Now, another term entered the conversation: ecocide. 

Broadly defined as the severe, widespread, and long-term destruction of the environment, ecocide isn’t considered a crime under international law. At the moment, the only way to prosecute vast environmental destruction internationally is as a war crime in the International Criminal Court, based in The Hague, Netherlands. But a growing number of countries, advocates, and legal experts are trying to change that. While some, like representatives from the island nation of Vanuatu, are motivated by the escalating climate crisis, and others, like Ukraine, are more interested in prosecuting environmental war crimes, they ultimately share the same goal: making ecocide the fifth international crime the ICC could prosecute, along with crimes against humanity, war crimes, crimes of aggression, and genocide. 

Their campaign reached a major milestone in 2021, when a panel of legal experts worked over six months to create a legal definition of ecocide. Afterward, a number of countries and the European Union incorporated at least part of this definition into new legislation, which, experts said, increases the likelihood that it will eventually be adopted by the International Criminal Court. While there are plenty of obstacles to making such a law effective, advocates interviewed for this story said that the symbolic importance could have far-reaching consequences. Creating a law against ecocide could eventually force government officials and corporate executives to think twice before polluting rivers, poisoning the air, or destroying the land.

“It would make clear what we care about and what we think cannot be left to individual states to regulate,” said Kate Mackintosh, the executive director of the Netherlands-based UCLA Law Promise Institute Europe, which provides training for students interested in international law. She explained that to be a crime under international law, an act must be a violation against not only its direct victims, but all of humanity. “Destroying our environment has got to be on that level.”

A soldier in the Israeli military walks through an underground tunnel that the army claimed is used by Hamas fighters. Jack Guez / AFP via Getty Images

The term ecocide was coined during the Vietnam War after the U.S. military sprayed more than 90 million liters of Agent Orange and other herbicides across South Vietnam’s countryside. The chemical’s 20-year half-life can increase to more than 100 years if it’s buried beneath the soil, and people in southern Vietnam are still living with its effects more than half a century later. After visiting the region in the early 1970s and observing the chemicals’ devastating effects, a group of American scientists and legal experts began a campaign against using herbicide as a weapon of war. Their efforts led to an executive order by President Gerald Ford in 1975 renouncing the use of defoliants in future wars and to a U.N. convention in 1978 prohibiting the “hostile use of environmental modification techniques.” 

But none of these official declarations made ecocide prosecutable as a crime under international law, experts pointed out, underscoring the significance of the current campaign to codify it as one.

After the adoption of the U.N. convention, the movement against ecocide died down for the next several decades. When it reemerged in the early 2000s, it was tied to concerns about climate change. A U.K.-based campaign helmed by the late lawyer and environmentalist Polly Higgins gained traction at the ICC’s annual assembly in 2019, when Vanuatu called for the Court to consider recognizing the crime of ecocide. The South Pacific island nation, where sea level rise has eaten away coastlines and saltwater has contaminated most sources of drinking water, is widely considered to be a leader in the global fight against climate change. 

Vanuatu’s petition “put ecocide back on the diplomatic table,” said the British environmentalist Jojo Mehta, who founded the Stop Ecocide campaign with Higgins in 2017. It was the impetus for that panel of lawyers to convene in 2021 with the aim of developing a legal definition of ecocide that could be adopted by the ICC. After months of deliberation, they settled on the meaning of ecocide as “unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts.”

Mackintosh, who was on the panel, emphasized that this definition allows prosecutors to pursue legal action simply if they can prove the intent to cause environmental harm. “The crime is not making the damage happen,” she explained. “It’s creating substantial risk of that damage.” 

This distinction fills an important gap in the ICC’s legal code. The Rome Statute, the treaty that established the Court in 2002, criminalizes environmental damage under its war crimes statute. Prosecutors must prove that the damage to the environment is “widespread, long-term, and severe” — that is, the damage must already be done. But there hasn’t been a single successful prosecution of environmental crime under this statute, not even in seemingly clear-cut cases, such as the Russian military’s destruction of the Kakhovka Dam in southern Ukraine last summer. The more than 1-mile long hydropower facility held back one of Europe’s largest reservoirs, and when it burst, a torrent of water flooded over 230 square miles, killed scores of people, and spread chemical pollution across the land. 

