Grist

The Inflation Reduction Act, the 2021 U.S. climate law abbreviated IRA, primarily reduces emissions through financial incentives, rather than binding rules. But in addition to all its well-known carrots, lawmakers quietly included a smaller number of sticks — particularly when it comes to the potent greenhouse gas methane, which has proven to be a pesky source of increasing climate pollution with each passing year. New research suggests that those sticks could soon batter the oil and gas industry, which is responsible for a third of all methane emissions in the U.S.

An IRA provision directs the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, to charge $900 for every metric ton of methane above a certain threshold released into the atmosphere in 2024. The issue is particularly challenging to tackle in oil and gas fields because methane is the primary component in natural gas, and it leaks from hundreds of thousands of devices scattered across the country. In 2022, oil and gas facilities emitted more than 2.5 million metric tons of methane. 

The methane fee is one of a handful of ways in which the Biden administration is trying to get the industry to clean up its act. Late last year, the EPA finalized a rule requiring drillers to take comprehensive measures to monitor for and fix methane leaks. Separately, the agency is revising a rule that governs how companies count up and report the volume of methane emissions from their operations. That rule in particular will determine the EPA’s ability to assess the success of its methane reduction rule and help it calculate defensible fees to penalize companies for their emissions. 

A new analysis by Geofinancial Analytics, a private data provider, found that some companies may be liable for tens of millions of dollars in fees — a possibility that could bankrupt some operators. The analysis, which relied on satellite data, found that the top 25 oil and gas producers in the country would together have been liable for as much as $1.1 billion if the methane fee was applied to emissions for a one-year period ending in March 2023.

On the one hand, major players like Chevron and Shell, which have publicly welcomed the new methane fee rule, are well below the rule’s threshold for penalizing emissions, according to Geofinancial. (This is likely due to large companies’ relative technological sophistication and economies of scale.) The fee only goes into effect when companies emit methane at volumes equivalent to more than 25,000 tons of carbon dioxide, which means that smaller companies, too, are largely exempt from the rule. Still, a 2022 Congressional analysis found that, despite the exemptions, the rule should effectively penalize about a third of all methane emissions from U.S. oil and gas infrastructure.

As a result, industry trade groups like the American Petroleum Institute, which represents a large swath of the oil and gas industry, have pilloried the rule and backed a proposal to repeal the fee.  

Some of the largest potential liabilities stemming from the rule, according to Geofinancial’s analysis, belong to Diversified Energy Company, a seasoned operator with about two decades in the oil and gas industry but an unusual business model. While the Exxons and Chevrons of the world typically rely on drilling new wells and increasing fossil fuel production to generate revenue, Diversified’s growth is heavily dependent on buying old wells at the end of their lives and wringing every last bit of oil or gas out of them. These low-producing wells come with serious environmental liabilities: The older the well, the more expensive it is to complete the required steps to seal it and prevent additional pollution — and the more likely it is to leak copious amounts of methane. 

Diversified, which has become the largest owner of oil and gas wells in the U.S., has some 70,000 such old and potentially leaky wells — making it potentially one of the biggest methane emitters in the industry as well. According to Geofinancial, Diversified would be liable for as much as $184 million if its annual excess methane emissions are equivalent to what it released over the year ending in September 2023. While the satellite results are a snapshot in time and contain some uncertainty, the overall finding that Diversified is probably facing catastrophically steep methane fees likely holds regardless of the potential variation. 

Natural gas is flared in an oil field in Andrews, Texas, in March 2022. Methane can leak from storage tanks, pipelines, valves, and other oil and gas infrastructure. Joe Raedle / Getty Images

This potential liability is one of the reasons twin brothers Henry and Chris Kinnersley, founders of the activist investing firm Snowcap Research, are betting Diversified will fail. The brothers are shorting Diversified’s stock — making a big bet, essentially, that the company’s stock value will fall. 

“To put the methane fee in context, in the last 12 months Diversified’s free cash flow was $172 million,” said Chris Kinnersley. “We estimate nearly all of this was required to fund new acquisitions to offset the company’s declining production.”

John Sutter, a spokesperson for Diversified, said that the company has taken proactive measures to crack down on methane and that the practices are resulting in significant emissions reductions. “Diversified’s stewardship model shows a viable path forward for mature well operators: that it is possible to cut methane emissions and responsibly manage existing producing assets,” he said.

Part of the reason for the diverging expectations could be that quantifying methane emissions is fundamentally a difficult undertaking. The industry is required to submit its own estimates to the EPA’s greenhouse gas reporting program, but those numbers are widely understood to be an undercount. One study by the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund found that the industry’s figures may be 60 percent lower than actual emissions. (Editor’s note: The Environmental Defense Fund is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.)

Based on research largely from the 1990s, the EPA has developed emission factors for every type of equipment found in oil fields. That means that, to comply with the EPA’s rules, operators first count up the various methane-emitting devices they own and operate, then multiply the number of devices by the corresponding emission factor to arrive at their total emissions for the year.

This approach falls short for two major reasons. When devices fail or malfunction, they tend to release large volumes of methane well above those accounted for by the emission factor — but the industry currently isn’t required to report these large releases. Additionally, the EPA’s emission factors are outdated, having been developed decades ago, well before the fracking revolution. New drilling and production technology has led to new and increased sources of methane releases, which the agency’s emission factors don’t fully capture.

Since calculating a fee to levy on operators requires an accurate and defensible count of the methane companies are spewing, the EPA proposed updating the reporting requirements last year. The proposed rule contains updated emissions factors based on new research. It also requires companies to report large releases if they become aware of them. Still, these measures aren’t expected to fully eliminate the gap between the emissions companies are reporting on paper and true emissions.  

“It’s likely to help close the gap but not get all the way there,” said Edwin LaMair, an attorney at the Environmental Defense Fund. “A lot of those large releases will not be seen and then won’t be reported.”

To increase the probability that large releases are caught, the EPA’s regulations include a provision for watchdog groups to report methane data independently. Over the last few years, the capabilities of satellite technology and aerial flights have been leveraged to get more accurate information about methane emissions from oil and gas fields. Nonprofit groups like the Environmental Defense Fund, for instance, have conducted aerial flights over the Permian Basin, the largest oil-producing region in the U.S. Earthworks, another environmental group, has long used infrared cameras to observe well sites and report faulty equipment. That empirical evidence can now be independently submitted to the EPA for consideration as it calculates methane fees for companies. 

In particular, satellite data is expected to play an important role in holding companies accountable. The Environmental Defense Fund, for instance, is planning to launch its own satellite in the coming months to monitor methane. The data from the satellite is expected to be posted to a public website. 

There’s also the data from existing satellites, which firms like Geofinancial have utilized. The data provider relied on a satellite launched by the European Space Agency that can provide a resolution of one square kilometer at best. In dense oil fields like the Permian in Texas and the Bakken in North Dakota, there are often multiple wells owned by different companies within a square kilometer. Scientists at Geofinancial used statistical methods to attribute emissions to specific operators, but there is some inherent uncertainty in the estimates. While the findings may not be precise, they are still valuable to investors and the public trying to grasp a company’s contribution to the methane problem and its potential financial liability. 

“We’re conveying the empirical data, which has plus or minus error bars on it,” said Mark Kriss, the managing director at Geofinancial. “Even at a given wellhead, a one-kilometer pixel, in many cases, we have pretty good confidence about who’s responsible for that, but not in every case. But when you aggregate things at the company level, we have very high confidence.”

For investors like the Kinnersleys, that data is valuable even with all its uncertainty. Until 2021, Diversified calculated its methane emissions using the EPA’s methodology. But that year, the company switched to a method developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which allows companies to self-measure emissions in the field. The company claimed that the measurement-based work “highlighted the negative implications of using prescribed, theoretical emissions factors in our calculations as compared to using the actual measurements from the true operations of our assets.”

The resulting emissions were 60 percent lower than in previous years. The main difference came from how the company estimated its emissions from pneumatic devices, which are used to move fluids. The EPA’s method requires that the company use an emission factor of 13.5 for pneumatic devices, but the company calculated a lower emission factor of 5.5 through measurements in the field. 

“As a third party, it’s very difficult to verify whether that new, updated emission factor is actually fair,” countered Chris Kinnersley. “There’s lots of ways you can game that. You can go to newer wells at certain times and you can say, ‘Hey, we sat outside this well, and it was only emitting this much.’”

Sutter, the Diversified spokesperson, did not respond directly to questions about the Kinnersleys’ allegations, but the company told Bloomberg that the brothers’ “report contains numerous inaccuracies, ignores specific financial and operational results and sustainability actions, and is designed for the sole purpose of negatively impacting the company’s share price for the short seller’s own benefit.”

As satellite technology matures and the EPA’s rules for reporting are finalized, advocates expect transparency around methane emissions will increase. The EPA is expected to audit the emission numbers that companies turn in more closely. 

“They’re going to be beefing that process up in light of the methane fee, since now there’s a financial incentive to misreport their emissions or omit certain things,” said LaMair. “They’ll be able to find these discrepancies, continue to improve their reporting methodologies, and find the companies that might be underreporting.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Biden’s climate law fines oil companies for methane pollution. The bill is coming due. on Feb 20, 2024.

Hundreds of fed-up Germans driving tractors rumbled into Berlin and parked in a long line leading up to the stately sandstone columns of the Brandenburg Gate in mid-December. Many donned yellow vests, now the trademark garb of European populism. They blasted horns and brandished signs that said the German government had declared war on them. 

The country’s center-left leaders, faced with a budget deficit, had decided to get rid of tax breaks on diesel used in agriculture, a move that would save the government some 900 million euros ($1 billion) —and one that might carry climate benefits — but would cost individual farmers as much as 20,000 euros ($21,500). Many growers and ranchers saw the cuts as the last straw in a series of events, like inflation, the war in Ukraine, and new environmental regulations, that had already made life harder for them. Protests mostly in the form of tractor blockades soon spread across the country. 

Then they erupted across the continent. For the past few weeks, roads and city plazas in nearly every country in the European Union have been blocked by farmers angry about a number of regulations, including policies intended to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture. E.U. officials, who met earlier this month mere feet from protesters clashing with police in Brussels, scrapped plans for the bloc’s first-ever target to reduce climate pollution specifically from food production. 

The protests have revealed just how tough it is for governments to curb agricultural emissions, not just in Europe but worldwide, policy analysts told Grist. Farming accounts for about 10 percent of climate pollution in both Europe and the United States, and climate scientists largely agree that curbing those emissions is key to limiting global warming. The E.U.’s reversal on agriculture-specific climate goals highlights the need for a meticulously-planned ‘just transition’ — a shift toward climate-friendly farming that doesn’t ignore farmers’ economic needs, said Tim Benton, who directs research on food production and the environment at Chatham House, a think tank based in London.

