Grist

This story was produced in partnership with Atlanta News First.

The bruises on Alexandria Pittman’s body wouldn’t go away. Nor would the aches that plagued her at her new job at a distribution center in Lithia Springs, a small town 17 miles west of Atlanta, sorting and repackaging boxes containing medical devices. She was convinced the symptoms were connected to the job.

Pittman had applied to the position at the warehouse, run by the medical supply company ConMed, after learning about the opening from her fiancé, Derek Mitchell, who delivered products there. Every day she’d come home and complain to him about the mysterious aches and marks. At first, Mitchell tried to reassure her, guessing that the bruises were probably from bumping up against something. “I really didn’t think nothing of it,” he recalled. 

Then, in the spring of 2019, came a surprising revelation. ConMed managers announced that the seemingly innocuous products in the boxes they were packaging had been sterilized with ethylene oxide, which the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency considers a carcinogen and is linked to lung and breast cancers as well as diseases of the nervous system. Suddenly, Pittman began connecting the dots between her symptoms and those of her colleagues. It would later emerge that at least 50 warehouse workers experienced a slew of health effects tied to ethylene oxide exposure, including seizures, vomiting, and trouble breathing. Ambulances were routinely called to the facility after workers collapsed, convulsed from seizures, or broke out in hives. Several — including Pittman — developed cancer. 

Since ConMed came clean about the workers’ exposure to ethylene oxide, Pittman has suffered four strokes and had brain surgery. She’s currently undergoing chemotherapy for myeloma, according to multiple claims she has filed with the Georgia State Board of Workers’ Compensation for help paying her medical bills. After the second stroke, Mitchell was unable to care for her, and she moved in with her mother where she now lives. Mitchell and Pittman had planned to marry, but the $5,000 ring Mitchell purchased now sits collecting dust. 

“It just corrupted everything that she ever wanted to do in life,” said Mitchell. “She can’t talk, and she’s being fed through a tube.”

The ethylene oxide that Pittman and dozens of her coworkers were exposed to wasn’t supposed to have made it to the warehouse at all. At a sterilization plant 12 miles down the road, the chemical had been used to fumigate products before they were sent to the warehouse, a standard procedure for making sure that medical equipment is antiseptic and safe to use in hospitals across the country. More than 50 percent of all U.S. medical supplies are sterilized by ethylene oxide, due to the chemical’s unique ability to penetrate porous surfaces without causing damage.

Ethylene Oxide Facts

What is ethylene oxide? Ethylene oxide is a colorless and odorless toxic gas used to sterilize medical products, fumigate spices, and manufacture other industrial chemicals. According to the Food and Drug Administration, approximately half of all sterile medical devices in the U.S. are disinfected with ethylene oxide.

What are the sources of ethylene oxide exposure? Industrial sources of ethylene oxide emissions fall into three main categories: chemical manufacturing, medical sterilization, and food fumigation. 

What are the health effects of being exposed to ethylene oxide? Ethylene oxide, which the EPA has labeled a carcinogen, is harmful at concentrations above 0.1 parts per trillion if exposed over a lifetime. Numerous studies have linked it to lung and breast cancers as well as diseases of the nervous system and damage to the lungs. Acute exposure to the chemical can cause loss of consciousness or lead to a seizure or coma.

How is the EPA regulating ethylene oxide? The EPA is in the process of finalizing regulations for ethylene oxide emissions from the sterilization industry. The new rule requires companies to install equipment that minimizes the amount of the chemical released into the air. However, it does not address emissions from other parts of the medical device supply chain, such as warehouses and trucks.

But over the past few years — beginning with findings by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA, in 2019 and Georgia’s Environmental Protection Division, or EPD, in 2020 — regulators have learned that some amount of ethylene oxide travels out of sterilization facilities on the treated products. In the hours and weeks following application, the chemical evaporates, or off-gasses, turning the buildings where these products are stored into potentially significant sources of toxic air pollution — particularly for workers like Pittman who handled the boxes directly.

The dangers came as a surprise to warehouse workers and regulators alike. Georgia EPD officials had originally only set out to monitor ethylene oxide levels around the industrial sterilization facilities fumigating medical equipment. The EPA had just published modeling that suggested high levels of cancer risk around the country’s medical sterilization facilities, and Georgia regulators wanted to assess the plants in their jurisdiction. (The modeling incorporated the results of a 2016 study that found ethylene oxide to be 30 times more toxic to adults and 60 times more toxic to children than previously known.)

After finding elevated levels of ethylene oxide outside of a Becton Dickinson sterilization plant in Covington, a city southeast of Atlanta, officials asked a state judge to temporarily shut the operation down while further testing took place. As part of a consent decree reached in October 2019, the company would not only have to install new technology at its sterilization plants to reduce its emissions, but also test the air coming from its warehouse to ensure that emissions were below the legal limit there as well. The results of this testing showed that the warehouse was emitting nearly 5,600 pounds of ethylene oxide per year — about nine times as much as the sterilization facility when it was still operational, and higher than almost a third of all sterilizer plants in the country. (Georgia requires an industrial facility emitting more than 4,000 pounds of a hazardous air pollutant per year to obtain a permit from the state allowing it to do so.)

Officials found elevated levels of ethylene oxide in this Becton Dickinson medical sterilization facility in Covington, Georgia, seen here in 2020. John Bazemore / AP Photo

“We basically cited the facility for failure to have an air permit, and we required them to control their air emissions,” recalled Jim Boylan, head of the air protection branch at the Georgia Environmental Protection Division, in an interview. “That’s how it all started.”

When he realized that Becton Dickinson couldn’t be the only company storing medical products recently sterilized with ethylene oxide, Boylan assigned several engineers in the EPD’s inspection program to search for similar operations. They had their work cut out for them — because the risk of exposure at these warehouses is such a new concern, there is no comprehensive public or government data on the identity, location, or number of these facilities in Georgia or any other state, let alone any kind of risk assessments. Inspectors scoured the internet and made in-person visits to warehouses to identify potential sources of emissions. Their research revealed that in some cases, warehouse operators were aware that the medical devices they stored were releasing a carcinogen that could be poisoning their workers.

All told, interagency emails obtained by Grist through a Freedom of Information Act request show that inspectors initially identified seven warehouses in Georgia storing products that had been sterilized with ethylene oxide; four emitted enough of the chemical to require air permits and the installation of emission-reduction equipment. Those facilities are on track to receive their permits in the coming months. While these measures may protect residents who live near the warehouses, they don’t guarantee the protection of the workers who may be experiencing exposure day in and day out. The responsibility of safeguarding workers falls to OSHA, which has not investigated ethylene oxide levels at three of the four warehouses that Georgia regulators have identified as requiring permits. 

Court documents include photos of a ConMed warehouse allegedly containing rows of packages of medical devices sterilized with ethylene oxide. PeachCourt According to court documents, cardboard and wood absorb ethylene oxide. The more dense the material, the slower it is to evaporate. PeachCourt

Frances Alonzo, a spokesperson for the federal Department of Labor, said that OSHA evaluates employers “on a case-by-case basis based on OSHA standards, employer records, interviews, observations on a walk-through, measurements, and air sampling.” (In a follow-up email, Alonzo told Grist that OSHA’s ethylene oxide standards were established in 1984 and that the agency does not have plans to update it.) The agency focuses its resources on workplaces where employees are in imminent danger and conducts follow-up investigations to ensure any previously identified violations have been addressed. 

In the ConMed case, after an initial investigation in 2019 identified a slew of violations, OSHA conducted two follow-up investigations. Those inspections revealed “no violations of OSHA standards or serious hazards,” Alonzo said. In 2020, Pittman and dozens of her coworkers filed a lawsuit against ConMed and the sterilization company that shipped products to the warehouse, but the claims were later dismissed by the judge.

Despite all the work still to be done by regulators, Georgia is relatively far ahead of the curve on addressing ethylene oxide emissions from warehouses. Most other states have yet to examine whether warehouses in their jurisdiction are storing sterilized products — and if emissions from the facilities put workers and nearby residents at risk. A review of public records submitted to the EPA and state regulators revealed that there are dozens of such warehouses across the country, suggesting there are thousands of workers like Pittman, unknowingly and routinely exposed to ethylene oxide. These nondescript facilities are hiding in plain sight in places as disparate as Quincy, Massachusetts; Richmond, Virginia; and Tempe, Arizona.

Warehouses that store products sterilized with ethylene oxide pose “a deep threat to communities, and unfortunately, because we don’t really know or have as much information as we should about where those warehouses are, it’s an unknown source of major ethylene oxide emissions,” said Marvin Brown, an attorney with the environmental nonprofit Earthjustice.

Grist contacted the environmental agencies of 10 states that are home to multiple medical supply sterilization facilities. Most agencies said that they did not regulate warehouses that stored products sterilized with ethylene oxide and pointed to federal regulations that require them to oversee sterilization and manufacturing facilities — but not warehouses or distribution centers. Apart from Georgia, the South Coast Air Quality Management District, a regulator that serves a portion of Southern California, is a lone outlier. The agency is currently in the process of finalizing a rule requiring warehouses that store ethylene oxide products to conduct air quality monitoring.

The federal government, for its part, hasn’t yet addressed major loopholes that exempt warehouses from emissions rules. Because ethylene oxide is toxic in such small amounts, officials have had trouble regulating emissions from the sterilization facilities themselves, in many cases permitting emissions that they later discover generate levels of cancer risk that exceed federal public health standards.

While the EPA introduced regulations to reduce ethylene oxide emissions from sterilization facilities last year, its rules only apply to warehouses when they are located on the same property as sterilization facilities. But not only do many companies store their products at warehouses tens or even hundreds of miles away, they also often contract third-party logistics providers to do the job for them. That means products may be warehoused at facilities owned by subsidiaries or entirely separate logistics firms. Some companies have reported using FedEx facilities to store sterilized products. To make matters more complicated, sterilizers have largely been unwilling to disclose the locations of their storage facilities, citing those details as “confidential business information” not subject to public disclosure, according to records submitted to the EPA.

Environmental Protection Agency administrator Michael Regan speaks at a news conference in May 2022. The EPA warned residents in 13 states and Puerto Rico about health risks from ethylene oxide emissions. Patrick Semansky / AP Photo

Environmental advocates and public health experts interviewed for this story worried that these informational gaps as well as the findings in Georgia could indicate a substantial and invisible public health threat affecting communities across the country — and one that the EPA should take greater effort to regulate.

“Four years after the stunning discovery of warehouse emissions in Georgia, the EPA has failed to propose standards to address this source of uncontrolled emissions,” read a comment letter submitted to the EPA last year and signed by 16 environmental, public health, and labor groups, including Earthjustice and the Union of Concerned Scientists. It is also concerning, they wrote, that most sterilization companies fail to publicly disclose the locations of these warehouses.

“If [warehouses] are significant sources of ethylene oxide, we believe they should be covered by the [EPA’s sterilizer] rule,” Darya Minovi, a senior analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told Grist. “I don’t think that the EPA provided a strong enough rationale for why that wouldn’t be considered.”

The agency is expected to finalize its sterilizer rule in early March. Environmental attorneys said the EPA’s reasoning for overlooking warehouses may come down to legalese. The agency issues regulations based on categories of pollution sources defined in amendments to the Clean Air Act in the 1990s. Since off-site storage facilities weren’t clearly defined in the law decades ago, whether the EPA can regulate them with a rule targeting sterilization facilities is an open question. 
A spokesperson for the EPA did not comment on why the agency isn’t including warehouses in its current sterilizer rule but said that it has already determined the levels of ethylene oxide that would be harmful to workers and plans to address emissions in a separate pesticide rule before the end of the year.

Ira Montgomery takes 26 pills a day. There’s one to calm the spasms that ripple through his muscles, another to lower his blood pressure, and yet another to make sure his body doesn’t reject a liver that doctors transplanted after diagnosing him with cancer.

The 51-year-old traces his problems to the years he spent working at the ConMed warehouse. The facility sprawls out over an area the size of five football fields and has rows of shelves that store wooden pallets, each containing medical devices sterilized at a facility owned by Sterigenics about 30 minutes away in Smyrna, Georgia. The products are stored anywhere from a few weeks to several months before they are shipped off to hospitals for use in life-saving procedures.

Ira Montgomery lies in the hospital after surgery. He was diagnosed with cancer and needed a liver transplant. Courtesy of Ira Montgomery Ira Montgomery shows a scar from his liver transplant. He believes his health problems are linked to his time working at the ConMed warehouse. Courtesy of Ira Montgomery

In records submitted to the EPA, Sterigenics responded “No” to a question about whether products sterilized at its facilities are shipped to a warehouse, since ConMed contracts with Sterigenics to sterilize products. Given this, the presence of ethylene oxide emissions at the ConMed warehouse only became public knowledge due to Georgia regulators’ efforts. The 7-acre warehousing facility in Lithia Springs had neither state permits nor any protective gear for workers between 2008 and 2019, when Montgomery worked there.

Until an inspection by OSHA in 2019, the 3,500 workers at the warehouse were unaware that the products had been sterilized with a dangerous chemical. Dozens of Montgomery’s and Pittman’s coworkers mysteriously developed rashes, had trouble breathing, and fainted; many had seizures. When Nick Jackson began experiencing seizures in 2007 and eventually died in 2013, ConMed managers told his wife the fluorescent lights at the warehouse were to blame. They later informed his doctors that there were no occupational hazards at his workplace.

Similarly, when Essence Alexander opened a box containing products sterilized with ethylene oxide, her right arm broke out in hives and her body began to itch. Warehouse managers called an ambulance, but when paramedics arrived they were not informed that products at the warehouse were emitting a toxic chemical that could have triggered the reaction. In another case, when a worker broke out in hives all over her body, a manager told paramedics the worker had “an allergic reaction to a cookie,” according to legal filings.

