Grist

In the months since Hamas attacked Israel, killing some 1,200 people and taking hundreds more hostage, Israeli forces have pummeled Gaza in a campaign to dismantle the group, which the U.S. considers a terrorist organization. The offensive has killed 22,000 Palestinians and dealt a grievous blow to the territory’s fragile air, water, and land — and risks the long-term health of its residents.

The ruin dwarfs anything Gazans have ever experienced. The ongoing aerial, naval, and ground assault has by one United Nations estimate damaged or destroyed about one-fifth of the structures in Gaza. According to Thorsten Kallnischkies, a former disaster waste manager who has advised cleanups in 20 countries, 15 million tons of debris now litter the Gaza Strip.

The last major hostilities between Israel and Gaza, in 2021, left 1 million tons.

When these buildings, some 40,000 in all, were blown up, concrete, insulation, and other materials — not to mention residents’ possessions — were pulverized into toxic dust. The Jabalia refugee camp, for example, a sprawling neighborhood of apartment towers known to contain asbestos, has seen repeated battering. 

Systematic research after the September 11, 2001, attacks in the United States was among the first to link exposure to such a mix of detritus to pulmonary and respiratory disease and cancer. Public health experts say the death count from debris-related diseases stemming from the destruction in New York will soon exceed that of the day’s attacks, if it hasn’t already. 

Yet such studies have not been replicated in places like Syria, Ukraine, and Iraq, where the vast leveling of urban and industrial infrastructure left legacies of pollution in addition to their costs in blood. Some environmental health advocates argue it is time to devote the same attention to Gaza and other war zones that was given to Ground Zero.

“You can make a very solid case that civilians in these settings with a lot of dust, debris, and rubble are inhaling it on a frequent basis,” said Wim Zwijnenburg, a researcher with the Dutch peace organization PAX. “At the moment, nobody is looking at those kinds of risks. But it does have real-life effects.”

Gaza is among the most urbanized places in the world, with a population density comparable to London’s. That makes the often toxic pollution associated with decades of conflict one of the “serious long-term public health and environmental problems” Gazans face, according to a report PAX released on December 18. “It’s a known unknown,” Zwijnenburg said. “We know it’s a risk, we just don’t know how much it is in Gaza right now.”

Research after 9/11 established links between razing buildings and a panoply of short- and long-term ailments. The attacks on the World Trade Center produced a toxic cloud of dust, smoke, and fumes whose exact composition remains unknown even now. It’s thought that most of the particulates consisted of pulverized concrete, giving the plume the alkalinity of lye, a common ingredient in household drain cleaner. The rest contained some 150 substances, from glass, wood, lead, and asbestos to heavy metals and polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, carcinogens produced by incinerated wiring and electronics.

Most building materials are harmless in their everyday state. Blowing them up gives them entree to the body. “Just like tobacco smoke, it’s a toxic mixture,” said Ana Rule, an assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The nose and throat may catch larger particles, but the tiniest of them move within the body “a little like a gas,” she said, transiting the lungs into the bloodstream and on to other critical systems.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, this chemical miasma affected some 400,000 people in metropolitan New York — first responders most severely, but also many who lived and worked near ground zero. The health consequences are still surfacing. In 2011, the CDC launched, at congressional direction, the World Trade Center Health Program to identify, understand, and treat diseases linked to 9/11. It has documented a long and growing list of ailments traced to the attack and, as of September, estimates that more than 6,500 of the program’s enrolled members have died. (It cautions that not all those deaths were necessarily due to the 9/11-related disease.) The most frequently observed illnesses are aerodigestive diseases, mental health conditions, and cancers. A network of clinics across the U.S. will treat them at no charge. In a 2021 paper, program officials called their work “a model for how to address the complex health issues that arise in the near and long term from any large-scale environmental disaster.”

The volume of rubble littering the Strip is by one estimate roughly four times that of the Great Pyramid of Giza. Potentially toxic microparticles within it can be kicked up by footfalls or vehicles or lofted to other places on the wind. Rahim Khatib / Anadolu via Getty Images

Catastrophic wars in Syria, Ukraine, and Iraq would seem to qualify. The conflict in Syria has destroyed one-third of the country’s housing stock and a quarter of its forest cover, largely by bombing and arson. In heavily industrialized Ukraine, Russian attacks on nuclear power plants, oil refineries, and mines are among thousands of possible sources of dangerous pollution suspected by the U.N. Environment Program. In Iraq, where retreating ISIS fighters often set oil wells ablaze, Zwijnenburg saw crude flowing in open pools and sheep blackened by soot.

In principle, making post-conflict zones livable again requires rigorous field sampling, remediation of pollution hotspots, and health surveillance to watch for disease trends. In practice, these things usually get skipped in the exhaustion that follows hostilities. Advocates for more health-minded cleanups say they have a tough time persuading governments and funders such efforts are more than a luxury. “When conflict finishes, this can be a long and lingering issue. You need clean water, clean soil to be able to sustain livelihoods,” said Linsey Cottrell, a career chemist and the environmental policy officer at the Conflict and Environment Observatory, a U.K. charitable organization. “It’s not that it’s not happening, it’s just not as visible or highlighted as a priority concern as some of the other things.”

Without ground access to Gaza, observers are relying on remote sensing and publicly available information to measure environmental impacts to the Strip. Using satellite analysis, He Yin, an assistant professor of geography at Kent State University, reckons the fighting has damaged 15 to 29 percent of Gaza’s arable land. The PAX report identifies a plume of black smoke from a soda factory, suggesting burning plastics, and heavy damage at an industrial campus that makes pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, plastics and other chemical goods. In November, The New York Times observed a huge fire at a water-treatment plant, a frightening development in one of the most water-stressed places in the world.

Debris will probably pose a risk too. The volume of rubble littering the Strip is roughly four times that of the Great Pyramid of Giza, according to Kallnischkies. Given Gaza’s ultra-dense building environment and Israel’s extensive bombing in residential areas, experts told Grist, aerosolized concrete and asbestos are two likely public-health threats. Most of the territory’s 2.3 million people live in apartment buildings. Many residents build informal add-ons to their homes using inexpensive but durable materials like asbestos sheeting. Asbestos is safe in its inert state, but when destroyed releases microscopic fibers that can enter the body with ease.

Inhaling silica, a key ingredient in cement and glass, also increases the risk of cancer. And while the greatest exposure occurs when a building is destroyed, even its wreckage poses a risk. “Based on the images I have seen, people may also be sleeping and living within homes that are partially damaged and filled with dust,” Rule said. These microparticles can be kicked up by footfalls or vehicles or lofted to other places on the wind, she said. 

People also tend to overlook the risk posed by the stuff of daily life — bottles of bleach and detergent, cans of paint and thinner, jugs of gas and oil. Businesses like dry cleaners and printers and auto repair shops keep bulk chemicals on hand; so do high school chemistry labs. With proper handling by trained professionals, all can be safely disposed of. But too often in post-disaster scenarios, cleanups occur in bootstrapped ways as people, governments, and even humanitarian organizations get on with reconstruction. Kallnischkies is skeptical that Gazans will get all the protective gear and equipment needed to do the job safely, and says it’s very likely a lot of rubble will simply be dumped into the sea. 

The PAX report said the war in Gaza offers a chance to do better. It recommends that when the shooting and bombing ends, U.N. authorities and the World Bank should lead a comprehensive environmental assessment. By identifying any toxins in the environment and who might have been exposed to them, such analysis could alert public health officials to the diseases they need to watch for.

In the longer view, some want to see greater reflection and consideration about where and how wars are fought. “We need the military to understand the human and environmental cost when they fight in urban areas,” Cottrell said. “We need to see that wars aren’t conducted where people live.”

This story has been updated.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The war zone in Gaza will leave a legacy of hidden health risks on Jan 8, 2024.

For months now, it’s been free for anyone 18 or younger to ride the light rail through Seattle, the ferry across Puget Sound, and buses all over Washington state. As students tapped their new ORCA cards and hopped on the bus, probably the last thing they were thinking about was the state’s carbon pricing program, the source of funding behind their free ride.

One year after it went into effect, Washington’s “cap-and-invest” system has already brought in an eyebrow-raising $2.2 billion for action on climate change. The Climate Commitment Act, signed by Governor Jay Inslee in 2021, establishes a statewide limit on greenhouse gas emissions that steadily lowers over time. The law also creates a market, like California’s, for businesses to buy “allowances” for the carbon pollution they emit, prodding them to cut their emissions — and at the same time generating a boatload of money to tackle climate change. Touted as the “gold standard” for state climate policy, the law requires Washington to slash its emissions nearly in half by 2030, using 1990 levels as the baseline.

The program’s early success has attracted attention — praise from climate advocates and pushback from anti-tax hawks. A hedge fund manager named Brian Heywood has funded a petition drive to repeal the Climate Commitment Act, over its effects on gas prices, along with other petitions to strike down the state’s capital gains tax, give the police more leeway to pursue vehicles, and grant parents access to their kids’ medical records at school. The repeal could be headed to voters as a ballot initiative this November. If voters approve it, Heywood’s initiative wouldn’t just cancel the climate law; it would block the state from creating any other cap-and-trade system in the future.

“This is going to force us to do a better job communicating and defending our policies,” said Joe Nguyễn, a state senator representing White Center, an area just south of Seattle, who chairs the state’s Environment, Energy, and Technology Committee.

Experts said that the law is already having tangible benefits. Businesses, hoping to avoid paying for costly pollution “allowances,” are figuring out how to run their operations while emitting less carbon. Meanwhile, the revenue from the program is spurring clean energy efforts, including a large-scale solar project by the Yakama Nation, and attracting green industries like clean hydrogen. The funding will also help families install energy-efficient (and money-saving) heat pumps and provide incentives for garbage trucks, delivery vans, and buses to go electric.

The fate of the climate law could have ripple effects beyond Washington, the second state to adopt a cap on carbon after California. New York, for example, just unveiled plans for a cap-and-invest program in December. Officials in New York are closely monitoring the backlash in Washington state, and, in turn, other Northeastern states are watching New York to see what it decides. If Washington’s law goes up in flames, states might decide against enshrining similar carbon-cutting laws. But if it survives the backlash, it could boost other politicians’ confidence in putting a price on carbon pollution.

Grist spoke with experts in Washington about the lessons they’ve learned, one year into the program. They suggested that advocates for any stringent carbon price should be ready to play defense right away — and should work to make its benefits tangible to people around the state.

“The success of the Climate Commitment Act will depend on whether real people in real neighborhoods are actually seeing better infrastructure and things like better transit, home weatherization and electrification, and reductions in emissions from industry,” said Deric Gruen, co-executive director of the Front and Centered, an environmental justice coalition based in Seattle.

The gas price debacle

If the state’s residents have heard anything about the law, it’s most likely been about the bane of politics: the price of gasoline. Washington’s gas prices soared to $4.91 a gallon on average in June, the highest in the country. 

Almost as soon as the first auction to sell pollution credits was held in March, raising $300 million, opponents started drawing a connection between the climate law and “pain at the pump.” The price of emitting a ton of carbon dioxide clocked in at $49, nearly double the average price in California’s cap-and-trade market at the time. Kelly Hall, the Washington director for the regional nonprofit Climate Solutions, attributes the higher prices to the stringency of Washington’s program, which requires more ambitious carbon dioxide cuts than California’s.

In a YouTube video promoting the repeal campaign, Heywood calls the law a “sneaky” gas tax and characterizes it as a money-grab by the state government. “Who knows where [the money] goes?” he asks in the video. He maintains that Inslee and state Democrats weren’t upfront about its potential cost to drivers of gas-powered vehicles. Last year, Heywood hired signature gatherers to go around the state, and in November, they turned in more than 400,000 signatures to repeal the climate law. If enough of those signatures pass the verification process, the repeal initiative will be headed to voters this November.

“Once those auctions were high, there were billboards and ad campaigns and everything blaming the price of gas on this,” said David Mendoza, the director of government relations at The Nature Conservancy in Seattle. “Being ready for that pushback as soon as implementation actually gets started, I think is key.”

Washington Governor Jay Inslee speaks at an event in San Francisco in October 2022, when West Coast leaders agreed to collaborate on climate action. Tayfun Coskun / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

State officials have estimated that the program added somewhere around 26 cents to the price of a gallon of gas, though some economists have put the number as high as 55 cents. Confidentiality rules around which companies are participating in cap-and-trade auctions make the analysis difficult. Lawmakers like Nguyễn are working on a “transparency bill,” similar to one that went into effect in California last year, that aims to open financial records from oil companies to see if they’re price gouging.

Proponents of the Climate Commitment Act argue that Washington’s gas prices have always been higher than the national average — they reached $5.50 in 2022, before the climate law began — and that oil companies are choosing to pass the costs onto consumers. They also point out that drivers of electric vehicles in the state are paying the equivalent of less than $1.50 a gallon in electricity. Last year, tens of thousands of Washingtonians switched to electric vehicles. 

“If we are concerned about the cost of transportation for Washington businesses and residents, we have to keep our focus away from the arm-waving of the variations of gas prices that we’ve suffered through for decades and really look to true solutions,” said Michael Mann, the executive director for Clean & Prosperous Washington, a climate-friendly business coalition. “And the true solution to lower our transportation costs is to get off of fossil fuels.”

Who’s getting the money?

Legislators are using the revenue from the auctions for dozens of programs to tackle the state’s two biggest sources of carbon emissions: transportation and buildings. They have set aside $400 million for public transit projects, including the free transit for youth program, and $120 million for electrifying garbage trucks, delivery vans, school buses, and other large vehicles. Another $115 million is earmarked for rebates to help low-income households and small businesses install energy-efficient equipment like heat pumps, a key tool for lowering carbon emissions and energy bills.

The Climate Commitment Act requires that at least 35 percent of the investments go toward “overburdened communities,” such as the $25 million that’s for improving air quality in polluted neighborhoods. An additional 10 percent of investments are set aside for projects that directly benefit Native American tribes. The state budgeted $50 million to help tribes address climate change and adapt to its effects, for example, and $20 million for the Yakama Nation’s utility to build solar panels over irrigation canals. 

The rest of the proceeds go to cleaning up transportation, accelerating the shift to clean energy, and helping communities and ecosystems withstand the effects of climate change, without specific percentages attached. 

The burned remnants of an historic grange are seen near a wind farm after the Newell Road Fire moved through in July 2023 in Dot, Washington. David Ryder / Getty Images

Front and Centered, which originally opposed the law based on concerns that cap-and-trade would fail to limit pollution, is now focused on making sure that communities get their promised share of the revenue. “The conversation is leaning into this thing about gas prices,” said Gruen, the group’s co-executive director, “but the attention really needs to be on effectiveness in reducing pollution and justice for frontline communities, and that seems to be getting lost in the conversation.” He says that communities should get more of a say in the budgeting process, so they get to be part of climate solutions in their neighborhoods. 

It’s taking a while for some projects to get up and running, but that’s sort of the nature of the work, Mendoza said. “From my own engagement with government agencies, they’re trying to do things differently,” he said. “They know that they need to invest in overburdened communities. They know they want to reach smaller organizations to get in a pipeline to receive these funds that invest directly in communities.”

How things are changing for businesses

Climate policies are often discussed in terms of “carrots” (the rewards) and “sticks” (the punishments for emissions). The “stick” in Washington’s law prompts businesses to clean up their act so they don’t have to pay for pollution credits. Some progress is already happening on that front, according to Mann of Clean and Prosperous. The oil giant BP, which supported the Climate Commitment Act, spent about $270 million on efficiency upgrades at its refinery in Cherry Point near Bellingham, estimated to reduce the facility’s emissions by 7 percent. Washington’s law also gave the U.S. its first all-electric Amtrak bus line when the transportation company MTRWestern, which contracted with Amtrak, swapped its diesel-powered bus between Seattle and Bellingham for one that charges on electricity.

Then there are the carrots. Every dollar invested by the state has yielded $5 in federal money through matching grant programs from the federal Inflation Reduction Act and bipartisan infrastructure law, according to Nguyễn. Legislators in other states are jealous, he said, “because we were able to take advantage of these things when they couldn’t, and it’s going to really accelerate the work that we’re doing.”

The global mining company Fortescue, for example, obtained $20 million from the state to build a multibillion-dollar “clean hydrogen” plant in Centralia, Washington, near an old coal-fired power plant that’s set to retire in 2025. (Hydrogen can replace fossil fuels in a range of tough-to-decarbonize industries, from aviation to steelmaking.) The project was recently awarded an additional $1 billion in federal funds. Without the revenue from the Climate Commitment Act, Mann said, getting the grant money from the state that made the project eligible for federal funding “would have been next to impossible.”

Another example is Group14, a Seattle startup that’s building the world’s largest factory for advanced silicon battery materials, which promises to make the lithium-ion batteries used in EVs more powerful and faster-charging. The factory, set to open in Moses Lake, Washington later this year, is expected to provide enough battery materials for 200,000 electric vehicles every year. It’s bolstered by funds from Washington’s program and the federal bipartisan infrastructure law.

