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Young conservatives want to push Trump on climate change — the ‘America First’ way

Grist - Fri, 01/17/2025 - 01:30

For most environmentalists, the day that Donald Trump got elected president in November was “a dark day.” But there was one small, overlooked corner of the movement that celebrated. In a statement congratulating Trump on his victory, the leaders of the American Conservation Coalition saw a chance to bring “an America-first climate strategy” to fruition. “Now, we will build a new era of American industry and win the clean energy arms race,” they wrote.

The Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit was founded in 2017 by college students who wanted to prove that there was a conservative case for climate action. Since then, it’s evolved from a group on the right’s fringes into a political force. The American Conservation Coalition has wide grassroots support, with some 60,000 members in branches around the country and connections all over Congress. Trump’s second term, which starts on Monday, will be a test of how strong its influence has become.

“I think there’s a golden opportunity right now for Republicans to shift the environment from a left-wing issue that Republicans lose on to a conservative issue that they can win on,” said Chris Barnard, the organization’s president. “And by the end of this administration, that is what we hope to achieve, and hope to have real, tangible progress and solutions that point back to that show that.”

The group has extensive ties to Trump’s Cabinet nominees, according to Barnard. Liberty Energy’s CEO Chris Wright, nominated for secretary of energy, is a “personal friend” to the American Conservation Coalition, or ACC, and recently hosted a fundraiser for the coalition. Former North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, Trump’s nominee to lead the Interior Department, led a town hall in New Hampshire with Barnard during his six-month presidential run in 2023; Lee Zeldin, Trump’s pick to run the Environmental Protection Agency, has worked on various issues with the ACC.

“If that’s the yardstick — helping Republicans get engaged on climate — they’ve been a resounding success,” said Matthew Burgess, an environmental economist at the University of Wyoming who studies how to depolarize climate change. In his estimation, the Republican Party has perceptibly shifted its stance on climate change, moving away from outright denial in recent years. “Whatever movement there’s been on the Republican side, the ACC is probably easily the single most important advocacy group on that.”

You wouldn’t mistake the American Conservation Coalition’s platform for one found on a progressive climate group’s website. The top three priorities are unleashing nuclear energy, reforming the permitting process to make it easier to build new energy projects, and beating China by “leading the world in all-of-the-above energy production.” That includes more oil and gas development, in line with Trump’s “energy dominance” agenda. In his first week, Trump is expected to push to undo President Joe Biden’s limits on offshore drilling and federal lands, roll back emissions standards for vehicles, and end a freeze on new projects to export liquefied natural gas.

“Our approach will always be distinct from the approach of a progressive group, because it’s guided by conservative principles like innovation and deregulation and empowering individuals and local communities,” said Danielle Butcher Franz, the CEO of the ACC. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re not on the same page about the severity of these issues.”

Read Next How to take climate change out of the culture wars

Butcher Franz says that tackling climate change effectively means that both conservatives and progressives need to change their approach. Conservatives could be a lot bolder in the solutions they propose, she said: “They oftentimes have a reputation for being the party of ‘no’ and just striking down the things that they don’t like.” Progressives, on the other hand, could work harder to find common ground. “There are a lot of self-imposed litmus tests where if you don’t agree on everything, you’re not [seen as] worth working with,” Butcher Franz said. She said she’s seen potential partnerships with other climate groups collapse over a single area of difference, like support for fossil fuel production. 

For some progressives, the ACC’s Republican ties are the problem. “I think people often try to hold us accountable for the views of high-profile Republicans that people don’t like,” Butcher Franz said. She gets asked questions like, “Well, President Trump has said that climate change is a hoax, so how can Republicans possibly make progress on this?” But that’s the wrong starting place, she said. “I think the better question is, Does somebody need to be bought into a progressive climate agenda to reduce emissions? And I would argue that, no, they don’t.”

The group’s approach creates a pairing of ideas that are rarely seen side by side. “Enough alarmism. Enough inaction,” a slogan on the ACC’s site reads. 

Those feelings may be reflected by much of the country, regardless of political affiliation: 80 percent of Americans say that climate news makes them feel frustrated that there’s so much political disagreement over the problem, according to a recent survey by Pew Research Center.

“The interesting thing about the ACC is, I think a lot of what they say, if you look at polls, is pretty close to what the median voter is saying about climate change,” Burgess said. “You know, ‘It’s real, doing something is much better than doing nothing, and renewables and nuclear are good and we should be prioritizing them, but we don’t want to get off fossil fuels, and particularly natural gas, in the short term, especially insofar as it hurts our economy.’”

When the ACC began in 2017, talking about climate change with Republican politicians who had long shied away from the subject — or simply denied it existed — wasn’t easy. “In the early days, we were all volunteers who were just trying to chase each opportunity that presented itself,” said Stephen Perkins, now the coalition’s COO. “It was tough back then to even say ‘climate’ or ‘environment’ in conservative spaces. We found it difficult to get those meetings and to have those conversations with elected officials or with other leaders within the conservative movement.”

But as early as 2019, partway through Trump’s first term, some of this resistance started to fade. Trump’s EPA administrator, Andrew Wheeler, signed a memorandum of understanding with the ACC to find ways to get young environmental leaders involved in the agency’s programs. In 2020, Barnard and Benji Backer, the ACC’s founder, went on a hike with Senator John Curtis, who was in the House of Representatives at the time, in his home state of Utah. The conversation sparked the idea for the Conservative Climate Caucus, started by Curtis as a safe place for House Republicans to talk to each other about climate change. It now has more than 80 members, who have been more willing to support green technology than other Republicans, if still generally opposed to measures to curtail greenhouse gas emissions directly. 

Read Next What will the GOP’s new ‘climate caucus’ accomplish?

As these changes unfolded, the American Conservation Coalition’s base grew. In 2021, Perkins was hired to build grassroots support for the group, which had about 5,000 members at the time. Across the country, through outreach and advertising, they now have 60,000 members, mostly college students and young professionals who are right-of-center, Perkins said. The goal is to reach 100,000 members by the end of 2025. 

“A lot of our members are in government offices,” Perkins said. “In fact, it’s really hard for us now to walk into a member of Congress’ office without someone in the front room knowing about ACC because they were involved in college.” According to Eli Lehrer, president of the R Street Institute, a center-right think tank, the ACC’s grassroots support is crucial to its success. “They have an impact in D.C., because they have an impact around the country,” he said. “So they both can mobilize people locally, and that gives them a way to talk about the same issues in D.C.”

Over the last two years, the American Conservation Coalition reached the national stage. In August 2023, the Republican primary debate included a question from a college student, one of the group’s members, about how the presidential candidates would calm fears that their party didn’t care about climate change. Even as the candidates deflected, some young conservatives saw it as progress that the topic even came up. The ACC also sponsored the Republican National Convention last July and had a booth there for the first time, with Trump’s former chief of staff, Reince Priebus, speaking at their reception

“These are just signs that the narrative is changing, and that conservatives or Republicans are seeing that there’s an opportunity for them to engage that is authentically conservative,” Barnard said. “They don’t feel like they have to leave their values at the door when talking about this stuff.”

However, Barnard says he’s more concerned with achieving practical results than getting Republican politicians to say the right thing. If they pass a bill to boost nuclear power and clean energy, but it’s for economic reasons or national security reasons rather than climate reasons, it’s still a win, he said: “We need to focus a lot more on what actually works than what sounds good, and on tangible progress than on litmus tests that just further polarize both sides.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Young conservatives want to push Trump on climate change — the ‘America First’ way on Jan 17, 2025.

Categories: H. Green News

Justin Trudeau taxed fossil fuels — and paid the price

Grist - Fri, 01/17/2025 - 01:15

Justin Trudeau’s resignation as prime minister of Canada signals the departure of one of the world’s leading climate hawks. From the moment the charismatic young progressive took power a decade ago, he staked his career on aggressive climate action, pushing through a carbon tax, clean energy subsidies, and a slew of regulations loathed by the country’s large oil and gas industry.

The prime minister’s impending exit, announced January 6, comes as his Liberal party heads toward a wipeout in an election that must occur before October. Voters are furious over what they consider Trudeau’s failure to address housing costs and crime; his handling of the pandemic; and his climate action, which many blame for rising energy and gas costs. This popular swing against climate policy parallels a trend seen across the developed world, including Europe and the United States, where President-elect Donald Trump has promised to repeal the Biden administration’s landmark climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act.

Trudeau’s policies went well beyond Biden’s — he passed a federal carbon-pricing system and successfully defended it against several challenges, something Democrats in the United States have never been able to do. In the end, his ambitious carbon-pricing program contributed to his downfall. Pierre Poilievre, who leads the surging Conservative party, has over the past year launched a campaign to “Axe the Tax,” holding rallies that channeled voter frustration with energy costs and made climate policy a liability for the liberal government.

“It was a national, relatively universal carbon tax on consumers, and people were angry, they were feeling pinched,” said Cherie Metcalf, a law professor at Queen’s University in Ontario and an expert on Canadian climate politics.

The Trudeau government made substantial progress in almost every major area of climate policy. Trudeau rolled out clean energy subsidies, stepped up Canada’s overseas aid funding for climate disasters, and enshrined the country’s net-zero target into law. But the centerpiece of his legacy is a carbon tax based on a policy adopted in the left-leaning province of British Columbia. The tax, launched in 2019, requires big polluters to purchase emissions credits, much like the major cap-and-trade schemes in Europe and California, but it also imposes a surcharge of a few cents on every gallon of gasoline or heating oil that Canadians use. 

It’s too early to say how the carbon tax has affected Canada’s emissions trajectory, but the government says the provision in British Columbia that inspired it has cut emissions by 15 percent from where they otherwise would be. Federal officials also say the tax will drive more than a third of Canada’s overall emissions reductions by 2030, by which point the government hopes to cut emissions by half from peak levels

“Justin Trudeau has accomplished more on climate policy than any other Canadian prime minister so far,” Caroline Brouillette, executive director of the advocacy organization Climate Action Network Canada, said in a statement after his announcement. “The past 10 years have seen a revolution in how we tackle climate change in Canada, moving from a piecemeal and voluntary approach toward one where the government proactively plans … to reduce emissions to reach our climate targets.”

The Liberal leader’s climate record was far from perfect, however, particularly when it came to Canada’s $250 billion oil industry. He waffled for years on the issue of drilling in Alberta’s oil-rich tar sands, for example, at one point suggesting production should be “phased out” and at another saying that “no country would find 173 billion barrels of oil in the ground and just leave them there.” 

Although he imposed stringent regulations on oil producers in the Alberta tar sands and the carbon tax made drilling much more expensive, critics considered his spending $9 billion on carbon-capture projects to make that work cleaner an attempt to prop up the industry. In 2018, his government purchased and completed the struggling Trans Mountain pipeline project, boosting Canada’s export capacity over the furious objections of indigenous First Nations groups. Oil and gas production, which comprises an astonishing 31 percent of Canada’s overall emissions (compared to around 4 percent in the United States) is the main obstacle to the country’s full-scale decarbonization.

Beyond his uneven action on fossil fuels, Indigenous leaders say Trudeau has a spotty history with environmental justice, and of addressing Canada’s colonial history of oppression and genocide.

“He took much more progressive action on climate than any other prime minister we’ve ever seen, but he lacked any clear justice element to address historical wrongdoings and the ongoing legacy of colonization,” said Eriel Deranger, an Indigenous climate activist and a member of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation. Deranger has fought drilling in Alberta’s tar sands, her nation’s ancestral home, for more than a decade. 

“Canada is a petrostate, and they haven’t figured out their just-transition strategy to transition out of that,” she added, noting that oil exports reached an all-time high of 4 million barrels per day in 2023, driven in large part by growth in the tar sands.

Trudeau’s exit comes as left-of-center parties suffer electoral defeats throughout the West. Republicans scored a convincing win in federal elections in the United States, while France and Germany are expected to see conservative governments take power this year. Climate issues have proven effective fodder for right-wing parties in countries like the Netherlands as well.

Pierre Poilievre, leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, at a press conference in Ottawa after Justin Trudeau’s resignation. Poilievre has campaigned heavily against Canada’s carbon tax.
Dave Chan / AFP via Getty Images

Disaffected voters in many of these countries have latched on to climate issues: Cloudy weather that blocks solar energy has caused political furor over power prices in Germany, while the Dutch government’s efforts to reduce nitrogen emissions from farming triggered a political war that elevated a nativist far-right party. The Biden administration’s misnamed Inflation Reduction Act was an attempt to meet these concerns head-on, but it failed to persuade voters outraged by rising costs.

Trudeau’s hold on power began slipping last year when polls showed that support for the Liberals had cratered, even in reliable strongholds like Toronto and Vancouver. According to the latest projections from election forecaster 338 Canada, Conservatives are on track to win more than two-thirds of the 343 seats in Parliament, more than doubling their current count. The Liberals, meanwhile, may end up with as few as 25, putting them behind both the progressive New Democratic Party and the Quebec separatist party known as the Bloc Quebecois. 

The election of Donald Trump, who has promised to impose a devastating 25 percent tariff on all Canadian imports, further sank Trudeau’s fortunes. The prime minister flew to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida to meet with the president-elect in November for what he called an “excellent conversation”; Trump later referred to Trudeau as the “governor” of Canada and said he wanted to annex the country. Around the same time, Trudeau announced a nationwide sales tax rebate, prompting a falling-out with his finance minister, Chrystia Freedland, another top Liberal politician. Freedland called the tax holiday a “costly political gimmick” that the country couldn’t afford given Trump’s impending tariffs. Dozens of other Liberal representatives soon called on him to resign.

Climate change is not the only issue dragging down Trudeau’s party. A sizable chunk of the electorate still hasn’t forgiven Trudeau for his aggressive response to the pandemic, which included a federal vaccine mandate. Concerns about crime and the cost of housing remain top of mind even in Liberal bastions such as Toronto and Vancouver. Trudeau’s own political brand, and a laundry list of personal scandals, including revelations that he wore blackface on at least three occasions as a young man, have also become wearisome for many voters.

But no issue has proven as effective for Conservatives over the past year as climate change, and in particular the impact of the carbon tax on gasoline and home heating oil. The tax raises the price of gasoline by the equivalent of around 3 cents per gallon, a charge that will continue ratcheting up in coming years. Conservatives tried to elevate the issue in national elections as early as 2019, but it didn’t take hold with voters until costs started to rise in every segment of the economy following the pandemic. That trend allowed the Conservatives to blame Trudeau’s climate policies for voters’ sticker shock, even though around 80 percent of Canadians receive more in tax rebates than they spend on carbon penalties.

“There was actually quite good support for action on climate change at first,” Metcalf told Grist. “The current backlash is really focused more on the consumer side of the carbon tax, given that we’ve been experiencing really high inflation. You also see some of the same aspects that you see in the U.S. or in Europe, you’ve got a populist disenchantment with top-down, directive federal policies.”

As heating and gas prices rose, Poilievre traveled the country holding dozens of rallies where he blamed Trudeau’s climate policy for inflation and high heating prices. In response to public outcry, the federal government in 2023 suspended the carbon tax for home heating oil in several provinces, but that only gave the Liberals’ opponents more ammunition. But then last spring, Trudeau raised the tax from around $45 to around $55 per ton of carbon, barely surviving a no-confidence vote forced by Poilievre.

With the Conservatives poised to take power, Metcalf said it’s too early to know how they will handle climate issues. Poilievre has pledged to eliminate the consumer carbon tax, but the fate of the rest of Canada’s climate policy is still up in the air, including Trudeau’s less controversial subsidies for clean energy. As in other countries that faced voter backlash, the success of the right has been more about frustration with past climate action than an alternate vision for how to tackle the emissions problem.

“It remains to be seen what Poilievre will do,” she told Grist. “Except for his slogans about axing the tax, we don’t have a lot of information.”

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Justin Trudeau taxed fossil fuels — and paid the price on Jan 17, 2025.

Categories: H. Green News

What sparks a wildfire? The answer often remains a mystery.

Grist - Fri, 01/17/2025 - 01:00

What’s shaping up to be one of the worst wildfire disasters in U.S. history had many causes. Before the blazes raged across Los Angeles last week, eight months with hardly any rain had left the brush-covered landscape bone-dry. Santa Ana winds blew through the mountains, their gusts turning small fires into infernos and sending embers flying miles ahead. As many as 12,000 buildings have burned down, some hundred thousand people have fled their homes, and at least two dozen people have died.  

As winds picked up again this week, key questions about the fires remain unanswered: What sparked the flames in the first place? And could they have been prevented? Some theorize that the Eaton Fire in Pasadena was caused by wind-felled power lines, or that the Palisades Fire was seeded by the embers of a smaller fire the week before. But the list of possible culprits is long — even a car engine idling over dry grass can ignite a fire.

“To jump to any conclusions right now is speculation,” said Ginger Colbrun, a spokesperson for the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the lead agency investigating the cause of the Palisades Fire, to the Los Angeles Times. Figuring it out will likely take months. It took the bureau more than a year to conclude that the fire in August 2023 that devastated Maui, which was similarly lashed by high winds, was started by broken power lines. 

