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This story is published as part of the Global Indigenous Affairs Desk, an Indigenous-led collaboration between Grist, High Country News, ICT, Mongabay, Native News Online, and APTN.

In 2019, Makanalani Gomes stood on the slopes of Mauna Kea, the tallest mountain in Hawaiʻi, face-to-face with Honolulu riot police. For decades, Native Hawaiians like Gomes watched — and protested — as their sacred mountain was bulldozed and excavated for the construction of telescopes and other astronomical facilities. After the observatories were built, they abandoned construction equipment and debris, littering Mauna Kea’s summit.

Gomes and other activists spent months sleeping on the mountainside, in the cold, successfully blocking construction crews from heading up the slope to build the proposed Thirty Meter Telescope, and to date, the project remains in limbo.

“We are in the fight of our lives and in the front lines every day,” Gomes said.

This week, Gomes will continue her work fighting for Indigenous self-determination and sovereignty when she speaks at the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in New York — the largest gathering of Indigenous leaders, activists, and policymakers on the planet. Beginning today, the 23rd annual event runs until April 26 and will focus on “emphasizing the voices of Indigenous youth” like Gomes, who is now one of three co-chairs of the Global Indigenous Youth Caucus. 

“We are intrinsically of our lands and of our waters, of our mountains and of our oceans, and then laying down our bodies in turn to preserve what we have left,” she said. “So I think that’s what I’m looking forward to, is just being with people who understand the walk that we walk and the honor and privilege that we do it with.”

The forum was established more than two decades ago as a permanent advisory body for Indigenous Peoples at the U.N., and is a uniquely influential venue for attendees to ensure their perspectives are heard. Indigenous Peoples and nations can’t vote at the U.N. like member states, but the forum has the ability to make official recommendations as an adviser to the Economic and Social Council, one of the six main U.N. bodies that helps facilitate multinational agreements on sustainable development. The forum has 16 members that serve three-year terms, with eight nominated by state governments and eight by Indigenous organizations. 

“The importance of the Permanent Forum is that it puts pressure on other parts of the United Nations to take appropriate action regarding Indigenous Peoples,” said Andrea Carmen, executive director of the International Indian Treaty Council. 

The existence of the forum is itself a product of Indigenous advocacy. Mililani Trask, a longtime Native Hawaiian activist and one of the first members of the Permanent Forum, said advocates used to have to sit and listen while U.N. members discussed issues relevant to them. She said that Indigenous advocates wanted a permanent space where they could speak on the floor. 

“Once we were established as a body, it shifted the balance of power,” Trask said. It meant, “we have a basis in working with governments in partnerships instead of going to the gun.”

Trask also said that the forum elevated Indigenous expertise. 

“When the forum came into existence it was the first time that non-white Indigenous international legal experts came to the forefront,” Trask said. Member states “didnʻt think that we had any.”

She said the advisory body had a huge influence on the eventual adoption of the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples five years later in 2007. The U.N. document outlines the rights of Indigenous Peoples and has been a key tool for Indigenous advocates who seek to hold states and corporations accountable for human rights violations. It’s not legally binding, but it provides an international standard that Indigenous people can point to when their rights are violated. 

Just two years ago, the venue enabled the Yaqui Nation in Mexico to regain their sacred Maaso Kova from a museum in Stockholm, Sweden. The deer head is used in ceremonial dances and was taken as part of the colonial enslavement and suppression of the Yaqui people. The return of the Maaso Kova in 2022 was what The New York Times reported as the “first successful repatriation of cultural artifacts to an Indigenous group overseen by the United Nations under its Declaration of Indigenous Rights.” 

Andrea Carmen, who is also Yaqui, said it wouldn’t have happened without the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. 

The forum doesn’t accept human rights complaints, or initiate investigations, like the Special Rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous Peoples. But veteran attendees like Carmen say it is an opportunity to meet high-level officials from the U.N. and state governments, bring awareness to important issues, and create community with other Indigenous Peoples from around the world. The latter is what Gomes is most looking forward to as she prepares her remarks to open Tuesday’s discussion on self-determination and Native youth.

“So many of us, although we’re young people, we’ve already experienced being land defenders and water defenders and literally using our physical bodies to defend Earth Mother,” she said. 

This year’s focus will be on how to strengthen those self-determination rights with an eye toward Indigenous youth like Gomes. Gomes is hopeful that the theme will result in more youth attending for the first time. Bryan Bixcul, who is Maya Tz’utujil from Guatemala and works as an advocacy coordinator at the nonprofit Cultural Survival, is one of them. 

“A lot of things are being discussed at the international level, but the implementation happens at the national level,” said Bixcul.

Among other events, he’s looking forward to a conversation on the first day of the forum about ongoing efforts to replace fossil fuel energy production with cleaner alternatives like solar and wind that release fewer carbon emissions. Indigenous Peoples’ territories are critical to the success of the energy transition as land they manage holds an estimated 80 percent of the world’s biodiversity, but new mining projects and conservation areas have frequently overlooked their rights. Last year, the Permanent Forum commissioned a group of experts to meet and discuss the green energy transition and its effect on Indigenous Peoples. The resulting report is on the agenda for this year’s forum and spells out a long list of ways that governments and corporations can and should respect Indigenous rights, such as passing laws to require clean energy projects to respect the right for Indigenous people to consent to projects on their land. 

Bixcul is also helping to organize a workshop for youth on April 18 to help build solidarity and learn effective advocacy strategies to bring back home. Side events like this are a critical part of the gathering this week and next because they facilitate discussions and connections between activists who have to abide by official time limits for speeches during the main agenda. 

“We think it’s very important for communities to outline their priorities — their self-determined priorities — so that as they are facing threats, now or in the future, they are prepared to be engaged in these conversations with corporations,” he said. 

One tangible output of the forum will be a report that summarizes recommendations collected during the forum, which advocates can reference as they continue their work in their home countries and in other United Nations bodies. For example, in last year’s report, the Permanent Forum condemned the use of the term “Indigenous Peoples and local communities,” arguing that Indigenous Peoples should be separated from local communities instead of being lumped together, which could diminish the former’s rights. The IPLC acronym continues to be used, but Indigenous advocates have repeatedly pointed to the forum’s statement to bolster their argument for its disuse. They’re concerned that the language could have major implications for who gets access to global funding to mitigate climate change and whether Indigenous people get a say in land decisions, including the expansion of conservation areas.

Last year’s forum also called for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to conduct a special report led by Indigenous experts to analyze climate change’s effects and opportunities for Indigenous peoples. The recommendation wasn’t immediately taken up by IPCC but Carmen from the International Indigenous Treaty Council said that’s typical.

“These things take some time,” she said. 

Many of the topics at this year’s Permanent Forum arenʻt new: Last year, there was a particular focus on climate, and planned sessions on land defenders and militarization have been discussed before. But one agenda item that wasn’t there last year is a meeting with the president of the General Assembly to discuss the outcome document from the 2014 World Conference on Indigenous Peoples, a report from the General Assembly meeting a decade ago that lists a series of commitments by U.N. member states’ to Indigenous rights, such as implementing policies that promote the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. 

Carmen said such a high-level meeting hasnʻt happened for a few years and plans to use the opportunity to ask about the creation of a new U.N. body dedicated to the repatriation of Indigenous items. 

The Permanent Forum can be challenging to navigate for Indigenous youth, especially those who are from more rural areas, need visas, or face language barriers. But Gomes said she has been inspired by how many Indigenous people attend despite such hurdles. 

“We find a way to navigate in these systems that weren’t designed by us, or for us,” she said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Your guide to the 2024 UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues on Apr 15, 2024.

When the sharing economy took off in the 2010s and upended entire industries, the firmest proponents of the model heralded it as an economic revolution that would help slash emissions. Of all the ideas that emerged and dissolved over the years, shareable electric scooters seemed to possess the most promise for climate. Almost anyone with a smartphone and a credit card could grab one and ride it down the block or across town, eschewing automobiles.

Yet, as the industry matures and Lime — which, with operations in 280 cities worldwide, is the biggest player — moves further into its eighth year, researchers have shown that the eco-friendly dreams of shared micromobility have not materialized without problems. The true climate benefits of these fleets depends upon how companies deploy and manage them, and safety remains a concern as injuries climb. But industry leaders appear intent on ensuring their scooters are as sustainable and safe as possible.

“It’s really important as a company that has set a net zero target by 2030,” said Andrew Savage, Lime’s head of sustainability, Andrew Savage, “that we walk the walk, and that we do everything we can to inspire the industries around us to decarbonize as well.”

The sustainability of shared micromobility is an active area of research in a fast-changing industry. Ultimately, researchers see two factors that determine the overall climate impact of e-scooters: how users ride them, and how operators manage them from manufacturing to disposal.

A recent survey of the latest research questioned whether the sharing economy is inherently sustainable, which included a particular look at e-scooters. The survey found many researchers repeatedly concerned with the question, “If riders hadn’t rented a scooter, how would they have gotten to their destination?” If someone would have walked instead of ridden, that person increased the emissions associated with that trip. But several studies, including one by the Portland Bureau of Transportation and another, funded by Lime, by a German research institute, have found that though anywhere from a third to well over half of scooter users would have walked instead, enough other trips that would have been taken by car were not and shared scooters, on the whole, help reduce overall transportation emissions — often preventing 20 grams of CO2 emissions per mile ridden on a scooter.

The picture in urban landscapes, however, can get slightly more complicated when researchers consider how those providing the scooters retrieve them to charge, repair, or redistribute them to where people are likely to use them. Colin Murphy, director of research and consulting at the Shared Use Mobility Center said that when operators use big cargo vans to manage their fleets, they can negate some of the emissions savings from users.

To address this, Savage said the company is improving its fleet logistics to reduce overall emissions. Lime’s scooters and bikes are now equipped with larger, swappable battery packs which means they need to be charged less often and when they do, fleet workers can drive around with a trunk full of battery packs rather than taking the scooter back to a warehouse, effectively cutting logistics emissions in half while ensuring scooters are available more often. Savage said the company has also bought over 140 electric vans to support those operations. Though that’s 10 times the number Lime had a few years ago, it’s still only one van for every two cities it operates in.

Savage said Lime is also working to reduce its impacts in other ways. For instance, in North America, “once vehicles arrive at port,” Savage said “we are now using emissions-free trucking to get those to our distribution centers.” Beyond that, it has designed a modular bike that makes it easier to swap out damaged parts, and parts that are beyond repair are often sent for recycling. And it has worked with one company, Gomi, to salvage cells from partially damaged batteries for use in what it says are zero-waste bluetooth speakers.

But perhaps the most concerning hurdle the industry faces is also the one over which it has, in reality, the least direct control: rider safety. One study, released earlier this year by researchers at the University of California Los Angeles, found that from 2017 to 2020 serious injuries for scooter riders rose threefold, just as revenues for the scooter-sharing industry shot from $10 million to nearly $450 million. This trend only continued into 2021 and 2022, with micromobility injuries increasing an average of 23 percent every year. And these aren’t just scrapes and bruises. The UCLA-led study found that scooter users were, compared to cyclists, more likely to end up with a broken arm or leg, require surgery, or even end up paralyzed. The researchers suspect that may be due, among other things, to riders often lacking safety gear.

Lime insists that it places safety first. But with most American cities designed to promote cars over all other forms of transit, the health of scooter users is, like those of pedestrians and cyclists, at risk once wheels hit pavement. Perhaps it should be no surprise that of the 30 people killed in 2018 while riding an e-scooter, 80 percent were struck by a car. This is why, if society wants to move away from cars as the default, Kailai Wang, who studies urban mobility at the University of Houston, believes urban areas need to invest in upgraded infrastructure like protected bike lanes that can make roads safer for non-automotive transport.

Of course, cars aren’t the only dangers e-scooter users, like cyclists, face. Poor road and sidewalk conditions can lead to serious injuries. And sometimes riders are their own enemy. According to some studies, first-time riders and late-night riders face elevated risks. Murphy, said that these are two areas where scooter-sharing platforms and local policymakers can step in. 

For instance, he said that operators could artificially limit the max speed of a scooter during a user’s first few rides as they grow accustomed to the vehicle. In other cases, many cities prohibit e-scooter rides in the wee hours to prevent misuse. But “to the degree that these vehicles provide a real kind of transportation lifeline for some people,” Murphy said, “that’s almost when they’re at their most important.” For someone who ends a late shift after bus services end, an e-scooter might actually be their best, or only, means of getting home. This reality led the Chicago City Council, for example, to consider revising its own late-night prohibition.

As long as people have access to one of these vehicles when they need one, and a safe lane in which to ride it, shared micromobility can help cities move away from car-dependent transportation, slashing emissions in the process, by shifting transit from something material and energy-intensive to something low-impact and electric.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline 8 years into America’s e-scooter experiment, what have we learned? on Apr 15, 2024.

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

With its expanse of buildings and concrete, Mexico City may not look squishy — but it is. Ever since the Spanish conquistadors drained Lake Texcoco to make way for more urbanization, the land has been gradually compacting under the weight. It’s a phenomenon known as subsidence, and the result is grim: Mexico City is sinking up to 20 inches a year, unleashing havoc on its infrastructure.

That includes the city’s metro system, the second-largest in North America after New York City’s. Now, satellites have allowed scientists to meticulously measure the rate of sinking across Mexico City, mapping where subsidence has the potential to damage railways. “When you’re here in the city, you get used to buildings being tilted a little,” says Darío Solano‐Rojas, a remote-sensing scientist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. “You can feel how the rails are wobbly. Riding the metro in Mexico City feels weird. You don’t know if it’s dangerous or not — you feel like it’s dangerous, but you don’t have that certainty.”

In a recent study in the journal Scientific Reports, Solano‐Rojas went in search of certainty. Using radar satellite data, he and his team measured how the elevation changed across the city between 2011 and 2020. Subsidence isn’t uniform; the rate depends on several factors. The most dramatic instances globally are due to the overextraction of groundwater: Pump enough liquid out and the ground collapses like an empty water bottle. That’s why Jakarta, Indonesia, is sinking up to 10 inches a year. Over in California’s San Joaquin Valley, the land has sunk as much as 28 feet in the past century, due to farmers pumping out too much groundwater.

A similar draining of aquifers is happening in Mexico City, which is gripped by a worsening water crisis. “The subsurface is like a sponge: We get the water out, and then it deforms, because it’s losing volume,” says Solano‐Rojas. How much volume depends on the underlying sediment in a given part of the city — the ancient lake didn’t neatly layer equal proportions of clay and sand in every area. “That produces a lot of different behaviors on the surface,” Solano‐Rojas adds.

Subsidence rates across Mexico City vary substantially, from 20 inches annually to not at all, where the city is built atop solid volcanic rock. This creates “differential subsidence,” where the land sinks differently not just square mile to square mile, or block to block, but square foot to square foot. If a road, railway, or building is sinking differently at one end than the other, it’ll destabilize.

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That’s how you get the tilted road traffic barriers at Acatitla Station, shown above. And below, the deformation of tracks at Oceanía Station. If in either of these places the land was subsiding at a uniform rate, the tracks and road would also sink uniformly, and you might not have a problem. “We found that some of the segments of the metro system are moving faster” than it was designed for, says Solano‐Rojas. The study found that nearly half of elevated segments of the metro are experiencing differential subsidence. This would imply that they would need to be serviced before the system’s typical threshold of 50 years, at which point a segment would need rehabilitation or repair to continue optimal operation.