Whatever happens next with Washington’s cap-and-invest law, whether it gets overturned or continues to bring in billions for climate action, it’s bound to influence how other states choose to tackle global warming. “It’s so funny when people see these things like this happen, and they say, ‘Oh, well, this went wrong, and that went wrong, and that went wrong,’” Nguyễn said. “And it’s like, of course — that’s what leadership looks like. You know, nobody had a map of how this was supposed to happen.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Washington’s cap on carbon is raising billions for climate action. Can it survive the backlash? on Jan 8, 2024.

This story was originally published by the Daily Yonder, which covers rural America, and Climate Central, a nonadvocacy science and news group.

Will and Julie Volpert have led white water rafting trips on Southern Oregon’s Rogue and Klamath rivers for over a decade for their company Indigo Creek Outfitters, out of the small town of Talent, Oregon. The rafting season, which extends from May to September, is a perfect time to be out on the river where snowpack-fed cold water provides respite from the region’s hot summer.

Or it would be perfect, if wildfire smoke weren’t a looming concern. 

“We’ve been in operation here since 2011, and almost every year there’s some smoke that comes in and is noticeable on our trips,” Will Volpert said in an interview. If people have flexibility, he recommends that they schedule a trip before the third week of July when the likelihood of smoke in the air is lower.

Customers frequently cancel in late July and August because of the smoke, especially for day trips. Federal data shows air quality tends to be more than four times worse on average in Jackson County, Oregon, during this period than earlier in the summer.

“We’ve gotten very used to saying, ‘Hey, it’s very likely going to be smoky on your trip. It might not be, but it could be.’” Volpert said. But as long as they’re not putting their participants at risk, Volpert said, they won’t cancel a rafting trip because of wildfire smoke.

Will Volpert poses with one of the rafts used on river trips for his company, Indigo Creek Outfitters. Jan Pytalski / The Daily Yonder

Running a business affected by wildfire smoke has become normal for the Volperts, but it hasn’t come without its personal toll. 

“I used to get very stressed out and paralyzed with the idea of losing our summer, which for us is, as the owners of this small business, our livelihood,” Volpert said. 

While Volpert says he’s learned to manage that anxiety, wildfire smoke is a frequent source of stress for many people living in rural communities. The smoke harms farms and recreation-based businesses, can be psychologically triggering for wildfire survivors, frequently drives residents indoors, and recent research showed it’s associated with increases in rural suicides.

Wildfire smoke has become a pervasive form of air pollution released from intensifying fires due to the warming effects of heat-trapping pollution and a litany of other environmental changes.

Southwestern Oregon experienced unhealthy air from wildfire smoke nearly 13 days each year on average from 2013 through the end of 2022 — up from one to two days on average from 1985 through 2012, according to a report by Oregon’s Department of Environmental Quality that used data from the town of Medford, about 10 miles northwest of Talent where Indigo Creek Outfitters is based.

Smoke pollution exacerbates asthma, worsens infections, and contributes to a variety of other physical maladies. Tiny smoke particles move from lungs into bloodstreams and can directly affect brain health, with research out of the University of Montana connecting smoke exposure to the development of dementia. 

Its noxious effects on mental health, particularly on rural communities, tend to receive less discussion.

Hidden dangers in rural valleys

Southern Oregon’s Rogue Valley is at the heart of a region synonymous with white water rafting, rock climbing, and other outdoor activities in the Klamath Mountains and Cascade Range. Vineyards and pear orchards dot the valley, and in the midsize town of Ashland at the valley’s south end, the annual Oregon Shakespeare Festival boasts international recognition. 

All these activities hinge on good summer weather, and during the past decade, they’ve been disrupted by wildfire smoke, directly affecting wages and profits and reducing overall quality of life.

“In rural areas there’s likely more people whose livelihoods are based on the land and working outside,” said Colleen Reid, a health geographer and environmental epidemiologist at the University of Colorado in Boulder who studies the health effects of wildfire smoke.

Wildfire smoke fills the air at an olive orchard on the North Umpqua River in Glide, Oregon, in September of 2020. Jan Pytalski / The Daily Yonder

In the valley, wildfire smoke settles more easily and often sticks around longer than it does in the surrounding mountains and plains. Atmospheric conditions often arise in valleys that keep smoke close to the ground, where its effect is the strongest. This can trigger more than physical ailments like asthma.

“We’re increasingly seeing mental health impacts,” Reid said. While early research focused on the effects of flames from wildfires, she said “There are some more recent studies where even individuals who were just affected by the smoke could have mental health impacts.”

By trapping people inside homes and forcing the cancellation of outdoor social events like youth sports, smoke can contribute to loneliness, domestic quibbling, and despair. 

A study published last fall in the science journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences linked smoke exposure with increases in suicides among rural populations, though not among urban ones.

“In rural areas, we find that smoke days are significantly associated with increases in suicide rates,” said David Molitor, a health economist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who led the research, which drew on 13 years of smoke and federal suicide data to track mental health effects. 

Because deaths from suicide are tracked by the federal government, they can be a useful measurement reflecting mental health, which is otherwise difficult to research and track. And that federal data shows that rural Americans are about a third more likely to die from suicide than those living in cities or suburbs. 

“I think what’s different with rural people is they have access to guns, and they’re much more effective at succeeding in their efforts,” said Joseph Schroeder, a disaster response veteran and former mental health extension specialist at the University of Kentucky with experience working at and running crisis hotlines for farmers and other rural residents. 

Suicide ideation often arises from desperate needs for financial aid and other help, more so than poor mental health. This puts residents of rural communities that have been hollowed out following closures of timber, manufacturing, and other employment-rich industries at greater risk.

“From my experience, the despair that has become suicidal ideation, or a suicidal threat, they’ve all come from conversations I’ve had with people who are calling me to get out of a situational problem — mostly financial,” Schroeder said. “It’s a poverty problem and it’s an isolation problem. And that looks differently in rural communities than it does in urban communities.”

The Almeda fire

Come smoke or shine, Indigo Creek Outfitters — Volpert’s white water rafting company in Talent — always operates. 

But on the morning of September 8, 2020, Volpert knew something was different about the wind whipping through the trees around his house outside of Phoenix, just three miles from Talent. The weather was so unusual he canceled the Upper Klamath rafting trip planned for that day. 

“That is literally the only time that I can remember ever pulling the plug on one of our trips,” Volpert said. A few hours after making that decision, Talent and Phoenix were engulfed in flames. 

A conncrete building that survived the Almeda Fire in Talent, Oregon, undergoes reconstruction in November 2023. Claire Carlson / The Daily Yonder

The wildfire, known as the Almeda Fire, was the most destructive in Oregon history: About 3,000 buildings burned, most of them homes. Three people and many more animals died.

Analysis of weather station data shows the Almeda Fire broke out during a bout of fire weather — when conditions are persistently dry, warm, and windy. The area was in extreme drought at the time, setting up conditions conducive to an extreme wildfire once winds strengthened. It took more than a week for firefighters to extinguish the flames completely.

After surviving a wildfire that completely changed the lives of so many in the Rogue Valley, there’s an added layer of grief that comes with the smoke season. 

“For me, [smoke] causes a lot of anxiety,” said Jocksana Corona. The mobile home in Talent where she lived with her husband and two children burned down during the Almeda Fire. The family relocated to a suburban neighborhood in nearby Central Point, but haven’t been able to rebuild the kinds of strong community ties they had enjoyed in Talent. 

“My kids grew up in the Latino community [in Talent] where there were always kids on their bikes, people on the streets walking their dogs,” Corona said. “In our new community and our new neighborhood, we don’t have that. It’s like we don’t know anybody.” 

Even though Corona and her family were able to buy a house after losing their mobile home, she said three years later, they’re still not fully recovered. 

“We’re listed [by the state of Oregon] as a recovered family because we purchased the house and relocated,” Corona said. “But for me, for my own mental health and for my kids’ mental health, I wouldn’t say we’re recovered. I’m still experiencing triggers from the fire.”

Corona said she is bothered by the smoke in the air much more after her experience with the Almeda Fire, especially around its September anniversary. 

Smoke is a constant reminder for wildfire survivors of their own harrowing experiences, and the potential for it to happen again. 

“That grieving and that mourning is re-triggered by smoke season because it’s evident in the very air we breathe that their experience is not only real, but it hasn’t ended,” said Tucker Teutsch, executive director of Firebrand Resiliency Collective, a nonprofit created to support the area’s recovery from the Almeda Fire.

The nonprofit runs a peer support group that provides a safe grief space for Almeda Fire survivors to share recovery resources and talk through problems they’re having in the fire’s aftermath. The group has met weekly since the 2020 fire.

When clean air is impossible to find

In the Methow Valley, a rural region in north-central Washington state, a coalition of community members has been supporting each other during smoke seasons since the 2013 Carlton Complex Fire, which destroyed 500 buildings.

The community coalition, called Clean Air Methow, spreads awareness about air quality safety. It also supports people struggling with the mental health toll of living with smoke. 

A swing set at the Gateway Project in Talent, Oregon. The project provided more than 50 transitional housing trailers for people who lost their homes in the Almeda Fire. More than three years after the fire, people are still living in the trailers. Claire Carlson / The Daily Yonder

“With this mental health and wellness piece, what we often don’t explicitly acknowledge is the threat of what the oppressive, opaque, physical heaviness of being under this white smoke for a prolonged period of time is like,” said Elizabeth Walker, director of Clean Air Methow. 

“People kind of just say, ‘Oh, it’s so bad, so smoky, I hate it,’” Walker said. “But when we ask people to actually give the words of their experience, they use ‘oppressive, heavy.’ They feel depressed.”

The number one clean air recommendation is for people to stay indoors, but this can contribute to feelings of social isolation when it’s smoky, according to Walker. Indoor air isn’t always cleaner than outdoor air, either. Older homes without modern windows, doors, ventilation, and air conditioners can let in lots of smoke particles. 

“Make sure you’re indoors, but also make sure you’re indoors with a HEPA filter or an air filtration system,” said Erin Landguth, a University of Montana at Missoula scientist who researches the health effects of wildfire smoke exposure. Because buying and maintaining such systems is expensive, a “key difference” from cities is that rural residents may be less able to afford them.

Clean Air Methow has been advocating for “cleaner air shelters” in the Methow Valley to provide public spaces with better indoor air quality for community members to visit when it’s smoky out. They’ve also provided air purifiers to people living in homes that let lots of smoke in. 

Poor indoor air quality affects countless rural communities. 

At Southern Oregon University in Ashland, access to clean indoor air during smoke season is hard to come by. The college’s older buildings don’t have updated indoor ventilation, causing workers and students there to be exposed to toxic smoke particles.

Willie Long stands in front of a climbing wall at a Southern Oregon University climbing gym. Jan Pytalski / The Daily Yonder

“I’m lucky enough that the building I work in was built in, I think 2016 or something like that, and it has a great HVAC system,” said Willie Long, assistant director at the outdoor program and climbing center at Southern Oregon University. “I generally have pretty good air quality when I get to go to work, but it’s not like that for most people who work at SOU.” 

And when it’s smoky, colleges stay open. Southern Oregon University issued a policy in 2019 that states it will postpone all non-emergency strenuous activity, review filtration and HVAC systems, and “encourage the use of N95 filtration masks or equivalent for personnel outdoors” when air quality exceeds the rate deemed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as hazardous for everyone. 

Trauma and anxiety

Heidi Honegger Rogers spent 25 years working as a family nurse practitioner before shifting her focus as an academic at the University of New Mexico researching the health impacts of weather disasters and environmental change. She’s an active member with the Alliance of Nurses for Healthy Environments. “Wildfire is a really intense and often traumatizing experience,” she said.

Though not everybody gets a diagnosis, Rogers said research shows that between a quarter and 60 percent of those directly affected by a wildfire will experience post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. About 1 in 10 people could still be affected a decade later, she said.

“Even after a trauma has dissipated and there’s no immediate emergency, the people stay in this agitated, super-alert state, which is characterized by anxiety,” Rogers said.

Smelling wildfire smoke or seeing another community burn can be triggering for those with PTSD, according to Rogers.

Smoke has become a trigger for Jocksana Corona, the former Talent resident who lost her mobile home in the Almeda Fire. She sought counseling after the fire to deal with her anxiety, in part because she didn’t want it interfering with her own work as a drug and alcohol counselor. 

“I knew my physical and emotional reactions to the smoke could interfere with my ability to help my own clients with their own struggles,” Corona said.

She went to a mental health counselor for six months who helped her process her anxiety. Corona encouraged her two children to seek counseling as well, but for her daughter, the experience wasn’t helpful. Most of the mental healthcare providers in the Rogue Valley are white and only speak English, which can be a barrier for nonwhite or non-English speaking patients. 

“I think that when it comes to mental health counseling for Latinos, it’s definitely lacking no matter whether you’re in Central Point or Medford, which are bigger towns,” Corona said. 

When Corona worked as a drug and alcohol counselor, she said she was one of just a handful of bilingual counselors in Jackson County — which includes Talent and Phoenix — and neighboring Josephine County. She had clients come from Roseburg, 100 miles away, seeking her bilingual services.

Trauma manifests itself differently in every person through experiences like sleep loss, chronic worry, and grief, Rogers said. “People can do okay for a little bit and then they can be triggered by something that goes into their brain and reminds them of this scary experience that they had.”

Stress, anxiety, and sleeplessness can manifest in declining physical health. “It degrades our immune response. We end up with more inflammation. We end up with more pain. We end up with more cardiovascular problems, high blood pressure,” Rogers said.

And for those not directly affected by wildfires, seeing infernos on the news and smelling smoke hundreds of miles away can serve as reminders that the climate is changing. Rogers said that can lead to senses of hopelessness and anger that corporations continue to pollute the atmosphere despite decades of warnings and mounting impacts.

One of the consequences of atmospheric pollution has been stark increases in the number of days each year when fire weather occurs across the U.S. and the world. Fire weather is marked by windy, hot, and dry conditions.

The region torched by the Almeda Fire sees three to six more days on average every year during the past decade when fire weather conditions are present, compared with four decades prior, analysis shows.

“We can have anxiety and fear and worry about any of those injustices that we’re seeing, or any of those losses that we’re seeing,” Rogers said.

Walker, the clean air educator with Clean Air Methow, said it can be helpful to remember that “smoke season doesn’t last forever” during smoky days.

“I think that living with wildfire smoke can become this really lovely reinforcement of mindfulness,” Walker said. “This is what it is right now, whether it’s good or bad, it’s going to change.” 

The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline can be reached by dialing 988 and the Crisis Text Line can be reached by texting HOME to 741741.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Persistent wildfire smoke is eroding rural America’s mental health on Jan 7, 2024.

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation.

Cities and towns across the Mississippi River basin have always needed to weather the environmental disasters associated with living along a river.

The past few years have brought wild fluctuations between flooding and drought, bringing more stress to the communities nestled along the Mississippi’s 2,350 miles.

In the last five years alone, they’ve seen springtime flooding, flash flooding, significant drought, and low river levels, with opposite ends of this spectrum sometimes occurring in the same calendar year.

“When these rivers have disasters, the disaster doesn’t stay in the river,” said Colin Wellenkamp, executive director of the Mississippi River Cities and Towns Initiative. “It damages a lot of businesses, homes, sidewalks, and streets; even broadband conduit and all kinds of utilities, mains, and water return systems.”

The cost of those damages can run into the millions, if not billions.

The River Des Peres in south St. Louis in December of 2023. The drainage ditch fills up with water during heavy rains and prolonged flooding. Eric Schmid / St. Louis Public Radio

One potential solution Wellenkamp encourages the 105 individual communities in his organization to consider is to work with, rather than against, the river. 

“Just about all of them have some sort of inlet into the Mississippi River that they’re built around,” he said. “Some of them are big and some of them are really small. But all of them need attention.”

It’s not a new idea, and many cities are already investing in nature-based solutions, such as removing pavement, building marshes, and making room for the river to flow. Now, St. Louis is looking to learn from Missouri’s neighbors in Dubuque, Iowa, on what the city can do with its River Des Peres. 

‘It’s just an eyesore’

“It’s just an eyesore,” said Beatrice Chatfield, 15, who was walking along the River Des Peres pedestrian and bike greenway with her mom, Jen. “There’s trash and debris and muck in it. It’s just all-around gross.”

It’s less of a river and more of a large concrete and stone-lined drainage channel that winds from the Mississippi through the urban landscape before disappearing beneath St. Louis’ largest park, Forest Park. It then reemerges further west in the suburb of University City.

“It’s basically the small version of the LA River, which is just a cesspool,” said Sam Rein, 29. “During the summer, it smells — we don’t exactly like living next to it, but it’s a neat feat of engineering, that’s for sure.” 

An aerial photo of the Bee Branch Creek in Dubuque, Iowa, in the summer of 2018. The creek is the result of a project to convert a buried storm sewer into a linear park. City Of Dubuque

It can also be dangerous, Wellenkamp said.