Even given enough time, the causes of the Los Angeles fires might remain a mystery. According to a recent study, authorities never find the source of ignition for more than half of all of wildfires in the Western U.S. — a knowledge gap that can hamper prevention efforts even as climate change ramps up the frequency of these deadly events. If authorities can anticipate likely causes of a fire, they can help build more resilient neighborhoods and educate the public on how to avoid the next deadly event. 

“Fire research is so incredibly difficult. It’s more difficult than looking for a needle in the haystack,” said Costas Synolakis, a professor at the University of Southern California who studies natural disasters. Synolakis said fires with especially high temperatures, such as those in Los Angeles, often obliterate the evidence. “That’s why it’s so challenging to mitigate fire losses,” he said. “You just don’t know what triggers them.”

The U.S. Forest Service is teaming up with computer scientists to see if artificial intelligence can help crack old cases. A study led by data scientists at Boise State University, published in the journal Earth’s Future earlier this month, analyzed the conditions surrounding more than 150,000 unsolved wildfire cases from 1992 to 2020 in Western states and found that 80 percent of wildfires were likely caused by people (whether accidentally or intentionally), with lightning responsible for just 20 percent. According to Cal Fire, people have caused 95 percent of California’s wildfires.

Karen Short, a research ecologist with the Forest Service who contributed to the study and maintains a historical database of national wildfire reports, says understanding why they start is essential for preventing them and educating the public. Strategic prevention appears to work: According to the National Fire Protection Association, house fires in the U.S. have decreased by nearly half since the 1980s

In 2024, Short expanded her wildfire archive to include more information useful to investigators, such as weather, elevation, population density, and a fire’s timing. “We need to have those things captured in the data to track them over time. We still track things from the 1900s,” she said. 

According to Short, wildfire trends across the Western United States have shifted with human activity. In recent decades, ignitions from power lines, fireworks, and firearms have become more common, in contrast with the railroad- and sawmill-caused fires that were once more common. 

Signage warns against the use of illegal fireworks in Pasadena, in June 2022. David McNew / Getty Images


The study found that vehicles and equipment are likely the number one culprit, potentially causing 21 percent of wildfires without a known cause since 1992. Last fall, the Airport Fire in California was just such an event, burning over 23,000 acres. And an increasing number of fires are the result of arson and accidental ignition — whether from smoking, gunfire, or campfires — that make up another 18 percent. In 2017, an Arizona couple’s choice of a blue smoke-spewing firework for a baby gender reveal party lit the Sawmill Fire, torching close to 47,000 acres. 

But these results aren’t definitive. Machine learning models such as those used for the study are trained to predict the likelihood of a given fire’s cause, rather than prove that a particular ignition happened. Although the study’s model showed 90 percent accuracy selecting between lightning or human activity as the ignition source when tested on fires with known causes, it had more difficulty determining exactly which of 11 possible human behaviors were to blame, only getting it right half the time.

Yavar Pourmohamad, a data science Ph.D. researcher at Boise State University who led the study, says that knowing the probable causes of a fire could help authorities warn people in high-risk areas before a blaze actually starts. “It could give people a hint of what is most important to be careful of,” he said. “Maybe in the future, AI can become a trustworthy tool for real-world action.” 

Synolakis, the USC professor, says Pourmohamad and Short’s research is important for understanding how risks are changing. He advocates for proactive actions like burying power lines underground where they can’t be buffeted by winds.

A 2018 study found that fires set off by downed power lines — such as the Camp Fire in Paradise, California, that same year —  have been increasing. Although the authors note that while power lines do not account for many fires, they’re associated with larger swaths of burned land.

“We have to really make sure that our communities are more resilient to climate change,” Synolakis said. “As we’re seeing with the extreme conditions in Los Angeles, fire suppression alone doesn’t do it.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline What sparks a wildfire? The answer often remains a mystery. on Jan 17, 2025.

Categories: H. Green News

Biden administration gives up on lower ocean speed limits to protect right whales

Grist - Fri, 01/17/2025 - 00:45

This coverage is made possible through a partnership with Grist and WABE, Atlanta’s NPR station.

Federal regulators are abandoning a proposal to expand ocean speed limits that were designed to protect North Atlantic right whales. 

The whales, which give birth off Georgia’s coast in the winter, are nearing extinction: Just 370 remain, and vessel strikes are one of their leading causes of death. 

Marine industry groups applauded the move to abandon a rule they have criticized as overly broad, while whale advocates said they were disappointed.

“The whales are going to suffer because of the inaction by the Biden administration,” said Gib Brogan, campaign director with the advocacy group Oceana.

There are already some seasonal speed limits on large ships designed to cut down the risk of strikes during times of year when the whales are known to be in certain areas — like off the Georgia coast during the winter calving season. 

In 2022, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration proposed expanding those restrictions to include smaller boats and to apply over larger areas of the ocean for longer periods. The agency also proposed making some voluntary speed limits mandatory. 

Whale scientists and advocates had celebrated the proposal and pushed for its adoption because smaller boats can and do kill right whales. They also emphasized the urgency, as the North Atlantic right whale population numbers falter, and whale behavior shifts due to climate change. 

But marine industry groups fought the proposed changes, which they argued could hurt the fishing and boating industries and other related businesses. Among other criticisms, they contended that smaller boats often need the ability to move fast to respond safely to changing ocean conditions. They also said the rules would cancel or alter thousands of recreational fishing trips that are important for coastal economies.

“The rule’s many blind spots would have created dire consequences for boater safety and accessibility, the economic vitality of coastal communities and marine manufacturers, and the livelihoods of countless supporting small businesses,” said Frank Hugelmeyer, president of the National Marine Manufacturers Association, in a statement. 

He added that the rule “failed to distinguish between large, ocean-crossing vessels and small recreational boats, which could not be more different from each other.” 

The rule was never implemented, and now the agency is withdrawing it just days before a new administration enters the White House — a move whale advocates said was political, based on its timing.

Read Next Climate change and boat strikes are killing right whales. Stronger speed limits could save them.

Congress can review and overturn some recent actions taken by federal agencies, under a law known as the Congressional Review Act. This often comes into play when a new presidential administration and new Congress take over, because it gives them the power to rescind recent actions taken by a prior administration. With this mechanism, Congress can also block the agencies from taking similar actions in the future. 

Whale advocates worry that’s exactly what a Trump administration and Republican-controlled Congress would have done with this rule had it gone into effect within the review window: They could have overturned the rule and prevented future changes to vessel speed rules to protect right whales.

“So the real deadline for the Biden administration was this past summer,” said Brogan. “They knew that they needed to act this past summer to put durable protections on for North Atlantic right whales, but with an election and other things in play, they chose not to.”

Whale advocates and scientists said they would continue to push for expanded right whale protections, despite what New England Aquarium conservation scientist Jessica Redfern called a “serious setback” in the effort to save right whales from extinction.

“I’m gonna have hope, because I do have hope that we can save this species,” she said.

The aquarium maintains one of the longest-running right whale research programs in the country, and Redfern said the evidence is clear: The whales can recover, “if we stop killing them.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Biden administration gives up on lower ocean speed limits to protect right whales on Jan 17, 2025.

Categories: H. Green News

Biden-Harris Administration Leaves Mining Reform Largely Untouched, Despite Promising Steps Forward

EarthBlog - Thu, 01/16/2025 - 14:40

The Biden-Harris Administration ends without significant changes to our public lands mining policies. Despite proposing comprehensive changes to statute, regulation, and policy, the Administration finalized only a few. They were primarily about early outreach to Tribes and the public before mining occurred. To be sure, the Trump Administration may ignore or repeal these new instructions. However, honoring these steps forward can help avoid conflicts around permitting new mines.

For a quick refresher of the President’s term on mining reform: 

  • Feb 2021. Executive Order (EO) 14017 America’s Supply Chains directed all federal agencies to report within 100 days on how to improve ways to source metals, including from public land mines. 
  • June 2021. One hundred days later, as directed, the public lands agencies recommended updating their mining regulations. The report stated: Congress should enact comprehensive reform of the GML (General Mining Law) of 1872 and USDA (Agriculture Department) and DOI (Interior Department) should strengthen the regulations governing mining on public lands.” 
  • Sept. 2021. Earthworks, along with a coalition of Tribes, Indigenous-led organizations, and conservation groups, petitioned the Department of Interior’s Bureau of Land Management for better mining rules.
  • Sept 2021. Congress passed Section 40206 of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law directing our public lands agencies to 1) calculate the time spent permitting hardrock mines, 2) develop mine permitting metrics, and 3) measure performance against those metrics to achieve better environmental outcomes. 
  • May 2022. In response to Congress and our petition, the Administration convened a meeting of stakeholders, including Earthworks, to announce an Interagency Working Group to deliver mining reform recommendations.

  • Nov. 2022. At the annual Tribal Nations Summit, the Interior and Agriculture Secretaries announced mining reforms specifically to empower Tribal communities and improve consultation processes. The Administration chose these reforms to build upon their Uniform Standards for Tribal Consultation
  • Sept 2023. The Interagency Working Group delivered its final report. It contained more than 60 recommendations for updates to the 1872 Mining Law, regulation, policy, and permitting. Notably, the Government determined that the average and median times to permit public land mines is only three years. Further, they found the primary cause of permit delays stems from mining companies providing incomplete, inaccurate, and/or untimely information to under-resourced agencies. The Government also specifically refuted often-cited mining industry estimates that mine permit times span 7-10 years or longer- labeling the data “unsubstantiated.”  These conclusions help bolster the advocacy from mining-impacted communities, raising fierce opposition against “sham permitting reform,” weakening the 1872 Mining law and limiting environmental reviews. 
  • Sept. 2024. Building upon the Tribal Nations Summit and IWG report, the BLM finalized the Instruction Memorandum, IM 2024-048. It directs field offices to notify neighboring Tribes when the BLM receives a notice for mine exploration. Before, mining companies could begin constructing roads, drilling, blasting, and conducting other exploration activities without any notice to Tribes. This memorandum invites Tribes to meet with BLM before exploration begins to confidentiality and share information that may help BLM preserve sacred sites or prevent mining in some areas. It also allows Tribes to withhold certain sensitive information.  
  • Nov. 2024. The BLM finalized their Information Bulletin, IB 2025-0013, notifying field offices of the Infrastructure Law’s permitting metrics for public participation and interagency coordination. These metrics include conducting Tribal outreach before exploration begins (IM 2024-048) and receiving input from other communities before the environmental reviews begin.   

The government should put into practice its ongoing commitment—before and during environmental reviews and Tribal consultations—to listen, respect, and incorporate traditional knowledge and community input in mine plans if only to avoid or mitigate potential mine permitting conflicts early on. Now is the time to build power and organize for future Administrations, when more lasting reforms—including dozens more from the Interagency Working Group—can become law.

The post Biden-Harris Administration Leaves Mining Reform Largely Untouched, Despite Promising Steps Forward appeared first on Earthworks.

Categories: H. Green News

Support grows for global tax on shipping emissions to fund climate action

Climate Change News - Thu, 01/16/2025 - 06:58

The number of governments backing a proposal for a global levy on maritime emissions has grown, according to the head of the United Nations shipping body, in a shift celebrated by Pacific island states which are particularly vulnerable to climate change.

“You will see that an increased number of member states are now adding their support for the levy,” Arsenio Dominguez, secretary-general of the International Maritime Organization (IMO), told journalists at its London headquarters on Tuesday.

Shipping-reliant nations like Panama and Liberia have joined the European Union, UK, Japan, Nigeria, Kenya and others in backing the Pacific islands’ proposal for a levy on ships’ emissions.

Veteran Pacific shipping negotiator Albon Ishoda, the Marshall Islands’ special envoy for maritime decarbonisation, said support from Panama and Liberia was a “milestone in our collective journey” and “validates the Pacific’s enduring efforts to champion ambition and equity”.

Price on all emissions?

At upcoming talks in London in February and April, governments will debate whether to impose a levy on all of a ship’s emissions or only to introduce a fuel standard.

A levy would force ship owners to pay for every tonne of greenhouse gases their vessels emit, making the use of more polluting fuels – like today’s oil-based bunker fuel – more expensive. It would incentivise the use of lower-emitting fuels like ammonia, biofuels, methanol and hydrogen.

A fuel standard, which most countries already agree on, would see ship owners pay for emissions only above a certain level. Owners of ships emitting below this level could potentially sell licenses to those emitting above it, enabling them to continue polluting. This would incentivise shipowners to use cleaner fuels or to save fuel by sailing slower.

On Tuesday, Dominguez said he was optimistic that agreement on whether to have a levy, fuel standard or both would be found in April and signed off at the next set of IMO talks in October.

Arsenio Dominguez speaks to journalists at International Maritime Organization headquarters on January 14 2024 (Photo: IMO)

Details to come later

Negotiations on how much a levy should be, and what it should be spent on, are likely to take longer but the IMO aims to have any measures in place by 2027.

Ahead of the February 17-21 talks, governments have submitted proposals on how a levy – which could raise over $100 billion a year, according to UN estimates – should be designed.

A proposal put forward by the broad group of levy backers unanimously recommends that some of the money should be given to ships powered by clean fuels and used to research and develop these fuels and the port infrastructure required to use them.

It also says that part of the funds raised should go towards addressing disproportionately negative impacts of the measures, which studies have shown are likely to raise the price of shipping across the world, on some countries.

But the countries behind the proposal disagree on whether proceeds from a levy should be allocated only to developing countries and whether they should be restricted to the shipping sector or used for the wider energy transition.

One option in their joint proposal says the funds should be limited to “the boundaries of the energy system of international shipping” while another option deletes this text.

Hunger concerns

A group of five small island states and the International Chamber of Shipping, a trade association, put forward a separate proposal, which says some funds should be directed to climate causes outside shipping, through existing funds like the Green Climate Fund or the Global Environment Facility.

Ishoda’s Marshall Islands was one of the nations backing this proposal. He told Climate Home that the shipping industry must “assist our communities to adapt to the constant sea level rise made by shipping’s dirty past”.

A levy has been opposed most vocally by South American nations like Brazil, whose economy is reliant on shipping bulky goods like iron ore long distances, and are therefore sensitive to increases in the price of shipping.

Dominguez – who is Panamanian – told Climate Home on Tuesday that some nations, particularly in the Global South, are concerned that shipping price rises may lead to exporting farms becoming unprofitable and shutting down, harming national food security. The IMO will hold a workshop before the April talks to address these concerns.

Outside of the IMO, a coalition of governments led by France, Kenya and Barbados is researching and attempting to win support from other nations for levies on different sectors, including shipping, aviation, fossil fuels and financial transactions.

Friederike Roder is the director of the secreteriat for this Global Solidarity Levies Task Force. She told Climate Home that it supports the IMO’s discussions on a shipping emissions levy and is “following matters very closely”, but doesn’t want to “duplicate processes”.

(Reporting by Joe Lo; editing by Megan Rowling)

The post Support grows for global tax on shipping emissions to fund climate action appeared first on Climate Home News.

Categories: H. Green News

Whiplash: How Big Swings in Precipitation Fueled the L.A. Fires

Yale Environment 360 - Thu, 01/16/2025 - 03:32

Climate scientist Daniel Swain says that two very wet years followed by a very dry one helped to turn the Los Angeles wildfires into raging infernos. This phenomenon of “hydroclimate whiplash,” he says, is expected to occur in more and more places as the world warms.

Read more on E360 →

Categories: H. Green News

Lead in the water and chloroprene in the air: Whom does the EPA protect?

Grist - Thu, 01/16/2025 - 01:45

Whom does the EPA protect?

The Biden administration promised change for overpolluted communities in the South. Four years later, they’re still waiting.

By Lylla Younes Jan 16, 2025

When President Joe Biden announced his Justice40 Initiative, a week after he took office in January 2021, it had been almost 30 years since a U.S. president had signed an executive order related to environmental justice. He directed the federal government to allocate 40 percent of the benefits of climate, clean energy, and other investments to disadvantaged communities “marginalized by underinvestment and overburdened by pollution.” 

Biden’s initiative was a kind of rejoinder to President Bill Clinton’s earlier executive order, which directed federal agencies to identify and address the adverse human health and environmental effects of their actions on minority and low-income areas. While much toxic pollution was curbed in the decades in between, for the parts of the country with the highest concentrations of industrial activity, things hadn’t improved at all. More industrial companies set up shop. Dump sites swelled. Contaminated rivers became more contaminated. Lead accumulated in the soil. Biden’s Justice40 Initiative gave his new Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Michael Regan, the task of not looking away. 

In November 2021, as if to signal that the EPA had turned a leaf, Regan embarked on a tour of Southern towns and cities where the problem of environmental injustice is most acute: Jackson, Mississippi; Cancer Alley and Mossville in Louisiana; Houston, Texas. Dubbed the “Journey to Justice,” he met with community leaders and residents whose testimonies he promised he’d take into account when he returned to Washington. 

“[The tour] was really eye-opening,” Regan said in an EPA documentary about the trip. “To see it, to feel it, to have conversations. … I saw on the ground people expressing a desire to be treated like everyone else.” 

This fall, I set out to retrace Regan’s tour and look for signs of whether and how much the struggle for environmental justice truly advanced under Biden and Regan. Having reported on the region and the EPA’s operations there for six years, I knew that in its most polluted areas, changing conditions on the ground would take longer than a presidential term; still, I wondered whether the immediate actions that residents say they need — fines for companies violating federal standards, home buyouts with fair prices, permit reform, more government transparency — had been granted.