Sistema de Transporte Colectivo, which operates the Mexico City Metro, did not provide comment for this story after repeated inquiries.

A metro system by its nature is a sprawling web of lines: Mexico City’s includes 140 miles of tracks running underground in subways, aboveground as you can see above, and on elevated platforms. “It goes from areas that are really stable, to areas that are subsiding at 30 centimeters per year, or even almost 40 centimeters every year,” Solano‐Rojas. “So the goal here was to see where the most damage could be.”

That damage comes in a few forms. As the land sinks, it can create divots for rainwater to accumulate, causing flooding along railways. That can mess with the electrical system that powers the trains, Solano‐Rojas says.

And elevation changes can increase the grade of the rails. The metro’s trains are designed to operate on a maximum slope of 3.5 percent, Solano‐Rojas says, but some stretches of track are now double that due to subsidence. “Trains can get derailed very easily if there is a slight change in the leveling of the railways,” says Manoochehr Shirzaei, an environmental security expert at Virginia Tech who studies subsidence but wasn’t involved in the new paper. “Most of the infrastructure has certain thresholds; it tolerates a certain level of differential land subsidence. But often they don’t account for the rate that we see, for example, in Mexico City.”

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Solano‐Rojas and his colleagues found subsidence in the area of an overpass near the Olivos station, which collapsed in 2021 while a Metro train was traveling over it. “We did part of this analysis before 2021, and we detected that that area was having differential displacements,” says Solano‐Rojas. “We were like, ‘Oh, yeah, it looks like something could be happening here in the future.’ We think that it’s not a coincidence that we found this.” Solano‐Rojas was careful to say that the potential contribution of subsidence to the disaster would require further evaluation, and official investigations have cited construction errors and do not mention subsidence.

For this study, the researchers looked at the metro infrastructure above ground, not the subway segments — basically, the parts of the system they could verify visually. (The photo below shows the differential subsidence of columns supporting an overpass.) But by providing the system’s operators with information on how quickly its infrastructure might be subsiding, their work can hopefully inform interventions. Engineers can add material underneath railways, for instance, to restore lost elevation. Bolstering subways, though, could be much more challenging. “We don’t have a concrete solution for that,” says Shirzaei. “In most cases, when that happens, it just results in shutting down the project and trying to open a new lane.”

This isn’t just Mexico City’s problem. Earlier this year, Shirzaei and his colleagues found that the East Coast’s infrastructure is in serious trouble due to slower — yet steady — subsidence. They calculated that 29,000 square miles of the Atlantic Coast are exposed to sinking of up to 0.08 inches a year, affecting up to 14 million people and 6 million properties. Some 1,400 square miles are sinking up to 0.20 inches a year.

Differential subsidence is not only threatening railways, the researchers found, but all kinds of other critical infrastructure, like levees and airports. A metropolis like New York City has the added problem of sheer weight pushing down on the ground, which alone leads to subsidence. The Bay Area, too, is sinking. On either coast, subsidence is greatly exacerbating the problem of sea level rise: The land is going down just as the water is coming up.

Wherever in the world it’s happening, people have to stop overextracting groundwater to slow subsidence. Newfangled systems are already relieving pressure on aquifers. It’s getting cheaper and cheaper to recycle toilet water into drinking water, for instance. And more cities are deploying “sponge” infrastructure — lots of green spaces that allow rainwater to soak into the underlying aquifer, essentially reinflating the land to fend off subsidence. Such efforts are increasingly urgent as climate change exacerbates droughts in many parts of the world, including Mexico City, putting ever more pressure on groundwater supplies.

With increasing satellite data, cities can get a better handle on the subsidence they can’t immediately avoid. “I really feel like governments have a chance to use these kinds of studies to have a more structured plan of action,” says Solano‐Rojas.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Mexico City’s metro system is sinking fast. Yours could be next. on Apr 14, 2024.

This story was originally published by Capital & Main.

When it comes to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and watershed protection, several downballot elections this year in a handful of states could have a major effect in the transition away from fossil fuel. 

The media tend to ignore such contests, which attract far fewer voters than big federal and state elections. But board members of public utilities in Arizona and Nebraska are up for election in coming months, and the results of those contests could potentially transform energy policy for millions of Americans. 

The elections come amid growing concern about the role of money in such races and in the wake of headline-grabbing corruption scandals at utilities across the country. Utility fraud and corruption — in Florida, Illinois, Mississippi, Ohio, and South Carolina — has cost electricity customers at least $6.6 billion, according to an analysis by news nonprofit Floodlight, which noted that “some power companies embrace — or seek to block — the transition away from fossil fuels toward wind, solar, hydrogen, and nuclear, which produce fewer greenhouse gasses.”

On April 2, six clean-energy candidates won seats on two boards of the Salt River Project, a not-for-profit utility that provides water and power to more than 2 million people living in central Arizona. It’s one of the largest public power companies in the country. Critics say that it’s also one of the biggest contributors in the Western U.S. to greenhouse gas emissions since it relies on coal, oil, and natural gas to generate more than two-thirds of its energy. Arizona is the sunniest state in the country, yet the Salt River Project gets only 3.4 percent of its energy from solar, lagging behind the state overall, which gets 10 percent from solar.

Though they didn’t win a majority of the board, the new clean energy members could have a greater role shaping the energy future of Phoenix, the fifth-largest city in the U.S. with a population of more than 1.6 million. The election attracted controversy due to rules limiting voter eligibility to property owners and not all rate payers in the district — it also got the attention of famed environmental activists like Bill McKibben, leader of the climate campaign group 350.org.

Some of the incumbent board members have served for decades because of an election system set up in the early 1900s — when the Valley of the Sun was settled by farmers and ranchers — that allows only property owners to vote and apportions votes by acreage. The more land you own, the more votes you get. 

As a result, most of the utility’s customers don’t have a say in choosing the leadership of a body that sets their energy rates and decides what energy sources they use to generate electricity.

The clean energy advocates promise to accelerate solar deployments, adjust rates to incentivize the use of rooftop solar, and strengthen watershed protection in a region that is increasingly suffering from drought and extreme heat. In 2023, Phoenix saw a record 54 days when the temperature hit 110 degrees.

“We call ourselves the Valley of the Sun for a reason,” said Randy Miller, a winning Salt River Project board member who supports the slate of clean energy candidates and was motivated to run several years ago when he was told that his energy rates would nearly triple since he installed rooftop solar on his home. “I couldn’t believe it, the nearby ASP [Arizona Public Service] district has more than triple the amount of rooftop solar. Higher rates are a complete disincentive to getting solar power. We need new leadership on the board.”

The candidates were especially motivated in light of a state commission’s recent decision to scrap its renewable energy standard, the only state to take such action, according to solar industry advocates. That body, the Arizona Corporation Commission, also has an election coming up in August.

Longtime board member Stephen H. Williams, who defeated one of the clean-energy candidates, did not return calls from Capital & Main for comment.

The current board members running for reelection had pushed back against the new candidates, sending out flyers touting “40 combined years of providing affordable and reliable power and water” and citing sustainability as one of their concerns. They criticized what they called an attempted “takeover” by “ideological extremists,” claiming that Salt River Project “has managed to reduce carbon intensity by 35 percent since 2005, despite the dramatic growth happening in our service area.”

The insurgents in the Salt River Project race had hoped to emulate Nebraska, where clean-energy advocates won three seats in 2016 on the heavily rural Nebraska Public Power District. That helped tip the balance of power and led the board to vote 9-2 in 2021 to aim for net-zero emissions in the utility’s generation by 2050. As a result, with the state’s other two major power utilities already making similar pledges in recent years, Nebraska became the first GOP-dominated state to commit to net-zero electricity emissions.

The end result was a long-sought goal of climate activists and environmental groups, such as the Nebraska Conservation Voters and the Sierra Club, which poured money into the 2018 and 2020 races. Before that, such races were sleepy affairs with incumbents running unopposed. The unprecedented level of campaign contributions sparked debate in this year’s election cycle, with some state lawmakers recently pushing to make the elections partisan so that voters have a better idea of each candidate’s agenda.

“Nebraskans support clean energy” but the utilities didn’t reflect those values — and so it became a matter of organizing and educating voters, said Chelsea Johnson, deputy director of Nebraska Conservation Voters, describing recent election results. “You can have a really big impact running for these local offices.”

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The downballot races that could transform energy policy in Arizona and Nebraska on Apr 13, 2024.

The Department of Energy, or DOE, announced Friday that it’s strengthening energy efficiency requirements for light bulbs in U.S. markets, in a move anticipated to save Americans $27 billion on their utility bills over 30 years. The DOE estimates that the new standards will prevent 70 million metric tons of carbon from being emitted over 30 years — equivalent to the annual emissions of 9 million homes.

According to the new rule, light bulbs sold or imported after 2028 must have an efficiency level of at least 120 lumens per watt, almost triple the current minimum standard. Under the new standard, a light bulb as bright as an old-school 60-watt incandescent bulb would require no more than 6.5 watts of electricity.

The federal government has already once strengthened its efficiency standards under the Biden administration. Last year, the classic Edison-style incandescent bulb was almost entirely phased out. (That rule, which set the current efficiency standard of 45 lumens per watt, actually predates Biden’s presidency and was initially scheduled by Congress to go into effect in 2020, but it was delayed by the Trump administration.)

By 2028, when the new standards kick in, the DOE predicts that some 98 percent of new bulbs sold in the U.S. will be LEDs.

The federal standards do not prescribe a particular kind of bulb for common household usage, but merely mandate minimum efficiency levels. And they only apply to new sales and imports; no one is required to replace the bulbs already in their homes.

Exemptions are carved out for certain types of bulbs, like oven lights, where LEDs are unsuitable because they don’t perform well under high heat.

Andrew deLaski, the executive director of the Appliance Standards Awareness Project, a coalition of energy efficiency proponents, said the trend toward greater efficiency has made a difference in the battle against global warming — especially since the widespread adoption of LEDs.

“What was a 60 watt light bulb now uses, say, 9 or 10 watts,” deLaski said. “That’s a big reduction in energy use, which means less fossil fuels being burned in power plants which leads to climate change. But even an efficient technology can get better.”

Those improvements are already on their way, as lighting manufacturers have been steadily increasing efficiency in light bulbs for years, driven by economic incentives as well as federal regulation. Lighting manufacturers weighed in on the new standard during the federal rulemaking process.

“The modern LED light bulb is a much better light bulb than the one you bought five years ago, way way better than the one you bought ten years ago, and in another universe than the CFL [ compact fluorescent lamp] that you can’t even buy anymore,” said deLaski.

The new federal standards effectively guarantee that these innovations are shared across the market, ensuring “that all the choices available in stores and from internet sellers are going to be LEDs that incorporate the latest efficiency technologies,” deLaski said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The lowly light bulb is the Biden administration’s latest climate-fighting tool on Apr 12, 2024.

The world’s most prominent verification program for corporate climate pledges is reportedly in turmoil following its board of trustees’ unilateral decision this week to allow carbon offsets to count toward companies’ supply chain emissions reduction targets.

In a letter to the board seen by Grist, dozens of staffers and program managers at the Science-Based Targets initiative, or SBTi, said the decision had caused “grave reputational damage” and implied that it risked turning their organization into a “greenwashing platform.”

The letter called for the resignation of SBTi CEO Luiz Amaral and board members who supported the change, as well as the withdrawal of the new policy.

“The actions of the CEO and the board have resulted in significant harm to our organization’s reputation and viability,” the letter said.

The SBTi is a nonprofit that sets standards for corporate emissions reduction targets. It evaluates hundreds of companies’ targets each year and certifies those it deems legitimate. Companies, in turn, advertise the SBTi’s certification as evidence that their pledges are meaningful.

Among the staffers’ main concerns is that access to carbon credits will incentivize companies to offset, rather than reduce, greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation and production of materials they buy and products they sell to consumers. Scientists say companies should do everything they can to limit these emissions, known as “scope 3” emissions, before trying to cancel them out with credits. 

Carbon credits are supposed to represent some amount of carbon emissions that are avoided or removed from the atmosphere — through projects like planting trees or installing wind turbines — but experts say it’s questionable whether they actually work. More than 90 percent of the rainforest-based credits offered by one popular organization were shown last year to be “worthless,” largely because they promised to protect forests that were never under threat. (The issuer of those credits disputed the findings.)

The SBTi staffers also said the board moved “prematurely,” without notifying or adequately consulting with its technical advisers.

“The Technical Council was neither informed, consulted, nor given approval for such a significant decision,” they wrote, calling this a “clear and apparent breach” of the SBTi’s governance structures. At least one of the SBTi’s technical advisory group members — Stephan Singer, a senior adviser at the nonprofit Climate Action Network — said he resigned from the SBTi over the issue. In his resignation letter, obtained by the Financial Times, he called carbon credits “scientifically, socially, and from a climate perspective a hoax.”

Doreen Stabinsky, another SBTi adviser and a professor of global environmental politics at the College of the Atlantic in Maine, told Grist the move was a “corporate takeover of SBTi that will undermine any ‘science-based’ credibility they had.”

More than 90 percent of the rainforest-based credits offered by one popular organization were shown last year to be “worthless,” largely because they promised to protect forests that were never under threat. Michael Dantas / AFP via Getty Images

The trustees’ abrupt decision may have been influenced by external pressure to boost business prospects for the voluntary carbon market. Over the past few years, investigations and public scrutiny of “fraudulent” offsets have made prospective buyers wary of carbon credits; perhaps fearing backlash, companies bought 17 percent fewer carbon credits in 2022 than they did the previous year.

If the SBTi softened its position on these credits, it could drive up demand for them. Carbon credit programs would benefit from a bigger pool of interested buyers, and companies would be able to meet their emissions reduction targets more easily. Indeed, dozens of companies told the SBTi in a survey published last month that meeting their scope 3 targets is “too much of a challenge,” and the overwhelming majority of positive reactions to the board’s about-face on carbon credits have come from carbon market funders and participants like the American Forest Foundation, Climate Impact Partners, and Indigo Ag.

María Mendiluce, CEO of the We Mean Business Coalition — which advocates for corporate climate action and is one of the SBTi’s five partner organizations — said in a statement that the move would allow companies to “bring more innovation and investment into cutting emissions from their value chains, while also bringing in much needed funding for climate projects in the Global South.” 

Organizations that set standards for the voluntary carbon market in order to help it grow, including the International Emissions Trading Association, the Integrity Council for Voluntary Carbon Markets, and the Voluntary Carbon Markets Integrity Initiative, also supported the new policy. The last of these recently adopted a similar position on carbon credits used to offset supply chain emissions that raised similar concerns among experts.

“The faulty business model of offset credits is in danger, and this wild move is an attempt to keep the business model alive,” Sybrig Smit, a policy analyst for the nonprofit NewClimate Institute, told Grist. “It’s not an attempt to save the climate.”

Some carbon credit proponents may have lobbied the SBTi board directly for a change in policy. Earlier this week, the Financial Times reported that the Bezos Earth Fund, a $10 billion philanthropic organization created by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and a “core funder” of the SBTi, arranged a two-day meeting in March with SBTi board members, at which representatives of the fund urged the SBTi to allow companies to use offsets.