“As the Mississippi River rises, the River Des Peres then begins to back up into people’s basements and yards and small businesses into the city,” he said. 

Some 300 homes flooded in University City alone when the St. Louis region was hit with record-breaking rainfall in July 2022. Wellenkamp argues St. Louis should look to other cities in the Mississippi River basin who’ve learned to work with water, instead of against it.

Dubuque’s hidden creak

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Dubuque, Iowa, had a major flash flooding problem. Over the course of 12 years, the city of nearly 60,000 received six presidential disaster declarations for flooding and severe storms.

Whenever heavy rains drenched the city, the water would rush down the bluff and overwhelm the stormwater infrastructure, said Dubuque Mayor Brad Cavanagh. 

Manhole covers erupted from the water pressure, turning streets into creeks and damaging thousands of properties.

“Somewhere along the line about 100 years ago, somebody buried a natural creek and turned it into a storm sewer and it wasn’t keeping up anymore,” Cavanagh said. “Many of the residents (in these neighborhoods) are low- to moderate-income and those least able to really recover from damage like this.” 

Around 2001, the city started looking for solutions. 

Dubuque faced a decision: Expand the existing underground storm sewer or bring the Bee Branch Creek back into the daylight, expanding the floodplain and giving the water somewhere to go. The city opted for the latter option.

A child fishes in the Bee Branch Creek in Dubuque, Iowa, in 2017. The creek has become a place where people can interface and learn about watersheds. City Of Dubuque

The city established a citizen advisory committee early on in the process, which played a central role in determining the eventual design for the restored Bee Branch Creek. 

Residents wanted more than a concrete drainage ditch, Cavanagh said. They wanted trails, grasses, and greenery that wildlife and people could both enjoy — and, importantly, access to the water, he added.

The Bee Branch Creek turned into a 20-year-long project that became much more than just an engineering solution for excess rain water, Cavanagh said.

“It is one of the most beautiful parks we have in the city, a place where people go and watch the ducks and the birds,” he said.

Most importantly, it solved the city’s flash flooding issues, said Deron Muehring, Dubuque’s water and resource recovery center director, who before that role was an engineer involved with the Bee Branch restoration from start to finish. 

“2011 is the last presidential disaster declaration we had,” he said. “Now we haven’t had rains of that magnitude, but we have had significant rainstorms where we would have expected to have flooding and flood damage without these improvements.”

Learning from Dubuque

Other river cities see Dubuque’s success and want to know how they can apply it to their own flooding challenges, Cavanagh said. 

“As mayor, I’ve talked about this project more than anything else,” he said. “People want to know: ‘How did you do it? Why did you do it? What worked and what didn’t?’”

Cavanagh covered those details during a presentation on the Bee Branch to St. Louis aldermen in December, who were looking for ways to apply those lessons on the River Des Peres.

Ward 1 Alderwoman Anne Schweitzer was inspired by the ideas. 

“I could wish all day long that things like this had started sooner,” Schweitzer said. “But we’re here now and we have a responsibility. The length of time something will take always feels really long, but it takes longer if we don’t start.”

Time isn’t the only constraint; money is another. The Bee Branch in Dubuque had a price tag near $250 million. The city found a mixture of state and federal grant dollars totaling $163 million related to disaster resiliency, the environment, transportation, and recreation and tourism, leaving the city covering around $87 million, Cavanagh said. 

Midwest Climate Collaborative director Heather Navarro said floodplain restoration projects like Bee Branch are worth the investment. 

A thin layer of water lines the bottom of the River Des Peres near a storm sewer outlet and pedestrian bridge on in south St. Louis in December. The river serves as a drainage channel for the city and frequently has debris and other trash in it. Eric Schmid / St. Louis Public Radio

“We have done a lot to pave over our floodplains and wetlands, but we know there’s a lot of inherent natural value in those,” she said. “Whether it is absorbing floodwaters, helping filter pollution, reducing soil erosion. When you start to add up those numbers, that really starts to change the economics. ”

She adds that when cities improve existing infrastructure like roads, bridges, and wastewater management, they should consider how to use nature-based solutions and reduce flood and other climate risks. 

“It’s not like we’re swapping out old infrastructure for new infrastructure,” Navarro said. For example, rain gardens can reduce pressure on wastewater drainage by absorbing excess water. Trees can reduce heat. “We’re really taking a whole new approach to how this infrastructure is interrelated with other systems that we’re trying to provide for our community.”

And there’s billions of dollars on the table from the bipartisan infrastructure law and Inflation Reduction Act for communities to tackle projects that build resilience. 

The path forward

As it stands, St. Louis is at the beginning of even considering what a project to bring more nature to the River Des Peres could even look like. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is also exploring projects, specifically in University City, that could help store rainwater during heavy rains. 

The next major step would be a feasibility study of the entire River Des Peres watershed, which encompasses a handful of municipalities, Schweitzer said.

“There’s so many people who would need to be at the table to move something like this forward, which I don’t think is a bad thing,” she said. 

Navarro said if cities like St. Louis want to use natural infrastructure to reduce their flood risk, there’s no better time than now. 

“We know that climate change is impacting our communities,” she said. “We know that the way that we have been doing things in the past has in part contributed to where we are when it comes to the climate crisis.”

Wellenkamp agrees.

“Nature attracts business,” he said. “It stabilizes property value. It reduces crime. It creates resilience to disasters and extreme events. And it gives your place a better quality of life.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline As climate risks increase, Mississippi River towns look to each other for solutions on Jan 6, 2024.

As more and more Americans embrace electric vehicles, automakers and the federal government are racing to secure the materials needed to build EV batteries, including by pouring billions of dollars into battery recycling. Today, recyclers are focused on recovering valuable metals like nickel and cobalt from spent lithium-ion batteries. But with the trade war between the U.S. and China escalating, some are now taking a closer look at another battery mineral that today’s recycling processes treat as little more than waste.

On December 1, China implemented new export controls on graphite, the carbon-based mineral that’s best known for being used in pencils but that’s also used in a more refined form in commercial EV battery anodes. The new policies, which the Chinese government announced in October shortly after the Biden administration increased restrictions on exports of advanced semiconductors to China, have alarmed U.S. lawmakers and raised concerns that battery makers outside of China will face new challenges securing the materials needed for anodes. Today, China dominates every step of the battery anode supply chain, from graphite mining and synthetic graphite production to anode manufacturing.

Along with a new federal tax credit that rewards automakers that use minerals produced in America, China’s export controls are boosting the U.S. auto industry’s interest in domestically sourced graphite. But while it could take many years to set up new graphite mines and production facilities, there is another, potentially faster option: Harvesting graphite from dead batteries. As U.S. battery recyclers build big new facilities to recover costly battery metals, some are also trying to figure out how to recycle battery-grade graphite — something that isn’t done at scale anywhere in the world today due to technical and economic barriers. These companies are being aided by the U.S. Department of Energy, which is now pouring tens of millions of dollars into graphite recycling initiatives aimed at answering basic research questions and launching demonstration plants.

If the challenges holding back commercial graphite recycling can be overcome, “the used graphite stream could be huge,” Matt Keyser, who manages the electrochemical energy storage group at the the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory, told Grist. In addition to boosting domestic supplies, recycling graphite would prevent critical battery resources from being wasted and could reduce the carbon emissions tied to battery production.

To understand why graphite is hard to recycle, a bit of material science is necessary. Graphite is a mineral form of carbon that has both metallic and non-metallic properties, including high electrical and thermal conductivity and chemical inertness. These qualities make it useful for a variety of energy and industrial applications, including storing energy inside lithium-ion batteries. While a lithium-ion battery is charging, lithium ions flow from the metallic cathode into the graphite anode, embedding themselves between crystalline layers of the carbon atoms. Those ions are released while the battery is in use, generating an electrical current.

Recycled graphite attached to air bubbles at a graphite recycling laboratory in Freiberg, Germany. Jens Schlueter / AFP via Getty Images

Graphite can be found in nature as crystalline flakes or masses, which are mined and then processed to produce the small, spherical particles needed for anode manufacturing. Graphite is also produced synthetically by heating byproducts of coal or petroleum production to temperatures greater than 2,500 degrees Celsius (about 4,500 degrees Fahrenheit) — an energy-intensive (and often emissions-intensive) process that triggers “graphitization” of the carbon atoms. 

Relatively cheap to mine or manufacture, graphite is lower in value than many of the metals inside battery cathodes, which can include lithium, nickel, cobalt, and manganese. Because of this, battery recyclers traditionally haven’t taken much interest in it. Instead, with many battery recyclers hailing from the metals refining business, they’ve focused on what they already knew how to do: extracting and purifying those cathode metals, often in their elemental form. Graphite, which can comprise up to 30 percent of an EV battery by weight, is treated as a byproduct, with recyclers either burning it for energy or separating it out to be landfilled.

“Up until recently, people talking about recycling for batteries really went after those token [metal] elements because they were high value … and because that recycling process can overlap quite a bit with conventional metal processing,” Ryan Melsert, the CEO of U.S. battery materials startup American Battery Technology Company, told Grist.

For graphite recycling to be worthwhile, recyclers need to obtain a high-performance, battery-grade product. To do so, they need methods that separate the graphite from everything else, remove any contaminants like metals and glues, and restore the material’s original geometric structure, something that’s often done by applying intense heat.

Crude recycling approaches like pyrometallurgy, a traditional process in which batteries are smelted in a furnace, won’t work for graphite. “More than likely you’re going to burn off the graphite” using pyrometallurgy, Keyser said.

Today, the battery recycling industry is moving away from pyrometallurgy and embracing hydrometallurgical approaches, in which dead batteries are shredded and dissolved in chemical solutions to extract and purify various metals. Chemical extraction approaches could be adapted for graphite purification, although there are still “logistical issues,” according to Keyser. Most hydrometallurgical recycling processes use strong acids to extract cathode metals, but those acids can damage the crystalline structure of graphite. A longer or more intensive heat treatment step may be needed to restore graphite’s shape after extraction, driving up energy usage and costs.

Elements and other materials reclaimed from electric vehicle batteries, including graphite, are displayed during the London EV Show in November 2023. John Keeble / Getty Images

A third approach is direct recycling, in which battery materials are separated and repaired for reuse without any smelting or acid treatment. This gentler process aims to keep the structure of the materials intact. Direct recycling is a newer idea that’s further from commercialization than the other two methods, and there are some challenges scaling it up because it relies on separating materials very cleanly and efficiently. But recent research suggests that for cathode metals, it can have significant environmental and cost benefits. Direct recycling of graphite, Keyser said, has the potential to use “far less energy” than synthetic graphite production.

Today, companies are exploring a range of graphite recycling processes. 

American Battery Technology Company has developed an approach that starts with physically separating graphite from other battery materials like cathode metals, followed by a chemical purification step. Additional mechanical and thermal treatments are then used to restore graphite’s original structure. The company is currently recycling graphite at a “very small scale” at its laboratory facilities in Reno, Nevada, Melsert said. But in the future, it plans to scale up to recycling several tons of graphite-rich material a day with the help of a three-year, nearly $10 million Department of Energy grant funded through the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law.

Massachusetts-based battery recycling startup Ascend Elements has also developed a chemical process for graphite purification. Dubbed “hydro-to-anode,” Ascend Elements’ process “comes from some of the work we’ve done on hydro-to-cathode,” the company’s patented hydrometallurgical process for recycling cathode materials, said Roger Lin, the vice president of global marketing and government relations at the firm. Lin said that Ascend Elements is able to take graphite that’s been contaminated during an initial shredding step back to 99.9 percent purity, exceeding EV industry requirements, while also retaining the material properties needed for high performance anodes. In October, Ascend Elements and Koura Global announced plans to build the first “advanced graphite recycling facility” in the U.S.

The Department of Energy-backed startup Princeton NuEnergy, meanwhile, is exploring direct recycling of graphite. Last year, Princeton NuEnergy opened the first pilot-scale direct recycling plant in the U.S. in McKinney, Texas. There, batteries are shredded and a series of physical separation processes are used to sort out different materials, including cathode and anode materials. Cathode materials are then placed in low-temperature reactors to strip away contaminants, followed by additional steps to reconstitute their original structure. The same general approach can be used to treat anode materials, according to founder and CEO Chao Yan. 

“From day one, we are thinking to get cathode and anode material both recycled,” Yan said. But until now, the company has focused on commercializing direct recycling for cathodes. The reason, Yan said, is simple: “No customer cared about anode materials in the past.”

That, however, is beginning to change. Yan said that over the past year — and especially in the last few months since China announced its new export controls — automakers and battery manufacturers have taken a greater interest in graphite recycling. Melsert also said that he’s starting to see “very significant interest” in recycled graphite.

A lithium-ion battery pack and wiring connections inside an electric vehicle. Getty Images

Still, customers will have to wait a little longer before they can purchase recycled graphite for their batteries. The methods for purifying and repairing graphite still need refinement to reduce the cost of recycling, according to Brian Cunningham, the batteries R&D program manager at the Department of Energy’s Vehicle Technologies Office. Another limiting step is what Cunningham calls the “materials qualification step.” 

“We need to get recycled graphite to a level where companies can provide material samples to battery companies to evaluate the material,” Cunningham said. The process of moving from very small-scale production to levels that allow EV makers to test a product, “could take several years to complete,” he added. “Once the recycled graphite enters the evaluation process, we should start to see an uptick in companies setting up pilot- and commercial-scale equipment.“

Supply chain concerns could accelerate graphite recycling’s journey to commercialization. Over the summer, the Department of Energy added natural graphite to its list of critical materials for energy. Graphite is also on the U.S. Geological Survey’s list of critical minerals — minerals that are necessary for advanced technologies but at risk of supply disruptions. 

This classification means that domestically sourced graphite can help EVs qualify for the “clean vehicle credit,” a tax credit that includes strict requirements around critical mineral sourcing following the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. To qualify for the full credit, EV makers must obtain a large fraction of their battery minerals from the U.S. or a free-trade partner. By 2025, their vehicles may not contain any critical minerals extracted or processed by a “foreign entity of concern” — an entity connected to a shortlist of foreign countries that includes China. This requirement could “drive a premium” for domestically recycled graphite, Lin said.

Tax incentives could be key to helping recycled graphite compete with virgin graphite, according to Yuan Gu, a graphite analyst at the consulting firm Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. Despite China’s new export controls, Gu expects graphite to remain relatively cheap in the near future due to an “oversupply” of graphite on the market right now. While Gu said that graphite recycling is “definitely on radar for Western countries” interested in securing future supplies, its viability will depend on “how costly or cheap the recycled material will be.”

If graphite recycling does catch on, industry insiders are hopeful it will be able to meet a significant fraction of the country’s future graphite needs — which are growing rapidly as the clean energy transition accelerates — while making the entire EV battery supply chain more sustainable.

“You can help regional supply chains, you can help with efficiency, with carbon footprints,” Lin said.  “I think it’s a no-brainer this will happen.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The next frontier in EV battery recycling: Graphite on Jan 5, 2024.

On Tuesday, a federal appeals court decided not to revisit its earlier decision to strike down Berkeley, California’s first-in-the-nation gas ban in new buildings. The ruling dealt a blow to the city of Berkeley, which requested a rehearing after the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ initial decision in April, and casts uncertainty over similar policies to electrify buildings in dozens of other cities. 

In effect, the court simply chose to uphold its earlier judgment in April to invalidate Berkeley’s gas ban, legal experts told Grist. But unless the city of Berkeley chooses to appeal the case to the Supreme Court, the 9th Circuit’s judgment is now final. (The Berkeley city attorney’s office did not respond to a request for comment on its next steps in time for publication.) That means that for cities in the 9th Circuit region, which spans 11 western states and territories including California, Oregon, and Washington, local gas bans similar to Berkeley’s are no longer legal. 

“For cities in the 9th Circuit that have laws that are modeled closely on the Berkeley ordinance, this is a door closing,” said Amy Turner, director of the Cities Climate Law Initiative at Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. 

In 2019, Berkeley became the first city in the country to pass a ban on installing natural gas piping in new buildings, requiring all-electric appliances. Dozens of cities across the 9th Circuit region, including more than 70 in California alone, quickly followed suit, drafting new laws to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and indoor air pollution. 

But later that year, the California Restaurant Association initiated a lawsuit against Berkeley’s policy, arguing that natural gas stoves were essential for preparing foods like “flame-seared meats” and “charred vegetables.” In 2021, a federal district court ruled against the restaurant industry, but that decision was overturned in April 2023 by the 9th Circuit. That court held that national energy efficiency standards preempted Berkeley’s law, which would in effect prevent the use of gas-powered appliances that meet federal standards. The city of Berkeley requested a rehearing of the case before 11 judges on the 9th Circuit — a petition that was denied in this week’s decision. 