Pallets and boxes are seen are stacked outside the Sterigenics facility in Smyrna, Georgia. Atlanta News First

Michael Yeh was working as a medical toxicology fellow at Emory University’s School of Medicine in 2021 when a dozen ConMed workers visited the center. As he got to know these patients better, Yeh began to notice certain patterns in their symptoms. Many felt fine on the weekends, but as soon as the work week rolled around, they developed headaches in the afternoon. Once they got home, the pain would subside. There were other common complaints as well: an irksome cough, itchy eyes, and inflamed nasal passages. These workers weren’t looking for a cure for their conditions, Yeh recalled, but an opportunity to understand how their exposure to ethylene oxide may have affected their health.

“There is no antidote to inhaling ethylene oxide,” Yeh said in an interview. “But they wanted us to hear their story and to document in a medical record what they were experiencing so that there’s documentation of what happened to them.”

ConMed warehouse managers attributed these health effects to a range of unrelated issues, according to a lawsuit filed by about 50 workers in 2020. In filings with the court, the company has argued that the workers did not provide sufficient evidence about their individual exposures and subsequent ailments. Since Pittman, Montgomery, and the other plaintiffs submitted multiple claims to the Georgia Workers’ Compensation Board, ConMed has also claimed that the workers have foregone other avenues to air their grievances. The workers are attempting an “end run around the Workers’ Compensation Act … based on a smattering of vague factual allegations interspersed among a series of legal conclusions,” the company claimed in filings. 

In total, the lawsuit counts approximately 50 instances of ambulances being called to the warehouse between 2007 and 2019. A Grist review of 911 call records shows that since 2016, ambulances were dispatched to the ConMed warehouse to treat employees on at least 22 occasions. Multiple workers reported similar health effects: seizures, losing consciousness, vomiting, and trouble breathing. All of these symptoms are triggered by high-dose exposure to ethylene oxide. According to medical management guidelines developed by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, which develops profiles for hazardous substances, ethylene oxide is a central nervous system depressant, and acute exposure to it “can result in diverse neurologic manifestations including seizures, loss of consciousness, and coma.” Exposure to lower concentrations can cause nausea and vomiting, while exposure via skin may cause “inflammation with redness of the skin, blisters, and crusted ulcerations.”

Ambulances were called to this ConMed warehouse approximately 50 times between 2007 and 2019. Courtesy of Atlanta News First. Atlantic News First obtained 911 audio for one of those calls, which has been de-identified and edited for length.

Due in part to these risks, OSHA has set acceptable ethylene oxide exposure limits for workers. The federal agency requires companies to inform workers if they are exposed to more than 0.5 parts per million, or ppm, of ethylene oxide and take measures to reduce exposure when levels are above 1 ppm. 

OSHA’s efforts to investigate ConMed’s storage center in Lithia Springs in 2019 point to the warehouse owners’ anxieties over the possibility of being regulated. Grist reviewed OSHA complaint records about the facility and found that federal inspectors’ efforts to sample the indoor air were repeatedly rebuffed. 

“The employer was not forthcoming in providing the requested documentation,” the complaint read, adding that two subpoenas had been issued to the company to request information about working conditions, but that the company lawyer rejected both. The initial complaint alleged that airborne ethylene oxide inside the warehouse was causing workers to experience “headaches, burning eyes, itching eyes, cough, and chest pains.” It took five months for regulators to get access to the facility and take air samples and another two months to publish the results. 

Those results ultimately indicated that ethylene oxide was present in the air at ConMed, but not at levels that breach federal standards. In handwritten notes attached to the complaint file, an OSHA inspector noted that managers instructed workers not to open packages during the inspection, raising the possibility that managers altered operating procedures on that day. “They didn’t know I can see them,” the inspector wrote.

“Did they change their practices when they knew the inspectors were coming?” Yeh wondered, noting that it would be easy for the company to make adjustments if it knew the inspection date in advance.

The investigation also found that warehouse managers had removed an indoor air quality monitor because it routinely recorded levels between 3 and 5 ppm and beeped loudly. The levels of ethylene oxide were so high, the workers claimed, that the cardboard packages wrapped in plastic shrink-wrap became wet. (Ethylene oxide converts into ethylene cholohydrin and ethylene glycol when it interacts with plastic, and the lawsuit claims that the wet boxes were evidence of the high levels of ethylene oxide that the products were off-gassing.) 

OSHA fined ConMed $7,800 for failing to inform workers of their high exposure to ethylene oxide and required the company to install equipment that reduced levels of the chemical. ConMed complied by opening bay doors for better ventilation and installing a stationary air quality monitor, but the monitor continued to detect high ethylene oxide levels.

The workers’ lawsuit claims that the products were off-gassing dangerous levels of ethylene oxide in part because Sterigenics, the sterilization company that shipped products to the ConMed warehouse, was using a sterilization method that requires overapplication of the chemical. Ethylene oxide is an effective disinfectant because even at low levels it can eliminate microbes effectively, but different volumes of the chemical may be required to properly disinfect different products. (The amount of ethylene oxide required to sterilize a product is based on regulations by the Food and Drug Administration.)

Because companies often sterilize different types of products all in one fell swoop, they end up gassing them with more ethylene oxide than is required. The lawsuit claims that Sterigenics used this process — called “overkill” in industry parlance — to sterilize more products quickly. The sterilized products are supposed to be held for several hours to days to allow the ethylene oxide to off-gas before they are sent to warehouses for storage, but the lawsuit claims that Sterigenics rushed this process to increase profits. As a result, the products that were trucked to the warehouse had higher levels of ethylene oxide than anyone would have had reason to suspect at the time.

“The method of sterilization has been to over sterilize,” said Brown, the Earthjustice attorney. 

“The result for communities is that they are exposed to higher amounts of ethylene oxide, because more ethylene oxide is being used than necessary.”

Sterigenics did not respond to specific questions about its sterilization methods. In an emailed statement, Kristin Gibbs, a spokesperson for the company, noted that Sterigenics sterilized products provided by ConMed on a contract basis “as required by FDA regulations and standards.” 

“The facility in Lithia Springs belongs to ConMed — not Sterigenics — and as such, the facility, the employees working in that facility, and those employees’ working conditions are under the control of and are the responsibility of ConMed,” she added.

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In 2019, after OSHA investigated and the EPA identified the Sterigenics facility as a major source of ethylene oxide emissions, workers at the ConMed warehouse began trying to take precautions. Pittman asked her fiancé to buy her a mask, but when she wore it at work, the lawsuit alleges that managers told her not to because she was “scaring” others. Several workers were fired after they began raising concerns about the levels of ethylene oxide at the facility.

Since the EPA hasn’t proposed specific regulations for warehouses, Boylan, the Georgia EPD air chief, said states “should work closely with their warehouses to gather site-specific information on ethylene oxide emissions and try to calculate the risk associated with those emissions.” 

“Georgia has done kind of above and beyond, because we thought there were possible risks to nearby communities, and we thought the risks were too great,” said Boylan.

In January, the workers elected to drop ConMed from the lawsuit in part because some of their claims were dismissed in 2022 by the judge presiding over the case. Since the workers had filed claims with the Georgia Workers’ Compensation Board, they were barred from seeking redress through the courts. The judge also dismissed certain claims against Sterigenics, but the company remains a party to the lawsuit. “Sterigenics is vigorously defending the limited surviving claims against it,” said Gibbs, the Sterigenics spokesperson. 

Since the lawsuit was filed in 2020, four workers who signed up as plaintiffs have died. Mitchell, Pittman’s fiancé, said that working at the ConMed facility completely changed the trajectory of her life. She was a friendly person, always smiling, but the health complications have dimmed the light in her eyes. 

“She was proud of her job and how she had moved up,” said Mitchell. “She always talked about how sad it was and how it hurt her. She was just trying to earn a living and do her job.”

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

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline An invisible chemical is poisoning thousands of unsuspecting warehouse workers on Feb 29, 2024.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — the federal agency that monitors diseases and establishes guidelines to protect human health — published a paper last month that shows cases of Lyme disease jumped nearly 70 percent nationwide in 2022. But what looked like an alarming spike in disease was actually the result of smarter disease surveillance that better reflects what’s happening on the ground. 

The CDC revised its Lyme reporting requirements in 2022, making it easier for states with high infection rates to report those cases. The report, the first published analysis of the new data collection guidelines, demonstrates the crucial role efficient surveillance plays in better understanding the scope of infectious disease in the U.S. — and what more must be done to safeguard public health as climate change fosters the proliferation of ticks. 

“Disease surveillance that is interpretable and is standardized is integral to being able to understand how disease frequency is changing, and if it’s changing,” said Kiersten Kugeler, a CDC epidemiologist and lead author of the paper. She noted that climate change will complicate the already difficult task of monitoring and controlling diseases such as Lyme. Cases in some areas will continue rising while declining in others as parts of the U.S. become more amenable, or hostile, to ticks. “It’s not going to be straightforward,” Kugeler said. “It’s going to be incredibly important to have good surveillance to be able to understand how climate is affecting risk of disease.” 

Blacklegged ticks are known vectors for the zoonotic spirochetal bacteria, Borrelia burgdorferi, which is the pathogen responsible for causing Lyme disease. Photo by CDC/ James Gathany; William L. Nicholson, Ph.D.

Studies have documented significant shifts in Lyme trends across the country. The illness is caused by the bite of a black-legged tick and causes symptoms that range from flu-like and mild to neurological and debilitating, depending on how quickly the disease is diagnosed. Cases doubled in the three decades between 1990 and 2020. Many researchers, including CDC employees, say climate change is one factor behind that precipitous rise. Environmental changes such as urban sprawl and swelling populations of white-tailed deer, among other drivers, also play a role.

Warmer winter temperatures have coaxed black-legged ticks into regions that have historically been too harsh for the blood-sucking arachnids. Meanwhile, milder spring and fall seasons have given the pests more time to breed. Lyme is a portent of climate-driven diseases to come. But, as it has spread into new areas and infected more people, the CDC has struggled to capture the full impact.

In 2022, the agency redoubled its disease surveillance efforts, with a special emphasis on vector-borne disease. As part of that push, the CDC loosened its Lyme disease reporting requirements in the Northeast, mid-Atlantic, and upper-Midwest, where cases are high. Public health departments in those areas no longer have to track down the clinical details of each positive Lyme test, such as a patient’s symptoms and when they began, and doctors can skip the labor-intensive process of recording and reporting them. Now, a positive laboratory test is sufficient. Eliminating these steps takes the onus off doctors and local public health authorities and puts it on state health departments, which are typically better equipped to handle it. 

“We have a lot of behind-the-scenes data management that’s new with this Lyme disease surveillance system,” Rebecca Osborn, a vector-borne disease epidemiologist at the Wisconsin Department of Health Services. But overall, she said, “it has gotten quite a bit less burdensome.” 

The new system runs the risk of including information on people who no longer show symptoms but are still testing positive for the bacteria, which can linger in the blood for years after the infection has gone. But those cases likely comprise a small fraction of the overall data, the CDC said. In areas where Lyme remains rare, providers must continue reporting clinical information for each case. 

These relatively modest changes to the case definition requirements unearthed 62,551 cases of Lyme nationwide. That’s 1.7 times the annual average reported from 2017 to 2019.

Chuck Lubelczyk, a vector-borne ecologist with Maine Medical Center, collects ticks at a site in Cape Elizabeth. John Ewing / Portland Press Herald/Getty Images

Still, most cases of Lyme disease in the U.S. go unreported. Studies based on health insurance records estimate that roughly 500,000 cases are diagnosed every year. Those reported by states to the CDC in 2022 comprise less than one-fifth of that. Elizabeth Schiffman, an epidemiologist with the Vector Borne Diseases Unit at the Minnesota Department of Health, said figuring out how to capture every case is nearly impossible and perhaps besides the point. 

“No system is ever perfect,” she said, “we’re always going to miss something, we’re always going to count something that probably shouldn’t be counted.” If the CDC could use the data it collects every year under its new system to measure the overall impact of Lyme, Schiffman said, then the number of cases it already knows about may be enough. 

“If what we are able to capture is able to give us an idea of where things are happening, how things are changing, and inform good public health actions, then it could be argued that we don’t need to count every case.” 

The data deficit and lack of standardization among states becomes more of a problem when researchers try to tease out the impacts of climate change on the disease. The CDC argues that in regions where Lyme incidence is still relatively rare, the updated surveillance system doesn’t make sense. Doctors and local health departments in those areas still need to collect clinical information on every potential Lyme patient, because each case is a revealing datapoint rather than a statistic in a larger trend. But the burdensome requirements in low-incidence areas muddy efforts to detect the role of climate change in how black-legged ticks may be migrating, said Richard Ostfeld, a senior scientist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies who researches tick-borne illnesses. 

A tick bite on the forearm of a man in Toronto. Creative Touch Imaging Ltd./NurPhoto via Getty Images

The prevalence of Lyme disease typically falls along geographic lines. Counties in the upper Midwest and Northeast report tens of thousands of cases each year, while those in the Southeast and South report hundreds. Although the CDC’s revised reporting guidelines more accurately revealed the extent of Lyme disease in areas with a high prevalence, the implementation of the system over time may obscure growth of the disease elsewhere. The new guidelines “would tend to bias your estimate of geographic trends toward more growth in incidence in northern parts of the country as opposed to southern parts of the country where you’re still being very conservative,” Ostfeld said. “It complicates matters for those trying to understand the role of climate change.”

North Carolina, for example, a state long classified as low-incidence, was among five states with the highest number of Lyme disease-related insurance claims in 2016, according to one analysis. But the disease reporting there, said Noah Johnston, director of the Lyme awareness group Project Lyme, still isn’t where it needs to be. “There’s an expectation that tick populations in North Carolina are not as high as they are in the Northeast,” he said.

