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Propulsion without the need for petroleum: That’s the lithium-ion battery’s promise.

Backed by government incentives across the globe, lithium-ion batteries are hailed as key to a green transportation revolution — and for good reason. They cut planet-warming emissions. They promote independence from fossil fuels. 

Today, electric vehicle purchases are soaring. They’re expected to account for half of car sales worldwide in the next decade. 

But as battery production ramps up — amid record spending to combat climate change — so does a hidden risk that few outside New Jersey or southern France may recognize. And it’s a risk residents of Augusta, Georgia, and communities along the South’s “battery belt” and elsewhere ought to know.

The same companies that spewed “forever chemicals” linked with cancer and other diseases in neighborhoods around the world are now key players in the development of EV batteries — sometimes with hefty taxpayer support. Often those companies keep their chemical formulas and emissions from the public, an investigation by The Examination, reported in partnership with Columbia Journalism Investigations, the Post and Courier and Belgian public broadcaster RTBF, and published in partnership with Mother Jones, has found.

Companies making battery chemicals stand accused of misleading regulators, hiding information and contaminating communities while making similar, related products.

For decades, forever chemical makers have been “trying to get away with having to tell the authorities as little as possible,” said Gretta Goldenman, a retired attorney who consulted with European Union agencies to improve chemical regulations. “There’s been a real wakeup call in the last five years about how much these companies have not been disclosing.”

Transitioning quickly from gas-guzzling cars and trucks to electric vehicles remains important to reducing motor vehicle exhaust, a leading factor in death and disease, as well as carbon dioxide, a key driver of climate change. So, experts say, it’s crucial to make lithium-ion batteries in ways that don’t pollute communities. 

Kimberly and Richard Bond with their daughter Christina, at home in Pedricktown, New Jersey. They’re four years into a court battle against chemical companies for allegedly causing profound injuries to their daughter. Erica Lee / The Examination

At a facility in Pierre-Bénite, France, chemical giant Arkema produces PVDF, a key polymer used in EV batteries. The plant created such a stew of chemical waste, while making PVDF for other purposes, that it ignited recent protests, led 41 cities to haul the company into court and prompted French investigators to search it and other Arkema sites. Arkema says activists are overstating the risks and that it is phasing out those waste products anyway. Company representatives also say Arkema uses a different method to make PVDF for electric cars, but did not provide details.

In Pedricktown, New Jersey, Richard and Kim Bond spend their days visiting doctors for scores of ailments, and they believe forever chemicals are the culprit. They’re four years into a legal battle in federal district court against chemical companies, including Arkema and Solvay Specialty Polymers — the former and current owners of a nearby PVDF plant.

Both companies dispute the claim that the facility contributed to the Bond family’s health issues.

The state of New Jersey sued the companies, too, claiming they conducted “abnormally dangerous activities” that contaminated drinking water for thousands of people with some of the highest levels of forever chemicals ever recorded. Solvay Specialty Polymers, in particular, downplayed risks, withheld details about chemicals it was using and did not disclose how its work might harm people, the state alleged.

Arkema has tentatively agreed to pay the state up to $75 million — without admitting wrongdoing. In March, Solvay Specialty Polymers agreed to pay $394 million, although it, too, did not admit fault. 

One month later, 745 miles south in Augusta, Georgia, city officials joined executives from Solvay Specialty Polymers on a sand-filled stage near a 30-acre patch of pine forest where landowners once raised hogs and butter beans. They used golden shovels to break ground on a plant expansion. Here, the company aims to make PVDF exclusively for EV batteries — with a $178 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy.

Syensqo, spun off from Solvay, was awarded a $178 million grant from the US Department of Energy to produce PVDF exclusively for EV batteries at a plant in Augusta, Georgia. Grace Beahm Alford / The Post and Courier

The company said there’s no cause for worry; this product will be made using a different process. Safeguards are in place. Government scrutiny will be heavier.

Outside experts say Solvay’s new approach is likely safer but aren’t convinced that makes it safe. 

As Ian Cousins, a professor at Stockholm University in Sweden and one of Europe’s leading “forever chemical” experts, put it: “I wouldn’t want it on my doorstep.”

Much has been made of the risks of mining lithium and other precious metals for EV batteries. That process has disrupted sensitive environments, drained water supplies and, with cobalt, even led to slave labor.

Less attention has been paid to the production of batteries’ chemical ingredients — or to the track records of the companies making them.

The chemicals needed for lithium-ion batteries pose tricky problems. They must withstand heat and corrosion, repel water and be electrochemically stable while meeting performance standards. The industry has often counted on materials that use — or produce as waste — per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS.

This group of more than 10,000 chemicals is found in nonstick coatings, cleaning products and firefighting foams. Exposure to small amounts of some may decrease fertility, weaken immune systems and delay development. Others have been linked to kidney disease, liver issues or prostate, ovarian and testicular cancers. They’ve earned the nickname “forever chemicals” because they take a long time to break down.

Europe and the U.S. for decades have largely relied on chemical companies to self-report production and emissions of these contaminants. Other major forever chemical manufacturing hubs — notably China and India — have barely been regulated.

Lithium-ion cells were developed two centuries after the invention of the electrochemical circuit — a prototype of the modern battery. They can store a lot of energy in a small space but can be unsafe to use if all the parts in a battery aren’t working together. PVDF is a specialty plastic used as a binder to hold battery components into place. But the process of manufacturing PVDF can create byproducts that don’t break down naturally in the body or the environment, known as forever chemicals. Brandon Lockett / The Post and Courier/Alec Gitelman for Columbia Journalism Investigations

Too many industry practices aren’t shared with the public, said Jonatan Kleimark of ChemSec, a European nonprofit that advocates for substitution of hazardous chemicals. “We have a very big lack of transparency in the supply chain and in the production.”

Consider Chemours. The DuPont spinoff was discovered in 2017 to have contaminated North Carolina’s Cape Fear River — and drinking water for hundreds of thousands of people — with forever chemicals it used to make Teflon. The Environmental Protection Agency has linked those PFAS to cancer, and even the U.N. Human Rights Commission chastised the company for its emissions. Only after Chemours got caught polluting did the public find out what else was in its wastewater: 250 “previously unidentified” PFAS.

Chemours, in a statement, said it has spent millions of dollars installing waste-capturing technologies and has committed to dramatically curtailing PFAS emissions in North Carolina.

Today Chemours markets Teflon for use in EV batteries.

Richard Bond is a 71-year-old retired truck driver whose family hails from southern New Jersey. He has lived most of his life 14 miles downriver of Solvay Specialty Polymers. He and his wife, Kim, moved there in the 1970s, eventually settling in the hamlet of Pedricktown. The couple relished the expansive farmland and the close-knit community of fewer than 1,000.

After Kim gave birth to the couple’s eldest daughter, Christina, in 1978, they noticed she wasn’t walking and talking like other toddlers. Doctors attributed her issues to developmental delays. 

At age 8, Christina was diagnosed with a rare disorder often caused by a gene mutation that stalls bone, muscle, and brain development. Genetic testing would later reveal that neither Kim nor Richard has the mutation.

And Christina wasn’t the only one with a baffling health condition. Kim began suffering from gastrointestinal problems shortly after her daughter’s diagnosis. She was often nauseous, doubled over in pain. Richard, too, noticed his hands and feet growing weak; sometimes they went numb. Their other daughters experienced unusually painful periods later attributed to endometriosis. Two of them have since had gotten hysterectomies. The family found no explanation for these ailments. 

“This has been our life,” Kim said. “Just going from one specialist to another, trying to find answers.”

Then in 2019, the Bonds received a letter from New Jersey officials offering to test the drinking water from their private well.  

When Christina Bond was a toddler, her parents, Kim and Richard, noticed she was not walking and talking like other children her age. Erica Lee / The Examination

The results shocked them. Tests showed their drinking water was riddled with forever chemicals — which they’d never heard of before. 

“For 45 years we’ve lived in it, bathed in it, cooked with it, drank it,” Richard said.

One year later, the family sued Solvay and Arkema, among other chemical companies, blaming the area’s PFAS pollution for the health ailments of their daughter. Solvay, along with the other companies, are fighting the claims. The case is ongoing. 

While the court battle is over Christina’s health issues, the rest of the Bonds believe their sicknesses, too, stem from exposure to forever chemicals. Today, Richard’s kidneys have shut down, forcing him to undergo dialysis every day. He’s ineligible for a kidney transplant. Christina, now 46, needs help with life’s daily tasks like cooking a meal and sorting her medication. Kim, 65, balances taking care of her husband and adult daughter with 12-hour shifts as a nurse at a nearby hospital. 

“I feel guilty for moving my family into the neighborhood,” Richard said.

And, he said, another thought haunts him: “How do I know what is safe?” 

Richard Bond does dialysis every day: “Now I sit in that room at 5 o’clock at night, sun shining, and kids are outside playing, here I am hooked to a machine to stay alive. And if I don’t do it, I don’t stay alive.” Erica Lee / The Examination

The risks of PFAS are becoming increasingly apparent. Research published just this week in the journal Nature Communications shows that one forever chemical can now be found in water, soil and sometimes snow even miles away from a 3M facility in Minnesota where it was made for about 20 years. The study suggests that this class of PFAS (bis-perfluoroalkyl sulfonimides) — often used to boost lithium-ion battery performance — can affect the behavior of fish in concentrations as small as 25 parts per trillion. Concentrations found in Minnesota were up to 97 times that.

And yet, few studies have explored whether this contaminant might harm people. It’s not even clear how many companies make it. (Solvay advertises it for sale for EVs.) Nor does anyone know how ubiquitous it has become in the environment. Already, small amounts have been found in German drinking water sources.

3M, which recently agreed to a $10.3 billion class-action lawsuit settlement with drinking water suppliers for PFAS pollution without admitting liability, said it is phasing out production of the chemical as part of a wider exit from PFAS manufacturing. Solvay won’t say where or for how long it has produced the chemical. 

With the need for EV batteries growing, demand for PVDF is soaring. Six years ago, less than 10 percent of PVDF global production was for batteries, with the rest used for pipes, cable coatings, electronics and other uses. Today, more than 40 percent of PVDF manufactured is used in EV batteries. And by 2028, global production of PVDF is expected to double, JP Morgan data show. 

At the urging of climate scientists, governments around the world have offered tax breaks, grants, and loans to speed up the energy transition. So far, 267 new battery projects have been announced in the U.S. just since President Joe Biden took office, 69 of them in the Southeast, which is now often called the battery belt.

While PVDF can be considered a forever chemical, it is largely inert. Some byproducts of producing it, however, can cause trouble for communities. Just ask Edith Metzger.

From her bedroom window in Pierre-Bénite, the 82-year-old can see Arkema’s plant. Her husband worked for many years at the facility, which advertises that some of its PVDF products are “used by all major battery manufacturers in Asia and the U.S.” In 2022, she learned the facility had been polluting her town with PFAS.

A television report that year showed residents already carried significant forever chemicals in their blood from PFAS the plant no longer used. Health experts urged residents to avoid local eggs and vegetables. The report showed the company was still spraying a different forever chemical into air and water. Authorities were alarmed enough to demand that Arkema stop its use by 2025. “It’s bad news after bad news,” Metzger said. “And we don’t know where it is going to stop.”

Arkema said its French plant is reducing PFAS emissions faster than originally planned and added that the company “has been engaged in a process of elimination and substitution” of PFAS additives for years because its products are at the heart of the clean energy transition.

The chemical industry says it has made major strides reducing PFAS — and it has. Companies have eliminated some chemicals with the highest-known risks, are adopting new procedures and are adding emissions and wastewater controls.

“We remain committed to site remediation, advancing water treatment technologies at sites where we have historically manufactured PFAS,” 3M said in a written statement to The Examination.

Still, neither 3M nor Solvay would say how much battery-related PFAS either company has made — or clarify how much, if any, pollution has accompanied that production.

From left: Syensqo CEO Ilham Kadri; Glenn Kelly Jr.; Tom Perez, senior advisor to President Joe Biden; Giulia Siccardo, director of the Department of Energy’s Office of Manufacturing & Energy Supply Chains; and Chief Technology Innovation Officer Mike Finelli at Syensqo’s April 2024 groundbreaking in Augusta. Grace Beahm Alford / The Post and Courier

When Augusta, Georgia, officials joined executives from Solvay Specialty Polymers for the battery-chemical maker’s groundbreaking, details about the company’s New Jersey operation didn’t come up.

Georgia leaders focused on the economic benefits of the company’s expansion. The endeavor is expected to bring in more than $800 million for the state’s third-largest city, a onetime textile hub perhaps best known as the home of the Masters golf tournament.

New Jersey leaders declined to answer questions for this story. But court documents, emails, memos and letters show just how difficult it was for the Garden State to get Solvay to stop belching chemicals and clean them up.

“Solvay was recalcitrant from the beginning,” said Erica Bergman, a retired case manager who spent 34 years with New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Protection.

Today Bergman lives in a modest gray home with a nicely kept garden in Johns Island, a Charleston County, South Carolina, community 150 miles from Augusta. 

But Bergman grew up in Hamilton, a suburb of Trenton, and joined her state’s environmental agency out of college in the 1980s. In 2013, she became the regulator charged with overseeing Solvay’s cleanup of chemical contamination at its New Jersey plant. She did that for eight years until she retired in 2021.

If she lived closer to the Georgia facility, “I’d be asking some serious questions,” she said.

For decades, the plant in West Deptford, New Jersey, that spewed forever chemicals across the region was owned by Solvay, among the world’s biggest chemical conglomerates. At the end of 2023, Solvay spun off this business to a new company, now called Syensqo. Erica Lee / The Examination

For decades, Solvay had been among the world’s biggest chemical conglomerates. Founded by Belgian brothers in the 1860s, it operated in dozens of countries, making gases for semiconductors and solvents for cement, as well as flavorings, fragrances and plastics. (Last year Solvay split in two; Solvay Specialty Polymers is now run by a new company, Syensqo.)

In 1990, Solvay took over a maze of pipes and tanks on 240 acres in West Deptford, New Jersey, across the Delaware River from Philadelphia International Airport. Lodged in this suburban community of 20,000 near one of the nation’s busiest petroleum and crude oil ports, the chemical plant had been run for years by companies that were later bought by Arkema. The facility used a compound containing another in the alphabet soup of forever chemicals: perfluorononanoic acid, or PFNA. Solvay used PFNA to make PVDF.

By the time Solvay quit using PFNA in 2010, its sprawling facility, which looms over West Deptford’s landscape of cookie-cutter homes and cul-de-sacs, had discharged more than 100,000 pounds of the chemical into the surrounding air and water, according to state regulators.

In 2013, the public learned that PFNA had been found in the Delaware River at higher levels than anywhere else in the world. Drinking water concentrations of it in tiny Paulsboro, an industrial borough a few miles away, were 15 times above what EPA now considers safe.

While PFNA was not yet regulated, studies suggested it may be toxic at extremely low levels. It builds up and persists in the body years after exposure, and it can pose risks to the liver, spleen, kidneys and reproductive organs.

Read Next EPA finalizes the nation’s first PFAS limits in drinking water Joseph Winters & Sachi Kitajima Mulkey

New Jersey health officials urged area parents to feed infants formula made with bottled water. Solvay provided the water, conducted sampling and installed treatment on the well.