I knew that this iteration of the EPA was a test — of the limits of American bureaucracy, of the strength of industrial and corporate power, of the purpose and efficacy of the EPA itself. 

No previous administration had dedicated enough resources, funds, or public relations efforts needed to confront industry’s unbridled expansion in the country’s most polluted and vulnerable areas. Cleaning up America’s air and water, a bipartisan mission at the EPA’s founding in 1970, has become highly politicized over the years, with reactionary state governments and industrial companies balking at the agency’s attempts to tighten regulations — all of which makes it difficult to imagine another administration, especially one led by Donald Trump, continuing these efforts. 

Over 500 miles, through thick swampland and crowded interstate highways, I encountered scenes and people that elucidated the promise of Biden’s environmental justice agenda — and where it fell short. The administrator’s visits raised the profile of these industrial sacrifice zones and spurred EPA efforts to strengthen industrial regulations. But many community leaders remained frustrated at the agency’s hesitation to push for more aggressive, systemic change. Policies like permit reform and deepening community engagement could have helped safeguard the progress of the past four years against the whims of President-elect Donald Trump and his incoming administration, which has promised to clear the path for unchecked oil and gas production. Indeed, over the course of the Biden EPA, the agency’s core function was exposed. So were its limits.

Regan began his Journey to Justice tour in Jackson, Mississippi, on the same day in November 2021 that Biden signed the first of his two landmark climate bills, the bipartisan infrastructure act, into law. The capital city is at the end of a long period of decline. In most of its neighborhoods, tangles of overgrowth spill onto wide, empty streets bearing cracks and potholes. Torn up segments of asphalt and caution tape are ubiquitous. All across south and east Jackson, abandoned homes appear to be overtaken by the land, the roofs fallen in, the windows all gone, vines threading up the exteriors as if to pull the structures back down into the earth.

The city, which is more than 80 percent Black and has a poverty rate more than double the national average, is also in dire need of extensive infrastructure upgrades to its water system — an issue within the remit of the EPA. As Biden and Regan were just taking office, a quick succession of severe winter storms caused systemic failures at one of Jackson’s primary water treatment facilities. About 20,000 customers served by the O.B. Curtis plant — 15 percent of the city’s population — lost access to safe, reliable water.

The facility lacked proper weatherization equipment and suffered from a lack of corrosion controls, which allowed bacteria to spread throughout the system. By November, the city’s water distribution network was plagued by persistent leaks and lead contamination, and the whole system was nearing a breaking point. Rolling boil-water notices advised residents of E. coli contamination, which causes stomach pain and can lead to kidney damage. Additionally, two separate lawsuits filed by aggrieved parents blamed the city for their children’s lead poisoning diagnoses. One of Regan’s first stops in Jackson was to tour the Curtis plant with Jackson’s mayor, Chokwe Antar Lumumba, and Charles Williams, the city’s Public Works director. He pledged later that day to ensure the community, and others like it, would get the funds they needed to address infrastructure failures endangering public health. 

A water tower, left, looms over an abandoned soy depot in Jackson, Mississippi. In another part of town, right, vines overtake old buildings. Lylla Younes / Grist

Later in the day, after his visit to Wilkins Elementary School, which was enduring low water pressure, Regan championed Biden’s infrastructure spending as a solution to environmental injustice. “We want those who need these resources the most to receive them first,” he said. “So we’re going to work very diligently with our state partners to ensure that, in months not years, communities like Jackson will be able to receive the funds and move forward with investing the funds.” 

In January 2022, just a few months after Regan’s visit, the EPA issued a notice of violation to the city for failing to comply with the terms of the Safe Drinking Water Act, requiring local officials to develop a corrective action plan. In August, heavy rainfall caused the pumps at O.B. Curtis to fail again. Water pressure throughout the network plunged, and the entire city was without potable water. Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves declared a state of emergency. Pictures of Jacksonians waiting in long queues for National Guardsmen to load crates of water bottles into their cars flashed across national headlines. 

Regan visited Jackson twice in quick succession. “It’s hard to explain how and why [the] government has failed the city of Jackson and the people of Jackson,” he said in an October interview. When asked whether he would consider implementing “a state or a federal takeover of the Jackson water system,” Regan replied, “We’re evaluating all options.”

By November, the EPA’s complaint against Jackson for violating the Safe Drinking Water Act ended up in federal district court, where Judge Henry Wingate issued an order appointing Ted Henifin, an engineer known for his experience overhauling municipal water infrastructure, to manage the system. Several weeks later, the Biden administration allocated an unprecedented $600 million to fix the city’s beleaguered water infrastructure. Something like a takeover was beginning to take form, and it was a moment of great hope for a city that had suffered decades of white flight and discriminatory neglect. 

But in the years since, Jackson’s water troubles have become not only a crisis of public health, but also one of public trust. A wide cast of characters continues to vie for control of both the system and the narrative, and ordinary people are left wondering about the true state of affairs. In 2023, Henifin created a private company named JXN Water to carry out the overhaul of the city’s water system, and through which all of the federal money is funneled. It was a move that only worsened the issues of trust. The EPA, for its part, has been sidelined in a process it created. 

In August 2022, after heavy rainfall, Jackson’s water system failed again and lurched toward a breaking point. Residents, meanwhile, relied on bottled water.
Brad Vest / Getty Images

I arrived in Jackson on a rainy night last October, about a week before the presidential election. Momentarily forgetting the purpose of my visit, I opened the kitchen tap at my rental to fill a glass of water and was immediately hit with the stench of rotten eggs. I stood by the sink with the tap running for a moment longer, shocked by how quickly I had encountered the very problem residents had described to me on the phone over the past year. Then I noticed the tall water dispenser in the corner.

“You’re on a war boat declaring the mission’s been accomplished, but bombs are still dropping,” local activist Makani Themba told me the next morning, referring to President George W. Bush’s infamous speech about the war in Iraq. 

That, she continued, was what it has felt like to have the federal government swoop in to address the failing water system, only for the problems to persist. 

We were chatting at Themba’s kitchen table. She has warm eyes and curly snow-white hair, which she’d gathered in a high bun. That day, she and other local advocates were still reeling from a recent hearing in which Judge Wingate accused them of being racist against Henifin, a white man, for challenging his governance of the water system. All they’d been agitating for, Themba said while stirring a pot on the stove, is transparency and community engagement.  She and other activists had initially been excited about the engineer, having heard from environmentalists in St. Louis that he had worked miracles there. But instead of a collaborative process, many Jackson residents and activists were shut out once Henifin established his private company to fix the city’s drinking water problem.

According to Jackson activist Makani Themba, the federal government swooped in only for the problems with the failing water system to persist. Lylla Younes / Grist

“I wish that the EPA’s behavior here in Jackson would reflect the goals and the principles that the Biden administration laid out,” Themba said. “They talk about community involvement and all these things, but that’s not what we’ve experienced.”

“I’d say right now we’re in the worst position we’ve possibly been in since the EPA stepped in to help us,” said Tariq Abdul-Tawwab, the director of the Mississippi Rapid Response Coalition’s ground support team, which has been instrumental in mobilizing bottled water, filters, and lead testing kits to Jackson residents. Reflecting on the hearing with Judge Wingate, he continued, “When you’re being told you don’t have the right to ask questions, it’s the beginning of the end.”

Outside the realm of advocacy and politics, the water crisis has become a part of daily life. Willie Williams, the owner of the local restaurant Sweet Spot, pays a monthly bill to upkeep a water filtration system he installed, because he can’t serve or cook with the tap water. 

“It’s more than a crisis. I mean, it’s something that you have to add to your budget when you’re a business owner,” he said. “Water is very important.”

Another Jackson resident, Lula Henry, who I’d been connected with by a member of the Mississippi Rapid Response Coalition, had recently come home to find her washroom and carport flooded after a group of city contractors blew open a hydrant while working on her street. When I pulled up to her house, furniture and cooking equipment lay scattered throughout the front yard, drying off in the sun. Like other residents I spoke to, Henry only uses the tap water in her house for cooking and bathing, and relies on bottled water for drinking and brushing her teeth. She called JXN Water to understand what happened. No one came to help.

The drive from Jackson to south Louisiana takes about three hours, and shortly past the state line, the strips of pine forest flanking the highway give way to extensive swampland. After crossing the freshwater marsh at Lake Maurepas, I was finally in “Cancer Alley,” a stretch of land on the lower Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans where over 200 industrial facilities operate in the vicinity of historic Black neighborhoods. Recent studies have confirmed what residents of the region have long said, that people living along the fence lines of these industrial operations suffer from higher-than-average rates of miscarriages, infertility, respiratory ailments, and cancer.

Under the system of air pollution regulation in the U.S., fighting the construction of new industrial facilities is difficult. Cleaning up existing ones is even harder. Amendments to the Clean Air Act passed by Congress in 1990 divided the country’s industrial landscape into different categories of facilities and gave the EPA a decade to develop a set of regulations for each. It was a momentous task that required agency staffers to collect emissions data for thousands of plants across the country and determine what technologies industrial companies should install to reduce the pollution. These new rules, while useful for reducing — though not eliminating — emissions from facilities without pollution controls, could only work at the margins of the health crisis taking shape in the country’s most industrial areas. As toxicologists often point out, in the case of potent cancer-causing chemicals like dioxins, no level of exposure is considered safe. 

“There’s nothing in the Clean Air Act itself that says a community has a right to be healthy and safe,” said Monique Harden, a former director at the Deep South Center for Environmental Law and Policy. “It’s a voluminous and very technical document that puts into law the status quo of industrial operations.” 

As part of his 2021 tour, EPA administrator Michael Regan speaks to residents of “Cancer Alley,” where over 200 industrial facilities operate in the vicinity of historic Black neighborhoods.
EPA

Scott Throwe, who spent 30 years working in the EPA’s enforcement division, remembers the 1990s as a time of great activity and immense pressure. Agency staffers were directed to write rules that wouldn’t generate much public comment controversy or lead to lawsuits from chemical companies. In their rush to finalize all the rules by statutory deadlines, certain community health protections fell through the cracks. 

“It’s like watching a sausage get made. It’s not pretty, and we made a lot of sacrifices,” he recalled. “We couldn’t get perfect rules out, and sometimes they weren’t even very good. They were just OK.”

The amendments to the Clean Air Act also directed the EPA to revisit the slate of rules after eight years to assess the cancer risk that remained in communities. Many of these “risk assessments” were conducted under George W. Bush’s EPA, which adopted a far less protective standard of acceptable risk than prior administrations. Whereas the original text of the Clean Air Act said the EPA should strive to protect the public from pollution exposure with a cancer risk greater than 1 in 1 million, the Bush EPA began using the exponentially less protective standard of 1 in 10,000. 

While the Bush standard may seem fairly protective on its face, agency assessments only evaluate the cancer risk from a single chemical at a time. In reality, though, multiple plants operate simultaneously and in close proximity, releasing a slew of toxic chemicals on surrounding communities. The true cancer risk is cumulative.

The task, then, of enforcing these standards lies with state governments. Regulators in state agencies have wide latitude to permit new industrial facilities, along with construction and operating permits, wherever they see fit, including in areas that are already highly polluted. 

When Regan came to Cancer Alley in November 2021, he visited Fifth Ward Elementary in St. John the Baptist Parish. The school sits in the shadow of the Japanese chemical company Denka’s synthetic rubber manufacturing plant. Regan told residents that the proximity of the facility’s toxic chloroprene emissions to the school reminded him of his young son, and that the trip compelled him to use his “bully pulpit” to make change. 

Later, Regan left for a tour of nearby St. James Parish. Among the group of activists, local residents, and reporters there to receive Regan and his staff was Sharon Lavigne, a local organizer. When he emerged from his travel bus, the sight of a sharply dressed Black man around the age of her son shocked Lavigne. 

“I thought it would have been an all-white man with gray hair,” she said. “He was good-looking!”

When Sharon Lavigne met Regan in 2021, the sight of a sharply dressed Black man shocked her. “He was good-looking!” she said.
Eric Vance / EPA

Regan expressed surprise at how close chemical storage tanks were to people’s homes. The administrator promised to buff up the EPA’s inspections of local facilities and require certain companies to install air monitors around their facilities.  

In early 2022, Lavigne’s organization, Rise St. James, and several other local environmental groups filed two separate civil rights complaints with the EPA. One complaint alleged that the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality, or LDEQ, had behaved discriminatorily by granting permits to companies to build in the parish’s Black neighborhoods, such as the Taiwanese chemical group Formosa’s proposal for a plastics complex in St. James Parish. The other contested the state’s decision to let Denka continue operating in St. John, despite the EPA’s own data showing that the cancer risk it generated violated federal standards. During previous presidential administrations, the EPA had allowed such complaints to languish unresolved, but under Regan’s leadership, the agency opened a civil rights probe into conditions in Cancer Alley. 

Lavigne visits the graveyard where many of her friends are buried in St. James Parish. Lylla Younes / Grist

Federal and state officials were making significant progress at the negotiating table in the early part of 2023. Louisiana officials agreed to assess pollution levels in communities before greenlighting new industrial development. But then Attorney General Jeff Landry (who’s now governor of the state) sued the EPA and the Department of Justice, arguing that they were overextending their authority. A month later, the EPA closed its investigation.

To Lavigne, the EPA’s handling of the civil rights complaints constituted a genuine attempt at improving conditions in Cancer Alley. Others I spoke to weren’t so generous. Lifelong St. James resident Melvin Whittington said the EPA’s actions in the region amounted to little more than “a front to make you think they’re doing something, but they’re not.” 

With the civil rights probe closed, the EPA has run up against the extent of its power to do anything about the alleged discrimination in Formosa’s permitting. As for Denka, an EPA lawsuit against the company has been slowly making its way through the court system while the facility continues emitting the highly carcinogenic chemical chloroprene. In June, the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund sued the St. John the Baptist school board for violating its Civil Rights-era desegregation order by exposing the majority-Black student body to Denka’s toxic pollution — a tactic that exposes why the dynamics inherent to the hopeful phrase “environmental justice” are sometimes referred to with the more unforgiving phrase “environmental racism.”  

Melvin Whittington, left, said the EPA’s actions in Cancer Alley amounted to little more than “a front.” Whittington lives near the Denka synthetic rubber manufacturing plant, right. Lylla Younes / Grist

Considering these developments, Whittington wondered aloud whether the organizing they’d committed themselves to in Cancer Alley had even been effective. His words seemed to echo the sentiments of residents I’d spoken to in Jackson, who’d said that for all the resources and attention from the EPA, meaningful change was still elusive. “Doesn’t seem like we’re getting nothing done,” he said.

Five days after I left Cancer Alley, the St. John school board voted to shut down Fifth Ward Elementary

On the morning of Election Day, I headed west toward Lake Charles, Louisiana, passing through sprawling fields of soybean and sugarcane under an overcast sky. The serpentine Calcasieu River forms the city’s northern border, and across it lie the industrial town of Westlake and the community of Mossville. 

I’d been here before, back in 2021, when I sat on the plush couch of Debra Sullivan Ramirez’s dimly lit living room, just a month before Regan’s tour. Sullivan Ramirez grew up in Mossville and moved to the city of Lake Charles in the late 1980s to get her three children away from the pollution, which she attributed to the lesions that had formed on their skin. As I sat with Sullivan Ramirez and two of her friends, discussing the string of diseases that had stalked her family, she handed me a stack of documents she’d saved over the years — newspaper clippings detailing fires and explosions at local plants, permit files, emissions registers — evidence of a place under siege. 

Over the past several decades, the greater Lake Charles-Mossville area has transformed into a transnational oil and gas hub, with new pipelines, liquified natural gas terminals, and industrial plants rising up out of the swamp and filling the air with the din of construction and the sweet odor of synthetic chemicals. In 2001, the South African chemical company Sasol, whose plant outside of Johannesburg is the biggest single emitter of carbon dioxide in the world, began building an ethane cracker in Mossville to produce ethylene. Sasol didn’t begin the industrial takeover of the town — that had started as far back as the 1940s — but it exacerbated the problems. 

After deciding to expand its complex to include an ethylene cracker and a gas-to-liquid plant, Sasol began making offers to buy the properties of Mossville residents, but a study has shown that the company offered significantly less money to Black homeowners, many of whom trace their ancestry back to the founding of Mossville by formerly enslaved people. Some residents decided to take the buyouts anyway, and some decided to stay.

There are four things that the people of Mossville still want, Sullivan Ramirez told me: a lifetime of health insurance, free education, enough money to buy a proper home, and a memorial to honor everyone who’d died with cancer and liver failure. 

Once called “the world’s most important chemical,” ethylene is used to manufacture everything from food packaging and airplane engines to polyester and drainage pipes. Toxic as it may be to create, it is an essential ingredient to modern life. But as Mossville learned, some people have to pay a higher price for it. A 2000 study from the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry found that the level of dioxins in Mossville residents’ blood was triple the national average.

When Regan’s tour bus pulled into Mossville that November, members of the Concerned Citizens of Mossville, a local advocacy group, showed him around. As they drove, one person asked Regan whether he was wearing a face mask to protect himself from COVID or from the air pollution. “Both, in this case,” he replied.