“Farmers are increasingly fed up with being seen as the whipping boy of food-systems emissions, in terms of them being told they are bad people and bad managers of the land,” Benton said. “If we are going to do transitions, then we have to bring people along with us.”

Farmers with tractors arrive for a protest at the government district in Berlin, Germany, January 15. AP Photo / Ebrahim Noroozi

With echoes of France’s populist yellow vest protests in 2018, farmers from Spain to Slovenia have been choking off highways with tractors, leaving hulking piles of dirt and manure in front of government buildings, hurling eggs and firecrackers at police, and setting hay bales and tires on fire. The farmers have a litany of complaints — high fuel and fertilizer costs, cheap imports and competition with foreign producers, volatile commodity prices — but one thing in particular has united them: the European Union’s climate policies, which they view as out of touch and overbearing.

E.U. officials, who agreed in 2020 on a target to make the continent carbon-neutral by 2050, were planning to make a recommendation this month to cut pesticide use in half and slash 30 percent of agricultural greenhouse gas emissions by 2040. After farmers took to the streets of Brussels, the European Commission – the E.U.’s executive branch — nixed the proposal, although they kept a broader target to reduce 90 percent of the bloc’s total emissions by 2040. Officials also delayed a recommendation to leave some farmland fallow to preserve biodiversity, and they abandoned a plan to promote lab-grown and plant-based meats to limit climate pollution from the livestock industry. 

“We’ve seen this slide, this reversal from a really ambitious agenda a few years ago to basically nothing left,” said Patty Fong, director of the climate program at the Global Alliance for the Future of Food in the Netherlands. 

The proposals would’ve needed approval by the E.U. parliament after elections in June, when the far-right is expected to make gains. Eyeing the polls, right-wing politicians in Europe have tried to capitalize on the farmers’ discontent as they push to dismantle the E.U.’s climate policies, according to Danielle Resnick, a research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute and the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. “The discourse is being hijacked in some quarters,” Resnick said.  

Lacking popular support, top-down mandates and emissions targets don’t tend to work, Benton and other policy researchers told Grist. The key, they said, likely will involve investing billions of dollars to incentivize farmers to take up environmentally friendly growing practices and to ensure that they’ll make a living even if yields decline as a result of those changes. 

As an example of a step in the right direction, Benton cited the Inflation Reduction Act, the landmark climate bill that the U.S. Congress passed in 2022. That legislation wasn’t accompanied by a specific target for lowering agricultural emissions, but it directed $20 billion to “climate-smart” farming and tens of billions of dollars more to spur the renewable energy transition. 

In Europe, lawmakers have set ambitious climate goals, but they haven’t done the extensive planning — or investing — that the transition calls for, analysts told Grist. 

“No one’s really proposing a long-term plan saying, ‘We need to transition. We need massive amounts of funding to be able to do this transition to more sustainable agrifood systems. This is how we’re going to pay for it. And this is how we’re going to support farmers in this transition,’” said Julia Bognar, head of the land use and climate program at the Institute for European Environmental Policy. 

A daunting task for governments is figuring out where to get all that money to help farmers along. Bognar pointed to the vast subsidies that the E.U. already doles out: About one-third of its entire budget — some 56 billion euros ($60 billion) each year — goes to farmers, agricultural companies, and rural development. Bognar suggested that reallocating some of those payments would be one way to free up cash. For example, the E.U. could reduce funds that support environmentally harmful practices, like intensive livestock production at factory farms, and boost funds for practices that curb emissions (say, planting carbon-storing perennials like trees).

Still, dairy and meat companies probably wouldn’t let those livestock subsidies slide without a fight. And there’s no guarantee that money set aside for “climate-smart” agriculture will actually go to practices that help the planet. In the U.S., a good chunk of the Inflation Reduction Act funding, for example, could flow to equipment at factory farms, like methane digesters, which capture methane emissions from manure but still tend to pollute the air and water.  

“It’s very easy to say we must have a just transition,” Benton said. “But I can’t think of an example where we’ve really managed it.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline What Europe’s egg-hurling farmers can teach us about climate progress on Feb 20, 2024.

For 40 years, plastic and petrochemical companies have tried to convince the public that plastics can be recycled. But they’ve known for just as long that plastics recycling would never work.

A report released last week by the nonprofit Center for Climate Integrity, or CCI, chronicles a “decades-long campaign of fraud and deception” from Big Oil and the plastics industry to promote recycling as a solution to the plastic pollution crisis. New documents show that industry executives pushed plastics recycling despite knowing since the 1980s that it “cannot be considered a permanent solid waste solution,” and that recycled plastics would never be able to compete economically with virgin material. 

Today, the U.S. recycling rate for plastics sits at about 5 or 6 percent. It has never risen above 10 percent. 

The report’s authors liken the plastics industry’s recycling campaign to Big Oil’s tactics to convince the public that its products don’t cause climate change. Many companies have been involved in both efforts, since plastics are made from fossil fuels. “The oil industry’s lies are at the heart of the two most catastrophic pollution crises in human history,” Richard Wiles, CCI’s president, said in a statement.

CCI traces industry support for plastics recycling back to the 1980s, when it was proposed as a response to widespread public concern over the material’s proliferation — especially as litter. With the threat of regulation looming large, industry representatives felt they had little choice but “to recycle or be banned.” 

Even then, the industry acknowledged major and potentially insurmountable hurdles to plastics recycling. Most significantly, there was no market for recycled plastic — it was too expensive and low-quality to compete with virgin material. One document uncovered by CCI — a 1986 report from the plastics industry trade group the Vinyl Institute — noted that “purity and quality demands set for many applications preclude the use of recycled material.” In the end, the report concluded that recycling “merely prolongs the time until an item is disposed of.”

Plastics and petrochemical company representatives repeatedly shared similar concerns at industry conferences, in meeting notes, and elsewhere: that plastics recycling consumed too much energy, that it would only work for a small fraction of plastic waste, and that a quickly growing supply of virgin materials would “kick the s–t out of” recycled plastic prices, as one official of the now-defunct American Plastics Council wrote in meeting notes obtained by CCI. 

Davis Allen, an investigative researcher for CCI and the lead author of the report, said many of the new documents came from a former American Plastics Council staffer. Others came from industry document databases maintained by Columbia University, New York University, and the University of California, San Francisco. 

A plastic bag from a Publix store in Florida promotes recycling. Lindsey Nicholson / UCG / Universal Images Group via Getty Images

The documents, Allen said, strongly suggest that the plastics and petrochemical industries saw recycling as little more than a way to tame public outrage and ward off anti-plastic legislation. One 1994 document quotes a representative of Eastman Chemical saying that, while plastics recycling might one day become a reality, “it is more likely that we will wake up and realize that we are not going to recycle our way out of the solid waste issue.” Another document — handwritten notes from a meeting between Exxon Chemical and the American Plastics Council — quotes Exxon Chemical’s then-vice president saying that, when it came to recycling plastics, “we are committed to the activities, but not committed to the results.”

Still, trade groups and large petrochemical companies invested heavily in public relations to improve plastics recycling’s image. They touted ambitious goals to increase the recycling rate, and then remained quiet when they failed to meet them, or changed the way they measured their progress. Advertisements “simply repeated the same lies about the viability of plastic recycling,” according to CCI. For example, one 1991 ad in Ladies’ Home Journal claimed that “a bottle can come back as a bottle, over and over again.” Meanwhile, educational materials created for use in schools implied that recycling could assuage students’ guilt over using disposable plastic foodware.

By the mid-1990s, the results seemed to have paid off. Industry polling showed that public opinion on plastics had greatly improved and state-level efforts to ban or restrict plastic production had waned considerably — even though the dismal state of plastics recycling had not significantly improved.

Today, most plastic waste gets incinerated or sent to landfills, where it creates hazardous air and water pollution that disproportionately affects low-income communities and communities of color. Meanwhile, environmental advocates say the “myth” of plastics recycling has facilitated the industry’s unmitigated expansion — plastic production has grown by nearly 230 times since 1950. Plastics are expected to drive nearly half of the growth in global oil demand between 2017 and 2050.

CCI isn’t the first group to document the plastics industry’s deceptive communication practices around recycling. A 2020 investigation from NPR and Frontline found ample evidence that the plastics industry and its trade groups promoted plastics recycling despite knowing it was “costly” and “infeasible.” Two former industry executives told the outlets that recycling was used to “advertise our way out of” negative PR.

Plastic waste strewn on a beach. Education Images / Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Since the mid-2010s, a second wave of anti-plastic outrage has spurred the plastics industry and its lobbying groups to again promote the promise of plastics recycling — only this time, they’re pushing so-called “chemical recycling,” which can supposedly melt plastic into its constituent polymers so it can be turned back into new products. Although chemical recycling technologies have existed for decades, most existing existing facilities — and there are only a few — are still unable to create new plastic products; they mostly turn plastic into chemicals or fossil fuels to be burned. 

Lew Freeman, the Society of the Plastics Industry’s former vice president of government affairs, told Grist in an interview last year that there are “serious questions” about the degree to which chemical recycling can ever work. “The industry seems to be doing the same thing it did 30-some-odd years ago,” Freeman said. 

Ross Eisenberg, president of America’s Plastic Makers — a subgroup of the petrochemical industry trade organization the American Chemistry Council, which absorbed the American Plastics Council in 2002 — criticized the CCI report as “flawed.” In a statement, he said it “works against our goals to be more sustainable by mischaracterizing the industry and the state of today’s recycling technologies.” Eisenberg did not specifically refute any of the claims made by CCI.

In response to Grist’s request for comment, the Vinyl Institute did not address any of the report’s claims but said it was “committed to increasing” the amount of polyvinyl chloride — a kind of plastic — that gets recycled each year. Eastman Chemical and Exxon Mobil did not respond to Grist’s requests for comment in time for publication.

CCI hopes that its report “lays the foundation” for more ambitious legal challenges against the plastics and petrochemical industries. According to Alyssa Johl, CCI’s vice president of legal and general counsel, most lawsuits so far have targeted the makers of specific products — for instance, Keurig, which misleadingly placed the “chasing arrows” recycling symbol on coffee pods that couldn’t actually be recycled.

These lawsuits “don’t go far enough,” Johl said. In her view, future cases should target the whole industry — including the fossil fuel producers themselves and their trade organizations, highlighting the integral role they played in promoting recycling as a solution to the plastic pollution crisis. Such lawsuits are mostly likely to be brought by cities or state attorneys general, Johl said, and they may invoke public nuisance, consumer fraud, racketeering, or conspiracy laws — similar to successful legal challenges that have been brought against the tobacco and opioid industries. 

The most promising push so far has come from California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who in 2022 began investigating fossil fuel and chemical companies for their role in what he called an “aggressive campaign to deceive the public” about the viability of plastics recycling. That investigation is ongoing. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Petrochemical companies have known for 40 years that plastics recycling wouldn’t work on Feb 20, 2024.

This story was originally published by Canary Media.