A view of Berkeley, California, including Sather Tower and International House, with the San Francisco Bay in the background. Eric Fehrenbacher / Getty Images

Sarah Jorgensen, a lawyer for the California Restaurant Association, told the San Francisco Chronicle that the judges had acknowledged that “energy policy was a matter of national concern and that there should be uniform national regulation.” Sean Donahue, a lawyer for the city of Berkeley, called the order disappointing and stated that Berkeley’s ordinance “is well within its authority to protect the health and safety of its own residents,” according to the Chronicle.

Tuesday’s denial featured a detailed dissent authored by U.S. Circuit Judge Michelle Friedland and seven other judges on the 9th Circuit. “Climate change is one of the most pressing problems facing society today, and we should not stifle local government attempts at solutions based on a clear misinterpretation of an inapplicable statute,” wrote Friedland. “I hope other courts will not repeat the panel opinion’s mistakes.”

Including any dissent at all is highly unusual for an action as rote as denying a petition, said Turner. “It seems like she is attempting to bolster the cases of other states and local governments that might be looking to pursue building electrification policies and providing a legal road map for why other courts should find a Berkeley-style ordinance to be lawful,” Turner noted.

In the United States, buildings account for nearly a third of all greenhouse gas emissions. For cities motivated to electrify their buildings, Tuesday’s denial of a rehearing is a “disappointing outcome,” said Jim Dennison, an attorney working on building decarbonization at the Sierra Club. Since the April ruling, several cities in California have already pulled back their own natural gas bans, including Encinitas, Santa Cruz, and San Luis Obispo, to avoid legal risks. Eugene, Oregon, which modeled its policy on Berkeley’s, also withdrew its gas ban in June.

Yet some cities, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Jose, still have natural gas bans on the books. Tuesday’s decision could inspire those cities to take action, but ultimately, whether they decide to halt or maintain their gas bans is up to each individual government, said Turner. It could also depend on the resources they have available to take on potential legal challenges. 

A view of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in June 2017 in San Francisco, California. Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

“Local governments have different appetites for legal risk, and so they chose to navigate this decision and this time in different ways,” Turner said. The legal uncertainty created by the Berkeley decision especially impacts smaller communities that may not have the staff and financial resources to take on potential litigation, she said. “This uncertainty is going to cause some local governments to pull back a bit. And that’s an unfortunate reality of being a local government. They don’t always have the resources that a San Francisco or a Berkeley has to throw behind a challenge like this.”

Both Turner and Dennison emphasized that despite a setback to local gas bans, city officials still have a wide range of options available for electrifying buildings, including building codes and air pollution standards. Dennison highlights Washington state’s recently updated building codes as one legally robust way to reduce emissions from buildings. The codes, which set minimum energy efficiency standards, will require new buildings to achieve the same energy performance as buildings that use electric heat pumps beginning this year. Notably, they offer building owners flexibility in meeting the benchmarks instead of requiring them to install heat pumps or forgo natural gas.

Local governments can also consider setting emissions standards for buildings and appliances, which concern air pollution rather than energy use. That’s an approach taken by New York City, which prohibits new buildings from emitting more than a certain amount of carbon dioxide pollution. Turner notes that state utility regulators can also take steps to limit the expansion of natural gas infrastructure, which could also serve building electrification goals.

“Cities are extremely motivated to address emissions from their buildings, which are an incredibly important source of climate and health-harming pollution,” said Dennison. “And I don’t think that this court order can stand in the way of that progress.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Berkeley’s gas ban is all but dead. What does that mean for other cities? on Jan 5, 2024.

When a small Arizona community called Rio Verde Foothills lost its water supply one year ago, forcing locals to skip showers and eat off paper plates, it became a poster child for unwise desert development. The rural neighborhood of about 2,000 people north of Phoenix had relied on trucked-in water deliveries from the nearby city of Scottsdale, but the city elected to stop deliveries to conserve its own water amid a climate-fueled drought on the Colorado River.

Last month, after months of public debate over how to resolve the crisis in Rio Verde Foothills, the state government approved a deal that will restore permanent water access to the beleaguered community, albeit with much higher bills than residents are used to. But when the new legislative session begins next week, the Republican-led chamber may actually weaken the standards that govern new development, rather than tightening them, clearing the way for thousands more homes to pop up on water-insecure outskirts of Phoenix and Tucson. 

“The broader solutions are tougher, and people may not be ready to contemplate what really fixing the problem would require,” said Priya Sundareshan, a Democratic state senator who represents part of Tucson. 

When Arizona developers build six or more homes on a tract of land, they have to demonstrate that they can supply water to those homes for at least a hundred years. This rule exists to protect home buyers from the kind of land fraud that was notorious in the state for decades, but over time some landowners have found a way around it. The developers of so-called “wildcat” subdivisions split large parcels of land into smaller chunks and sell hundreds of those chunks off one by one, skirting the requirement to ensure a long-term water supply. 

Rio Verde Foothills is one such subdivision. Many residents of the neighborhood have residential wells that pump water from underground. But because there isn’t much water in the area’s aquifers, many others rely on trucks that deliver water from the city of Scottsdale, which has rights to water from the Colorado River. When Scottsdale shut off the water last year, Rio Verde had nowhere to turn for substitute supplies: There was no spare groundwater, and all the water from the Colorado River was spoken for. Locals who found alternate water haulers had to pay monthly bills that were larger than their mortgage payments.

As the media frenzy around Rio Verde Foothills reached a fever pitch last summer, the state legislature passed a bill that forced Scottsdale to provide water to the neighborhood through 2025. A few months later, a state regulator approved a long-term agreement between the community and a large utility called Epcor, which agreed to build a new water standpipe in the neighborhood and import a new water supply from elsewhere in Phoenix. Rio Verde Foothills residents will pay for the $12 million project through water bills that could be double or triple current rates. The deal also limits future growth in the neighborhood, allowing for just 150 additional homes to access the standpipe.

“It’s been an exhausting, exhausting fight for this community, and people are not happy with how much it costs,” said John Hornewer, a Rio Verde resident who runs the neighborhood’s largest water hauling company.

But the state legislature’s fix doesn’t address the larger problems presented by wildcat subdivisions. While Democrats and some Republicans in the legislature sought to add language that would have limited when and how developers can exploit the wildcat loophole, they couldn’t get enough support to send it to the governor’s desk. Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs initially held out for a fix to the loophole — she vetoed an initial bill in May that didn’t tackle the wildcat issue — but she ultimately signed a Rio Verde-focused bill that reached her desk the following month, acknowledging that the neighborhood needed immediate help.

“The bill did not do anything to fix the underlying problem,” said Sundareshan, the state senator from Tucson. “We could find ourselves with many more communities … in the same situation.”

John Hornewer delivers water from his truck to a residential water tank in Rio Verde Foothills, Arizona. The neighborhood lost its water access last year as the Colorado River drought worsened. Frederic J. Brown / AFP via Getty Images

Hobbs has continued to push for broader reform on the wildcat issue. Last year she created a “water policy council” made up of experts and industry leaders and tasked it with alleviating the state’s water woes, including the wildcat loophole. The council released its final recommendations in December, calling on the legislature to clamp down on these subdivisions and give local governments more power to regulate them. It isn’t clear how many such subdivisions exist, but they have been popping up outside Phoenix and Tucson for at least two decades.

Democratic lawmakers will make another push once the state’s legislative session starts next week, but Hobbs’s proposed reforms still face stiff opposition. Many members of the state legislature oppose more government involvement in water regulations, and the state’s home building lobby has fought against previous efforts to clamp down on the kind of lot-splitting that enables wildcat development.

“There’s an appetite for [reform], but I think that will be lost in the shuffle,” said John Kavanagh, a Republican state senator who represents the Rio Verde Foothills area. “The home builders will be aggressively lobbying against a lot-split bill, and you’ve got some members with a more libertarian slant who believe in the right to property being almost unlimited.”

Indeed, home builders are now pushing the legislature to move in the other direction, arguing that the 100-year water supply standard is holding back the state’s economic growth. Back in June, Hobbs’s administration paused new water supply approvals in the Phoenix area, declaring that the city’s aquifers didn’t have enough water to support future development over the next century. This has left several major development projects in limbo, with builders unable to move forward on tens of thousands of homes.

Hobbs’s administration has since moved to loosen the moratorium in response to protest from the real estate industry, and regulators may soon allow builders in fast-growing suburbs like Buckeye to resume construction on stalled projects. But the state’s builders are seeking more comprehensive changes to the 100-year water supply standard: They argue that lawmakers should create an incentive for replacing water-intensive crop fields with residential neighborhoods, which require far less water than large-scale agriculture. The builders also argue that lawmakers should tweak the state’s model for calculating groundwater shortages, which they say is too pessimistic. 

“If the legislature and the governor’s office don’t agree to the necessary changes to resolve this issue this year, that would be very devastating to our housing affordability, our housing supply, and our economy,” said Spencer Kamps, the vice president of legislative affairs for the Home Builders Association of Central Arizona.

The future of the 100-year requirement is likely to take center stage this year, along with a parallel debate over how to regulate the kind of intensive groundwater pumping that has dried up wells and caused land to sink in rural areas such as Cochise County. That issue became so contentious last year that two members of Hobbs’s water policy council with ties to the agriculture industry, which is responsible for some of the most aggressive pumping, resigned before the council even finished its recommendation. 

Until the legislature reforms the wildcat subdivision statute, though, there’s nothing to stop developers from creating more vulnerable neighborhoods in the middle of the desert. Hornewer, the Rio Verde Foothills water hauler, said he’s sure his neighborhood’s crisis will play out again somewhere else.

“It’s probably already happening,” he told Grist.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Will Arizona close a loophole that lets developers build without water? on Jan 5, 2024.

This story was produced by Grist and co-published with El País. A Spanish-language version can be read here. Reporting was supported by the Joan Konner Program in the Journalism of Ideas.

On the morning of June 12, 2022, Ángela Astudillo, then a law student in her mid-20s, grabbed her water bottle and hopped into her red Nissan Juke. The co-founder of Dress Desert, or Desierto Vestido, a textile recycling advocacy nonprofit, and the daughter of tree farmers, Astudillo lives in a gated apartment complex in Alto Hospicio, a dusty city at the edge of the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, with her husband, daughter, bunny, and three aquatic turtles. 

Exiting the compound, Astudillo pinched the wheel, pulled over next to a car on the side of the road, and greeted Bárbara Pino, a fashion professor, and three of her students, who were waiting inside. 

They headed toward a mountain of sand known as El Paso de la Mula. Less than a mile from her home, squinting into the distance, Astudillo saw a thread of smoke rising from its direction. With her in the lead, the two vehicles caravanned toward the dune, the site of the second-largest clothes pile in the world. 

As they got closer to El Paso de La Mula, the thin trail of smoke had expanded into a huge black cloud. Astudillo stopped the car and texted the academics behind her. 

It looks like it’s on fire. Hopefully, it’s not there. :( :( :(

She then dialed them directly and asked, “Do you still want to go?”

A Chilean flag stands in a traffic cone among burned piles of clothing in the Atacama Desert. Fernando Alarcón

Pino, director of Santiago’s Fashion System Observatory at Universidad Diego Portales, had planned this trip for months. Astudillo had volunteered to be their guide. The mound of discarded fabric in the middle of the Atacama weighed an estimated 11,000 to 59,000 tons, equivalent to one or two times the Brooklyn Bridge. 

By the time the team reached the gates of El Paso de la Mula, more than half of the clothes pile was on fire. Smoke obscured everything, hanging like an opaque black curtain. Municipal authorities turned the group away, forbidding them to stay on the premises. But Astudillo knew the landscape, so she directed the team to the dune’s far side, where access was still unimpeded. 

There, the students surveyed the inferno. It was “like a war,” Pino said. She felt waves of heat. Black smoke unspooled from the burning clothes. The air was dense and hard to breathe. Smoke coated the back of their throats and clogged their nostrils with the acrid smell of melting plastic. They covered their faces, trying not to breathe it in. Then the group heard a series of loud pops as mini explosions burst from within the vast expanse of burning garments. 

Ángela Astudilo holds a piece of discarded clothing from the Atacama Desert. Fernando Alarcón

Despite the danger, Pino and her students rummaged, pulling out specimens to examine from among unburned portions of the pile. On prior visits to the clothes dump, Astudillo had uncovered clothing produced by the world’s most well-known brands: Nautica, Adidas, Wrangler, Old Navy, H&M, Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hilfiger, Forever 21, Zara, Banana Republic. Store tags still dangled from many of her findings. The clothes had come to the Atacama from Europe, the United States, Korea, and Japan. Now, as Astudillo began taking pictures and uploading them to Instagram, Pino wandered the mound, horrified and fascinated by the grotesque volume and variety of apparel: ski jackets, ball gowns, bathing suits. She plucked out a rhinestone-encrusted platform stiletto in perfect condition. She crouched to search for its match, but the wind was getting stronger. If it shifted, the team realized, they’d be trapped in the spreading fire. 

For 14 years, no rain has fallen in Alto Hospicio or the surrounding Atacama Desert region. Those dry conditions, coupled with the nonbiodegradable, predominantly synthetic, petroleum-derived fibers that modern clothes are made with, meant that the pile never shrank. Instead, for more than two decades, it grew — metastasized — with every discarded, imported item that was added.

In 2021, six months prior to the fire, a photographer from Agence France Presse, Martín Bernetti, captured a bird’s-eye image of this sprawling mound of apparel, essentially an oil slick, strewn across the edge of the Atacama desert. 

The aerial image was picked up by news outlets across the globe, from the front page of the New York Post to the BBC, and continues to circulate today. But the mountain of clothes depicted by that 2021 drone photo is utterly gone. As Astudillo, Pino, and the three students witnessed, and unwittingly tasted: The blaze tore through the pile, throwing black plumes of toxic ash into the air.

An aerial view of used clothes discarded in the Atacama Desert, in Alto Hospicio, Iquique, Chile, on September 26, 2021. Martin Bernetti / AFP via Getty Images

The town of Alto Hospicio sits on a cliff above the Pacific Ocean, a bedroom community for the seaside vacation city of Iquique below. Imagine if Atlantic City in New Jersey were simultaneously hemmed in and backed by a high Nevada plateau, and if the two locales were connected by a two-lane switchback highway. 

Each day in Iquique’s port, giant cranes pluck containers full of discarded clothing from the decks of ships and deposit them onto flatbed trucks. No one really knows exactly how much clothing passes through the port every year; estimates range from 60,000 to 44 million tons. Next, they head to the nearby Free Trade Zone, known locally as “Zofri,” where trailers back into the warehouses of 52 used-clothes importers and forklift operators transfer sealed bales of clothing, or fardos, inside. 

Chile is the biggest importer of secondhand clothing in South America, and between 2020 and 2021 it was the fastest-growing importer of used clothing in the world. The port of Iquique is an established tax-free zone, incentivizing this booming industry of castaway textiles.

A vendor in Iquique sells secondhand shoes. Muriel Alarcón

From Zofri, bales of clothing are sold, uninspected, to merchants betting that at least some of the items inside are sales-worthy. “When you buy, you are buying with your eyes closed,” one former merchant said. Sometimes 80 percent of the garments in a bale are usable. Sometimes the opposite is true. Because bales are so cheap, however, most merchants need only sell 40 percent to turn a profit. 

According to the global environmental advocacy group Ekō (formerly known as SumofUS), an estimated 85 percent of the used clothing imported into Iquique remains unsold. Chilean federal law states it’s illegal to dispose of textiles. 

Considered Iquique’s backyard, Alto Hospicio is one of the poorest cities in Chile, widely known as a place to abandon pets and dump trash. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the small desert town is where more than a dozen teenage girls mysteriously vanished, until their apprehended killer led authorities to bodies buried in desert graves. 

Manuela Medina, left, and her family pose for a photo near their clothing pile in the Atacama Desert. Fernando Alarcón

In 2001, Manuela Medina*, a former gardener, saw an opportunity in Iquique’s growing textile abundance. Relocating to Alto Hospicio, she established an unauthorized compound on government lands at the base of El Paso de la Mula, the huge sand dune at the far side of an unregulated shantytown. Every few days, she hired a fletero — a driver with a jalopy — to travel the switchback roads, out of the brown dunes of Alto Hospicio, to arrive in the colorful oceanside city of Iquique, which sits a thousand miles north of the country’s capital, Santiago.

Near the dock where cranes unload massive container ships, inside Iquique’s free trade zone, Medina ventured into the contiguous warehouses, asking secondhand clothing importers, “Do you have any garbage?” 

Back at her compound, Medina unloaded her wares in piles on the ground where she had the luxury of storing them indefinitely — the Atacama Desert is one of the driest places on Earth, meaning items don’t undergo normal degradation from elements like rain. Here, Medina sold her piles to merchants and others for $10 each. 

As more and more bales of ropa americana, or secondhand clothes, arrived in Iquique, the clothes flooded importers’ warehouses and overflowed vendors’ stalls in open air markets, including La Quebradilla — one of the largest open air markets in South America, located just a few miles from Medina’s unauthorized compound. 