While there is no clear path for codifying ecocide as a crime under international law, Mehta said, the campaign has already cleared several hurdles, particularly with the European Union’s adoption of its own ecocide law in November. In the coming years, the Stop Ecocide campaign will focus on getting together an informal group of countries willing to propose a law at the ICC’s annual assembly. “It’s not really a question of if,” she said “It’s a how and a when.”

The campaigners pushing for an international ecocide law have two main objectives. The first would be to bring specific people, such as the military officers behind the Kakhovka Dam’s destruction, to justice, because the ICC requires that defendants be individuals rather than governments or corporations. That presents some challenges, said Richard Falk, a veteran legal expert and environmental advocate. (Falk, along with the biologist Arthur Galston, was the first to use the term “ecocide” in the 1970s.) For instance, if the ICC wanted to prosecute the fossil fuel giant Shell for contaminating vast swaths of the Niger Delta with crude oil, it would have to pin the blame on individuals within the company, rather than on the company itself. 

“That would make the proof of intent extremely difficult,” though not impossible, to establish, Falk said. 

A view of the destroyed Kakhovka dam, July 2023. Stringer / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

The second major objective of an international ecocide law would be to prevent widespread environmental damage. On this point, experts Grist spoke to were torn about the effectiveness of an international ecocide law. For one, prosecuting any crime takes time, during which the environmental destruction may continue. What’s more, Falk said the ICC has previously behaved as a “policy instrument” of Europe and the U.S. and often votes with the flag rather than the law. In a case like the war in Gaza, countries might defend their diplomatic allies rather than trying to judge their guilt or innocence in good faith, he said. 

Rob White, a professor of criminology at the University of Tasmania who has written extensively about ecocide, wrote in an email that he agreed with this perspective, adding that “one could well argue” that Israel’s actions in Gaza fit the existing Rome Statute’s standard of “widespread, long-term, and severe” environmental destruction. “However, as the genocide unfolding in Gaza also illustrates, international law is basically useless” in stopping the ongoing aggression, he said. 

All four of the ecocide experts interviewed for this story said that Israel’s actions in Gaza could plausibly fit the definition of ecocide, as determined by the panel. Evidence of immense environmental devastation is everywhere in the Gaza Strip, from the razing of farm lands with heavy machinery to the use of white phosphorus on porous soil. The Israel military confirmed in late January that it had started flooding underground tunnels with seawater, raising fears that it will contaminate the main source of drinking water for the strip’s 2 million people. 

While Mehta acknowledged that it would be difficult to stop acts like these even with an ecocide law in place, she is optimistic that the law would have a deterrent effect. She offered the example of the United Kingdom’s Children Act of 1989, which made it illegal for parents to hit their children, helping to turn a once-acceptable behavior into a taboo. 

The law has “actually got a kind of cultural force to it, which I think is super, super important,” Mehta said.

The experts Grist interviewed insisted that an ecocide law would, at the very least, serve an important symbolic purpose. 

“The impact of this kind of decision, even if it’s not enforced, does have a legitimating and mobilizing effect, on civil society activism,” Falk said. He pointed to his and scientists’ efforts after the Vietnam War, which led to Ford’s executive order and the U.N. declaration that effectively made the use of Agent Orange taboo. “It’s the most you can expect from the law,” he said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Israel’s campaign in Gaza is fueling demands to make ‘ecocide’ an international crime on Feb 26, 2024.

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Environmental justice activists in Chicago claimed a major victory last week when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ruled that the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency needs to revamp its process for permitting polluting industries in residential neighborhoods. 

The announcement comes four years after the Illinois EPA approved the move of General Iron, a scrap metal operation, to the city’s Southeast Side, a neighborhood already heavily polluted. The approval set off months of protests, a hunger strike, and the civil rights complaint filed with the federal EPA.