Read Next Corporate climate plans are improving, but still ‘critically insufficient’ Joseph Winters

The Bezos Earth Fund is a founding sponsor, along with the Rockefeller Foundation and the U.S. State Department, of a large-scale carbon credit system that was first unveiled at the U.N.’s annual climate summit in 2022. At the time, an independent analysis suggested that the system would need to attract significant business participation in order to have more than marginal impact on greenhouse gas emissions and climate finance. 

The initiative “basically aims to develop a system that will look to sell a lot of credits, and they need to find buyers,” said Gilles Dufrasne, lead on global carbon markets for the European nonprofit Carbon Market Watch.

The Bezos fund and its partners relaunched their carbon credit system at last year’s U.N. summit and said they would finalize a framework for the system by Earth Day 2024, less than two weeks after the SBTi board’s announcement. Dufrasne called the timing “curious.”

The Bezos Earth Fund did not respond to Grist’s request for comment, but the philanthropy told the Financial Times it was uninvolved in the SBTi’s new policy on offsets. A spokesperson said the fund is committed to “ensuring that any use of high integrity market mechanisms is subject to stringent guardrails, limits, and rules so that any use of high integrity carbon credits enhances rather than undermines the integrity of corporate climate targets.”

Neither the U.S. Department of State nor the SBTi board of trustees responded to Grist’s requests for comment. Amaral, the SBTi’s CEO, didn’t respond to a message on LinkedIn.

Across academia and the advocacy world, critics have not held back in repudiating the SBTi board’s decision. Teresa Anderson, global lead on climate justice for the nonprofit ActionAid International, said on X that the move “renders the standard for climate action meaningless.” Alison Taylor, a clinical professor at the New York University Stern School of Business, posted that the move was “good news for voluntary carbon markets, bad news for the overwhelming prevalence of BS in this area.”

Other organizations, including Carbon Market Watch, run their own efforts to evaluate private sector decarbonization plans, but none of them do it at the same scale as the SBTi. In 2022, the organization approved more than 1,000 companies’ climate pledges. It removed hundreds of them from a validation process last month over their failure to submit sufficiently ambitious emissions reduction targets.

“It’s just sad,” said Peter Riggs, director of the environmental nonprofit Pivot Point, describing the niche position the SBTi has held as a widely respected arbiter of corporate climate plans, trusted by both business leaders and climate advocacy groups. “We were hoping SBTi was going to be the exemplar of integrity at a time when other initiatives were still messing around with offsets. And now they’re indistinguishable.”

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A climate pledge verifier said it would allow more carbon offsets. Its staff revolted. on Apr 12, 2024.

Last year’s United Nations climate conference in the United Arab Emirates ended on a surprising high note as the world’s countries endorsed a landmark agreement to transition away from fossil fuels. After weeks of tense negotiation, the conference produced a slew of unprecedented commitments to ramp up the deployment of renewables, adapt to climate disasters, and move away from the use of coal, oil, and gas.

The question at this year’s COP29 conference in Baku, Azerbaijan, is just how much that massive effort will cost. After years of global debate over the scale of funding that developed countries owe less fortunate nations for decarbonization and disaster aid, negotiators have until the end of the conference in December to agree on a hard-fought financial target for climate assistance over the next few decades. This new target, referred to as the New Collective Quantified Goal by climate negotiators, is critical to upholding the 2015 Paris Agreement and addressing the harm of fossil fuel emissions from industrialized countries like the United States. Without funding, some of the poorest nations in Asia and Africa, which have contributed negligibly to the climate crisis, stand little chance of transitioning their economies away from fossil fuels and adapting to a warmer world. 

The last time the world set such a goal, it didn’t work out well. Back in 2009, wealthy countries agreed to send poorer countries $100 billion in climate finance every year by 2020. Though the figure was less than half of the annual global need, according to World Bank estimates, rich countries didn’t even come close to meeting their target until last year. Even then, some aid organizations like Oxfam contend that these countries have overstated or double-counted their aid by tens of billions of dollars. In the meantime, international estimates of total aid needs have ballooned into the trillions. As a result, the talks around climate finance are still marked by frustration and mistrust, and diplomats debating the goal over the past two years have made little progress toward consensus.

As dozens of negotiators head to Colombia later this month for the first in a series of pre-conference talks that will lay the groundwork for the new goal, developing countries are trying to use the failures of the $100 billion promise as leverage for a much bigger commitment. After years of advocacy from climate-vulnerable nations, the economic heavyweights of India and Saudi Arabia are making a formal demand for climate aid to reach $1 trillion per year, broaching a number that will send negotiations into uncharted territory. 

Increasing climate aid by more than tenfold could alter the life prospects of millions of people staring down imminent climate impacts in poor countries in Africa and Asia, but experts say the astronomical number will be a hard sell for many wealthy nations dealing with inflation and domestic turmoil. Plus, the commitment itself won’t mean much without strong safeguards to ensure the money reaches the vulnerable communities that most need it.

“It’s good that countries are using the t-word because that’s grappling with the scale of ambition that we need,” said Joe Thwaites, a climate finance expert at the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council. “But the key question is the political one of how you break that up.”

The world has known for years that the $100 billion goal was fundamentally flawed: The target number was far too low to match the mounting toll of climate change in the developing world, which one recent estimate pegged at around $2.4 trillion per year. And more than two-thirds of the aid from wealthy countries has been through loans rather than grants, forcing poor states to take on higher debt loads to respond to climate disasters. Some countries also tried to count aid to seaside hotels and gelato stores as climate assistance, exaggerating their contributions.

The slow pace of United Nations diplomacy has forced developing countries to wait more than a decade for the opportunity to hash out a new number with their counterparts in the United States and the European Union. Now that that chance has arrived, many of these countries are seeking to raise the floor for climate finance by scaling up their demands to a level that once would have sounded ludicrous. 

In a letter to fellow negotiators in February, India argued that “developed countries need to provide at least USD 1 trillion per year, composed primarily of grants and concessional finance,” or very low-interest loans. Saudi Arabia, writing on behalf of a group of countries in the Middle East, said just a few days later that “we set a [target] of USD 1.1 trillion from developed to developing countries,” plus arrears for the failure of the last goal. There are just 19 countries in the world whose economies are larger than $1 trillion, according to data from the International Monetary Fund.

The fact that India and Saudi Arabia have endorsed this number is significant. India is the world’s most populous country and one of its largest emitters, and it has significant political clout in climate talks as the largest country that still needs aid to finance its energy transition. Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, and it has faced immense pressure to join the United States and the European Union in sending aid to poorer countries. They are the only two countries to name a number so far.

Setting such an ambitious goal comes with pros and cons, experts say. On the one hand, shooting for the moon with a very high target provides poor countries with some cushion against the possibility that rich countries may fail to meet their promises. On the other hand, if voters and political leaders in wealthy countries don’t back the goal, the strategy might backfire and poor countries may end up receiving very little aid. 

The United States Congress, for instance, has fought for months over whether to send around $60 billion in new aid to Ukraine, and it’s a safe bet that many lawmakers would balk at helping with a trillion-dollar global commitment. Mobilizing climate aid in a divided Congress has proven to be a challenging endeavor in previous years. Endorsing a new goal could even become a liability for President Biden and other climate-forward leaders as they stare down an election year. 

Developed countries like the United States, the United Kingdom, and those within the European Union haven’t proposed a numerical target for the goal in their missives to fellow negotiators. Instead, they’ve urged a broader conversation about how to mobilize private money and how to ensure aid contributions are reaching the right communities, with Canada for instance advocating a “pragmatic approach to establishing a quantum [goal size].” The U.S. has shied away from discussion of the size, focusing in its letters on questions about which nations should contribute aid money and which nations should receive it.

“Although this [trillion] number better reflects the needs of developing countries, it will be a difficult outcome to achieve given the current constraints of developed countries — shifting geopolitics, energy security concerns, stagflation, and internal politics,” said Aman Srivatstava, a climate finance expert at the Centre for Policy Research, an India-based think tank.

But negotiators and climate advocates told Grist that the structure of the new goal matters just as much as the eventual size. The $100 billion goal was too low, but it was also too vague about what counts as “climate finance,” and many wealthy countries focused on doling out loans and private investment rather than no-strings-attached grants. These countries also tended to provide much more assistance for renewables and energy projects rather than the flood and drought aid that many countries have demanded. 

“We don’t need to talk only about the quantum in terms of the money, but also about the quality of the money,” said Sandra Guzmán Luna, the founder of the Climate Finance Group for Latin America and the Caribbean, which helps developing countries in the region track and access climate aid money. 

Herd boys pull out an ox stuck in the muddy waters of a drying reservoir in southern Zimbabwe. The county has declared a national emergency due to a drought caused by climate change and El Niño. Zinyange Auntony / AFP via Getty Images

The most likely outcome is a structure that some negotiators liken to an onion with multiple concentric layers. The United States, the European Union, and other wealthy countries would contribute a chunk of public funding in the form of grants for unprofitable projects like sea walls and drinking water systems. The other layers could include additional grants from new contributors like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which have ample wealth but have never donated much climate aid, or private loans from investors and banks. This approach would mimic the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, a 2022 agreement to protect nature and endangered species that also featured a “layered” set of commitments.

But creating such a complex structure for climate aid ahead of COP29 will be a Herculean task. Despite new endorsements for a $1 trillion goal, rich and poor countries still have huge disagreements about who should contribute to the goal, how much money should come from grants and loans, and how rich countries should be held accountable for their share. Rich countries are advocating a broader group of contributors that would include Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, as well as more flexibility to include private money in their aid contributions. Countries like China and Saudi Arabia, which have huge economies but account for a low share of carbon emissions historically, are pushing for the U.S. and the E.U. to bear the greatest burden.

With COP29 just seven months away, negotiators still haven’t even put their ideas to paper, and drafts of the potential text likely won’t appear until the summer. From there the world’s climate leaders will sprint to settle as many details as possible before the conference clock in Baku runs out. Thwaites likened the process to the puzzle game Rush Hour, where a player has to move several cars around on a grid in order to clear space for one car to escape.

“Even when you think that it’s a done deal, things can fall apart, so it’s hard to make predictions,” said Eleonora Cogo, a climate finance expert at ECCO, an Italian think tank. (Cogo has negotiated on behalf of the European Union in previous climate finance talks.) 

Given how far apart the sides are right now, Cogo says that she doubts countries will be able to work out all the details by the end of COP29. The most likely outcome is a basic agreement on “some core elements” like an approximate size and a promise to work the rest out later. This could produce any number of commitments — a strong promise from rich countries to scale up their grants, a weakened framework like the $100 billion goal, or something in between.

“The asks on the table are so different, and the points of departure are so far away,” said Cogo. “It’s all open.”

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

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How much do rich countries owe in climate aid? That’s the trillion-dollar question. on Apr 12, 2024.

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

Those involved in the Line 5 pipeline controversy have been waiting for the United States Department of Justice — and the Biden administration — to come forward with its opinion on a case that involves tribal sovereignty and foreign relations. 

But when the legal brief came down on Wednesday, no one was satisfied. 

The Justice Department amicus brief backed claims from a Wisconsin tribe that Enbridge, a Canadian company, was trespassing on its lands by continuing to operate the Line 5 pipeline there. The 71-year-old pipeline carries up to 540,000 barrels of oil and natural gas liquids daily from Superior, Wisconsin, to Sarnia, Ontario. 

The DOJ also agreed that Enbridge has been trespassing on the band’s lands for over a decade, and specified the company should pay more than the court-ordered $5.15 million to the band, since the company has made over $1 billion in that time. 

“We are grateful the U.S. urged the court not to let Enbridge profit from its unlawful trespass,” said Robert Blanchard, chairman of the Bad River Band of the Lake Superior Chippewa Indians, located in northern Wisconsin.

But, Blanchard added in a statement, they’re disappointed the U.S. didn’t call for the company to stop trespassing immediately: “Enbridge should be required to promptly leave our Reservation, just like other companies that have trespassed on tribal land.”

Read Next How the US government began its decade-long campaign against the anti-pipeline movement Adam Federman

The legal trail began in 2019, when the band sued Enbridge for trespassing. The district ruling came out last June. Both Enbridge and the band appealed.

In their appeal, Enbridge and the Canadian government pointed to the 1977 Transit Pipeline Treaty between the United States and Canada, which promised an uninterrupted flow of oil and gas products between the nations. 

Both Enbridge and Canada argue that shutting down the pipeline before relocating it would violate the pipeline treaty, and would impact energy supplies across the northern U.S. and Canada. 

The court waiting for the DOJ brief, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, was looking for guidance on that question.

But the department stopped short of saying how the court should interpret the 1977 treaty, only recommending that the case be sent back to the district court to more fully consider public interests, including diplomatic relations with Canada, energy concerns around Line 5, and protecting the band’s sovereign rights. 

“The brief does not provide an interpretation of the transit treaty’s provisions, and that was pretty stunning, given that the court asked specifically for that interpretation,” said the band’s attorney, Riyaz Kanji. 

The Bad River Band disagrees with Enbridge and Canada’s interpretation of the pipeline treaty. The band refers to its 1854 treaty with the U.S., which recognizes its sovereign authority over those lands.

Even if the pipeline treaty applies, according to the band, it still allows for pipelines to be regulated, including for pipeline safety and environmental protection. 

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That has worried the band’s supporters. Some say the U.S. is failing to meaningfully support tribal sovereignty, instead protecting its interests with Canada.

“From the point of view of the tribe and its allies, this is incredibly concerning that the United States is not advocating for the shutdown or removal of that pipeline” said Matthew Fletcher, a citizen of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians and a law professor at the University of Michigan.

Other Great Lakes tribes have argued that accepting Canada and Enbridge’s interpretation of the pipeline treaty would undermine foundational principles of tribal sovereignty and would have major implications for property rights. 

In a letter to the Biden administration in late February, representatives from 30 tribal nations across the region said the U.S. should fulfill its trust responsibility by rejecting that interpretation of the pipeline treaty. 

Enbridge declined Grist’s request for an interview. In an emailed statement, company spokesperson Ryan Duffy said, “The Government of Canada has made its position clear. Such a shutdown is not in the public interest as it would negatively impact businesses, communities and millions of individuals who depend on Line 5 for energy in both the U.S. and Canada.”

The band, Enbridge, and Canada have until April 24 to respond to the DOJ’s brief. The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals will then decide how to move forward. 

Editor’s note: Enbridge is an advertiser with Interlochen Public Radio. Advertisers have no role in IPR’s editorial decisions.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline DOJ thinks Enbridge Line 5 pipeline is trespassing on tribal lands on Apr 12, 2024.

When it comes to a green future, money isn’t everything.

In the case of Indigenous peoples, there also needs to be a variety of support and cultural understanding.

That’s according to Kimberly Yazzie, a Diné researcher in ecology at Stanford University, who has seen how Indigenous communities have been harmed in the race to establish wind, solar, and mining projects. 

“There’s this history of tribes not getting a fair deal, and so this history needs to be addressed,” she said. “There’s work that needs to be done.”

As lead author in an article published this week in Science, she outlined ways Indigenous peoples can move forward on the journey to save the planet. 

Many green projects over the last few years have been criticized for not including tribes in important decisions that infringes or even destroys ancestral land. 

Yazzie cautioned that building a just and equitable energy future will take relationship building, research, and consultation. That can take time, she admitted, and while it’s not a luxury many feel we have, it’s essential so mistakes of the past are not repeated. 

“To go fast, start slow,” she said.  