The benefits and drawbacks of the CDC’s updated surveillance highlight the difficulties of tracking and controlling infectious diseases under climatic conditions that are rapidly shifting the distribution of disease carriers. Incremental adjustments to the status quo might not be enough to keep up with the growing scale of disease risk. “We’re likely going to see more and more cases of these diseases and more and more diseases that are going to affect not just our population in the U.S., but globally,” said Osborn. “Public health in general needs to become a little more proactive in our responses. We’re still working on that as a field.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline As ticks spread, the US is getting closer to understanding the true extent of Lyme disease on Feb 29, 2024.

This story was developed with the support of Journalismfund Europe.

In August 2020, Maria do Espirito Santo was returning from her family’s field in the savanna of northeast Brazil when she saw smoke billowing from her thatched hut.

Do Espirito Santo raced back to find that her home and those of her neighbors had been burnt to the ground by a group of armed men, some of them local police. They felled fruit trees, ripped up crops with tractors, and forced the small community of Bom Acerto from the lands where they had grown cassava, corn, and beans for generations. Afterward the families found out a businessman in Maranhao, the state she lives in, had laid claim to 10,872 acres of public land abutting 9,884 acres of land he had purchased, which includes the land that her family has been living on for generations. They suspect that he hired the men and bribed the police to come and terrorize the families so that they would leave. 

“When we arrived, we found several dozen people, mainly women and children, huddling under the one remaining structure that cast any shade,” said Maciana Veira, president of the Sindicato dos Produtores Rurais de Balsas, the local rural workers association. Veira, in her decades of work for the association, has more accounts of land being stolen from rural communities than she can count.

Maria do Espírito Santo and her husband stand in front of their former house, which was destroyed by gunmen who they suspect were hired by a local farmer to illegally claim their land. Ingrid Barros / Grist

Brazil possesses vast tracts of lands which exist in the public domain. Traditional peoples, small-scale farmers, quilombolas, and other homesteaders have the legal right to lay claim to these lands, but in rural Brazil, many communities like Bom Acerto still lack formal deeds. Those seeking to claim that land — often business owners or corporations — reportedly hire armed men to intimidate and run off residents. They then clear the land of trees or native vegetation, either seeding pasture for cows or preparing it to grow crops like soy, cotton, or corn. Eventually, they gain formal ownership through legal maneuvers or by forging land titles, sometimes by leaving falsified titles in a box with crickets, whose excreta makes the papers seem older than they are. It’s such a common practice that it’s picked up its own noun: grilagem, derived from the Portuguese for cricket, grilo.

Land grabbing is not a new phenomenon in Brazil, but it’s especially rampant in the 337 municipalities in the northern Cerrado that make up an area known as Matopiba (a portmanteau of the states Maranhao, Tocantins, Piaui, and Bahia.) The Cerrado, the world’s most biodiverse savanna, stretches 1.2 million square miles up the spine of Brazil, covering a fifth of the country. Squished between the Amazon rainforest on one side and the Atlantic rainforest on the other, it has been dubbed “the underground forest” because so much of its biomass is found in the long, thick roots that funnel water down into aquifers and store impressive amounts of carbon. Deforestation and land use change is Brazil’s single largest source of greenhouse gas emissions, so conserving the Cerrado, and its role as a carbon sink, is crucial for Brazil to meet its Paris Agreement goals. Much of the biome’s last remaining tracks of native Cerrado vegetation are in Matopiba, the country’s last agricultural frontier.

In Matopiba, some 1.7 million acres of native vegetation were ripped up and turned into soy plantations between 2013 and 2021, helping to turn Brazil into the world’s largest producer and exporter of soybeans. Most of the beans are used to fatten livestock in Europe and China, the two biggest buyers of Brazil’s crop. The usual narrative is that the destruction of the Cerrado is closely linked to the growing demand for meat and dairy. The full story, however, is more tangled and wider in scope: Behind this rapid and widespread transformation are some of the world’s largest investment funds that have put billions into buying farmland in the Cerrado, including pension funds in Sweden and Germany, Harvard University’s endowment, and the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association, better known as TIAA, the $1.2 trillion pension fund for 5 million people across the United States. 

Thanks in part to its investments in Brazilian farmland, TIAA has become one of the largest farmland investors in the world. Through its wholly owned subsidiary, Nuveen Natural Capital, the fund has accumulated some 3 million acres across 10 countries. It owns stakes in water-hungry almond and pistachio orchards in drought-stricken California, Macadamia nut farms and row crops in Australia, and vast swaths around the Mississippi Delta. But its investments in Brazil, where it manages 1 million acres, are some of its most controversial holdings.

Around the time of the financial crisis in 2008, TIAA and other investment funds started buying up farmland in Brazil, eventually honing in on the northern Cerrado, specifically Matopiba, where environmental protections are thin and land ownership is often in disputed. According to environmental organizations, academic researchers, satellite images, and media reports, many of the farms TIAA acquired are connected to land grabbing and deforestation. TIAA has regularly denied any knowledge of these practices, but emails and other leaked documents obtained from a data breach last year reportedly showed that as far back as 2010, TIAA was aware that some of the land it purchased was bought from people publicly accused of stealing it — groups like those that destroyed do Espirito Santo’s village of Bom Acerto. Despite an almost decades-long campaign by the Brazilian nonprofit The Network for Social Justice and Human Rights, along with environmental advocacy groups like ActionAid and Friends of the Earth, to get TIAA and other foreign funds to divest from their Brazilian landholdings, TIAA continues to raise money to invest in the region.

The New York offices of financial services firm TIAA-CREF as seen in January 2009. Mark Lennihan / AP Photo

Connecting specific farms to specific investment funds is a complicated task, said Lucas Seghezzo, a professor of environmental sociology at the National University of Salta, Argentina, who studies large-scale land acquisitions. Investment funds often keep their assets private when they aren’t stocks and bonds, and following the money can lead to a maze of shell companies and chains of subsidiaries. Researchers wind up stuck in dead ends. Deforestation and land clearing is a complex process, and not every instance is directly connected to pension funds or investors. But experts have traced the massive influx of foreign capital in Matopiba to skyrocketing land prices in the region, which, in turn, has fueled land grabbing, deforestation, and violent conflicts, all with devastating consequences for local communities and the land itself. 

“There’s a lot of evidence that investors who buy land in Latin America, for instance, but also in Southeast Asia, are responsible for deforestation — directly or indirectly,” said Seghezzo, who is also a scientific advisor to the Land Matrix Initiative, an independent monitoring initiative. “There is a clear correlation between land acquisitions and deforestation, especially those for agriculture.”

Bom Acerto is a two-hour drive from Balsas, an agricultural town in the heart of Matopiba. The route there is largely unpaved, passing over hills and through miles of scraggly shrubs and waving golden grass. The road dips occasionally from flat stretches of savanna into lush forests wedged into tiny riverine valleys. Far less known than the Amazon rainforest that borders the savanna to the north and west, the Cerrado is Brazil’s second-largest biome, covering an area larger than Germany, France, England, Italy, and Spain combined. It’s one of the oldest and richest ecosystems on Earth, with 5 percent of the planet’s biodiversity.

An aerial view of native Cerrado in western Bahia state, Brazil. Nelson Almeida / AFP via Getty Images

Much of the Cerrado has been plowed under for agriculture, especially in the southern and central parts of the savanna, which are closer to large urban centers like Sao Paulo and Brasilia, the country’s capital. Some of the last remaining swaths of intact Cerrado vegetation remain in the north, around places like Bom Acerto, which until the beginning of the 20th century had been largely occupied by peasant, Afro-Brazilian, and Indigenous communities.

Fabio Pitta has been studying the expansion of agriculture in the Cerrado since he was a university student researching sugarcane companies in the mid-2000s. Rising oil and gas prices and fossil fuel companies’ desire to appear “green” had stoked investments in sugarcane, which could be turned into ethanol when gas prices were high and used as sugar when they were low. The size of farms in the region was steadily growing, as were the number of laborers literally working themselves to death. Pitta set out to study this dynamic, focusing on Cosan, Brazil’s largest producer of sugarcane. He was puzzled to find that the company had started buying up large tracts of land in the Cerrado around 2008, thousands of miles from its home base near Sao Paulo in the southern Cerrado, through an investment arm it created called Radar Propriedades Agrícolas, or simply Radar. 

More puzzling still was the identity of Radar’s second-largest shareholder, an investment fund run by what was then known as TIAA-CREF, the pension giant in New York City that manages retirement funds for millions of American teachers and professors. 

Pitta was witnessing the convergence of two global crises. The U.S. financial crisis that started in 2007 sent big investors scrambling to find assets that weren’t tied to American real estate. Farmland, once considered a backwater and risky investment, gained overnight appeal. The surge in prices of basic staples that had started in 2005 had, by 2008, led to a fully fledged global food crisis. The commodities that could be grown on farmland suddenly became much more valuable, too. “Buying farmland was like buying gold with yield,” said Roman Herre, an agricultural expert at FIAN Germany, a human rights organization that advocates for the right to food. And global investors, Herre said, rushed to buy up whatever farmland they could.

An agriculture field abuts native Cerrado in western Bahia state, Brazil. Nelson Almeida / AFP via Getty Images

More than 100 new investment funds specializing in food and agriculture were created between 2005 and 2008, and agricultural investment magazines and conferences ballooned. Famous investors like George Soros wanted in. Whereas in 2008, the annual expansion of farmland hovered around 9.9 million acres a year, by the middle of 2009, around 138 million acres worth of large-scale farmland deals had been announced, many of them larger than 500,000 acres, or two and a half times the size of New York City. It was dubbed “a new global land rush.”

“In the beginning, it was really more like a Wild West story,” Herre said. And one of the biggest players was TIAA, which went from having virtually no farmland in 2007 to holding just shy of 2 million acres worldwide within a decade.

But it wasn’t just teachers in the United States whose savings were providing the capital for the land rush. Dutch, Canadian, and Swedish public employees, along with German physicians, were also funding it. In 2012, TIAA launched its first international farmland fund called TIAA-CREF Global Agriculture LLC with $2 billion primarily from pension funds to invest in farmland, primarily in Brazil, Australia, and the U.S. The roster included Swedish AP2, then one of the largest pension funds in northern Europe, Germany’s Ärzteversorgung Westfalen-Lippe, a pension fund for physicians, and the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, a public and private pension fund manager with around $176 billion in assets at the time. TIAA launched a second fund in 2015, the $3 billion TIAA-CREF Global Agriculture II LLC.

Figuring out exactly where these investments were located was difficult. Pension funds and other private investors don’t have to disclose precisely where their farmland holdings are, and investors often use complex business structures to buy farmland — particularly in places like Brazil, where foreign land ownership is legally restricted. Much of the data on TIAA’s investments comes from organizations like The Network for Social Justice and Human Rights, which Pitta now works for, that have traced the money through a messy web of subsidiaries and land acquisition companies, of which TIAA owns more than seven in Brazil, according to TIAA’s 2021 statements.

In 2016, the investment data company Preqin estimated that since 2006, more than 100 unlisted funds had raised approximately $22 billion in capital globally to invest in agriculture and farmland. TIAA’s investments, by far the biggest of any investor, made up almost a quarter of those. 

“TIAA is really the vanguard of pension funds making this type of investment,” said Gustavo Oliveira, an assistant professor of geography at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, who has been studying foreign investments in Brazil. “The important role that TIAA plays is not just on its own, because it’s got deep pockets and it invests in a lot of land. It is that once TIAA has ventured deep, it then becomes possible for smaller pension funds and other investors to follow in its wake.”

The northern Cerrado is crisscrossed by a handful of paved highways, lined on all sides by soybeans, that connect large agricultural hubs in Matopiba. In the rainy season, it’s a sea of bright green as far as the eye can see. Trucks thunder down the highways to and from large grain silos, many of them owned by international agricultural giants such as Bunge and Cargill which, alongside a few other companies, control more than half of the soy trade in Brazil. In the dry season, the soil lies bare and dusty, large piles of stark white lime piled up to one side, applied liberally to coax the otherwise nutrient-poor, acidic soil into producing what is now one of Brazil’s most lucrative exports. Over the last two decades, soybean production in Brazil has more than quadrupled.

A factory for Dutch agribusiness and food company Bunge in western Bahia state, Brazil, on September 25, 2023. Nelson Almeida / AFP via Getty Images

The farms are so large that their office complexes lie miles away from the highway, often on the iconic flat-top mountains called chapadas, ancient sandstone and quartzite formations formed tens of millions of years ago. While the rusty signs on the farms are largely in Portuguese, some of the owners are global. Between 2008 and 2020, Harvard Management Company, which manages Harvard University’s endowment fund, amassed more than 40 rural properties covering approximately 1 million acres, an area twice the size of all the farmland in the school’s home state of Massachusetts. BrasilAgro, whose shareholders include the Utah Retirement Systems, the Los Angeles City Employees Retirement System, and the Public School and Education Employee Retirement Systems of Missouri, owns a total of 741,000 acres in Matopiba. SLC Agrícola, one of the country’s largest soy producers and TIAA’s largest farm operator, and its sister organization SLC Landco, a joint venture with the British private equity fund Valiance, collectively bought up more than 450,000 acres of farms in Matopiba between 2011 and 2017.

While soybean farming has been expanding in the Cerrado for several decades, the relatively recent spread of soy into Matopiba, which has attracted the bulk of foreign farmland investment, stands out. “Matopiba is a relatively small portion of the Cerrado overall, but it is without a doubt the main expansion frontier for soy in the region,” said Lisa Rausch, a scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who for the last two decades has studied how agricultural production leads to forest loss in Brazil. 

Elsewhere in the Cerrado, soybeans tend to be grown on already converted land, often pasture. But in Matopiba, the vast majority of new farmland created since the turn of the century has been from previously intact Cerrado vegetation. According to Trase, a group that tracks global supply chains, three-quarters of all the deforestation from soybean production in the entire Cerrado from 2005 to 2016 happened in Matopiba alone. “One of the main features of soybean expansion in Matopiba has been its association with the clearing of native vegetation,” Rausch said.