All the while, Solvay Specialty Polymers and the state were at war.

Solvay took the state to court for setting emergency limits on PFNA in groundwater. When state regulators proposed limits for the chemical in drinking water, Solvay objected to that too. Then, in 2019, EPA chemists found evidence that Solvay was releasing yet another generation of toxic PFAS. New Jersey’s environmental agency demanded details from Solvay, which the company provided — on the condition that its information be kept from the public.

Those disclosures, first reported in 2020 by Consumer Reports, showed that long before Solvay stopped spewing PFNA, it had been pumping out hundreds of thousands of pounds of other forever chemicals too — and still was. Solvay has known since 2006 that these new substances were toxic to rats. Since 2011, a sister plant in Italy has studied the chemicals in its workers’ blood and found markers for liver damage and other health risks, which the company insists have not led to any “pathological effects on our employees.”

Danger from this new generation of chemicals appeared “similar or higher,” than for the PFAS they’d replaced, the state determined.

“Solvay uses obfuscation and sleight of hand to avoid providing anything that might make them stop using the chemicals they want to use,” said Tracy Carluccio, an activist with the Delaware Riverkeeper Network, an environmental group.

In 2020, the state sued. The scope and extent of Solvay’s remediation work “have been woefully inadequate,” the state charged. “Solvay has consistently failed to take responsibility, correct its past actions, and cease polluting.”

Solvay characterized things differently. In letters and emails to the state, the company highlighted steps it had taken: sampling water, hiring remediation engineers, modeling how its air pollution might have dispersed, adding new treatment to its groundwater. It repeatedly reminded the state that there could be other sources of contamination. Solvay argued — and maintains to this day — that another company was responsible for water contamination in Paulsboro. 

The company insisted it was honoring regulators’ expectations.

The state disagreed, arguing that the company’s assertions were “demonstrably false.”

In March 2021, amid this legal battle, Solvay told state officials it was eliminating the use of all PFAS in its processing. It already had completed a phaseout of forever chemical aids used to make PVDF. The company said that marked an 80 percent reduction in PFAS use overall.

The implication: Company waste would no longer contain PFAS.

Within days, the state collected wastewater samples from the plant and shipped them to North Carolina.

Mark Strynar, James McCord, Mark Cantwell, Anna Robuck, and Michaela Cashman — all EPA scientists — retrieve sediment core samples on a boat on a tributary of the Delaware River in August 2021. The work of these researchers has been key to identifying the forever chemicals polluting New Jersey and other states. Mark Strynar and Anna Robuck

Mark Strynar, an EPA chemist, works from a massive office complex in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, a forested hub for scientists and techies sandwiched between Chapel Hill, Raleigh and Durham. He calls his work “environmental forensics.” That means he’s a sleuth.

Strynar and colleagues analyze water, soil and blood sent to them by other scientists. Their job: identifying synthetic compounds that find their way into nature. Their specialty: uncovering new stuff. 

Strynar had helped find PFAS in the Cape Fear River. And he’d helped his EPA colleagues discover Solvay’s “alternative PFAS.” So when containers of chemical waste from New Jersey arrived in the spring of 2021, Strynar and colleague James McCord knew what to do.

Cantwell examines sediment core samples in EPA’s Narragansett, Rhode Island, lab in September 2021. Michaela Cashman

They ran the samples through a high-resolution mass spectrometer, which identifies individual chemical molecules by weight, distinguishing between known and unknown substances. 

McCord and Strynar found a surprise: dozens of largely unknown PVDF-like chemicals. By definitions used in Europe, most would be considered PFAS. By definitions the EPA used, many would not. “Oh, these are weird,” McCord recalled thinking. “I’ve never seen anything like that.”

There was no way to track their abundance. Nor could they ascribe any potential risk. That would require months, if not years, of health studies. They are unregulated.

“What do we know, toxicologically? Nothing,” Strynar said. “Do they degrade? Not sure. Do they accumulate? We don’t know.”

The pair dug into patent literature. They talked to organic chemists about polymers. They learned that with processes like the one in use in New Jersey, making PVDF could create residual forever-chemical byproducts — even if none were introduced intentionally.

“You don’t have to add it in at the very get-go,” Strynar hypothesized. PFAS may be generated in the mix and be part of the waste stream.

McCord and Strynar wrote a report and shared it with the state in February 2022. 

Today, Solvay Specialty Polymers will neither refute nor confirm the chemists’ findings. 

EPA chemist Anna Robuck collects water samples in the Delaware River in New Jersey in June 2020 as part of a wider investigation into forever-chemical contamination. Anna Robuck

The company said the transition to its new process had not been complete when samples were taken and that it’s following all the regulatory requirements. 

Asked if its new production process still released — then or today — the same byproducts found by the EPA, Solvay Specialty Polymers declined to say. Nor would it say if it is still spewing PFAS of any kind into New Jersey’s air or water.

The state of New Jersey, too, declined to tell the public whether Solvay is still releasing PFAS and would not say if it is monitoring the plant’s air emissions at all for forever chemicals.

“It’s déjà vu all over again,” said Carluccio, the regional activist. “This is exactly how the PFAS battle started in the early 2000s — with denial, cover-ups and cat and mouse games … This makes my blood boil.”

While oversight of forever chemicals has increased substantially in the U.S., one element remains largely unchanged: It’s up to governments to prove chemicals are dangerous, not companies to prove they are safe. With businesses routinely swapping out old PFAS when new ones better suit their needs, regulators are often many steps behind.

“It’ll take centuries before there’s enough data to figure out how dangerous each PFAS is,” said Eve Gartner, director of toxic exposure and health at the environmental law firm Earthjustice.

The backside of the Syensqo plant in Augusta, where the company intends to make chemicals for use in EV batteries. Clare Fieseler / The Post and Courier

It’s not easy to find Cal Wray’s office in Enterprise Mill, a refurbished flour mill that also happens to be the oldest industrial building in Augusta, built in 1848.

As president of the quasi-governmental Augusta Economic Development Authority, he leads efforts to bring in new companies and help existing ones expand. These days, the greatest rainmaker is Syensqo, spun off from Solvay.

It’s a familiar story playing out across the region’s battery belt as the clean car revolution takes root. Less than two hours away in Covington, Georgia, the nation’s largest lithium-ion battery recycling plant recently opened. EV startup Rivian is building a massive manufacturing site in the next county over. Scout Motors, an all-electric brand, is building a plant outside South Carolina’s capital city, and Redwood Materials has broken ground on a battery recycling operation that promises to be 10 times larger than the Covington plant. Together, those investments total around $11 billion.

In Augusta, Wray expressed little concern about potential downsides, such as possible chemical pollution. 

“We tend to make the assumption they’re going to follow the right procedures and follow the safety steps necessary,” Wray said.

A sign in Augusta, near the Syensqo plant. Clare Fieseler / The Post and Courier

While the White House was cracking down on PFAS, Congress in 2021 and 2022 adopted two massive spending bills that set aside more than $850 billion to usher in clean energy projects.

The new laws amounted to the largest investment in history to combat climate change. But they also meant money wound up going to businesses, like Solvay, that previously had been responsible for pollution.

When production starts, no earlier than 2027, Syensqo, the new parent company of Solvay Specialty Polymers, intends to make enough PVDF to supply more than 5 million EV batteries per year — nearly half of North America’s projected demand, according to a company statement.

And the process the company plans to use at the new plant will not require the intentional introduction of PFAS, Michael Finelli, North America leader for Syensqo, said in an April interview in Augusta. 

“It never did, it never will,” Finelli said. “It’s not necessary for this chemistry.”

Michael Finelli, North America leader for Syensqo, at the company’s groundbreaking festivities in Augusta. Grace Beahm Alford / The Post and Courier

That distinction was helpful when the company was applying for a federal grant, U.S. Energy Department officials said.

“It is possible for companies to make mistakes, to learn from them and, you know, operate better going forward, and we want to create space for that,” said Giulia Siccardo, director of the Energy Department’s Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains. 

Even experts suspicious of this industry concede that the company’s approach makes potential worst-case scenarios — tons of PFAS pollution spreading through communities like it did in New Jersey — unlikely.

It’s still possible, however, for PFAS to be produced as waste even while making PVDF this way, said Joost Dalmijn, one of few independent experts worldwide familiar with this manufacturing process, and a Ph.D. student in Stockholm, who studies chemical company emissions. It depends on the chemicals involved, and those details remain “a bit of a black box for us.”

An analysis by environmental authorities in France this month found chemicals, some of which could be PFAS, in wastewater at a Syensqo plant in Tavaux, France, that makes PVDF using a process similar to the one proposed for Georgia. It’s not clear how much, if any, of those actually were forever chemicals — or how much might be reaching nearby waterways — but an environmental organization, Generation Futures, which specializes in PFAS testing, did its own sampling and found significant quantities of one PFAS in a waste pond that feeds into one of France’s largest rivers.

A Syensqo spokesperson said the chemicals could be from other sources, including nearby companies, or may be legal, permitted discharges. The representative added that Syensqo does not use the PFAS found by the environmental group, and said operations in Augusta don’t include all the production steps that are used in Tavaux. 

With Syensqo still in the early stages of permitting in Augusta, details have been slow to emerge. An air emissions permit application filed in Georgia shows the company plans to incinerate waste using a thermal oxidizer. Finelli said that could capture 99 percent of air emissions.

But experts said many factors will determine if that’s true.

After significant legal battles over its PFAS pollution, Chemours, in North Carolina, spent $100 million to install a similar incineration system in 2019, saying it would make the company “best-in-class” when it comes to air emissions. While PFAS emissions are way down, Chemours already has violated its permit conditions several times, according to the state.

Then, earlier this year, experts hired by The Guardian news organization found PFAS emissions outside the plant were up to 30 times higher than the company claimed.

Chemours said such claims about its technology are “not just misleading, they are irresponsible.” The company said its oxidizer’s ability to destroy PFAS were validated in “multiple tests by an independent lab” and by the EPA.

A passing storm darkens the entrance to Syensqo’s Augusta facility. Clare Fieseler / The Post and Courier

Siccardo said Syensqo will be required to submit to a lengthy public process and publicize all chemical ingredients and byproducts.

Yet when asked by The Examination which chemicals will become part of its waste stream, Syensqo officials again declined to answer.

With a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions coming from transportation, lithium-ion batteries will likely remain central to the energy revolution.

For the moment, at least, the same may be true of PFAS.

From Rivian to Rolls Royce, few in the automotive industry see promising alternatives in the short term. Substitutes for battery chemicals exist. But finding commercially scalable options that are less hazardous and meet performance standards has been hard.

The European Chemicals Agency has been moving to ban most forever chemicals from the E.U. but appears likely to provide an exemption for batteries. Batteries made with PFAS chemicals “will continue to be the mainstay until around 2035,” according to a report from Nissan.

That makes it more important that chemical waste be better managed and not be released into the environment, scientists say. That means more treatment and better monitoring — and more openness from industry and scrutiny by everyone else, said Martin Scheringer, an environmental science professor and renowned PFAS expert at ETH Zurich, a public university.

This industry “has a very bad track record,” Scheringer said. Its plans “need to be followed very closely by watchdogs of all kinds.”

Read Next Cleaning up ‘forever chemicals’ is costly and messy — just ask this Wisconsin town John McCracken

On that sunny April morning, down a small lane off Augusta’s Tobacco Road, a throng of dignitaries passed below an orange-and-white balloon arch to celebrate Solvay Specialty Polymers’ massive investment in their city.

The mayor was on hand. A congressman, too, along with a White House adviser and a federal energy official. They cheered as a flight of executives from the company heralded the company’s workers as explorers and shouted “Go, Dawgs!” to show their affinity for University of Georgia football.

The tattered old Solvay flag no longer flew outside the compound. Instead, a fluorescent orange sign announced Syensqo’s arrival, complete with a fresh logo. Everything seemed brand new.

Noticeably absent were the neighbors of the factory.

Robert Jordan at his house on Augusta’s Clanton Road, not far from Syensqo’s plant. Jordan grew up in the neighborhood, moved away as a teen, and returned six years ago. He has no health complaints that he would attribute to industrial contaminants, but he worries about the plant’s expansion. Clare Fieseler / The Post and Courier

For years, Robert Jordan, 60, wondered what went on at the plant near his home where freight trains arrived before the sun most mornings. Neighbors talked of the plant “making plastics,” but few knew specifics of the operation — or its planned expansion.

Not long ago, Augusta had paid for a new road that made the plant’s entrance more private, its workings more mysterious. Local officials like Wray say the road will protect residents from industrial traffic. But all the activity made Jordan and some of his neighbors more leery of what might be spewing from the plant’s steaming towers.

PVDFs on display at the groundbreaking for the Syensqo plant where the chemicals will be made. Grace Beahm Alford / The Post and Courier

As golden shovels bit into the red clay, few on hand appeared concerned about what the new operation might mean for neighbors.

Most walked right by the small glass case where a set of beakers sat on display, partially filled with white powders. Little placards identified the contents: PVDF — a building block of batteries whose own building blocks may be with us forever.

Craig Welch reported this story for The Examination, Clare Fieseler for The Post and Courier, and Emilie Rosso for Belgian public broadcaster RTBF. Jana Cholakovska, Pooja Sarkar, and Alec Gitelman were fellows at Columbia Journalism Investigations, the investigative-reporting unit at the Columbia Journalism School. The Examination, The Post and Courier, and CJI provided editing, fact-checking, data analysis, photography, graphic illustration, and other support.

toolTips('.classtoolTips4','An acronym for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, PFAS are a class of chemicals used in everyday items like nonstick cookware, cosmetics, and food packaging that have proven to be dangerous to human health. Also called “forever chemicals” for their inability to break down over time, PFAS can be found lingering nearly everywhere — in water, soil, air, and the blood of people and animals.
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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The problematic chemicals fueling America’s EV revolution on Jul 21, 2024.

As this summer has already made clear, extreme heat is here, and it’s poised to get worse in the coming years.

Due to soaring temperatures, more and more people are also at risk for severe health concerns that come with them, including heat stroke, cardiovascular problems, and respiratory issues.That’s particularly true for already-vulnerable groups including elderly people, those who are pregnant, and those with preexisting conditions like heart disease or diabetes.

In Texas — a state that often sees some of the hottest temperatures in the country — extreme heat killed more than 330 people in 2023, setting a new record. More recently, millions of people in cities like Houston have had to deal with a massive heat wave while navigating power outages caused by Hurricane Beryl.

Despite the growing toll, there’s shockingly little regulation around protecting people from the effects of heat. It’s a stark contrast to how policies tend to treat the extreme cold. And while extreme cold continues to be deadlier than extreme heat, as heat waves become more dangerous, the gap between the two is likely to shrink.

For example, very few states have laws that require landlords to provide air conditioning for their renters. Conversely, most states have policies that mandate the provision of heat in the winter. But even navigating what is and isn’t required around extreme heat is difficult. A comprehensive state-by-state cooling policy resource doesn’t yet exist, which speaks to the sparse landscape of regulations considering heat exposure.