Heat pumps outsold gas furnaces. Again.

According to data from the Air-Conditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration Institute released last week, Americans bought 21 percent more heat pumps in 2023 than the next-most popular heating appliance, fossil gas furnaces. That’s the biggest lead heat pumps have opened up over conventional furnaces in the two decades of data available from the trade group.

As electric appliances, heat pumps help slash planet-warming emissions from a major source — space heating — while also letting consumers ditch the health-harming fumes from gas and heating oil in their homes. They’re almost magically efficient; they can routinely produce the same amount of heat as a fossil-fired system using just a third or a quarter of the energy.

Heat pumps’ growing popularity compared to furnaces is ​“really good news,” said Alex Amend, director of communications at pro-electrification advocacy group Rewiring America. The U.S. is ​“absolutely moving in the right direction.”

Last June, Rewiring put together a year-by-year sales growth trajectory for heat pumps that would be fast enough to take adoption from the 16 percent of U.S. homes they’re installed in as of 2023 to all projected 140 million homes by midcentury. Rewiring America’s figures and the data from the Air-Conditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration Institute aren’t directly comparable; AHRI tracks units sold while Rewiring tracks households. But even so, it’s clear that ​“we still have a ways to go” for gas furnace sales to fall to zero, said Wael Kanj, research associate at Rewiring America.

Sales for both heat pumps and fossil gas furnaces were down relative to 2023 due to supply-chain bottlenecks and a double punch of inflation and high interest rates that tempered consumer spending across the board. But heat pumps continued to widen a lead that first emerged in 2022, when they surged ahead of gas furnaces by 12 percent and topped 4 million units sold for the first time.

It’s important to note that the data does not unequivocally mean that more U.S. homes are now installing heat-pump systems than gas furnaces. Because heat pumps are modular, home systems often have more than one unit. Larger homes may also install more than one gas furnace.

But the data does suggest that the growing popularity of heat pumps could be opening up new markets across the U.S. The tech is popular in the Southeast where mild climates have long made them a viable option. In recent years, though, heat-pump technology has improved, and the appliance has taken hold in states with frigid winter weather, such as Maine and Colorado. Heat pumps proved so popular in Maine that in July, the state beat its original deployment goal and had to set a new, more ambitious one.

The Biden administration is galvanizing the move to heat pumps. The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act incentivizes heat pumps with a 30 percent federal tax credit up to $2,000, and federal rebates are expected to start rolling out this year.

Leaders at the state level are also setting ambitious clean-heat targets. In September, governors of 25 states pledged to cumulatively install 20 million heat pumps by 2030. And last week, nine states upped the ante with a target (albeit a nonbinding one) for heat pumps to make up 90 percent of home heating sales by 2040. Many states and utilities also have incentive programs to encourage residents to install heat pumps.

Read Next The promise and the perils of Hawaiʻi’s renewable energy revolution Jennifer Oldham, Capital and Main

At the same time, consumers are getting more curious about the tech. As recently reported by Distilled, Google searches for the term ​“heat pump” have doubled in the last five years.

Climate advocates are increasingly pushing policymakers to incentivize — or even mandate — homeowners to replace their broken-down ACs with heat pumps. Data from AHRI reveals a big missed opportunity on this front: Americans are buying more central ACs when they could be purchasing dual-purpose heat pumps.

Despite the strong showing for 2023 overall, heat-pump sales fell behind gas furnaces in the last quarter of the year. That could be in part because many consumers aren’t prepared to switch to a heat pump when their gas furnace breaks, Kanj said; as temperatures drop, they just need a replacement fast.

According to Kanj, that’s why it’s crucial to make it easier for consumers to choose heat pumps by alleviating supply-chain constraints, educating contractors and the public, and helping people plan for the upgrade rather than wait until they have an emergency. That way, ​“when someone’s furnace goes out and it’s cold outside … there’s a heat pump ready and waiting.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Heat pumps outsold gas furnaces again last year — and the gap is growing on Feb 19, 2024.

This story was produced through a collaboration between the Daily Yonder, which covers rural America, and Nexus Media News, an editorially independent, nonprofit news service covering climate change.

One of the most iconic landmarks in downtown Grants Pass, Oregon, is a 100-year-old sign that arcs over the main street with the phrase “It’s the Climate” scrawled across it. 

To an outsider, it’s an odd slogan in this rural region, where comments about the climate – or rather, climate change – can be met with apprehension. But for locals, it’s a nod to an era when the “climate” only referred to Grants Pass’ warm, dry summers and mild winters when snow coats the surrounding mountains but rarely touches down in the city streets. 

Now, the slogan takes on a different meaning.

In May 2023, the Grants Pass City Council passed a one-of-a-kind sustainability plan that, if implemented, would transition publicly owned buildings and vehicles to renewable energy, diversifying their power sources in case of natural disaster.

While passing the sustainability plan in this largely Republican county was an enormous feat on its own, actually paying for the energy projects proves to be Grants Pass’ biggest challenge yet. 

The exterior of City Hall in Grants Pass on November 28, 2023. Claire Carlson / The Daily Yonder

“There are grants out there, but I don’t think we’re the only community out there looking for grants to help pay for some of these things,” said J.C. Rowley, finance director for the city of Grants Pass. Some project examples outlined in their sustainability plan include installing electric vehicle charging stations downtown and solar panels at two city-owned landfills, and converting park streetlights to LED. 

Rural communities face bigger hurdles when accessing grant funding because they don’t have the staff or budget that cities often do to produce competitive grant applications. This can slow down the implementation of projects like the ones laid out in the Grants Pass sustainability plan.

And time is not something Grants Pass — or any other community — has to spare.

Global climate models show the planet’s average annual temperature increasing by about 6.3° Fahrenheit by 2100 if “business-as-usual” practices continue. These practices mean no substantive climate change mitigation policy, continued population growth, and unabated greenhouse gas emissions throughout the 21st century — practices driven by the most resource-consumptive countries, namely, the United States. 

In southwest Oregon, this temperature increase means hotter summers and less snow in the winters, affecting the region’s water resources, according to a U.S. Forest Service analysis. This could mean longer and more severe wildfire seasons. 

The “It’s the Climate” sign was first hung on July 20, 1920, to promote the temperate weather of Grants Pass. Claire Carlson / The Daily Yonder

In Roseburg, Oregon, about 70 miles north of Grants Pass, a 6.3°F increase would mean the city’s yearly average of 36 days of below-freezing temperatures would decrease to few or none, according to the analysis. Grants Pass would suffer a similar fate, drastically changing the climate it’s so famous for. 

Grants Pass has a population of 39,000 and is the hub of one of the smallest metropolitan statistical areas in the U.S. The metro contains just one county, Josephine, which has a population of under 90,000, nearly half of whom live outside urbanized areas. Over half of the county’s land is owned by the Bureau of Land Management or National Forest, and it contains a section of the federal Rogue River Scenic Waterway.

“In the event of a natural disaster, we are far more likely to get isolated,” said Allegra Starr, an Americorps employee who was the driving force behind the Grants Pass sustainability plan. “I’ve heard stories of communities that were less isolated than us running out of fuel [during power outages].”

Building resilience in the face of disaster is a main priority of the plan, which recommends 14 projects related to green energy, waste disposal, transportation, and tree plantings in city limits. All of the projects focus on improvements to city-owned buildings, vehicles, and operations. 

In partnership with Starr and the Grants Pass public works department, a volunteer task force of community members spent one year researching and writing the sustainability plan. In spring 2023, it was approved by the Grants Pass City Council. 

Now, the public works department is in the grants-seeking stage, and they stand to benefit from the influx of climate cash currently coming from the federal government. 

Money for sustainability, if you can get it

In 2022, the Biden administration passed the single largest bill on clean energy and climate action in U.S. history: the Inflation Reduction Act, which funnels $145 billion to renewable energy and climate action programs. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, passed in 2021, allocates $57.9 billion to clean energy and power projects. 

“It’s almost like drinking through a fire hose with the grant opportunities, which is a curse and a blessing,” said Vanessa Ogier, Grants Pass city council member. Ogier joined the council in 2021 with environmental and social issues as her top priority and was one of the sustainability plan’s biggest proponents. 

Grants Pass city council member Vanessa Ogier at City Hall on November 28, 2023. Claire Carlson / The Daily Yonder

But competing against larger communities for the grants funded through these federal laws is a struggle for smaller communities like Grants Pass. 

“I really don’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth, but when a small community only has one grant writer and they have to focus on water systems, fire, dispatch, fleet services, and they’re torn in all these different ways, it can be difficult to wrangle and organize all these opportunities and filter if they’re applicable, if we would even qualify,” Ogier said. 

Having a designated grant-writing team, which is common in larger cities, would be a huge help in Grants Pass, Ogier said. 

A 2023 study by Headwaters Economics found that lower-capacity communities – ones with fewer staff and limited funding – were unable to compete against higher-capacity, typically urban communities with resources devoted to writing competitive grant applications. 

“[There are] rural communities that don’t have community development, that don’t have economic development, that don’t have grant writers, that may only have one or two paid staff,” said Karen Chase, senior manager for community strategy at Energy Trust, an Oregon-based nonprofit that helps people transition their homes and businesses to renewable energy. Chase was a member of the volunteer task force that put together the Grants Pass sustainability plan.

When the Inflation Reduction Act money started rolling in, many of the rural communities Chase works with did not have plans that laid out “shovel-ready” energy and climate resiliency projects, which is a requirement of much of the funding. Grants Pass’ sustainability plan should give them a leg-up when applying for grants that require shovel-ready projects, according to Chase.

“Most of my rural communities pretty much lost out,” she said. 

This is despite the approximately $87 billion of Inflation Reduction Act money classified as rural-relevant, rural-stipulated, or rural-exclusive funding, according to an analysis from the Brookings Institute. Rural outreach is part of the Biden administration’s larger goal to put money into rural communities that historically have been left out by state and federal investments.

But this outreach isn’t perfect. Most of the federal grants available to rural communities still have match requirements, which are a set amount of money awardees must contribute to a grant-funded project. 

The Brookings Institute analysis, which also looked at rural funding from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the CHIPS and Science Act, found that “over half [of the rural-significant grants programs] require or show a preference for matching funds, and less than one-third offer flexibility or a waiver.” 

Of the rural-exclusive and rural-stipulated programs, less than one-third of the total grants offer match waivers or flexibility to reduce the match requirement. This makes getting those grants a lot harder for rural communities with smaller budgets. 

Help from the outside

To address limited staffing, in 2021 the Grants Pass public works department applied to be a host site for an Americorps program run out of the University of Oregon. 

The program, coined the Resource Assistance for Rural Environments (RARE) program, assigns graduate students to rural Oregon communities for 11 months to work on economic development, sustainability planning, and food systems initiatives. An Americorps member was assigned to Grants Pass to work as a sustainability planner from September 2022 to August 2023. 