While the resolution does not say that the agency violated any anti-discrimination laws, the agreement does compel the Illinois EPA to make sweeping changes to its air permitting process. It’s a rare victory for community groups that cite race-based discrimination when it comes to pollution, especially when working through the federal government.

“I think it is very significant,” said Catherine Coleman Flowers, a member of the Biden Administration’s White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council. 

“It also proves, you know, that the process does work and it puts something in the toolbox for [environmental justice] communities to seek some type of justice,” she said.

Óscar Sanchez is co-executive director of Southeast Environmental Task Force, a grassroots organization fighting polluting industries in the area. His organization is one of two community groups that originally filed the civil rights complaint. He called the agreement monumental 

Oscar Sanchez in his South Side neighborhood in December 2022. He went on a hunger strike to close the scrap metal operator. Miranda Zanca for YR Media and CatchLight Local

“This is something that should not be taken lightly,” Sanchez said. “But at the same time, we are also looking forward to seeing how this administration continues to do this type of work to actually improve public health.”

The settlement between the U.S. EPA and the Illinois EPA includes that the agency enact expansive changes which center community input as well as the history of the company applying for the permit. This is significant, according to Gina Ramirez, Midwest regional lead of the National Resources Defense Council.

“General Iron had a long history of being a really bad neighbor, a lot of EPA violations,” said Ramirez. “I mean, it even blew up right before the state issued its permit. And the fact that they weren’t considering that at all, was just like a huge red flag. So just the fact that that’s in this agreement, is a really big deal to me.”

Despite the company’s troubled history which included explosions and a 2015 fire, a temporary shutdown in 2016 after failing a building inspection, and an EPA citation in 2018, it was still granted a permit to move into the Southeast side in 2020 by the IEPA. The facility was eventually closed in 2021 after entering an agreement with then Mayor Lori Lightfoot. The $80 million metal shredding operation was fully rebuilt on the city’s South Side and renamed Southside Recycling. 

Other aspects of the settlement include consideration of vulnerable groups and greater inclusion for non-English speakers, which were both points of contention in this latest permit process for the metal scrapper. The proposed facility would have been located right next to a high school, something that current provisions would not have allowed. 

George Washington High School is across the street from the relocated General Iron facility on Chicago’s South Side. The plant sits idle. Jamie Kelter Davis / For The Washington Post via Getty Images

For a long time, Sanchez said that polluting industries and longstanding policies worked against the interest and livelihood of the city’s most vulnerable communities. Now he’s cautiously optimistic that’s beginning to change. 

“It means that we’re being heard, that we’re being listened to,” Sanchez said. “This means that people are paying attention, this means that organizing works.” 

Existing environmental laws that focus on trying to ensure clean air, water, and soil aren’t always effective in tackling pollution in communities of color, according to Debbie Chizewer, a managing attorney for Earthjustice’s Chicago office. This is because there’s no statute which protects people from the type of discrimination that ends up situating industrial facilities next to Black and Latino neighborhoods. 

That’s why, in Chicago, and across the country, activists are filing complaints under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Title VI prohibits states, city governments and other recipients of taxpayer dollars from discriminating on the basis of race and national origin among other protected classes. 

Under the provision,federal agencies are empowered to withhold funding from recipients, launch investigations, and bring partners into compliance via a negotiated settlement.

While the Biden administration’s EPA has made significant financial investments in pursuing goals like environmental justice, civil rights complaints like the ones filed by activists in Chicago have mostly not panned out the way advocates had hoped. Only two civil rights complaints filed to the Environmental Protection Agency have been resolved since 2021. 

“The Biden administration had been making commitments to strengthen its civil rights enforcement,” said Chizewer, “But historically, I think there are one or two successful [US EPA] complaints that resulted in findings of discrimination.”