That’s largely due to policymakers lagging behind climate change, the opposition from landlord groups to such requirements, and the hefty cost of both energy bills and equipment that would actually address the problem. There are questions, too, over who would bear those costs, including concerns that mandates for air conditioning would simply fall on tenants in the form of higher rents.

The need for adequate cooling will only become more pressing, though. And the growing prevalence of heat waves — which are getting stronger, longer, and more frequent — underscores the fact that air conditioning is no longer a luxury but a necessity and that the lack of it in people’s homes could prove fatal.

There are big gaps in cooling policies

Cooling policies for rental properties vary state by state, often city by city. There’s no federal law or regulation governing them, and many states don’t have them either. Although some cities like Dallas have approved ordinances mandating that landlords provide air conditioning, for instance, Texas doesn’t offer the same protections statewide.

“There’s no baseline right to air conditioning or anything like that at the federal level,” David Konisky, Indiana University’s co-director of the Energy Justice Lab, told Vox.

As a result, such measures — known as habitability laws— are highly dependent on where people live. These laws, which determine what requirements a landlord must meet for the housing they provide, rarely include cooling. For heat, meanwhile, these policies tend to say that rental properties need to include a heating unit that keeps them above a certain temperature.

“Unlike heat, cooling is really not incorporated into habitability standards or enforced in increasingly hot summers,” says Ruthy Gourevitch, a housing policy manager at the Climate and Community Project.

Read Next The surprisingly simple way cities could save people from extreme heat Matt Simon

Some state policies, like those in California and New York, require landlords to maintain air conditioning that’s already in a unit, but they don’t mandate that they provide AC in the first place. Most states have experienced scorching heat waves in recent years yet many still have no state law on the books to require cooling systems.

A similar dynamic is evident when it comes to federal energy assistance programs, which often dedicate most of their funds to assisting tenants in the winter to cover heating costs. About 80 percent of the funds allocated to the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) are doled out in the winter, while far less is distributed in the summer, says Mark Wolfe, executive director of the National Energy Assistance Directors Association. That’s largely a byproduct of the underfunding of the program, with much of the money running out after it’s been used in the winter, Wolfe says.

This breakdown can leave tenants in need of such aid struggling to cover costs in the summer even if they have access to air conditioning.

As Rebecca Leber previously reported for Vox, this same trend holds true when utility companies shut off power, something they do when a customer misses their payments.Many states will offer protections to customers in these situations during the cold months of winter. Not so with the increasingly fierce, hot months of summer. According to Vox’s previous reporting, 41 states offer customer protections from utility shut-offs during the extreme cold if they fail to pay a bill, while just 18 states offer the same for extreme heat.

Preventing such shut-offs is one key way to ensure that people have air conditioning access during dire spikes in temperature, Leber writes.

“There are lots of areas of policy where we have this distinction historically, between cold and heat,” says Konisky. “[We’ve thought that] trying to protect people from extreme cold temperatures has been more important.” But, now, “heat is just as deadly, just as big of a concern.”

These omissions could have severe consequences

As extreme heat becomes more common and more hazardous to people’s health as a result, the impact of these gaps will become increasingly apparent.

Low-income tenants, in particular, are disproportionately affected by such omissions, experts say, because they’re less likely to be able to afford their own cooling systems. Black Americans are also more likely to live in places where they are exposed to extreme heat, a 2020 study found. According to research by climate and health scientists Adrienne Hollis and Kristy Dahl, “counties with large African American populations are exposed to extreme temperatures two to three more days per year than those counties with smaller African American populations.”

The risks of being indoors without air conditioning or other cooling options during these heat waves are high especially for older people, infants, pregnant people, and those with serious health conditions like heart disease and high blood pressure. Severe complications that could result include blood clots, kidney impairment, and asthma.

Read Next In a rare court action, an Oregon county seeks to hold fossil fuel companies accountable for extreme temperatures Victoria St. Martin, Inside Climate News

“With access to cooling, unfortunately, it’s heading that direction of being another one that shows the economic divide in the country and also the globe,” says Wolfe. Roughly 13 percent of US households lack air conditioning, with renters more likely to go without than homeowners.

The consequences of that lack have been increasingly evident in recent years, with multiple cities like Phoenix recording record-high deaths from heat. In 2023, Phoenix experienced 30 consecutive days of heat over 110 degrees Fahrenheit and saw 645 deaths, almost double the number from the year before. A large proportion of these deaths included people who were low-income or unhoused, according to Phoenix officials.

Being inside during such heat waves, without air conditioning, is particularly hazardous.

“It can actually get hotter indoors than outside, and this is a really important environmental justice issue,” Leah Schinasi, an assistant professor of environmental and occupational health at Drexel University, concluded in a 2024 Heliyon study.

The policies that could change

In addition to regulations that treat cooling systems like a necessity, experts say there needs to be more funding to cover the costs associated with them.

Some cities, where temperatures have been consistently high and climbing, like Dallas, have approved ordinances in recent years to mandate that landlords provide air conditioning that keeps units under a specific temperature. Other cities, like Los Angeles, are considering similar proposals.

Such policies add to a handful of laws at the state level.

Seth Gertz-Billingsley, a Harvard law student who has studied heat protection policies across different states, notes that the Oregon law is one of the most expansive. That law — which passed in 2022 — allows renters to install air conditioning, and also sets up an emergency fund to help low-income tenants afford AC. It doesn’t, however, mandate that all landlords offer air conditioning.

Read Next Biden admin unveils first-ever heat protections for workers. Here’s what to know. Frida Garza & Ayurella Horn-Muller

In addition to strengthening requirements for air conditioning and other cooling systems, advocates say it’s important that such policies account for the costs that would accompany these changes, so they aren’t simply passed on to tenants.

Federal and state governments could offer subsidies to landlords, for instance, says Wolfe. And more funding is needed for energy assistance programs directly focused on tenants.Wolfe estimates that LIHEAP could use an additional $3 billion annually to cover the costs people face in summer.Tenant protection from rent increases and potential evictions needs to be baked into such proposals, too, says Gourevitch.

Another key consideration is the need to install cooling options, like heat pumps, which are more efficient than traditional AC. The paradox of air conditioning has long been that it’s crucial to help preserve people’s health during heat waves but that it simultaneously spews a sizable amount of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. Devices like heat pumps, which move heat from indoors to outdoors and vice versa, are a more climate-friendly alternative, especially in the winter since they are vastly more efficient than conventional furnaces.

To change such policies, however, lawmakers need to catch up with how quickly climate change is taking place and affecting people’s lives. Forecasts for this summer and beyond show that the world is poised to get hotter.

“Many of our habitability laws and enforcement policies are many decades old, and need to be updated to confront the new reality that we live in,” says Gourevitch.

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The US is failing renters during extreme heat waves on Jul 20, 2024.

In the Scottish city of Aberdeen, a debate over the region’s energy transition away from fossil fuels is playing out over roughly one square mile of green space.

In question is a proposed development called the Energy Transition Zone (ETZ), which is intended to bring in more renewable energy investments as the city tries to cut its dependence on the oil and gas industry that has defined it for half a century. 

As the UK’s new Labour government promises not to issue any more oil and gas licences, the future of the sector is in doubt and the company behind the ETZ says it wants to “protect and create as many jobs as possible” in the region through investing in clean energy.

But the ETZ has received significant pushback from community groups in the part of Aberdeen it is destined for. That’s because the proposed development, as currently designed, would pave over about a third of St. Fittick’s Park in Torry, the only public green space in one of Scotland’s most neglected urban areas.

The battle over St Fittick’s Park illustrates the friction that is emerging more frequently around the world as the ramp-up of clean energy infrastructure changes communities. Climate Home has reported on these tensions provoked by Mexico’s wind farms, Namibia’s desert hydrogen zone, Indonesia’s nickel mines and Germany’s Tesla gigafactory.

Just transition?

The ETZ is backed by fossil fuel giants BP, Shell and local billionaire Ian Wood, whose Wood Group made its money providing engineering and consulting services to the oil and gas industry.

The plan is to create campuses focused on hydrogen, carbon capture and storage, offshore wind, and skills development in an area initially the size of 50 football pitches, but expanding as private investment grows. 

To this end, ETZ Ltd – the company set up to build and run the zone – will receive up to £80m ($103m) from the UK and Scottish governments. Announcing some of that funding in 2021, the Scottish government’s then net zero, energy and transport secretary Michael Matheson said “urgent, collective action is required in order to ensure a just transition to a net-zero economy”, adding “Scotland can show the rest of the world how it’s done”.

But many Scottish climate campaigners don’t see this as a just transition. About 100 of them travelled to St. Fittick’s Park last week to hold a five-day “Climate Camp” in a clearing that would become part of the ETZ.

One camper, who did not want to give her name, told Climate Home that the energy transition should not “exacerbate existing inequalities, but try to redress existing inequalities”. A just transition, she said, must protect both workers in the fossil fuel industry and community green spaces.

Another protestor who did not want to giver her full name is Torry resident Chris. She said “the consultation process was flawed”. Not many people participated to start with, and some stopped going to meetings because “they were disillusioned with the way that good ideas were co-opted and then used to justify the expansion of the industrial area into the park”, she added.

Green MSP Maggie Chapman at the Climate Camp on 13 July (Photo: Hannah Chanatry)

Local Member of the Scottish Parliament (MSP) Maggie Chapman, from the Scottish Green Party, agreed, adding “the best transition zone plan in the world will fail” if it is done to a community rather than with meaningful input from them.

Another protesting resident, David Parks, said wealthier parts of the city would not have been disregarded in the same way. “You wouldn’t see this in Old Aberdeen and Rosemount,” he said. “[Torry] is just kind of the dumping ground for all these projects that you wouldn’t get off with anywhere else.”

Industrial developments have encroached on the old fishing town of Torry for decades. Today, residents are hemmed in by an industrial harbour, roads and a railway and live alongside a waste-to-energy incinerator, a sewage plant, and a covered landfill. 

David Parks at the Climate Camp in St. Fittick’s Park on 13 July (Photo: Hannah Chanatry)

Some of the activists also take issue with the emphasis the ETZ places on hydrogen and carbon capture and storage, which they see as “greenwashing”. 

Hydrogen is a fuel that can be made without producing greenhouse gas emissions, and used to decarbonise industries like steel-making which are difficult to clean up.

But a Climate Camp spokesperson told Climate Home that, “given the industry’s tendencies” and the fact that 99% of hydrogen is currently made using fossil fuels, they assume it will be produced in a polluting way at the ETZ.

Backers respond

ETZ Ltd told Climate Home in a statement that the project is committed to collaborating with the local community, particularly on efforts to refurbish what would be the remainder of the park. 

While the ETZ’s opponents argue there are existing industrial brownfield sites in the area that could be used instead of the park, the company said the area in St. Fittick’s Park next to the port is essential for the development to draw in substantial investment for renewables and for Aberdeen to compete in a new energy market.

Many brownfield sites are already planned for use by the ETZ, and would not provide the kind of logistical access needed for the planned projects, they added.

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“Almost all other ports in Scotland are making similar investments, and we simply don’t want Aberdeen to miss out on the opportunity to position itself as a globally recognised hub for offshore renewables and the significant job benefits this will bring,” said the statement.

The company added that the original plans for use of the park had been considerably reduced and the new master plan includes several measures to revitalise parts of the park and boost public access. It includes several parklets, a boardwalk, enhanced wetlands and a skate and BMX bike park.

While the oil industry’s backing has raised campaigners’ eyebrows, ETZ Ltd said the industry’s involvement is key to ensuring the development of skills and jobs central to the ETZ’s goals. 

The section of St. Fittick’s Park  up for development was rezoned in 2022 by the Aberdeen City council in order to allow industrial use of the land. Campaigners have challenged that decision and Scotland’s highest civil court will issue a judicial review later this month.

“You can’t just switch it off”

The ETZ dispute is just one example of efforts across Scotland to navigate the planned shift away from fossil fuels to renewable energy.

Tools to support a transitioning workforce have stalled. An offshore skills passport is meant to streamline and unify the certification process for both the fossil fuel and renewable offshore industries, to enable workers to go more easily from one sector to the other. But it was delayed for years before a “roadmap to a prototype” was released in May this year.

“The people can see a future, but it’s not happening – and they can see the current reality, which is [fossil fuels] declining, and that makes it very challenging,” said Paul de Leeuw, director of the Energy Transition Institute at Aberdeen’s Robert Gordon University. 

He said the focus needs to be on manufacturing and the supply chain, as that supports about 90% of employment in renewables such as solar and wind power. “If you don’t get investment, you don’t get activity, you don’t get the jobs,” he added.

That’s the key concern for Alec Wiseman, who spoke to Climate Home while walking his dog in St. Fittick’s Park on Saturday. He seemed mostly unbothered by the climate camp, but complained it meant he couldn’t let his dog off leash. 

Alec Wiseman walks his dog in St. Fittick’s Park on 13 July (Photo: Hannah Chanatry)

A Torry resident, Wiseman worked offshore for 25 years. He said he wants the ETZ to leave the park alone – and he also wants the overall energy transition to slow down until there is a clear plan.

“The government needs to sit down with the oil companies and figure out something proper” for both the transition and the ETZ, he said, expressing scepticism about employment in wind energy. Overall, operating wind farms, once they’re up and running, does not require as many skilled workers as operating an oil and gas field. “You can’t just switch it off [the oil and gas],” he said.

Lack of planning is what worries Jake Molloy, the recently-retired regional head of the Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers Union (RMT). Before leading the union, Molloy spent 17 years working offshore, and now sits on Scotland’s Just Transition Commission. He has spent years advocating for a fair deal on behalf of workers and local communities.

“We need to do that value-sharing piece, that community-sharing piece, which was lost with oil and gas,” he said, referencing the privatisation of the industry in the 1980s. Right now, he says, communities that bear the brunt of the impact of oil and gas production don’t see the majority of the benefits – those flow to corporations. “If we allow that to happen again, we’re a million miles away from a just transition,” he warned.

UK court ruling provides ammo for anti-fossil fuel lawyers worldwide

Molloy also thinks the investment and jobs promised by the ETZ are not realistic, because previous changes to government policies caused too much whiplash, making investors shaky. However, he is curious about what will come from Labour’s announcement of Great British Energy, described as a “publicly-owned clean energy company” headquartered in Scotland.  He also hopes to see climate change addressed on a crisis footing, similar to the approach to the COVID pandemic.

There are indications of renewed momentum on renewable energy in the UK. The Labour government has already lifted an effective ban on onshore wind in England and brought together a net-zero task force led by the former head of the UK’s Climate Change Committee,  Chris Stark. 

“In the context of an unprecedented climate emergency,” the ETZ said in a statement, “there are widespread calls from government and industry for energy transition activities to be accelerated.”

But, for many, it is still too soon to know whether that shift will materialise, and be implemented in a just way.

“The opportunities are there,” said MSP Chapman. But, she added, “it requires political and social will to make it happen and that’s the big challenge.”

(Reporting by Hannah Chanatry; editing by Joe Lo and Megan Rowling)

The post Scottish oil-town plan for green jobs sparks climate campers’ anger over local park appeared first on Climate Home News.