Kyrrha Sevco, business operations supervisor for the Grants Pass public works department, at City Hall on November 28, 2023. Claire Carlson / The Daily Yonder

Without the Americorps member, Grants Pass officials say there’s no way the plan would have been written.

“She came in and learned about the city and the operations and the technical aspects of it and was able to really understand it and talk about that,” said Kyrrha Sevco, business operations supervisor for the public works department. “That’s hard to do.”

Bringing outsiders in can be a tricky undertaking in a rural community, but RARE program director Titus Tomlinson said they collaborate with the host sites to make the transition for their members as smooth as possible. 

“When we place a member, we place them with a trusted entity in a rural community,” Tomlinson said. “[The site supervisor] helps them meet and engage with other leaders in the community so that they’ve got some ground to stand on right out of the gate.” 

Each participating community must provide a $25,000 cash match that goes toward the approximately $50,000 needed to pay, train, and mentor the Americorps member, according to the RARE website. Communities struggling to meet this cash match are eligible for financial assistance. 

Grants Pass paid $18,500 for their portion of the RARE Americorps grant.

Director of public works Jason Canady at City Hall on November 28, 2023. Claire Carlson / The Daily Yonder

Allegra Starr, the Americorps employee, no longer works in Grants Pass since completing her 11-month term. In her stead, a committee of seven has been created to monitor and report to the city council on the progress of the plan’s implementation. 

Much of this implementation work will fall on the director of the public works department, Jason Canady, and the business operations supervisor, Kyrrha Sevco. 

“There has to be that departmental person who’s really carrying that lift and that load,” said Rowley, the Grants Pass finance director. “It’s the Kyrrhas and Jasons of the world who are leading the charge for their own department like public works.”

Now, Canady and Sevco are laying the groundwork for multiple solar projects. Eventually, they hope to bring to life what local high school student, and member of the original volunteer sustainability task force, Kayle Palmore, dreamed of in an essay titled “A Day in 2045,” which envisions bike lanes, wide sidewalks, solar panels, and electric vehicle charging stations on every street corner. 

“A smile spreads across your face as you think of how much you love this beautiful city,” Palmore writes. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline With limited resources, an Oregon town plans for climate change on Feb 18, 2024.

This story was originally published by KUNC.

Colorado’s Glenwood Canyon is as busy as it is majestic. At the base of its snowy, near-vertical walls, the narrow chasm hums with life. On one side, the Colorado River tumbles through whitewater rapids. On the other, cars and trucks whoosh by on a busy interstate.

Pinched in the middle of it all is the Shoshone Generating Station.

“It is a nondescript brown building off of I-70 that most people don’t notice when they’re driving,” said Amy Moyer, director of strategic partnerships at the Colorado River District. “But if you are in the water world, it holds the key for one of the most interesting and important water rights on the Colorado River.”

Beneath a noisy highway overpass, Moyer looked at the hydropower plant through a chain-link fence. Her group, a taxpayer-funded agency founded to keep water flowing to the cities and farms of Western Colorado, is poised to spend nearly $100 million on rights to the water that flows through the Shoshone facility.

The purchase represents the culmination of a decades-long effort to keep Shoshone’s water on the west side of Colorado’s mountains, settling the region’s long-held anxieties over competition with the water needs of the Front Range, where fast-growing cities and suburbs around Denver need more water to keep pace with development.

Even though the Shoshone water rights carry an eight-figure price tag, the new owners will leave the river virtually unchanged. The river district will buy access to Shoshone’s water from the plant operator, Xcel Energy, and lease it back as long as Xcel wants to keep producing hydropower.

The Shoshone Hydroelectric Facility sits beneath a busy stretch of Interstate 70 on Jan. 26, 2024. The Colorado River District is poised to spend $98.5 million on rights to its water in an effort to keep the Colorado River flowing for farms and cities in Western Colorado. Alex Hager / KUNC

The water right is considered “non-consumptive,” meaning every drop that enters the power plant is returned to the river. The river district wants to keep it that way as long as they can and ensure the water that flows into the hydroelectric plant also flows downstream to farmers, fish, and homes.

The river district is rallying the $98.5 million sum from local, state, and federal agencies. The district has secured $40 million already, with deals in the works for the remainder. It’s rare for a big-money water deal to find this kind of broad approval from a diverse group of water users. But the acquisition is seen as pivotal for a wide swath of Colorado, and has been co-signed by farmers, environmental groups, and local governments.

“It’s so much more than, ‘We’re going to spend $100 million to do nothing,’” Moyer said. “We’re keeping native flows in the river for so many benefits on the West Slope.”

Why Shoshone?

To understand why this unassuming power plant wields so much clout, you have to take a look at its history.

About 40 million people across seven Western states rely on the Colorado River. It supplies big cities like Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Denver. It supports a multi-billion dollar agriculture industry. But it’s governed by a century-old legal document and a management system that has proven frustratingly difficult to adapt for today’s policymakers.

Core to that management system is the concept of “prior appropriation,” which means that those who were first to use water will be the last to have their water curtailed in times of shortage. It often ignores Indigenous people who were using the river’s water before white settlers ever arrived. But under the rules white settlers drew up and modern governments still use today, it means older water rights are more powerful.

Pedestrians walk across a bridge spanning the Colorado River in Grand Junction, Colorado on Jan. 25, 2024. The Colorado River District says buying the Shoshone water right will bring more predictable flows to the river’s ’15 mile reach.’ Alex Hager / KUNC

Shoshone’s water right is one of the oldest and biggest in the state, giving it preemptive power over many other rights in Colorado.

Even in dry times, when cities and farms in other parts of the state feel the sting of water shortages, the Shoshone Hydroelectric Plant can send water through its turbines. And when that water exits the turbines and re-enters the Colorado River, it keeps flowing for myriad users downstream.

The hydro plant itself produces relatively little energy. Its 15 megawatt capacity is only a small fraction of Xcel Energy’s total Colorado output of 13,100 megawatts. Shoshone’s capacity is enough to serve about 15,000 customers, which is less than a quarter of the population of Garfield County, where the plant is located.

But the power plant has held legal access to water from the Colorado River since 1902, and can claim seniority over the vast majority of other water owners in the state.

That kind of seniority means power and certainty for whoever owns it. And that has raised the hackles of Western Colorado water users, who worry that water users in other parts of Colorado might be interested in buying Shoshone’s water right.

Colorado’s Front Range — functionally the metro area from Fort Collins to Pueblo — only exists in its current capacity because of a complex network of canals, pipes, and tunnels cut through the mountains, carrying water against gravity to the places where it’s needed. About 80 percent of the state’s water falls on the west side of the mountains, but 80 percent of its people live on the east side.

Cities on the Front Range have been able to grow significantly over the past century, despite often having access to a finite supply of water. Their Western Colorado counterparts worry that future growth could lead those cities to spend big on more water from the West Slope and say securing Shoshone’s water blocks Eastern Colorado water users from the chance to snatch it up themselves.

Fish and farms

The Colorado River District’s plans to buy Shoshone’s water have rallied widespread support, largely because of the transfer’s widespread benefits.

Perhaps no constituency will benefit from the move as much as the one that lives in the river itself.

“Anything that results in more water in the river is good for fish,” said Dale Ryden, a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Fish biologist Dale Ryden holds a razorback sucker on Jan. 26, 2024. The endangered fish species lives in the Colorado River, and proponents of the Shoshone water right transfer say the fish will benefit from increased flows to a portion of its habitat. Alex Hager / KUNC

Standing on the banks of the Colorado River in Grand Junction, Ryden looked out over a murky, meandering stretch of water. It’s part of the “15 mile reach,” a critical section of the river about 80 miles west of the Shoshone plant. The reach is filled partly by water exiting Shoshone’s turbines.

Ryden explained that this section of river is home to a variety of species, some of which are endangered, and some which are found nowhere else on earth besides the upper portions of the Colorado River.

Those species — with funky names like the flannelmouth sucker and the humpback chub — rely on this stretch of river for virtually every aspect of life.

“Back in the day, before there were people here and there was a lot of water and snowpack, the ’15 mile reach’ was kind of the place to be if you were an endangered Colorado pikeminnow or a razorback sucker,” Ryden said. “The adults live here, they spawn here, they feed here. It’s just a really highly-used and good section of river for the adult endangered fish.”

Because the fish are protected by the federal Endangered Species Act, people who use water from this section of the Colorado River are legally required to leave enough behind for fish. That means dry conditions and water shortages would force farmers and ranchers in the nearby Grand Valley to play a tricky balancing game between their own water needs and the legal protections afforded to endangered fish.

“We can’t have farming without taking care of those fish,” said Tina Bergonzini, manager of the Grand Valley Water Users Association, one of a handful of agricultural irrigation districts near Grand Junction. “They go hand in hand.”

Mesa County, which contains the Grand Valley, has an annual agricultural output of about $94 million. It’s the state’s top producer of fruits and berries, including the regionally-famous peaches from Palisade.

Bergonzini says the farmers and ranchers who contribute to that total will be able to depend on a steady water supply year after year once Shoshone’s water is guaranteed to keep flowing their way.

“I think peace of mind is the number one most important thing that it’s going to be able to bring to the Grand Valley,” she said.

The Grand Valley Water Users Association was among 21 groups that co-signed the river district’s plan to buy the Shoshone water right.

Other potential suitors

The river district describes the deal as ‘protecting’ the Shoshone water right, but hasn’t detailed who exactly they’re protecting it from. History provides more than a few examples of Front Range cities and agriculture looking West for new water supplies, but it’s unclear which diverters, exactly, would have wanted to buy Shoshone.

This 1968 photo shows two large tubes, known as penstocks, which carry Colorado River water into the Shoshone hydropower facility from pipes within the canyon wall. Historic American Engineering Record / Library Of Congress

Denver Water, the state’s largest water utility, would have been a potential candidate to buy access to Shoshone’s water, but forfeited that opportunity in 2013 when the agency inked the “Colorado River Cooperative Agreement” along with the Colorado River District. In fact, Denver Water agreed to support the acquisition of the Shoshone water right by a West Slope entity.

Representatives from Denver Water, Aurora Water, and Northern Water — which serves eight counties north and east of the Denver metro — declined to comment on the transfer of Shoshone’s water rights. A spokeswoman for Colorado Springs Utilities said the agency was “aware of the Colorado River District’s efforts to acquire the Shoshone water rights and would not oppose the transfer of those rights.”

Mark Hermundstad, a retired water lawyer who helped craft the Colorado River Cooperative Agreement, said he was not aware of any particular water agency that was poised to buy the Shoshone right but that threats may have still existed. He even floated the idea that an East Coast hedge fund could theoretically attempt to buy Shoshone’s water.

“There’s always been a possibility that someone with a lot of money could come in and buy it and try to do something with it,” he said.