The three big takeaways from the paper include: flexible application deadlines, equal access to updated and accurate information, and resources to build stronger infrastructure within tribes for projects. Since 2021, federal money has been available for tribal renewable energy projects — an amount that now stands at around $14 billion dollars — and Yazzie hopes that the paper can help tribes access those dollars. 

Strict deadlines, for instance, can shut tribes out from funding due to how long it takes to identify resources, secure other funding sources, and tailor competitive applications. The paper calls for rolling deadlines, and specifically mentions the Tribal Energy Loan Guarantee Program as an example of how more applications should accept applications at any time. 

A second solution includes increasing access to updated and accurate information for tribal green energy projects. Although the federal government has a database, it can be hard to find state or private information. One solution could be a database updated with funding sources, not only from federal programs but philanthropic organizations, with funding amounts and requirements clearly outlined for easy reference. Or having readily available technical information or experts to answer nuts-and-bolts type questions about solar and electrical projects. 

Clara Pratte is a Diné researcher and a tribal government consultant. She’s a co-author on the paper and said that having a more effective way to share information was very important. 

“There’s no best practice guide on how to run projects like these,” she said. “And at the end of the day, we want better, more mindful, culturally competent development to happen on tribal lands.”

It’s also important that funding goes to the people on the ground and not just to the project, a way to make sure tribal members are involved. Pratte specifically said the role of “tribal energy champions” can make or break a idea. These are tribal members who stick with a given endeavor through the very early stages till its completion, and can pool information and resources from other tribal energy projects.

Pratte said that ideally this work would be done by tribal members who have cultural knowledge valuable to the ethical development of these projects. 

“Just because it’s ‘green’ doesn’t mean it’s going to be done in a thoughtful way, so I think tribes and tribal people really have to be at the forefront of defining what that process looks like,” she said.

Yazzie said she’d also like to take a closer look at the future, especially when the Biden administration’s financial support ends.

“I think a question we’re going to have to ask ourselves is what are we going to do when that administration changes and when funding programs run out,” she said. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline For a just transition to green energy, tribes need more than money on Apr 11, 2024.

Shortly after being elected president, Joe Biden made a sweeping promise on environmental justice: With a 2021 executive order, he vowed that a full 40 percent of the benefits of certain federal government climate and environmental investments would reach historically disadvantaged communities. This initiative, known as Justice40, was the centerpiece of the administration’s environmental justice efforts and was intended to compensate for both underinvestment and environmental harms that have disproportionately burdened communities of color throughout U.S. history.

Justice40 is striking both for the simplicity and specificity of its objective and also for the big open questions that the goal depends on. For one, Justice40 was conceived before hundreds of billions of dollars in climate funding were unlocked by the passage of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act, so it’s unclear what the grand total is from which the 40 percent figure will be drawn. Second, the president promised not 40 percent of spending but 40 percent of the benefits of said spending, and it’s not obvious how the latter is derived from the former. Finally, it’s not entirely clear where exactly the money is intended to go — in other words, for the purposes of Justice40’s accounting, which communities count as “disadvantaged?”

That last question alone was the target of a yearslong, open-source White House project, which resulted in a specialized screening tool for federal agencies to use to identify disadvantaged communities. And the original executive order itself stipulated an accountability mechanism: the creation of a scorecard “detailing agency environmental justice performance measures.” Three years on, however, environmental justice advocates Grist spoke to expressed disappointment in the quality of this progress report, saying the administration’s scorecard is confusing and provides little information about whether or not federal funding is on track to meet Justice40’s lofty goal.

In its current iteration, the scorecard consists of links to multiple web pages detailing the various environmental justice efforts undertaken by each federal agency. Most agencies have reported whether or not they have dedicated environmental justice offices, the number of Justice40-related programs announced, the number of staff dedicated to environmental justice programs, and the amount of funding made available through those programs. 

But the information collected provides little insight into how much of that funding has been allocated to disadvantaged communities. Since federal agencies currently don’t have a uniform method of tracking funding down to a specific zip code, that information has not been reported. In some cases, such tracking may not even be possible. For example, when the Department of Transportation builds an electric charging station along a highway, it may be used by residents of multiple communities spread out over a large area. The corresponding air quality improvements, to the extent they can be determined, may also span a vast region. Actually quantifying such benefits — whether it’s improvements in air quality or health or any number of other outcomes — is even more challenging. As a result, an interested member of the public can, for example, look at the EPA’s scorecard and see that the agency has 73 Justice40 programs and that it has made $14 billion in funding available. But how much of that money is going to disadvantaged communities — and the impact of those funds — is unknown. 

“The scorecard as it was presented was not user-friendly,” said Maria López-Núñez, an environmental justice advocate with the New Jersey-based Ironbound Community Corporation and co-chair of a White House advisory council’s working group on the scorecard. “It wasn’t really showing the public what the intentions of the scorecard are. When people hear a scorecard, they think, ‘Where’s the grade?’ And we obviously didn’t see any of that.”

“Given the amount of funding that we’re talking about, it seems like a remarkable accountability failure,” added Justin Schott, project manager of the Energy Equity Project at the University of Michigan.

Schott analyzed the information provided by each agency and collated the data in a spreadsheet. He found that there were large discrepancies in the quality of information presented: Some agencies had designated hundreds of staff members to work on environmental justice efforts while others did not report any. To add to the confusion, some agencies reported figures that appear incorrect. For instance, the Department of Agriculture noted that it made 12,000 funding announcements in fiscal year 2022 even though it lists just 65 Justice40 programs. Similarly, the Department of Housing and Urban Development reported conducting an eye-popping 1,914 technical assistance outreach events, though what constitutes such an event is not specified. (A spokesperson for the Housing Department confirmed the number is accurate and noted that outreach events can range from Zoom calls between an agency staffer and a state official to in-person meetings with multiple stakeholders; a spokesperson for the Department of Agriculture also confirmed the accuracy of its count of funding announcements, noting that the department included a broad range of appropriations, including those from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.)

The White House launched the first version of the scorecard, which it described as a “baseline assessment of actions taken by federal agencies in 2021 and 2022,” in early 2023. Since then it has requested recommendations from the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, a body made up primarily of community and environmental justice advocates (including López-Núñez), and solicited feedback from the public. Work on the scorecard is iterative, and the agency is expected to release an updated version later this year. 

“The Environmental Justice Scorecard alone cannot fully capture the depth or range of active work or the long-term impact of the Biden-Harris Administration’s environmental justice work within communities, including zero-emission school buses, cleaning up legacy pollution, and strengthening protections for clean water and air,” an administration official wrote in response to Grist’s questions. “As future versions of the Environmental Justice Scorecard are released on an annual basis, we will be continually working to improve the tool based on public input and improving data, so that everyone can better track progress and identify opportunities to advance environmental justice.”

The Biden administration is the first presidency to center environmental justice in its policymaking. Its approach has been broad, requiring every federal agency to consider the equity implications of its actions, including the effects of its policies and the funding that it doles out. Environmental justice advocates Grist spoke to lauded these efforts, which they called unprecedented. 

“It’s an undeniable fact that this administration has done more for environmental justice than any of the previous administrations,” said Manuel Salgado, a federal research manager with the nonprofit We Act for Environmental Justice and a contributor to a White House advisory council report on the scorecard. “If you look at the numbers that are highlighted on the scorecard, that’s not necessarily reflected.”

Salgado and other members of the advisory council drafted a set of recommendations to improve the scorecard last year. Salgado said that a key impediment is the lack of uniformity in how agencies manage and track the implementation of various programs. Some agencies may be managing hundreds of programs and disbursing billions in funding while others may oversee just a handful. In a number of cases, funding is typically allocated to state agencies, which then make decisions about how and where to invest the funds.  

“Every agency operates like their own fiefdom,” said López-Núñez. “They have their own set of entrenched customs and traditions that make it difficult to collaborate with other agencies.” 

Those vast differences in how agencies operate led the White House Council on Environmental Quality, which has been coordinating work on the scorecard, to take a “common denominator approach,” according to Yukyan Lam, a research director and senior scientist at The New School’s Tishman Environment & Design Center and an independent contributor to the advisory council’s report on the scorecard. “Trying to bring all the agencies to the lowest common denominator made it more confusing and less clear to the public what the purpose was,” added López-Núñez.

In trying to identify metrics that were relevant to all federal agencies, the White House requested that agencies report environmental justice staffing levels, programs funded, and staff trainings conducted. While that information is useful, it “really failed to capture some of the nuances and specifics of the kinds of work that each individual agency or department was carrying out,” Yam said. When Yam and other members who worked on the report met with agencies, staff were eager to come up with ways to provide specific information relevant to the programs they oversee, she said. 

As a result, the advisory council’s report emphasized the need to supplement the standard metrics with granting the agencies flexibility to report customized information most relevant to their work. “Rather than applying uniform expectations for the scorecard to all agencies, we recommend a tailored approach, allowing each agency to provide metrics that are relevant to its activities,” the report noted.

Even with the flexibility to report different metrics, however, tracking the benefits of climate funding will likely prove tricky for agencies. When the EPA provides community grants that increase tree cover in a neighborhood, or the Department of Housing and Urban Development builds more energy-efficient affordable housing, or the Department of Transportation invests in electric charging stations, those investments have environmental and public health benefits. But quantifying those benefits typically involves modeling, which requires expertise and resources. Given the challenges, advocates emphasized the need to at least first track funding. 

Salgado said the scorecard is not just an accountability mechanism but also a chance for the administration to communicate its environmental justice work to the public. Most members of the public don’t have an intimate understanding of the inner workings of various federal agencies, and the scorecard could be an opportunity for the Biden administration to explain how environmental justice efforts relate to people’s everyday lives, he said. 

“These are big environmental justice wins that should be communicated to the general public, especially in an election year,” said Salgado. “If we want to support our elected officials who provide us with environmental justice benefits, we have to know what they’ve done right. So it’s an opportunity for them to brag and for them to highlight all of these environmental justice wins and the great things that they’ve done over the course of this administration.”

This story has been updated to incorporate comments received from the Department of Agriculture after publication.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Biden’s environmental justice scorecard offers more questions than answers on Apr 11, 2024.

Despite minor improvements, major companies’ climate commitments remain “critically insufficient” to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), according to a new analysis.

The 2024 Corporate Climate Responsibility Monitor, a report by the European nonprofits Carbon Market Watch and NewClimate Institute, finds that many of the world’s biggest companies are making better climate pledges — for example, by beginning to move away from misleading “carbon neutrality” claims and setting quantitative emissions reduction targets alongside their net-zero pledges.

But huge problems remain. The report finds that 51 major companies’ climate plans would, collectively, only reduce emissions about 30 percent below 2019 values by 2030 — far short of the 43 to 48 percent that scientists say the world must achieve to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees C. Most companies’ targets continue to be “ambiguous,” the report says, leaving out critical supply chain emissions and banking on questionable carbon offsets.

“We’re seeing improvements from a very low baseline,” said Gilles Dufrasne, lead on global carbon markets for Carbon Market Watch and a co-author of the report. “There’s still quite a big gap between what they’re pledging to deliver and what they’re actually delivering.”

The companies analyzed span four sectors — automobiles, fashion, electric utilities, and food and agriculture — and account for about 16 percent of the world’s overall greenhouse gas emissions. Carbon Market Watch and the NewClimate Institute selected them because they have been some of the most vocal about their climate efforts. 

Thirty-one of the companies were included in previous versions of the Corporate Climate Responsibility Monitor, or CCRM. The first report, published in 2022, found that 25 companies’ “net-zero” targets would only reduce aggregate emissions by 40 percent. The report’s 2023 iteration raised similar concerns, describing two dozen companies’ climate commitments as “misleading” and “wholly insufficient.”

This year’s report takes another look at those same companies’ net-zero targets and brings in 20 new ones, but its main focus is on their medium-term goals — stepping stones on the path to decarbonization by 2050. Bodies like the United Nations High Level Expert Group and the International Organization for Standardization have recommended interim targets so that companies (and governments) don’t wait until the last minute to cut their emissions.

Although the analysis finds improvements in 19 of the companies’ interim targets over the past two years, many of them still feature the same flaws as the net-zero ones. Crucially, they tend to gloss over emissions associated with the transportation and production of materials that companies buy and the products they sell to consumers. These so-called “scope 3” emissions represent more than 90 percent of the companies’ collective climate footprint. However, firms including the automaker Toyota, the commercial truck manufacturer Daimler Truck, and the British supermarket chain Tesco have reported no plans or only limited efforts to address them.

The report notes efforts from Nestlé to transition toward renewable energy but says the company isn’t doing enough to replace animal products with plant-based alternatives. Fabrice Coffrini / AFP via Getty Images

Other companies’ pledges lean too heavily on land-based carbon credits and carbon removal projects, initiatives that attempt to neutralize greenhouse gas emissions by avoiding them elsewhere — like by protecting forests that might otherwise have been chopped down — or by planting trees to suck carbon out of the air. Such projects have a well-documented history of accounting problems, and the carbon they remove is often vulnerable to getting reemitted in the event of wildfires. Experts say carbon removal should only be used to offset the small sliver of global emissions from hard-to-decarbonize activities, but the NewClimate Institute and Carbon Market Watch say companies are using credits and removal as alternatives to emissions reductions.

According to the report, just eight of the companies have 2030 emissions reduction targets that are of “high or reasonable integrity.” Only four of those firms — the food companies Danone and Mars, the Spanish electric utility Iberdrola, and the automaker Volvo Group — back their targets with concrete plans to actually achieve them. Other companies, like the mega-retailer Walmart, have not updated their 2030 targets for several years. The car company Volkswagen dropped its interim target for 2025 three years ago and has not announced a replacement.

John Reilly, a senior lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, said the report shows how companies are perhaps too eager to align with science-based emissions reduction goals such as “net-zero by 2050.” They agree to such goals “without much thought about how they would actually achieve them,” he said, adding that weaker but better substantiated emissions targets might be preferable. “If these companies had very concrete, detailed plans to get to even a 20 percent reduction by 2030, I’d feel a lot more comfortable than vague commitments to get to 43 or 48 percent.”

According to Silke Mooldijk, a researcher with the NewClimate Institute and a co-author of the report, the problem is not a lack of clarity around what companies need to do to decarbonize. “It’s very clear what measures they need to take,” she told reporters last week, naming basic steps like setting a phaseout date for coal- and oil-fired electricity generation and the sale of gasoline-powered cars. Rather, companies seem to be resisting radical transformations in favor of small steps and “creative accounting” that allow them to continue business as usual.

Read Next Global corporations’ climate pledges are ‘misleading,’ not credible Joseph Winters

For example, the report commends the clothing companies H&M and Inditex — which owns Zara — for setting transparent emissions reduction goals that are of “moderate” integrity, but criticizes them for failing to envision an alternative to the highly polluting fast-fashion business model. For food and agriculture, the report notes efforts from Nestlé to transition toward renewable energy but says the company isn’t doing enough to replace animal products with plant-based alternatives. Plans from other firms like Kepco, an electric utility, appear to use carbon capture to mitigate ongoing climate pollution, potentially justifying a delay in the transition to renewable power generation.

Of the 20 companies named in the report that Grist contacted for comment, six responded in time for publication. Nestlé said it disagreed with the report; a spokesperson said the company is pursuing carbon dioxide removal as a complement to reducing its absolute emissions, a strategy that is based on recommendations from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. A Mars spokesperson objected to the report as well, saying that the company’s net-zero target does not rely on controversial land-based carbon removal. (Carbon Market Watch and the NewClimate Institute had said it was “unclear” whether this was the case.)