Last year, the EPA dropped three high profile civil rights investigations in Louisiana, where Black communities are exposed to pollutants at seven times the rate of white communities. The complaints were about the rights of people in “Cancer Alley” to not be discriminated against on the basis on race — including the right not to be disproportionately exposed to toxic and cancer-causing chemicals. 

“That was a big blow,” said Chizewer. “The Louisiana case was a big blow.” 

Read Next A geothermal energy boom could be coming to Chicago’s South Side Juanpablo Ramirez-Franco

For Ramirez, she’s celebrating this moment alongside her colleagues but it is not lost on her how rare this outcome is. 

”It’s like a bittersweet moment for me,” said Ramirez. “Because I know that there’s other civil rights complaints in red states that have been having a really hard time being settled or they’ve been thrown out.” 

The metal scrapper cited in the complaint was first announced to move in 2018 from Lincoln Park, a white, affluent neighborhood on the city’s North Side, to the Southeast Side, a low-income, Latino and Black neighborhood that has been home to industrial polluters for more than a century. 

Activists used a variety of tactics to stop the proposed move including filing a separate civil rights complaint against the city of Chicago with the Department of Housing and Urban Development which was settled last year just as former Mayor Lori Lightfoot left office. They also filed this civil rights complaint against the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency with the U.S. EPA, claiming that the state agency did not fulfill its duty to protect this pollution-burdened community by issuing the permit.

The complaint with the US EPA was a result of organizers trying to use every tool in their arsenal to stop the metal scrapper from opening. 

“We were so laser focused on the Southeast side,” said Ramirez. “We know that industry is just looking at us with hungry eyes all the time.” 

Organizers escalated the fight in 2021 with a hunger strike and protests, including one at then Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s house. Eventually, after years of community organizers putting pressure on elected officials, Mayor Lightfoot’s administration denied the permit. General Iron has not given up though and instead is still fighting the city in court to reopen the relocated facility. 

Ramirez is hoping that in the future, the increased pressure on the IEPA from the federal government will make them think twice about what types of industries they let into certain communities. For her, many of the additions from the civil rights complaint, like looking at a facility’s past history or including resources for non-english speakers, are things that should have already been happening.

“It shouldn’t have to be this hard to get these common sense rules in place,” she said. 

Editor’s note: NRDC is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Illinois EPA must revamp its permitting process after Chicago activists file civil rights complaint on Feb 26, 2024.

Ariana Tibon was in college at the University of Hawaiʻi in 2017 when she saw the photo online: a black-and-white picture of a man holding a baby. The caption said: “Nelson Anjain getting his baby monitored on March 2, 1954, by an AEC RadSafe team member on Rongelap two days after ʻBravo.ʻ” 

Tibon had never seen the man before. But she recognized the name as her great-grandfatherʻs. At the time, he was living on Rongelap in the Marshall Islands when the U.S. conducted Castle Bravo, the largest of 67 nuclear weapon tests there during the Cold War. The tests displaced and sickened Indigenous people, poisoned fish, upended traditional food practices, and wrought cancers and other negative health repercussions that continue to reverberate today. 

A federal report by the Government Accountability Office published last month examines what’s left of that nuclear contamination, not only in the Pacific but also in Greenland and Spain. The authors conclude that climate change could disturb nuclear waste left in Greenland and the Marshall Islands. “Rising sea levels could spread contamination in RMI, and conflicting risk assessments cause residents to distrust radiological information from the U.S. Department of Energy,” the report says. 

In Greenland, chemical pollution and radioactive liquid are frozen in ice sheets, left over from a nuclear power plant on a U.S. military research base where scientists studied the potential to install nuclear missiles. The report didn’t specify how or where nuclear contamination could migrate in the Pacific or Greenland, or what if any health risks that might pose to people living nearby. However, the authors did note that in Greenland, frozen waste could be exposed by 2100. 

“The possibility to influence the environment is there, which could further affect the food chain and further affect the people living in the area as well,” said Hjalmar Dahl, president of Inuit Circumpolar Council Greenland. The country is about 90 percent Inuit. “I think it is important that the Greenland and U.S. governments have to communicate on this worrying issue and prepare what to do about it.”