Following the funds, and what comes next

Almost all of the $98.5 million for the river district’s acquisition of Shoshone’s water will derive from public funds.

The vast majority of that money, about $49 million, is set to come from the federal government. The river district plans to request a chunk of money from a $4 billion pool given to the Department of the Interior in 2022 for Colorado River projects. The extraordinary infusion of federal money has so far been used to fund a number of incentive programs designed to pay water users — mostly farmers and ranchers — in exchange for reduced water use.

Cattle graze in the Grand Valley on Jan. 25, 2024. Alex Hager / KUNC

Twenty million dollars will come from the river district’s own coffers. The agency is funded by taxes from 15 counties in Western Colorado. In 2020, voters in those counties overwhelmingly approved a rate hike for payments to the river district, designed to bring in an extra $5 million each year.

Another $20 million will come from the state of Colorado. The state’s water management arm, the Colorado Water Conservation Board, recently voted to approve that spending from its annual “water projects bill,” bringing the river district one step closer to its fundraising goals.

Besides wrangling the formidable sum, the main hurdles left for the river district concern permitting, regulation, and a court hearing. Both the river district and state officials say they are optimistic that all the necessary paperwork will get stamped without issue.

“I don’t expect that there’s going to be entities or individuals that come out of the woodwork vocalizing any strong opposition to us moving forward in this way,” Lauren Ris, director of the Colorado Water Conservation Board, said.

Only one aspect of the transfer appears to present a potential wrinkle: the river district’s ability to own an “instream flow.” That designation refers to water that is owned but not used, in the traditional sense. Instead, it’s left in rivers and streams to “preserve the natural environment.” The state is usually the only entity allowed to own that type of water right.

In a recent Colorado Water Conservation Board (CWCB) meeting, Phil Weiser, the state’s attorney general, pointed out that it would be unusual for the river district — rather than the state board itself — to own Shoshone’s water and keep it as an instream flow.

In an interview with KUNC, Ris pointed to a short list of other times the board made exceptions to its usual policy about instream flow ownership. Ris said the Colorado River District’s takeover of Shoshone is big and important enough that it makes sense to “think creatively” and consider adding Shoshone’s water to that list.

“The easiest way to have an instream flow water, right, is for the CWCB to outright own it and operate it,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean that it’s the only way, and this is such an outlier unique situation.”

‘Long-term, permanent solutions’

The past few decades have seen the Colorado River governed by a patchwork of short-term agreements. The region’s top water policymakers have appeared reluctant to agree on more permanent measures to significantly correct a growing imbalance between supply and demand. Instead, they’ve put together temporary deals designed to stave off catastrophe at the nation’s largest reservoirs.

While the Shoshone water right transfer likely won’t change much for tense negotiations about water management between states that use the Colorado River, it’s a rare moment of durability and stability for at least one area that uses the river’s water.

“Now more than ever, there is a desire to look for long-term permanent solutions on the Colorado River,” said the Colorado River District’s Amy Moyer. “This is one that exists for Colorado.”

Read Next Groundwater levels are falling worldwide — but there are solutions Jake Bittle

Across the Colorado River Basin, that imbalance and the growing harm of climate change have also compelled environmental groups to raise alarm about potential damage to ecosystems for plants and animals. Management decisions about the river’s water tend to prioritize cities and agriculture over the natural world.

Proponents of the Shoshone water right transfer say it will help push back on the harms of water shortages, at least on one stretch of the Colorado River.

“Being able to stabilize or make permanent existing rights is very helpful as we look at addressing and dealing with climate change and its impact on streams,” said Bart Miller, healthy rivers director at the conservation group Western Resource Advocates. Miller’s group receives funding from the Walton Family Foundation, which also supports KUNC’s Colorado River coverage.

Policymakers are struggling to make significant reductions to the amount of water used by cities and farms, and climate change means less water will enter the river system in the future. Environmental advocates say the Colorado River District’s ownership of the Shoshone water provides some insurance against those realities by adding predictability and protection to a stretch of the Colorado River.

This story is part of ongoing coverage of the Colorado River, produced by KUNC and supported by the Walton Family Foundation. It was produced in partnership with The Water Desk, an independent initiative of the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Environmental Journalism. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline In $100 million Colorado River deal, water and power collide on Feb 17, 2024.

Tim Robinson is famous for making uncomfortable social situations funny — in a cringe-inducing way. On his Netflix sketch show I Think You Should Leave, he’s played a range of oddball characters: a contestant on a replica of The Bachelor who’s only there for the zip line; a man in a hot dog costume who claims he’s not responsible for crashing the hot dog car through the window of a clothing store; a guy wearing a really weird hat at work. These sketches are, for the most part, an escape from the heavy subjects that keep people up at night.

So it might come as a surprise that Robinson’s next move was a climate change PSA. “I’m sick and tired of scientists telling us mean, bad facts about our world in confusing ways,” Robinson shouts at the camera in a recent sketch. Playing a TV host named Ted Rack, he invites a climate scientist on his show “You Expect Me to Believe That?” for a messaging makeover. 

It’s produced by Yellow Dot Studios, a project by Adam McKay (of Don’t Look Up fame) that’s recently been releasing comedic videos to draw attention to a global problem that most people would probably rather not think about. Sometimes the resulting videos are only mildly amusing: In a recent one, Rainn Wilson, Dwight from The Office, presents the case against fossil fuels to the court from Game of Thrones. But for a comedian like Robinson who thrives on a sense of unease, talking about climate change isn’t just a public service; it’s prime material. 

In the sketch, the subject of the Queer Eye-style makeover is Henri Drake, a real-life professor of Earth system science at the University of California, Irvine. Ted Rack’s first step is to outfit Drake in a jersey with the number 69. “Let’s focus on making your messaging a little more appealing to someone like me,” Rack says. “Someone who, like, when I hear it, I get a little mad because I don’t understand it.” Robinson is famous for his facial acrobatics, and his expressions grow increasingly perturbed as Drake describes how fossil fuels have warped Earth’s “radiation balance.” By the end, Rack is holding his head in his hands. “I gotta be honest,” he says. “What you’re saying to me makes me want to fight you a little.”

The video struck a chord with the public, racking up 100,000 views on TikTok and almost a quarter million on YouTube. It also resonated with some scientists. “I immediately understood where this is coming from,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, after watching the video. “I feel the same pressures, I get the same complaints.” After he gives scientific talks, the most common response he hears is along the lines of “Oh my god, you’re just so depressing.” 

The sketch touches on similar themes as Don’t Look Up, McKay’s 2021 film that portrays a distracted, celebrity-obsessed world ignoring scientists’ warnings of an approaching asteroid.  Rack, though, wants to help avoid the disaster that ensues when no one pays attention to scientists’ “terrible message,” and he finds ridiculous ways to make climate science relatable. “Here’s what you should say,” he instructs Drake. “‘Your house is about to be part of the ocean … A shark could swim in there and eat a picture of your daddy.’”

As a scientist with a self-described dark sense of humor, Swain enjoyed the sketch. He thought it did a good job satirizing the expectation that scientists, as the bearers of bad news, should be “cheery cheerleaders.” At the same time, though, Swain thinks a lot of climate scientists really could use a communication makeover. “I absolutely agree that a lot of times where the scientists engaged with the wider world are really ineffective,” he said. Jargon scares people off.  And even if people stick around for technical discussions of, say, Earth’s radiation balance, they might disengage when the conversation turns to ecological collapse, even though it’s the crux of why the topic matters at all. The story of how humans have made the world hotter and more hostile is a difficult one to hear, especially when accepting it means you might be a tiny part of the problem.

If experts are having trouble talking about climate change, you can bet that the general public does, too. Two-thirds of Americans say climate change is personally important to them, but only about half that number, just over a third, actually talk to their friends and family about it, according to the most recent survey from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. People might be hesitant to express their thoughts because they mistakenly believe that their opinions are unpopular, or simply because scary things are just hard to talk about.

Weirdly enough, that’s what makes climate change a good subject for a Robinson sketch. A recent profile of the comedian in The New York Times Magazine — which begins with Robinson spooning an absurd amount of hot chiles over his noodles at a restaurant — compares an affinity for spicy food to the appeal of cringe comedy. “In a harsh world, it can be soothing to microdose shots of controlled pain,” wrote Sam Anderson, the author of the profile. “Comforting, to touch the scary parts of life without putting ourselves in real danger. Humor has always served this function; it allows us to express threatening things in safe ways. Cringe comedy is like social chile powder: a way to feel the burn without getting burned.”

YouTube / Yellow Dot Studios

Climate scientists, too, could spice up their talking points — if they were given resources to do so. “I think everyone kind of understands why this exists and is funny,” Swain said. “But the reason why that’s the case — why there aren’t engaging, funny climate scientists out there on TV — is nobody is facilitating that in any setting.” The real barrier, Swain says, is that the places where scientists work don’t generally support public communication as part of their job. 

Swain is just one of a handful of climate scientists with a very high level of public visibility, appearing all over TV news, articles, YouTube, and social media. He thinks he’s been featured on more podcasts than he’s ever listened to in his life. But he’s concerned that funding for his communications work will soon run out, with nothing to replace it. “I am still working through this myself,” Swain said. “I mean, I don’t know what my employment’s going to be in six months, because I can’t find anybody to really support this on a deeper level.”

Finding a climate scientist who had time to talk about a silly, five-minute video was also a bit of a challenge. Zeke Hausfather, another media favorite, was swamped; Drake, from the video, apologized but said that it was the busiest week of the year; other scientists didn’t respond. The initial email to Swain resulted in an auto-reply advising patience amid his “inbox meltdown.” As a one-man team, Swain wrote, he could only respond to a fraction of the correspondence coming in.

Talking to a journalist about comedy clearly isn’t at the top of the priority list for most scientists. But Swain doesn’t think it’s a waste of time. By now, he’d hoped that climate change would have a bigger role in comedy sketches, bad movies, and trashy TV shows, meeting people where they already are. “Where is the pop culture with climate science? It’s not where I thought it would be at this point,” he said. “But pop culture changes quickly. It responds fast to new things that are injected into the discourse.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Talking about climate change can be awkward. Just ask Tim Robinson. on Feb 16, 2024.

Indigenous nations, farmers, and ranchers throughout the Klamath Basin in the Pacific Northwest reached an agreement on Wednesday to collaborate on ecosystem restoration projects and to improve water supply for agriculture. 

The memorandum between the Klamath Tribes, Yurok Tribe, and Klamath Water Users Association, which represents agricultural producers across 17,000 acres in both California and Oregon, serves as a major step in a long-running battle over access to water as the Klamath River dries up and federal officials cut flows to tribes and producers.

Drought in the region has often pitted Indigenous peoples and endangered fish against more than 1,000 farms that rely on the same water for their crops. In 2001, the Bureau of Reclamation shut off irrigation water to farmers in the midst of a drought, prompting protests from farmers and illegal water releases. Two decades later, amid another drought, the agency cut water to farmers to preserve endangered suckerfish, again heightening tensions. ”It’s not safe for Natives to be out in farmland during a drought year,” Joey Gentry, a member of the Klamath Tribes, told Inside Climate News after the 2021 water cuts. 