Daimler Truck, the footwear giant Adidas, and H&M outlined their existing climate plans and emissions disclosures, and the latter two highlighted new data for 2023 that was not included in the report. In 2023, Adidas said it reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 24 percent from a 2019 baseline. H&M said it reduced scope 3 emissions by 22 percent.

Five of the companies expressed an ongoing commitment to emissions reductions and highlighted their alignment with the Science-Based Targets initiative, or SBTi, a nonprofit that validates more than 4,000 private-sector climate targets. Indeed, many of the companies’ near-term climate targets fit SBTi-approved pathways to limit global warming to at least 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F), even when the CCRM graded them as “poor” or “very poor.”

Dufrasne acknowledged this discrepancy and said there’s an urgent need for less flexibility across ratings programs and stronger standards overall. “I think it’s quite telling that companies don’t actually engage in the substance of the issues that are being flagged in the report and just say, ‘It’s fine, we’re being certified by SBTi,’” he told Grist.

Based on the NewClimate Institute and Carbon Market Watch’s analysis, Walmart has not updated its 2030 targets for several years. Viewpress / Getty Images

Dufrasne said he’s concerned that SBTi and similar organizations may actually be loosening their standards. Just last week, the SBTi’s board of trustees announced that they would begin allowing companies to use carbon credits toward their annual scope 3 emissions targets, a move critics say could undermine actual emissions reductions. Similarly, the Voluntary Carbon Markets Integrity Initiative, or VCMI — a body that sets guidance on the use of carbon credits — released a proposal last November that would allow companies to use carbon credits for up to 50 percent of their annual scope 3 emissions every year until 2035. 

The VCMI says this approach would help companies “bridge the gap” between their advertised scope 3 emissions reduction targets and the reductions they actually achieve. But Carbon Market Watch and the NewClimate Institute’s modeling suggests it could “nullify” companies’ scope 3 climate targets, allowing them to keep emissions steady or even increase them as long as they buy enough credits.

The VCMI did not respond to Grist’s request for comment. An SBTi spokesperson did not address specific parts of the report but said that the organization “urge[s] all interested parties to contribute to the development of our standards through the public consultations.” 

Jonathan Overpeck, dean of the University of Michigan’s School for the Environment and Sustainability, said the report suggests a failure of the voluntary approach to corporate climate action. Companies must now be “more proactive in figuring out a better approach,” or risk blowback from consumers and regulators.

“I like the idea of corporations … playing a role in more stringent decarbonization pathways,” Overpeck added, “but if they can’t do it then it will have to be imposed on them.”

Benja Faecks, an expert on global carbon markets for Carbon Market Watch and a co-author of the report, offered some specific ways governments could intervene: by setting binding, sector-specific emissions reduction targets; expanding carbon pricing and cap-and-trade systems to help drive down corporate emissions; and further restricting misleading advertising about companies’ climate pledges, especially around “carbon neutrality.” Earlier this year, the European Union banned companies from labeling products as carbon neutral by 2026, but companies are still allowed to describe themselves that way.

“It doesn’t make sense for Nestlé to be able to say they’re carbon neutral when they’re not allowed to say they sell carbon neutral espresso machines,” Faecks told reporters last week.

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Corporate climate plans are improving, but still ‘critically insufficient’ on Apr 11, 2024.

Some 70 years after they entered widespread chemical use, the federal government is finally regulating the so-called “forever chemicals” found in everything from nonstick cookware to menstrual products.

The Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday announced the nation’s first drinking water standards for six types of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, known as PFAS. These long-lasting synthetic chemicals don’t break down naturally in the environment and have been linked to cancer, heart and liver problems, developmental damage, and other health issues.

Under the new rule, drinking water concentrations of two of the most thoroughly studied and prevalent of these substances — PFOA and PFOS — will be capped at the lowest limit that the EPA believes is technologically possible, about 4 parts per trillion, reflecting scientists’ understanding that there is no safe exposure level for them. Three other common PFAS will be limited to 10 parts per trillion, either measured on their own, in combination with each other, or with one otherwise unregulated chemical. 

The compounds being regulated represent a fraction of the entire class of chemicals — more than 15,000 distinct variants fall under the PFAS umbrella. Still, the EPA estimates that its new rules will protect some 100 million people from exposure and prevent tens of thousands of serious illnesses, especially cancers.

“We are one huge step closer to shutting off the tap for forever chemicals once and for all,” agency head Michael Regan told reporters on Tuesday. He also announced nearly $1 billion in funding through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to help states and private well owners test for and clean up any contamination. The funding adds to the $21 billion that Congress already made available through the legislation to improve drinking water systems, $9 billion of which had been earmarked specifically for cleaning up this class of chemicals.

The regulations announced Tuesday represent the EPA’s strongest action yet to address the threat of forever chemicals, one likely motivated by escalating concerns about ubiquitous contamination in people’s bodies and the environment. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, virtually all Americans have PFAS in their blood, and researchers have found the chemicals in people’s brains, placentas, livers, and umbilical cords. 

Forever chemicals have grown so widespread that rainwater in most places on Earth contains unsafe concentrations. A study published this week found harmful levels in 31 percent of groundwater tested around the world — even though the samples were taken far from any obvious source of contamination. 

Chemical companies knew as early as the 1970s that PFAS were building up in people’s bodies and could cause serious consequences but continued to use them for decades. Big U.S. manufacturers like 3M voluntarily stopped producing the chemicals in the early 2000s, but face potentially billions of dollars in damages from consumer protection lawsuits filed by more than half of the attorneys general in the United States.

A family receives bottled water deliveries after high levels of PFAS were detected in their tap. Suzanne Kreiter/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

“How do you regulate something that’s already out of the box?” asked Daniel Jones, associate director for the Michigan State University Center for PFAS Research. “They’re still in the environment, in the soil, and in the water.” Now, he says, the focus is on cleaning up.

In 2016, the EPA published a nonbinding public health advisory recommending that drinking water contain no more than 70 parts per trillion of PFOA and PFOS. In 2021, it began working on a “strategic roadmap” to formalize regulations and released a proposal last year that drew some 120,000 comments. The final regulation adds maximum contaminant levels for PFNA, PFHxS, and GenX chemicals, rather than just restricting their combined use as previously proposed, although at higher concentrations than allowed for PFOA and PFOS. 

While the EPA deliberated, at least 11 states adopted rules limiting PFAS in drinking water. Those regulations will be superseded by the federal guideline.

Environmental and public health experts cheered the rule, even as they acknowledged its shortcomings. Katie Pelch, an environmental health scientist for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said regulating PFAS on a chemical-by-chemical basis is risky. Manufacturers could swap a restricted compound for something similar that might be less studied yet equally hazardous. 

“We need to define PFAS more broadly and take action on the entire class of chemicals, so we’re not just trading one toxic chemical for another,” Pelch told Grist. Although the EPA is testing for over two dozen of the chemicals in drinking water, a 2023 study by Pelch and her colleagues found a dozen compounds that the agency isn’t including. The other problem is the sheer amount of time it would take to evaluate every PFAS individually — potentially many lifetimes.

The EPA did not respond to Grist’s request for comment, but a senior Biden administration implied during a press call that, to make the most robust policy possible, the agency chose to address  chemicals for which there is the largest body of evidence proving their toxicity.

“We feel very confident that we have designed a very durable rule, well within our statutory authority, that begins to protect people from harmful pollutants that are showing up in their drinking water,” the official said.

States have five years to comply with the new drinking water standards — three years to test their water supplies and two to reduce concentrations of the regulated PFAS, if necessary. For up to 10 percent of the 66,000 water systems subject to the rule, that could mean upgrading their filtering processes, according to the EPA. Available options, funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, include common filtration methods already in use today, such as a granular activated carbon system, similar to a charcoal filter, or reverse osmosis which filters out contaminants using a semi-permeable membrane.  

The agency lets utilities decide which method works best for their community. In Wilmington, North Carolina, a granular activated carbon system has already been effective in removing the PFAS targeted by the EPA’s rule, and the same technology may help remove others that are not subject to the regulation.

“The state that you live in shouldn’t influence whether or not PFAS are in your drinking water,” said Pelch. “The EPA will help us address that.” Although the new rules don’t fully reign in the sprawling blanket of forever chemicals in our environment, every step forward matters.

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

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline EPA finalizes the nation’s first PFAS limits in drinking water on Apr 10, 2024.

This story was produced by Grist and co-published with Slate.

When Henri Kunz was growing up in West Germany in the 1980s, he used to drink an instant coffee substitute called Caro, a blend of barley, chicory root, and rye roasted to approximate the deep color and invigorating flavor of real coffee. “We kids drank it,” Kunz remembered recently. “It had no caffeine, but it tasted like coffee.”

As an adult, Kunz loves real coffee. But he also believes its days are numbered. Climate change is expected to shift the areas where coffee can grow, with some researchers estimating that the most suitable land for coffee will shrink by more than half by 2050, and hotter temperatures will make the plants more vulnerable to pests, blight, and other threats. At the same time, demand for coffee is growing, as upwardly mobile people in traditionally tea-drinking countries in Asia develop a taste for java. 

“The difference between demand and supply will go like that,” Kunz put it during a Zoom interview, crossing his arms in front of his chest to form an X, like the “no good” emoji. Small farmers could face crop failures just as millions of new people develop a daily habit, potentially sending coffee prices soaring to levels that only the wealthy will be able to afford. 

To stave off the looming threats, some agricultural scientists are hard at work breeding climate-resilient, high-yield varieties of coffee. Kunz, the founder and chair of a “flavor engineering” company called Stem, thinks he can solve many of these problems by growing coffee cells in a laboratory instead of on a tree. A number of other entrepreneurs are taking a look at coffee substitutes of yore, like the barley beverage Kunz grew up drinking, with the aim of using sustainable ingredients to solve coffee’s environmental problems — and adding caffeine to reproduce its signature jolt.

Stem’s cell-cultured coffee powder is prepared, roasted, and extracted. Courtesy of Jaroslav Monchak / STEM

A crop of startups, with names like Atomo, Northern Wonder, and Prefer, is calling this category of throwbacks “beanless coffee,” even though in some cases their products contain legumes. Beanless coffee “gives you that legendary coffee taste and all the morning pick-me-up you crave, while also leaving you proud that you’re doing your part to help unf–k the planet,” as the San-Francisco based beanless coffee company Minus puts it. But it’s unclear whether coffee drinkers — deeply attached to the drink’s particular, ineffable taste and aroma — will embrace beanless varieties voluntarily, or only after the coming climate-induced coffee apocalypse forces their hand.

Coffea arabica — the plant species most commonly cultivated for drinking — has been likened to Goldilocks. It thrives in shady environments with consistent, moderate rainfall and in temperatures between 64 and 70 degrees Fahrenheit, conditions often found in the highlands of tropical countries like Guatemala, Ethiopia, and Indonesia. Although coffee plantations can be sustainably integrated into tropical forests, growing coffee leads to environmental destruction more often than not. Farmers cut down trees both to make room for coffee plants and to fuel wood-burning dryers used to process the beans, making coffee one of the top six agricultural drivers of deforestation. When all of a coffee tree’s finicky needs are met, it can produce harvestable beans after three to five years of growth, and eventually yields 1 to 2 pounds of green coffee beans per year. 

A worker picks coffee berries in Karnataka, India. Rising temperatures and erratic weather patterns are forcing India’s coffee growers to change the way they farm, leading to reduced crop yields and concerns with quality. Abhishek Chinnappa / Getty Images

If arabica is Goldilocks, climate change is an angry bear. For some 200 years, humans have been burning fossil fuels, spewing planet-warming carbon dioxide into the air. The resulting floods, droughts, and heatwaves, as well as the climate-driven proliferation of coffee borer beetles and fungal infections, are all predicted to make many of today’s coffee-growing areas inhospitable to the crop, destroy coffee farmers’ razor-thin profit margins, and sow chaos in the world’s coffee markets. That shift is already underway: Extreme weather in Brazil sent commodity coffee prices to an 11-year high of $2.58 per pound in 2022. And as coffee growers venture into new regions, they’ll tear down more trees, threatening biodiversity and transforming even more forests from carbon sinks into carbon sources.

At many times in the past, coffee has been out of reach for most people, so they found cheaper, albeit caffeine-free, alternatives. Caro and other quaint instant beverage mixes, like Postum in the U.S. and caffè d’orzo in Italy, were popular during World War II and in the following years, when coffee was rationed or otherwise hard to come by. But the practice of brewing non-caffeinated, ersatz coffee out of other plants is even older than that. In the Middle East, people have used date seeds to brew a hot, dark drink for hundreds or perhaps thousands of years. In pre-Columbian Central America, Mayans drank a similar beverage made from the seeds of ramón trees found in the rainforest. In Europe and Western Asia, drinks have been made out of chicory, chickpeas, dandelion root, figs, grains, lupin beans, and soybeans. These ingredients have historically been more accessible than coffee, and sometimes confer purported health benefits.

An illustrated advertisement from 1902 for Postum by the Postum Cereal Company of Battle Creek, Michigan. Jay Paull / Getty Images

Today’s beanless-coffee startups are attempting to put a modern spin on these time-honored, low-tech coffee substitutes. Northern Wonder, based in the Netherlands, makes its product primarily out of lupin beans — also known as lupini — along with chickpeas and chicory. Atomo, headquartered in Seattle, infuses date seeds with a proprietary marinade that produces “the same 28 compounds” as coffee, Atomo boasts.  Singapore-based Prefer makes its brew out of a byproduct of soymilk, surplus bread, and spent barley from beer breweries, which are then fermented with microbes. Minus also uses fermentation to bring coffee-like flavors out of “upcycled pits, roots, and seeds.” All these brands add caffeine to at least some of their blends, aiming to offer consumers the same energizing effects they get from the real deal. 

“We’ve tried all of the coffee alternatives,” said Maricel Saenz, the CEO of Minus. “And what we realize is that they give us some resemblance to coffee, but it ultimately ends up tasting like toasted grains more than it tastes like coffee.”

A Prefer company display of its “beanless” coffee raw ingredients, including bread, barley, and soy. Courtesy of Prefer

In trying to explain what makes today’s beanless coffees different from the oldfangled kind, David Klingen, Northern Wonder’s CEO, compared the relationship to the one between modern meat substitutes and more traditional soybean products like tofu and tempeh. Many plant-based meats contain soybeans, but they’re highly processed and combined with other ingredients to create a convincing meat-like texture and flavor. So it is with beanless coffee, relative to Caro-style grain beverages. Klingen emphasized that he and his colleagues mapped out the attributes of various ingredients — bitterness, sweetness, smokiness, the ability to form a foam similar to the crema that crowns a shot of espresso — and tried to combine them in a way that produced a well-rounded coffee facsimile, then added caffeine. 

By contrast, traditional coffee alternatives like chicory and barley brews have nothing to offer a caffeine addict; Atomo, Minus, Northern Wonder, and Prefer are promising a reliable daily fix. 

“Coffee is a ritual and it’s a result,” said Andy Kleitsch, the CEO of Atomo. “And that’s what we’re replicating.” 