The authors of the GAO study wrote that Greenland and Denmark haven’t proposed any cleanup plans, but also cited studies that say much of the nuclear waste has already decayed and will be diluted by melting ice. However, those studies do note that chemical waste such as polychlorinated biphenyls, man-made chemicals better known as PCBs that are carcinogenic, “may be the most consequential waste at Camp Century.”

The report summarizes disagreements between Marshall Islands officials and the U.S. Department of Energy regarding the risks posed by U.S. nuclear waste. The GAO recommends that the agency adopt a communications strategy for conveying information about the potential for pollution to the Marshallese people.

Nathan Anderson, a director at the Government Accountability Office, said that the United States’ responsibilities in the Marshall Islands “are defined by specific federal statutes and international agreements.” He noted that the government of the Marshall Islands previously agreed to settle claims related to damages from U.S. nuclear testing. 

“It is the long-standing position of the U.S. government that, pursuant to that agreement, the Republic of the Marshall Islands bears full responsibility for its lands, including those used for the nuclear testing program.”

To Tibon, who is back home in the Marshall Islands and is currently chair of the National Nuclear Commission, the fact that the report’s only recommendation is a new communications strategy is mystifying. She’s not sure how that would help the Marshallese people. 

“What we need now is action and implementation on environmental remediation. We don’t need a communication strategy,” she said. “If they know that it’s contaminated, why wasn’t the recommendation for next steps on environmental remediation, or what’s possible to return these lands to safe and habitable conditions for these communities?” 

The Biden administration recently agreed to fund a new museum to commemorate those affected by nuclear testing as well as climate change initiatives in the Marshall Islands, but the initiatives have repeatedly failed to garner support from Congress, even though they’re part of an ongoing treaty with the Marshall Islands and a broader national security effort to shore up goodwill in the Pacific to counter China. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Decades after the US buried nuclear waste abroad, climate change could unearth it on Feb 26, 2024.

Pirates and rebels Channel Comment brendan 26th February 2024 Teaser Media

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Converse County is one of the most welcoming areas in Wyoming when it comes to clean energy. For roughly every 20 residents, there is one wind turbine, the highest ratio in the state. At a recent County Commissioners meeting, it took another step in diversifying its energy infrastructure, signaling its intent to issue its first solar farm permit to BrightNight.

The global energy company has proposed to build more than 1 million solar panels, a battery storage facility and a few miles of above-ground transmission lines on a 4,738 acres of private land run by the Tillard ranching family near Glenrock. The Dutchman Project, as it is called, is notable neither for its generation nor its storage capacity but for the creatures moseying beneath its panels.

The base of each sun-tracking panel will be several feet off the ground, allowing enough room for the Tillard’s sheep to continue grazing. In a state whose ranching industry predates its inclusion in the union, pairing solar generation with livestock grazing or other agricultural practices, a technique called “agrivoltaics,” could forge an unlikely alliance between two industries — one ancient; the other, high tech — that typically compete for resources.

At the conclusion of their February 6 hearing regarding the Dutchman project, Converse County Commissioners directed the county attorney to draft an order of approval, indicating they would likely grant the project its permit later this month. 

“BrightNight is proud to reach today’s permitting milestone. Our project is ideally-sited to deliver valuable capacity to a growing region preparing for significant generation retirements,” said Maribeth Sawchuk, the company’s vice president of communications, in a statement to Inside Climate News. The company is focused on “utility-scale renewable power solutions while also raising the industry standard for community engagement and support.” 

The Tillard family could not be reached for comment.

Inside Climate News

Jim Willox, chairman of the board of Converse County Commissioners and one of the people responsible for reviewing BrightNight’s permit application, remembered being excited to see the company proposing to use an agrivoltaic approach to building solar. 

“I think the solar industry has learned that they don’t have to be just bare ground underneath,” he said. “I find that very exciting and a continuation of Wyoming’s view on multiple use.”