In 2022, tribes won a long-running campaign to convince the federal government to remove four dams that stopped salmon from reaching their spawning grounds, marking a major win for Indigenous communities that rely on the Klamath. Now, Clayton Dumont, chairman of the Klamath Tribes, says the new agreement goes even further.

“We’re nowhere near finished, but this is a really strong beginning,” he said. “Getting adversaries like this together in a room and having to sit through a lot of bitterness to get to a point where we are now, I think it’s not just commendable, it’s pretty miraculous.”

Klamath Tribes were forced to cede 23 million acres in Oregon and California to settlers in exchange for a reservation, but an 1864 treaty gave the tribe the right to hunt and fish on those ceded lands forever. However, fishing hasn’t been consistently possible with drought and conflicting demands for water. 

“What’s at stake is our very livelihood, our culture, our identities, our way of life,” Dumont said. 

In the next month, tribes and agricultural producers will meet to decide on restoration projects that could be completed within the next two years and supported through existing federal or state programs. After the priorities are decided, officials from the U.S. Department of the Interior will identify both existing funding and new funding sources for the projects. The agency also plans to release more than $72 million to modernize agricultural infrastructure and restore the ecosystem in Klamath Basin.

Officials from the Klamath Water Users Association said in a press release that working together with the tribes will make both parties more effective in obtaining state and federal funding to support the region.  

“I am hoping that this MOU will be the first step to bring all the different entities together to work on a solution to the conflicts over water that have hampered this region for decades,” said Tracey Liskey, president of the Klamath Water Users Association Board of Directors. “The water users want fish in our rivers and lakes and water in our irrigation ditches. This way, we all can have a prosperous way of life in the basin.” 

Dumont says it helped that the administrations locally, statewide, and federally were all supportive of this agreement. However, he added that there’s no guarantee that the MOU will have any staying power after November.

“If the election goes the wrong way, all of this could dry up really quickly,” Dumont said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline As the Klamath River dries, tribal nations and farmers come to rare agreement on Feb 16, 2024.

Trudging across the top of Bromley Mountain Ski Resort on a sunny afternoon in January, Matt Folts checks his smartwatch and smiles: 14 degrees Fahrenheit. That is very nearly his favorite temperature for making snow. It’s cold enough for water to quickly crystallize, but not so cold that his hourslong shifts on the mountain are miserable.

Folts is the head snowmaker at Bromley, a small ski area on the southern end of Vermont’s Green Mountains. The burly 35-year-old sports a handlebar mustache, an orange safety jacket, and thick winter boots that crunch in the snow as he walks. A blue hammer swings from his belt.

It is nearing the end of the day for skiers, but not for Folts. He’ll work well into the evening preparing the mountain for tomorrow’s crowd. Cutting across the entrances to Sunder and Corkscrew, he heads toward a stubby snow gun used to blanket Blue Ribbon, an experts-only trail named in honor of Bromley’s founder, Fred Pabst Jr. The apparatus stands a few feet high, with three legs and a metal head that’s angled toward the sky. Two lines that resemble fire hoses supply the device with water and compressed air, which it uses to hiss precipitation into the air. As the water droplets fall, they coalesce into snowflakes. 

“If it was warmer I’d be a yeti,” says Folts, referring to wetter snow that, if conditions were just a bit balmier, would leave him abominably white. But at these temperatures the powder he’d just made bounced lightly off his sleeve. “That’s perfect.”

Yet perfect fake fluff like Folts’ poses a climate conundrum. On one hand, making snow requires enormous amounts of energy, which creates planet-warming emissions. On the other, a warming planet means that artificial snow is increasingly essential to an industry that, while admittedly a luxury, pumps over $20 billion annually into ski towns nationwide. The good news is that, in the face of these growing threats, resorts have been dramatically improving the efficiency of their snowmaking operations — a move they hope will help them outrun rising temperatures.

American ski areas logged more 65 million visits last season. A sizable chunk of those likely came during Christmas week, when a resort can make — or lose — a third or more of its annual revenue. The Martin Luther King Jr. and Presidents Day weekends are similarly vital. But ensuring that there’s a surface to slide on is an increasingly fickle business. 

Snowpack in the Western U.S. has already declined by 23 percent since 1955, and climbing temperatures have pushed the snowline in Lake Tahoe, California — which is home to more than a dozen resorts — from 1,200 to 1,500 feet. A recent study found that much of the Northern Hemisphere is headed off a “snow-loss cliff” where even marginal increases in temperature could prompt a dramatic loss of snow. 

Matt Folts checks a snowmaking gun that is blowing fresh flake on the Blue Ribbon trail at Bromley Mountain Ski Resort. Tik Root / Grist

By one estimate, only about half of the ski areas in the Northeast will be economically viable by mid-century. Research suggests that Vermont’s ski season could be two to four weeks shorter by 2080, while another study found that Canada’s snowmaking needs will increase 67 to 90 percent by 2050. At Bromley, snow guns have been essential for years; without them, the resort’s mid-January trail count would have likely been in the single digits, rather than 31.  

Opening terrain, however, comes at a cost. It takes a lot of horsepower to move water up the hill under pressure, and compress the air the guns need to function. Bromley’s relatively small operation, which produces enough snow each season to cover about 135 acres in three or more feet of the stuff, chews through enough electricity each year to power about 100 homes. All that juice adds nearly half a million dollars to the resort’s utility bill.

But Bill Cairns, Bromley’s president and general manager, says the system is actually much more efficient than it was just a decade ago. “I used to spend about $800,000,” he says. He’s now able to produce more snow for around half the price. “The reduction in cost with snowmaking has totally been a game changer.” 

Powder days start with specks of dust high in the atmosphere. As they fall, water droplets attach to them, forming snowflakes. Ski areas like Bromley replicate this natural process using miles of pipes that feed water and compressed air to hundreds, sometimes thousands, of snow guns scattered across a mountain. 

Early guns mixed compressed air and water inside a chamber, and then used air pressure to propel water droplets skyward through a large nozzle. This was the type of system Fred Pabst Jr., of beer family fame, spent $1 million installing in 1965, making his resort one of America’s earliest adopters.

“It was a black art. We knew nothing,” says Slavko Stanchak, whose inventions and expertise have made him a legend among snowmakers. It was an era when energy was relatively cheap and resorts would rent rows of diesel-powered compressors that threw whatever snow they could generate on the hill. But as energy costs rose in the 1990s and early 2000s, so did the impetus to innovate.

“We focused on making the process viable from a business standpoint,” Stanchak says.

He eventually launched a consulting company that helped ski areas, including Bromley, design or improve their snowmaking operations. On the water side of the equation, Bromley spent the 1990s improving its piping network and added a mid-mountain pump to help get H2O from its ponds to its trails. (Much of the water eventually returns to the watershed during the spring melt.) But the amount of water needed to carpet a ski hill in snow remains relatively fixed from year to year, so there are only so many efficiency gains to be had. Compressing air is what really eats into a budget.

“The air is where the little dollar bills fly out,” says Cairns, adding that two diesel compressors can consume a tanker truck of fuel every week.

The 1990s also saw more efficient snow guns come to market. Tinkerers discovered that devices with multiple small holes, instead of a single large aperture, could utilize water, rather than air pressure, to force fluid upward. This allowed them to move the compressed air nozzles to the outside of the barrel, where they would primarily break the water stream into droplets — a far less strenuous function than forcing them out of the gun.

“An old-school hog might use 800 cubic feet per minute [of compressed air]. This one here uses about 70,” Folts says, pointing toward a tower gun from the early 2000s that stands about 15 feet tall and, unlike the ground guns on Blue Ribbon, can’t be easily moved. Up the hill sits a newer model that can get by on closer to 40 cubic feet per minute, or CFM, and a bit farther down the slope is the resort’s latest tool, which under ideal conditions can use as little as 10. That’s a roughly hundred-fold increase in efficiency.

The state-backed Efficiency Vermont program urges resorts to swap in as many of the more efficient devices as possible. “That work got a real big boost in 2014, when we did the ‘Great Snow Gun Roundup,’” explains Chuck Clerici, a senior account manager at the organization. Before then, it had been doing a handful of sporadic replacements. The roundup retired some 10,000 inefficient models statewide, and, overall, Clerici says snowmaking operations are now using about 80 percent less air than they used to.

Bill Cairns, the president and general manager of Bromley Mountain Ski Resort, with a map of the resort and its snowmaking system. Tik Root / Grist

While Efficiency Vermont doesn’t separate savings that are the result of snowmaking upgrades from, say, those tied to building improvements, it reports that its efforts to help ski resorts use less energy have saved more than a billion kilowatt hours of electricity between 2000 and 2022. That’s nearly a million tons of planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions or the equivalent of taking more than two gas-fired power plants offline for a year.

“The bigger projects we’ve had over the years have been snowmaking projects,” says Clerici. “We don’t have that many instances in the energy-efficiency realm where you can swap something that uses one-fifth of the energy.”

Standing next to the building that houses Bromley’s air compressors, Cairns points to a concrete slab with two manhole covers that once fed massive underground diesel tanks. “Underneath was fuel,” he says. To his right is a large pipe marked where the carbon-spewing generators used to connect to the rest of the snowmaking system. Now it’s cut off.

Bromley is among the many snowmakers that have been able to eliminate, or drastically reduce, its dependence on diesel air compressors. Electrifying the job has also allowed some resorts to incorporate renewable energy. Bolton Valley, in Vermont, features a 121-foot-tall wind turbine. Solar panels now dot the hills of many others, including Bromley, which leases a strip of land beside its parking lot for a solar farm. The array produces more than half the power its snowmaking system consumes.

America’s snowmaking industry has been historically based on the East Coast, where natural snow can be especially elusive. But that’s changing. “We’re doing a lot more work out West,” says Ken Mack, who works for HDK Snowmakers, one of the largest equipment manufacturers. One of the company’s executives recently moved to Colorado to help meet demand. 

The snow guns that HDK sells currently may be reaching the limit of how little water and compressed air they use. “We’re probably getting to a point where we’ve gone as low as we can go,” says Mack. That’s required finding gains in other arenas.

One step snowmakers can take, says Mack, is to better track how much energy they use, ideally in real time. He’s in the midst of trying to help revive a metric called the Snowmaking Efficiency Index, or SEI. It’s a measure of how many kilowatt hours it takes to put 1,000 gallons of water worth of snow on the hill, something Stanchek pioneered years ago but never quite took hold. (For reference, under ideal circumstances it takes about 160,00 gallons to cover one acre in one foot of snow.)