An espresso shot made with Atomo beanless coffee. Courtesy of Atomo Coffee

Each of these new beanless coffee companies has a slightly different definition of sustainability. Northern Wonder’s guiding light is non-tropical ingredients, “because we want to make a claim that our product is 100 percent deforestation free,” Klingen said. Almost all its ingredients are annual crops from Belgium, France, Germany, Switzerland, and Turkey, countries whose forests are not at substantial risk of destruction from agriculture. Annual crops grow more efficiently than coffee trees, which require years of growth before they begin producing beans. A life cycle analysis of Northern Wonder’s environmental impacts, paid for by the company, shows that its beanless coffee uses approximately a twentieth of the water, generates less than a quarter of the carbon emissions, and requires about a third of the land area associated with real coffee agriculture.

Michael Hoffmann, professor emeritus at Cornell University and the coauthor of Our Changing Menu: Climate Change and the Foods We Love and Need, said he was impressed with Northern Wonder’s life cycle analysis, which he described as nuanced and transparent about the limitations of its data. He praised the idea of using efficient crops, saying that some of those used by beanless coffee companies “yield far more per unit area than coffee, which is also a big plus.”

An aerial view of a coffee plantation near Ribeirao Preto in Sao Paulo, Brazil. DeAgostini / Getty Images

But there are trade-offs associated with higher yields. Daniel El Chami, an agricultural engineer who is the head of sustainability research and innovation for the Italian subsidiary of the fertilizer and plant nutrition company Timac Agro International, pointed out that higher-yield crops tend to use more fertilizer, which is manufactured using fossil fuels in a process that emits carbon. Crops that use land and other resources efficiently can require several times more fertilizer than sustainably grown coffee, he said. For this reason, El Chami just didn’t see how Northern Wonder could wind up emitting less than a quarter of coffee’s emissions.

Other beanless coffee companies are staking their sustainability pitch on their repurposing of agricultural waste. Atomo’s green cred is premised on the fact that its central ingredients, date seeds, are “upcycled” from farms in California’s Coachella Valley. Whereas date farmers typically throw seeds away after pitting, Atomo pays farmers to store the pits in food-safe tote bags that get picked up daily. Atomo’s current recipe also includes crops from farther afield, like ramón seeds from Guatemala and caffeine derived from green tea grown in India, but Kleitsch said they’re looking to add even more upcycled ingredients.

Atomo beanless coffee grounds include date seeds “upcycled” from farms in California’s Coachella Valley. Courtesy of Atomo Coffee

Food waste is a major contributor to climate change, and Hoffmann, the Cornell professor, said repurposing it for beanless coffee is “a very good approach.” Minus, which also uses upcycled date pits, claims its first product, a canned beanless cold brew (which is not yet available in stores), uses 94 percent less water and produces 86 percent less greenhouse gas emissions than the real thing. Those numbers are based on a life cycle analysis that Saenz, Minus’ CEO, declined to share with Grist because it was being updated. 

(Atomo expects to release a life cycle analysis this spring, and Prefer is planning to conduct a study sometime this year.) 

Despite beanless coffee companies’ impressive sustainability claims, not everyone is convinced that building an alternative coffee industry from scratch is better than trying to make the existing coffee industry more sustainable — by, for instance, helping farmers grow coffee interspersed with native trees, or dry their beans using renewable energy. 

Read Next Who’s behind the destruction of Brazil’s Cerrado? Sarah Sax & Maurício Angelo

El Chami thinks the conclusion that coffee supply will dwindle in an overheating world is uncertain: A review of the research he coauthored found that modelers have reached contradictory conclusions about how climate change will change the amount of land suitable for growing coffee. Although rising temperatures are certainly affecting agriculture, “climate change pressures are overblown from a marketing point of view by private interests seeking to create new needs with higher profit margins,” El Chami said. He added that the multinational companies that buy coffee from small farmers need to help their suppliers implement sustainable practices — and he hoped beanless coffee companies would do the same. 

Whether demand for beanless coffee will increase depends a great deal on how much consumers like the taste. 

I, for one, enjoyed the $5 Atomo latte that I tried at the Midtown Manhattan location of an Australian cafe chain called Gumption Coffee — the only place on Earth where Atomo is being sold. The pale, frothy concoction tasted slightly sweet and very smooth. Atomo describes its espresso blend as having notes of “dark chocolate, dried fruit, and graham cracker.” If I hadn’t known it was made with date seeds instead of coffee beans, I would have said it was a regular latte with a dash of caramel syrup added. 

My $5 latte made with Atomo beanless grounds. L.V. Anderson / Grist

The Northern Wonder filter blend that I ordered from the Netherlands (about $12 for a little more than a pound of grounds, plus about $27 for international shipping) had to overcome a tougher test: I wanted to drink it black, the way I do my regular morning coffee. I brewed it in my pour-over Chemex carafe, and the dark liquid dripping through the filter certainly looked like coffee. But the aroma was closer to chickpeas roasting in the oven — not an unpleasant smell, just miles away from the transcendent scent of arabica beans. The flavor was also off, though I couldn’t quite put my finger on what was wrong. Was it a lack of acidity, or a lack of sweetness? It wasn’t too bitter, and it left a convincing tannic aftertaste in my mouth. After a few sips, I found myself warming up to it, even though it obviously wasn’t coffee. My Grist colleague Jake Bittle had a similar experience with Northern Wonder, describing the flavor it settled into as “weird Folgers.” If real coffee suddenly became scarce or exorbitantly priced, I could see myself drinking Northern Wonder or something like it. It would certainly be better than forgoing coffee’s flavor and caffeine entirely by drinking nothing at all in the morning, or acclimating to the entirely different ritual and taste of tea. 

Klingen concedes that the aroma of beanless coffee needs work. Northern Wonder is developing a bean-like product that, when put through a coffee grinder, releases volatile compounds similar to those that give real coffee its powerful fragrance, like various aldehydes and pyrazines. But beanless coffee could win over some fans even if it doesn’t mimic coffee’s every attribute. Klingen said drinkers often rate his product higher for how much they like it than for how similar it is to coffee. “With Oatly, oat milks or [other] alt milks, there you see the same,” he said. When you ask consumers if oat milk tastes like milk, they say, “‘Eh, I don’t know.’ But is it tasty? ‘Yes.’”  

Northern Wonder cofounder and CEO David Klingen drinks a “Coffee Free Coffee” oat latte. Courtesy of Northern Wonder

Just as the dairy industry has tried to prevent alternative milk companies from calling their products “milk,” some people raise an eyebrow at the term “beanless coffee.” Kunz — the German entrepreneur who grew up drinking Caro and is now trying to grow coffee bean cells in a lab — takes issue with using the word coffee to describe products made out of grains, fruits, and legumes. “What we do — taking a coffee plant part, specifically a leaf from a coffee tree — it is coffee, because it’s the cell origin of coffee,” Kunz said. Drinks made from anything else,  he insists, shouldn’t use the word. Kunz’s cell-cultured coffee product hasn’t been finalized yet and, much like lab-grown meat, faces fairly steep regulatory hurdles before it can be sold in Europe or the United States.

The specter of plant-based meat and dairy looms large over the nascent beanless coffee industry. A slew of startups like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods hit the scene in the mid-2010s with products that they touted as convincing enough to be able to put animal agriculture out of business. But in recent years, these companies have faced declining sales in the face of concerns about health, taste, and price.

Jake Berber, the CEO and cofounder of Prefer, fears something similar could happen to beanless coffee businesses. “My hope for everyone in the industry is to keep pushing out really delicious products that people enjoy so that the whole industry of beanless coffee, bean-free coffee, can profit from that, and we can sort of help each other out,” he said.

A Prefer worker lays out fermented base for roasting. Courtesy of Prefer

Different beanless coffee companies are staking out different markets, with some positioning themselves as premium brands. Saenz wouldn’t say how much Minus wants to charge for its canned cold brew, but she said it will be comparable to the “high-end side of coffee, because we believe we compete there in terms of quality.” Atomo is putting the finishing touches on a factory in Seattle with plans to sell its beanless espresso to coffee shops for $20.99 per pound — comparable to a specialty roast. 

“The best way to enjoy coffee is to go to a coffee shop and have a barista make you your own lovingly made product,” Kleitsch said. Atomo is aiming to give consumers a “great experience that they can’t get at home.”

In contrast, Northern Wonder and Prefer are targeting the mass market. Northern Wonder is sold in 534 grocery stores in the Netherlands and recently became available at a leading supermarket in Switzerland. Prefer, meanwhile, is selling its blend to coffee houses, restaurants, hotels, and other clients in Singapore with a promise to beat the price of their cheapest arabica beans. Berber predicts that proposition will get more and more appealing to buyers and consumers in the coming years as the cost of even a no-frills, mediocre espresso drink approaches, and then surpasses, $10. A warming planet will help turn coffee beans into a luxury product, and middle-class customers will get priced out. Then, Prefer’s bet on a climate-proof coffee replacement will pay off. 

“We will, in the future, be the commodity of coffee,” Berber said. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The best coffee for the planet might not be coffee at all on Apr 10, 2024.

Young people have for generations signed their names in history’s ledger as agents of change. James Monroe and Alexander Hamilton celebrated their 25th birthdays during the Revolutionary War. Nearly two centuries later, college-age Black men and women mobilized for the rights they had been denied since the nation’s founding. The youth of today have seized the baton passed to them by their elders. They have raised their voices in urgent anger to demand action for the defining issue of their lives: the climate emergency. 

Yet only a few governments at any level, in any country, have answered their demands for action. On Wednesday, to help address that, Bloomberg Philanthropies — the nonprofit funded by former New York Mayor and one-time Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg — has launched the Youth Climate Action Fund. It intends to help 100 cities worldwide better incorporate the voices and visions of young people into how they imagine and enact policies.

“We want to help bring more and more powerful voices into climate activism,” said James Anderson, who leads the philanthropy’s government innovation programs and helped design the fund. “And we also want to make sure and help local governments invite all of the people that want to make a difference in their city on climate into the effort in ways that are meaningful to them.”

The funds it has awarded to cities in 38 countries across six continents should enable just that kind of involvement. With the announcement, each city will receive an initial disbursement of $50,000. Should any mayor respond with adequate urgency and commit, within six months, the money to programs or projects that involve youth leadership in local climate action, their city will receive an additional $100,000 to further support youth-led efforts.

When typical funding announcements for climate efforts often reach into the millions and billions or even hundreds of billions, a five- or six-figure payout might sound paltry. Yet it can make an enormous impact — especially in cities and countries that need it most.

“I’m shocked. I’m shocked, but in a good way, because that money is a lot, especially here in Zimbabwe, and I believe that it could do a lot of great things in our city,” said Nozinhle Gumede, a 21-year-old climate activist from Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. Bulawayo, a city of 1.2 million in the country’s southwest, is among those selected for the Youth Climate Action Fund. Gumede hopes to see the money used to support youth-led organizations actively helping local communities to adapt to climate change, and to create capacity at the city level for young people to advise the mayor.

“We are the custodians of the future,” Gumede said. “So I believe that we have a right to be a part of some sort of leadership or advisory board to see how this money shapes our future.”

Several cities have already sought to establish climate councils populated by youth to ensure that they can help mold the plans and policies that will define the boundaries of their futures. 

Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr, the mayor of Freetown, Sierra Leone, has made climate resilience a foundational priority for her work leading the country’s capital and largest city, which was also selected for the Youth Climate Action Fund. She’s also made it a point to center youth in her work. “We work with the adage, ‘nothing for me without me,'” she said, so “when, in your city, 70 percent of your population are under the age of 35, you don’t do anything without the youth.”

A child indulges his curiosity at a borehole tap in Nyamandlovu, Zimbabwe. The government commissioned 20 boreholes at the Nyamandlovu Aquifer to supplement the water supply in Bulawayo, which experienced its worst water crisis in 2020. KB Mpofu/Getty Images

To further cement the essential status of youth involvement in the city’s structure, Aki-Sawyerr expects to launch a youth climate council later this year to provide a structured and ongoing forum to engage young people. This council will also help inform and shape how Freetown’s climate action strategy unfolds.

In cities like Freetown and Bulawayo, climate action is dissimilar to what cities throughout the United States and Europe concern themselves with. When she met with Freetown’s local chapter of Fridays for Future — the organization founded by Greta Thunberg to spread her Friday school strikes to other cities and countries — it forced Aki-Sawyerr to realize “how different our situations are, and how there should be no one-size-fits-all when it comes to youth movements.” In Freetown, “nobody cares if you go to school,” she said. “You don’t even get enough school time. You don’t get enough contact with teachers.”

Moreover, many young people in Freetown face a myriad of immediate concerns from food insecurity to forced marriages. “In the midst of all of that,” Aki-Sawyerr said, “their lives are being significantly, adversely impacted by climate change.” Yet, they get none of the benefits those in the Global North have accrued as they polluted the planet and exposed previously colonized countries to grave dangers. “You don’t get the light. You don’t get Broadway. You don’t get the fancy cars,” Aki-Sawyerr said. “But you get the impact of the emissions that come from all of that.”

As a result, their focus is not on mitigating a problem that they did not cause, but adapting to it. Already, Freetown has faced tragedies that climate change may make more common. In 2017, days of torrential rain triggered a landslide that killed over 1,000 people. Such rainfall is expected to become more common in places like Freetown. And in Bulawayo, Gumede said that the biggest concern is extreme heat, something residents already struggle with.

As these cities and others throughout the Global South seek to reinforce their resilience to climate change, the youth of the Global North face a daunting task: putting more pressure on polluters. In leveraging the resources of Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Youth Climate Action Fund, cities in developed countries must learn to channel the energy and ambitions of youth to accelerate their actions to eliminate emissions.

A youth activist at a demonstration organized by Extinction Rebellion in 2022. Romy Arroyo Fernandez/NurPhoto

Several young climate organizers in the United States spoke to the drive and vision that they and their peers bring to this work. Holly Swiglo, a freshman at Oberlin College in Ohio who helps lead the college’s chapter of the Sunrise Movement, said that youth who see their future defined by a worsening climate crisis stand unwilling to allow the burdens of bureaucracy to obstruct the pace and scale of change that they believe is not only possible but necessary. For cities and mayors to harness that energy, they cannot merely offer performative actions of allyship. Kristy Drutman, a New Jersey-based climate activist and communicator who serves on the EPA’s youth advisory council, said that such empty actions leave young people frustrated and disillusioned. But cities like Mesa, Arizona testify to how mayors and city council members can take to heart their role as public servants.

The city’s Republican mayor, John Giles, has listened to the climate concerns of his constituents since shortly after he entered office when local climate activists questioned him about his plans for the city’s climate agenda. The climate action plan that Mesa then developed contains the typical points — goals for carbon neutrality, renewable energy, and reducing waste — but it includes a fourth pillar that Giles considers critical to achieving the others: community engagement. Mesa residents have already shaped the city’s approach to climate action, including its proposal to the Youth Climate Action Fund, which emerged directly from its Hacktivate Mesa program that gives high schoolers the opportunity to understand the issues facing their communities and devise solutions.

Such initiatives provide an outlet for the pent up energy and anger of a generation desperate for action. The Youth Climate Fund hopes to encourage many more like them. Such efforts are needed, because today’s activists have in so many ways made clear that they have heeded the lessons of those who came before and will do whatever it takes to bring about the change they wish to see.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Bloomberg funds youth-led climate action in 100 cities worldwide on Apr 10, 2024.