Fernando Alarcón

Soon, importers and secondhand merchants began to deliver surplus used clothes directly to Medina. Fed by daily truck deliveries, and then by multiple daily tractor trailer load deliveries, Medina’s pile grew.

By 2020, Medina’s gargantuan desert dump had become an open secret in Chile, stretching across dozens of acres. Others followed her model, creating mini-dumps across the desert and along roadsides, but Medina’s pile remained the largest. 

On March 29, 2022, Paulin Silva, an environmental lawyer, stood before the Primer Tribunal Ambiental de Antofagasta, a regional tribunal in northern Chile that specializes in resolving environmental issues within its jurisdiction. She was presenting a lawsuit, brought on behalf of herself as a resident of Iquique, against the municipality and the federal Chilean government for their inaction over the sprawling, unregulated clothes dumps. For her submission of evidence, she asked the tribunal to join her in touring the mound of clothing.

Paulin Silva poses for a photo in an office. She has pushed the government to take action on the illegal clothing dumps near Iquique, Chile. Fernando Alarcón

For weeks, her informal team of supporters (a geographer, her sister, and her brother-in-law) had been documenting the problem, joking among themselves, “In which dump are we going to party tonight?”

Since obtaining her law degree, Silva has prosecuted a handful of environmental cases, but this one was personal, and she felt empowered to tackle it: “I have the education; I am a lawyer; I can do something,” she said. She’d grown up in northern Chile, a pencil thin country bordered by the Pacific Ocean. Her father is from Alto Hospicio and her mother is from Iquique. At 35, she’s several years older than Astudillo, the co-founder of the nonprofit Dress Desert, whom Silva asked to be a witness for the case. When Silva was a child, she observed people dumping clothes everywhere — the streets, yards, and city squares. Because this was the only place she knew for so much of her life, she thought, “It’s normal for people to live with … garbage accumulated around them.” 

This local “clothes-blindness” was documented by Astudillo’s colleague, Bastián Barria, an engineering student and her co-founder of Dress Desert. In November 2020, he and others conducted a survey to ascertain local attitudes regarding the clothing waste. Of the almost 400 people in Alto Hospicio he surveyed, representing less than 1 percent of the town’s population, more than half did not think there was any issue.

When Silva was 18, she moved a thousand miles south, to Valparaiso in central Chile, to study law and that was where she remained until the pandemic, when she returned home. That’s when she realized the dump situation had worsened. Exponentially. 

Shoes pile up in an illegal clothing dump in the Atacama Desert. Fernando Alarcón

During the decades between Silva’s girlhood and today, clothing production worldwide doubled, while utilization — the number of times an item of clothing is worn before it is thrown away — declined by 36 percent. Countries like Chile, Haiti, and Uganda became depositories for fast fashion discards. In 2021 alone, Chile imported more than 700,000 tons of new and used clothing — the weight equivalent of 70 Eiffel Towers.

“Even if we stopped clothing production throughout the world tonight,” said Francisca Gajardo, an Iquique-born fashion designer, “we still have more garments than we need or that the Earth can safely hold. It won’t go away nicely, and we’re not stopping today.” 

Nine days after the giant fires, around 4 p.m., Silva was having a light meal, the Chilean equivalent of afternoon tea known as once (pronounced “on-say”), with her family in northern Chile. A few days prior, the Primer Tribunal Ambiental de Antofagasta had informed her it was ready to view her case evidence by touring the clothes pile in person. Silva took out her phone to share the good news on Instagram with Desierto Vestido, but before she could, she saw the images of the burning clothes Desierto Vestido had just uploaded and shared. 

Silva sprang from her chair to process what was happening to the evidence in her case just a few miles away. She suspected why the court had been willing to view the landfill: “Because obviously the matter was burned,” she told Grist.

While no official cause of the fires has ever been reported, local residents claim it began late on Saturday night or in the early hours of Sunday. Days later, toxic air still clung to the area. Astudillo, who visited the site regularly, described the pile as “volcanic” — with clothes smoldering under the sand, venting smoke full of textile chemicals from synthetic materials. She warned, “You can’t be outside for long.” 

In the days following the fire, on June 22, instead of leading the tour of the prosecutorial evidence, Silva filed a statement to the Primer Tribunal Ambiental de Antofagasta: “With sadness and shame I inform you that 11,000 tons of clothes in the textile dump were burned.” 

Graffiti in one of the most dangerous shantytowns in Chile, near Manuela Medina’s home. The word “votar” is likely supposed to be “botar,” which in Spanish means “throw.” But in its current form, it reads, “Do not vote trash. It will be reported.” Fernando Alarcón

Although Paulin provided the court with Dress Desert’s smartphone video recordings of the clothes in flames, the defense argued that the Instagram account where they’d posted the videos could not be verified and confirmed. Lacking a certifiable timestamp, the films were inadmissible.

One year later, in August 2023, the Primer Tribunal Ambiental de Antofagasta called a trial hearing so that all parties involved in the case — the Consejo de Defensa del Estado, the body that judicially represents the state in Chile, the municipality of Alto Hospicio, and Silva — could present evidence.

During the hearing, the Mayor at Alto Hospicio, Patricio Ferreira, said that one of his priorities is to “transform this problem into an opportunity to generate employment.” He alluded to discussions he had with European businessmen to explore initiatives related to recycling.

Silva got people to testify in her favor, activists and academics who have given statements to different media outlets about the environmental problem generated by the textile landfill in the Chilean desert. But on the day of the hearing, none of them arrived.

“At the end of the day, in practice, I am alone in this action,” she said.

Chile’s government recently voted to adopt recycling measures that make certain producers accountable for their waste. Known as the extended producer responsibility law, or REP using its Spanish acronym, the legislation passed in 2016 and took effect in January 2023. Currently, Chilean companies that make tires and packaging (such as bags, plastics, paper or cardboard, cans and glass) must comply. 

Eventually, according to the Ministry of the Environment, Chile intends to incorporate clothing and textiles as a priority product into the REP law.

However, in the case of clothes, many describe the REP as a “paper solution” that lacks tangible enforcement, said Pino, from the Universidad Diego Portales.

In parallel, the Ministry of the Environment is developing a circular economy strategy for textile waste. Unlike the REP, the agency crafts public policy for the public and private sectors to prevent overproduction. 

The ministry has been holding workshops and conversations to collect input from stakeholders, including academics, business executives, retailers and nonprofit leaders. It is also tabulating the results of a preliminary survey on consumer clothes-buying habits. The details of this circular economy strategy is expected to be published in March this year.

At the minister’s invitation, Pino has shared her fashion expertise — both in the markets and in the desert — with the group. “These two things are wonderful initiatives,” she said about both efforts, but she lamented that they fail to address the issue of used clothes. 

Bárbara Pino, director of the Fashion System Observatory, stands on the campus of the Universidad Diego Portales in Santiago, Chile. Fernando Alarcón

A decade ago, when the REP was first being discussed, Denisse Morán, president of the Tarapacá Recyclers and the head of ServiREC, a recycling cooperative that operates within Iquique’s free trade zone, sought out her local representative to request that the law apply to both clothing producers and clothing importers. 

“Oh, because you are from Iquique?” she recalled him asking her. 

“Not only because I am from Iquique,” she replied, “but because we all wear clothes.”

For years, many residents in Alto Hospicio saw the piles of textiles as more of an opportunity than an eyesore or environmental threat, something that supported the local economy. 

When Jazmín Yañez arrived in town from southern Chile in 2018 almost penniless and on the brink of homelessness, for example, someone gave her a few cast-off garments and household garbage — from towels, kitchen implements to furniture — to sell. Ever since, Yañez, now 28, has waged a zealous campaign to salvage, fix, and reutilize all “waste” materials. She operates an informal store from the kitchen of her house called Stop Recicla: “Your trash is my treasure,” where she sells, exchanges, and gifts items such as rugs, used clothing, school supplies, costumes, and electronics to impoverished mothers, like she once was.

Jazmín Yañez poses next to a pile of secondhand clothing that she will sell in her home-based store, Stop Recicla. Fernando Alarcón

It’s this trash/treasure duality that kept Astudillo and other locals from viewing the region’s booming used clothing trade as a problem. But six months before the fires, in January 2022, Nathalia Tavolieri, a Brazilian journalist, invited Astudillo to El Paso de La Mula, where she encountered Manuela Medina’s mountain for the first time. 

Astudillo had seen numerous clothing dumps strewn and mounded throughout the desert, but nothing as big as this immense tangle of blouses and pants. “It was terrible,” she said, weeping as she recalled her first visit. “Maybe if I had been older, maybe I could have done more things [to stop this from happening].”

The experience galvanized her. She had already co-founded her nonprofit Dress Desert, or Desierto Vestido, two years before, to raise awareness and creatively respond to the country’s burgeoning waste clothing issue. As part of the project’s efforts, she and 20 other members host workshops and conversations. They upcycle castaway materials into new garments and craft household items. Seeing the vastness of Medina’s clothing pile, Astudillo stepped up her resolve, because “many people don’t see — or don’t want to see.”

“It was very, very hard,” she said, “to know that we live in a place that is so polluted and damaged by everyone’s waste.” Several months later, Astudillo brought Gajardo, the clothes designer and a fellow Iquiquean, to the dump, and gained an ally in her efforts. Despite growing up and shopping at the region’s numerous outdoor secondhand clothes markets, Gajardo was appalled by the scope of the waste. She developed rashes from rummaging among the fabrics. 

A garment emerges in stages from the desert sand in the Atacama Desert. Fernando Alarcón

“The fact that we have a desert, the fact that there’s a place to receive this, doesn’t mean that the place has to become the dump of the world,” she said. Since then, Gajardo’s conviction to never design clothes from virgin materials has deepened. Additionally, through her brand You Are the New Generation, she offers workshops in reusing garments, and visited Kansas City, Missouri, last year through the U.S. State Department’s Young Leaders of the Americas Initiative to teach people to make new clothes by harvesting old ones.

Other entrepreneurs have attempted to turn the clothes problem into revenue, but have faced a series of setbacks. 

Franklin Zepeda is a celebrated Chilean entrepreneur who toured Europe’s textile recycling plants before returning to the region in 2013 to establish Ecofibre, now known as Procitex. (Its name is an acronym meaning Proceso Circular en Textil in Spanish).

With seed funding from CORFO, the Chilean economic development agency, and later from private capital, Zepeda was able to route textiles imported into Iquique to his plant, where they were disassembled, shredded, doused with flame retardant, and transformed into insulation panels. Zepeda got praise for this work in several major international news outlets, but he shuttered his plant in Alto Hospicio in 2021 because of unfavorable economics, including the taxes on shipping the insulation panels to other regions of the country.

Dario Blanco, manager of the ZOFRI User Association AG (AUZ), a trade association that brings together businessmen from the Iquique free zone, believes that the solution to the region’s problem of discarded clothing is out there — it will just take the right company and policies. And there are plenty of entrepreneurs, fashion designers, and environmentalists working on the issue of textile waste, both in Chile and internationally.

Men work at a factory that recycles used textiles discarded in the Atacama Desert for wooden isolation panels for the walls of social housing, in Alto Hospicio, Iquique, Chile in 2021. Martin Bernetti / AFP via Getty Images

As Bloomberg reported in May, New York, California, Sweden, and the Netherlands are developing legislation similar to Chile’s extended producer responsibility law that went into effect this year, mandating that the fashion industry fund recycling programs via tariffs calibrated to the quantity of garments produced.

In order to help New York City uphold its existing law limiting or forbidding textiles in the waste stream, FabScrap, a nonprofit founded in 2016 by a former New York Department of Sanitation worker, receives 7,000 pounds of pre-consumer textile waste each week. Sorted by volunteers, the nonsynthetic scrap items are sent to a New Jersey facility that shreds the material, producing “shoddy,” a stuffing used to fill punching bags, sofas, and soft toys.

A Czech company called RETEX has been attempting to bring its fabric-macerating technology to Alto Hospicio. Blanco says that in exchange for securing a contract with Chile, the company promised to hire local workers. But, Blanco admitted, negotiations like these have fallen through in the past. For example, he said, a Spain-based company, Egreen, planned to open a fabric-waste processing plant, but the deal was scrapped late last year.

Read Next How clothing forms the fabric of society, both past and future Eve Andrews

The governor’s sustainability adviser at the Regional Government of Tarapaca, Pablo Zambra, recently formed a 25-member committee that includes stakeholders such as Astudillo and Barria from Dress Desert and Morán, the president of the Tarapacá Recyclers, to publicize economic incentives for circular economy initiatives. Collectively, they hope RETEX will succeed in doing what Zepeda’s company failed to do: turn a profit. As of this writing, no importers are involved.

Meanwhile, every day, container ships continue to offload more cargo. 

In the fall of 2022, Alto Hospicio’s mayor, Ferreira, acknowledged the unsolved problem but blamed clothing manufacturers, citing a “lack of global awareness of ethical responsibility.” 

“Our land has been sacrificed,” he said. 

Pino agrees that the fashion industry and its consumers are culpable. “We have to worry about the complete cycle: before, during, and after our clothes,” she wrote in an editorial published in 2021.

She believes a more comprehensive solution is necessary, including regulating the entry of textile materials to Chile, educating consumers about prolonging garments’ lives, promoting Chile’s homegrown fashion industry, and supporting research to design new uses for fabric waste. 

Ecocitex, founded in 2020 by engineer Rosario Hevia in Santiago, has sprung up as another Chilean company addressing a surfeit of garments.

Ecocitex operates in a manner contrary to the country’s organized and informal secondhand clothes markets. It invites people to recycle high-quality clothing or pay $1.50 per kilogram to leave poor quality clothing and walk away empty-handed.

Bastián Barria, co-founder of the organization Dress Desert with Ángela Astudillo, recently joined a government-sponsored committee to help push forward circular economy initiatives in Chile. Fernando Alarcón

During the pandemic, Andrea Espinoza Pérez, a civil industrial engineer at the University of Santiago, initiated a study on the ecological impacts of projects like Ecocitex. She wanted to know: Did factory-processed, used clothing produce fewer emissions than the original clothing manufacturing process? With data provided by Ecocitex’s founder Hevia, scientists determined that the clothes deconstruction process is effective because it keeps waste clothes out of landfills, and it replaces the demand for virgin materials. While Ecocitex’s procedure is also energy-intensive, the study found, it uses just 73 percent of the energy required to produce the same product from raw materials. 

Meanwhile, neither Zepeda’s Procitex nor Hevia’s Ecocitex in Chile, nor Fabscrap’s efforts in New York and Philadelphia, have matched the direct profitability of Medina’s now-defunct business. (Medina has started a new business storing tires.) In fact, all have relied heavily on a variety of underwriting measures, including subsidies, nonprofit funding, subscriptions, or volunteer labor to generate their products. 

In recent years, Zepeda has earned his living as an employee of Chile’s largest retailer, CENCOSUD. He collects surplus clothes donated by customers, and produces insulation panels for buildings that are sold by the same retailer. 

As for Ecocitex, in June, the business caught fire and the building was destroyed. The cause is still under investigation. Undeterred, Hevia has launched a campaign to rebuild. Meanwhile, she is raising funds by selling blankets made from recycled fibers to a mining company.

By last January, the height of the Chilean summer, the gigantic, unsightly clothes dump at El Paso de la Mula, the one Agence France Presse had shown the world, was nowhere to be found. 

All that remained was a smattering of ashes and the tread marks of bulldozers. Here and there, across Medina’s unofficial backyard, small piles of garments peeked out of the sand dunes. But according to municipal officials, dumping and burning continues. Rey, an indigent man who lives by the side of a desert road in a blue and yellow tent emblazoned with “National Geographic,” attests that he and others accept money from nonprofit refuse-disposal contractors or freelance truckers in exchange for setting fires to whatever waste is discharged from a truck. This way, the trucker can keep more of his hauling profits, which would otherwise be whittled down by the official dump fees.

In the surroundings of Alto Hospicio, in the Atacama Desert, new landfills emerge every day. What arrives is burned by individuals living there. Some of them receive payment for doing it. Fernando Alarcón

Astudillo says that beyond the limits of Manuela’s dune, there are as many as 200 micro-garbage dumps, and consequently, miles and miles of ashes in the desert — not just scattered over the ground, but also in the air. She told Grist in late December that this is an everyday thing. “You go out to buy bread and you smell the burning smell. You smell the materials that make up the clothes: oil and plastic. After 5 in the afternoon, I no longer let my 7-year-old daughter leave the apartment, and I close the windows to prevent smoke from coming in.” She also confirmed the abandoning of clothes continues: “They throw it away, they burn it immediately.”

On December 12, the Primer Tribunal Ambiental de Antofagasta issued its final ruling in the case with Silva, commissioning a unit of experts to carry out an on-site report on the accumulation of textile waste in different areas of Alto Hospicio, and to propose a solution to the accumulation of waste.