Based on data obtained from the Network for Social Justice and Human Rights and Trase, Grist mapped the municipalities of farms that had significant investments from foreign pensions funds with information on which municipalities had the highest deforestation risk from soy farming. The results revealed that farms with significant foreign investment owned thousands to tens of thousands of acres in nine of the 10 municipalities that have experienced the most deforestation from soy from 2008 to 2020.

Grist / Clayton Aldern

The loss of habitat threatens the region’s biodiversity, and consequently, the livelihoods of locals, many of whom depend on the forests and shrublands of the Cerrado for food and medicine. Alongside deforestation and foreign farmland investment, violent land conflicts in the region have also ballooned. Matopiba saw an overall 56 percent increase in reported land conflicts between 2012 and 2016, in contrast to a national increase of 21 percent. According to the Pastoral Land Commission, an organization affiliated with the Catholic Church that tracks conflicts in Brazil’s countryside, Bahia and Maranhao — both in Matopiba — ranked first and second among the states with the highest number of conflicts in 2022. 

To be sure, some funds have dropped their investments in companies that deal in soy in the Brazilian Cerrado, some citing deforestation risk, others based on what they claim are financial reasons. The Norwegian Government Pension Fund and the Danish insurer Danica Pension divested their shares from SLC Agricola in 2017 and 2021, respectively. And last year, Germany’s pension fund for physicians in Westphalia-Lippe divested its shares from TIAA’s Global Agriculture Funds. But others have jumped in: In 2022, the Board of the Los Angeles County Employees Retirement Association committed around $500 million to TIAA-CREF Global Agriculture Funds, which encompasses its Brazilian farms.

The rapid expansion of large farms, funded by an influx of foreign capital, has reshaped the Cerrado’s landscape. The long, thick roots of vegetation store billions of metric tons of carbon, and have long funneled the region’s rainwater into aquifers. Two-thirds of Brazil’s rivers originate here, and nine out of 10 Brazilians use electricity generated by water originating in the Cerrado, according to the World Wildlife Fund. Now, so many trees and shrubs have been ripped out for soy fields, cattle, and sugarcane plantations that nearly half of the biome is cropland or pasture. Scientists predict that if agricultural expansion continues unabated, the biome could collapse by 2030, threatening the region’s drinking water as well as the thousands of unique species native to the world’s most biodiverse tropical savanna. 

The soya boom is far from over. Brazil is expected to plant roughly 30 million more acres of soy between 2021 and 2050, according to one study. Of that, 27 million acres are destined for the Cerrado, and 86 percent of that is projected to be planted in Matopiba. But this is already coming at a cost. “The loss of native vegetation in the Cerrado has very serious consequences environmentally,” Rausch said. That loss has disrupted the region’s water cycle and has increased the frequency of extremely hot days in places like Matopiba, leading to more severe droughts. Climate change is likely to make all these problems worse.

Tractors work in an agricultural field in western Bahia state, Brazil, on September 29, 2023. Nelson Almeida / AFP via Getty Images

TIAA has previously said it invests responsibly and always carries out thorough due diligence on land purchases. But last year, a hacker group obtained 100 gigabytes of files from Cosan, Brazil’s sugarcane giant, through a ransomware attack, a trove that included sales documents, land holding records, legal papers, and emails, which were then handed over to Distributed Denial of Secrets, an activist group. They reportedly revealed that both Cosan and TIAA ignored red flags when buying Brazilian farms — even purchasing land from people who had already been publicly accused of stealing it.

Grist reached out to TIAA and its subsidiary Nuveen to respond to the information uncovered in the data breach and asked how the pension fund incorporates sustainability into its investment decisions. A spokesperson replied that TIAA and Nuveen evaluate the impact of their investments on local communities, make sure that the land they acquire and hold meets all government requirements for forest and natural habitat protection, and also ensure that their investments comply with local rules and regulations. 

“Any suggestion that TIAA has engaged in improper business practices is without merit,” the spokesperson wrote. “In every country in which we operate, including Brazil, we follow the requirements of all laws and adhere to strong ethical guidelines in our investments. And we expect the government to investigate and prosecute instances of land-grabbing wherever it occurs.”

News of TIAA’s farmland holdings in Brazil first gained widespread attention in 2015 when a smattering of media reports began to lay out the extent of TIAA’s investments in the Cerrado. But it was a report in 2018 that detailed the scope and scale of Harvard endowment’s extensive landholdings in Brazil, written by the Network for Human Rights and Social Justice and the international nonprofit GRAIN, that gave the issue traction in the United States. The news spurred the growing fossil fuel divestment movement at Harvard to include land grabbing in its platform, forming the “Stop Harvard Land Grabs” campaign. Brazilian authorities were also starting to take notice, scrutinizing companies backed by Harvard’s endowment and TIAA. 

In 2020, a small activist group called TIAA Divest tapped Caroline Levine, an English professor at Cornell University, to help lead a campaign to urge TIAA to get rid of its investments in fossil fuels and other environmentally destructive industries. Earlier that year, Levine had successfully helped win the campaign to get Cornell to divest its own endowment from fossil fuels, and she was riled up by what she saw as the blatant disregard for the environment and human rights that accompanied many of the investment decisions universities were making.

A protester holds a sign at a 2022 rally in New York City calling on TIAA to make good on anti-deforestation commitments. Erik McGregor / LightRocket via Getty Images

“I had this idea that financiers were sort of unaware of what was happening, that there’s a kind of distance between the investment and what’s going on on the ground,” Levine said. “But the more I looked at it, the more it seemed like, ‘No, there’s a lot of conscious bad action happening.’”

Levine and a dozen other professors started researching TIAA’s investments, but were taken aback by the sheer number of shell companies and the opaque web of financial flows. “I’m a researcher, but this really wasn’t my ballpark,” she said. They brought on Tom Sanzillo, a former New York state comptroller then working with the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, who talked them through the financial hurdles. After two years of gathering evidence, they filed an 87-page complaint in October 2022 to the United Nations-sponsored Principles for Responsible Investment against TIAA and its subsidiary, Nuveen. Nearly 300 academics, researchers, and TIAA account holders signed on, including the climate scientist Michael Mann, the American academic Judith Butler, and the writer and activist Bill McKibben. 

“TIAA/Nuveen’s climate commitments are contradicted by its substantial investments in fossil fuels and commodities linked to deforestation, which undermine the climate objectives established in the Paris Agreement,” the complaint states. “TIAA/Nuveen’s ongoing investments in coal, oil, and gas, as well as land-based investments linked to deforestation and illegality, are financially, morally, and socially irresponsible.”

TIAA was one of the founding signatories of Principles for Responsible Investment, or PRI, in 2006, which aimed to help investors make their funds more sustainable. The complaint argued that the $78 billion worth of investments in fossil fuels, as well as various environmental and human rights abuses connected to their large farm holdings in the Brazilian Cerrado, violated PRI’s principles, as well as TIAA’s own climate pledges. It charged that TIAA was misleading investors by advertising its funds as climate-friendly, making the case that many of its products marketed as being aligned with ESG principles — shorthand for environmentally and socially responsible — allegedly had higher exposure than non-ESG funds to fossil fuels and deforestation, the top two sources of greenhouse gas emissions in the world.

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PRI signatories commit to six principles, including incorporating ESG matters into decision-making. While PRI has a serious violations policy, it is only sparingly applied, Levine said. In 2021, the Save the Dawson project in Australia filed a complaint to PRI about Liberty Mutual’s financing of a coal mine, which resulted in the global insurer canceling their financing. In October 2022, PRI said that it had reviewed Nuveen’s response to the allegations and “decided that the allegations do not constitute a breach of the policy. As such, there is no reason to change Nuveen’s status as a PRI signatory,” they wrote in an email response to Levine. 

“We knew it was a long shot,” Levine said. Still, she considered the result disappointing.

University students, professors, and pension holders aren’t the only ones attempting to highlight the connection between foreign investment funds, deforestation, and land grabbing. Traditional communities and peasant farmers in Matopiba have protested in front of government agencies and blocked roads to bring attention to the problem. Last June, a delegation of leaders from several rural communities in Piaui handed a letter to government authorities asking for the state to protect them from ongoing violence and violations of their rights.

“Human rights violations in Piaui caused by land grabbing, deforestation, fumigation with toxic agrochemicals and other pollutants, as well as physical and psychological violence against rural communities, have been widely documented and brought to the attention of state and federal authorities,” the letter said. “The perpetrators of the violence are usually individuals linked to local land grabbers and/or agribusinesses, but research has shown that international investors play a key role in encouraging human rights violations and environmental crimes in the region.”

A tree that has been pulled up with industrial-strength chains is left to dry in the sun near Bom Acerto. Ingrid Barros / Grist

Around 10 miles from Bom Acerto, piles of native shrubs and vegetation cook in the punishing sun, their long, thick roots a contrast to the bright blue sky and the flat-topped mountains in the distance. For generations, the tops of these mountains were common areas used by peasants and Afro-descendent communities to forage for food, firewood, and medicines. People preferred to live in the more lush valleys, where crystalline rivers flowed. Nowadays, many of these rivers are polluted with agricultural runoff, and plantation owners keep ripping out more native vegetation. Just over the border from Bom Acerto, in Piaui, 5,000 acres of land was cleared in 2021 from a large farm, called Kajubar. In all likelihood, Pitta and other researchers predict, it will be sold to the highest bidder.

Though not all the deforestation in Matopiba can be directly linked to foreign investors, researchers agree that the scale and speed of destruction would not be possible without the massive influx of foreign capital. “Even if they sold all the enterprises, they profited from them a lot, and the impacts are still there,” Pitta said. Last year, the Stop Harvard Land Grabs campaign published a petition demanding that Harvard “stop investing in new farmland, return the lands already acquired to affected communities, and pay reparations for the undeniable harm of Harvard’s global land business.”

Meanwhile, forests continue to be torn down in the Cerrado at a fast clip. Between July 2022 and August 2023, deforestation in the region rose almost 17 percent, eating up more than 1.5 million acres of Cerrado vegetation, an area almost twice as large as Yosemite National Park. Around three-quarters of that was in Matopiba. According to the Pastoral Land Commission, more than 20,000 families in the four states were involved in conflicts over land in 2022, a record number.

In Bom Acerto, all that remains of the former settlement are piles of ashes and empty trails. The community has tried to take the businessman who is claiming he owns their land to court, but the case is stalled. Despite the uncertainty, the community has begun to rebuild some of the stalls for animals, and replant the fields with cassava, beans, and rice. Most of the trails end at the edge of the dry forest, where native Cerrado vegetation still extends for acres and acres into the horizon.

Maria do Espírito Santo has lived in Bom Acerto for decades. “I have the dream to stay here,” she told Grist in January. Ingrid Barros / Grist

Last January, do Espírito Santo stood on the site of her old house and looked toward the village that she and her old neighbors are slowly piecing back together. “My dream is to stay here,” she said. “My dream is that we have the right to stay here, that we have the right to have our land and our home.” 

At the end of August, four men in an unmarked pickup truck invaded Bom Acerto and set fire to a family’s house. Now, residents report that a drone constantly flies overhead. Most of the native Cerrado is still visible out beyond their fields, but for how long, do Espírito Santo doesn’t know.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Who’s behind the destruction of Brazil’s Cerrado? on Feb 28, 2024.

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This story was published in partnership with High Country News.

Before Jon Eagle Sr. began working for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, he was an equine therapist for over 36 years, linking horses with and providing support to children, families, and communities both on his ranch and on the road. The work reinforced his familiarity with the land, and allowed him to explore the rolling hills, plains, and buttes of the sixth-largest reservation in the United States. But when he became Standing Rock’s tribal historic preservation officer, he learned that the land still held surprises, the biggest one being that much of that land didn’t belong to the tribe. Standing Rock straddles North and South Dakota, and both states own thousands of acres within the tribe’s reservation boundaries. 

“They don’t talk to us at all about it,” Eagle said. “I wasn’t even aware that there were lands like that here.”

It wasn’t until John Eagle Sr. became Standing Rock’s tribal historic preservation officer that he learned that much of the reservation didn’t belong to the tribe. Stephen Yang

On the North Dakota side, nearly 23,500 acres of Standing Rock are managed by the state, along with another 70,000 of subsurface acres, a land classification that refers to underground resources, including oil and gas. The combined 93,500 acres, known as trust lands, are held and managed by the state and produce revenue for its public schools and the Bank of North Dakota. The amount of reservation land South Dakota controls is unknown; the state does not make public its trust land data and did not supply it after a public records request.

And Standing Rock isn’t alone.

Data analyzed by Grist and High Country News reveals that a combined 1.6 million surface and subsurface acres of state trust lands lie within the borders of 83 federal Indian reservations in 10 states.

Grist / Maria Parazo Rose / Clayton Aldern

State trust lands, which are managed by state agencies, generate millions of dollars for public schools, universities, penitentiaries, hospitals, and other state institutions, typically through grazing, logging, mining, and oil and gas production. Although federal Indian reservations were established for the use and governance of Indigenous nations and their citizens, the existence of state trust lands reveals a truth: States rely on Indigenous land and resources to support non-Indigenous institutions and offset state taxpayer dollars for non-Indigenous people. Tribal nations have no control over this land, and many states do not consult with tribes about how it’s used.  

Even in the obscure world of trust lands, states’ holdings within reservations have been almost completely unknown until now. Many of the experts Grist and High Country News reached out to, including longtime policymakers and leaders on Indigenous issues, were unfamiliar with state trust lands’ history and acreage. However, what sources did make clear is that the presence of state lands on reservations complicates issues of tribal jurisdiction in regards to land use and management and undercuts tribal sovereignty. According to Rob Williams, University of Arizona law professor and a citizen of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, this has broad implications for everything from the handling of missing and murdered Indigenous people to tribal nations’ ability to confront climate change. 