The chemical plants that dot the industrial corridors of Texas and Louisiana produce some of the most toxic pollution in the country. Companies like Celanese and Indorama Ventures emit ethylene oxide and 1,3-butadiene into the air of predominantly Black and Latino communities, day and night. At the start of his term running the EPA in 2021, Michael Regan pledged to tackle these emissions. On Tuesday, the agency announced a major step in that direction when it finalized  a rule to cut thousands of tons of toxic emissions and require air monitoring at more than 200 chemical plants across the country. 

“We promised to listen to folks that are suffering from pollution and act to protect them,” Regan said in a press release. “Today we deliver on that promise with strong final standards to slash pollution, reduce cancer risk, and ensure cleaner air for nearby communities.”

It marks the first time that federal regulations for chemical plants have been updated in decades. The EPA expects the rule to cut more than 6,200 tons of toxic emissions each year, and lead to reductions of more than 100 hazardous pollutants. Officials also estimated a 23,000 ton-per-year reduction in smog-forming volatile organic compounds, which create the brown-tinged air often found in industrialized areas. The announcement follows a move in March to crack down on emissions of ethylene oxide, a dangerous carcinogen, from facilities that sterilize medical equipment.

Some of the facilities subject to these rules, such as the Denka Performance Elastomers plant in Louisiana’s St. John the Baptist Parish, are more than half a century old. Regan visited St. John on a tour of pollution hotspots across the Deep South in November 2021, and promised residents that they would see a reduction in Denka’s emissions of chloroprene, a toxic compound that studies have linked to cancers of the liver, lung, and digestive system. But multiple avenues the agency took to tackle the plant’s pollution, including a civil rights complaint and an emergency legal motion, failed to cut the facility’s emissions. 

The new rule “shows that the agency was not willing to give up after trying to use other legal platforms to address the problem,” said Scott Throwe, a former EPA enforcement official and air pollution expert. 

The most important chemical that the rule seeks to reduce is ethylene oxide, a potent carcinogen that studies have linked to cancers of the breast and the lymph nodes. Plants emitting ethylene oxide came under greater scrutiny after the EPA published a study in 2016 finding the chemical to be 30 times more toxic to adults and 60 times more toxic to children than previously thought. Ethylene oxide pollution is particularly bad in the industrial suburbs of the Houston Metro Area and in Cancer Alley, the corridor full of oil refineries and chemical plants on the lower Mississippi River in southeast Louisiana. 

Once it’s in place, the rule is expected to reduce both ethylene oxide and chloroprene emissions from certain processes and equipment by nearly 80 percent. One provision seeks to improve the efficiency of flares, gas combustion devices that burn off excess chemicals. Recent research connected the practice of gas flaring to increased childhood asthma cases. The regulations will also require plant operators to install monitors around the perimeters of their sites to measure concentrations of a number of cancer-causing chemicals, including ethylene oxide and vinyl chloride. If the amount of any of these chemicals is above the agency’s “action level,” plant operators will be required to determine the cause and make repairs. In a fact sheet published alongside the final rule, the EPA noted that a similar monitoring provision in the regulations for petroleum refineries led to significant reductions in benzene levels around those facilities. 

Chemical companies subject to the rule will have two years to implement the new provisions. Officials estimated that the regulations will cost the chemical industry $1.8 billion over the next 14 years, the equivalent of $150 million per year. 

“Most of the facilities covered by the final rule are owned by large corporations,” the agency noted. “The cost of implementing the final rule is less than 1 percent of their annual national sales.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The EPA’s first chemical plant rule in 20 years targets polluters in Louisiana and Texas on Apr 9, 2024.

With decades of experience, Reno Red Cloud knows more than anyone about water on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. As climate change makes fire season on the reservation — which covers more than 2 million acres — more dangerous, he sees a growing need for water to fight those fires. 

Red Cloud is the director of water resources for the Oglala Sioux Tribe and he recently received nearly $400,000 in federal funding to revive old wells that have been dormant for decades. He thinks the wells can produce over a million gallons of water a day. But there’s one catch: They have elevated levels of arsenic.

“We have to look at using these wells,” he said. “They are just sitting there. Instead of plugging them, like a Band-Aid, let’s utilize them for the future of drought mitigation.”

The Oglala Sioux’s water needs have doubled in recent years, with longer and hotter summers and, of course, drought. With more wildfires on the horizon, the water Red Cloud envisions could not only add to the quality of life for those on the reservation, but he sees this as a climate solution for reservations across the nation. 

“We think other reservations could do the same,” he said. 

Arsenic can’t be seen, smelled, or tasted. It is a natural element found in the upper parts of the Earth’s crust, and while a big dose of it is fatal, the more common issue is consumption of low levels of arsenic over long periods of time. 

Jaymie Meliker, a professor at Stony Brook University in New York and an authority on arsenic in drinking water, said the water Red Cloud wants to use should be safe to use to fight fires. 

“Nothing is really toxic,” he said. “One of the first things they teach you in toxicology is [that] it’s the dose that makes the poison.”

He said the concentration of arsenic in the soil is measured in parts per million while in the water it is measured in parts per billion. It’s “still a thousandfold as small as the levels that are already in the soil, back into the soil. I don’t see a big risk from that at all.”

The wells were installed in the 1970s when the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development funded and developed them for home projects on reservation land. Back then, the acceptable level of arsenic in a water supply was 50 parts per billion, and then in 2001 the Environmental Health Agency changed it to 10 parts per billion. When that happened, the pumps were plugged up and there were no plans to use them. 

Understandingly, some in the area are hesitant when they hear about arsenic. The water many drink on Pine Ridge is pumped in from the Missouri River but the reservation has many private wells with elevated levels of arsenic. Tribes throughout the U.S. are disproportionately affected by elevated levels of arsenic in their private wells, such as those on the Navajo Nation. 

A paper outlining a two-year study on arsenic in drinking water among Indigenous communities in the Northern Plains confirmed that those populations have higher levels of arsenic in their water. Prolonged arsenic exposure can lead to cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancers, and other serious health conditions. 

The World Health Organization offers guidelines on the subject, saying, “Low-arsenic water can be used for drinking, cooking and irrigation purposes, whereas high-arsenic water can be used for other purposes such as bathing and washing clothes.” 

A funding summary of the tribes project said there was speculation on if the water should be used for agriculture and livestock. So, even though Red Cloud is interested in potentially using this water for livestock and agriculture, there is still more research to be done to look at the viability of these wells for other uses. 

Red Cloud helped write the 2020 Oglala Sioux’s Drought Adoption Plan. New water sources were the first solution to mitigate drought in that report. He hopes that other tribes look at their old wells on reservation lands to see if they can help mitigate drought — or if it’s better to just plug them up and let them sit. 

“The bottom line is we’re looking to deal with extended drought and the increasing intensity of wildfires,” he said. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Water from arsenic-laced wells could protect the Pine Ridge reservation from wildfires on Apr 9, 2024.

Few issues are as divisive among American environmentalists as nuclear energy. Concerns about nuclear waste storage and safety, particularly in the wake of the 1979 Three Mile Island reactor meltdown in Pennsylvania, helped spur the retirement of nuclear power plants across the country. Nuclear energy’s proponents, however, counter that nuclear power has historically been among the safest forms of power generation, and that the consistent carbon-free energy it generates makes it an essential tool in the fight against global warming.

But this well-worn debate may not actually be the one that determines the future of nuclear energy in the United States. More decisive is the unresolved question of whether the U.S. actually has the practical ability to build new nuclear plants at all.

The answer to this question may hinge on what happens in the wake of a construction project that’s reaching completion near Waynesboro, Georgia, where the second in a pair of new nuclear reactors is scheduled to enter commercial service at some point over the next three months. Each reactor has the capacity to power half a million homes and businesses annually without emitting greenhouse gases. Despite this, they are hardly viewed as an unambiguous success.

The construction of those reactors — Units 3 and 4 of Plant Vogtle, the first U.S. nuclear reactors built from scratch in decades — was a yearslong saga whose delays and budget overruns drove the giant nuclear company Westinghouse into bankruptcy. The reactors, first approved by Georgia regulators in 2009, are reckoned to be the most expensive infrastructure project of any kind in American history, at a total cost of $35 billion. That’s nearly double the original budget of the project, which is set to cross the finish line seven years behind schedule. Much of the cost was ultimately borne by Georgia residents, whose energy bills have ballooned to pay off a portion of the overruns.

“It’s a simple fact that Vogtle had disastrous cost overruns and delays, and you have to stare that fact in the face,” said John Parsons, a researcher at MIT’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research. “It’s also possible that nuclear, if we can do it, is a valuable contribution to the system, but we need to learn how to do it cheaper than we’ve done so far. I would hate to throw away all the gains that we’ve learned from doing it.”

What kind of learning experience Vogtle ends up being may well come down to how it’s interpreted by the state and regional utility officials who approve new sources of power. Many are likely looking at the monumental expense and difficulty of building Vogtle and thinking they’d be foolish to try their hand at new nuclear power. Other energy officials, however, say those delays and overruns are the reason they’d be foolish not to.

The case for building more nuclear plants in the wake of Vogtle rests on a simple argument: Because the new reactors were the first newly built American nuclear plant to come online since 1993 — and the first to begin construction since the 1970s — many of their challenges were either unique to a first-of-a-kind reactor design or a result of the loss of industrial knowledge since the decline of the nuclear industry. Therefore, they might not necessarily recur in a future project, which could take advantage of the finalized reactor design and the know-how that had to be generated from scratch during Vogtle.

The Biden administration, which sees nuclear energy as an important component of its plan to get the U.S. to net-zero emissions by 2050, is betting that Vogtle can pave the way for a rebirth of the nuclear industry.

The generational gap between Vogtle and previous nuclear projects meant that the workforce and supply chain needed to build a nuclear plant had to be rebuilt for the new units. Their construction involved training some 13,000 technicians, according to Julie Kozeracki, a senior advisor at the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office, a once-obscure agency that has become one of the federal government’s main conduits for climate investments under the Biden administration.

When Vogtle’s Units 3 and 4 were approved by Georgia regulators in 2009, the reactor model, known as an AP1000, had never before been built. (It was Westinghouse’s flagship model, combining massive generation capacity with new “passive safety” features, which allow reactors to remain cooled and safe without human intervention, external power, or emergency generators in the case of an accident.) It later emerged that the reactor’s developer, Westinghouse, had not even fully completed the design before starting construction, causing a significant share of the project’s costly setbacks. While that was bad news for Georgians, it could mean a smoother path ahead for future reactors.

“In the course of building Vogtle,” Kozeracki told Grist, “we have now addressed three of the biggest challenges: the incomplete design, the immature supply chain, and the untrained workforce.”

These factors helped bring down the cost of Unit 4 by 30 percent compared to Unit 3, Kozeracki said, adding that a hypothetical Unit 5 would be even cheaper. Furthermore, as a result of the Inflation Reduction Act, the climate-focused law that Congress passed in 2022, any new nuclear reactor would receive somewhere between 30 and 50 percent of its costs back in tax credits.

“We should be capitalizing on those hard-won lessons and building 10 or 20 more [AP1000s],” Kozeracki said.

Despite this optimism, however, no U.S. utility is currently building a new nuclear reactor. Part of the reason may be that it’s already too late to capitalize on the advantages of the Vogtle experience. For one thing, the 13,000 workers who assembled Vogtle may not all be available for a new gig.

“The trained workforce is a rapidly depreciating asset for the nuclear industry,” said John Quiggin, an economist at the University of Queensland, in an email. “Once the job is finished, workers move on or retire, subcontractors go out of business, the engineering and design groups are broken up and their tacit knowledge is lost. If a new project is started in, say, five years, it will have to do most of its recruiting from scratch.”

In Quiggin’s view, the opportunity has already passed, as much of the physical construction at Plant Vogtle happened years ago. “You can’t go back and say, ‘Look, we’ve got the team, we know what we did wrong last time, we’re going to do it better this time.’ It’ll be a totally new group of people doing it,” he said in an interview.

“It would have been better to start five years ago,” Kozeracki acknowledged. “But the second best time is right now.”

The federal government has put money on the table, but whether a new nuclear plant will actually get built is ultimately in the hands of a constellation of players including the nuclear industry, utility companies, and utility commissions, who would have to work together and overcome their current stalemate. None of them are clamoring to shoulder the risk of taking the first step.

“Everybody’s hoping that someone else would solve the cost problem,” Parsons said.

Utility commissioners — the state-level officials, often in elected positions, whose approval would be needed to site a future reactor — are wary of being blamed for passing on potential cost overruns to ratepayers.

“It would just be surprising for me if a Public Service Commission signed off on another AP1000 given how badly the last ones went,” said Matt Bowen, a researcher at Columbia’s Center on Global Energy Policy.

If more nuclear energy is built soon, it will most likely be in the Southeast, where power companies operate under what’s called a “vertically integrated monopoly” profit model, meaning they do not participate in wholesale energy markets but rather generate energy themselves and then sell it directly to customers.

Under this model, utilities are guaranteed a return on any investment their shareholders make, which is paid for by their customers at rates set by the state-level utility commissions. Many ratepayer advocates accuse these commissions of effectively rubber-stamping utility demands as a result of regulatory capture — at the expense of customers who are unable to choose a different power company. But this same dynamic means that vertically integrated utilities are in the best position to build something as expensive as a nuclear plant.

“Their primary business model is capital expenditure,” explained Tyler Norris, a Duke University doctoral fellow and former special advisor at the Department of Energy. “The way they make money is by investing capital, primarily in generation capacity or transmission upgrades. They have an inherent incentive to spend money; they make more money the more they spend.”

Under the regulatory compact between states and utilities, it is utility commissioners’ job to make sure those expenditures (which ultimately, after all, come from ratepayer money) are “just and reasonable.”

Tim Echols, a member of Georgia’s Public Service Commission, said in an email that he would not approve another nuclear reactor in Georgia in the absence of “some sort of federal financial backstop” to protect against the risk of a repeat of the Vogtle experience.

“I haven’t seen any other [utility commission] raise their hand to build a nuclear reactor,” added Echols, who is also the chair of a committee on nuclear issues at the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners.

Kozeracki, of the Department of Energy, said that private-sector nuclear industry players have also asked for such a backstop in the form of a federal cost overrun insurance program, which would require Congressional legislation. However, she added that it might be incumbent upon industry figures to explain just how much more capacity to build such a backstop would give them.

“The real piece that’s missing there is a compelling plan from the nuclear industry for what they would deliver with something like a cost overrun insurance program,” Kozeracki said.

There is an ongoing debate among nuclear advocates about whether a different type of reactor, such as the so-called small modular reactors currently in development, is a more viable solution than the AP1000. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has issued a permit for the Tennessee Valley Authority to build one such reactor. But the excitement around SMRs has somewhat waned since the cancellation of a much-anticipated project in November. Experts told Grist that some, but not all, of the knowledge and lessons gained through the Vogtle experience would carry over to a new project that was not an AP1000.

The search for new nuclear solutions is coinciding with what could be a dramatic juncture in the history of American energy planning. In recent months, utilities across the country have reported anticipating massive increases in demand for electricity, which had remained relatively flat for two decades. A December report from the consulting firm Grid Strategies found that grid planners’ five-year forecasts for the growth of their power loads had nearly doubled over the last year.

The growth in demand is largely attributed to a mix of new data centers, many of which will power artificial intelligence, as well as new industrial sites.

For James Krellenstein, co-founder of the nuclear energy consultancy Alva Energy, this new load growth “dramatically changes the calculus in favor of nuclear.” 