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis has signed a law to allow wildlife authorities to reintroduce the North American wolverine to the state. Under the law Colorado Parks and Wildlife is expected to create new rules for a wolverine reintroduction program, as well as set guidelines for compensating ranchers and farmers for potential financial losses from any damage to livestock. (Wolverines typically prey on rabbits and other small mammals but have been known to take down animals are large as elk or moose; experts say they rarely prey on livestock.)

Colorado has been attempting to reintroduce wolverines for nearly 15 years. The state first floated a potential program in 2010, but officials opted to reintroduce lynx first. The state wildlife agency estimates Colorado is now home to as many as 250 lynx.

The Northern American wolverine’s natural habitat includes snowy, cold climates. They’ve traditionally been found in the northern Rockies and North Cascade mountain ranges and parts of Alaska and Canada. However, due to aggressive hunting, climate change, and habitat fragmentation, they have been virtually eliminated across the United States. In November 2023 the North American wolverine received federal protection as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act. Meanwhile, the species has recently started to expand its range — one wandering wolverine was even spotted last year near Portland, Oregon, and may still be patrolling the region.

Most people will never have an opportunity to see reclusive wolverines in the wild, but they’ve appeared several times in the pages of The Revelator. Here’s some of our previous coverage of this fascinating species:

What’s Needed to Save Wolverines? A New Study Has Answers

Wolverines are notoriously elusive, which has made them hard to study. And harder to protect.

Often dwelling in high mountain reaches and denning in deep snow, wolverines (Gulo gulo) prefer to stay away from people. Although evidence has long suggested their populations have declined, some scientists and policymakers have, for years, fallen back on a common trope that not enough is known about them to warrant protective action.

But a new study published in Global Ecology and Conservation flips this narrative — and renews the call for conservation.

“It turns out we actually know a lot more than we thought we did about this creature,” says Aerin Jacob, a conservation scientist at the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative.

Read more.

Carnivore Conservation Is Tougher in the Mountains

When the Yakama Nation detected a wolverine on Washington’s Mt. Adams in 2005, outside the animal’s known distribution, Jocelyn Akins wanted to learn more. Was it part of a population that hadn’t been previously known or a lone animal seeking new territory?

To answer those questions, Akins, who had previously studied wolverines and grizzly bears in the Rocky Mountains, launched the Cascades Carnivore Project in 2008. Studying these elusive and rare mountain carnivores is no easy feat. After setting up remote camera traps with the help of friends and other volunteers, it was 15 months before they got their first photograph of a wolverine. And it wasn’t until 2018 when field researchers working with Akins documented the first female wolverine in 75 years in Washington’s South Cascade Mountains.

Read more.

A Wolverine Feasts — on Fish?

Wolverine is Gulo gulo; the glutton so nice they named it twice. Across their range, they are known to eat goats, grouse, goose eggs and everything between. People have been picking apart their scat for half a century. I had never heard of anyone finding fish scales.

In the coming days, to my amazement, Nimbus marched back to the channel and sat at its center for hours, accumulating GPS locations at a baffling rate. From camp, I inspected our photos of the barren ice, imagining him there. What on earth was he doing?

Read more.

Road to Nowhere: Highways Pose Existential Threat to Wolverines

This is not a good time to be a wolverine.

The infamously scrappy, snow-adapted mustelid — a relation of badgers, martens and otters — is barely hanging on in the contiguous United States, where its population has dipped to mere hundreds. Decades of habitat loss and trapping reduced the wolverine’s numbers, and now diminishing snowpack from climate change is adding insult to injury.

And we can add one more surprising threat to the list: roads.

Yes, even though wolverines thrive in remote, snowy wildernesses, roads can still pose a problem — but perhaps not in the way you might think.

Read more.

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The post Wolverines Continue Their Comeback — This Time in Colorado appeared first on The Revelator.

An international body of botanists voted Thursday to rename more than 200 species of plants, fungi, and algae whose scientific names include variations of the word "caffra," an Arabic word for "infidel" that is used as a racial slur against Black people.

Read more on E360 →

Let me preface this by saying that what Sen. J.D. Vance really believes about anything is uncertain given his flip-flops on major matters ranging from whether climate change is real to whether the guy who picked him as his running mate is “America’s Hitler.” His stance of no-abortions-no exceptions-in-any-state-even-for-raped-10-year-olds makes it seem as if he’s jockeying to be Commander Fred Waterford […]

The post JD Vance has rancid views on everything – energy and environment, too appeared first on Red, Green, and Blue.

Foteini Simic, 16 years old, and Petros Kalosakas, 18 years old, are high-school students and Greenpeace volunteers from Athens, Greece.  

There are few moments in life that count forever. Choosing who (and if) to marry, becoming a parent, buying a house… Before all of these come the last years of the Greek Lykeio (senior high school) and the critical final exams held during the month of June. The grades one gets at the end of those three years give shape to all the life milestones to come.  

This year’s exams – especially their final days, June 11-13 – were for sure memorable… Temperatures soared to 43C in the month of June in much of the country – an unprecedented occurrence in our lifetime, which forced us to go through this important rite of passage at the end of high school in unbearable conditions.  

Difficulty to focus and breathe, dry mouths during oral exams, stifling heat slowing one’s handwriting, and temperatures that the human body cannot endure for long – these were not the ideal conditions for a successful graduation.  

But the heatwave that messed up our graduation exams is not just bad luck. It is the result of very bad decisions. Recent studies have attributed Greece’s searing heat and ensuing wildfires of the past years to climate change. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concludes that the burning of fossil fuels is a primary cause for the excessive heating and rapidly rising temperatures.

Saudi visa crackdown left heatwave-hit Hajj pilgrims scared to ask for help

This year’s heatwave was not only intense, but earlier than in previous years. As schools close for three months in the summer when the summer heat is high, there is normally not much need for air conditioning and most public schools don’t have more than ceiling fans to cool off.  

The climate crisis has become an unfair obstacle to our individual prospects, affecting our entire generation across countries and continents. Of course, we will work hard to go through all the precious moments that life can offer, but it will be impossible to look back at this boiling month of June and ignore how badly it impacted our grades – and our future.  

This might be a year that fossil fuels, and the companies that profit out of them, stole our opportunity to make memories and build a bright future. 

Climate chaos hitting children

What we have missed in Greece this year pales in comparison to what others around the world have lost. Millions are displaced by floods in Bangladesh, while wildfires and storms claim victims from the Caribbean to China and Canada.  

Children are often those more severely affected: we’re living through a global decline in the provision of education, with the number of children missing out on schooling inflating to a quarter billion. Extreme heat waves, fuelled by fossil fuel companies, threaten our generation’s future. In our times, the climate crisis is no longer just a warning. It is a harsh reality that is affecting our daily lives. 

Climate chaos is real – and we are already facing its impacts. Yet governments have failed to move beyond fossil fuels and continue to depend on oil and gas companies, whose profits have been going strong, at an average of $3 billion a day for the last 50 years.  

UK court ruling provides ammo for anti-fossil fuel lawyers worldwide

Big oil and gas majors like Shell, TotalEnergies, and ENI have known about the impacts of climate change for decades. Yet even though they kept making record profits – they never devoted their talents and resources to fix the problem. They didn’t use their political ties to ring the alarm bell. They rather invested millions and millions in greenwashing and denial.  

Many others knew as well. Even our grandparents knew the lines of Greek singer Cat Stevens (today Yusuf Islam): “You roll on roads… pumping petrol gas… But they just go on and on and it seems that you can’t get off.” It was impossible to ignore.  

Now it’s definitely time to jump off the fossil fuel wagon. Our generation must devote all its energies to raise awareness of how climate chaos is affecting us all, and to mobilise more people to support climate and environmental action. Alternatives must be pursued, and historical polluters must pay for all that they’ve taken from us – including our future. 

 

The post To keep its profits, Big Oil stole our future  appeared first on Climate Home News.

As delegates arrived at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee earlier this week to officially nominate former president Donald Trump as their 2024 candidate, a right-wing policy think tank held an all-day event nearby. The Heritage Foundation, a key sponsor of the convention and a group that has been influencing Republican presidential policy since the 1980s, gathered its supporters to tout Project 2025, a 900-plus-page policy blueprint that seeks to fundamentally restructure the federal government. 

Dozens of conservative groups contributed to Project 2025, which recommends changes that would touch every aspect of American life and transform federal agencies — from the Department of Defense to the Department of Interior to the Federal Reserve. Although it has largely garnered attention for its proposed crackdowns on human rights and individual liberties, the blueprint would also undermine the country’s extensive network of environmental and climate policies and alter the future of American fossil fuel production, climate action, and environmental justice. 

Under President Joe Biden’s direction, the majority of the federal government’s vast system of departments, agencies, and commissions have belatedly undertaken the arduous task of incorporating climate change into their operations and procedures. Two summers ago, Biden also signed the Inflation Reduction Act, the biggest climate spending law in U.S. history with the potential to help drive greenhouse gas emissions down 42 percent below 2005 levels. 

President Biden signs the Inflation Reduction Act into law. Drew Angerer / Getty Images

Project 2025 seeks to undo much of that progress by slashing funding for government programs across the board, weakening federal oversight and policymaking capabilities, rolling back legislation passed during Biden’s first term, and eliminating career personnel. The policy changes it suggests — which include executive orders that Trump could implement single-handedly, regulatory changes by federal agencies, and legislation that would require congressional approval — would make it extremely difficult for the United States to fulfill the climate goals it has committed to under the 2015 Paris Agreement. 

“It’s real bad,” said David Willett, senior vice president of communications for the environmental advocacy group the League of Conservation Voters. “This is a real plan, by people who have been in the government, for how to systematically take over, take away rights and freedoms, and dismantle the government in service of private industry.”  

Trump has sought to distance himself from the blueprint. “Some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal,” he wrote in a social media post last week. 

However, at least 140 people who worked in the Trump administration contributed to Project 2025, and policy experts and environmental advocates fear Project 2025 will play an influential role in shaping GOP policy if Trump is reelected in November. Some of the blueprint’s recommendations are echoed in the Republican National Convention’s official party platform, and Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts says he is “good friends” with Trump’s new running mate, Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio. Previous Heritage Foundation roadmaps have successfully dictated presidential agendas; 64 percent of the policy recommendations the foundation put out in 2016 had been implemented or considered under Trump one year into his term. The Heritage Foundation declined to provide a comment for this story.  

A Heritage Foundation welcome sign for the Republican National Convention at the Milwaukee Mitchell International Airport. Michael M. Santiago / Getty Images

Broadly speaking, Project 2025 proposals aim to scale down the federal government and empower states. The document calls for “unleashing all of America’s energy resources” by eliminating federal restrictions on fossil fuel drilling on public lands, curtailing federal investments in renewable energy technologies, and easing environmental permitting restrictions and procedures for new fossil fuel projects such as power plants. “What’s been designed here is a project that ensures a fossil fuel agenda, both in the literal and figurative sense,” said Craig Segall, the vice president of the climate-oriented political advocacy group Evergreen Action. 

Within the Department of Energy, offices dedicated to clean energy research and implementation would be eliminated, and energy efficiency guidelines and requirements for household appliances would be scrapped. The environmental oversight capacities of the Department of the Interior and the Environmental Protection Agency would be curbed significantly or eliminated altogether, preventing these agencies from tracking methane emissions, managing environmental pollutants and chemicals, and conducting climate change research. 

In addition to these major overhauls, Project 2025 advocates for getting rid of smaller and lesser-known federal programs and statutes that safeguard public health and environmental justice. It recommends eliminating the Endangerment Finding — the legal mechanism that requires the EPA to curb emissions and air pollutants from vehicles and power plants, among other industries, under the Clean Air Act. It also recommends axing government efforts to assess the social cost of carbon, or the damage each additional ton of carbon emitted causes. And it seeks to prevent agencies from assessing the “co-benefits,” or the knock-on positive health impacts, of their policies, such as better air quality. 

“When you think about who is going to be hit the hardest by pollution, whether it’s conventional air water and soil pollution or climate change, it is very often low-income communities and communities of color,” said Rachel Cleetus, the policy director with the climate and energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit science advocacy organization. “The undercutting of these kinds of protections is going to have a disproportionate impact on these very same communities.” 

Chemical plants and factories line the roads and suburbs of the area known as “Cancer Alley” in Louisiana. Giles Clarke / Getty Images

Other proposals would wreak havoc on the nation’s ability to prepare for and respond to climate disasters. Project 2025 suggests eliminating the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service housed therein and replacing those organizations with private companies. The blueprint appears to leave the National Hurricane Center intact, saying the data it collects should be “presented neutrally, without adjustments intended to support any one side in the climate debate.” But the National Hurricane Center pulls much of its data from the National Weather Service, as do most other private weather service companies, and eliminating public weather data could devastate Americans’ access to accurate weather forecasts. “It’s preposterous,” said Rob Moore, a policy analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Action Fund. “There’s no problem that’s getting addressed with this solution, this is a solution in search of some problem.” 

The document also advocates moving the Federal Emergency Management Administration, which marshals federal disaster response, out from under the umbrella of the Department of Homeland Security, where it has been housed for more than 20 years, and into the Department of the Interior or the Department of Transportation. “All of the agencies within the Department of Interior are federal land management agencies that own lots of land and manage those resources on behalf of the federal government,” Moore said. “Why would you put FEMA there? I can’t even fathom why that is a starting point.” 

The blueprint recommends eliminating the National Flood Insurance Program and moving flood insurance to private insurers. That notion skates right over the fact that the federal program was initially established because private insurers found that it was economically unfeasible to insure the nation’s flood-prone homes — long before climate change began wreaking havoc on the insurance market. 

Despite the alarming implications of most of Project 2025’s climate-related proposals, it also recommends a small number of policies that climate experts said are worth considering. Its authors call for shifting the costs of natural disasters from the federal government to states. That’s not a bad conversation to have, Moore pointed out. “I think there’s people within FEMA who feel the same way,” he said. The federal government currently shoulders at least 75 percent of the costs of national disaster recovery, paving the way for development and rebuilding in risky areas. “You are disincentivizing states and local governments from making wise decisions about where and house to build because they know the federal government is going to pick up the tab for whatever mistake they make,” Moore said.  

The remnants of a neighborhood after being battered by Hurricane Laura in 2020 outside of Lake Charles, Louisiana. Photo by Stringer / AFP via Getty Images

Quillan Robinson, a senior advisor with ConservAmerica who has worked with Republicans in Washington, D.C., on crafting emissions policies, was heartened by the authors’ call for an end to what they termed “unfair bias against the nuclear industry.” Nuclear energy is a reliable source of carbon-free energy, but it has been plagued by security and public health concerns, as well as staunch opposition from some environmental activists. “We know it’s a crucial technology for decarbonization,” Robinson said, noting that there’s growing bipartisan interest in the energy source among lawmakers in Congress. 

An analysis conducted by the United Kingdom-based Carbon Brief found that a Trump presidency would lead to 400 billion metric tons of additional emissions in the U.S. by 2030 — the emissions output of the European Union and Japan combined.