Regan takes a walking tour of Mossville, where the roads leading into town are lined with abandoned homes with faded for-sale signs, in 2021. Eric Vance / EPA

“It’s astonishing to see the level — the presence — of industry surrounding this community,” Regan told reporters later that day. 

When I returned to Sullivan Ramirez’s house this fall, she was dismayed by the EPA’s actions since Regan’s visit. In January 2022, Regan announced funding for increased air and water monitoring in Mossville, but little else. Companies were rarely fined, or paid minimal amounts, for breaching federal emissions standards, and most importantly, people felt as though there was no way out. (Sasol, which earned $275 billion in 2024, reached a $1.4 million settlement with EPA last April for a string of violations, including a chemical fire at the facility). “EPA is just trying to pacify us. They’ve done nothing but ignore the community folk and what they want,” Sullivan Ramirez said. “We want true change.”

Today, the roads leading into Mossville are lined with abandoned homes with faded for-sale signs. As I approached, the air became acrid and I felt a familiar pressure in my nose, a sign of my proximity to petrochemical pollution. In the parking lot of the old community rec center, a man on a four-wheeler approached and asked what I was doing there. When I said I was a reporter, he waved me off and began driving away.

“Are you from Mossville?” I quickly asked. 

He said he didn’t want to talk, that people like me came through from time to time and took pictures of the plants looming over people’s homes — and then they left. 

But, he said, he’d been living there all his life. His mother’s home was down the road. The rec center was still open, he said, and if I stayed long enough I might see some kids playing ball. Sure, many folks had left. But for some, he made clear, Mossville was still home.

Mossville seemed to represent more clearly than anywhere I’d visited the terminus of unchecked industrial growth, the final result of a regulatory system administered by industry-friendly state governments and overseen by a federal agency with little power to do anything to upset business as usual. A well meaning EPA, like Biden and Regan’s, could offer an ear to communities in the crossfire or require companies to use better technology and hang up air monitors. But in a place like Mossville, the root of the injustice — a massive chemical complex — is left unchecked.

A playground sits in the shadow of a petrochemical facility in Mossville, Louisiana. More clearly than anywhere I’d visited, Mossville seemed to represent the terminus of unchecked industrial growth. Lylla Younes / Grist

Heading west from Mossville, the problem of pollution hotspots remains starkly apparent on the Texas Gulf Coast, where 10-lane highways fill the air with smog and dozens of industrial companies operate close together and share pipelines, storage infrastructure, and export docks. Regan traveled these highways on his way to Houston’s Fifth Ward, the last stop on the Journey to Justice. 

The neighborhood is framed by plants that make concrete along Interstate 45 to the west and metal recyclers dotting Interstate 69 to the east. A cancer cluster, defined as a greater-than-expected number of cancer cases in a particular area, was identified in the community, linked to a toxic plume of creosote in the soil. The site is currently owned by Union Pacific Railroad, which acquired it in a merger with the Southern Pacific Railroad in the 1990s. A 2020 Houston Health Department study of the Fifth Ward found that more than 40 percent of the households surveyed had at least one cancer case. 

Regan visited two churches and an elementary school in the Fifth Ward. He sat in the front yard of local activist Sandra Edwards’ home, and listened as she detailed the experience of living on contaminated earth. She wanted more than just a reduction in pollution levels. Like Sullivan Ramirez in Lake Charles, Edwards demanded restitution for the harm already done to residents’ health. 

“We shouldn’t have to go all the way to the medical center across town,” she told him. “We should bring a facility to this neighborhood for people.”

To get to Houston, the last stop on his 2021 Journey to Justice, Regan traveled down 10-lane highways that fill the air with smog. “We have access to EPA now,” one advocate said, “but what has that actually translated to?”
Eric Vance / EPA

Regan promised Fifth Ward residents what he had other communities on the tour — air monitoring, stronger enforcement, and better oversight of the state regulator. 

“EPA is exploring ways that we can legally read the Clean Air Act in a way that allows us to take into consideration some of these external factors,” he said. “Do we believe that there’s some vulnerabilities there if people want to challenge us in court? Possibly. But the only way to find out is to test it.”

Longtime Houston resident Leticia Gutierrez left her corporate job for a position at Air Alliance Houston, an environmental justice advocacy organization, after her son was diagnosed with childhood asthma. Administrator Regan’s visit was meaningful, she said, particularly for the residents he met with, who have long family histories of cancer. 

At the start of Regan’s term, Air Alliance Houston had really believed that change would come, but, Gutierrez said, “Here we are, four years later, with not much to really speak of.” The industrial facilities surrounding Houston kept up their steady work: In 2023, the city’s smog levels violated health-based standards on 55 days, more than any other year since 2011.

“We have access to EPA now,” she continued, “but what has that actually translated to?” 

One thing that the EPA did do, in November, was to release its Interim Framework for Advancing Consideration of Cumulative Impacts, which the agency opened for community feedback. Once the document is finalized, it will provide guidance for local governments to better understand and mitigate the effects of cumulative pollution. That framework, however, will amount to little more than words of advice to state agencies unless a successive EPA administrator moves it forward.

On the last day of my trip, I drove back east to a city that Regan skipped over — Port Arthur, Texas, which is 75 percent non-white and is one of the country’s most important fossil fuel export hubs, where thousands of cubic feet of fracked gas are loaded onto tankers and shipped to Europe each year. 

I was on my way to meet with John Beard, an environmental advocate and former chemical industry worker who’s now known for giving his own kind of tours. We were joined by a group of European climate activists traveling between hotspots of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. 

We piled into Beard’s car and drove through the old downtown toward the industrial infrastructure along the coast. Abandoned buildings lined the streets around the city hall. In the surrounding neighborhoods, many homes had boards or plastic sheets instead of windows — damage from past hurricane seasons. Beard began listing facts about the city’s petrochemical history.

John Beard, an environmental advocate and former chemical industry worker, is now known for giving what he calls “toxic tours” of Port Arthur, Texas. Lylla Younes / Grist

The first refineries in Port Arthur were built in 1903, he said, and the only time they ever stopped operating was during Hurricane Harvey in 2017. The two largest refineries in the country were located there, within 15 miles of each other. Beard worked as an operator at the one owned by Exxon Mobil for 38 years. 

As we crested a bridge overlooking the patchwork of industrial complexes in western Port Arthur, he rolled down the windows.

“You’re smelling wood particles that are laced with formaldehyde,” he informed us, gesturing toward a wood pellet manufacturing facility just out of view.

For several hours, we drove between the different industrial operations in town, stopping to photograph hundred-foot flares and smokestacks emitting billowing steam. Across the river from Sempra Energy’s new liquified natural gas terminal, a group of fishermen were reeling in their daily catch while a pelican perched on a railing nearby, eying them cautiously. According to data from the Texas Cancer Registry, cancer rates among Black residents in Jefferson County, which encompasses Port Arthur and the industrial city of Beaumont to the north, are around 15 percent higher than the state average.

The cruel irony of all the Gulf Coast’s industrial corridors — that mere miles away from neighborhoods where people are too financially stressed to repair their hurricane-damaged homes, the world’s highest revenue-generating companies operate — seemed particularly pronounced in Port Arthur. Workers come from “lily white” suburbs, Beard explained, while locals struggle to make ends meet. The city’s poverty rate hovers around 30 percent, nearly triple the national average. 

It’s the same formula I had seen again and again, in the towns Regan visited and in the dozens of others he hadn’t. It’s a problem bigger than the Southern U.S., one that spans Midwestern cities like Gary, Indiana, and southwestern villages like Murray Acres, New Mexico; places where people’s health and futures had been sacrificed for industries that promised to make the country more prosperous and comfortable to all.

It’s also a problem bigger than the EPA. With approvals from elected officials, industrial companies will always set up shop where it’s most profitable for them to: alongside deepwater ports, near natural resource deposits, and in areas where infrastructure like pipelines and roads already exist. The EPA’s job, then, is to somehow regulate the ever-expanding anatomy of industrial America. Its mandate does not require it to consider the necessity or risks of an operation before it comes into being; only to ensure that operation remains in compliance with federal standards. Regan’s EPA tightened many of these rules, requiring for the first time, for example, that synthetic chemical manufacturers monitor the air near their plants. But in a place like Port Arthur, where different kinds of pollution sources operate in the same industrial sprawl, clotting the air and coloring the water, no amount of overhauled regulations (which take years to come into effect) can make it safe. Perhaps this is the most we can expect of the EPA, regardless of whom the president is: incremental progress in the form of pollution-source rule updates, too slow to match the churn of economic growth. 

I reached out to Administrator Regan to get his thoughts on what I’d heard as I retraced the path he took four years prior. I also requested an interview with Earthea Nance, the administrator of EPA Region 6, which includes Texas and Louisiana. Neither would meet with me, their press secretaries informed me. They were busy wrapping up their terms and preparing for the holidays, the national office’s spokesperson said, but I could look out for a documentary about the tour soon to be published on the agency’s website. It would answer most of my questions, he assured me. 

The video, however, told a familiar story in American politics. Regan decried the environmental pollution he witnessed as “unacceptable anywhere in the United States of America.” And then he championed government funding as the solution. “At EPA, we have designed billions of dollars in grant programs, billions of dollars being invested into our infrastructure to ensure that every single person — no matter the money in your pockets, the color of your skin, or the ZIP code you live in — will have access to clean water, clean air, and safe and healthy lands.” Ultimately, the video betrayed no concern about the threat to such funding under Donald Trump’s next term; nor did Regan himself speak directly to the root of the pollution — industrial activity. “The journey to justice continues,” Regan concluded. 

Our final stop on Beard’s tour was a refinery owned by Motiva, a U.S. subsidiary of a Saudi company, separated from a single house by a levee, a weak creek, and a road — maybe 100 feet. Beard knew the woman who lived there, and wondered if she was home. All along the levee, signs warned passersby of the highly pressurized natural gas pipeline that ran under their feet. Long white cushions had been laid across the ditch; Beard asked us to guess what they were. Nobody offered any.

Oil absorbers, he said finally, laid down to absorb the crude oil that floated into the creek. 

“What are we making this sacrifice for?” Beard asked. “It is certainly not doing us any good.”

Correction: An earlier version of this article misidentified the company responsible for soil pollution in Houston’s Fifth Ward neighborhood. It was the Southern Pacific Railroad, which was later acquired by Union Pacific Railroad.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Lead in the water and chloroprene in the air: Whom does the EPA protect? on Jan 16, 2025.

Categories: H. Green News

A new frontier in the voluntary carbon market: Old, leaky oil wells

Grist - Thu, 01/16/2025 - 01:30

The environmental harm of oil and gas wells doesn’t end when the pumping stops. If disused wells remain unplugged — the term of art for closing them up with concrete and remediating the environment around them — they can leach toxic chemicals and spew planet-warming methane into the air. Some 3 million such wells dot the U.S., and the companies responsible for them have often fled the scene. In recent years, Congress has poured billions of dollars into cleaning up the mess, giving rise to a niche industry of hardscrabble well pluggers across the country.

But all that money still isn’t anywhere close to enough, which is why carbon credit developers are also getting in on the action. A handful of private companies and nonprofits are now attempting to use the voluntary carbon market — which sells emissions-reducing schemes to institutions attempting to meet their climate goals by cutting down on carbon pollution other than their own, essentially — as a source of funding for cleanups of these orphan wells.

Here’s how it’s supposed to work: The amount of methane leaking out of a given well can vary dramatically, so carbon credit developers first identify high emitters. They secure access to the well from landowners, obtain the right to operate and plug the well from regulators, measure the amount of methane being released, plug the well, and estimate the amount of emissions avoided as a result of their work.

The methodology for this last, crucial calculation varies depending on the standards that the developer decides to adhere to. If the standard setter requires independent verification, the developer also hires a certification firm to audit the emissions calculation. Once the developer clears these hurdles, the standard setter issues the equivalent carbon credits into the voluntary carbon market where companies — think data centers, automobile manufacturers, and any corporate actor making promises to green their operations — can purchase them.

Nearly 5 million credits have been generated since the first project was issued in the summer of 2023. While it’s unclear exactly if and how much these credits sold for, experts told Grist it’s reasonable to assume that they can fetch at least $10 to $30 per credit, each of which constitutes 1 metric ton of avoided carbon dioxide emissions.

There’s clearly money to be made through the voluntary carbon market for orphan well cleanups, but the exact environmental benefits are less certain. For one, the amount of methane emissions avoided as a result of plugging a well is difficult to estimate, in part because leakage rates decline at an uncertain pace over time, as more natural gas escapes from a well and the pressure underground decreases. Some wells leak significant amounts in short bursts, while others pollute gradually. And even when a well is plugged, it’s not entirely clear that the methane will remain trapped underground. In some cases, it could bubble up from neighboring leaky wells. 

“There are a lot of hurdles that you have to get over in order for those [carbon] credits to be any good,” said Adam Peltz, a director and senior attorney at the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund. “And some of those hurdles require a lot of thinking and vigilance.”

When it comes to verifying the credibility of carbon offsets, the American Carbon Registry is the most prominent standard setter. The program, founded in 1996, has developed a methodology for estimating the climate benefits of reducing emissions from landfills, restoring wetlands, and planting trees, among other activities. Since establishing a set of standards for evaluating oil and gas well pluggings in May 2023, the Registry has issued more than half of the nearly 5 million credits generated by the industry so far. The other major standard setters are CarbonPath and BCarbon.

As for calculating the amount of methane pollution avoided when a leaky well is plugged, each standard setter has a different approach. This leads to different assessments of the number of credits that can be issued for a particular project. A key difference lies in each setter’s assessment of methane’s potential to heat the planet. Once it’s in the atmosphere, methane degrades into less potent greenhouse gases in about a decade. That means that its warming power, compared to that of carbon dioxide, is highly dependent on the timescale one chooses: Methane’s warming potential is about 80 times greater than carbon dioxide’s over a 20-year timeframe, but roughly 27 times greater over a 100-year timeframe. In calculating methane’s potential to warm the planet, BCarbon uses a 20-year timeframe while the Registry and CarbonPath use a 100-year timeframe. Because it’s using a shorter time horizon, BCarbon issues more credits.

The standard setters also use different time horizons to estimate the period over which methane emissions are avoided as a result of a well plugging. CarbonPath assumes that by plugging a well, the developer helped protect the planet from up to 50 years of methane emissions. The other two standard setters use a period of 20 years. 

Brad Handler, a researcher and program director of the Energy Finance Lab​ at the Colorado School of Mines, suggested that the methodologies might come closer together as more data is gathered. “I can’t sit here and tell you that one is wrong,” he said. “As buyers get more educated about all of it, the methodology may be refined.”

In the meantime, it’s entirely possible that developers are overestimating the planetary benefits of plugging wells — and in turn helping corporations overstate their progress on their climate goals. Peltz, the Environmental Defense Fund attorney, said there was little reasoning behind assuming that emissions were avoided over 50 years rather than 20 years. “I’m hard-pressed to see a basis other than generating more credits for the same activity,” he said. 

Concerns about overcrediting are already circulating about at least one project. Last year, a company called Rebellion Energy Solutions plugged six orphaned wells in Oklahoma and estimated that the wells leaked between 2.7 and 285 kilograms of methane per hour. Based on two measurements taken 30 days apart, Rebellion calculated an average methane leak rate of 68 kilograms per hour. Those numbers are orders of magnitude higher than the values measured by researchers. Most studies have found that unplugged orphan wells emit 10 to 30 grams of methane per hour. One study in Colorado estimated an average leak rate of 586 grams per hour and identified one instance of a super-emitting well releasing 76 kilograms per hour. 

Read Next States want to clean up leaky oil wells. Well-intentioned laws are getting in the way.

Rebellion issued nearly 1.9 million credits for the project — more than a third of all credits issued so far. BeZero Carbon, a global carbon credits rating agency, found that the project likely overestimated the amount of methane released. (A spokesperson for BeZero said the firm doesn’t comment on specific ratings.)

“The values recorded by the project may reflect the worst-case-scenario baseline; a scenario that may not come to pass,” the ratings firm noted, adding that the project “faces significant over-crediting risk as a result of uncertainties regarding the project’s modeling of baseline methane leakage rates.”

But Staci Taruscio, Rebellion’s CEO, said that the high leakage rate in the pool of wells they’ve plugged so far is in part because the company spends significant time and resources to identify high emitters. Rebellion staff conduct analyses to select wells that have historically produced natural gas and are likely to hold reserves underground that can leak. They also sign agreements with landowners giving them access to wells that academics typically can’t reach when collecting standard measurements. The company measured methane levels at roughly 3,000 wells before selecting the dozen or so highest emitters that they’ve plugged so far, said Taruscio, who worked most of her career in the oil and gas industry.

“We have a lot of tools in our tool belt to identify those [high-emitting wells],” she said. “If you think of the oil and gas industry, our entire existence depends upon finding reservoirs with energy. That’s all we’re doing.”

Taruscio said she was “shocked” by BeZero Carbon’s rating and has submitted the methane measurements from the other 3,000 wells for the agency to reconsider its finding. “We realized a big part of their rating was because they haven’t seen all the wells that weren’t included,” she said.