“When there’s clarity about jurisdiction over Indian lands, it is easier for tribes to work with others to protect public safety, public health, and the natural environment,” said Bryan Newland, assistant secretary for Indian Affairs at the Department of Interior and a citizen of the Bay Mills Indian Community. “It’s been the longstanding policy of the department to reduce ‘checkerboard’ jurisdiction within reservations by consolidating tribal lands and strengthening the ability of tribes to exercise their sovereign authorities over their own lands.”

The creation of Indian reservations was followed closely by states entering the union, as well as successful attempts by state governments to carve up and dissolve those tribal lands.

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Once states became part of the U.S., they received millions of acres of recently ceded tribal lands, many of which became trust lands. But as more settlers moved west, states pushed for more land. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the U.S. government responded by carving up Indian reservations, parceling out small amounts of land to individual tribal members, then handing over “surplus” lands for states, settlers, and federal projects. Known as the Allotment Era, the federal policy moved approximately 90 million acres of reservation lands nationwide from tribal hands to non-Native ownership.

According to Monte Mills, professor of law at the University of Washington and director of the Native American Law Center, allotment served a dual purpose: It broke up tribal power and gave non-Native citizens access to tribal lands and natural resources. 

The allotment system, Mills explained, provided “a whole other set of opportunities for non-Indian settlers to get access to surplus lands and for the states to come in and get more state trust lands on lands that had been expressly off-limits.”

As Rob Williams put it, “The conquest was by law.”

“The implications of that policy are just devastating,” Williams said. “It’s hard to think of a single problem in Indian law that you can’t blame it in part on.”

For example, nearly 512,000 surface and subsurface acres on the Ute Tribe’s Uintah and Ouray Reservation came into Utah’s possession after a series of murky state and federal policies and land transfers. In 1898, just two years after Utah became a state, Congress began allotting land to individual tribal members without the tribe’s consent. A quarter of the tribe’s 4 million-acre reservation was taken by President Theodore Roosevelt for a national forest, while other land went to provide townsites and establish trust lands. By 1933, 91 percent of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation had been allotted.

In other cases, as with the Yakama Nation, states acquired parcels when reservation boundaries were redrawn. Shortly after the tribe ceded over 12 million acres in central Washington, the agreed-upon map of its new reservation simply disappeared, sparking nearly a century of border disputes between the Yakama Nation, the state, and the federal government, specifically over a 121,000-acre section known as Tract D. In the 1930s, the map was rediscovered by an employee in the federal Office of Indian Affairs — apparently misfiled under “M” for Montana. In 2021, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the land was still a part of the original reservation. But in the meantime, Washington state had established trust lands inside Tract D. Today, 108,000 surface, subsurface, and timber acres inside the recently recognized borders of the Yakama Nation are still providing revenue for the state’s K-12 schools, scientific schools, and penal and reform institutions. This makes up 78 percent of all state trust lands on the Yakama Reservation.

Washington’s Department of Natural Resources, or DNR, is responsible for managing these lands. An agency spokesperson said, “The Yakama Treaty retained many rights for tribal members on public lands throughout the ceded territory of the Yakama, and DNR’s management of these trust lands continues to be done with much input from the Yakama Nation.”

​​Within the lines

In at least 10 states, trust lands are present within 83 tribal reservation boundaries.

State trust lands Federal Indian reservations Yakama Standing Rock Uintah and Ouray Flathead

Grist / Maria Parazo Rose / Clayton Aldern

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Michael Dolson has spent most of his life on the western side of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes’ Flathead Reservation on his family’s ranch, started by his great-grandparents before allotment. Today, a map of the reservation shows large squares of state trust land parcels located not far from his family’s land: a total of 108,000 surface and subsurface acres that fund Montana’s K-12 schools and the University of Montana. 

Dolson — now the tribe’s chairman — says that the state lands on the reservation are managed separately; the tribe has no input over how or whether Montana decides to log or lease them. Since different groups have different objectives, Dolson says, this complicates the tribe’s ability to manage its own reservation.

“I think we’ve gotten used to lands on the rez being owned by others, and they make use of those lands the way they want to,” Dolson said. “Do we appreciate that? Well, no. Especially when it’s parcels that have some sort of cultural significance to us, and we have no control over it, even though they’re on our own reservation.”

For more than a decade, the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes have carefully planned for climate change, documenting and developing tools, like drought-resiliency plans, to limit the impacts it could have. Meanwhile, Montana continues to prioritize oil and gas and coal production, making extraction one of the biggest sources of its trust land revenue.

Like many other tribes, the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes have had to buy back their own land, at or above market value. After allotment, less than a third of the reservation — about 30 percent — remained in tribal ownership. According to Dolson, about 60 percent of the Flathead Reservation, or 791,000 acres, is currently back in tribal ownership, following decades of strategic work. Yet Montana still controls 8 percent of the reservation as state trust land. 

States are legally obliged to make money from state trust lands to benefit state institutions, so they are unlikely to return any land without getting something in exchange. But the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes may have created a model for how tribes can negotiate for large-scale transfers of land back to tribal ownership. In 2020, Congress passed a water-rights settlement that cleared the way for a transfer of nearly 30,000 acres of Montana state trust land back to the tribe. In exchange, the state will receive federal lands elsewhere; the acreage is currently in the process of being selected over the next five years. It’s a creative and unique arrangement, but one that presents opportunities — if states are willing to work with tribes.

Read Next California offers $100 million for tribes to buy back their land. It won’t go far. Joseph Lee

Jon Eagle Sr. believes that systematic land theft has hampered tribes’ ability to manage the environment and protect their communities. The checkerboard parcels that allotment created are hard to manage; land-use policy is more effective over large, cohesive swaths of land. And returning land to tribal control gets complicated when state trust lands are involved: States don’t want to lose out on tax revenue. 

The Biden administration’s policy is to assist tribes in reacquiring tribal homelands. But the policy is silent on the issue of state trust lands on reservations. There is currently no clear mechanism to return those lands to tribes. That means tribal nations have to work with states or else buy land outright — something the Ute Tribe tried unsuccessfully to do in 2019.

In 1969, Utah received 28,000 acres of land from the federal government inside the Ute’s reservation. Much of this land, known as Tabby Mountain, was converted to trust lands, and over the next 60 years it produced nearly $3.2 million in hunting and leasing revenue for state institutions, including Utah State University. In 2018, when the state put Tabby Mountain up for sale, the tribe was the highest bidder, offering nearly $47 million. 

But shortly afterward, the state suspended the sale indefinitely, leaving the tribe unable to buy back its own land. Based on complaints filed by a whistleblower, the Utes allege that the state agencies responsible for the sale rigged the bidding process in order to prevent the tribe from reacquiring the land. The case is still in court. 

According to Rob Williams at the University of Arizona, “The big issue now — and this is the burden on the tribes — is land back.”

Correction: A graphic in this story originally misidentified the number of reservations that contain land owned by states.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline At least 10 states quietly own lands within Indian reservations — and profit from them on Feb 28, 2024.

When oil and gas companies attack a climate campaign, activists usually focus on the obvious negative: One of the world’s biggest industries, with its wealth of resources, is trying to quash their efforts to, for instance, ban natural gas in buildings.

But in Northern California, where grassroots activists have succeeded in getting towns across Napa and Sonoma counties to prohibit new gas stations, some consider the emerging backlash a sign of validation.

The news of Big Oil’s opposition came to Jim Wilson in late January. The longtime climate activist in Napa County found a flyer in his mailbox one day with a picture of a gas nozzle next to an empty wallet, along with the message “Banning gas stations = higher gas prices.” The mailer, sponsored by the Western States Petroleum Association, the West Coast’s oil industry trade group, warns that efforts to limit new gas stations could lead to less competition and increased costs for the drivers of gas-powered cars.

“I believe that Napa County is the first in the U.S. to have all of the municipalities ban new gas stations,” Wilson said. “And so maybe we’ve rocked the boat.” 

As the urgency of addressing climate change grows across the United States, one unprecedented heat wave and flood at a time, cities are finding ways to cut fossil fuels out of their future. But any action that has meaningful consequences, whether it’s an electrification ordinance in Seattle or a prohibition on new gas stations in California, is bound to grab the attention of the powerful industries it hurts.

The front and back of the Western States Petroleum Association flyer distributed in Napa County. Courtesy of Jim Wilson

Wilson, with 350 Bay Area and Napa Climate Now, advises climate activism efforts for local teenagers, who have led the push to prohibit new gas stations in the area. Liliana Karesh, a junior at Napa High School and a co-president of Napa Schools for Climate Action, said her group has reached out to government officials, participated in public comments, and presented to city councils to get their message across. “We’re in such a state of climate emergency, yet our government continues to approve the building out of these fossil fuel infrastructures,” Karesh said.

The movement to prohibit new gas stations began in 2021 when Petaluma, California, in the neighboring Sonoma County, became the first town in the United States to prohibit new gas stations. From there, bans spread throughout Sonoma and Napa counties; the idea has also been proposed in Los Angeles, Sacramento, Eugene, Oregon, and north into Kelowna, Canada. 

For a while, activists were puzzled why they weren’t seeing more opposition to their efforts, said Woody Hastings, an environmental activist in Sonoma County who helped form the Coalition Opposing New Gas Stations. He sees the flyer, along with a new bill introduced in the California State Senate that would limit gas station bans, as signs that the movement has gained enough traction to matter to opponents. “It’s really something,” Hastings said. “It tells us that the Western States Petroleum Association, which is big guns, cares about this.”

In recent years, California has seen catastrophic fires, unhealthy pollution from smoke, and wild swings between drought and heavy rain, all enhanced by climate change. Towns across Sonoma and Napa counties have declared a “climate emergency,” and activists see the prohibition of new gas stations as one way to follow through on those words.

The bans aren’t really aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions — it’s unclear what kind of effect they have on the climate — but rather ending investments in fossil fuel infrastructure. “We’ve been told it’s a silly thing to do because, you know, it doesn’t matter, because people will just be able to fill up at the existing gas stations,” Hastings said. But he says that residents aren’t clamoring for more gas stations, so local governments don’t need to spend staff time and resources approving and supporting what might soon turn into outdated infrastructure. California plans to phase out sales of gas-powered cars by 2035 and zero out its carbon emissions by 2045. Gas station developers, Hastings said, “are assuming that they’ll be able to sell gas just like they’ve been selling gas for 100 years.”

Activists also oppose gas stations for the same reason they would oppose the construction of any other pollution-spewing facility. Beneath every neighborhood station sit underground tanks storing thousands of gallons of gasoline and diesel. These tanks are the source of toxic vapors, vented aboveground through pipes. They’re also famous for leaking, infusing the surrounding soil and groundwater with a host of contaminants. Nearly all underground storage tanks eventually leak, and the cost of cleaning up a single site can top $1 million. Gas stations account for nearly half of the country’s 450,000 contaminated brownfields, sites where the presence of hazardous substances make them difficult to redevelop.

For the oil industry, gas stations are crucial: They’re the end of a long supply chain that starts in the oil fields and ends with people filling up their vehicles. “We’re paying attention across the state where these types of bans are being proposed,” said Kevin Slagle, a spokesperson for the Western States Petroleum Association. He believes the prohibition on new gas stations in parts of California are “a mix of symbolic bans and bans that really would limit fuel supplies in the community.”

Slagle said that restricting the supply of gas stations would lead to increased costs for consumers. For support, the trade group’s flyer points to a working study from University of California, Berkeley, not yet peer-reviewed, in which economists studied more than 1,000 stations in Mexico and found that adding nearby gas stations led to slightly lower gasoline prices. The flyer is part of the industry’s “Facts Per Gallon” campaign that launched late last year to draw attention to how California policies, from its cap-and-trade program to low carbon fuel requirements, contribute to some of the highest gas prices in the country.

That same Berkeley study is also mentioned in the text of a bill introduced in late January by Aisha Wahab, a Democratic state senator representing the district east of the Bay Area. The bill, as written, calls for the California Energy Commission to conduct a study on gas stations and alternative fueling infrastructure, such as electric vehicle chargers. If enacted, it would block local governments from imposing bans starting in January 2025 and lasting until the study is completed, potentially as late as January 1, 2027.

A representative for Wahab told Grist that the original bill contained a “double negative” that was being fixed and said that the bill wouldn’t prevent moratoriums on gas stations, but did not provide further details. Since bills in California can’t be amended for 30 days after they’re introduced, the official text can’t be changed until February 29, according to the state Senate office.

In the meantime, the bans are already having an effect. “We have seen projects in Napa County stranded, and applicants for new gas stations strongly discouraged, because of [Napa] Schools for Climate Action’s work and success,” Wilson said. “This industry must be furious about the progress that children are making in trying to describe their vision for a fossil-free future.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline California towns are banning new gas stations. Big Oil is paying attention. on Feb 28, 2024.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But that’s not what’s happening. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This coverage is made possible through a partnership between WBEZ and Grist, a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Sign up for WBEZ newsletters to get local news you can trust.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Tillard family could not be reached for comment.

Inside Climate News

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Naomi Davis won’t lose her faith in the earth. At a recent community meeting in Chicago’s South Side she wanted to drive the point home — that the city’s Black community will not be left out of the new, emerging green economy. 

To do it, she’s betting on energy trapped deep below the surface of the earth known as geothermal, which could be an answer to heating and cooling homes more efficiently and a path to building decarbonization. 

Davis heads Chicago’s Blacks in Green, an environmental justice group which has dedicated the past 17 years to figuring out the blueprint for self-sustaining, climate-resilient Black communities everywhere. 

“We’re hit first and worst, resourced least and last, and we contribute the least to global warming,” said Davis. 

Naomi Davis speaks at a South Side Chicago meeting about geothermal power. David McDuffie

Last year the group won the support of the Biden administration with the Environmental Protection Agency awarding a five-year $10 million grant. The money will enable Blacks in Green to work with other environmental justice communities in the Midwest to take advantage of historic funding made available through the Inflation Reduction Act. 