The municipality of Alto Hospicio, which claims it does not have the workforce to adequately address the problem, has also installed nearly 100 cameras along the main roads as a means of tracking polluters, and has begun doling out fines as high as $350 for illegal dumping. So far, trucks have been apprehended transporting domestic and industrial garbage, as well as bulky items such as mattresses, washing machines, and furniture. 

Drone footage recorded by Cheng Hwa, one of Pino’s students, the day of the June 2022 fires captures the municipality fighting what was in essence an oil fire. Hwa, who grew up in Iquique and now works in tech for the hospitality industry, had long been aware of the desert dumps but didn’t comprehend the magnitude until he witnessed them at close range. 

Fire blazes through Manuela Medina’s clothes dump in the Atacama Desert on June 12, 2022. Cheng Hwa

He’s haunted by what his drone footage made visible. “How the desert of sand starts to turn into a desert of clothes,” he said. “It has no limit; there is no closure … Clothes begin to appear on the ground until the horizon is completely covered.”

In Iquique, he often glances up toward the high plateau of Alto Hospicio. “You can’t see the dump, but [you can see] the column of smoke on days that [clothes] burn. That cloud of smoke lets you know … It makes [the issue] visible on a day-to-day basis.”

Thirty miles south of Iquique, toward the city’s main airport, on her family’s farm, Astudillo and her parents drop pieces of used clothing on the ground, but in a purposeful way. Over the past 20 years, Astudillo’s father has experimented with growing trees in the infertile, saline soils. Many of his efforts failed until he began using certain fabrics to mulch his trees. This improves the quality of the soil, enabling it to retain moisture. For the past year, Astudillo has been working with one of the Zofri importers, who asked to remain anonymous. She consults with his staff about the clothing bales and recommends ways of sorting the material into specific categories based on fiber content, some of which she collects personally. Those items — a pair of cotton shorts, a T-shirt, a blouse — become mulch for a pine and eucalyptus forest rising in the desert.

Recently, as Astudillo was leaving the farm, she stashed a few perennials in her truck and drove them to Manuela’s compound in Paso de La Mula. Just beyond Medina’s courtyard, where sky- blackening fires had once burned, Astudillo troweled a small hole for the plants. As she dug, she dislodged several odd socks and a faded blue sweatshirt — discarded clothes that had survived the fires, but were buried by bulldozers. 

Astudillo filled the hole, amending the desert sand with compost and garden soil. “For me it’s like a Band-Aid for a wound that is so big in that place,” she said. Then she tucked in cardinal flowers — a native plant whose petals resemble shooting flames. 

Editor’s note: During visits to her compound in Alto Hospicio, Manuela, the owner of the secondhand clothing dump, told Grist reporters her name was Manuela Medina. However, other outlets have used the surname Olivos. Her legal name is Manuela de Los Angeles Medina Olivos. 

This story has been updated.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A mountain of used clothes appeared in Chile’s desert. Then it went up in flames. on Jan 4, 2024.

When Kira Roberts moved to Juneau, Alaska, last summer, she immediately noticed how the town of 31,000 changes when the cruise ships dock each morning. Thousands of people pour in, only to vanish by evening. As the season winds down in fall, the parade of buses driving through her neighborhood slows, and the trails near her home and the vast Mendenhall Glacier no longer teem with tourists.

“That unique rhythm of Juneau is really striking to me,” she said. “It’s just kind of crazy to think that this is all a mile from my house.”

But Mendenhall is shrinking quickly: The 13-mile-long glacier has retreated about a mile in the past 40 years. Getting all those tourists to Juneau — some 1.5 million this summer by cruise ship alone — requires burning the very thing contributing to its retreat: fossil fuels.

In an effort to mitigate a portion of that CO2, some of those going whale watching or visiting the glacier are asked to pay a few dollars to counter their emissions. The money goes to the Alaska Carbon Reduction Fund, but instead of buying credits from some distant (and questionable) offset project, the nonprofit spends that cash installing heat pumps, targeting residents like Roberts who rely upon oil heating systems. 

Heat pumps are “a no-brainer” in Juneau’s mild (for Alaska) winters, said Andy Romanoff, who administers the fund. Juneau’s grid relies on emissions-free hydropower, so electricity is cheaper and less polluting than oil heat. They also save residents money — Roberts said she was paying around $500 a month on heating oil, and has seen her electricity bill climb just $30.

“The financial difference is huge,” she said.

Programs from Monterey, California, to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, have tried using similar models to finance local renewable or energy-efficiency projects, and carbon offsets for flying and other activities are nothing new. But most of the voluntary market for such things is run by large companies backing distant projects. The fund in Juneau is eager to capitalize on the massive tourist interest in its backyard.

The program, which until recently was called the Juneau Carbon Offset Fund, started in 2019 when members of the advocacy organization Renewable Juneau were discussing how to help Juneau achieve its goal of having renewables provide 80 percent of the city’s energy needs by 2045. The organization’s existing heat pump programs were reaching only the “low-hanging fruit,” Romanoff said: People who had money and were ready to switch for climate reasons alone. It envisioned the fund as a way to get the devices — and the fossil fuel reduction they provide — to more residents. 

Some 1.5 million tourists visited Juneau aboard cruise ships this summer. Many of them visited Mendenhall Glacier, which has retreated about a mile in the past 40 years due to climate change. Wolfgang Kaehler/LightRocket via Getty Images

Romanoff, who also is executive director of the nonprofit Alaska Heat Smart, is aware of the reputational hit carbon offsets have taken lately, but believes the fund’s focus on heat pumps, and working locally, provides transparency and accountability. “It’s a carbon cost that people could actually relate to and understand,” he said.

Many voluntary offset projects overestimate the emissions they’re preventing, sometimes by as much as five to 10 times, said Barbara Haya, director of the Berkeley Carbon Trading Project. “Project developers are making methodological choices that give them more credits instead of less,” she said, and those verifying the claims are not enforcing conservative estimates when there’s uncertainty.

The Alaska Carbon Reduction Fund uses three years of utility bills to determine how much oil a recipient was burning before getting a heat pump. It’s paid for 41 installations since 2019, at an average cost of $7,000, and estimates the devices will prevent 3,125 metric tons of carbon emissions over their 15-year lifespans. Those calculations, plus a subsidy from non-tourism donations, brings its carbon price to $46 a ton. 

That’s more expensive than many voluntary credits, but in line with what Haya said are higher-quality projects. “That looks like the cost of real mitigation,” she said. A more fundamental issue is proving any offset project wouldn’t have happened on its own, Haya said. 

Romanoff believes their project meets that condition because the heat pumps go to residents who earn less than 80 percent of the local median income. One of the first recipients, Garri Constantine, lived on far below that when his system was installed. In the three years since, Constantine has become an evangelist for the technology, in part because he no longer spends $300 a month on firewood, trading it for a $50 monthly increase in his electricity bill. 

“I just don’t understand why these things haven’t taken off like wildfire,” he said.

Although the fund has money for future installations, Romanoff said the speed with which it can work is limited by a nationwide shortage of installers. Most of its donations came from the nearby gold mine and the Juneau guiding company Above and Beyond Alaska, but Allen Marine, a regional tour operator, started pitching the fund to passengers this summer and now offers an opt-in donation when booking online. The company considered the fund an opportunity to “give back to the communities that we operate in,” said Travis Mingo, VP of operations. As part of the partnership, the carbon reduction fund agreed to start funding heat pumps in other Allen Marine destinations, like Ketchikan and Sitka.

A much smaller company, Wild Coast Excursions, includes the offset in its prices. When owner Peter Nave’s plan for summer tours on the local ski mountain fell through, he shifted to bear viewing and alpine hiking trips, some of which are far enough away to require helicopter rides. Climate change is especially visible for Nave, a Juneau native who’s seen the dramatic changes in Mendenhall up close and has worked as an avalanche forecaster. He’s covering a 125 percent offset of the climate impact of those excursions, labeling his company “carbon-negative.” He estimates that will end up being about 1 percent of the price of each tour. In his mind, it’s simply a cost of doing business.

“I kind of rationalized that if I could offset more than we would use, then I could feel a little bit better about taking on [the helicopter] strategy,” he said.

He’s skeptical of offsets in general, but the tangibility of this program made a difference. “I could see the reduction happening, because I know the heat pumps work, my friends have them, people I know install them,” he said.

Wild Coast Excursions’ contribution to the carbon reduction fund in the first year is unlikely to cover even one heat pump, however. Including cruise ships or major airlines in the program would make a far more significant dent in Juneau’s emissions. Romanoff said his organization had an initial conversation with a local representative of a major cruise company, but was told it wouldn’t participate if the fund only benefits Juneau and the offsets weren’t verified by a third party.

The Alaska Carbon Reduction Fund began pursuing verification with Verra, the world’s largest certifier of voluntary credits by volume, but walked away because of the cost and its own discomfort over negative press coverage. “We could install five or six heat pumps with that money,” Romanoff said.

Offsets are one tool cruise companies consider “on a case-by-case basis,” to hit their own emissions goals, said Lanie Downs, a spokeswoman for Cruise Lines International Association Alaska. 

Carnival Plc, which owns three cruise companies operating in Alaska, said it will consider carbon offsets only if energy efficiency options have been exhausted. The other two major cruise lines that regularly dock in Juneau did not respond to requests for comment, but do list offset purchases in their annual sustainability reports.

While the city charges cruise lines a per-head passenger fee, that revenue can be used only for specific projects in the port area. Alexandra Pierce, Juneau’s tourism manager, said the city has “never formally proposed any emissions fees,” on cruise ships, but pointed to the industry’s involvement in efforts to reduce cruise line emissions and install electric shore power, the marine equivalent of stopping idling emissions.

Allen Marine has “started discussions” about including an offset fee in its tours sold through cruise lines. “As we go through contract renewals, it will actually start to snowball effect the amount of money we’re able to receive for this program,” Mingo said. But ultimately, that leaves the bulk of tourists’ emissions — the cruises — unaccounted for.

Romanoff gets a few emails a year from people in other parts of Alaska and the Lower 48 interested in setting up their own offset funds. He thinks his organization’s model could be replicated in places with plenty of oil heating systems to replace. That said, a carbon price based on replacing gas-powered heat might be too expensive for most people, he said.

But in the Alaskan panhandle, he thinks a “groundswell” of support from small businesses could make a difference in getting the cruise lines on board. “Once we build that arsenal to a certain size, then I think that’ll speak pretty loud and clear,” he said.

This story has been updated.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline In Juneau, Alaska, a carbon offset project that’s actually working on Jan 4, 2024.

Last year, climate change came into sharp relief for much of the world: The planet experienced its hottest 12-month period in 125,000 years. Flooding events inundated communities from California to East Africa to India. A heat wave in South America caused temperatures to spike above 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the middle of winter, and a heat dome across much of the southern United States spurred a 31-day streak in Phoenix of 110 degree-plus temperatures. The formation of an El Niño, the natural phenomenon that raises temperatures globally, intensified extreme weather already strengthened by climate change. The U.S. alone counted 25 billion-dollar weather disasters in 2023 — more than any other year. 

Yet this devastation was met by some of the largest gains in climate action to date. World leaders agreed for the first time to “transition away” from oil and gas at the annual United Nations climate summit, hosted last month by the United Arab Emirates. Funds and incentives from President Joe Biden’s signature climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act, started to roll out to companies and municipalities. Electric vehicle sales skyrocketed, thousands of young people signed up for the first-ever American Climate Corps, and companies agreed to pay billions of dollars to remove harmful chemicals called PFAS from drinking water supplies.

As we enter a new year, we asked Grist reporters what big stories they’re watching on their beats, 24 predictions for 2024. Their forecasts depict a world on the cusp of change in regard to climate — both good and bad, and often in tandem. Here’s what we’re keeping an eye on, from hard-won international financial commitments, to battles over mining in-demand minerals like lithium, to the expansion of renewable energy.

Politics & Policy Energy Business & Technology Environmental Justice Land Use Climate Impacts Protesters hold placards during a climate march in New York City last September. Photo by Ryan Rahman/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images Politics & Policy A new climate corps will turn young people’s anxiety into action

The American Climate Corps will officially kick off in the summer of 2024, sending 20,000 18- to 26-year-olds across the country to install solar projects, mitigate wildfire risk, and make homes more energy-efficient. President Biden’s New Deal-inspired program is modeled after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Climate Conservation Corps and attracted 100,000 applicants. As it rolls out, the climate corps will continue to draw criticism from the left for low wages and ageism, and from the right for being a “made-up government work program … for young liberal activists.” Yet the program will remain popular with the public, bolstering towns’ resilience to weather disasters and training thousands of young people to help fill the country’s shortage of skilled workers needed for decarbonization.

Kate Yoder Staff writer examining the intersections of climate, language, history, culture, and accountability Despite rising temperatures, climate change takes a backseat during the 2024 election

Although more than a decade of surveys and polls show that a growing proportion of Americans are concerned about climate change, it has never been a defining issue in a general election — and will likely remain that way in 2024, at least on the main stage. Put simply, there are too many immediate concerns that will dominate the campaign trail as President Joe Biden faces off against the Republican nominee — most likely former President Donald Trump: Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine, Israel’s war against Hamas, the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the fight for abortion rights, new charges against Biden’s son, Hunter, and, of course, the numerous criminal charges against Trump. Biden may herald his signature climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act, in his own messaging, but climate change is unlikely to cross party lines.

Zoya Teirstein Staff writer covering politics and the intersection between climate change and health A climate reparations fund gets off the ground

During COP28, the U.N. climate conference that took place in Dubai last year, countries agreed to set up a climate reparations fund on an interim basis at the World Bank. The fund was a longtime priority of developing countries and climate justice advocates who argued that nations that had contributed negligibly to a warming planet were facing the consequences. This year, the World Bank is expected to set up the fund and begin disbursing money to poor nations. Board members will be selected, an executive director will be appointed, decisions about how countries can access the money will be made, and money will begin flowing to those in need. During COP28, wealthy countries chipped in more than $650 million to the fund. More money will also fill the coffers this year.

Naveena Sadasivam Senior staff writer covering environmental justice and accountability ‘Greenhushing’ spreads as companies seek to dodge lawsuits

Just a few years ago, splashy corporate climate promises were everywhere. Even oil companies promised to cut their emissions. But there won’t be as many misleading advertisements touting companies’ climate progress in 2024. Amid new regulations against false environmental marketing and a pileup of greenwashing lawsuits, more corporations will join in hiding their climate commitments to avoid scrutiny. This trend of “greenhushing” ramped up in 2023, when 1 in 5 companies declined to publicly release their sustainability targets, a threefold increase from the prior year. While this makes it harder to see what companies are doing, California’s new “anti-greenwashing” law, which went into effect on January 1, will tackle the transparency problem by requiring companies to disclose their carbon emissions.

Kate Yoder Staff writer examining the intersections of climate, language, history, culture, and accountability A global treaty to end plastic pollution faces delays

Delegates from around the world have been working to finalize a U.N. treaty by the end of 2024 that will “end plastic pollution.” They’ve had three negotiating sessions so far, and two more are scheduled for later this year. Despite signs of progress, petrochemical industry interests have resisted the most ambitious proposals to limit plastic production — they’d prefer a treaty focused on cleaning up plastic litter and improving plastic recycling rates. After countries failed to make significant headway at the most recent round of talks, it’s now possible that an extended deadline will be needed to deliver the final treaty. To some involved in the talks, that’s OK if it’ll mean a stronger agreement. But the pressure is still on, as every year without a treaty means more unchecked plastic pollution.  

Joseph Winters Staff writer covering plastics, pollution, and the circular economy Employees of NY State Solar, a residential and commercial photovoltaic-systems company, install solar panels on a roof in Massapequa, New York, in 2022. AP Photo/John Minchillo Energy Expect a deluge of new household electrification and efficiency rebates

When the Inflation Reduction Act passed in 2022, some decarbonization incentives were quickly accessible — such as tax credits for solar and heat pump installation — but others have taken longer to kick in. The wait, however, is almost over, and 2024 is set to see a slew of new, or expanded, opportunities come online. The Inflation Reduction Act earmarked $8.8 billion for residential electrification and energy-use reduction, especially in low-income households.Think things like induction cooktops and energy-efficient clothes dryers, which don’t currently have federally funded rebates. The Department of Energy is in the process of allocating funding to participating states, which will be in charge of getting the money into Americans’ pockets.

Tik Root Senior staff writer focusing on the clean energy transition A push for public power takes root in communities nationwide

Across the country, close to a dozen communities are exploring ways to replace their investor-owned electric utilities with publicly owned ones. Advocates say they want to lower electricity costs, improve reliability, and speed up a clean energy transition. While a referendum in Maine to create a statewide publicly owned utility failed this past November, supporters elsewhere are just getting started. Next year, a group in San Diego could succeed in getting a vote for a municipal utility on the ballot. Decorah, Iowa, is contemplating a similar vote, and ongoing efforts could gain traction in San Francisco, the South San Joaquin Irrigation District in California, New Mexico, and Rochester, New York.