Above all else, Segall, from Evergreen Action, is worried about the effect Project 2025 would have on the personnel who make up the federal government. Much of the way the administrative state works is safeguarded in the minds of career staff who pass their knowledge on to the next cadre of federal workers. When this institutional knowledge is curbed, as it was by budget cuts and hostile management during Trump’s first term, the government loses crucial information that helps it run. The personnel “scatter,” he said, disrupts bottom-line operations and grinds the government to a halt. 

Although Project 2025’s proposals are radical, Segall said that its effect on public servants would echo a pattern that has been playing out for decades. “This is a common theme in Republican administrations dating back to presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan,” he said. “What you do is you break the government, make it very hard for the government to function, and then you loudly announce that the government can’t do anything.”

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline What Project 2025 would do to climate policy in the US on Jul 19, 2024.

If all goes according to plan, by the end of the year, some 170 countries will finalize the world’s first legally binding treaty to curtail plastic pollution. Its success will depend in no small part on money: creating a funding pipeline so that signatories, especially in the Global South, can execute the promises they agree to.

For the moment, the specifics of this financing remain bound up in diplomatic haggling. Still, countries broadly agree that billions of dollars are a necessary, if modest, starting point; modeling studies have pegged the need anywhere between $3 trillion and $17 trillion. Disagreements center on how to raise it, who should administer it, and what to spend it on.

But these differences are unlikely to sink a treaty whose urgency has never been more apparent to national leaders. Each year some 20 million metric tons of plastic, roughly the mass of 200 aircraft carriers, enter the environment. Microscopic shreds of the stuff are increasingly found not just in nature’s remotest reaches, including Mount Everest and the Mariana Trench, but throughout the human body, with unknown consequences. And with production of this petrochemical-derived material set to skyrocket – possibly tripling by 2060 — plastic pollution and climate action are increasingly considered joined at the hip.

Whatever form the treaty takes, it’s likely to prioritize one popular line item: expanding waste management, like trash systems and recycling, in the Global South. A good place to start addressing the problem, the thinking goes, is to get it out of nature and into landfills and recycling plants. Worldwide, 2.7 billion people live without regular refuse collection. As garbage volumes surge across the developing world, growing quantities of degrading plastic litter filter into rivers, lakes, and oceans.

This has put the spotlight on waste management as a low-tech, politically palatable way to curtail plastic pollution. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, or OECD, which represents 38 industrial countries, says a comprehensive package of measures — tackling plastic’s whole lifespan, from production to disposal — could eliminate 95 percent of the pollution by 2040. Such steps include taxing plastic, banning some single-use items, and redesigning goods so they don’t have to be thrown in the trash. But it also called a $2.1 trillion expansion of old-fashioned waste infrastructure, like landfills, recycling plants, and the logistics systems that supply them, a “crucial prerequisite.” To meet the goals, it estimated, the world must recycle about 40 percent of its plastic. Today it recycles about 9 percent.

A key target is Southeast Asia, where roughly a third of all marine plastic originates. There are several reasons for this. Rising living standards have boosted consumption of consumer goods, like soft drinks and takeout meals, packaged in single-use plastic. Europe, Japan, and the U.S. continue to offload hundreds of millions of tons of plastic waste to the region each year, not all of it legally. With many population centers near coastlines and waterways, any mismanaged waste gets a free ride to the sea.

The governments of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN, have not invested nearly enough to fix this, mostly because they cannot afford to. Landfills, garbage trucks and recycling systems cost a lot, but aren’t very profitable. For cash-strapped governments facing multiple crises – pandemics, climate disasters, poverty – building even basic waste infrastructure can quickly fall by the wayside. Many of the 670 million people who live in the association’s member states have no one to take their trash.

People in boats collect plastic from the heavily polluted Citarum River at Batujajar in Bandung, West Java, on June 12. Timur Matahair / AFP via Getty Images

“So what do you do when it’s not collected?” said Umesh Madhavan, research director at The Circulate Initiative, a nonprofit focused on ocean plastic pollution and the circular economy. “You dump it or dig a pit and bury it. Or you try and burn it.”

That is a common outcome for much of the refuse in Southeast Asia, where by one estimate, only about a third of waste gets any form of management — like landfills, recycling plants or incinerators. The number is closer to 100 percent in the U.S. and other wealthy nations.

For that reason, research suggests, basic waste management can bring outsize benefits. Last year a study by data scientists at the University of California at Santa Barbara identified five relatively simple and straightforward actions that could go a long way towards eliminating 89 percent of mismanaged plastic globally; improving trash and recycling systems were among them. In the OECD’s most ambitious scenario — which envisions a 95 percent reduction in plastic leakage by 2040 — these types of measures deliver three-quarters of the drop.

“Downstream” solutions — that is, addressing plastic at the end of its life — will find supporters in Southeast Asia, where the governments of Malaysia and the Philippines have joined domestic petrochemical and manufacturing interests to promote “waste-to-energy” and “co-processing” plants as solutions to clear backlogged waste. These operations, which burn plastic to generate electricity or produce cement, are common in rich countries. But ASEAN environmentalists call them “false solutions” that release noxious and planet-warming pollutants while failing to tackle the root issues of the plastic crisis.

Some scientists and environmentalists in the developing world say a treaty centered on waste management is bound to fail. They say experience shows no number of landfills or recycling plants can contend with the volume of plastic they’re seeing. 

“Nobody is talking about the production side of things. We’re just talking about how we can deal with the waste,” said Hema Mahadevan, a public engagement campaigner for Greenpeace Malaysia. “If you really want to cut down on plastic waste, then you should really start from the top. Go to the source of the problem.”

Jorge Emmanuel, a Filipino chemical engineer and former technical advisor for the United Nations Development Program, said the Philippines’ waste systems are broken in ways infrastructure can’t fix. A 2023 study found it has the world’s highest per capita rate of plastic released to the ocean, at about 7 pounds a year. Emmanuel said the country has tough laws supporting recycling and prohibiting illegal dumps, but officials don’t enforce them. That’s why he and others are urging treaty writers to invert how they think about waste: Focus on reducing the amount of plastic in the system, with waste management as a last resort.

“I’m in public health, and we say prevention is better than cure,” he said. “If you put money into preventing the problem, you’ll spend less to take care of the problem afterward.”

He and others with extensive firsthand experience with the region’s plastic pollution have a few suggestions for those crafting the treaty. The first is to direct money and supportive policies toward entrepreneurial solutions.

Southeast Asia, for instance, has in recent years seen a blossoming of projects and small-scale enterprises that hint at what a low-plastic economy might look like. On the Vietnamese resort island of Phu Quoc, a startup called Greenjoy has persuaded local businesses to replace 1 million plastic straws with those made of lepironia, a local grass.

An initiative in the Philippines has equipped 1200 sari-sari stores, the local equivalent of bodegas or corner stores, to dispense liquid detergent, dishwashing soap, and fabric conditioner in bulk to customers who bring their own containers. The products are made by local manufacturers rather than global corporations, and they’re cheaper. The project directors claim this has replaced thousands of thin plastic packages called sachets that are virtually impossible to recycle.

Members of Greenpeace Indonesia stage a protest against the plastic waste generated by Unilever’s products outside the company’s office in Tangerang, a suburb of Jakarta, on June 20. Yasuyoshi Chiba / AFP via Getty Images

But such efforts have struggled to scale, often for lack of money. Businesses tackling plastic pollution often fall into a “missing middle” where they’re too big to receive microfinance, venture or philanthropic funding, but too risky for bank loans, said Madhavan. He and others said this financing gap could be plugged with funding from the plastic treaty, or by cash from corporations that need to comply with regulations.

New financing tools could help. In January the World Bank launched an experimental bond that will raise $14 million to help community-recycling projects in Indonesia and Ghana expand. The more plastic these projects collect, the more money the bond’s investors will make.

But novel financial methods can bring novel problems. The World Bank-funded projects will make money in part by selling plastic credits, a relatively young instrument of questioned effectiveness. They work something like carbon credits. A local project gathers plastic litter, disposes it properly, and a government, corporation, or other entity that wants credit for that cleanup pays the project for what it collected. Advocates say this can offer a quick injection of capital into developing countries with overwhelmed waste systems. Verra, the world’s biggest issuer of carbon credits, and companies like it are urging plastic-treaty negotiators to help this new tool scale up.

Environmentalists blast this idea, saying the credits are too easy to game for projects of dubious environmental value, like co-processing. Even if such credits incentivize local junk cleanups, they argue, they’re not enough to remake a system that pours so much plastic on developing countries in the first place.

A global plastic fund also could mobilize the world’s largest recycling workforce. Most of the world’s plastic recycling is not done by municipalities or corporations, but people who salvage things from the trash as a livelihood. There are some 20 million waste pickers in the world, mostly in the Global South; together their efforts account for 60 percent of the plastic recycled on Earth.

Indumathi, a woman in Bengaluru, India, began waste picking about two decades ago after falling into medical debt. She started out going street to street, but as the years passed she wondered how to make this low-margin business safer and more profitable for herself. She saved enough money to open her own scrap shop. She helped convince the city to give waste pickers identification cards to avoid harassment by cops and passersby.

Today she leads a recycling business with 88 employees and 10 collection trucks. Her ardent advocacy has secured contracts from the local government to collect recyclables in several neighborhoods. She suggested money from the plastic treaty could provide workers with more protective equipment, better working conditions, and opportunities for career advancement like she had.

“What has happened to my life is just transition,” Indumathi said through a translator provided by Hasiru Dala, a social impact organization that advocates for waste pickers. “I want the same for all waste pickers everywhere.”

Finally, any funding effort could go into building the hidden infrastructure that makes treaties work. For example, Emmanuel said, many developing countries will not have the resources to write their own action plans on plastic — nationally defined strategies on how to tackle the problem, as with treaties on climate and biodiversity — and should get funding and technical support for them.

Or if the treaty ends up requiring countries to ban plastics that contain chemicals linked to cancer, but doesn’t specify further, “developing countries would need technical and financial support to create or strengthen their scientific infrastructure to make determinations of what is cancer-causing,” Emmanuel said in an email. That could come as equipment or training for Philippine scientists, for example.

Money doesn’t buy everything, of course. Erin Simon, vice president and head of plastic waste and business at the World Wildlife Fund, said plastic-reduction pilots around the world have fizzled out because there was no policy to support them. She wants to see a treaty that includes a range of pro-transition measures — like banning some single-use plastics and making corporations financially responsible for the fate of their packaging — that will give innovators more of a fighting chance.

“You have tons of levers, but the challenge lies in pulling all the levers together,” she said. “Therein lies the hope of the treaty.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline One way a plastics treaty could help the Global South: Fund waste management on Jul 19, 2024.

As a kid, Mary Kunesh watched her dad travel to reservations in northern Minnesota, working as a pro bono attorney for tribal nations who needed legal assistance. She heard stories from her grandfather about her family’s history, filled with brave Lakota women like her aunt Josephine Gates Kelly, the first tribal chair of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. 

As a child, Kunesh learned how the U.S. forced Native people from their homelands, agreed to provide housing, education, and economic opportunities in exchange, then reneged on those agreements. She learned how settlers changed the landscape by erasing forests and eliminating buffalo, and how dam construction displaced Indigenous peoples, again, making it possible for mills and factories to pollute the water and air. 

But as Kunesh got older, she realized that history wasn’t widely known: Non-native people around her often accepted reservations as normal and didn’t realize just how tribal nations arrived there. 

Now, Kunesh is the first Native woman to serve in the Minnesota state Senate.

Last year, she authored legislation that returned sacred land to the Upper Sioux community, and this year she successfully pushed through a bill to give land back to the Mille Lacs Band of the Ojibwe. She is also working on two bills to return state land in White Earth State Forest back to the White Earth Nation and land in Upper Red Lake back to the Red Lake Nation. The latter two bills died this year after generating lots of pushback locally, but Kunesh said she doesn’t plan to give up. 

“There are a lot of people who say, ‘Well. that was then, we should just forget about the past and move on.’ But no, legally, those lands belong to the tribe, and they should be returned to the tribe to be the steward of the land,”  she said. 

Grist spoke with Kunesh about what motivates her, and what she sees as the future of the landback movement. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

State Senator Mary Kunesh speaks at the State Capitol in St. Paul, Minnesota, with members of the People of Color and Indigenous Caucus in 2023. Trisha Ahmed / AP Photo

Q. How would you describe the connection between the landback movement and climate change? 

A. A lot of the lands here in Minnesota that we’re asking to be returned have been stripped of all of their timber. They’re commercialized — the lake and the shorelines are commercialized, and have a lot of people coming and going and bringing in invasive species, not treating the environment the way that they should. When it was just the Indigenous people on the lands, the lands were healthy, the four-legged animals were in sync with the seasons and it was a symbiotic relationship with the human beings. It’s important that we allow the tribes to go back to their Indigenous roots of caring for the lands, and I think we’ll see a really positive outcome from doing just that. 

I was in Washington, D.C., last week and ended up sitting next to an Anishinaabe woman from Red Lake that I had been corresponding with, and we had a really good discussion about how important it is to retain the stewardship of the lands to the Indigenous people. I didn’t know this, but northern Minnesota used to have a very strong and robust caribou population. And now they are all gone. The whitetail deer have replaced them, but it’s because all of the white oak forests have been cut down. And those white oak trees, the lichen likes to grow on it and that’s what the caribou ate. So once those forests were gone, the caribou were gone. That’s another example of how, through colonization and timber destruction, we pushed away a whole part of the environmental cycle in northern Minnesota. So it’s vitally important that the Indigenous people are able to recover their lands and manage and care for the lands the way that the ancestors have done for hundreds of years.

Q. One of the bills you succeeded in passing this year requires Minnesota to offer to sell state lands within a reservation’s borders, or just outside, to that tribe first, at its appraised value. Why did you push for that measure? 

A. I think it is really important because, number one, it allows the tribe to expand tribal lands that are connected to them, but it also helps to provide a buffer around those tribal lands. Often these are lands that might be wooded land, these might be natural bogs, they might be wild rice lakes. They might be the site of medicinal and sacred plants that have been here forever. I think it honors the sovereign rights of the nations, that they too have the right to to purchase lands just like anybody else. And why would we not at least provide that? Sometimes those lands sit there for decades as tax forfeited land and it’s not generating any taxes at all. And this is certainly a way to help some of those counties that tell us time and time again, “We’re the poorest county in Minnesota, and don’t take our lands.” This is a way to work with those counties to generate the income that they need.

Q. What would you say to critics who say that Indigenous people shouldn’t have to buy back their lands?

A. I would agree with them. In general I don’t believe that the tribes should have to pay for those lands at all. But if that’s part of the deal and the tribe agrees to it, then they should be able to express and use their sovereignty to make their own individual agreements. 

Q. What has been surprising to you about this work? 

A. We have a really strong base of support by non-Indigenous people here in Minnesota. Many of the faith-based organizations, environmental organizations, those that are sensitive to the inequities and the racism in Minnesota toward our Indigenous people, are very much in support of these landback bills and very happy to come in and write letters to the newspaper, and come and testify when we have hearings at the Capitol. So this isn’t just an Indigenous-only movement. There are many, many organizations and individuals who do not identify as Native who who support the work that we do. 

These [faith-based] organizations look to the doctrine of discovery, the papal decree that says to send all these explorers out and any land that they touch can be claimed for whatever country they represent — that you can take all the riches, that everything you find you can claim for country. 