The Chicago organization is already beginning to work on sustainability projects in Cleveland.

Back home, Davis is focused on carbon-free energy: how to generate it, how to make it affordable, and how to get it out of the ground. Her aim is to ensure that her community won’t be left behind as the rest of the city becomes sustainable.

“We’re not going to be the ones left on the gas bills with the spiraling costs and the technology that is continuing to pollute us,” she said, adding for emphasis, “No.”

In 2023, Blacks in Green was one of 11 community partners across the country chosen by the U.S. Department of Energy to design and develop a community geothermal heating and cooling district. That will mean building out a shared geothermal network across four city blocks containing more than 100 multi-family and single-family homes.

U.S. Department of Energy

The goal is to decarbonize buildings and reduce energy costs for families. To get there, Blacks in Green received nearly $750,000 to kick off the initial phase of the pilot, which includes hosting community meetings and determining household needs.

Davis said Chicago’s West Woodlawn neighborhood — located about 9 miles south of the city’s downtown — is ready to experiment with geothermal energy. 

But at the Blacks in Green community meeting, neighbors like Debra Gay and her mother Retta Ford have questions about what exactly it’ll take to bring geothermal energy to the South Side. 

“Given that our city lots are so tightly spaced, how would you do that for an existing home and will that create some disruption?” asked Gay. 

Ford, Gay’s mother, worried whether the project could destabilize the foundation of older homes. 

Debra Gay, right, and her mother Retta Ford, left, attend a community meeting about geothermal power in Chicago’s South Side. Grist / JuanPablo Ramirez-Franco

Not necessarily, according to Andrew Barbeau, president of the Accelerate Group, a clean energy consulting firm working alongside Blacks in Green to design and deploy the geothermal pilot project. 

The key to geothermal in these old neighborhoods: the alleys.

“Out in front, you got water, you got gas, you got sewer, and other things are alleys,” Barbeau said. “There’s nothing under that ground.”

The plan is to leverage the earth underneath the alleys behind homes and businesses to build out a community geothermal system. That will mean a series of deep, 400-foot holes that pipe water into the ground, absorb the temperature of the earth, and bring it back up to the surface to make use of it.

By building the community heating system beneath the alleys, the project sidesteps the major challenge that major American cities like Chicago face: lack of open, workable space. Once installed, buildings along the alleyway can connect to the underground heating system at their own convenience. 

Read Next As offshore wind stumbles, Biden moves to speed up solar and geothermal in the West Katie Myers

This all works because the earth functions as a kind of thermal battery. The sun beats down on the earth, and it absorbs some of that energy. So much so that between 20 and 40 feet below the surface of the earth, the temperature hovers consistently around 12.8 degrees C (55 degrees F) year round, according to Andrew Stumpf, a geologist with the Prairie Research Institute at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

“So you circulate water in a pipe, and you exchange the heat from the pipe into the water, and you’re pulling that temperature out,” Stumpf said. 

Experts call geothermal energy a nearly inexhaustible energy source, and it isn’t limited to just Chicago. It can be brought online almost anywhere. Back in 2019, the DOE released a study charting the path to massively scaling geothermal across the country. It found significant economic opportunity for geothermal district systems throughout the Midwest and Northeast, with Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, New York, and Pennsylvania leading the pack.

With 23 geothermal districts across the country, the U.S. lags behind Europe, where nearly 400 are in operation. 

While the DOE is investing in geothermal districts which rely on the earth’s near surface temperatures, they’re also betting big on larger-scale enhanced geothermal systems, which typically require drilling miles underground. Enhanced geothermal works by pumping fluid deep into the earth, which is then recovered as steam and put to work to generate electricity.

Earlier this month, the Biden administration announced $60 million for three enhanced geothermal system pilots in California, Oregon, and Utah. An analysis from the DOE last year found that by advancing enhanced geothermal, the U.S. could be on track to generating 90 gigawatts of electricity, or enough to power 65 million homes by 2050.

Read Next America’s first ​‘enhanced’ geothermal plant just got up and running Maria Gallucci

Geothermal in West Woodlawn is a long way out. Once the community engagement phase wraps up, Blacks in Green will have the opportunity to be selected for up to $4 million in grants to actually go out and build the system. 

But there are still major questions left. Who owns the geothermal network? Who decides the rates? West Woodlawn could develop public benefit corporations or local co-ops that share benefits with residents. 

The hope isn’t just to break ground on geothermal but explore new ownership models that center equity along the way. 

Back at the Blacks in Green meeting, resident Rosazlia Grillier said she thinks a lot about what people sacrifice when they’re unable to pay their energy bills. She said the more that people know about geothermal, the more likely they’ll be on board.

“Prices around energy costs are skyrocketing,” said Grillier. “And so we can either just complain about it, or we can educate ourselves about it and make the change that we know needs to happen.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A geothermal energy boom could be coming to Chicago’s South Side on Feb 23, 2024.

The University of Arizona this week delayed implementation of its climate action plan citing a $177 million budget deficit. Despite rising revenues, the university has been grappling with low cash reserves due to overspending, and is now dealing with hiring freezes, flat-lined salaries, and potential layoffs. Now, the university’s climate commitments may be on the chopping block. 

Nick Prevenas, director of media relations at the University of Arizona, said the administration is “currently reassessing how to approach the final steps in the development of the university’s Sustainability and Climate Action Plan to ensure it best supports the university’s Financial Action Plan.” 

Six working groups and two technical teams spent last fall working on nearly 100 recommendations to decrease carbon emissions at the university, including upgrading facilities, incentivizing cleaner transportation options, and improving public awareness of sustainability issues. The list of final recommendations includes divesting from fossil fuels by 2030, creating positions to oversee socially conscious investing, and creating policy to deal with donations from individuals or groups with ties to the fossil fuel industry. According to Prevenas, 6 percent of the University of Arizona Foundation’s endowment is currently made up of privately managed fossil fuel investments, which is valued at about $75 million. 

It is now unclear when or if those proposals will be put into action, and Prevanas did not respond to direct questions about how long implementation may be delayed.

“We are the only public university in Arizona that doesn’t have a climate action plan,” said Samantha Gonsalves-Wetherell, a senior at the University of Arizona who has been a leader in the campus divestment movement. “It shows a lack of responsibility and accountability.”

Jake Lowe, executive director of the Campus Climate Network, says Arizona isn’t the first university to backtrack from divestment goals, noting that students at the University of Illinois have protested similar delays. But he says there’s a financial case for sticking with divestment goals, citing a recent analysis by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis that advocates for a green transition. 

“Weak economic performance and an unstable future for fossil fuels have made it clear that divestment can be achieved without financial harm to any individual investment fund,” the analysis says. “Divestment is a defensive tool employed to protect investors from the loss of value — losses as certain as climate change’s global reach.”

The news comes just weeks after a Grist investigation found that Arizona is among several universities that rely on fossil fuel production, mining, and other extractive industries to earn revenue from land taken from Indigenous peoples. Divestment activists at the University of Arizona have called the practice shocking, but not shocking.

Nadira Mitchell, a Diné student at the university who is currently serving as Miss Native American University of Arizona, was among those disappointed by Grist’s findings, and the delay in the climate action plan compounds her frustration. 

“If sports funding isn’t cut and the climate action plan is,” she said, “that kind of shows what the university’s priorities are.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Cash-strapped University of Arizona says climate action can wait on Feb 23, 2024.

The past half-century has seen remarkable improvements in air quality in many parts of the world, thanks largely to legislation like the U.S. Clean Air Act. Efforts like these took aim at pollutants like the group of chemicals known as aerosols, which include sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, and other compounds that are harmful to human health.

Like greenhouse gases, aerosols are produced by cars, factories, and power plants — but unlike greenhouse gases, they make the earth cooler rather than warmer. This is because aerosols reflect the sun’s rays, rather than trapping its heat like carbon. Some studies estimate that, without aerosol pollution, the world might have already warmed by another half a degree Celsius. 

This creates a tricky paradox, which renowned climate scientist James Hansen has called a “Faustian bargain.” If you remove aerosols from the air, you reduce the health impacts of pollution, saving thousands of people from lung and heart disease, but you might also make global warming worse. This powerful relationship has been on display over the past few years in the maritime shipping industry: As freight ships have stopped using dirty bunker fuel since 2020, they’ve also stopped emitting trails of sulfur dioxide, which has caused world temperatures to jump by an additional .05 degrees C.

Now, new research shows that the interaction between aerosols and greenhouse gases also has implications for flooding, which is one of the costliest climate disasters. A peer-reviewed paper published this week in Nature Communications finds that the presence of toxic aerosols in the atmosphere over the United States helped suppress the impacts of climate change on rainfall for decades, postponing a surge in rainfall and flood risk driven by climate change. The passage of clean air laws, which removed these aerosols from the atmosphere, ironically unleashed a trend of worsening floods.

The paper’s results help solve what had been something of a mystery in climate science: Even though warmer air holds more moisture, rainfall in the United States hasn’t been increasing in the way scientists expected as temperatures rise.

“This paper highlights that the counteraction between aerosols and greenhouse gases has likely masked a lot of climate hazards over the last few decades,” said Geeta Persad, an assistant professor of Earth sciences at the University of Texas at Austin and an expert on aerosols. (Persad wasn’t involved in the study.)

“If aerosol emissions drop drastically over the next few decades and greenhouse gases don’t, a lot of those unanticipated climate hazards could be revealed,” added Persad.

The paper uses data from thousands of rain gauges to tease out how aerosols and greenhouse gases have influenced rainfall averages and the frequency of extreme rain events. The use of rain gauges allowed researchers to trace how the two types of human-caused pollution balance each other out in different regions of the country.

Greenhouse gases have been stacking up in the atmosphere for more than a century, and they have a pretty simple impact on rainfall. The more carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere, the hotter it gets; the hotter it gets, the more moisture the atmosphere can hold. Aerosols are more complicated: They react differently with different types of clouds, and as a result their impact on rainfall varies from region to region and from season to season. In most of the U.S., they made things drier.

The passage of the landmark Clean Air Act in 1970 caused a rapid decline in aerosol pollution as factories installed “scrubber” devices to clean up their smokestacks and automakers updated their cars to comply with emission limits. The disappearance of these aerosols left greenhouse gases to dominate in the atmosphere, which started to ratchet up rainfall totals. If those aerosols hadn’t been there, the paper argues, rainfall and flooding might have started worsening in the United States several decades earlier.

Separating out the effect of these aerosols also allows the researchers to make predictions about how flood risk will change over the next decade. It’s not good news: Now that there’s nothing to offset the heat-trapping effect of carbon dioxide and methane, much of the country is about to get a lot wetter and see a lot more monster storms.

“This somewhat rapid intensification of rainfall extremes is the new normal, at least for the next five years,” said Mark Risser, a research scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and one of the paper’s lead authors.

The effect is most pronounced in the southeastern United States, where a slew of hurricanes and rainstorms have caused billions of dollars of flood damage in recent years. The authors find that aerosol pollution tamped down summer and fall precipitation until the late 20th century, when the effect of greenhouse gases started to dominate in the region. That led to both an increase in annual rainfall totals and an increase in the frequency of big rainstorms. (Previous research has shown that aerosols can also suppress the emergence of tropical storms by disrupting cloud formation.)

The paper’s findings could have big implications for the next few decades of environmental regulation. President Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency is racing to finalize strict regulations on industrial pollution that could slash emissions of key aerosol pollutants such as sulfur dioxide. If these regulations take effect, they would apply to numerous facilities in the Southeast, including the petrochemical facilities in the Louisiana region known as “Cancer Alley.”

These regulations would protect residents who live near industrial facilities from asthma, heart disease, and cancer, but a further decline in aerosols could also make hurricane season worse by allowing big storms to hold moisture — meaning more events like Hurricane Harvey, which struck in 2017 and stunned climate scientists by dropping more than 50 inches of rain over Houston, Texas.

Persad, the aerosols expert, says the paper offers a grim warning about future climate risk. If air pollution declines in the United States over the next few decades, many more Americans in regions such as the Southeast could see stronger storms and more severe flooding.

“We’re looking at a situation where over the next 30 years, you could either keep masking, or you could reveal 50 percent more warming,” she said. “Up until now, there has not been very much recognition of how much the evolution of this aerosol signal, over the lifetime of a mortgage of a house that somebody buys today, is going to affect the climate hazards they’re exposed to.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How air pollution delayed a surge in extreme rain on Feb 22, 2024.

A choking layer of pollution-laced fog settled over Minneapolis last month, blanketing the city in its worst air quality since 2005. A temperature inversion acted like a ceiling, trapping small particles emitted from sluggish engines and overworked heaters in a gauze that shrouded the skyline. That haze arrived amid the hottest winter on record for the Midwest. Warmer temperatures melted what little snow had fallen, releasing moisture that helped further trap pollution.

Though summertime pollution from wildfire smoke and ozone receives more attention, climate change is making these kinds of winter inversions increasingly common — with troubling results. One in 4 Americans are now exposed to unhealthy air, according to a report by First Street Foundation. 

Jeremy Porter, head of climate implications research at the nonprofit climate research firm, calls this increase in air pollution a “climate penalty,” rolling back improvements made over four decades. On the West Coast, this inflection point was passed about 10 years ago; air quality across the region has consistently worsened since 2010. Now, a broader swath of the country is starting to see deteriorating conditions. During Canada’s boreal wildfires last summer, for example, millions of people from Chicago to New York experienced some of the worst air pollution in the world. It was a precedent-breaking spate that saw the average person exposed to more small particulate matter than at any time since tracking began in 2006. 

It’s a preview of more to come.