Akielly Hu News and politics reporting fellow Puerto Rico becomes be a U.S. leader in residential-solar energy adoption

While the nationwide rate of residential-solar installations is expected to shrink by more than 10 percent next year, due to interest rates and changes in California’s net-metering rules, installations show no sign of slowing down in Puerto Rico. The archipelago of 1.2 million households already installs 3,400 residential rooftop solar and battery-storage systems per month. In spring 2024, the Energy Department will begin deploying $440 million in residential-solar funding, which they say will be enough for about 30,000 homes. Analysts predict that by 2030, one-quarter of Puerto Rico households will have photovoltaic systems, though that depends in part on whether Puerto Rico passes a pending bill that would protect net metering until then.

Gabriela Aoun Angueira Climate solutions reporter who helms The Beacon, Grist’s solutions-oriented newsletter Workers walk the assembly line of Model Y electric vehicles at Tesla’s factory in Berlin in 2022. Patrick Pleul/picture alliance via Getty Images Business & Technology Changes to the federal tax credit will improve EV access for lower-income drivers

As of January 1, consumers can redeem the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean-vehicle tax credit directly at car dealerships. Last year, the $7,500 incentive for new electric vehicles and $4,000 for previously owned ones were only available as a credit, meaning that car buyers had to wait until they filed their taxes to get any benefit. The point-of-sale rebate will make getting a clean vehicle more accessible to buyers who can’t afford a hefty down payment, or whose income is too low to owe taxes. But their model options will also shrink — the Treasury Department just proposed rules disqualifying cars with battery components or minerals that come from countries deemed hostile to the U.S.

Gabriela Aoun Angueira Climate solutions reporter who helms The Beacon, Grist’s solutions-oriented newsletter Carbon-capture tech will continue to boom (and be controversial)

In some ways, it was a mixed year for carbon capture. While the world’s largest carbon-capture plant broke ground in Texas, the builders of a major carbon dioxide pipeline — which would be used to transport captive emissions to their final destination underground — canceled the project in the face of regulatory pushback. Climate activists have also long been skeptical of carbon capture as an industry ruse to keep burning fossil fuels. Overall, though, the carbon-capture market is surging on the tailwinds of largely favorable government policies in recent years. The use of the technology is also spreading beyond traditional sectors, such as natural gas facilities, into other industrial arenas, including cement, steel, and iron manufacturing. Next year will bring some continued hiccups but, overwhelmingly, continued growth.

Tik Root Senior staff writer focusing on the clean energy transition Republicans ramp up their war on “woke” ESG investing

An ongoing Republican crusade against ESG investing — shorthand for the environmental, social, and governance criteria investors use to evaluate companies — could end up costing retirees and insurers millions in lost returns next year. GOP lawmakers claim that considering climate risks while making investments imposes “woke” values and limits investment returns. Yet anti-ESG laws passed in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas last year were estimated to have cost taxpayers up to hundreds of millions of dollars. That’s partly because most Wall Street banks and businesses still employ ESG strategies. The backlash could continue through next year’s election — presidential candidates Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy have both taken strong anti-ESG positions.

Akielly Hu News and politics reporting fellow Unions expand their fight for electric vehicle worker protections

United Auto Workers recently won provisions for electric vehicle employees after a sweeping strike at Detroit’s Big Three carmakers — Ford, Stellantis, and General Motors. Now, the union has launched organizing campaigns at 13 non-union shops, including at EV leaders like Tesla and at other companies just getting into the EV space, such as Volkswagen and Hyundai. Next year, these campaigns will begin to go public, with resulting walkouts, negotiations, and expected union-busting tactics. Such efforts have failed in the past, and some companies have announced wage increases to entice workers away from a potential union drive, but UAW has already announced thousands of new member sign-ups and filed labor grievances against several companies, signaling a hard-headed approach that may win new contracts to protect workers as the auto industry increasingly shifts toward EVs.

Katie Myers Climate solutions reporting fellow A ConocoPhillips refinery abuts a residential area in the Wilmington neighborhood of Los Angeles in 2022. Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images Environmental Justice The EPA will back away from using civil rights law to protect residents

In 2020, a federal judge ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to start investigating the complaints it receives under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race or national origin in any program that gets funding from the federal government. Since then, communities around the country have attempted to use the law to achieve environmental justice in their backyards. But after the agency dropped its highest profile civil rights case in Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley” following a lawsuit from the state attorney general, advocates worry that the legal avenue won’t fulfill its promise. In 2024, it’s likely that the EPA will pursue Title VI complaints in states with cooperative environment agencies, but shy away from pressuring industry-friendly states like Louisiana and Texas to make big changes based on the law.

Lylla Younes Senior staff writer covering chemical pollution, regulation, and frontline communities Additional testing will reveal the true scope of “forever chemical” pollution

Major chemical manufacturers like 3M, DuPont, and Chemours were forced to strike multibillion-dollar settlements last year with coalitions of states, cities, and townships over PFAS — the deadly “forever chemicals” these companies knowingly spewed into the environment for decades. 2024 will be a big year for determining just how pervasive this problem is in U.S. water supplies. New hotspots are likely to emerge as the EPA conducts additional testing across the country, particularly in areas where little data on the chemicals currently exists. New fights over forever chemicals will also unfold in places like Minnesota, where lawmakers have introduced a bill that would require 3M and other large chemical corporations to pay for medical testing for PFAS-exposed communities, and in North Carolina, where the United Nations just declared PFAS pollution a human rights violation.

Zoya Teirstein Staff writer covering politics and the intersection between climate change and health A booming liquefied natural gas industry goes bust … maybe

The liquefied natural gas industry is booming on the U.S. Gulf Coast as companies export huge amounts of fracked gas to Europe and Asia, but the buildout of liquefaction facilities in the South has stumbled in recent months. A federal court revoked one facility’s permit in Texas, and the federal Department of Energy denied another company seeking an extension to build a facility in Louisiana. The coming year will be a big test for the nascent business: If courts and regulators delay more of these expensive projects, the companies behind them may abandon them and instead try building smaller, cheaper terminals elsewhere in the United States or even offshore.

Jake Bittle Staff writer focusing on climate impacts and adaptation Polluting countries could be legally liable to vulnerable ones

At COP28, negotiators from small island states sought to hold larger countries financially accountable for their outsize role in fueling carbon emissions. In 2024, that issue could be decided in international courts: As soon as March, the International Court of Justice will weigh arguments regarding countries’ obligations under international law to protect current and future generations from the harmful effects of climate change. The case brought by Vanuatu raises the question of how much big polluters owe island nations, with Vanuatu and other Pacific island communities particularly affected by rising sea levels and worsening storms.

Anita Hofschneider Senior staff writer focusing on Indigenous affairs An aerial view of Thacker Pass in northern Nevada. A proposed lithium mine on the site has drawn impassioned protest from the local Indigenous population, ranchers, and environmentalists. Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images Land Use Mining for rare earths takes off, as new discoveries and investments are made

Discoveries of major new deposits of rare earth minerals will continue to explode in the western and southeastern U.S. — places like the Salton Sea in California and a lithium belt in North Carolina — as well as in Alaska. These developments, alongside incentives from the Inflation Reduction Act, will bolster domestic mining and renewable energy industries in 2024. Many of these discoveries are being made in coalfields and oil fields by fossil fuel companies looking to diversify their portfolios. In response, expect a boom in the efforts to reform laws around the poorly regulated mining industry as well as community-driven activism against places like the Thacker Pass lithium mine in Nevada.

Katie Myers Climate solutions reporting fellow Congress doles out funds for unproven “climate-smart” agriculture

2024 could be the biggest year yet for “climate-smart” agriculture. Billions of dollars that Congress earmarked a year and a half ago in the Inflation Reduction Act are starting to flow to farmers planting trees and cover crops that sequester carbon. Lawmakers will have the chance to carve out even more funds in the farm bill, the sprawling legislative package that will be up for renewal next year. But climate advocates won’t be satisfied with all of the results: The fight over what counts as “climate smart” will heat up as subsidies go to tools like methane digesters, which some advocates blame for propping up big polluters.

Max Graham Food and agriculture reporting fellow More renewable energy comes to public lands

The Bureau of Land Management controls a tenth of the land base in the U.S. — some 245 millions acres. The Biden administration has been trying to utilize that public land for renewable energy projects and infrastructure, with the Department of Interior recently announcing 15 such initiatives. The department is also aiming to reduce fees to promote solar and wind development. These efforts have run into roadblocks in the past, including from Indigenous nations. For example, the Tohono O’odham Nation and San Carlos Apache Tribe challenged a transmission line in southern Arizona because of its potential to harm cultural sites. But with the goal of permitting 25 gigawatts of renewable energy on BLM land by 2025, expect the federal government to continue pushing its buildout next year.

Tik Root Senior staff writer focusing on the clean energy transition Residents in Houston look out at flooding from Hurricane Harvey in August 2017. Scott Olson/Getty Images Climate Impacts El Niño peaks, bringing a preview of life in the 2030s

Last year brought the onset of the latest cycle of El Niño, a natural phenomenon that spurs the formation of a band of warm water in the Pacific Ocean and fuels above-average temperatures globally. In fact, the cycle has already nudged the world over 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming for the first time. 

Because these systems tend to peak from December to April, the worst impacts will likely hit in the first half of 2024. Scientists predict the world will experience its hottest summer on record, giving us a preview of what life will look like in the 2030s. El Niño has already spurred an onslaught of knock-on effects, including heat waves in South America, flooding in East Africa, and infectious disease outbreaks in the Americas and the Caribbean. This year, researchers expect El Niño will lead to an unusually strong hurricane season in the Pacific, impact agricultural production and food security, lead to more explosions of vector-borne diseases, and depress the global economy. In some places, this is already happening.

Zoya Teirstein Staff writer covering politics and the intersection between climate change and health To migrate or not: Pacific islanders weigh their options

Last year, a proposed treaty between Australia and Tuvalu made international headlines for a unique provision: migration rights for climate refugees from the Pacific island country, which is at particular risk of rising seas. Now, Tuvalu’s general election, set for later this month, may serve as a de facto referendum on the agreement. But the country’s voters aren’t the only ones weighing their options as their islands slowly sink. The coming year will bring more attention to the plight of Pacific Islanders who are confronting a future of forced migration and grappling with the question of where their communities will go, what rights they’ll have, and how their sovereignty will persist.

Anita Hofschneider Senior staff writer focusing on Indigenous affairs Insurers flee more disaster-prone states

California. Louisiana. Florida. Who’s next? The insurance markets in these hurricane- and fire-prone states have descended into turmoil over the past few years as private companies drop policyholders and flee local markets after expensive disasters. State regulators are stepping in to stop this downward spiral, but stable insurance markets will mean higher prices for homeowners, especially in places like low-lying Miami, where the average insurance premium is already around $300 a month. The next year will see the same kind of insurance crisis pop up in other states such as Hawaiʻi, Oregon, and South Carolina, as private carriers try to stem their climate-induced losses.

Jake Bittle Staff writer focusing on climate impacts and adaptation Despite barriers, workplace heat standards make slow progress

Earlier this year, Miami-Dade County in Florida — where the region’s humidity makes outdoor workers especially vulnerable to extreme heat — was poised to pass one of the most comprehensive and thoughtful workplace heat standards in the country. Instead, county commissioners bowed to pressure from industry groups, and the vote was deferred. On the national level, OSHA, the agency responsible for workplace safety, has been in the process of creating a federal heat standard for over two years. That work is far from over, and it seems unlikely that the agency will announce a finalized rule next year, despite record-breaking heat. That leaves states and municipalities to lead the way in 2024 for worker-heat protections, but as was the case in Miami-Dade, local officials will likely face obstacles from powerful industry groups as they do so.

Siri Chilukuri Environmental justice reporting fellow “Heatflation” comes for desserts 

Heatflation came for condiments like olive oil and sriracha in 2023. This year, it’ll strike desserts. Unusually dry weather and a poor sugar cane harvest in India and Thailand — two of the world’s biggest producers — have driven global sugar prices to their highest level in more than a decade. Heavy rainfall in West Africa has led to widespread rot on the region’s prolific cocoa farms, causing chocolate prices to soar and snack companies like Mondelēz, which makes Oreos, to warn of more expensive products in 2024. And an extra-hot year fueled by a strong El Niño could be a rough one for wheat growers and flour prices. So now’s the time to indulge in chocolate cake — before it’s too late.

Max Graham Food and agriculture reporting fellow

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline 24 Climate Predictions for 2024 on Jan 3, 2024.

This story was originally published by Yale E360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Makueni County, a corner of southern Kenya that’s home to nearly a million people, is a land of extremes. Nine months a year, Makueni is a hardened, sun-scorched place where crops struggle and plumes of orange dust billow from dirt roads. Twice yearly, though, the county is battered by weeks of torrential rain, which drown farm fields and transform roads into impassable morasses. “Water,” says Michael Maluki, a Makueni County engineer, “is the enemy of roads.”

Maluki’s axiom is true the world over: Where roads and water intersect, trouble follows. Roads cut off streams and bleed sediment; meanwhile, floods often erode roadbeds into muddy gullies. Although wealthy nations are far from immune, these problems are most severe in developing countries, where roads are largely unpaved and thus especially vulnerable to obliteration. In Kenya and other nations, the issue is exacerbated by climate change, which has amplified the intensity of seasonal monsoons and droughts.

In 2019, Maluki began to ponder how to reconcile two of his county’s challenges: the aridity of its dry season and the destructiveness of its wet season. That year, he and colleagues attended a local workshop led by a Dutch consulting firm called MetaMeta on the concept of “Green Roads for Water” — a set of precepts for designing roads to capture water through strategic channels, culverts, and ponds and divert it for agricultural use. Inspired by the session, Maluki brought the idea to his colleagues and local farmers, who gave Green Roads their cautious blessing.

Makueni County’s Green Roads quickly proved their worth. Along roadsides, Maluki’s team members installed “mitre drains,” which shunted floodwaters into newly dug channels that irrigated mangoes, bananas, and oranges. They excavated farm ponds, which stored the rainy season’s floodwaters for use during drought, and they planted roadside fruit trees to absorb runoff and help control the dust that billowed from unpaved roads. And where travel routes crossed ephemeral rivers at right angles, the county built drifts — concrete road segments that also functioned as makeshift dams. During seasonal floods, the drifts captured deep banks of sand on their upstream sides. The sand retained pockets of water, which farmers tapped during the dry season via four-foot-deep wells dug upstream of the drift. In neighboring Kitui County, one study found that every $400 spent on similar low-tech tweaks increased farmers’ yields by around $1,000; according to Maluki, they’ve also made the rainy season far less damaging.

A tree-lined road in Bangladesh. Trees block dust, reduce erosion, and absorb runoff. Andrew Zakharenka

“The biggest asset for [the county government] in this program is the reduction of maintenance costs,” Maluki says. “It’s a two-way benefit.” He estimates that between 5 and 10 percent of the counties’ roads now apply water-harvesting principles.

Southern Kenya isn’t the only place seeing such gains: Nearly 20 countries have either implemented Green Roads for Water or plan to begin soon, and thousands of kilometers of roads, worldwide, have already received Green Roads interventions. Engineers who have taken MetaMeta’s trainings have employed its tenets in Ethiopia and Bangladesh, and the concept is rapidly spreading to places as diverse as Somaliland, Tajikistan, and Bolivia. The idea has also gained a toehold at the World Bank and other international lending institutions, which are currently financing a road-building boom that promises to reshape ecosystems and communities around the world. Green Roads for Water offers one potential path through this thicket of new construction, one that repositions roads as environmental assets as well as liabilities.

“By integrating these small and easy practices, you can have very big benefits,” says Anastasia Deligianni, manager of MetaMeta’s Green Roads for Water program. “We think this is a critical moment to really do it right.”

Green Roads for Water is the brainchild of Frank Van Steenbergen, a Dutch geographer and MetaMeta’s director. While working on irrigation projects in Pakistan in the early 1990s, van Steenbergen first encountered “gabarbands,” stone terraces likely built by farmers millenia ago to capture water and soil from seasonal rivers during monsoons. The gabarbands were proto-dams, but their sinuous paths across ancient streambeds also reminded van Steenbergen of roads, which tend to gather water along their surfaces. In the years that followed, he began to wonder: Why not use roads to direct and collect water in desirable locations, rather than undesirable ones?

The idea’s first major test occurred in the Ethiopian state of Tigray. Every year, the region’s farmers take part in a weeks-long volunteer restoration effort known as “mass mobilization,” rebuilding terraces and clearing irrigation canals. In 2015, the mobilization included the application of Green Roads principles. Among other measures, Ethiopian farmers dug new trenches and ponds and installed “floodwater spreaders” — low earthen berms that channeled road runoff into adjacent fields of maize, wheat, and barley.