Willox has been a Converse County Commissioner for the last 18 years, during which he’s witnessed the rise, fall, and rise again of fossil fuels in the county. When he first started his job, coal production was a huge economic asset to the county. Now, “it’s zero,” he said. 

While fossil fuels still play an important role in the county’s economy, and Converse County still takes an “all of these above” approach to energy development, “we also really believe renewables are part of the energy portfolio for the country and generally are welcoming to them,” Willox said. 

Economically, Willox viewed the solar farm as a good source of tax revenue for the county. “You’ll have sales tax that will be collected during construction, then there will be a property tax value increase,” money from BrightNight that can be used for schools, hospitals, and other public resources in the county, he said.

Still, renewables — much like oil, gas, and coal — are not without “some challenges and some concerns,” Willox said.

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A few partnerships between farmers and scientists have shown that some crops react poorly to living under the penumbra of a solar farm. Shade from the panels can sometimes trap too much water near the plants, and the presence of large photovoltaics can make it difficult for farmers to conduct their harvest.

At the public briefing held in Douglas, Wyoming, on Tuesday, county residents gathered in a courthouse basement to hear presentations from BrightNight executives regarding the Dutchman solar farm’s permit application. Afterwards, some county residents voiced concerns regarding the solar farm’s access to transmission lines, its impact on prairie dog migration patterns and the effects of radiation on residents. 

BrightNight must wait for its county and state permits before determining its grid access, said Jess Melin, BrightNight’s executive vice president of development. As with other nearby energy projects going through the permitting and contracting phases, Melin said once BrightNight has “a permit and a power contract, that’s the point when they say ‘OK, let’s actually sit down at the table and negotiate queue position,’” for delivering energy to the grid.

Brandon Pollpeter, BrightNight’s director of development, called prairie dog migration a “difficult thing to manage,” and said the company would coordinate with the Wyoming Game and Fish department to consider best practices for responding to the rodents. He added that any high-voltage equipment, which produces a small amount of electromagnetic waves, has been sited far from the community, and would not be a factor to county residents.

“This county is very knowledgeable on energy and energy generation,” said Pollpeter. “We’ve gotten some outstanding feedback.” Pollpeter added that BrightNight increased the project setback and moved its construction entrance in response to local concerns. 

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There is evidence that agrivoltaic solar farms are just as effective grazing areas as traditional open pastures, and that combining grazing with solar generation increases land productivity by offering crops respite from the sun in hot, arid environments.

In the spring of 2019 and 2020, Chad Higgins and a team of other researchers from Oregon State University tracked sheep grazing at an agrivoltaic solar farm in Oregon, measuring the animals’ growth, grazing habits and water consumption. They split two groups of sheep on the same land; one that grazed near the solar panels, and another browsing on open pastures. What they found led them to conclude that agrivoltaic solar farms can be an ideal setup for sheep ranchers. 

“In the early spring grazing time, which is when the most intense grazing is and the most growth is, we could put more sheep on the agrivoltaic array than on the open pasture, and the sheep grew at the same rates,” said Higgins, an associate professor in Oregon State University’s department of biological and ecological engineering. “There was overall more production in that intense grazing period because of the solar panels.” 

The reason why has to do with shade. “You can reduce heat stress to plants by watering them more or shading them some,” Higgins said. “If you shade them some — which is what you’re going to do, for example, in a Wyoming project that’s on non-irrigated lands — you’re going to reduce some of that heat stress on those plants. Those plants tend to grow a little more, and as they grow a little more, the sheep take advantage of them.” 

The study found that, while the sheep grazing near the solar panels experienced a 38 percent drop in the quantity of grazable vegetation, that was offset by an increase in the available plants’ quality, as measured by the nutritional makeup of the vegetation’s tissue. Despite having access to less vegetation, the sheep grazing near solar panels “were gaining weight at their maximum rate,” and reached similar peak weights to sheep on the open field, Higgins said. “We actually had to fence the sheep in the open field to keep them in the open field, because, given the choice, they all preferred to be in the solar.”