They recognize the injustice of this and the destruction to the Indigenous people that lived on the lands before Europeans came to it. It’s an opportunity to not undo but pay the piper for what happened to the Indigenous people, recognizing the fact that they never got their due for all these hundreds of years. And so for them, I think they feel it really is a moral issue and are willing to stick their necks and, oftentimes, their money and their time out for this.

Q. What advice do you have for other Indigenous advocates who are hoping to make landback and similar goals happen in their own communities?  

A. I think the first thing that I would counsel our people in — and this is a really hard thing for most of them — is to become involved in the community. For so long, Native people were not encouraged or welcomed into city council or school boards or those positions of decision-making for the community. They felt unwelcome. They felt racially separated. They felt threatened, and they didn’t feel heard or recognized. And with the rise in Native folks starting to run for these positions, I think has made a really big difference. 

I’m the first Native woman to serve in the Minnesota Senate in history. And that’s a sad thing. You know, people say, “Oh, hooray, the first, the first!” But we have to stop being the first. We have to be the second, fourth, eighth, 50th. When I was elected to the Minnesota House, there were only two Native women before me that served in the House. And so my suggestion would be, please, start stepping up and serving in ways in your community, not only to show that tribal people are involved in their community, but they also bring such a unique voice to the issues at hand. And it might be hard to speak about those issues, especially when they’re really personal, it might be hard to advocate for your people when you’re outnumbered and historically have been treated so poorly. But the more of us that get into positions where we can talk about the hardships and the historic trauma that our people have had and work for positive change, I think it will serve all of our communities, Indigenous anywhere, whether it’s South America, Australia, New Zealand, North America, wherever — even the Sámi people over in Finland. But we do have to start showing up, and we do have to start putting ourselves in positions where we can make decisions that are going to be good not just for our own folks, but for all of the communities that we represent or the states that we represent. 

Be present. Be vocal. Write letters to the editor about important issues and work with your community in ways that are going to build trust and collaboration so when an opportunity to do things like returning land, when there’s a huge opposition, maybe you’re in a position to speak to it or advocate for it or educate people around the issues. But we can’t sit back anymore and not participate. And the other thing is please participate in elections and know who represents you and are they representing you and your community in the best way? And if not, either become that candidate or support candidates that represent your values and your goals in life, not just for today or tomorrow or the next 10 years, but like we say, for the next seven generations. 

Q. If all goes well with landback efforts, what could happen next? 

A. What I would really like to see is the ability for the tribes to manage the lands that they were promised, and that the United States and Minnesota validate and honor the treaties as they were written and then not get in the way or not try to micromanage the tribes when those lands are returned. Let them do it through their own, sovereign governments. I think we will be a better state for that. I think environmentally, we certainly will. Especially when we are concerned about mining in Minnesota and the waterways of Minnesota. The last thing we want to see is any of those things polluted or destroyed, but also we could see the return to some of the Indigenous lands, the bog lands, the prairie lands, the woodlands, that support the environment in a really good, healthy way. Through co-managing or co-stewarding Minnesota will become a healthier place, a happier place, and a place where the racial tensions that have existed — that most people won’t acknowledge — become almost nonexistent.

This story has been updated to clarify that Kunesh is the first Native woman to serve in the Minnesota state Senate and her aunt is Josephine Gates Kelly.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The state senator leading efforts to return land to tribal nations on Jul 19, 2024.

James Lange remembers the day he and a team of botanists and conservationists gathered at a rock formation encircled by a thicket of mangroves in Key Largo, Florida. They’d come to the nation’s last wild stand of a rare cacti to confront the inevitable. With sea level rise bringing the Atlantic Ocean ever closer to the withering plants, the group had made the difficult decision to remove the cacti’s remaining green material, preserve it in nurseries, and hope that it might one day be reintroduced in the wild.

Three years later, research published last week reveals what Lange and the others long suspected: The demise of the Key Largo tree cactus is the first recorded case of sea level rise driving a local species to extinction in the United States. Its collapse was a blow to Lange, a research botanist at Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in Coral Gables who coauthored the study. “It was one of the things that made the Keys so special,” he said. “Just a big, bold, beautiful plant.”

Tree cactus is a suitable name for Pilosocereus millspaughii, known to reach towering heights, yield white flowers that entice nectar-hungry bats and produce reddish-purple fruits for birds and mammals to feast upon. Although the cactus still grows on a few scattered islands in the Caribbean, it was restricted to a single population in North America, a thriving stand of 150 plants discovered in the Florida Keys in 1992. By 2021, just six ailing stems remained. 

It is a monumental loss, scientists say, in no small measure because of what it signifies. Anthropogenic planetary warming is no longer solely endangering human communities. It is eradicating the very species that make up the fabric of our natural world. 

“This existential threat that everyone’s aware of, seeing the actual evidence of it happening, giving an expectation of what we can expect moving forward, is important,” said Lange. He remembers how “everything was just looking horrible,” as the sea rapidly encroached on the cluster of plants. “We just knew there was no long-term hope for this population in this area,” he said. “There’s no shortage of plants in the Keys that are threatened with this same fate.”

From the critically imperiled Big Pine partridge pea to the jumping prickly apple, any number of coastal species in the Florida Keys could be wiped out next in one of the places most vulnerable to sea level rise. And unlike the Key Largo cacti, which survives, if only barely, elsewhere, several of them are the last of their kind. 

Staff from Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection removed all remaining green material in 2021 after it became clear the population was not going to survive. Jennifer Possley

“It’s very alarming,” said Marcelo Ardón, who studies coastal ecology at North Carolina State University. “Climate change is compounding all of these different drivers that makes these populations even more vulnerable.” 

A major herbivory event, in which a substantial amount of the plants were eaten by animals, stressed the Key Largo cactus species in 2015. (Researchers suspect it might have occurred as a result of tidal flooding causing a shortage of freshwater, driving a gaggle of thirsty racoons or other wildlife to gnaw on the stems.) The threat was magnified by an ensuing series of recurring king tides, in addition to storm surge and damage wrought by Hurricane Irma. Jennifer Possley, lead author of the new study, considers it a possible “bellwether for how other low-lying coastal species will respond to climate change.”

But on a planet being reshaped by warming, plants aren’t the only populations facing a looming threat of extinction. A decade ago, the Center for Biological Diversity identified 233 federally-protected species in 23 coastal states as most at-risk from sea level rise. The Key deer, loggerhead sea turtle, Delmarva Peninsula fox squirrel, Western snowy plover and Hawaiian monk seal topped that list. Today, restoration efforts have kept these five endangered species from being snuffed out, but their future is increasingly in question, as each remains threatened by habitats ceding to rising seas. 

Globally, climate change has already led to the eradication of flora and fauna ranging from the Bramble Cay melomys, a rodent in Australia that was the first confirmed mammal driven to extinction by global warming, to the “functional extinction” of elkhorn corals in the Keys and several bog species in Germany. Some estimates suggest that, if emissions continue on their current trajectory, roughly 1 in 3 species of animals and plants may go extinct by 2070.

The loss of any species to climate change is something plant physiologist Lewis Ziska feels deeply. Bidding farewell to the Key Largo tree cactus, in particular, is all the more meaningful for the scientist, who vividly remembers admiring the spiny cacti when visiting the Florida island chain. “It’s a beautiful plant, it’s very inspiring,” said Ziska. “So when you see it gone, there’s a sense of loss, almost a mourning.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline In a first, rising seas drove an entire species to extinction in the US on Jul 19, 2024.

In recent years, the suppression of LGBTQ+ rights in Hungary has placed Victor Orbán’s government on a collision course with European institutions. At the centre of the controversy is a 2021 law known as the “Child Protection” act. The bill has attracted international condemnation for enabling the subjugation of the rights of sexual minorities, but that is not the full story. Analysing the effects of the law shows how its complex nature has led to a stifling atmosphere of uncertainty.

Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz government are seen as outliers in the European Union because of their gender-phobic and homophobic ideology. The European Commission even took Budapest to court in 2022 over an anti-LGBTQ+ law known as the “Child Protection” act.

The controversial law, which passed on 15 June 2021 under the guise of protecting children, implicitly conflates LGBTQ+ individuals with child abusers. It also simultaneously contains a US-style registry of paedophilic sex offenders and a Russian-style ban on exposing minors to so-called LGBTQ+ propaganda in the context of sexual education and general representation in education, media, and advertisement.

The law was widely criticised domestically and abroad for undermining equality, fundamental rights, freedom of expression, and the right to information. What is more, by blurring the lines between sexual minorities and child molesters, the bill suggests that both categories deserve similar social judgement. The new law has been subjected to further criticism for not clearly defining the focal theme of “LGBTQ+ propaganda”, leaving it open to subjective interpretation and enabling confusion and potential misuse.

Since the act was ratified, Hungary has made international headlines for its LGBTQ+ censorship. While these reports often paint a picture of consistent ideological persecution of sexual minorities, the reality is that the government’s approach to censorship is far less consistent and much more complex.

What’s in the act?

The law prohibits making content available for children under the age of 18 that “promotes or displays sexuality for its own purposes, or that promotes or displays gender/sex change or homosexuality.” Further guidelines published by the main regulator – the Media Authority – stipulate that children should not be exposed to topics of gender reassignment and homosexuality if these subjects are emphasised as central, essential, or indispensable parts of the content. The recommendation also states that the presentation of such themes as social norms and appealing lifestyles constitutes propaganda, which is allegedly aimed at spreading LGBTQ+ “ideologies” and influencing minors.

Despite including provisions regarding the representation of homosexuality and transgenderism in the law, the document from the Media Authority also addresses general gestures of affection in a subsequent paragraph. Without specifying the genders or sexes involved, it states that expressions of affection such as kissing, hugging, or holding hands should not be deemed problematic as long as these gestures are not portrayed for their own sake, are not the focal point, or are not prominently featured.

While the Media Authority provides a short list of productions to be restricted, such as the American drama series The L World and Queer as Folk, or Pedro Almodóvar’s comedy-drama film All About My Mother, these explanations do not clarify what constitutes “propaganda” and what determines whether queer elements are central to a work of art. In the absence of precise definitions, accurate guidance can only be drawn from previous decisions of the Media Authority and the courts.

Inconsistent enforcement

In principle, the Media Authority does not directly supervise or control Hungarian publicity. However, it has been involved in cases that have either drawn public attention or have been pursued after reports from the Consumer Protection Authorities. Yet, the Child Protection bill is by no means uniformly enforced.

For instance, the Media Authority’s website has an easy-to-fill-out anonymous reporting form. In the six months between June 2021 and the end of the year, 84 notifications were received from citizens referring to the Child Protection act, but in the first eight months of the following year, only 12 notifications were sent.

As the regulator told journalists, none of the 96 complaints delivered by citizens was followed up with. This may explain why there was a sharp drop in the number of notifications.

The law’s effectiveness is further hampered by domestic and international legal environments. The provisions of the Media Act only apply to media service providers residing in Hungary, excluding foreign media services available in the country. Regardless, in 2022, the Media Authority objected to streaming platforms such as Netflix and Disney+. The streamers disregarded these complaints, but the Media Authority argued that these companies are “responsible” to comply with Hungarian law even though they are not obliged to do so. 

The same thing applies to social media platforms and websites hosted on non-Hungarian servers, where it is arguably more likely for children to encounter harmful content. The government and the pro-government media simply ignore this glaring contradiction. Moreover, they fail to advocate for improving children’s media literacy or creating programmes to help teachers and parents to protect children. Instead, the Media Authority targets Hungary-based curated institutions with well-defined profiles and audiences – domestic analogue media, museums, and bookshops – only to fail before the national courts.

Examples of these contradictions abound.  While Netflix, based in the Netherlands, is freely streaming the gay coming-of-age series Heartstopper, in July 2023, the Líra book distributor in Hungary was fined 30,000 euros for displaying the original Heartstopper novel in the youth literature section. The bookstore challenged the decision in court and, in February 2024, won due to a punctuation error in the law. (Although the problem was discovered last October, the government failed to replace the missing comma until recently.)

There are also other inconsistencies in the way bookshops are targeted. Líra has been fined an additional 12,500 euros for displaying the volume Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls as youth literature since the story of a transgender girl is featured among the 100 female biographies told in the volume. However, the court dismissed the case alongside the Heartstopper fine. Another bookshop was fined only 2,500 euros for the same book on February 13, 2024.

There was no argument in court about how the authorities planned to collect the fine in light of the recently lost case, nor was there an explanation for why there was such a significant difference in the amount of the fine imposed for selling the same book. Unsurprisingly, the second bookstore has also promised to take their case to court.

In the face of these developments, bookstores have repeatedly indicated that it should not be their responsibility to decide which book is punishable under the text of the ambiguous law. The vagueness of the Child Protection bill and the regulatory attention of the Media Authority risks seriously affecting bookshops’ business, which could essentially cease the distribution of some titles.

Larger businesses have their own coping mechanisms when it comes to navigating the uncertain realities of the Hungarian market. In response to a question from Amnesty International Hungary, large multinational corporations replied that their international LGBTQ+-related or Pride Month advertisement campaigns are simply not worth presenting in Hungary any longer, since they see no reason to risk penalties that can climb up to 1.2 million euros. On the other hand, the television network RTL reported regular pre-emptive consultations with the Media Authority to avoid punishment.

A public mess

The anti-LGBTQ+ law has created controversy in both national and municipal institutions. In 2023, the extreme right-wing Mi Hazánk (“Our Homeland”) party’s leader raised attention to a World Press Photo exhibition displayed in the Hungarian National Gallery that included images of elderly gay men living in a retirement home. He claimed that the national institution is breaking the child-protection law by promoting homosexuality in an exhibition without an age restriction. In reaction to these claims, the minister of culture ordered the Fidesz-appointed director of the gallery to only let legal adults visit the exhibition.

As museums have no authority to ask for visitors’ IDs, László L. Simon rejected the request. This prompted the minister of culture to fire him on the grounds of “a lack of leadership skills”. There were no further explanations about how the images in question would threaten the development of minors. Perhaps even more importantly, authorities did not address the fact that the Child Protection law has no relevant section about museum exhibitions.

L. Simon himself had voted for the Child Protection act as a member of the Hungarian parliament for Fidesz in 2021. He continued to champion the law after being fired, criticising only its loose application. The World Press Photo exhibition at the National Gallery saw record attendance after the controversy.

Parallel to the National Museum’s scandal, the Museum of Ethnography closed a section of its running exhibition featuring photographs of homosexual men to avoid possible consequences. The museum management was not held responsible in this case. However, a United Student Front activist group member who demonstrated for students’ rights and freedom in the arts, information and education received a 200-euro fine for visiting the part of the museum that was cordoned off. The student took the case to court, and a final decision is now pending.

The burden of vagueness

While this preventive practice of self-censorship can feel absurd when it is done by an institution that wishes to avoid punishment, it can amount to downright mental and psychological torture for the individual.

This was the case for Gideon Horváth, a renowned sculptor whose work is often grounded in theoretical frameworks of queer ecology or queer history. Since 2021, the artist has repeatedly faced warnings from art institutions’ authorities. In 2022, the director of an autonomous Budapest municipal museum attempted to censor Horváth’s explanatory texts from a group show.