Low stone barriers built to channel runoff into cropland in Tigray, Ethiopia. Courtesy of MetaMeta

The results, says Kifle Woldearegay, a geoengineer at Ethiopia’s Mekelle University, were dramatic. By 2018, so much water had infiltrated the soil around Tigray’s Green Roads that the water table had risen around two meters, improving the productivity of adjacent farms by 35 percent. Woldearegay has estimated that Tigray’s efforts produced nearly $17,000 in agricultural and infrastructural benefits for every kilometer of road the state treated — around a fourfold yield on the government’s investment.

“Farmers were very happy,” Woldearegay says. “They see that moisture is retained in their farmlands and landscapes, and that their crops are performing better.” Today, he says, practically every road in Tigray has been retrofitted with at least some water-harvesting techniques.

Buoyed by their success in Ethiopia, van Steenbergen and a growing network of collaborators have refined the precepts of Green Roads for Water. The techniques tend to be astonishingly simple. Gentle earthen ridges called crossbars guide water off roads and toward irrigation ditches. “Borrow pits” left after the excavation of gravel can be repurposed as rainwater collection ponds. In Bangladesh, engineers have deployed gated culverts to channel floodwaters into rice paddies. “It is often very non-glorious things that make the difference,” van Steenbergen says.

Although MetaMeta coined the term “Green Roads for Water,” van Steenbergen is adamant that no single entity owns the concept. MetaMeta holds no patents nor licenses any technologies; it merely conducts trainings and assessments, and it offers technical guidance to road-building agencies. Many of the techniques it promulgates were developed by local engineers and farmers: for example, an Ethiopian drain design that might also apply to Yemen, or a Pakistani culvert with relevance in Tajikistan. “People are very creative,” says van Steenbergen. “These are all things that can be easily replicated.”

As Green Roads practices have cohered, the concept has garnered institutional support. The German NGO Welthungerhilfe has funded Green Roads trainings and construction in Somaliland; the Global Resilience Partnership has funded assessments in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Nepal; and the International Fund for Agricultural Development and the United Nations World Food Programme have organized events on the topic. In 2021, the World Bank hired MetaMeta to compile a set of guidelines delineating the principles of Green Roads for Water and highlighting successful case studies. The approach, says Kulwinder Singh Rao, the World Bank’s lead transport specialist, “offers a new way of thinking” about the relationship between roads and water. “Practitioners and policymakers in the road sector need to embrace this new concept.”

Trees block dust that billows from an unpaved road in Makueni, Kenya. Courtesy of Makueni County

The Green Roads movement is expanding in an era of unprecedented road construction in developing nations. William Laurance, an ecologist at James Cook University, has dubbed the phenomenon an “Infrastructure Tsunami” — a wave of construction that could produce more than 15 million miles of paved roads by mid-century and tens of millions of miles of unpaved roads. This exploding transportation network may produce immense benefits for human welfare. “Once there is a road, there is everything,” says Saroj Yakami, an engineer who spearheads the Green Roads movement in Nepal, where thousands of road miles have been constructed since 2015. “You can go to the hospital easily. You can get government services quickly. You can take your produce to the market.”

Yet this enhanced connectivity often comes at a high social and ecological price. In the Amazon, Laurance has found, the vast majority of deforestation occurs near roadways; in Nepal’s Chitwan National Park, researchers have cautioned that roads stand to “cause dramatic reductions in tiger numbers” over the next two decades. According to Yakami, shoddily bulldozed Himalayan roads often leave behind wedges of spoil, which absorb water and trigger devastating landslides. “They’re taking roads everywhere, and that is not good for the environment,” he says.

In some cases, roads provide benefits and costs simultaneously. According to Yakami, new Nepalese roads have cut off mountain springs that have long sustained farms and households, but they’ve also revealed long-buried springs. Left to flow, the unearthed springs turn dirt roads into unstable slicks of mud. But channeled into taps and pipes, they can become important water sources for drought-stressed villages. This approach differs from Green Roads strategies in Ethiopia or Kenya, where roads have primarily been modified to capture rainfall rather than groundwater, but it similarly tries to synchronize road design with water delivery infrastructure.

But if roads can be recast as boons for water provision, will that framing provide a perverse incentive to build more of them? The very notion that a road can be “green” seems oxymoronic: A vast body of scientific literature demonstrates that roads befoul air and water, fragment ecosystems, introduce non-native species, and obliterate wildlife. In an email, Laurance expressed worry that “water harvesting might become a driver of road expansion in arid environments.”

Deligianni doesn’t dismiss those fears outright, but she doesn’t give them much credence. For one thing, most Green Roads for Water techniques have thus far been applied as retrofits to existing roads, rather than included in new ones. For another, she says, new roads are inevitable and, in many cases, desirable to local communities. So why not optimize the construction to come? “We’re looking at the projections for the future, and so many roads are going to be built,” Deligianni says. “We’re just trying to change the narrative and add some benefits.”

For now, the Green Roads movement, for all its institutional momentum, is moving forward in fits and starts. The idea, says the World Bank’s Singh Rao, requires “a paradigm shift in thinking and practice,” one that entails cooperation across agencies that tend to be siloed. In Ethiopia, Woldearegay says that agricultural ministries are enthusiastic about Green Roads and have incorporated them into their own technical guidelines, but road departments themselves have proved reluctant. “They don’t want the costs associated with designing and implementing [them],” he says. That’s the case in Kenya’s Makueni County, where limited budgets have hampered progress.

Yet these projects continue to attract attention: In recent months, Michael Maluki has given Green Roads tours to newspaper reporters, engineers, and farmers from neighboring counties. “We have been receiving so many visitors,” Maluki says. “The small things we do here, people are noticing.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline ‘Green roads’ are plowing ahead, buffering drought and floods on Jan 3, 2024.

A change to the federal EV incentive that took effect Monday could widen access for low and middle-income buyers who want to go electric but have been excluded by high prices. 

The clean vehicle tax credit, which offers up to $7,500 toward a new electric, hydrogen, or plug-in hybrid vehicle, and up to $4,000 for a used one, is now available as an instant rebate at approved dealers. Until now, buyers could not take advantage of the credit until they filed their taxes. 

EV-equity advocates said the change will put buying an electric vehicle within reach of more buyers. “It’s a huge help,” Irvin Rivero, e-mobility associate at the Bay Area nonprofit Acterra, told Grist. Rivero consults prospective buyers on how to apply for financial incentives, and said some clients either can’t afford the upfront cost or do not earn enough to owe taxes.

“A lot of people were getting the tax credit, but the people who didn’t have tax liability weren’t benefiting from this program,” Rivero said.

Consumers bought more than one million electric vehicles in the United States in 2023. The average new EV transaction price was $53,469 in July, about $5,000 more than the overall average car price. While some automakers dropped prices toward the end of 2023, rising interest rates are undermining those cuts.

Part of the Inflation Reduction Act, the clean vehicle tax credit is available to households making up to $300,000, depending on their filing status, and applies to cars costing no more than $55,000 and vans, pickup trucks, and SUVs costing up to $80,000. Used cars must be at least two years old and not cost more than $25,000.

Rivero said many of those he helps have been waiting for the change to go into effect before buying a car. “It’s going to get busy at the dealerships, I imagine.”

To get the rebate, consumers must go to a dealership that is registered with the IRS for the program. Dealers will either reduce the purchase price or provide cash to the buyer, and will be reimbursed by the IRS. 

Danny Connelly, the general sales manager at Tracy Volkswagen about an hour east of Oakland, California, said his dealership has already registered for the program. “We expect to sell a bit more cars from it,” he told Grist, adding that some customers have been waiting for the change to take effect before making a purchase. “It will be an easier customer experience and easier for us,” he said.

What may become less easy for customers, however, is finding a model that qualifies for the incentive. As part of the Biden administration’s efforts to promote a domestic supply chain for EVs, eligible vehicles must meet certain requirements for how much of their battery components and critical minerals are sourced or manufactured in North America. 

It’s still unclear how many cars will qualify, but Taylor Shively of the analytics firm CRU estimates that of the 17 available all-electric models, as few as 10 will get the full credit, and not all variants of a model may be eligible. Tesla, for example, has stated that certain versions of its most affordable offering, the Model 3, no longer qualify. 

Rivero has been telling clients to regularly check the Energy Department’s online tool that shows eligible vehicles.

It’s also not clear how customers will know which dealers are part of the program. The Internal Revenue Service did not respond to an emailed question about how customers will be able to find out which dealers are registered. 

While the list of qualifying cars is shorter in 2024, Rivero said the rebate creates opportunities for buyers previously priced out of buying an electric vehicle, especially if they “stack” it with local incentives available from their state, local government, or utility. 

Some of Rivero’s customers live in San Mateo County, where a resident buying a used car could also apply for a $4,000 rebate from their utility company, and get around $5,500 from a state program if they turn in an older car.  

“I try to help people stack as many as possible,” Rivero said. “They can pay less than $5,000 for an EV.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Buying an EV just got more affordable on Jan 2, 2024.

This story was supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

As mobile home owners fight rising housing costs, some of them have hit upon a solution that also helps in the fight against climate change: banding together and buying the land underneath their homes.

This model of collective ownership, also called resident-owned cooperatives or ROCs, is on the rise. In 2000, there were little more than 200. Today, there are more than 15,000, according to a 2022 study from researchers at Berkeley, Cornell, and MIT. 

When residents own the land, they can move more quickly to upgrade infrastructure. That’s where climate change comes in. Renewables — especially solar —  work uniquely well with these types of places, according to Kevin Jones, director at the Institute for Energy and the Environment at the Vermont Law and Graduate School. 

“There’s nothing more perfect than these resident-owned communities because they already have a cooperative structure and, generally, commonly own the piece of land,” said Jones. “[They] are just kind of natural communities to be able to bring the benefits of solar to more low- to moderate-income people.”

Mobile home parks — often a misnomer, because many homes are anchored to the ground — house more than 22 million Americans and provide a vital form of housing amidst a nationwide housing crisis. 

Often, private landlords will delay vital upgrades but continue to collect lot rents, which pay not for the actual property which the resident could rent or own but for the land underneath it. This can result in a system where many owners invest thousands of dollars into paying off their home, but are still beholden to the park owner for lot rents and other fees. 

The problem of displacement has been exacerbated in the past decades by private equity’s foray into mobile home park ownership, which often leads to higher increases for rent, utilities, and other fees while conditions either stay mostly the same or worsen. 

Nonprofit organizations like ROCUSA have been essential to providing communities with resources such as low or interest-free loans, grants, and the essential planning knowledge needed to create a co-op. 

The organization does more than help individual co-ops, it also helps connect people in a vast network of co-ops so they can share resources and knowledge. This process can help immensely when considering, for example, the prolonged process of acquiring a permit for a solar array or which contractors to use to install heat pumps in residences. 

Ronald Palmer knows all about the process of installing solar in a co-op. As board president for Lakeville Village in Geneseo, New York, he helped his community navigate the lengthy process. It was one of the first solar projects in the upstate town of Geneseo, with a population around 7,000 people.

That community, which comprises 50 homes for people 55 and older, has had a solar array for just over two years now. The benefits from it don’t just help Lakeville Village residents, but also local businesses and other sites.

A large majority of these co-ops are concentrated in the Northeast and Pacific Northwest. One of the reasons for the high number of them in states like New Hampshire is access to state-specific resources, according to Jones. 

“The Northeast, you know, clearly is an area where there’s a lot of interest in solar,” said Jones. “We don’t necessarily have the best solar resource in the country, but we have generally good public policies toward solar.”

This allows communities in those areas, including people who live in resident-owned mobile home co-ops, to access the resources needed to set up solar. 

In New Hampshire, ROC-NH helps connect co-ops with state resources and helps prioritize the needs of co-op members. These needs are usually related to financial stability, according to Sarah Marchant, Vice President of ROC-NH. 

“Our goal when talking about community solar, with residential communities, is not just to reduce their carbon footprint,” said Marchant. “But the way this works is it has to reduce their costs and has to reduce their bills as well.” 

This is vital for communities where members might be working two or three different jobs just to stay afloat, according to Marchant. 

While the process of forming a co-op and investing in climate-friendly projects is time-consuming, there are many benefits.

In South Texas, a resident-owned cooperative called Pasadena Trails, located just outside of Houston, found a solution to chronic flooding. The predominantly Latino community installed drainage systems, which helped significantly when Hurricane Harvey hit and drenched the Houston area in 60 inches of rain. In the wake of Harvey, Pasadena Trails fared better in comparison to neighboring areas. 

Back in New York state, the residents of Lakeville Village are pleased with their solar project, which reflects the values of the older residents, most of whom are grandparents. For them, this solar project was their way of taking care of their own and ensuring a small step in the right direction for future generations.

”We want to reduce our carbon footprint, and one of our concerns was for our grandchildren and their children,” said Jones. “And we saw this as a way of contributing to that and being responsible grandparents.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How mobile home co-ops provide housing security — and climate resilience on Jan 2, 2024.

This coverage is made possible through a partnership with WABE and Grist, a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future.

The neighborhood near Savannah, Georgia, where rooftop solar installers Nicole Lee and Seth Gunning met up one fall afternoon was “ideal” for solar panels, they agreed. The houses were relatively new, and the one they were eyeing had a clear expanse of roof in perfect condition.

“This is an amazing candidate for solar because it is solar ready,” said Lee, the owner of Be Smart Home Solutions. “We know they have the newer upgraded electrical system. Plenty of sun because it is a newer neighborhood, so there are no mature trees.”

Lee and Gunning weren’t there to sell solar panels; they were evaluating the house for the new Georgia BRIGHT solar leasing program, funded by the national nonprofit Capital Good Fund. Available to households earning less than $100,000 annually, the program aims to reduce energy bills by making solar power affordable. This house, Gunning said, could expect a savings of about $400 a year.

Savings like that, along with other benefits of solar energy like avoiding fossil fuel emissions and relying less on the power grid, remain out of reach for many people in that income bracket because of the high upfront cost. While the median income of solar adopters has dropped from $140,000 in 2010 to $117,000 in 2022, their incomes still skew higher than most.

Buying solar panels and having them installed typically costs tens of thousands of dollars. While there’s a substantial federal tax credit to mitigate that cost, for individual households it can only offset a tax liability — if you don’t owe very much on your taxes, or you typically get a tax refund, you can’t benefit from the credit. 

But a recent law could change that. Under the Inflation Reduction Act, nonprofits like Capital Good Fund can now claim the tax credit as a direct refund, then pass those savings on to the customers who sign on to the Georgia BRIGHT program. It’s especially important to provide solar for the moderate-income households the program is seeking, organizers said, because those families often have to spend a greater share of their income on energy. 

“This program levels the playing field for those families who are facing those energy burdens to help them reduce their energy costs,” said Lee.

While solar leasing isn’t new, in the past it’s been offered mostly by for-profit companies. The change in tax law, however, has opened the field to nonprofits, who can often charge less, said Capital Good Fund founder and CEO Andy Posner.

“So if it’s a $10,000 system, and we’re gonna get a $3,000 refund check from the IRS, it costs us less to purchase the system,” he said. “Also because we don’t have the same requirements for return on investment as a for-profit.” 

Capital Good Fund’s Georgia BRIGHT program is in its pilot phase, aiming to add solar to around 200 roofs in the next few months. But the goal, Posner said, is to go nationwide.

“This pilot is about impacting 200 lives, but it’s also about creating a model for serving 200,000 over the next 10 years,” he said. “Both within Georgia and in other states, there’s a tremendous interest.” 

The initiative has already expanded to include churches and smaller nonprofits in Georgia, and Posner said the organization is in “various stages of conversation” with about 10 other states interested in a similar leasing program.

And more money is coming: In June, the Environmental Protection Agency announced it will dole out $7 billion in IRA funds to states, tribal governments, nonprofits, and others for programs that enable “low-income households to access affordable, resilient, and clean solar energy.” Grantees will be selected next spring.

“It’s going to enable a real scale-up of these programs, in Georgia and beyond,” Posner said of the grant funding.

For Savannah homeowner David Morgan, the pilot project in Georgia was a good fit. He bought his 1955 house a couple of years ago, and he’s been looking to install solar. Morgan works in disaster recovery, earning $65,000; he said he sees a lot of places dealing with extended power outages and wants to be less reliant on the grid. He also pays a steep $270 a month for electricity.

“I’ll be into the solar panel program for $98 a month,” he said of his Georgia BRIGHT solar panels. “And I should be using between $60 and $70 a month from Georgia Power.”

In other words, once the solar is installed early next year, Morgan can expect a savings of about $100 a month. He said he’ll put that money toward retirement.

“Every little bit helps towards trying not to work when I’m old,” he said.

Morgan has opted for a system with battery storage, so he’ll have backup power when the sun isn’t shining, or when there’s an outage on the grid. And he said he’s also glad he’ll be doing his part to fight climate change.

He hopes more people will get on board with renewable energy. “This is one of those programs that anybody can actually get involved in,” he said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A change in tax law has some solar providers walking on sunshine on Jan 2, 2024.