Taruscio said that, given the novel nature of carbon credits for plugging wells, developers, standard setters, certifiers, and rating agencies are all still moving up the learning curve. 

“There are bad actors out there,” she said. “So everybody just has to be really cautious at this point so that we don’t let bad projects through.”

Editor’s note: The Environmental Defense Fund is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.

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('.classtoolTips3','A powerful greenhouse gas that accounts for about 11% 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 a 20-year period, it is roughly 84 times more potent than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere.');

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A new frontier in the voluntary carbon market: Old, leaky oil wells on Jan 16, 2025.

Categories: H. Green News

Saving the surf is a climate solution

Grist - Thu, 01/16/2025 - 01:15

Vibrant shades of green merge with brilliant streaks of blue where the land meets the sea on Rao Island, which sits just west of Morotai in the northeastern corner of the Indonesian archipelago. Fishing boats bob in the bay, and children perched on the colorful hulls laugh as their bare feet dangle in the water. Some of them leap playfully into the waves.

The island lies in a region recently declared a surf-protected area, a legal designation that preserves the surf break just offshore and the ecosystems that surround it. On the beach, shaded by palm trees and against the rhythmic crash of the ocean rolling ashore, youngsters from seven nearby villages attending surf camp are learning to safeguard this ecological treasure, both for the sake of a sport they love and as a lifeline to their culture, their community’s livelihood, and the planet.

Coastlines around the world are marked by surf breaks — places where a reef, sandbar, rocky outcropping, or other feature causes the water to crest, giving a wave its curl. Rising and warming seas, coastal erosion, and development threaten this delicate cadence of forces, with grave implications for surfing. A 2017 analysis of the California coastline found 34 percent of the state’s breaks could be lost to climate change by 2100. This global risk has alarmed surfers and mobilized organizations like Conservation International and the Save the Waves coalition to protect breaks worldwide. 

Doing so requires protecting the ecosystems around them, which in turn defends coastlines against erosion, minimizes storm surges, and supports marine life. It also mitigates climate change.

Research published last fall by a team of surfer-scientists revealed that the mangroves, seagrass beds, and other habitats within 1 kilometer (0.6 mile) of the world’s surf breaks hold 88.3 million metric tons of carbon worldwide. Five countries — the United States, Australia, Indonesia, Brazil, and Panama — account for nearly half of that. Expand that radius to 2 miles and the amount of sequestered carbon nearly doubles.

“It was pretty astounding to find out that if we could effectively protect the breaks of the world with their surrounding ecosystems, we could have a significant role in sustaining that stored carbon,” said Scott Atkinson, one of the authors of the paper and senior director of surf conservation at Conservation International. “It starts to be a real significant number in terms of relative carbon emissions every year.” 

The finding builds on a study, published in 2021, that showed 25 percent of the world’s surf breaks lie within 3 miles of an area deemed  crucial to maintaining the planet’s biodiversity. Yet nearly two-thirds of them lack formal protection against development and other threats, which imperils these carbon stores.

A growing number of surf-protected areas, or SPAs, are bringing some level of conservation to these habitats. The work that Atkinson and his colleagues published in Conservation Science and Practice provides a framework for aligning such efforts with climate goals. They urge conservationists, policymakers, and the surfing community to work with local communities to protect these carbon sinks.

“If we lose this carbon, it would be impossible to get it back within the next couple of decades,” said Marissa Miller, another contributor to the paper, a colleague of Atkinson’s at Conservation International, and a professional surfer. 

In Morotai, locals work with Save the Waves to combine surf protection with sustainable fishing practices and eco-friendly tourism. The Morotai Surf Conservation Camp serves as an educational hub to raise awareness of these efforts, particularly among children. Rafaela Maia

Conservation International and Save the Waves have collaborated with authorities and local communities in Indonesia, Peru, and Costa Rica to establish 30 surf-protected areas. Of those, 23 are in Indonesia and cover 148,000 acres, an area roughly half the size of Los Angeles. They’d like to see such efforts, which started in 2019, expand, and they hope to establish another 20 SPAs this year. 

In Morotai, locals work with Save the Waves to combine surf protection with sustainable fishing practices and eco-friendly tourism. The Morotai Surf Conservation Camp that drew so many children on Rao Island in March serves as an educational hub to raise awareness of these efforts and stress the link between environmental stewardship and economic benefits.

Surf tourism, valued at up to $65 billion annually, brings livelihoods to coastal communities, but carries with it a latent threat: Without protection, the development that often accompanies the industry risks degrading the very ecosystems that sustain these areas and the people who live there. Nearly 20 percent of the carbon stored in surf ecosystems lies within areas that have no formal protection, vulnerable to development and the impacts of climate change. Smaller coastal island communities often feel these threats most intensely. By helping develop surf-protected areas, surf tourism can advance conservation rather than degradation. 

Experienced surfers understand the damage that can occur when a spot suddenly becomes popular. “If there’s no plan in place to protect the local community, environment, or culture, there can very quickly become issues with overdevelopment and overcrowding that lead to a lot of other problems,” she said. “But it doesn’t have to be that way, and fortunately, in most places, it’s not too late.”

The surfers behind the paper also note that their sport has a unique ability to foster connection with place — a bond that, in many parts of the world, has been severed. Surfing provides a way of rekindling a sense of responsibility for natural resources, Miller and others said. Leveraging that can preserve not just waves and biodiversity, but the cultural and economic lifeblood of coastal communities while providing a model for sustainable tourism.

Read Next The business case for saving coral reefs

“Our focus is nature for people,” Miller said. “It’s not just about creating a protected area, but it’s about how we can make it last. Our strategy for making it last is ensuring that local people are benefiting from it, that sustainable livelihoods are connected to it, and ensuring that we have sustainable financing mechanisms so that these protections have the resources to be continued.”

Clifford Kapono, a professional surfer, chemist, and molecular bioscientist at the Multi-scale Environmental Graphical Analysis Lab in Hilo, Hawai’i, has spent the last few years working with his team to map coral reefs beneath iconic surf breaks, in a similar effort to protect waves and the ecosystems below them. Less than 20 percent of the ocean floor is mapped, a critical gap in efforts to understand and protect marine environments. 

“How are we supposed to look after something when we don’t even know what it looks like?” he said. “Without an indication of what you have, it’s hard to know what to strive for and how to help.” 

Their bathymetric data highlights the economic and ecological value of reefs, showing that the most complex formations not only protect shorelines, prevent erosion, and store carbon, but often produce the best waves. Yet their significance extends beyond their ecological roles. “In Hawaiian culture, coral is respected and revered as an ancestor and elder,” says Kapono, a Native Hawaiian. “They’re a keystone entity for planetary stability and, in a way, our biggest ally.” 

Protecting these vital ecosystems is not just a duty to nature, he and others said, but a responsibility to heritage and humanity. “We as surfers are so connected to the ocean and these coastal environments, it’s more than our favorite playground,” Miller said. “We’re obligated to give back and take care of these places that have given us all so much.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Saving the surf is a climate solution on Jan 16, 2025.

Categories: H. Green News

Mitsubishi cancels plans for a $1.3B chemical plant in Louisiana’s Cancer Alley

Grist - Thu, 01/16/2025 - 01:00

This coverage is made possible through a partnership between Grist and Verite News, a nonprofit news organization with a mission to produce in-depth journalism in underserved communities in the New Orleans area.

Environmental groups are claiming victory after Mitsubishi Chemical Group dropped plans for a $1.3 billion plant in the heart of Louisiana’s industrial corridor. 

In the works for more than a decade, the chemical manufacturing complex would have been the largest of its kind in the world, stretching across 77 acres in Geismar, a small community about 60 miles west of New Orleans. Tokyo-based Mitsubishi cited only economic factors when announcing the cancellation last week, but a recent report on the plant’s feasibility noted that growing community concern about air pollution could also hamper the project’s success. 

“The frontline communities are fighting back, causing delays, and that amounts to money being lost,” said Gail LeBoeuf with Inclusive Louisiana, an environmental group focused on the industrial corridor along the Mississippi River known as Cancer Alley.

The nonprofit group Beyond Petrochemical declared the project’s failure a “major victory for the health and safety of Louisianans.”

According to Mitsubishi, the plant could have produced up to 350,000 tons per year of methyl methacrylate, or MMA, a colorless liquid used in the manufacture of plastics and a host of consumer products, including TVs, paint, and nail polish.

The plant was expected to be a major polluter, releasing hundreds of tons per year of carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, volatile organic compounds, and other harmful chemicals, according to its permit information. 

Mitsubishi cited rising costs and waning demand for MMA as the reasons for dropping the project. In a statement, the company indicated the plant likely wouldn’t have enough MMA customers to cover “increases in capital investment stemming from inflation and other factors.”

In July, a report on the plant’s viability warned that a global oversupply of MMA and fierce local opposition made the project a “bad bet.” 

Conducted by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, the report said that credit agencies are paying more attention to “community sentiment” about petrochemical projects, particularly in Louisiana. In Geismar and other parts of Cancer Alley, there’s a “disproportionately heavy concentration of polluting industrial facilities” and Mitsubishi could become “entangled in a decades-long dispute involving issues of racial inequality and environmental justice,” the IEEFA report said. 

Read Next Lead in the water and chloroprene in the air: Whom does the EPA protect?

Geismar residents are surrounded by about a half-dozen large chemical facilities that emit harmful levels of air pollution. Of the more than 6,000 people who live within the 3 miles of the planned project site, about 40 percent are Black or Hispanic, and 20 percent are considered low-income, according to federal data

“The air here is already so dirty that the kids can’t play outside anymore,” said Pamela Ambeau, Ascension Parish resident and member of the group Rural Roots Louisiana.

The proposed plant is the latest in a string of failed industrial projects in Cancer Alley. Since 2019, local activism was instrumental in halting the development of two large plastics complexes in St. James Parish and a grain export terminal in St. John the Baptist Parish. All three projects would have been built in historically Black and rural communities.  

Mitsubishi’s project had the strong backing of Louisiana political leaders. In 2020, then-Governor John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, praised the project as a “world-scale” chemical manufacturing facility that would create “quality jobs.”

Louisiana Economic Development predicted the plant would create 125 jobs with an average salary of $100,000 and another 669 “indirect jobs” in the region. 

The state agency began courting Mitsubishi in 2016, offering the company worker recruitment and training assistance and a $4 million grant to offset construction costs. 

In 2021, Mitsubishi applied for property tax abatement via the state’s Industrial Tax Exemption Program, or ITEP. The tax relief, which Louisiana has granted to several similar projects, was pending the plant’s construction and would have saved the company an estimated $17 million in its first year, according to LED. 

The first of a series of project delays began in 2022 due to what Mitsubishi called “market volatilities.” 

Mitsubishi appeared to be betting on generous state subsidies “while ignoring the larger financial landscape,” said Tom Sanzillo, author of the IEEFA report.

The combination of sustained market weakness and strong public opposition “erased the potential benefits they are counting on,” he said. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Mitsubishi cancels plans for a $1.3B chemical plant in Louisiana’s Cancer Alley on Jan 16, 2025.

Categories: H. Green News

LA fires show human cost of climate-driven ‘whiplash’ between wet and dry extremes

Climate Change News - Wed, 01/15/2025 - 12:27

Doug Specht is a reader in cultural geography and communication at the University of Westminster.

October to April is normally considered to be the wet season in California, yet this January, the region is experiencing some of the most devastating fires it’s ever seen.

As of January 14, five major fires in and around Los Angeles have burned over 40,000 acres, leading to the evacuation of more than 180,000 people, the destruction of some 12,000 structures (mainly homes), and an estimated damage cost that could rise as high as $250-275 billion. At least 25 lives have been lost, and these numbers are expected to rise as the fires continue to burn.

The exact causes of each fire are still under investigation. However, several factors have contributed to their rapid spread and intensity.

The seasonal Santa Ana winds are particularly strong this year, bringing low humidity, dry air and high wind speeds. Southern California has received less than 10% of its average rainfall since October 2024, creating dry conditions that make the area highly vulnerable to fire.

Unusually wet winters in both 2022-23 and 2023-24 led to increased vegetation growth, providing more fuel for the fires. This cycle of wet and dry extremes, known as “hydroclimate whiplash”, is part of the increasingly intense climate cycles caused by climate change.

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Hydroclimate whiplash can occur virtually anywhere. These cycles can cause extreme wildfires, such as those in California, where rapid vegetation growth is followed by drying. They can also exacerbate flooding when unusually heavy rains hit the dry-baked ground, then run off over the land rather than seeping in, leading to flash flooding.

The human impact of hydroclimate whiplash

Rapid transitions between extreme wet and dry conditions have significant and wide-ranging impacts on people, a focus of my academic research, affecting everything from public health to economic stability and social equity.

As we have seen in California, there is the immediate impact of loss of life, property and livelihoods. We have also seen this during whiplash-induced floods and landslides, such as those experienced across California in 2023 and east Africa in 2024, when years of drought were followed by weeks of rain.

Fires exacerbate respiratory and cardiovascular diseases through their polluting smoke. Flooding creates conditions for waterborne illnesses such as cholera, leptospirosis or norovirus to rip through populations. Extreme swings in temperature can also create more heat-related illnesses, as human bodies struggle to adapt quickly. It is estimated that the health-related impacts of climate change will cost US$1.1 trillion by 2050.

Super-rich have already burned more than their fair share of carbon for 2025

But this number pails into insignificance against the projected US$12.5 trillion in economic losses worldwide due to climate change by 2050. Critical infrastructure, including water supply systems, wastewater treatment plants and transportation networks, is at risk of damage or destruction. Food insecurity and scarcity will also increase during hydroclimate whiplash events.

And these impacts are not evenly distributed. While this month’s wildfires are affecting some of the richest communities in the US, it is generally low-income communities and vulnerable populations that are disproportionately affected, with limited resources to prepare for or recover from extreme events. Across the world, poorer populations are experiencing a 24%-48% increase in drought-to-downpour events, exacerbating their vulnerability and widening the health equity gap.

All these events and concerns also lead to mental health issues such as anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), resulting from displacement and trauma. Such human impacts are harder to measure, and often under-reported.

Adaptation and resilience

As climate change intensifies hydroclimate whiplash events, the human impacts are expected to grow more severe. Addressing these challenges will require coordinated efforts across multiple sectors, with a focus on both mitigation and adaptation strategies to protect human health, economic stability and social equity.

Governments and local authorities will need to implement co-management approaches for both drought and flood risks, alongside developing more flexible water management systems and infrastructure. Investing in natural infrastructure to enhance biodiversity and ecosystems will reduce risks to humans, both by restricting the effects of climate change and lowering the risks of fire and flooding.

In a major reversal, the World Bank is backing mega dams

As individuals we can often feel powerless, but environmental campaigns and movements have been highly successful in changing government policies. In the UK, the 2008 Climate Change Act and the net zero by 2050 legislation were the direct result of citizen lobbying and action, and the same can be said for numerous renewable energy transition policies around the world.

In California, we have seen the devastating effect of hydroclimate whiplash – and this won’t be the last we see. By calling on our governments to produce adaptation and resilience strategies that recognise climate change as a long-term human and economic risk factor, we can be more prepared for these events.

Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?

Get a weekly roundup in your inbox instead. Every Wednesday, The Conversation’s environment editor writes Imagine, a short email that goes a little deeper into just one climate issue. Join the 40,000+ readers who’ve subscribed so far.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The post LA fires show human cost of climate-driven ‘whiplash’ between wet and dry extremes appeared first on Climate Home News.

Categories: H. Green News

Undermining Environmental Justice Protections

EarthBlog - Wed, 01/15/2025 - 11:55

Late last year, the Air Quality Control Commission (AQCC) adopted a new set of rules intended to reduce emissions from the midstream oil and gas sector, which includes facilities such as gas plants and compressor stations. The state of Colorado lauded the rules as “groundbreaking” because they rely on a novel (but unproven) cap and trade program that offers flexibility for operators and a lot of uncertainty for communities. Unfortunately, there is nothing new about prioritizing the interests of industry over those of communities in Colorado.

Under this new program, midstream operators will have to reduce their emissions to meet an emissions cap, which will represent the total amount of emissions they are allowed to emit from all of their facilities. If they reduce emissions below what they are allowed by their cap, they will generate credits that can be sold to other operators who are still emitting more than what is allowed by their caps.

This program offers flexibility to operators because it allows them to decide where and how they will achieve their required emissions reductions. Without any guardrails, a program like this would fail to uphold the principles of Colorado’s Environmental Justice Act because it would not require operators to specifically reduce emissions at facilities located in communities where the burden from pollution is greatest. 

In an attempt to address this issue, the rules state that before operators can buy credits from other operators, they must first achieve at least 45% of their required emissions reductions by reducing emissions at facilities located in either:

1) Disproportionately impacted communities (DICs), which are communities that have a higher proportion of vulnerable populations exposed to environmental harms than other communities across the state.

OR

2) Counties located in the Front Range nonattainment area, which includes counties in the Denver metropolitan area and in Northern Colorado along the I-25 corridor that are failing to achieve federal standards for ozone, a dangerous air pollutant.