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Agrivoltaic solar farms, while suitable for sheep, are more difficult to tailor to cattle, Wyoming’s most common livestock. The state is home to 1.2 million cattle, which are burlier and heavier than sheep. Cows “just beat up equipment by rubbing up against it,” Pollpeter said. The solar industry “is taking a tough look to try and see how that starts to make sense. But, at least in my personal opinion, we’re not quite there yet.”

Among Wyoming’s sheep ranchers, there may be a budding interest in agrivoltaics. “If there are opportunities to make the two work together that provide sheep producers expanded revenue and better financial stability, that’s the type of thing we look for,” said Jim Magagna, a longtime sheep rancher and executive vice president of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association, the state’s most powerful livestock advocacy organization. 

Given the variation in soil, grazing plants, sunlight, moisture, and terrain across Wyoming, Magagna stopped short of endorsing agrivoltaics as the de facto approach to solar farms moving forward. “I think it needs to be a carefully considered decision by the landowner,” he said. 

Magagna wouldn’t rule out the possibility of an agrivoltaic solar farm cropping up on public land in the future, a process that would involve years of planning and environmental assessments by the Bureau of Land Management, or BLM, as well as stakeholder input. But given the fact that a majority of public lands in Wyoming are grazed by cattle, “I think the opportunity to do that on public land on a very significant scale would not be there today,” he said.

In January, the BLM released an environmental impact statement regarding utility-scale solar farms in 11 Western states, including Wyoming, as it considers whether or not to amend its approach to solar farms in the region. The agency acknowledged agrivolatics as an “emerging [photovoltaic] system” that could gain commercial traction in the future. 

Converse County Commissioners expect to finalize their support for the Dutchman project permit during a February 20th vote. The company still needs to secure a permit from the state’s Department of Environmental Quality, whose Industrial Siting Council is already considering the company’s application. Should the state issue it a permit, BrightNight expects to break ground on the Dutchman solar farm as early as March of next year.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Sheep may soon graze under solar panels in one of Wyoming’s first ‘agrivoltaic’ projects on Feb 25, 2024.

This story was originally published by WIRED and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Earlier this month, the future fell on Los Angeles. A long band of moisture in the sky, known as an atmospheric river, dumped 9 inches of rain on the city over three days — over half of what the city typically gets in a year. It’s the kind of extreme rainfall that’ll get ever more extreme as the planet warms.

The city’s water managers, though, were ready and waiting. Like other urban areas around the world, in recent years L.A. has been transforming into a “sponge city,” replacing impermeable surfaces, like concrete, with permeable ones, like dirt and plants. It has also built out “spreading grounds,” where water accumulates and soaks into the earth.

With traditional dams and all that newfangled spongy infrastructure, between February 4 and 7 the metropolis captured 8.6 billion gallons of stormwater, enough to provide water to 106,000 households for a year. For the rainy season in total, L.A. has accumulated 14.7 billion gallons.

Long reliant on snowmelt and river water piped in from afar, L.A. is on a quest to produce as much water as it can locally. “There’s going to be a lot more rain and a lot less snow, which is going to alter the way we capture snowmelt and the aqueduct water,” says Art Castro, manager of watershed management at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. “Dams and spreading grounds are the workhorses of local stormwater capture for either flood protection or water supply.”

Centuries of urban-planning dogma dictates using gutters, sewers, and other infrastructure to funnel rainwater out of a metropolis as quickly as possible to prevent flooding. Given the increasingly catastrophic urban flooding seen around the world, though, that clearly isn’t working anymore, so now planners are finding clever ways to capture stormwater, treating it as an asset instead of a liability. “The problem of urban hydrology is caused by a thousand small cuts,” says Michael Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Institute at UC Berkeley. “No one driveway or roof in and of itself causes massive alteration of the hydrologic cycle. But combine millions of them in one area and it does. Maybe we can solve that problem with a thousand Band-Aids.”