If publicly released, such data could provide transparency and allow ski areas to boast about their efficiency. That’s particularly appealing given that sustainability and environmental stewardship are increasingly top of mind for consumers. But because SEI varies considerably from mountain to mountain, and by temperature, it will likely be most effective as a tool for resorts to compete against themselves, rather than each other.

Read Next The Midwest defined itself by its winters. What happens when they disappear? Jena Brooker

This year, Bromley’s SEI ranged from about 23 in the warm, early weeks of the season to mid-teens when temperatures dropped. Cairns consistently tries to beat those numbers and can monitor them from his office. If the number ever spikes, he can search for an open gun, leaking water line, or other culprit.

“Anything below 20 is really good,” Cairns says. “So we’re trending the right way.”

An arguably more revolutionary development in snowmaking is the move toward automated systems that can be operated almost entirely remotely. One obvious benefit is reducing the need to find people willing to schlep around a mountain in the dead of night, when temperatures can dip into single digits. More importantly, automation allows resorts to ramp snowmaking up and down quickly, which is particularly useful as global temperatures climb. 

Snowmaking can occur when the mercury drops to about 28 degrees F (though the process is optimal at around 22 degrees or less); a threshold Mother Nature sometimes crosses for only brief periods. When it does, resorts can take advantage with a press of a button, instead of having to spend the time dispatching a crew out to fire up all those guns. The ability to operate in shorter time windows also means less energy is needed to run pumps and compressors — and get people up and down the mountain.

“You’re done sooner,” says Mack. Where it might take 100 man-hours to cover a trail, automation could cut that to 20 or 30. “It’s absolutely a savings. But it also gives you a little bit of reserve if you need it.”

Europe is far ahead of North America when it comes to automation, in part because governments have subsidized the daunting expense of running electricity and communication lines across a mountain. The cost of installing the technology can quickly run into the millions and, without subsidies, the benefits for American ski areas have been limited largely to smaller mountains in warmer climates, such as in the mid-Atlantic, where it is vital to surviving. But bigger resorts in snowier locales, including Stowe, Stratton, and Sugarbush in Vermont and Big Sky in Montana, have been testing the equipment.

“The future of snowmaking is definitely going to be automation,” says Cairns. “It’s just a lot of money, and nobody really wants to subsidize that yet.”

Bromley is testing one semi-automated gun that could avoid the wiring issue. It uses the existing compressed air supply to spin an internal turbine that creates just enough energy to run a small onboard computer. By monitoring the weather conditions, it can automatically adjust the rate of water and air flow to produce optimal snow.

“Those guns don’t need any power,” says Folts, as he finished adjusting the position of one gun and moved to the next. “That’s kind of another next level.” 

Until then, Folts and his crew lumber on into the night, one gun at a time.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Greener snowmaking is helping ski resorts weather climate change on Feb 15, 2024.

This story was originally published by Floodlight, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powerful interests stalling climate action.

In his first four weeks in office, Louisiana Republican Governor Jeff Landry has filled the ranks of state environmental posts with fossil fuel executives. 

Landry has taken aim at the state’s climate task force for possible elimination as part of a sweeping reorganization of Louisiana’s environmental bureaucracy. The goal, according to Landry’s executive order, is to “create a better prospective business climate.” 

And in his first month, Landry changed the name of the Department of Natural Resources, the state agency with oversight of the fossil fuel industry, by adding the word “energy” to its title.

While the United States and other countries have vowed to move away from fossil fuels, Landry is running in the opposite direction.

Landry, who has labeled climate change “a hoax,” wants to grow the oil and gas industry that supports hundreds of thousands of jobs in Louisiana. Environmentalists blame the industry for the pollution that has harmed vulnerable communities in the state and for the climate change tied to increased flooding, land loss, drought, and heat waves in the Gulf Coast state.

Read Next The unlikely coalition behind Biden’s liquefied natural gas pivot Naveena Sadasivam, Zoya Teirstein, & Jake Bittle

A key indicator of where Landry is headed is the choice of Tyler Gray to lead the state’s Department of Energy and Natural Resources. Gray enters the new administration after spending the past two years working for Placid Refining Company as the oil company’s corporate secretary and lobbyist. 

Before that, Gray spent seven years with the Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association, or LMOGA, his final two years serving as the lobbying group’s president. During his tenure with LMOGA, Gray helped draft the controversial 2018 law that criminalized protesting near the oil and gas pipelines and construction sites. 

At the time, Gray said the law was needed as protection from individuals who attempt to unlawfully interrupt the construction of pipeline projects or damage existing facilities. Greenpeace USA found such laws — enacted in 18 states — were directly tied to lobbying by the fossil fuel industry and resulted in insulating more than 60 percent of the U.S. gas and oil industry facilities from protest. 

Anne Rolfes with the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, a grassroots nonprofit focused on accountability in the petrochemical industry, has a grim outlook on Gray’s tenure. Her organization has been involved with many of the protests in question.

“His willingness to suppress people’s rights in favor of that industry is alarming,” Rolfes said.

“He’s been writing laws that favor the oil industry over the rights of people throughout his career,” she added. “But the state has never stood up to the oil industry. Under every administration there is this myopic idea of destroying our state via the oil and gas industry is somehow economic development.”

Neither Landry nor Gray’s office responded to multiple requests for comments.

Landry picks have oil, gas, and coal ties

Gray is one of several former fossil fuel executives Landry has selected to lead Louisiana’s environmental efforts.

Tony Alford, the former co-owner and president of a Houma-based oil-field service company that was accused of spilling toxic waste in a Montana lawsuit, is now the chairman of the Governor’s Advisory Commission on Coastal Protection. And Benjamin Bienvenu, an oil industry executive and petroleum engineer, is serving as the commissioner of conservation within the Department of Energy and Natural Resources. 

Landry also tapped Aurelia Giacometto to lead the state’s Department of Environmental Quality. It was reported that Giacometto, the first Black woman to serve in the position, had ties with skeptics of climate science when she served under then-President Donald Trump as head of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. She currently sits on the board of a coal manufacturing company. 

Read Next A Superfund for climate change? States consider a new way to make Big Oil pay. Katie Myers

And Landry’s pick for the state’s new leader for the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, Madison Sheahan, doesn’t have a background in wildlife — or fisheries. She enters the job after serving as the executive director of the South Dakota Republican Party and managing Trump’s re-election campaign in that state. The agency led by Sheahan is one of the state entities responsible for investigating oil spills.

At a recent press conference, Landry said he seeks to expand oil and gas refining in Louisiana, seeing it as the only way to increase job opportunities for the middle class. 

For environmentalists, these are worrying signs for a state that is the site of a boom in proposed liquified natural gas facilities and carbon capture projects that they say threaten to increase Louisiana’s already high contribution of climate-changing greenhouse gases.

In late January, President Joe Biden announced his administration was halting approvals of new liquified natural gas export facilities to examine the need for the additional capacity and the environmental impact of such projects. The temporary delay reportedly affects five projects in Louisiana and one in Texas. 

Louisiana’s ‘sacrifice zone’

Landry’s moves weren’t unexpected, advocates say, given his past actions as state attorney general and his combative stance toward environmental justice issues. 

Gray’s appointment is “disappointing but not surprising,” said Jackson Voss, climate policy coordinator for the Alliance for Affordable Energy.

“Unfortunately, from our perspective, the history of the [Louisiana] Department of Natural Resources has always been very deeply connected with the oil and gas industry,” Voss said. “In some ways it helps us, because there’s not going to be very many surprises about where Secretary Gray will align on certain issues.” 

Read Next The big question behind Biden’s liquefied natural gas pause Jake Bittle

In its latest report, Human Rights Watch highlighted the environmental harms and health-related issues the oil and gas industry is accused of inflicting on predominantly Black communities in the southeast Louisiana corridor known as Cancer Alley. The group is asking state leaders to phase out fossil fuel production and to halt any new developments or expansions to existing fossil fuel and petrochemical facilities. 

Author Antonia Juhasz interviewed dozens of residents living in Cancer Alley who talked about miscarriages, high-risk pregnancies, infertility, respiratory issues and a multitude of other health impacts in their communities. They attribute the maladies to years of pollution and dangerous emissions from the high concentration of polluting industries, especially in southern Louisiana.  

“The fossil fuel and petrochemical industry has created a ‘sacrifice zone’ in Louisiana,” Juhasz, senior researcher on fossil fuels at Human Rights Watch, said in a prepared statement. “The failure of state and federal authorities to properly regulate the industry has dire consequences for residents of Cancer Alley.”

Landry takes aim at oil and gas limits

As the state’s attorney general, Landry pushed lawsuits against restrictions the Biden administration tried to implement on offshore oil lease sales and the cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline. 

He also sued over the Environmental Protection Agency’s push to better regulate emissions from oil and gas facilities in Cancer Alley.

A Trump-appointed federal district court judge in western Louisiana recently sided with Landry on that lawsuit. U.S. District Judge James Cain said in his opinion that the federal agency’s enhanced oversight of proposed projects in Cancer Alley communities overstepped its powers and that it was “imposing an improper financial burden on the state.” 

Read Next Human Rights Watch blames Louisiana regulators for low birth weights in Cancer Alley Lylla Younes

As attorney general, Landry also sued to obtain correspondence between EPA, environmentalists and certain journalists. 

As governor, Landry has opposed Biden’s climate initiatives, including the push to increase manufacturing of electric vehicles. And Landry has claimed that boosting renewable energy in Louisiana, including solar and wind, would force the state into “energy poverty.” 

Oil and Gas Association applauds appointment

Landry’s pick of Gray was lauded by the president of the Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association. In a prepared statement, Mike Moncla praised Gray for knowing their industry “backwards and forwards.” 

“This appointment marks the state of a new era for our state’s oil and gas industry,” Moncla wrote. “We know that he will be an incredible asset for our industry.” 

At LMOGA, Gray also pushed back at any efforts to limit offshore drilling and domestic energy production to reduce planet-warming emissions. Gray said the country needed “sound, science-based policies” and solutions to address climate change that also promote “domestic energy development” while not stifling the state’s economy and job market. 

Read Next A Louisiana court just revived plans for the country’s biggest plastics plant Lylla Younes

LMOGA is a staunch supporter of carbon capture and sequestration. The agency Gray now leads recently received primary regulatory oversight from the federal government for the wells used to pump carbon dioxide underground for permanent storage. 

The technology is being touted as the solution to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but debates are ongoing over its safety and effectiveness. 

Environmental advocates argue that carbon capture and storage is just a ploy to prolong the life of the fossil fuel industry instead of transitioning to cleaner energy sources like wind and solar. They lack confidence in the state’s ability to properly permit carbon capture projects with Gray at the helm. 

“With Gray’s appointment and then an already heavily underfunded and understaffed agency, it very much feels like they’ll be sending those permits through instead of truly evaluating them one by one,” said Angelle Bradford, a spokesperson with the Delta chapter of the Sierra Club. “It’s once again the usual good-old-boy mentality where we’re putting people in positions who not only won’t follow the rules but create rules that make it harder for the other side, which is us.”