“Facing both the need to decrease carbon emissions while having to increase the amount of power that we need, nuclear is a natural technology for that challenge,” Krellenstein added.

So far, however, utilities have responded instead by seeking to rapidly expand fossil fuel generation — in particular, by building new natural gas plants.

“We’re seeing utilities put forward very large gas expansion plans, and this is eating nuclear’s lunch,” said Duke University’s Norris.

Kozeracki characterized the utilities’ plans as shortsighted. “I recognize that natural gas may feel like the easy button, but I should hope that folks are able to account for the cost and benefits of decarbonizing resiliently and make choices their children will be proud of, which I think would be starting new nuclear units now,” she said.

Norris urged caution in accepting the largest estimates of forecasted electricity demand. “Utilities have every incentive to characterize a worst case scenario here for extreme load growth, and not seriously consider demand response solutions, so that they can justify very large capital expenditures for capacity,” Norris said. “That’s why it’s so important that the clean energy and climate community be very engaged in these state level resource planning processes.”

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.');

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Georgia’s Vogtle plant could herald the beginning — or end — of a new nuclear era on Apr 8, 2024.

This story is excerpted from THE WEIGHT OF NATURE: How a Changing Climate Changes Our Brains, available April 9, 2024, from Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group.

Imagine you are a clown fish. A juvenile clown fish, specifically, in the year 2100. You live near a coral reef. You are orange and white, which doesn’t really matter. What matters is that you have these little ear stones called otoliths in your inner ear, and when sound waves pass through the water and then through your body, these otoliths move and displace tiny hair cells, which trigger electrochemical signals in your auditory nerve. Nemo, you are hearing.

But you are not hearing well. In this version of century’s end, humankind has managed to pump the climate brakes a smidge, but it has not reversed the trends that were apparent a hundred years earlier. In this 2100, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have risen from 400 parts per million at the turn of the millennium to 600 parts per million — a middle‑of‑the-road forecast. For you and your otoliths, this increase in carbon dioxide is significant, because your ear stones are made of calcium carbonate, a carbon-based salt, and ocean acidification makes them grow larger. Your ear stones are big and clunky, and the clicks and chirps of resident crustaceans and all the larger reef fish have gone all screwy. Normally, you would avoid these noises, because they suggest predatory danger. Instead, you swim toward them, as a person wearing headphones might walk into an intersection, oblivious to the honking truck with the faulty brakes. Nobody will make a movie about your life, Nemo, because nobody will find you.

Author Clayton Page Aldern. Bonnie Cutts / Dutton

It’s not a toy example. In 2011, an international team of researchers led by Hong Young Yan at the Academia Sinica, in Taiwan, simulated these kinds of future acidic conditions in seawater tanks. A previous study had found that ocean acidification could compromise young fishes’ abilities to distinguish between odors of friends and foes, leaving them attracted to smells they’d usually avoid. At the highest levels of acidification, the fish failed to respond to olfactory signals at all. Hong and his colleagues suspected the same phenomenon might apply to fish ears. Rearing dozens of clown fish in tanks of varying carbon dioxide concentrations, the researchers tested their hypothesis by placing waterproof speakers in the water, playing recordings from predator-rich reefs, and assessing whether the fish avoided the source of the sounds. In all but the present-day control conditions, the fish failed to swim away. It was like they couldn’t hear the danger.

In Hong’s study, though, it’s not exactly clear if the whole story is a story of otolith inflation. Other experiments had indeed found that high ocean acidity could spur growth in fish ear stones, but Hong and his colleagues hadn’t actually noticed any in theirs. Besides, marine biologists who later mathematically modeled the effects of oversize otoliths concluded that bigger stones would likely increase the sensitivity of fish ears — which, who knows, “could prove to be beneficial or detrimental, depending on how a fish perceives this increased sensitivity.” The ability to attune to distant sounds could be useful for navigation. On the other hand, maybe ear stones would just pick up more background noise from the sea, and the din of this marine cocktail party would drown out useful vibrations. The researchers didn’t know.

The uncertainty with the otoliths led Hong and his colleagues to conclude that perhaps the carbon dioxide was doing something else — something more sinister in its subtlety. Perhaps, instead, the gas was directly interfering with the fishes’ nervous systems: Perhaps the trouble with their hearing wasn’t exclusively a problem of sensory organs, but rather a manifestation of something more fundamental. Perhaps the fish brains couldn’t process the auditory signals they were receiving from their inner ears.

The following year, a colleague of Hong’s, one Philip Munday at James Cook University in Queensland, Australia, appeared to confirm this suspicion. His theory had the look of a hijacking.

A neuron is like a house: insulated, occasionally permeable, maybe a little leaky. Just as one might open a window during a stuffy party to let in a bit of cool air, brain cells take advantage of physical differences across their walls in order to keep the neural conversation flowing. In the case of nervous systems, the differentials don’t come with respect to temperature, though; they’re electrical. Within living bodies float various ions — potassium, sodium, chloride, and the like — and because they’ve gained or lost an electron here or there, they’re all electrically charged. The relative balance of these atoms inside and outside a given neuron induces a voltage difference across the cell’s membrane: Compared to the outside, the inside of most neurons is more negatively charged. But a brain cell’s walls have windows too, and when you open them, ions can flow through, spurring electrical changes.

In practice, a neuron’s windows are proteins spanning their membranes. Like a house’s, they come in a cornucopia of shapes and sizes, and while you can’t fit a couch through a porthole, a window is still a window when it comes to those physical differentials. If it’s hot inside and cold outside, opening one will always cool you down.

Until it doesn’t.

A school of manini fish pass over a coral reef at Hanauma Bay in Honolulu. Donald Miralle / Getty Images

Here is the clown fish neural hijacking proposed by Philip Munday. What he and his colleagues hypothesized was that excess carbon dioxide in seawater leads to an irregular accumulation of bicarbonate molecules inside fish neurons. The problem for neuronal signaling is that this bicarbonate also carries an electrical charge, and too much of it inside the cells ultimately causes a reversal of the normal electrical conditions. At the neural house party, now it’s colder inside than out. When you open the windows — the ion channels — atoms flow in the opposite direction.

Munday’s theory applied to a particular type of ion channel: one responsible for inhibiting neural activity. One of the things all nervous systems do is balance excitation and inhibition. Too much of the former and you get something like a seizure; too much of the latter and you get something like a coma — it’s in the balance we find the richness of experience. But with a reversal of electrical conditions, Munday’s inhibitory channels become excitatory. And then? All bets are off. For a brain, it would be like pressing a bunch of random buttons in a cockpit and hoping the plane stays in the air. In clown fish, if Munday is right, the acidic seawater appears to short-circuit the fishes’ sense of smell and hearing, and they swim toward peril. It is difficult to ignore the question of what the rest of us might be swimming toward.

From THE WEIGHT OF NATURE: How a Changing Climate Changes Our Brains by Clayton Page Aldern, to be published on April 9, 2024, by Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2024 by Clayton Page Aldern.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Climate change is rewiring fish brains — and probably ours, too on Apr 8, 2024.

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

A limitless supply of heat exists beneath our feet within the Earth’s crust, but harnessing it at scale has proved challenging. Now, a combination of new techniques, government support, and the pressing need to secure continuous clean power in an era of climate crisis means that geothermal energy is finally having its moment in the U.S.

Until recently, geothermal has only been viable where the Earth’s inner heat simmers near the surface, such as at hot springs or geysers where hot water or steam can be easily drawn to drive turbines and generate electricity.

While this has allowed a limited number of places, like Iceland, to use geothermal as a main source of heating and electricity, it has only been a niche presence in the U.S, providing less than 1 percent of its electricity. But this could change dramatically, offering the promise of endless, 24/7 clean energy that can fill in the gaps of intermittent solar and wind generation in the electricity grid.

“Geothermal has been used for over 100 years, limited to certain geographic locations — but that is now changing,” said Amanda Kolker, the geothermal laboratory program manager at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, or NREL.

“As we penetrate the grid with renewables that are not available all the time, we need to find a base load, which is currently taken up by gas. There aren’t really many options for zero-emissions base load power, which is why geothermal is entering the picture.”

Geothermal capacity could increase twentyfold by 2050, generating 10 percent of the country’s electricity, according to a recent road map released by the U.S. Department of Energy. President Joe Biden’s administration has also funded new projects aimed at pushing forward the next generation of geothermal that aim to make the energy source available anywhere on America’s landmass, not just easy-to-reach hot springs.

“The U.S. can lead the clean energy future with continued innovation on next-generation technologies, from harnessing the power of the sun to the heat beneath our feet, and cracking the code to deploy them at scale,” said Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, who added that she saw “enormous potential” in geothermal.

Expanding the geothermal footprint to the entire U.S. will take time, as well as plenty of money — the Department of Energy estimates as much as $250 billion will be needed for projects to become widespread across the country, providing a major source of clean power.

But advocates of geothermal say that such growth is within reach, because of a wave of geothermal technologies as well as government support. In February, the Biden administration announced $74 million for up to seven pilot projects to develop enhanced geothermal systems that, the government said, hold the potential for powering 65 million American homes.

Ironically, enhanced geothermal uses similar fracking techniques currently used to extract oil and gas, which must be phased out if the world is to avoid climate disaster. In the geothermal version of fracking, fluid is injected deep underground, causing fractures to open up, with the liquid becoming hot as it circulates. The hot water is then pumped to the surface, where it can generate electricity for the grid.

This, and other new techniques that involve deeper and horizontal drilling, in some cases 8 miles deep, allows geothermal energy to be drawn from hot rocks found anywhere underground, rather than select spots that have hot water near the surface. This vastly expands the potential of the technology.

“Anywhere in the country, if you drill, it gets hotter and hotter with each mile you go deeper,” said Koenraad Beckers, an NREL thermal sciences researcher.

“In the western United States, that temperature increases fast. If you drill just 1 to 2 miles deep, you have temperatures hot enough for electricity. To get those temperatures in eastern states, you might need to drill miles and miles down, but you can use lower temperatures to directly heat or cool campuses, neighborhoods, and even towns.”

Dozens of new companies are looking to push ahead with geothermal plans, buoyed by incentives offered by recent legislation, although only a few have so far managed to complete full projects in the country, such as Eavor, a Canadian firm that successfully drilled a 3-mile hole in New Mexico to prove it could access heat deep in granite rock.

At play for these companies is an inexhaustible energy supply. Just one type of next generation geothermal — called superhot rock energy, where deep drilling reaches temperatures 400 degrees Celsius (752 degrees Fahrenheit) or hotter — is abundant enough to theoretically fulfill the world’s power requirements. In fact, just 1 percent of the world’s superhot rock potential could provide 63 terawatts of clean firm power, which would meet global electricity demand nearly eight times over.

“While this modeling is preliminary, our findings suggest an enormous opportunity to unlock vast amounts of clean energy beneath our feet,” said Terra Rogers, the director for superhot rock energy at Clean Air Task Force, which produced the modellng tool to measure the potential of this approach.

“Energy security backed by always available zero-carbon energy isn’t a far-off dream.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The US aims to ‘crack the code’ on scaling up geothermal energy production on Apr 7, 2024.

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

Rolling up to a Tesla charging port, Illinois Republican state Senator Dan McConchie grimaced that wheelchair users like him couldn’t use it — or any of the others at the gas station where he filmed his Instagram reel. They’d all been placed on a raised surface that he couldn’t readily reach. McConchie introduced a state bill to improve relevant accessibility standards, including electric car chargers. But it’s a national problem: Electric vehicle charging stations are often inaccessible, despite being designed and built decades after the Americans With Disabilities Act, or ADA, became law. 

By April 2023, the Department of Energy reported, there were more than 140,000 public EV charging ports in the U.S., up from around 80,000 just three years earlier. The number of charging ports accessible to disabled drivers isn’t easy to pin down, an issue in itself; Department of Transportation data estimates that half of disabled adults under 65, some 10 million people, drive themselves around. By 2030, there will be more than 25 million electric vehicles on U.S. roads, according to industry group Edison Electric Insitute. That includes a growing share of more affordable plug-in hybrids, driving even more demand for charging infrastructure. But for drivers with disabilities, inaccessible chargers make it a lot less appealing to switch: In a 2022 U.K. survey, though two-thirds of disabled drivers planned to go electric, most — more than 70 percent — said concerns about inaccessible infrastructure factored in. And in a society that considers EVs key to a more sustainable future, the spread of inaccessible chargers signals that disabled people have been left behind. 

Adam Lubinsky, of New York–based architecture and design firm WXY Studio, has worked with New York state to find ways to make future EV charging locations more accessible. “If we really want to move the needle and get to a place where we’re really driving electric vehicles, we have to put them in the public realm,” Lubinsky said. In a city like New York, that means placing them on sidewalks, so residents of different neighborhoods have reliable access. “Once they’re in the public realm, we need to make sure they’re as universally accessibly designed as possible.”

Public charging stations provided by private entities, like the more than 2,000 operated by Tesla, are supposed to be accessible, according to the U.S. Access Board, an independent federal agency focused on making infrastructure and services more accessible for disabled people. The agency is developing enforceable accessibility rules for charging stations, but there’s no estimate for when those standards will come into force, says Juliet Shoultz, an Access Board transit engineer and accessibility specialist who helped develop its accessible design recommendations for EV charging stations. Meanwhile, nothing stops firms like Tesla, real estate developers, or local governments from reaching out to the board for technical assistance.  

The devices themselves, not just their locations, can be made more accessible, says Dak Kopec, a University of Nevada, Las Vegas architecture professor who focuses in part on how different health conditions shape our ability to use the built environment. Kopec has concerns about how aging people, or those with disabilities that cause muscle weakness, such as multiple sclerosis, would be able to operate the charging cord — especially while balancing something like a walker.

“These are all things that need to be considered as we start looking at the design of these stations,” Kopec said.

Shoultz also looked to existing, enforceable requirements — not specific to EV chargers — under the Americans With Disabilities Act, the Rehabilitation Act, and the 1968 Architectural Barriers Act. Under those rules, chargers have to be at a height that allows people using mobility devices to reach the power cable; they also need a clear and wide path that lets people with walkers, for instance, get to them. Chargers that rely on displays need speech output for people with low vision, and other communication features for people who are deaf or hard of hearing. Under the ADA, for example, the highest operable part of a charging station shouldn’t be more than 4 feet off the ground. As with many inaccessibility issues, Shoultz says that enforcement “would probably be by somebody filing some sort of complaint.” 

Coming up with more effective ways for disabled people to access EV chargers isn’t always straightforward. Many are on raised platforms in parking lots. Car-to-car differences mean accessible parking spots can’t necessarily become EV stations. Building more municipal chargers on sidewalks near pedestrian ramps could let wheelchair users plug in more easily. These chargers would also help clear sidewalks blocked by the long, hefty cords of household chargers used by some drivers without garages.

Charging stations aren’t the only accessibility issue for electric vehicles: As Business Insider reported last year, there isn’t a fully wheelchair-accessible EV, with a large door opening and entry-exit ramp, on the American market. (The more accessible Volkswagen ID Buzz won’t launch in the U.S. until almost 2025.)

That’s no reason to delay the push for accessible EV charging, Kopec says: “Retrofitting costs more than simply doing it the right way to begin with.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Disabled drivers can’t use many electric car chargers. It doesn’t have to be this way. on Apr 6, 2024.