The problem with this framework should be immediately obvious: an operator could comply with these rules and not actually reduce emissions at any facilities located in DICs if they instead opted to reduce emissions only at facilities in the Front Range and not in DICs. Not only that, they could actually increase emissions at facilities located in DICs so long as they offset them elsewhere.

Two different angles on a plume of uncontrolled pollutants (black, unheated cloud of gas) being released from a compressor station located in a DIC in Weld County.

Colorado’s explanation for allowing operators to substitute emissions reductions at facilities in DICs for reductions at facilities in the nonattainment area is as follows: reducing emissions that contribute to ozone formation in the Front Range benefits air quality in all DICs located in the Front Range, even if emissions reductions are not occurring directly at facilities located in DICs. 

A less generous take on why the state structured the program this way is because it prioritizes flexibility for operators over strict requirements to target emissions reductions at specific facilities in vulnerable communities which may be costly or difficult. In this way, the state is also deemphasizing the importance of reducing localized pollution in these communities, which should be a top priority given our observations of midstream emission in DICs.

Improving regional air quality in the Front Range is an important goal, and one that the state of Colorado should take seriously. However, positioning benefits to regional air quality as a substitute for measures that will directly address localized pollution in DICs is not an approach that prioritizes the health and safety of communities or that honors the spirit of the EJ Act.

Sadly, community members in DICs are accustomed to the state of Colorado incentivizing trade-offs like this, and it is precisely how sacrifice zones are created and maintained. 

With these rules, Colorado takes another step forward in attempting to reduce harmful pollution from oil and gas. And, another step backward from a stated commitment to prioritizing environmental justice.

The post Undermining Environmental Justice Protections appeared first on Earthworks.

Categories: H. Green News

Saving the Ryukyu Rabbit Tick: The Posterchild of Parasite Conservation

The Revelator - Wed, 01/15/2025 - 08:00

In the southern reaches of Japan lies the lush, subtropical island of Amamioshima — Japan’s garden of Eden. Although almost unknown to the larger world, Amamioshima is the country’s ecological crown jewel, with some of its richest biodiversity. The island is blanketed in native forest and skirted by vibrant coral reefs.

Photo: Mackenzie L. Kwak (used with permission)

Unsurprisingly Amamioshima is also home to scores of endemic species, including perhaps its most famous resident, the Amami rabbit (Pentalagus furnessi). This bizarre mammal, sometimes called a “living fossil,” is about the size of a miniature schnauzer and covered in a woolly black fur with such minute ears some people fail to recognize it as a rabbit when they first see it. Amami rabbits are a keystone species in the island’s warm, wet forests, regulating plant communities through their grazing, dispersing seeds, and even providing the dung relied on by several endemic dung beetles.

 

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They’re also host to one of the world’s rarest parasites, the endangered Ryukyu rabbit tick (Haemaphysalis pentalagi).

The rabbit tick is unique to the island of Amamioshima, where it coevolved with the Amami rabbit — the two species spend most of their lives in close association. The life of a Ryukyu tick begins when it hatches from an egg deep in a rabbit’s burrow. The young tick quickly locates the resident rabbit, who will become its home, transportation, and constant companion. Although ticks feed on the blood of rabbits, this appears to have no adverse impacts on the host animals and may even serve to enhance their health by keeping their immune system primed.

A rabbit burrow. Photo: Mackenzie L. Kwak (used with permission)

Although ticks are known for their role in disease (e.g., Lyme, spotted fever, tick-borne encephalitis), Ryukyu rabbit ticks never bite humans and seem to be content in their association with the rabbits.

Unfortunately, the once peaceful island life enjoyed by the Ryukyu rabbit tick and Amami rabbit has been disrupted by human activity. In the 1970s the Japanese government introduced the small Indian mongoose (Urva auropunctata) to Amamioshima in a poorly planned effort to control venomous snakes. The mongooses, who reproduced rapidly, had little interest in snakes and instead preyed upon Amami rabbits, resulting in massive declines.

There’s good news: A 30-year campaign to eradicate the invasive mongoose was finally declared a success in 2024, providing a reprieve to the Ryukyu rabbit tick and Amami rabbit.

Tragically, feral dogs and cats still stalk the island’s forests, killing Amami rabbits and representing a major threat to both rabbit and tick — and wildlife diseases like toxoplasmosis also threaten the pair. To make matters worse, the invasive big-headed ant (Pheidole megacephala) has also been introduced to the island. This voracious invader is known to decimate communities of small invertebrates, including ticks. As they spread, they may also cause Ryukyu rabbit tick populations to decline.

Amidst these threats the world’s first conservation program for a globally threatened parasite was launched to save the Ryukyu rabbit tick in 2022. The Mohamed bin Zayed Species Conservation Fund and Japanese Ministry of Environment provided support to a small team led by researchers from Hokkaido university, who partnered with rangers on Amamioshima to begin conserving this endangered species.

Hardly anything was known about the Ryukyu rabbit tick, but within the first year the team developed monitoring methods to track wild populations and understand the trajectory of the species. An ongoing monitoring program is now in place to track the tick indefinitely and assess the impacts of conservation actions and invasive species.

Some wild ticks were collected and transported back to Hokkaido University, where they were used to start a captive-breeding program. It didn’t take long before they were reproducing successfully in captivity, and now a third generation of captive-bred Ryukyu rabbit ticks has recently been welcomed into the world.

Many people have a burning question have after hearing about the Ryukyu rabbit tick: Why should we save parasites?

At a foundational level, some argue that all species hold intrinsic value, including parasites.

A more compelling argument can be made, though: Parasites play unseen but often important roles in ecosystems, where they serve to support and stabilize entire biological communities.

Parasites even provide direct benefits to humans. In the case of the Ryukyu rabbit tick, scientists are studying its saliva with hopes of develop new pharmaceuticals to treat auto-immune diseases. Researchers are also developing the tick as a model organism (like the fruit fly and lab rabbit) to aid in their efforts to answer fundamental scientific questions and develop new technologies.

Although small, the Ryukyu rabbit tick is making a big impact on the world of conservation biology as a flagship species — a symbol that even parasites are worth saving from extinction. By conserving this rare animal, we take the first steps on the road toward a holistic new conservation, free from the old “species chauvinism” that focuses almost exclusively on larger, more charismatic animals.

On top of that, protecting the Ryukyu rabbit tick will help to safeguard its ecosystem — and may safeguard our health, too. That’s a big role for a tiny invertebrate.

Scroll down to find our “Republish” button Previously in The Revelator:

Parasite Lost: Did Our Taste for Seafood Just Cause an Extinction?

The post Saving the Ryukyu Rabbit Tick: The Posterchild of Parasite Conservation appeared first on The Revelator.

Categories: H. Green News

What Trump’s second term means for climate action in the US and beyond

Climate Change News - Wed, 01/15/2025 - 06:56

With Donald Trump, a notorious climate change sceptic, poised to enter the White House for a second term, the climate world – from officials to campaigners and business executives – is bracing for the impact of his presidency.

Trump, a Republican business mogul who has called climate change a “scam”, has made no secret about his intentions. From plans to withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement once more, to attacks on the scientific research underpinning our knowledge of global warming and the roll-back of key emission-cutting regulations, the incoming administration could mark a major setback for climate action.

Experts believe one of Trump’s first moves after being sworn in on January 20 could be to pull the US out of the landmark global climate agreement. If he takes that step – something he did last time around – the US would join just three other countries outside the Paris Agreement: Iran, Libya and Yemen.

Legal experts say Trump could quit Paris pact – but leaving UNFCCC much harder

The process to leave would take a year from the time Trump triggers it, meaning that the US will still be part of the Paris Agreement when the COP30 climate talks take place in Brazil in November.

Trump’s team is also reportedly mulling a more audacious attempt to pull the US out of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the instrument underpinning global climate action, for the first time. While leaving the Paris pact would be legally straightforward, experts are divided on whether Trump could withdraw the US from the UNFCCC without Senate approval and – if he did – how easy it would be for a future president to re-join.

Frances Colón, lead for international climate policy at the Center for American Progress, told journalists this week that Washington’s role at COP30 is “not clear”. “Diplomats will do their best, but they’ll have to see whether the White House will be interested at all in engaging in COP talks, and this is still an open question,” she said.

Leaving the Paris pact would mean the US would no longer have to report on its greenhouse gas emissions each year and would have weaker legal responsibilities to provide climate finance for developing countries to adopt clean energy and adapt to a warming world.

Developing-world climate dollars at risk

Joe Thwaites, senior advocate for international climate finance with the US-based Natural Resources Defense Council, said Trump’s administration is expected to try to cut back on international climate finance provision everywhere it can – but that doesn’t mean funding will fall to zero.

Early in his first term in 2017, when Trump announced that the US would leave the Paris Agreement, he launched a blistering attack on the UN’s Green Climate Fund (GCF) – which was littered with inaccuracies – and refused to deliver any more of a $3-billion pledge to the fund made by his predecessor, Barack Obama.

Super-rich have already burned more than their fair share of carbon for 2025

The US seems unlikely to stump up the $4 billion it now owes to the GCF under Trump, after the Biden administration made another large promise. But some international climate finance may be forthcoming if Congress continues approving money for organisations like the US Agency for International Development and the Global Environment Facility which back climate projects overseas.

“It’s not just about what Trump wants – and last time around, we saw that a lot… he didn’t get his way,” Thwaites said.

Trump-proofing climate finance

International climate finance allocations added up to about $600 million a year when Trump was previously in office. That’s a far cry from the roughly $11 billion a year provided by the end of Biden’s government, but advocates again plan to push hard to ensure the taps are not turned off.

Thwaites said international climate finance “is a vital investment”, adding “there’s still a strong case – including just a very self-interested case for why the US would want to carry on providing this kind of finance” – and geopolitically important partners such as small island developing states are likely to keep on asking for it as a priority.

In addition, the world is now better prepared for a climate-sceptic US president, he noted, compared with the shock in 2016. “People have priced in Trump’s impact,” Thwaites said.

A protester at COP29 calls on wealthy nations to “pay up” (Photo: UN Climate Change/Kiara Worth)

This was reflected at the COP29 climate summit in Baku, he said, where the deal on a new finance goal to channel money to developing countries reflected the likelihood of Washington not playing ball for the next four years in terms of its size and composition.

For example, the decision to allow all finance coming via multilateral banks to be counted towards the goal to provide government finance of $300 billion a year by 2035 means that contributions made by the US can be included in the total, even if it pulls out of the Paris pact. Wealthier emerging economies like China are also encouraged to make voluntary contributions, which could help make up any shortfall due to the US.

Uncertain future for EXIM

One US provider of finance to clean energy overseas, however, could be severely affected under Trump.

According to Kate DeAngelis, deputy director for international finance at Friends of the Earth, Trump will be under pressure from some Republicans in Congress not to renew authorisation for the EXIM (Export-Import) Bank when its current mandate runs out in 2026.

This would effectively shut down the organisation. EXIM is a semi-independent agency and has backed both fossil fuel and renewable energy deployment abroad under both the previous Trump and Biden administrations.

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It is now considering support for about a dozen projects mining for minerals like lithium, which are needed for the energy transition. DeAngelis said this support is now in greater doubt because of the change in the presidency, although she suspects the bank would still back them.

Under Biden, the bank continued to support fossil fuel projects in countries like Bahrain, and that is very unlikely to change under Trump, she added.

Climate regulation bonfire

Fossil fuels are also expected to get a boost on the domestic front. Under his refrain of “drill, baby, drill”, the president-elect has promised to increase oil and gas extraction in the US, while rolling back many of the landmark climate regulations introduced by the Biden administration aimed at slashing emissions. 

Hannah Kolus, a senior analyst with Rhodium Group’s energy and climate practice, said it looks “very likely that Trump will pursue an aggressively deregulatory agenda” judging by his first stint in office and recent statements from the incoming administration. 

“Rolling back regulations would be a lengthy process, so it’s not going to happen on day one,” added Kolus, “but certainly by the end of his term, he could remove many of the key climate regulations enacted over the past four years.”

WA Parish Generating Station, a natural gas and coal power plant, in Fort Bend County near Houston, Texas on June 25, 2023. (Photo by Reginald Mathalone/NurPhoto)

The Environmental Protection Agency’s greenhouse gas (GHG) standards for power plants could be first on the chopping block. Announced less than a year ago, the rules require existing coal-fired power plants that plan to operate beyond 2039 and large new gas-fired power stations to cut 90% of their GHG emissions by 2032. Trump vowed to revoke those regulations on the election campaign trail last August when he described them as an “anti-American energy crusade”. 

Another set of rules aimed at “sharply” reducing methane emissions from oil and gas operations risk a similar fate, along with a new levy meant to punish those not complying with the measures. Fossil-fuel lobby groups have repeatedly called on the incoming administration to cancel the methane regulations.

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More stringent emissions standards for passenger cars and small trucks – announced in March 2024 – may also be targeted. 

Rachel Cleetus, policy director with the climate and energy programme at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), said it is “very clear” the broader intention is to boost the fossil fuel sector. The rhetoric of many nominees for key positions in the incoming administration is about “delivering for the fossil fuel industry, promoting their profits, their narrow interest over the public interest,” she told Climate Home. 

Reprieve for IRA measures?

While reversing specific regulations might be an easy win for Trump, the future of the mammoth clean energy incentives enacted through the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) remains less clear. 

Trump has repeatedly taken aim at tax credits for electric vehicles and renewable energy, labelling them wasteful spending. Reuters reported last November that his transition team was working on plans to kill off the subsidies. 

But experts think it won’t be easy for the Trump administration to dismantle the IRA. Congress holds the power to modify tax credits and, although it is now Republican-controlled, Trump could struggle to convince enough lawmakers to push through its agenda. 

Rhodium Group’s Kolus said that’s because Republican districts have benefited the most from IRA subsidies so far – and there’s a history of bipartisan support for many of those. “It seems unlikely that Congress is going to repeal all of the energy tax credits,” she added. 

Leading Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson suggested that “a scalpel and not a sledgehammer” should be used for making changes. Whichever tool Trump ends up wielding, the question is what that would do to the emissions-cutting targets spelled out in the US’s updated Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) under the Paris Agreement unveiled last December. 

The Biden administration insisted that the US could reach the goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 61-66% below 2005 levels by 2035, even if Trump rolls back climate policy. But others are more sceptical. Even if the IRA was left untouched, undoing regulations on fossil fuel standards alone would put the US on a less ambitious path to reduce emissions by 31-51% by 2035, according to modelling by Rhodium Group. 

Climate science under threat

Climate science is another domain where experts fear the incoming administration will go on the offensive. Trump has a lengthy track record of amplifying disinformation while denigrating legitimate climate research. 

Cleetus of UCS told Climate Home “a very sombre mood” pervades the scientific community as it braces for the start of an administration that, she said, “holds a deeply anti-scientific view”.

Cleetus expects the Trump team will try and “take a wrecking ball” to federal agencies at the forefront of climate research. That would include the Environment Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which plays a crucial role in monitoring global temperatures and devising climate models. 

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“It is a real problem,” said Cleetus, “because these career scientists are doing the kind of bedrock science that helps inform good policies that we can take to both prevent climate change and protect against its impacts.”

And the consequences of a potential Trump attack on climate science would reach far beyond the American borders. The US government is one of the world’s largest supporters of climate science and its federal agencies provide key instruments, such as satellites, that facilitate the understanding of global warming, its causes and impacts across the globe.  

Despite the gathering storm clouds, Cleetus said “we should not concede that this destruction will be complete”.

“Just because all of these political signals are aligned one way, it does not mean that we live in a dictatorship,” she added. “The United States is still a democracy. There are public interests that will come forward in different kinds of ways.”

(Reporting by Matteo Civillini; additional reporting by Joe Lo and Megan Rowling; editing by Megan Rowling)

The post What Trump’s second term means for climate action in the US and beyond appeared first on Climate Home News.

Categories: H. Green News

Trees That Have Never Known Plentiful Rainfall Better Prepared for Drought

Yale Environment 360 - Wed, 01/15/2025 - 06:00

A new study finds that trees that have lived through many wet years struggle to cope with dry spells.

Read more on E360 →

Categories: H. Green News

The American Climate Corps is over. What even was it?

Grist - Wed, 01/15/2025 - 01:45

Giorgio Zampaglione loved his two-hour commute from the town of Mount Shasta into the surrounding northern California forests last summer. The way the light filtered through the trees on the morning drive was unbeatable, he said. He ate lunch with his crew, members of the new Forest Corps program, deep in the woods, usually far from cell service. They thinned thickets of trees and cleared brush, helping prevent the spread of fires by removing manzanita — a very flammable, shoulder-high shrub — near campsites and roads. 

“The Forest Service people have been super, super happy to have us,” Zampaglione said. “They’re always saying, ‘Without you guys, this would have taken months.’” 

Zampaglione, now 27 years old, had previously worked analyzing environmental data and mapping, but he was looking to do something more hands-on. Then he saw an ad on YouTube for the Forest Corps and applied through the AmeriCorps site. He didn’t realize until his first week on the job last summer that he was part of the first class of the American Climate Corps, an initiative started by President Joe Biden to get young people working in jobs that reduce carbon dioxide emissions and protect communities from weather disasters.