Since Congress passed the Clean Air Act in 1970, federal law has regulated all sources of emissions, successfully reducing pollution. Between 1990 and 2017, the number of particles smaller than 2.5 micrometers, known as PM2.5, fell 41 percent. These particulates pose a significant threat because they can burrow into the lungs and enter the bloodstream. Exposure can cause heart disease, strokes, respiratory diseases like lung cancer, and premature death. Such concerns prompted the Environmental Protection Agency to toughen pollution limits for the first time in a decade, lowering the limit from 12 micrograms per cubic meter of air to 9 earlier this month.

But a stricter standard isn’t likely to resolve the problem, said Marissa Childs, a post-doctoral researcher at Harvard University’s Center for the Environment. That’s because the agency considers wildfires an “exceptional event,” and therefore exempt from the regulation. Yet about one-third of all particulate matter pollution in the United States now comes from wildfire smoke. “The Clean Air Act is challenged by smoke,” she said, both because wildfires defy the EPA’s traditional enforcement mechanisms, and because of its capacity to travel long distances. “Are we going to start saying that New York is out of compliance because California had a fire burning?”

Read Next Study: Wildfire smoke is reversing years of US air quality progress Anita Hofschneider

To get a better sense of how a growing exposure to air pollution might impact the public, First Street used wildfire and climate models to estimate what the skies might look like in the future. (Though its researchers relied on Childs’ national database of PM2.5 concentrations, she was not otherwise involved with First Street’s report.) They found that by 2054, 50 percent more people, or 125 million in all, will experience at least one day of “red” air quality with an Air Quality Index from 151-200, a level considered risky enough that everyone should minimize their exposure. “We’re essentially adding back additional premature deaths, adding back additional heart attacks,” Porter said at a meeting about the report. “We’re losing productivity in the economic markets by additionally losing outdoor job work days.”

First Street has now added its air quality predictions to an online tool that allows anyone to search for climate risks by home address. As extreme heat increases ozone and changing conditions intensify wildfires, it shows just how unequal the impacts will be. While New York City is projected to see eight days a year with the Air Quality Index at an unhealthy orange, meaning an in the range of 101 to 150, an increase of two days, the Seattle metropolitan area is expected to see almost two additional weeks of poor air. “That’s two more weeks out of only 52,” said Ed Kearns, First Street’s chief science officer. “Twelve more days of being trapped in your house, not being able to go outside — worrying about the health consequences.”

Just as the sources of pollution are unevenly distributed, so too is people’s ability to respond. “People across the board are seeking information about air quality,” Childs said, for example, searching online about pollution levels on particularly smoky days. But not everyone has the same ability to make choices to protect themselves. Childs cowrote a 2022 Nature Human Behavior paper that found behavioral responses to smoke — staying indoors, for example, or driving to work rather than waiting for the bus — are strongly correlated with income. If left to individuals, she says, “the people who have the most resources are going to be the most protected, and we’re going to leave a lot of people behind.”

In a collaboration with real estate company Redfin, First Street found early signals that suggest people are already leaving areas with poor air quality. Tarik Benmarhnia, an environmental epidemiologist at the University of California, San Diego, quibbles with those conclusions, however, saying many variables influence both air quality and residential mobility, like income and housing prices. Air pollution is a notoriously complex subject — difficult to predict even a week out, much less speculate on what might happen in three decades. “I think the most critical problem is a total absence of any discussion of uncertainty,” he said. 

He also worries that First Street’s risk index could unintentionally magnify these distinctions of privilege. If potential homeowners use the database to avoid areas based on the report’s predictions, property values in those regions could fall accordingly, reducing tax bases and decreasing the ability to provide services like community clean air rooms during smoke events. “It may act like a self-fulfilling prophecy.”  

Benmarhnia notes that traditional sources of air pollution, like factory emissions, show a very consistent relationship between socio-economic status, race, and higher pollution levels, a pattern that repeats across the country. Smoke and ozone don’t tend to follow these social gradients because they disperse so widely. “But wildfire smoke doesn’t come on top of nothing, it’s on top of existing inequities” like access to health care, or jobs that increase outdoor exposures, he said. “Not everybody is starting from the same place.” Benmarhnia recently published a paper finding that wildfires, in concert with extreme heat, compound the risk to cardiovascular systems. But the people most likely to be harmed by these synergies live in low-income communities of color.  

“The thing about air pollution is there’s only so much you can do at individual or civil society level,” said Christa Hasenkopf, the director of the Clean Air Program at the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago. “It’s a political and social issue that has to be tackled at a national level.” The university’s Air Quality Life Index measures how air pollution is contributing to early deaths around the world, aiming to provide a clearer image of the health gaps. “The size of the impact on life expectancy in two relatively geographically nearby areas can be surprising,” she says, like between eastern and western Europe. 

For her part, Hasenkopf is enthusiastic about First Street’s air quality report, hoping it will help highlight some of these inequities. Though 13 people die every minute from air pollution, funding for cleaner air solutions remains limited. “That disconnect between the size of the air pollution issue, and what resources we are devoting to it is quite startling,” Hasenkopf said. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Climate change is undoing decades of progress on air quality on Feb 22, 2024.

The trouble with air pollution is that it tends to travel — blowing downwind for hundreds of miles, entering the lungs of people living far from its source. Nitrogen oxides emitted by coal-fired power plants, for example, can waft across state lines and react with other chemicals in the atmosphere to form ozone, a potent pollutant and the main ingredient in smog. Last March, the federal Environmental Protection Agency issued a rule to rein in those downwind ozone pollutants in 23 states. But in the months since, states and fossil fuel industry groups have filed dozens of lawsuits to block the plan. As a result of this ongoing litigation, the agency’s ozone pollution reduction rule, dubbed the “Good Neighbor” plan, has been put on hold in 12 states, including Kentucky, Texas, and Utah. 

Those legal battles have now reached the Supreme Court. On Wednesday, as supporters of the rule demonstrated outside, attorneys representing the state of Ohio, the oil and gas pipeline company Kinder Morgan, the American Forest and Paper Association, and the manufacturing company U.S. Steel, among others, presented oral arguments before the Supreme Court. The groups want the court to grant what’s called an “emergency stay,” which would halt the Good Neighbor plan entirely — even in the 11 states already implementing the rule — while lawsuits in lower courts play out. 

The justices wouldn’t have a final say on the legitimacy of the EPA’s rule — that’s up to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which is currently wrangling with 18 related lawsuits on that question. But legal experts say that Wednesday’s oral arguments seem to indicate that the Supreme Court could end up wading into the validity of the Good Neighbor plan in its decision anyway, with untold public health consequences for residents of downwind states.

“The applicants are trying to get the Supreme Court to weigh in on the merits through this procedural stay application,” Zachary Fabish, senior attorney at the Sierra Club, told Grist based on what he heard at the court on Wednesday. “And the downwind folks in those states are paying the public health price.”

A few justices commented on the plaintiffs’ unusual choice to argue in front of the Supreme Court before their pending litigation has been decided by the D.C. Circuit. The groups even admitted during oral arguments that they had requested a delayed briefing at the lower court so they could present their case to the Supreme Court first.

“It’s fairly extraordinary, I think, to be asking the court to decide this matter when you haven’t even lost below in terms of what is before the D.C. Circuit,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson told the plaintiffs. “So I’m trying to understand what the emergency is that warrants Supreme Court intervention at this point.”

Read Next An EPA rule dramatically reduced smog pollution — in states that haven’t sued to stop it Akielly Hu

That emergency, the state and industry plaintiffs argue, mostly boils down to the costs of complying with the EPA’s ozone reduction plan. In 2015, the EPA updated the federal air quality standard for ozone, which sets strict limits for that pollutant nationwide. According to federal law, each state was required to submit a plan within three years of the updated standard describing how it would reduce the amount of ozone pollution blowing downwind to other states. If they failed to do so, or submitted inadequate plans, the EPA was obligated under the Clean Air Act to enforce the Good Neighbor rule to reduce downwind pollution in those states. By February 2023, the EPA had rejected 21 states’ plans; another two, Pennsylvania and Virginia, did not submit one. 

In March, the agency issued the Good Neighbor plan for those 23 states, a rule that plaintiffs argued levies an unfair burden on states like Ohio and Indiana; oil and gas companies; and heavy industry. “In order to get into compliance with an unlawful federal rule, we are spending immense sums, both the states as well as our industries,” argued Ohio Deputy Solicitor General Mathura Sridharan. 

But Judith Vale, a deputy solicitor general for New York who argued in favor of the Good Neighbor plan, noted that the EPA’s rule helps address inherent cost imbalances between upwind and downwind states. In many cases, power plants and industrial facilities in upwind states in the South and Midwest would simply need to turn on existing pollution controls to come into compliance. Downwind states like Connecticut and Wisconsin, on the other hand, need to reduce their own pollution while also compensating for pollutants blowing into their jurisdiction. 

Often, those states have “already exhausted a lot of the less expensive strategies,” Vale said. “So they need to turn to more and more expensive strategies to find any further cuts.”

While Jackson and other liberal justices seemed to question challenges against the Good Neighbor plan, conservative justices like Justice Brett Kavanaugh appeared more sympathetic. In response to a point raised by Malcolm Stewart, a deputy solicitor general at the U.S. Department of Justice, that pausing the air pollution plan would disproportionately harm downwind states, Kavanaugh agreed but added that “there’s also the equities of the upwind states and the industry,” concluding that both sides had experienced irreparable harm.

Read Next To protect downwind states from smog, EPA cracks down on coal power pollution Akielly Hu

Fabish noted that the court’s decision to even schedule oral arguments for this case is highly unusual. The request for the emergency stay arrived on the Supreme Court’s “shadow docket,” a lineup of cases that, until recently, involved less consequential matters and got decided on without oral arguments, extensive hearings, or even explanations from the judges. But by asking for briefings and an oral argument, the court has created a kind of “process conundrum” for themselves, Fabish said. While the justices have some materials to base a judgment on, he noted they lack most of the evidence used in a typical case, such as extensive briefs, documents, and arguments. The justices also lack detailed opinions from a lower court, since the D.C. Circuit has yet to issue a decision.

All those factors, in addition to dozens of pending lawsuits related to the Good Neighbor rule in courts across the country, create a great deal of uncertainty around how and when the Supreme Court will rule on this application, Fabish said. Richard Lazarus, an environmental law professor at Harvard Law School, told Harvard Law Today that anywhere from four to six justices could agree to halt the rule, pointing to Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito as likely votes to do just that. Meanwhile, other justices worried aloud whether this case could encourage future plaintiffs to use the shadow docket as a venue to challenge environmental regulations. 

“I mean, surely, the Supreme Court’s emergency docket is not a viable alternative for every party that believes they have a meritorious claim against the government and doesn’t want to have to comply with a rule while they’re challenging it,” Justice Jackson said. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Supreme Court weighs blocking a federal plan to cut smog pollution on Feb 22, 2024.

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The vision

It’s a five-minute bike ride to the train station. On brisk mornings like this, I wear gloves and pack a warm coffee for the commute. My work buddy Lucy gets on two stops down, always with a pair of scones, wheeling her bike next to mine in the locker downstairs before joining me in the sunny coach section. Half an hour later, we unload the bikes and race each other along the greenway to our office. Twice a week, this; twice a week, we co-work from a cafe in the suburbs. The rest of the week is ours to enjoy.

— a drabble from Looking Forward reader Betsy Ruckman

The spotlight

If you like the idea of a perpetual three-day weekend, you might be one of a growing cadre that supports the concept of degrowth: a school of thought aimed at shrinking economies and moving away from GDP growth as a metric of success, while instead emphasizing universal basic services and social well-being. The idea is gaining followers, especially in Europe and especially among young people. But it’s not just a fringe theory. A Beyond Growth conference hosted by the European Parliament last May saw 7,000 attendees, including the president of the European Commission.

Akielly Hu, Grist’s news and politics fellow, discussed the growing popularity of degrowth with Kohei Saito — a Marxist author whose 2020 degrowth manifesto quickly turned into a bestseller in Japan and beyond. (The English translation, called Slow Down, was just released last month.)

“I think one of the reasons why people like the idea so much is because, in a capitalist economy, people work a lot,” Hu said. “And one of the central ideas of degrowth is shorter working hours.” We covered this in a previous newsletter about the four-day workweek — one of the first degrowth-esque policies that we’re beginning to see implemented in some places. (The idea of a future where work is deemphasized also inspired Betsy Ruckman to submit the drabble above, which shows two colleagues enjoying a four-day week and basic services like accessible public transport.)

Hu was also inspired by Looking Forward’s drabbles in writing the lede of her piece, which paints an image of a degrowth future:

Imagine a world where you work three or four days a week. In your free time, you play sports, spend time with loved ones, garden, and engage with local politics. Overnight shipping, advertising, and private jets no longer exist, but health care, education, and clean electricity are free and available to all.

It’s a vision that’s pretty hard to argue with — especially, as Hu pointed out, the idea of working less and having more time for activities that are about joy, not money. But there’s another aspect of degrowth that lends itself to a vision of a clean, green, just future: It’s inherently about producing and consuming less, and that means less carbon.

“We’re hurtling toward these major climate deadlines,” Hu said. “And I think there’s this deep sense of disconnect between what we say we’re going to do about climate change and what’s actually happening. And one of the things that’s actually happening is that there are all these blatant, unnecessary, and unhelpful ways that massive amounts of carbon are still being consumed.” She offers private jets as a common example highlighted by degrowth advocates. Taking a private plane (ahem, Taylor Swift) creates an absurd amount of emissions proportionate to the number of people it benefits. “It’s a form of consumption that contributes to economic growth, but it’s not accessible to 99.99 percent of people,” Hu said. “So why are we spending so much of the remaining carbon budget on private jets?”

Even though the theoretical future of degrowth may sound appealing, critics still say it’s a political nonstarter. “If you tell people to shrink economies, it’s kind of focusing on scarcity. And that’s a little bit unpalatable in a world where we’re already facing so much scarcity,” Hu said. But, she added, the original goal of the degrowth movement was to be a “shit disturber” — to provoke thought, and cause people to question the way economic growth is prioritized in our society and embedded in our policies.