The following year, within the framework of the Veszprém-Balaton European Capital of Culture, Horváth was invited to a residency programme. His work plan on queer ecology was accepted initially, but he later encountered pressure to remove some words to comply with the “political climate.” He refused and, after a prolonged debate, managed to have his works’ descriptions published without change.

A similar incident occurred in September 2023, in the programme of the Budapest City Gallery’s public art biennale, which initially had the support of the anti-Orbán political leadership of the Hungarian capital. Citing the Child Protection law, the vice-director of the autonomous municipal Deák17 Gallery – which was hosting a subsection of the biennale – attempted to prevent the descriptions of Horváth’s work from appearing in the exhibition.

After extensive discussion, Horváth managed to display his texts, albeit with LGBTQ+-related words blacked out. In this way, he showcased the impact of censorship in a performative manner. A similar text appeared uncensored in public space in another section of the same festival.

Subsequently, Horváth was nominated for a prestigious prize by the independent Esterházy Foundation. Dr. Júlia Fabényi, the Fidesz-appointed director of the state-funded Ludwig Museum in Budapest, is a member of the Board of Trustees that grants the prize. In defiance of Horváth’s arguments, the director decided to censor his accompanying text when the shortlisted artists’ works were exhibited in the Ludwig Museum.

In the end, Horváth won the prize, but the event hosts did not ask the winners their traditional questions. This was an apparent attempt to prevent the artist from speaking. (Since then, however, the museum has purchased some works from Horváth.)

Afterwards, Horváth reported on social media that, apart from enduring repeated censorship, he was tormented by his otherwise anti-establishment critics. They accused him of legitimising government-enforced institutional censorship by taking part in the exhibition rather than sanctioning it in protest. These censures implied that Horváth’s moral responsibility was to give up an important opportunity for his career, including the nomination, the prestigious exhibition opportunity and the chance to win the prize.

The truth, however, is that Horváth risked his future career opportunities each time he publicly revealed the details of his experience with censorship. He never received public support from leading autonomous institutions or professionals in the Hungarian cultural and political field.

The laws are a political tool designed to serve the interests of Orbán’s government by sowing division in society and distracting the public from Fidesz’s failures.

Perhaps it is this last example that best illustrates the burden placed by the extreme vagueness of the illogical law and its inconsistent application on individual creators, NGOs, publishers and other businesses. Every time they consider publishing or displaying something that can be linked even marginally to the portrayal of sexual minorities, they face extreme uncertainty.

And yet, despite the government’s anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric, the acceptance of LGBTQ+ people in Hungary has not decreased in recent years. In fact, the results of an IPSOS 2023 international survey show the exact opposite: support for same-sex marriage in Hungary has risen from 30 to 47 per cent in the past 10 years. In the same period, support for adoption by same-sex couples rose from 42 to 59 per cent. Has the entire anti-LGBTQ+ propaganda failed?

An instrument of division and distraction

When the Child Protection law was passed in 2021, it sparked widespread speculation about whether the government had any intention to enforce it or whether it was just a calculated component of Fidesz’s communication strategy aimed at dividing the public.

Even if we accept the government’s explanation that the law is meant to protect children, its inconsistent enforcement exposes Fidesz’s blatant hypocrisy. The act cannot be interpreted in terms of ideological rigour, but only as political opportunism. While Hungarian activists, creators, and distributors are busy interpreting the law, the government revels in the opportunities created by a persistently unclear situation.

As expected, the Fidesz government is simply exploiting the law and the reactionary critical voices to legitimise its symbolic fight against the alleged attempts of the European Union to subjugate Hungarian sovereignty and destroy national cultural identity. 

For the government, creating an uncertain situation is enough to drive a wedge into the fabric of society based on gender-phobic ideology, and to demonise and further alienate LGBTQ+ organisations and their political and social allies from the social mainstream. Furthermore, the law allows Fidesz to suppress opposition parties and the liberal intelligentsia who support  LGBTQI+ causes.

The persistent focus and agenda-setting around this issue serve to frame those who support the rights of sexual minorities as anti-national actors aiming to destroy Hungarian sovereignty, thus committing a form of quasi-treason. For this strategy to succeed, the Hungarian government does not need a well-thought-out law that can only be enforced with a large financial and infrastructural investment. It is enough that such a bill exists and can be referred to in certain situations where the government’s ethos requires it.

Of course, these occasions are not isolated but are integrated into the broader aggressive propaganda against the LGBTQ+ groups pouring out from the pro-government media. These channels regularly dehumanise members of sexual minorities and engage in targeted character assassination of known Hungarian LGBTQ+ members. When the opportunity arises, the Child Protection act is routinely adapted to daily political issues.

Recent events exemplify this opportunism particularly well. The reputation of the Fidesz government was badly damaged at the beginning of this year when President Katalin Novák, also known as the face of Orbán’s family policy, was caught up in a scandal. For reasons that are still unclear, Novák granted a presidential pardon to a man who had repeatedly forced children to withdraw cases of sexual violence brought against the director of a state children’s home.

Following the scandal that led to the swift resignation of the president and the minister of justice, the Fidesz government embarked on a series of strong actions in the form of regulations and legislation. Among other things, the new regulations make perpetrators or accomplices of child sexual abuse ineligible for a presidential pardon. In addition, the recreational activities of workers in children’s homes will be monitored. Internet service providers will also be obliged to provide internet filtering services to ban pornographic sites at the request of parents. The filtering would be based on a constantly updated “blacklist” of the most visited pornographic sites, drawn up by the Media Authority.

What’s more, other parts of the media law have also been amended. For example, the government replaced the comma that has been losing lawsuits against bookshops for months. In addition, the responsibility for deciding on the appropriateness of the content of books is now being transferred from bookshops to publishers. Publishers now have to answer questions such as “is the representation or promotion of gender non-conformity, gender reassignment or homosexuality a defining element of the book?” Still, even with further explanations, the act remains as ambiguous as it was in June 2021.

The new laws are nothing more than a political tool designed to serve the interests of Orbán’s government by sowing division in society and distracting the public from Fidesz’s failures. Their effectiveness lies in their inconsistent application, which creates a climate of absolute uncertainty.

Among the several critical issues on the November ballot in the U.S., the future of Planet Earth has to be high on the list.   By Rick Steiner Common Dreams For decades, scientists have warned of the apocalyptic consequences of global ecological collapse. We know the causes, consequences, and solutions to this existential crisis, but […]

The post Election 2024: Planet is Earth is on the ballot. What are you going to do? appeared first on Red, Green, and Blue.

Moazzam Malik is managing director at the World Resources Institute and honorary professor at the UCL Policy Lab.

At COP29 in Baku in November, the world will come together to agree a new target for climate finance. The stakes are huge given record temperatures and heatwaves, floods and droughts wreaking havoc globally.  

Tackling climate change and its consequences – and supporting wider human development – needs urgent investment. But the international financial system is struggling to respond. Is it time now to agree a new framework for international climate and development finance? Can the G20 under Brazil’s leadership, and international leaders meeting at the United Nations in New York in September, prepare the ground for COP29?  

Almost 54 years ago, in 1970, the world came together at the UN to set a target for rich countries to support poorer countries. They promised 0.7% of national income as “official development assistance” (ODA) to improve economic outcomes and reduce poverty. At the Copenhagen climate negotiations in 2009, world leaders again came together and promised to mobilise an annual $100bn to finance climate action by 2020. They said this would be “new and additional” to development finance.  

Hurricane Beryl shows why the new UK government must ramp up climate finance

Since then, with the exception of a few Europeans, rich nations have failed to meet the 0.7% target. In 2022, ODA peaked at $211bn, or 0.37% of combined OECD national income. Almost 15% of this was used to finance refugee-related costs in OECD countries themselves. The climate commitment was met in 2022, two years late. Without ODA levels rising, the 33% of ODA classified as climate-related cannot reasonably be claimed as “additional”.   

 In practice, maintaining this distinction between climate and development finance has proved difficult. For example, is planting trees in an urban landscape a climate investment because it absorbs emissions, a health investment because it reduces street-level temperatures, or a biodiversity investment as it creates habitats for wildlife? 

 The challenge of navigating these distinctions means it is difficult to track commitments or secure meaningful accountability against promises made. And it leaves many countries juggling a false trade-off between investments for the planet and for their people.  

Trillions needed

It is absolutely clear, however, that financing for poorer countries needs to increase dramatically. Despite progress over recent decades, development needs remain significant, with major setbacks through the pandemic. The Independent High Level Expert Group on Climate Finance estimates, presented to the G20, indicate that by 2030 $5.4 trillion a year will be needed for development, climate and nature. Of this, $1 trillion a year will be required in external financing for developing countries for climate and nature alone, of which roughly half will need to come from international public finance.  

International public finance – including new and additional aid finance from rich countries – is needed to provide concessional resources for the poorest and most indebted countries. It is needed to anchor capital increases for international financial institutions that can leverage this at least ten-fold, in part by borrowing from private capital markets. These institutions, together with other development finance institutions and strong policy environments, are key to bringing in private lenders and investors, whether by reducing risk or helping develop investment pipelines. 

The Loss and Damage Fund must not leave fragile states behind

As well as additional finance, poorer countries need money that better responds to their needs. In recent years, the relentless cycle of summits has spawned dozens of initiatives. The landscape is fragmented, with over 80 funds or instruments in the climate space alone. It has become increasingly difficult for poor countries to navigate this. There is an urgent need for a moratorium on new funds and to agree principles and coordination mechanisms for all external finance – building on the aid effectiveness principles agreed in the 2000s. 

Binding 0.7% commitment?

Taking these elements together, is it time now to drop the voluntary framework of ODA crafted in the last century to meet the problems of the last century? Can countries come together now to agree a new framework for official climate and development assistance, with a binding commitment for rich countries to finally meet the 0.7% national income promise by, say, 2030?  

Such a target, negotiated under a UN framework, would double the flow of aid finance. That funding would anchor multilateral, public and private investments that are needed to close the financing gap. A negotiated process could also bring in emerging countries like China that already provide significant finance. It could clarify definitions and shift arrangements for monitoring climate and other development spend from the OECD to the UN to improve accountability. And it could begin to consolidate the range of instruments and make them more responsive to the needs of poor countries. 

With public finances under strain around the world, many will say this is simply unaffordable. But international polling indicates that people are willing to contribute 1% of their income to fight climate change. Will politicians have the courage to engage their electorates? And at the G20, in the UN, in the lead up to Baku and beyond, will they have the vision to collaborate internationally to agree a new deal that delivers both development and climate justice? 

 

The post The world needs a new global deal on climate and development finance appeared first on Climate Home News.

Michael Diamond thought he’d have to wait until this year, at least, to have enough data to understand how a shipping regulation aimed at curbing pollution affected the clouds that deck the ocean. “They’re so variable. They’re so wispy. They’re so ever, ever changing,” he said. “So you really often need a lot of observations to get at what they’re doing.”

Nonetheless, just three years after the international maritime community slashed sulfur emissions in 2020, the cloud physicist with Florida State University published an award-winning paper studying clouds along a shipping lane in the southeast Atlantic. By analyzing satellite data from before and after the regulation took effect, Diamond demonstrated that the clouds had dimmed. In other words, even as it cleaned its emissions, the global shipping sector made marine clouds a little less bright.

This change carries important implications for the planet. It means less sunlight is reflected back into space — which means more warming. 

That effect extends well beyond the isolated shipping lane Diamond studied. Others have detected it worldwide in the years since the International Maritime Organization adopted the rule. The regulation, shorthanded as IMO 2020, cut the maximum level of sulfur in shipping fuels for all vessels, container ships, and cruise ships alike, from 3.5 percent to 0.5 percent with the goal of cleaning the air in ports and the communities around them, potentially saving hundreds of thousands of lives each year.

It worked. Measurably lower levels of ammonia and sulfur dioxide dirty the air around many ports, and the majority of shipping fuel tested by the organization comply with the limits. Yet, it’s had the unintended consequence of ramping up near-term global warming. 

How much hotter things are going to get remains an open debate.

“I think there’s going to be a lot of papers on the shipping emission reductions,” said Robert Allen, a climate scientist from University of California Riverside with expertise in aerosols. “I don’t think they’re all necessarily going to be arguing the same thing.”

Aerosols, which are short-lived pollutants suspended in the atmosphere, introduce more uncertainty into climate models than any other variable. One of the most common comes from sulfur. Unlike its carbon cousin, sulfur dioxide tends to cool the planet by creating aerosols that reflect sunlight while also making clouds brighter. When industries around the world emit fewer of these pollutants, clouds darken. The planet absorbs more sunlight, and land, air, and water heat even faster than before.

At the end of May, Tianle Yuan, an atmospheric scientist with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, published one of the first papers to use observational data and climate models to determine what this means for Earth. The results were stark and startling.

On March 4, 2009, the skies over the northeast Pacific Ocean were streaked with clouds that form around the particles in ship exhaust. NASA / MODIS Rapid Response Team

Until now, temperatures have typically climbed almost a fifth of a degree Celsius, on average, per decade since 1981 — just over a third of a degree Fahrenheit. Yuan’s results suggest that, over the next decade, the sharp decrease in ocean aerosols will cause temperatures to rise an additional quarter of a degree Celsius. “This decade, we expect the warming rate to be more than double,” Yuan said, “if our calculation is right.”

But, as happens in science, not everyone agrees that he and his collaborators got it right.

Robert Allen, for one, believes that Yuan and company went astray. He and his colleagues conducted a study of their own (it is awaiting peer review), and though they agree with Yuan on how the regulation affected the amount of light the Earth receives, they came “to some different conclusions.”

“We get less than 0.05 degrees,” Allen said, “over the next 20 years.” In fact, as he and his coauthors noted, their range of results is consistent with “no discernible” impact on global temperatures. The discrepancy between the two results, Allen indicated, comes down to how they simulated the impact.

At their core, the differences between Allen’s results and Yuan’s boils down to a difference in modeling. Yuan relies on an energy balance model, which makes simplifying assumptions about the planet to calculate the temperature change associated with a given force on the climate. Allen, on the other hand, used an Earth system model, which attempts to include more realistic representations of Earth’s climate as it seeks to predict how changing the composition of the atmosphere will affect temperature, among other things.

A third study by a pair of Cornell researchers also leveraged an Earth system model and came away with results that largely align with Yuan’s. The difference here can be explained, at least in part, by the number of “ensemble members” used. Simply put, each member of the ensemble represents the same model run using slightly different initial conditions, an approach that allows scientists to explore the myriad ways that even small factors might push the climate in different directions. Think of it as a way of attempting to account for the butterfly effect. A large ensemble, then, allows researchers to separate the signal from the noise and discern the actual impact that something like IMO 2020 produces.

Modeling differences aside, a more modest impact seems more reasonable. As both Allen and Diamond pointed out, if all the aerosols in the world suddenly vanished, the planet would warm by at least half a degree Celsius and, at most, just over 1 degree. And though IMO 2020 cut maritime sulfur emissions by almost 80 percent, shipping was responsible for less than 10 percent of global emissions of the pollutant even before the regulation was adopted. That means even deep cuts in that sector should produce a limited response. 