It also appears to be the Climate Corps’ last class, as the Biden administration has quietly been winding down the program ahead of President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration on January 20. “It’s officially over,” said Dana Fisher, a professor at American University who has been researching climate service projects for AmeriCorps. “​​The people who were responsible for coordinating it have left office or are leaving office. Before they go, they are shutting it all down.”

Think of it as a precautionary step. When Trump takes over, any federal program with “climate” in the name will likely have a target on it. Republican politicians have fiercely opposed the idea of the Climate Corps ever since Biden proposed it at the start of his term in 2021, with Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky blasting the notion of spending billions of dollars on a “made-up government work program” that would essentially provide busywork for “young liberal activists.”

But the American Climate Corps’ thousands of members across the country will keep their jobs, at least for the time being. That’s in part because the Climate Corps isn’t exactly the government jobs program people think it is. Environmental advocates hyped the corps’ creation as a “major win for the climate movement,” while news headlines declared that it would create 20,000 jobs. But the Climate Corps didn’t employ people directly — it was actually a loose network of mostly preexisting positions across a slew of nonprofits, state and local governments, and federal agencies, with many different sources of funding. Take away the “American Climate Corps,” and little changes. The jobs survive, even if the branding doesn’t.

“People say it’s the American Climate Corps, but like, what does that mean?” said Robert Godfried, the program manager for the recently launched Maryland Climate Corps, part of the larger network. “There isn’t really any meat on those bones.”

Two AmeriCorps NCCC Forest Corps members participate in field training in California last summer.
AmeriCorps

Some of the jobs roped into the American Climate Corps have funding locked down for much of Trump’s term. Zampaglione’s program, the Forest Corps, has $15 million in funding from the U.S. Forest Service that should last it five years, according to Ken Goodson, the director of AmeriCorps NCCC, which recruits young adults for public service. 

Other federal agencies, however, will likely see funding cuts that hit these climate jobs, especially as Elon Musk has promised to cut $2 trillion from the government’s budget — about one-third of existing spending — as co-lead of Trump’s proposed Department of Government Efficiency, aka DOGE. 

“The big challenge,” Fisher said, “is going to be a question having to do with funding for these federal programs, and the degree to which they’re going to be even allowed to say ‘climate.’”

The American Climate Corps was supposed to be a New Deal-era program brought back to life. In Biden’s first days as president, he called for a Civilian Climate Corps that would employ hundreds of thousands of young people across the country. The vision was inspired by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps — which put about 3 million men to work outdoors during the Great Depression, planting trees and building trails — but reimagined for the needs of the 21st century. Young people would get paid to protect neighborhoods from fires and floods and learn trade skills for installing heat pumps, solar panels, and electric vehicle chargers, building up a workforce that could accelerate the United States toward a cleaner future.

The idea had been inserted into Biden’s platform in the run-up to the 2020 election, a result of some olive-branch efforts to reach progressive voters after Senator Bernie Sanders dropped out of the Democratic primary. The party’s task force on climate policy, including Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Varshini Prakash from the youth-led Sunrise Movement, recommended a climate corps, and it reportedly caught Biden’s attention. Young activists were enthusiastic about the possibility. In May 2021, members of the Sunrise Movement marched 266 miles across California to pressure Congress to pass funding for the program, from Paradise, a town almost completely destroyed by a wildfire in 2018, to San Francisco.

Climate activists with the Sunrise Movement demonstrate outside the White House in June 2021, calling for a Civilian Climate Corps. Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images

But the New Deal-inspired jobs program seemed to lose resonance as unemployment recovered from its huge spike during the 2020 lockdowns, and power in the labor market shifted toward employees in 2021, the year of the “Great Resignation.” While the Democratic-controlled House managed to pass $30 billion to start a Climate Corps in late 2021, as part of Biden’s Build Back Better bill, it didn’t make it past the divided Senate. Money for the Climate Corps got cut out of the Inflation Reduction Act, the landmark climate law that passed in 2022, during negotiations. By early 2023, with Republicans taking control of the House from Democrats, the vision of reviving the Civilian Conservation Corps looked dead.

Then, that September, the Biden administration surprise-announced that the American Climate Corps was happening after all — but scaled back. Instead of creating 300,000 jobs, the new version, authorized through an executive order, aimed to put 20,000 members to work in its first year. Some saw the move as a sort of marketing effort to rally young voters, whose support for Biden had dropped after his administration had cleared the way for the Willow oil project in Alaska, ahead of Biden’s campaign for reelection in 2024.

“I think the title American Climate Corps was really the Biden administration sort of placating, looking for younger votes,” said Jeff Parker, executive director of the Northwest Youth Corps. “During early conversations, many of us, myself included, were in conversations where we were really asking for the word ‘resiliency’ to replace the word ‘climate,’ just because it’s a hot issue. And they were like, ‘Well, of course it’s hot. That’s why we want it, because that’s who we’re trying to market this to.’” (Officials from the Biden administration did not agree to an interview for this article, despite several requests.)

After the Climate Corps’ official announcement, a pressing question loomed: How on Earth do you create 20,000 jobs without any money from Congress? “There are no new appropriated dollars for American Climate Corps,” confirmed Michael Smith, CEO of AmeriCorps, the independent federal agency tasked with becoming the hub for the American Climate Corps. The White House formed an interagency group to figure out how to bring climate programs together, because without funding, the obvious path was to take advantage of what was already out there.

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Climate service programs had been expanding independently, across agencies in the federal government and also through nonprofits and state and local governments. AmeriCorps, for example, had moved almost $160 million toward its environmental work, including trail restoration and urban forestry, before the national initiative was up and running, Smith said.

“What the American Climate Corps did was look at all programs that were currently involved in that type of land management and conservation work. And instead of everybody sort of being off in their own space, doing those efforts, helped bring them together under the American Climate Corps umbrella,” said Goodson, the director of AmeriCorps NCCC.

Even though the Climate Corps didn’t get any help from Congress, it found resources in other places. The MacArthur Foundation, which often funds climate projects, gave a $500,000 grant to AmeriCorps last year to support it. Meanwhile, corps programs within the larger network used existing funding from federal agencies and supported some of their work with money from the bipartisan infrastructure law in 2021 and the Inflation Reduction Act.

The American Climate Corps jobs site appeared last April, directing anyone interested to apply for positions on the sites of the network’s partners. Since the jobs weren’t centralized, term limits and pay were all over the place. Nonetheless, the first cohort was sworn in virtually in June 2024. In talking to organizers of programs that had been bundled into the national network, Fisher encountered confusion about their status as part of the American Climate Corps. “Some of them recounted being told last-minute about opportunities to be sworn in and told that they could get a T-shirt,” she said.

The White House claimed that it had gathered 15,000 members by last September, but the way this number got presented was somewhat misleading, because most of these jobs aren’t new jobs, or even jobs created by the federal government. The positions just came with a new label.

“I think they can claim that there are 15,000 young people doing climate-related work under this umbrella, but I think it would be disingenuous if they called those new or added jobs,” Parker said. His Northwest Youth Corps accounted for roughly 300 positions with the American Climate Corps across Washington, Oregon, and Idaho.

Even some of the jobs that were new can’t be attributed directly to the Climate Corps. The Forest Corps program that Zampaglione is participating in, for example, was set in motion about a year before Biden established the national corps. According to Goodson, the U.S. Forest Service had asked AmeriCorps to help with reforestation and managing wildfires, as well as training up a new generation of land conservation workers. Funded by the Forest Service, 80 Forest Corps members started their terms last July. “When the American Climate Corps was announced and launched, the timing was such that it really lined up with the Forest Corps program coming together,” Goodson said.

President Biden delivers an Earth Day speech mentioning the Climate Corps at Prince William Forest Park in Virginia in April 2024. Andrew Harnik / Getty Images

Another program that recently launched, the Maryland Climate Corps, wouldn’t have happened without that state’s governor, Wes Moore. The Democratic governor made creating a service-year option for young people a priority once he took office in 2023, said Godfried, the manager of Maryland’s climate corps. Some of the money for the 40-person program comes from the state, and the rest comes all the way across the country from the California Volunteers Fund, affiliated with California Governor Gavin Newsom’s office. That fund, in turn, is supported by AmeriCorps and philanthropic donors.

“California Volunteers Fund, in my mind, is actually one of the unsung heroes of this movement,” Godfried said. The program, along with AmeriCorps, is helping to establish state-level efforts modeled after the California Climate Action Corps, which launched in 2020 and has put tens of thousands of volunteers to work planting trees, fighting food waste, and making communities more resilient to wildfires. The effort has expanded to a dozen other states: Arizona, Colorado, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, North Carolina, Utah, Vermont, and Washington. The state level, Godfried said, “is where the action is.”

Credit for this nationwide expansion of climate service work should go to the many governors’ offices that have been working hard to create these jobs, Godfried said. Yet the American Climate Corps is what gets people’s attention. “When the White House does something, everyone wants to report on it,” he said. “When I do something, when the folks in state government do, to be frank, no one really cares that much.”

So the New Deal-style climate jobs program that Biden envisioned never really materialized — but the cobbled-together, low-budget version wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. The White House’s megaphone brought public attention to the fact that you can volunteer to help address climate change and get paid for it. Climate Corps members have replaced old fluorescent lights with energy-efficient LEDs, put solar panels on homes, and educated kids about the effects of a warming planet.

The people managing these efforts say that their participation in the national network increased their visibility, bringing in more applicants through the federal jobs site. The Forest Corps, for example, got 800 applications for just 80 positions, according to Goodson.

This kind of work won’t end under the Trump administration, though it has already put a damper on ambitions to expand it. “The American Climate Corps will evaporate as a Biden initiative, as if it never happened, because it really didn’t get the runway to take off,” Parker said. 

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The effects of Trump’s presidency could also trickle down to the state-level climate corps. Many leaders were hoping to supplement their existing funding with federal money that no longer looks like it’ll be coming, Fisher said. Governor Moore has said he’ll trim $2 billion out of Maryland’s budget and cut environmental projects that he thinks won’t get federal support from a Trump White House, though he hasn’t said anything about the Climate Corps specifically.

Parker asked for the Northwest Youth Corps to be taken off the Climate Corps site, because he was worried that the affiliation might jeopardize his funding, which has historically received bipartisan support, given Trump’s hostility to climate initiatives. A lot of organizations, he said, just want to put the American Climate Corps behind them and not attract too much attention so that their work will survive without the Biden-era branding.

After all, the idea of creating programs to fight fires, plant trees, and do conservation work modeled after the Civilian Conservation Corps doesn’t need to be a partisan issue. Polls show it has cross-party appeal: One from 2020 found that 84 percent of Republican voters, compared to just 78 percent of Democratic voters, were in favor of starting these kinds of corps at the state level. But that Republican support for the general idea dropped dramatically after Biden announced his national program that swapped “climate” for “conservation” in the name. “In our current political climate, it just has sort of been collateral damage,” Parker said.

The irony is that the work that the American Climate Corps promised is needed more than ever. “Climate shocks are going to come, and they’re going to come more and more frequently with more severity,” Fisher said. “We need communities to be prepared and capable of responding. And service corps programs are a wonderful way to do that.”

Correction: This story originally misidentified the year Climate Corps members were sworn in.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The American Climate Corps is over. What even was it? on Jan 15, 2025.

Categories: H. Green News

How states will keep fighting for climate progress under Trump

Grist - Wed, 01/15/2025 - 01:30

This coverage is made possible in part through a partnership with Grist and Interlochen Public Radio in northern Michigan.

Even before President-elect Donald Trump’s return to the White House next Monday, California got ahead of things. Anticipating more of the federal meddling they’d seen in the past, like when Trump’s first administration tried to block the state’s vehicle emissions standards, lawmakers met in a special session to start preparing a defense of its progressive civil rights, reproductive freedom, and climate policies. 

The incoming president brings renewed threats to climate progress. Trump has repeatedly called climate change a hoax. During his first term, he withdrew the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement and rolled back more than 100 environmental rules. In his second term, Trump has signaled he would attack Joe Biden’s climate policies any way he can, increase fossil fuel production, and stymie the expansion of renewable energy. 

Yet he may not be as successful as he hopes, because states will once again take action. Their efforts, often led by California, have among other things pushed utilities to move away from fossil fuels, limited tailpipe emissions, and mandated energy-efficiency rules for buildings. It’s here, at the state level, where climate progress will continue, or even accelerate, in the years ahead. 

“The way that our federalism works is, states have quite a lot of power to take action to both reduce carbon pollution and to protect residents from climate impacts,” said Wade Crowfoot, head of California’s Natural Resources Agency. “So regardless of who is president, states like California have been driving forward and will continue to drive forward.”

Such action occurred regularly in Trump’s first term. In 2017, a bipartisan coalition of governors launched the U.S. Climate Alliance to collaborate on policies to address the crisis. That coalition now includes two dozen states that are chasing 10 priorities, including reducing greenhouse gases, setting more efficient building standards, and advancing environmental justice. 

“Governors have filled the void left by President Trump before, and are absolutely prepared to do it again,” said Casey Katims, executive director of the alliance. “A change in federal leadership really underscores the importance of state and local action over the next four years.” Governors have a strong mandate, too: A 2017 poll found that 66 percent of Americans think that in the absence of federal climate action, it’s their state’s responsibility to step in.

States have had additional reasons to ramp up their efforts: The Biden administration’s landmark climate legislation, the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, provided $369 billion for clean energy tax credits along with other climate and energy programs. It also pumped hundreds of billions of dollars into industries involved in the green economy, like renewable energy. 

While Trump has promised to rescind the law’s remaining funding, 85 percent of the investments stemming from the act, and 68 percent of the jobs created, have gone to Republican districts across the country, including in states he won, such as Georgia, North Carolina, and Nevada. That legislation is expected to help create over 300,000 jobs in clean energy. Trump has also said he’ll stop the construction of new wind farms, but the top four states for wind generation — Texas, Iowa, Oklahoma, and Kansas — are solidly red and unlikely to acquiesce.

A row of wind turbines outside Medicine Bow, Wyoming. Wind accounts for almost one-fifth of the state’s electricity generation. Patrick T. Fallon / AFP via Getty Images

Even those who voted against the IRA are now seeing green. In August, 18 House Republicans urged Speaker Mike Johnson not to slash the law’s clean energy credits, because of the benefits their constituents are receiving. “Energy tax credits have spurred innovation, incentivized investment, and created good jobs in many parts of the country — including many districts represented by members of our conference,” they wrote in a statement. “A full repeal would create a worst-case scenario where we would have spent billions of taxpayer dollars and received next to nothing in return.”

Chelsea Henderson of the group republicEn, which strives to engage conservatives on climate change, pointed to states like Tennessee and Alabama welcoming EV manufacturing as evidence that conservatives are already invested. “I think, because there is money to be made on solving climate change through innovation and technology, that it will happen,” she said.

Ultimately, the amount of money available to advance the green economy may be too much for any state to resist. “Those are jobs and those are investments that are going on in communities, whether they’re red or blue or purple,” said Matt Petersen, president and CEO of the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator. “That’s something that for a governor, a legislature, when push comes to shove, are they really going to want that to go away?”

Beyond his efforts to roll back the IRA, Trump is expected to take aim at electric vehicle mandates and state efforts to restrict tailpipe emissions. California — which would have the world’s fifth largest economy if it were a country — wields particular influence over the automobile market. The state has long regulated tailpipe emissions, but the first Trump administration barred the state from doing so, a move the Biden administration subsequently overturned. Even while Trump was still in office in 2019, BMW, Ford, Honda, and Volkswagen signed a voluntary agreement recognizing the state’s legal authority to set its own standard. In March, Stellantis, which owns Chrysler, Dodge, and Jeep, formally committed to accelerate the adoption of zero-emission vehicles even if the state “is unable to enforce its standards as a result of judicial or federal action.” 

What happens in California hasn’t stayed there, either; 17 states and the District of Columbia have adopted its tailpipe standards. If automakers agree to follow California’s rules, those cars will be sold nationwide. “It’s this ripple effect,” Petersen said.

Other robust state-level climate policies have advanced in the last year. In Massachusetts, for example, lawmakers approved a climate bill in November that puts guardrails on gas pipelines, streamlines renewables, and allows gas utilities to use geothermal energy — which enjoys bipartisan support, unlike wind and solar. Voters in Washington rejected a challenge to a landmark law that’s raised money to fight climate change. And California voters signed off on $10 billion to fund climate projects.

And despite the incoming Trump administration’s promises to ramp up fossil fuel production, states could spur still more climate action, Jay Inslee, who was governor of Washington until today, said during a press conference at COP29 in November. “I can say this unequivocally,” said Inslee, who leads America Is All In, a coalition of private and governmental leaders fighting climate change. “We know that despite the election of Donald Trump, the incredible momentum, the incredible dynamic growth, the incredible political support that preexisted his previous administration will continue, and will continue unabated.” 

Read Next The 5 states where environmental ballot initiatives triumphed

States have also provided residents with tax credits and rebates to buy an EV or electrify their homes with ever more efficient appliances. Heat pumps, for example, now outsell gas furnaces. Maine announced in 2023 that it had reached its goal of installing 100,000 of the appliances two years ahead of schedule, thanks in large part to state rebates. Trump could hamper IRA funding for such systems, but that wouldn’t necessarily stop states from picking up the slack. “Maine was doing this in a time period before the federal government was really engaging with more potential ways to fund it,” said Hannah Pingree, co-chair of the Maine Climate Council and director of the state’s Office of Policy Innovation and the Future. “We’ve been using lots of creative means to do it.” Maine aims to install another 170,000 heat pumps by 2027. 