Saito admits the idea of widespread degrowth is “in some sense utopian.” But, he adds, “believing that capitalism will prosper in the decades to come is utopian, too.”

We’ve excerpted Hu’s Q&A with Saito below. Find the full piece on the Grist site.

— Claire Elise Thompson

Q. Why do you think we’re seeing a growing interest in critiquing capitalism, and degrowth in general?

A. Looking at previous decades, neoliberal reforms really destabilized our society all over the world. And there are a lot of discussions about how we can solve the climate crisis, and how we can solve economic inequality. But these measures are not properly working, and the climate crisis has been accelerating. People are suffering from precarious jobs, low wages, and a lot of competition. And people are indeed unhappy.

Degrowth and the idea of post-capitalism are of course in some sense utopian at the moment. But at the same time, people who are really looking for an alternative — people who really care about the crisis — can’t find the answer within the existing framework. I don’t claim that my answer is definitive and comprehensive, but it resonates with the general atmosphere of dissatisfaction and discontent, especially among younger generations.

Q. I want to dig into your critiques of capitalism as laid out in Slow Down. Could you talk about why you think capitalism drives global inequality and climate change?

A. Karl Marx famously demonstrated that capitalism has the tendency to enlarge economic inequality because capitalism exploits workers so that the capital is accumulated in the hands of the few. And Marx also said that in such a system where people are exploited, nature is also exploited. We didn’t really recognize this tendency for many years because affluent countries, like the U.S. and Japan, and the E.U., were able to externalize a lot of costs to somewhere else.

That means that our affluent lives are often supported by cheap products and cheap resources based on the exploitation of nature and humans in the Global South.

Capitalism has subsumed the entire planet now because of globalization. That means we externalized all the costs. Now, we don’t have any more space to externalize because China is expanding, Brazil is expanding, India is expanding: Everyone tries to be a capitalist and it doesn’t work anymore. We are encountering the global ecological crisis, the pandemic, the climate crisis, competition for resources — and these things are closely related to capitalism and the tendency to constantly expand.

Q. Many climate policies today, like Green New Deal proposals, are focused on expanding renewable energy and clean technology, while creating new jobs and continuing to grow the economy. In your view, why are these measures insufficient for tackling the climate crisis?

A. First of all, I’m not against technology. We need renewable energy. We need electric vehicles and so on. I’m for inventing new technologies and investing more in developing cheaper, sustainable energy. I’m not an advocate of “going back to nature.”

The problem is that when we try to grow, we sell more products and bigger products. The most representative case is SUVs. Even if we transition to electric vehicles, if we keep building bigger cars, we still use a lot of energy and resources that come mainly from the Global South. So there will be a continuation of the robbing of land and resources, exploitation of mining workers and the destruction of Indigenous life, deforestation, and so on.

I think what’s necessary is: Invest in those green technologies. But at the same time, we should start talking about the need to reduce the number of cars, for example, or industrial meat consumption, or frequency of flying. Maybe we should ban private jets. Maybe we should ban domestic short-distance flights because we can take trains. These things must be also prioritized.

The problem with the existing mainstream green capitalism discourse is they never talk about reducing our excessive consumption and production, because that’s not something capitalism can accept. For everyone to live a decent life on this planet, the Global North needs to give up what is unnecessary. That’s not something capitalism can do.

Q. You write in the book about how a degrowth transition doesn’t have to happen all at once, and that in fact, it’s already happening. Could you talk about a few examples you see today that represent a step toward degrowth?

A. France has banned short-distance domestic flights — that is one important step. Some European societies are now experimenting with shorter working hours, like a four-day workweek. Free education and free medical care are other examples. We should expand these to free internet, which is something [former U.K. Labour Party leader] Jeremy Corbyn put forward during his electoral campaign a couple years ago.

We should also introduce maximum limits on annual incomes, worker cooperatives, and social ownership of companies, including water companies and electricity companies. These are some of the basic countermeasures that we can introduce within capitalism.

Read the full piece here — Slow down, do less: A Q&A with the author who introduced ‘degrowth’ to a mass audience

More exposure

• Read: a previous Looking Forward about four-day workweeks
• Read: a more in-depth description of what degrowth is, and how it would work in practice (Nature)
• Watch: an overview of degrowth principles and the history of the movement (CNBC)
• Read: one economist’s argument for why social inequality should be at the core of how we address climate change, including banning private jets (The Guardian)
• Check out: the International Degrowth Network, which was officially launched late last summer

A parting shot

A woman poses with a sign, in French, reading “Only degrowth is green,” as part of a climate protest in Toulouse in 2021.

IMAGE CREDITS

Vision: Grist

Spotlight: Grist / Erika Shimamoto / Ben Denzer / Astra House

Parting shot: NurPhoto / Getty Images

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The growing popularity of degrowth on Feb 21, 2024.

In cities across the country, people of color, many of them low income, live in neighborhoods criss-crossed by major thoroughfares and highways. The housing there is often cheaper — it’s not considered particularly desirable to wake up amid traffic fumes and fall asleep to the rumble of vehicles over asphalt. But the price of living there is steep: Exhaust from all those cars and trucks leads to higher rates of childhood asthma, cancer, cardiovascular disease, and pulmonary ailments. Many people die younger than they otherwise would have, and the medical costs and time lost to illness contributes to their poverty.

Imagine if none of those cars and trucks emitted any fumes at all, running instead on an electric charge. That would make a staggering difference in the trajectory, quality, and length of millions of lives, particularly those of young people growing up near freeways and other sources of air pollution, according to a study from the American Lung Association. 

The study, released today, found that a widespread transition to EVs could avoid nearly 3 million asthma attacks and hundreds of infant deaths, in addition to millions of lower and upper respiratory ailments. Children, being particularly vulnerable to air pollution, would benefit most, said study author William Barret, the association’s national director on advocacy and clean air. “Children are smaller, they’re breathing more air pound for pound than an adult,” Barret said. “The risk can be immediate, but it’s also long lasting.”

Some 27 million children live in communities affected by high levels of air pollution, the study found. Their vulnerability begins in the womb, where vehicle exhaust, factory smoke, and other pollutants can jump-start inflammation in a fetus and its mother, causing health problems for both and leading to preterm birth and congenital issues that can continue for a lifetime.

Prior research by the American Lung Association found that 120 million people in the U.S. breathe unhealthy air daily, and 72 million live near a major trucking route — though, Barret added, there’s no safe threshold for air pollution. It affects everyone.

Bipartisan efforts to strengthen clean air standards have already made a difference across the country. In California, which, under the Clean Air Act, can set state rules stronger than national standards, 100 percent of new cars sold there must be zero emission by 2035. Truck manufacturers are, according to the state’s Air Resources Board, already exceeding anticipated zero-emissions truck sales, putting them two years ahead of schedule. All that’s needed is for the EPA to grant California the waivers required to implement these standards. 

Other states have begun to take action, too, often reaching across partisan lines to do so.  Maryland, Colorado, New Mexico, and Rhode Island adopted zero-emissions standards as of the end of 2023. The Biden administration is taking similar steps, though it has slowed its progress after automakers and United Auto Workers pressured the administration to relax some of its more stringent EV transition requirements.

While Barret finds efforts to support the electrification of passenger vehicles exciting, he said the greatest culprits are diesel trucks. “These are 5 to 10 percent of the vehicles on the road, but they’re generating the majority of smog-forming emissions of ozone and nitrogen,” Barret said. Ozone is especially harmful. When ozone makes its way inside the human body, it causes what amounts to a sunburn, inflaming and degrading respiratory tissues.

Lately, there’s been significant progress on truck decarbonization. The Biden administration has made promises to ensure that 30 percent of all big rigs sold are electric by 2030. California has moved aggressively to curb truck emissions, aiming to make medium- and heavy-duty vehicles zero-emission “where possible” by 2035, while heavily regulating certain kinds of freight trucks. 

Though legislative mandates and tax incentives like those in the Inflation Reduction Act go a long way toward getting EVs on the road, they don’t remove internal combustion trucks and cars, which pose enough of a health threat that advocates are urging immediate change. 

Ideally, Barret said, the Biden administration would immediately roll out clear-cut standards to slash emissions. It is considering truck standards that would by 2032 reduce emissions from heavy-duty vehicles 29 percent below 2021 levels using battery-electric and hybrid vehicles. The current standard only explicitly calls for the use of advanced diesel engines. The study’s authors also strongly recommend that the EPA finalize multi-pollutant regulations for light and medium-duty vehicles, which are currently under consideration. Such measures, combined with an increase in public EV charging stations, vehicle tax credits, and other incentives, could change American highways, not to mention health, for good.

“We just need to see more and more of that given the growing urgency of the climate crisis,” Barret said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The EV shift could prevent millions of childhood asthma attacks on Feb 21, 2024.

When households in the United States pay their gas and electric bills, they’re paying for energy, the wires and pipelines it takes to get that energy into their home, and the costs of maintaining that infrastructure. But those monthly payments could also be funding efforts by utilities to lobby against climate policies. 

While federal law prohibits utilities from recovering lobbying expenses from customers, consumer advocates say that those rules lack teeth and aren’t sufficiently enforced. Now, states are taking the lead to ban the practice. According to the utility watchdog group Energy and Policy Institute, lawmakers in eight states, including California and Maryland, have introduced bills this year that would block utilities from charging customers for the costs of lobbying, advertising, trade association dues, and other political activities. The measures build on a growing trend in state policy: Last year, Colorado, Connecticut, and Maine became the first states in the nation to pass comprehensive laws preventing utilities from passing on the costs of lobbying to ratepayers. 

“There is a lot of recent success that states can look to for inspiration,” said Charles Harper, power sector policy lead at the climate advocacy group Evergreen Action. “People are starting to pay attention because they’re realizing that they’re paying for climate denial in their bills every month.”

Over the years, utility companies have come under fire for lobbying to stall climate policies and keep fossil fuel plants running. In several high-profile instances, governments have discovered that those lobbying campaigns were funded in part by consumers. In one particularly brazen example, the Ohio utility company FirstEnergy admitted in 2021 to wire fraud after using millions of ratepayer dollars to bribe the then-speaker of the Ohio House of Representatives, Larry Householder, to pass legislation bailing out FirstEnergy’s nuclear and coal power plants and rolling back renewable power standards. 

Meanwhile, in California, the state’s Public Advocates Office found last year that the gas utility SoCalGas had charged ratepayers a total of $29.1 million between 2019 and 2023 to fund lobbying efforts against building electrification policies, which reduce the use of oil- and gas-powered appliances in buildings. 

Many of the bills introduced this year, including ones in California, Maryland, and Utah, broadly define lobbying as any activity meant to influence political outcomes. This includes advertising to boost a company’s image, as well as dues paid to utility trade associations, which routinely lobby at the federal level. The Edison Electric Institute, an industry group representing investor-owned electric utilities, has advocated against rooftop solar programs and stricter federal carbon emissions standards at power plants, for example. Another trade group representing natural gas utilities, the American Gas Association, has petitioned against more stringent federal energy efficiency standards and advertised the benefits of cooking with natural gas for decades. 

Former Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder sits at the head of a legislative session in Columbus, Ohio, Oct. 30, 2019. John Minchillo / AP Photo

“Any claim that we have not been a leader in advancing environmental goals is simply not accurate,” Karen Harbert, president and CEO of the American Gas Association, told Grist in an email. Harbert also noted that the gas industry “has long committed to collaboration with policymakers and regulators to help achieve our nation’s ambitious climate and energy goals.” Sarah Durdaller, director of media relations at the Edison Electric Institute, told Grist that the trade group engages in lobbying and advocacy “to ensure that electricity customers have the affordable, reliable, and resilient clean energy they want and need.” Durdaller noted that the institute complies with federal disclosure requirements and voluntarily provides an annual report on lobbying expenditures.

In Maryland, the utility Potomac Edison, a subsidiary of FirstEnergy, admitted to state regulators last year that it had improperly charged customers nearly $1.7 million in lobbying costs, including some related to Ohio’s FirstEnergy bribery scandal. Maryland’s bill, which has been introduced in both chambers, would prevent utilities from charging customers for investor relations, and travel, lodging, and entertainment for a utility’s board of directors or parent company. The bill, along with similar ones introduced in states like Ohio, Utah and Arizona, would require utilities to submit an annual report that itemizes all the costs associated with lobbying and advertising. In Maryland’s proposal, those costs would include the salaries and job descriptions of any staff engaged in lobbying. 

Legislation introduced in California would also require utilities to submit itemized reports on all lobbying activities and clarify that they were funded by shareholders — not customers. California’s bill, like measures introduced in Ohio and Utah, goes further than Maryland’s bill by also requiring state utility commissioners to impose fines on utilities that fail to comply with the rules. Under the California bill, three-quarters of those fines would go toward a fund to help low-income households transition to electric appliances. The other quarter would help fund enforcement of the law. 

It’s not uncommon for state regulators to fine utility companies for charging ratepayers for lobbying efforts. In 2022, for instance, the California Public Utilities Commission fined SoCalGas $10 million for using ratepayer money to lobby against local gas bans, federal energy efficiency standards, and building electrification policies. But according to Katy Morsony, a staff attorney at the consumer advocacy group The Utility Reform Network, writing those penalties and detailed annual reporting into law will make it much easier to hold utilities accountable. 

Morsony also clarified that the bills wouldn’t prevent utilities from engaging in lobbying — they would simply be forced to fund that advocacy work exclusively with money from shareholders. But as households face rising energy costs, she added that any policy to prevent utilities from unlawfully extracting more money from consumers will make a tangible difference.

“It’s common sense ratepayer protections,” Morsony said. “When you’re in the energy affordability crisis that we’re in, every dollar counts.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline 8 states move to ban utilities from using customer money for lobbying on Feb 21, 2024.