Ultimately, though — with some suggesting that warming will double this decade as others point toward only a minor increase — Allen said, “the science isn’t closed.” As a result, the current debate tells us less about the specific effects of cleaning up shipping pollution and more about the potential dangers of eliminating aerosols without also addressing greenhouse gases.

No one doubts that cutting sulfur emissions benefits public health. One study published in 2016 found that instituting the cap on sulfur emissions in 2020 would prevent at least 570,000 premature deaths over the following five years. But given that sulfur also cools the planet, failing to rein in, at the very least, short-lived greenhouse gases like methane while reducing sulfur pollution simply ratchets up the rate at which the world warms.

Cutting carbon dioxide is, of course, critical. But it can linger in the atmosphere for a millennium. Aerosols, on the other hand, fall from the sky within weeks, which means the incidental cooling effect they produce doesn’t stick around long after emissions of them end — even as airborne carbon continues to capture heat. Luckily, when combined, the greenhouse gases methane and groundlevel ozone warm the planet as much as aerosols cool it. And they don’t last nearly as long as CO2 does. Low-lying ozone persists for a few weeks at most, and methane disappears within a decade.

So, eliminating those pollutants alongside aerosols could negate any abrupt warming that might otherwise occur. “But that’s opposite what’s happened,” Allen said. Not only has ship-emitted sulfur all but vanished, China has gone to great lengths to clean its air at a pace faster than any expected. Meanwhile, carbon emissions have continued to swell around the world. Yuan and many others argue that this has created a “termination shock,” leading to an abrupt rise in global temperatures with additional effects that reach beyond heat. Eliminating aerosols without an associated decline in greenhouse gases has the potential to worsen wildfire activity in boreal forests, slow an essential ocean current, and affect regional weather patterns in ways not yet understood.

An aerial view of a cargo ship waiting at the Khawr Abd Allah canal leading up to Al-Faw port in southern Iraq in June. Photo by HUSSEIN FALEH/AFP via Getty Images

All of this has led seven climate advocates and researchers to pen an open letter to the International Maritime Organization. They urge it to consider allowing vessels to burn dirtier fuel on the high seas, far from population centers, to “increase the global cooling benefits of sulfur or similar aerosols without causing harm to humans or natural systems.” They also ask the organization to support research and testing of technologies that would enable ships to, for instance, create salt aerosols from sea water and spray them into the air to get the benefits of brighter clouds without the side effects of sulfur.

Although a spokesperson for the International Maritime Organization said it welcomes reports and research from most anyone, it only considers regulations when they are raised by member states. So whether the open letter will have any impact remains to be seen.  The dispatch nevertheless represents an early rumble of what many scientists fear may become a clamor to engineer the planet in increasingly dramatic and deliberate ways as the climate crisis intensifies.

Such calls aside, the inadvertent impact of IMO 2020 — to say nothing of climate change itself — makes it clear that humanity has long manipulated the atmosphere. But the debate between Allen, Yuan, and their colleagues poses the fundamental question of how any technologist can hope to engineer a precise degree of purposeful cooling when scientists can’t even agree on the exact impact of our accidental experiment.

toolTips('.classtoolTips1','Carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and other gases that prevent heat from escaping Earth’s atmosphere. Together, they act as a blanket to keep the planet at a liveable temperature in what is known as the “greenhouse effect.” Too many of these gases, however, can cause excessive warming, disrupting fragile climates and ecosystems.'); 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.'); toolTips('.classtoolTips3',' A powerful greenhouse gas that accounts for about 16% of global emissions, methane is the primary component of natural gas and is emitted into the atmosphere by landfills, oil and natural gas systems, agricultural activities, coal mining, and wastewater treatment, among other pathways. Over short periods, it is 28 times more potent than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere.
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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How cleaning up shipping cut pollution — and warmed the planet on Jul 18, 2024.

Roishetta Ozane founded a grassroots organization to help frontline Louisiana communities recover from back-to-back hurricanes. Soon, she was educating people about the deadly interconnections between gas export plants, climate disasters, and environmental racism.

Read more on E360 →

For more than a century, zoning ordinances rooted in segregation have encouraged the construction of single-family homes, often at the expense of apartment buildings and other structures that promote urban density. Beyond contributing to a mounting housing shortage and spiraling prices, such policies have contributed to sprawl and dependence upon automobiles.

Canada has decided to try something different. 

The government has taken the unprecedented step of offering provincial governments billions of dollars in infrastructure funds with one catch: To receive it, they must require cities to abandon single-family zoning laws and allow the construction of fourplexes. This unusually broad policy, adopted in May, has implications beyond expanding the housing stock. It could help mitigate climate change.

Research has consistently shown that multifamily structures reduce overall vehicle miles traveled by placing people closer to urban centers and mass transit. They also use materials and energy more efficiently, driving down the carbon footprint of construction. “Higher density tends to reduce emissions, and by a pretty significant amount,” said Zack Subin, a housing and climate researcher at the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC-Berkeley.

If Canada’s approach works, it could encourage similar policies in the United States and nudge cities toward building a greater variety of climate-friendly housing. “Historical planning, rooted in segregation and exclusion, have effectively banned the most efficient forms of housing across most of our cities and suburbs,” Subin said. “Any reform like this is moving in the right direction.”

States like Washington, Oregon, California, and cities including Minneapolis and Austin, have in recent years taken steps to eliminate or amend single-family zoning laws. But none have gone to the lengths of the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. The country’s 2024 budget includes 6 billion Canadian dollars (about $4.4 billion) to accelerate new construction, with 5 billion Canadian dollars of that set aside as conditional infrastructure funds. To access the money, each of the nation’s 10 provinces and three territories must require municipalities to eliminate single-family zoning and allow fourplexes. They also must adopt updates to Canada’s building code, which is advisory, not mandatory, and enforce renter and home-buyer protections, among other measures. 

Ottawa is serious about enforcing the rules, too. When the city of Oakville, Ontario rejected a measure to permit fourplexes in May, Housing Minister Sean Fraser ordered the city to return more than 1 million Canadian dollars it had received. “If provinces don’t want to make some of the changes, they don’t have to accept the funding that we are putting on the table,” he said in response to conservative leaders who rejected the idea of eliminating single-family housing. (Any money the provinces and territories don’t claim will be offered directly to municipal governments.) 

To get around the fact that in most of Canada, as in the United States, zoning is handled at the local level, the government offers its carrot to provincial authorities. By dangling vast sums in front of them, federal officials hope to encourage action at “levels of government that have been resistant to change,” said Carolyn Whitzman, a housing policy expert at the University of Ottawa who helped shape the country’s latest national housing plan.

Fourplexes like this building in Oakland, California, typically require fewer construction materials than single-family homes and use energy more efficiently, making them a climate-friendlier form of housing. But not all cities allow them. San Francisco Chronicle / Hearst Newspapers via Getty Images

It’s an example of what is called a pro-housing policy, one in which a state (or, in this case, province) or the federal government offers money or other benefits to incentivize progressive policies like zoning reform or eliminating parking minimums. Canada’s approach echoes a proposal the Biden administration floated to dole out $10 billion in grants to states and cities to reform single-family zoning and build new housing. The program was watered down last year to provide just $85 million to cities that commit to removing barriers to affordable housing construction. (In 2021, California succeeded in introducing a program that offers municipalities pursuing zoning reform a leg up when applying for certain state grants and exclusive access to additional funds.)

Canada’s policy targets what housing experts call the “missing middle” in home construction: low-rise dwellings like townhomes and fourplexes that fall between a single-family home and an apartment building. Such structures have until recently been illegal in many parts of Canada and the United States. Allowing their construction could boost housing supply by facilitating the development of parcels previously off-limits to multifamily housing. “The majority of land with existing infrastructure — close to public transit, schools, parks, community services — have been exclusively zoned for single-family housing,” Whitzman said. The change could lead to more construction, greater housing availability, and lower costs, she said.

Whether such reforms will do that is, according to Subin at UC Berkeley, “still a live research question.” Only a few U.S. cities, including Minneapolis and Portland, Oregon, have adopted missing middle zoning reforms, and the long-term effects still aren’t understood. Local market conditions, like housing demand and land value, also affect the impact of allowing more fourplexes. Yonah Freemark, a transportation and land use policy researcher at the Urban Institute, said Canada’s reform will likely have only a modest effect on housing availability, since fourplexes tend to get developed mostly in areas that have relatively high housing values and amenities within walking distance. 

But such efforts offer an often overlooked benefit: They mitigate climate change. Neighborhoods with denser housing tend to have far lower emissions than the national average, in large part because people living in them tend to drive shorter distances and use more public transit. A recent study that Subin led at the Terner Center found that across the San Francisco Bay Area, higher population density corresponded with fewer vehicle miles traveled. San Francisco residents, for example, drove one-third the distance of those in Oakley, a suburb about 50 miles to the east with far less density.

Although access to public transit is a critical factor for reducing car dependency, Subin noted that higher density leads to fewer vehicle miles traveled even when people don’t ride the bus or take the train. Simply having homes and businesses closer together means that “people are still driving shorter distances, and walking and biking for a greater share of their trips,” he said. 

Fourplexes and other low-rise multifamily dwellings require less energy than single-family homes because they share insulated walls and roofs. They also require less materials to build, reducing the emissions associated with their construction. A recent study by researchers in Canada estimated that building missing middle housing in Ontario, Canada, could reduce future construction-related carbon emissions from residential buildings by as much as 46.7 percent. 

For these reasons, encouraging greater housing density could be among the most underappreciated climate mitigation policies. UC-Berkeley researchers have found that building additional homes in underutilized urban areas is the most effective climate strategy available to California’s local governments. Yet most municipal climate action plans don’t mention adding housing as a climate tool, in part because it’s difficult to calculate the exact benefits. 

Housing experts cautioned that missing middle reforms on their own are insufficient to address the housing shortage or make a dramatic impact on emissions. “Just because you allow for housing does not mean the housing gets built,” Freemark from the Urban Institute said, pointing out that complex market dynamics ultimately determine what types of new housing gets built. He also said that large-scale apartment buildings built near public transit would more effectively address the need for housing while maximizing the carbon-cutting benefits of greater density. 

But as governments across the U.S. and Canada try new housing policies and wade into zoning reform, the two countries can learn from each other’s experiences. “There’s a lot of learning going on between them,” Whitzman said. “When we’re talking about these issues, the differences between Canada and the U.S. are very minimal.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Canada makes an unprecedented push for multifamily housing on Jul 18, 2024.

Each year, burning fossil fuels puffs tens of billions of metric tons of planet-warming carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. And for decades, the Earth’s forests, along with its oceans and soil, have sucked roughly a third back in, creating a vacuum known as the land carbon sink. But as deforestation and wildfires ravage the world’s forests, scientists have begun to worry that this crucial balancing act may be in jeopardy.

A study published in the journal Nature on Wednesday found that, despite plenty of turmoil, the world’s forests have continued to absorb a steady amount of carbon for the last three decades. 

“It appears to be stable, but it actually maybe masks the issue,” said Yude Pan, a senior research scientist at the U.S. Forest Service and the lead author of the study, which included 16 coauthors from around the world.

As the Earth’s forests have undergone dramatic changes, with some releasing more carbon than they absorb, Pan warns that better forest management is needed. “I really hope that this study will let people realize how much carbon is lost from deforestation,” Pan said. “We must protect this carbon sink.”

Roughly 10 million hectares of forest — an area equivalent to the size of Portugal — are razed every year, and ever-intensifying wildfires almost double that damage. The planet has lost so many trees that experts have warned forests may soon reach a tipping point, in which this crucial carbon vault would emit more planet-warming gases than it absorbs. Some studies have suggested that the Amazon rainforest, often called the lungs of the world, is already there.

Using data reaching back to 1990, the researchers analyzed hand measurements of tree species, size, and mass from 95 percent of the globe’s forests to calculate the amount of carbon being tucked away over three decades. For each biome studied — temperate, boreal, and tropical forests — the researchers considered how long-term changes in the landscape altered the region’s emissions-sucking power.

In the boreal forest, the world’s largest land biome that stretches across the top of the Northern Hemisphere, the researchers found a dire situation. Over the study period, these cold-loving tree species have lost 36 percent of their carbon-sinking capacity as logging, wildfires, pests, and drought devastated the land.

Some regions are faring worse than others: In Canada, wildfires have turned boreal forests into a source of carbon emissions. In Asian Russia forests, similar conditions caused the region to lose 42 percent of its sinking strength.

It’s the clear consequence of decades of worsening fires. A study published in Nature in June looked at 21 years of satellite records and was the first to confirm that the frequency and magnitude of extreme wildfires has more than doubled worldwide. The change is especially drastic in boreal forests, where these wildfires have become over 600 percent more common per year.

“I was just shocked by the magnitude,” said Calum Cunningham, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Tasmania and lead author of the wildfire study.

An overview of the dense canopy, alongside an area of deforestation, as seen in the Amazon rainforest in 2008 near Manaus, Brazil. Per-Anders Pettersson/Getty

Down near the equator, where tropical forests make up over half of the world’s tree cover area, the global carbon sequestration study found a complicated, three-part equation. Agricultural deforestation has caused a 31 percent loss of the old forest’s carbon-sinking strength. But new plant life has reclaimed large swaths of abandoned farmland, and the carbon-sucking power of these younger forests has made up for the losses from logging. Although persistent deforestation continues to create more emissions, the study found that when adding up these gains and losses, tropical forests are almost carbon-neutral.

So how has the globe managed to keep up the overall balancing act? The answer lies in temperate forests, where the carbon sink has increased by 30 percent. The study found that decades of reforestation efforts, largely by nationwide programs in China, are finally paying off. But the trend might not last. In China, urbanization and logging have begun to cut into tree cover. In the United States and Europe, wildfires, droughts, and pests have caused the temperate forest carbon sink to drop by 10 percent and 12 percent, respectively. 

Forest management efforts, along with the rate of emissions, will determine how this all plays out. A paper in Nature last year found “striking uncertainty” in the continued potential of carbon storage in U.S. forests, highlighting the need for conservation and restoration efforts.

Chao Wu, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Utah who led that 2023 study, said that mitigating emissions should be the biggest priority for solving the climate crisis. “But the other important part is nature-based climate solutions, and the forest will be a very important part of that,” Wu said. 

Richard Houghton, a senior scientist at the nonprofit Woodwell Climate Research Center who contributed to the latest sequestration study, says it’s “luck, in a sense” that the global forest carbon sink has remained stable. 

For it to stay that way, Houghton and Pan said that increased restoration efforts and reduced logging are needed in all biomes, and especially in tropical forests, where 95 percent of deforestation occurs. “We don’t have enough preservation,” Houghton said, adding that protecting forests has added biodiversity and ecosystem health benefits. “There’s always more reasons to do a better job.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Amazingly, forests are still sucking up as much carbon as they were 30 years ago. But there’s a catch. on Jul 18, 2024.

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Less than a month into summer 2024, the vast majority of the U.S. population has already experienced an extreme heat wave. Millions of people were under heat warnings across the western U.S. in early July or sweating through humid heat in the East. Mathew Barlow, UMass Lowell and Jeffrey Basara, UMass Lowell The Conversation Death […]

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