Even states that have until recently lagged behind climate leaders are getting on board, including Midwestern states once dependent on fuels like coal. Michigan lawmakers, for example, passed sweeping bills in 2023, leveraging narrow Democratic majorities in the House and Senate to set goals including a 100 percent clean energy standard by 2040. 

State Representative Betsy Coffia, a Democrat who represents a district around northern Michigan’s Traverse City and won a tight race for reelection in November, helped pass those bills, which she thinks will survive a hostile White House. “Whatever the Trump administration may try to do with the EPA or some of the federal entities, I think we have a real responsibility to be good stewards of Michigan, and that is what we have purview over,” Coffia said.

Michigan has seen an influx of more than 21,000 clean energy jobs in recent years under the Inflation Reduction Act. That law has also allocated billions of dollars toward nuclear and millions toward a hydrogen plant and expanding rooftop solar.

And despite an acrimonious end to the year, which saw Republicans walk out of session because their priorities were not being met, those like John Roth, a state representative from Interlochen, don’t think all environmental policy must split along party lines. He’s concerned about restricting fossil fuels like natural gas and local control over renewable energy projects, but said they have seen bipartisan support for things like expanding access to community solar.

“We want clean water and clean air up here. And we all live together,” Roth said. “A lot of us hunt and fish, and so I don’t think it’s exclusively toward the Democratic side of the aisle. It’s just a matter of doing good policy that doesn’t harm.”

Regardless of politics, the market has made renewables cheaper to deploy than sticking with fossil fuels. Texas, which hasn’t elected a Democratic governor since 1990, now generates more wind and solar energy than any other state. That didn’t happen because deep-red Texas is gung-ho about renewable energy, but because renewables often make better economic sense. 

“The transition to a renewable energy future is unstoppable,” said Petersen, of the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator. “The genie is out of the bottle.”

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How states will keep fighting for climate progress under Trump on Jan 15, 2025.

Categories: H. Green News

In Wyoming, tribal protests prevent land transfer — for now

Grist - Wed, 01/15/2025 - 01:15

A tiny scrap of land within the bounds of the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming has become the center of a heated debate. The roughly 2-acre site is home to the Pilot Butte Power Plant, a defunct hydroelectric station that a local irrigation district is interested in taking over and rehabilitating. 

The Midvale Irrigation District approached the Bureau of Reclamation, the federal entity that controls dams and other irrigation infrastructure, with the proposal in 2022. The situation to Steve Lynn, the manager of the irrigation district, seemed to work for just about everyone. The plant could be utilized to produce hydroelectric power for the community. There are very few clean energy projects in Wyoming, and this one at maximum capacity could power about 50 households on average per day, a substantial amount for a sparsely populated region.

But the project has run up against opposition from the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho, the Indigenous tribes that share the Wind River Indian Reservation. The tribes oppose the transfer, because the land in question was ceded to the federal government under duress. Even if the irrigation district takes over the plant, it would be of little benefit to the tribal members of Wind River. The district does not serve the reservation. 

Last year, United States Senator John Barrasso and Wyoming’s lone House representative, Harriet Hageman, introduced the Pilot Butte Conveyance Act to transfer ownership of the land to the Midvale Irrigation District, bypassing tribal approval. The move has led to multiple protests by tribal members. Last week, around 20 tribal members gathered in the cold, held signs that read “Respect Indigenous Sovereignty,” waved tribal flags, and chanted in downtown Lander, Wyoming. The Wind River Inter-Tribal Council, the governmental unit that represents the Northern Arapaho and the Eastern Shoshone, also passed a resolution in December opposing the act, stating that they were not “consulted, engaged, or notified of the legislation.”

“This is an erosion of tribal sovereignty,” Eastern Shoshone tribal member Sharolyn Jimerson told Grist. “They wanted to pass this through without anybody noticing.” The issue is bigger than just the 2 acres, she said, and touches on old tensions between tribes and non-Natives.

The fight over this small, dormant plant highlights the history of federal and private entities taking control of tribal land. Millions of acres of reservation land have been taken from hundreds of Indigenous nations over the years. As the population of non-Native people grew over the centuries, the U.S. government took land for universities, schools, fossil fuel exploration, and agriculture from tribes. The Eastern Shoshone, for instance, were originally promised 44 million acres of land by the government in 1863 but ultimately only received around 2.2 million acres. The federal government also said it would designate a reservation in Colorado for the Northern Arapaho, but the tribe was eventually placed on the Wind River Indian Reservation.  

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While the U.S. took large swaths of land to bolster agricultural projects in central Wyoming, some unused land acquired this way — deemed “excess lands” — was supposed to go back to the tribes. Since 1939, the tribes have been working to get land back through a series of consultations with the Bureau of Land Management and by advocating for legislative changes.  

Whether the federal government has the right to transfer ownership of the Pilot Butte Power Plant comes down to treaties signed more than 150 years ago and an agreement ratified by Congress in 1905. The Fort Bridger Treaty of 1863 designated the original 44 million acres to the Eastern Shoshone, and in 1905, Congress passed an act allowing for white settlement within the reservation. Three decades later, Congress reversed course, requiring that “undisturbed” land be returned to tribes. The Bureau of Land Management has estimated that roughly 57,000 of the 104,000 acres of so-called excess land should be returned to the tribes of the Wind River. (The tribes are requesting that the entire 104,000 acres be returned.)

As a result, federal representatives like Hageman and Senator Barrasso, as well as the local irrigation district, point to the land as firmly within the control of the federal government. But tribal leaders say that since the power plant is in the middle of the reservation, they should be consulted on its fate, and it should ultimately be returned to the tribe. 

Former Eastern Shoshone tribal council member Wes Martel said this land is protected under the Fort Bridger Treaty of 1863. “That’s always been the position of the tribes,” said Martel, who now works for the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, a conservation group based in Montana. 

“Everything north of the Big Wind [River] was reservation land.” Martel said that the tribes are disregarded by the federal government, because land not deemed on the reservation is treated like it’s completely separate from the surrounding land on the Wind River Indian Reservation. 

For Lynn, the irrigation district manager, and others in favor of the land transfer, the land was already ceded, and the tribes have no right to it. 

“The land was given by treaty to the federal government,” Lynn said. “The Pilot Butte Power Plant has nothing to do with the revocation back to the tribes.” A spokesperson for the Bureau of Reclamation told Grist that the agency sent the tribes an outreach letter about the transfer of the power plant, but did not follow up when they didn’t receive a response. The Biden administration’s guidelines for tribal consultation state that federal agencies should address issues of lack of adequate consultation by creating multiple contacts between the United States and the tribes. 

The future of the Pilot Butte plant is uncertain. Last month, Minnesota Senator Tina Smith and New Mexico Senator Martin Heinrich opposed Senator Barasso’s motion on the Senate floor to pass the bill citing the ongoing tribal protests in Wyoming. In response, Barasso promised to retaliate, noting that he will be “vigilant and watching out for bills that impact at least two-and-a-half acres in their home state.” 

Steve Lynn with the Midvale Irrigation District expects more support for the Pilot Butte Conveyance Act now that a new GOP-led Congress has taken office and said it would eventually pass. Lynn maintains that Pilot Butte was never explicitly included in plans to transfer land back to tribes and that they have no case. 

But Jimerson, who is part of the group Stop the Pilot Butte Conveyance Act, said she will be at the state’s capitol on President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration day to continue protesting the bill. She said that the legislation is another example of tribal interests being disregarded in favor of irrigation for mostly white families in central Wyoming. 

“I don’t see how they could not think we were stakeholders in this land,” she said. “It’s heart-wrenching. We stewarded these lands for generations.” 

Correction: This story originally misspelled Sharolyn Jimerson’s name.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline In Wyoming, tribal protests prevent land transfer — for now on Jan 15, 2025.

Categories: H. Green News

In a major reversal, the World Bank is backing mega dams

Climate Change News - Tue, 01/14/2025 - 09:22

This story was originally published by Yale Environment 360.

After a decade of declining to finance large hydroelectric dams, the World Bank is getting back into the business in a big way.

Throughout the last half of the 20th century, the bank was the world’s leading supporter of big hydro. But over the last two decades, it followed a zigzag pattern as dam supporters and critics inside the institution took turns determining hydro policy.

During the last 10 years, the critics — disturbed by big dams’ huge social and environmental costs and their long construction timelines — seemed to dominate, and the bank supported only one new big hydro project.

But last month the bank’s board of directors approved a scheme to make the bank the lead financier in a $6.3 billion project to finish construction of the Rogun Dam in Tajikistan. The frequently stalled project, launched in 1976, is now about 30 percent complete⁠. If fully built, it would become both the world’s tallest dam, at 1,100 feet, and with its total price tag of $11 billion, one of the world’s most expensive.

The World Bank and Democratic Republic of Congo officials also have been negotiating the terms of a deal that would include financing Inga 3, the third of eight proposed dams in a megaproject known as Grand Inga.

Jaw-dropping in scale, Grand Inga is a $100-billion venture that would be the world’s largest dam scheme, nearly doubling the power output of China’s Three Gorges, currently the world’s largest hydroelectric dam, and potentially bringing electricity to a sizable chunk of the African continent. It would also reconfigure the hydrology of the world’s second-most-powerful river, the Congo, in what opponents consider environmentally harmful ways.

The Three Gorges dam on the Yangtze river in China (Photo: Pedro Vasquez/Flickr)

In addition, last April the bank “agreed in principle” to lead a consortium of international and regional banks financing a $1.1 billion dam⁠, one of Nepal’s biggest, on the Arun River. Called the Upper Arun, the dam is backed by Indian companies, and its electricity is intended for export to India.

But Nepal is already sated with hydroelectricity, and as My Republica, a Kathmandu newspaper, reported in October, it has for several years been wasting massive amounts of produced electricity because of the inadequacy of its transmission lines.

The Upper Arun dam is also being built in a region that’s highly vulnerable to earthquakes and to floods caused by the bursting of ice dams on glacial lakes.

The bank’s role in these projects marks a sharp shift in its approach towards hydroelectric dams. “Rogun and Inga are the biggest dams in the world, on a scale we haven’t seen in decades,” said Josh Klemm, co-executive director of International Rivers, an Oakland, California-based river protection NGO. From 2014 to this year, the bank supported only one new major hydropower project, Nachtigal in Cameroon.

Yet before mid-2025, the bank’s board of directors is likely to approve financing for five major dams, including Rogun and Inga 3.

“We are witnessing a massive move [by the World Bank] to consider financing a range of large projects expected to have huge impacts on river basins, or that have already provoked huge, historic controversies,” said Eugene Simonov, coordinator of the Rivers Without Boundaries International Coalition and a researcher at the University of New South Wales, Canberra, in an interview. “The World Bank is revisiting projects it once dropped because of obvious challenges and risks, but those risks did not go away.”

In response to questions, World Bank officials said in a statement, “There has been no policy change on financing hydropower.” The statement continued, “Nevertheless, it has become increasingly clear that hydropower is an important component of promoting clean energy investments,” citing hydropower’s potential to supplement solar and wind energy.

The World Bank’s support for big hydro has been intermittent since the late 1990s, when social and environmental controversies sparked by its dam-building efforts spurred it to convene an investigative body — called the World Commission on Dams — of 12 independent experts to make recommendations for proper planning, design, and construction procedures for big dams. But the bank found the Commission’s recommendations, issued in 2000, so restrictive that it dismissed them.

Instead, it adopted a policy of “High Risk/High Reward” that wholeheartedly embraced big hydro. But the bank backed off when its dams once again triggered controversy. In 2013, the bank tried again to back big hydro, then backed off until 2018, when it softened its social and environmental standards for such projects.

“We believe the bank’s rediscovered fondness for big hydro reflects a desire by Ajay Banga, the bank’s president since June 2023, to kick off his tenure with a splash, even if that involves overlooking environmental and social issues that previously would have ruled the projects out,” said Klemm.

Ajay Banga speaks at the World Economic Forum (Photo credit: World Economic Forum)

Yet bank officials seem to be playing down hydropower’s renewed prominence in their plans, experts say, noting that they may not want to draw attention to the high costs of building dams at a time when President-elect Donald Trump may be considering⁠ ending U.S. support for the bank.

Project 2025, the compendium of controversial nationalist policies devised by advisors close to Trump, says the new administration “should withdraw from both the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and terminate its financial contribution to both institutions.” The U.S. is the bank’s largest contributor.

No matter how many of these projects result in completed dams, experts believe the bank’s involvement will not alter the global dam-building industry’s current downward trajectory, for many increasingly obvious reasons. These include dams’ enormous upfront costs followed by waits of as long as a decade or more before electricity revenues begin flowing; their destruction of fisheries and riverine ecosystems; their displacement of a conservatively estimated 80 million⁠ people around the world and their damage to the livelihoods of a half-billion more; their substantial emissions of methane from some reservoirs; their steep reductions in energy production when drought — which is increasingly common due to climate change — empties reservoirs, as is currently happening in southern Africa and elsewhere; and the seeming coup de grace, their declining competitiveness with increasingly less costly wind and solar installations.

Despite all this, hydro advocates argue for the technology’s capacity to generate huge quantities of renewable energy in countries where most people don’t have any electricity at all. Whereas dam industry officials once promoted their projects as critical to the economic development of countries or regions, they now talk up hydro’s potential to complement solar and wind.

River protection NGOs such as International Rivers argue that the bank’s imprimatur lends an unjustified sheen to the industry, encouraging other regional and international banks to support still more dam projects. “We are writing to express our collective alarm at the notable surge in proposed and recent World Bank support for extensive hydropower development,” began a nine-page, October 23 letter to bank leaders signed by more than 100 environmental NGOs around the world. The letter called on the bank to stop investing in virtually all hydropower projects. The bank answered promptly but cursorily, reaffirming its “partnership” with the NGOs, but it did not address the letter’s points.

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Rogun and Grand Inga have been magnets for controversy for decades. Tajikistan is a locus of competition in Central Asia, with Western, Arab, Russian, and Chinese interests all competing for political and economic leverage⁠; one way for Europe and the U.S. to gain influence with Tajikistan’s leaders is to help them build the world’s tallest dam there. Supporting Rogun may be a particularly potent tactic as the project is highly popular in Tajikistan and, according to Simonov, the nation’s leaders are “obsessed” with the dam.

One of Rogun’s liabilities is that it will displace between 50,000 and 60,000 people, according to a World Bank document. Simonov said engineering firms proposed alternate plans to build a dam that would be at least 115 feet lower and displace up to 30,000 fewer people. Officials rejected those plans, according to Simonov, because their primary interest was in the prestige they believed would come with building the world’s tallest dam.

Between 2033, when Rogun is projected to be completed, and 2039, when its reservoir is slated to be full, the dam will begin generating electricity and, according to an appraisal prepared for the bank’s board of directors, “will bring significant domestic and regional welfare benefits, contribute to the decarbonization of regional power grids in Central Asia, and potentially transform the Tajik economy.”

Of more immediate interest to Tajiks, the dam’s output should eliminate the electricity blackouts that disrupt heating during the country’s cold winters. The catch is that the water that will turn the Rogun power plant’s turbines in the winter will be impounded from the Vakhsh River during the summer, which means it will no longer reach farmers and others who depend on it downstream in Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, according to Simonov.

Rogun will also severely threaten Tajikistan’s Tigrovaya Balka Nature Reserve, a UNESCO World Heritage site, by permanently eliminating floods crucial for sustaining floodplain forests, environmentalists say. And by the time the dam is finished, according to the October 23 letter from NGOs to the World Bank, other renewable electricity options are projected⁠ to be far cheaper.

The World Bank appraisal of Rogun categorized the project’s overall risk as “high.” Among the risks it enumerated were the limited experience of Tajik officials⁠, which has resulted in both design and construction delays and “technical and dam safety issues”; the project’s impact on national debt; the poor performance of Tajikistan’s electricity sector, which could limit revenues from electricity sales; and the project’s location in an active seismic zone.

Like Rogun, Grand Inga, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, has a convoluted history. Long after the construction of Inga 1 and Inga 2, in 1972 and 1982 respectively, the poorly maintained dams provide electricity to only one in five Congolese, a condition that the proposed Inga 3, at a cost of more than $14 billion, will not change. Of Inga 3’s enormous projected output of up to 11,000⁠ megawatts, 5,000 would be exported to South Africa (after the construction of transmission lines costing another $4 billion); 3,000 would be routed to mining companies in the DRC’s Katanga province 1,700 miles away; and the rest would be used to improve electricity reliability⁠ in Kinshasa, the nation’s capital. Rural residents would continue to do without.

study comparing greener energy alternatives to Inga 3, published in Environmental Research Letters in 2018, suggests that the dam is not financially prudent. It concludes that in most scenarios, “a mix of wind, solar photovoltaics, and some natural gas is more cost-effective than Inga 3.” Since the study appeared, the costs of solar and wind have only declined.

The post In a major reversal, the World Bank is backing mega dams appeared first on Climate Home News.

Categories: H. Green News

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