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Or in this case, sponges. The trick to making a city more absorbent is to add more gardens and other green spaces that allow water to percolate into underlying aquifers — porous subterranean materials that can hold water — which a city can then draw from in times of need. Engineers are also greening up medians and roadside areas to soak up the water that’d normally rush off streets, into sewers, and eventually out to sea.

As the American West and other regions dry out, they’re searching for ways to produce more water themselves, instead of importing it by aqueduct. (That strategy includes, by the way, recycling toilet water into drinking water so cities reduce water usage in the first place.) At the same time, climate change is supercharging rainstorms, counterintuitively enough: For every 1 degree Celsius of warming, the atmosphere can hold 6 to 7 percent more water, meaning there’s often more moisture available for a storm to dump as rain. Indeed, studies have found that the West Coast’s atmospheric rivers, like the one that just hit L.A., are getting wetter.

To exploit all that free water falling from the sky, the LADWP has carved out big patches of brown in the concrete jungle. Stormwater is piped into these spreading grounds and accumulates in dirt basins. That allows it to slowly soak into the underlying aquifer, which acts as a sort of natural underground tank that can hold 28 billion gallons of water.

During a storm, the city is also gathering water in dams, some of which it diverts into the spreading grounds. “After the storm comes by, and it’s a bright sunny day, you’ll still see water being released into a channel and diverted into the spreading grounds,” says Castro. That way, water moves from a reservoir where it’s exposed to sunlight and evaporation, into an aquifer where it’s banked safely underground.

On a smaller scale, LADWP has been experimenting with turning parks into mini spreading grounds, diverting stormwater there to soak into subterranean cisterns or chambers. It’s also deploying green spaces along roadways, which have the additional benefit of mitigating flooding in a neighborhood: The less concrete and the more dirt and plants, the more the built environment can soak up stormwater like the actual environment naturally does.

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As an added benefit, deploying more of these green spaces, along with urban gardens, improves the mental health of residents. Plants here also “sweat,” cooling the area and beating back the urban heat island effect — the tendency for concrete to absorb solar energy and slowly release it at night. By reducing summer temperatures, you improve the physical health of residents. “The more trees, the more shade, the less heat island effect,” says Castro. “Sometimes when it’s 90 degrees in the middle of summer, it could get up to 110 underneath a bus stop.”

LA’s far from alone in going spongy. Pittsburgh is also deploying more rain gardens, and where they absolutely must have a hard surface — sidewalks, parking lots, etc. — they’re using special concrete bricks that allow water to seep through. And a growing number of municipalities are scrutinizing properties and charging owners fees if they have excessive impermeable surfaces like pavement, thus incentivizing the switch to permeable surfaces like plots of native plants or urban gardens for producing more food locally.

So the old way of stormwater management isn’t just increasingly dangerous and ineffective as the planet warms and storms get more intense — it stands in the way of a more beautiful, less sweltering, more sustainable urban landscape. L.A., of all places, is showing the world there’s a better way.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Los Angeles just showed how spongy a city can be on Feb 24, 2024.

The University of New Hampshire has been awarded over $1.2 million to investigate an apparent steady decline of the fisher population in the state of New Hampshire.

Supplementing the feed of high-producing dairy cows with the botanical extract capsicum oleoresin, obtained from chili peppers, or a combination of that extract and clove oil resulted in the animals using feed energy more efficiently and emitting less methane from their largest stomach, according to a new study conducted by Penn State researchers.

An often-overlooked water plant that can double its biomass in two days, capture nitrogen from the air — making it a valuable green fertilizer — and be fed to poultry and livestock could serve as life-saving food for humans in the event of a catastrophe or disaster, a new study led by Penn State researchers suggests.

Chronic exposure to fine particulate air pollutants (PM2.5) may increase seniors’ risk of hospitalization for a variety of cardiovascular conditions, according to a new study led by Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Mars was once a wet world. The geological record of the Red Planet shows evidence for water flowing on the surface – from river deltas to valleys carved by massive flash floods.