She added, “Louisiana is not taking the climate crisis seriously.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline When a climate denier becomes Louisiana’s governor: Jeff Landry’s first month in office on Feb 15, 2024.

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The spotlight

When Kristy Drutman attended the U.N. climate negotiations in Poland in 2018, she was struck by how impersonal everything felt. As a climate storyteller, educator, and social media influencer (who was featured on our 2022 Grist 50 list), Drutman’s work heavily emphasized people and connections. “It just felt like people were really disconnected from each other,” she said of the conference. She thought the climate movement as a whole could benefit from putting a greater emphasis on relationships.

Three years later, she returned to the U.N. conference and set up a table with a sign: “Looking for love? Come on a climate speed date.” People seemed to like it. “We actually had people that were in the negotiation rooms — policy people from different countries participated in it,” she said. Last fall, she turned the idea into a more intentional matchmaking setup; she started hosting filmed meetups in New York and posting episodes of the show — called Love and Climate — on Instagram, TikTok, and Youtube.

In the first few months of the project, Drutman says no bona fide couples have yet emerged — but several pairs have gone on second and third dates. “They told us we gave them a better match than Tinder or Bumble,” she said. “So I was like, ‘You know what? We’re better than dating apps, hell yeah.’” But even on the apps, young people are increasingly looking for matches who share their climate concerns. According to data from OKCupid, climate change was the top issue that daters cared about in 2022, with a 368 percent increase over the previous five years in climate and environmental terms on users’ profiles.

Out in the wild, Drutman has met several “climate couples” who got to know each other through their work or collaborations or even going to a climate march — “I’ve heard that story a few times,” Drutman said.

In this Valentine’s Day newsletter, we’re sharing stories of couples, friends, and collaborators who met through some form of climate work. Somewhat like the contestants on Drutman’s speed-dating show, many of these folks found each other because they were looking for companionship — in their work, in a new place, or in solidarity around a particular issue. They all found meaningful relationships that enriched their climate work, and their lives. Their stories serve as reminders of the joy that can be found in taking action and building community around a shared dedication to a clean, green, and just future.

Eileen Liu had been an environmental activist since middle school. When she moved to a new town for high school, “I didn’t know anyone or have any friends,” she said. “But I knew the current climate crisis was an issue many other youth my age were passionate about solving.” Last January, as a sophomore, she started the Menlo-Atherton Reusables Club — a student group focused on policy changes that target plastic waste in San Mateo County, California. “Through the reuse community I have met so many inspiring people, and formed the closest friendships,” Liu said. The club now has about 20 members, and Liu describes it as “one big friend group.”

But a few connections stand out — including her now best friend, Ella. “When I was planning the logistics of the club back in July of 2022, I was acquaintances with Ella,” Liu said. “After she joined the club, we found out that we actually share a lot of hobbies — aside from environmentalism — such as writing pen pal letters, being fangirls of BlackPink and Grey’s Anatomy, and photography!” Ella is now one of the leaders of the club, as are two of Liu’s other closest pals. When they aren’t busy advocating for reusables or listening to BlackPink, the two like to wake up early to hike the Stanford Dish (a nearby trail on Stanford University’s campus) — they love spotting turkeys and other wild animals in the hills.

Earyn McGee also met a close friend after a move — for her, it was moving back home to Los Angeles after finishing her Ph.D. in natural resources conservation. McGee (who was featured on the 2021 Grist 50 list) had been passionate about nature and wildlife (especially lizards) since she was a child — and she had also become an educator and advocate for BIPOC representation in the outdoors. She was one of the original organizers behind Black Birders Week, and when she moved to L.A. in 2022, she was invited to a local meetup as part of the third annual Black Birders Week. “It was just a lot of fun — everybody was looking at birds and chatting and having a good time,” McGee said. And it was there that she met T’Essence Minnitee.

“It was funny — we met and she told me that we were gonna be friends, and I was like, ‘Alright, I believe you!’” McGee recalled. “We had a lot of shared interests and values. You know, you just click with somebody — that’s kind of what it was like.”

They’ve enjoyed going to other green events together, like radical clothing swaps and climate-themed dinners, as well as non-climate-centric hangouts. “She’s one of those people where I can always just hit her up about anything. Having her friendship is just so meaningful for me.”

Among other roles, Minnitee is the director of strategic partnerships at Black Girl Environmentalist, and McGee now works as the coordinator of conservation engagement at the L.A. Zoo — and they also hope to collaborate professionally, McGee said. “Hopefully this summer, we’ll start putting together a couple of events around getting Black women and other women of color and gender non-conforming people into conservation, environment, and climate change careers, and creating resources in those ways.”

Jenni Vanos and David Hondula first met at the 2011 International Congress of Biometeorology in Auckland, New Zealand. They were both there to present research from their Ph.D. studies in atmospheric and environmental sciences, respectively. It was Vanos’ first time attending the conference, and she recalled that Hondula was very welcoming and friendly. “We both realized we were staying a few days longer in New Zealand so did some sightseeing together to a few of the islands, including climbing a volcano on Rangitoto Island,” she said. “We obviously got along really well from the start.”

At the time, she was studying at the University of Guelph in Canada, and he was at the University of Virginia. “We actually were good colleagues and friends for about three years before we started dating,” Vanos said. They kept in touch through their work, and saw each other at other conferences and workshops. When they did decide to take things to the next level, Vanos lived in Texas and Hondula was in Arizona. Their relationship was long-distance for about four years before Vanos was able to get a job at Arizona State University, where they are now both associate professors. (Hondula also leads Phoenix’s Office of Heat Response and Mitigation.)

“We are both very passionate about the work we do, but we have a lot of other hobbies and interests we do together and with our family and friends,” Vanos shared, including traveling and all manner of outdoor sports — and, now, taking care of their growing family. Their son, Evan, is 2 years old, and their second little one is due in May.

And bringing things full circle, last year, the pair helped host the 23rd annual Congress of Biometeorology at ASU.

Thelma and Fenton on their wedding day, taking in the view of the Fijian mountains. Ropate Kama

“Our story is one of multiple cyclones,” said Thelma Young Lutunatabua. She first met her husband, Fenton Lutunatabua, in 2015 when they were both working for 350.org — she was based in New York, and he was based in Fiji. “The first time I ever heard his voice was when he called me in the middle of the night after a cyclone hit Vanuatu and asked if I could help with building a missing-persons tracking system.” After that, they collaborated on a number of storytelling projects focused on frontline solutions and resistance in the Pacific. But things shifted when Cyclone Winston, a Category 5 storm, hit Fenton’s homeland of Fiji.

“That’s when we started calling each other and checking in more, and having deeper conversations especially around the emotional side of disaster response work,” Thelma said. They also exchanged personal numbers, and began talking more about life outside of work.

This remote friendship progressed for a few months, with a flirtatious undertone. They finally had the opportunity to meet in person in May of 2016, at 350’s all-staff retreat in Spain. “There was definitely that energy of expectation and hopefulness,” Thelma said. “He met me at the airport in Barcelona and picked me up, and then we walked around the Gothic Quarter of Barcelona together.” It didn’t take long for them to know that there was something more there. “Our final night in Barcelona, we just, like, got pizza and we were talking and he was like, ‘You should come to Fiji.’” And later that year, she did.

Thelma and Fenton are now happily married — they eloped in the mountains of Fiji, during a surprise downpour — and are parents to a 14-month-old son, Anders. “We met through storytelling and we’re both still actively doing that, both with our jobs and our own creative practices,” Thelma said. “And we’re both still committed to telling the full truth about climate — that it’s not just about despair and destruction, but there’s so much hope in the process as well.”

— Claire Elise Thompson

More exposure

• Read: more stories of climate couples who have found love in shared work and passions (Atmos)
• Read: an essay about why we need more tales of love and romance in climate fiction (Outside Magazine)
• Read: more about Kristy Drutman’s Love and Climate speed dating show (The Guardian)
• And watch: full episodes of Love and Climate on Youtube
• Read: a poem, “Love in a Time of Climate Change,” from the eco-poetry collection Habitat Threshold by Craig Santos Perez

A parting shot

For some, climate connections are more than one person, but a whole community. Leo Goldsmith (another Grist 50 honoree, whom we’ve interviewed in Looking Forward about his research into climate impacts on queer populations) told us about his experience on the board of OUT for Sustainability. “Before I joined, I met a couple of the members through a research paper we wrote together on climate-related disaster impacts on LGBTQIA+ communities,” Goldsmith said. “Being a part of OUT4S now has allowed for these relationships, and new ones, to grow. Through our mutual goal of working toward climate justice for LGBTQIA+ communities, we collaborate as a community to uplift each other and the communities we hope to serve through advocacy, resources, and education.” The board is shown here during a gathering in the summer of 2022.

IMAGE CREDITS

Vision: Grist

Spotlight: Ropate Kama

Parting shot: OUT for Sustainability

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Climate connections: Four stories of relationships forged through climate action on Feb 14, 2024.

This article was produced in partnership with Type Investigations, where Adam Federman is a reporting fellow. 

On the morning of March 5, 2012, Debra White Plume received an urgent phone call. A convoy of large trucks transporting pipeline servicing equipment was attempting to cross the Pine Ridge Reservation near the town of Wanblee, South Dakota. White Plume, a prominent Lakota activist, immediately dropped what she was doing and headed to the site, where, within a few hours, a group of about 75 people from the Pine Ridge Reservation gathered.

More than a dozen cars formed a blockade along one of the roads that runs through the reservation. Plume and other activists were outspoken critics of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, part of a larger network carrying oil from the tar sands of northern Alberta, Canada, to refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast. Many Indigenous nations in South Dakota, whose land the convoy was attempting to pass through on its way to the Canadian tar sands, fiercely objected to the project.

“We have resolutions opposing the whole entity of the tar sands oil mine and the Keystone XL pipeline,” White Plume declared after arriving at the site where the trucks had been stopped. “They need to turn around and go back. … They are not coming through here.” But the trucks were so big and unwieldy that the drivers said it would be dangerous, if not impossible, to turn them around.

The standoff in Wanblee was a relatively small protest compared to subsequent actions against the Keystone XL pipeline, which drew tens of thousands into the streets of Washington, D.C., and garnered national attention. Police arrested five activists, including White Plume (who died in 2020) and her husband, Alex White Plume Sr., on charges of disorderly conduct, and released them later that day. Beyond a few stories in Indigenous news outlets and regional papers, the protest hardly registered. Though tribes and landowners in the region had begun organizing around Keystone XL in 2011 and 2012, the pipeline had not yet become the galvanizing force for one of the largest campaigns in the history of the modern environmental movement.

Debra White Plume is arrested by U.S. Park Police in front of the White House in Washington, D.C., during a protest against the Keystone XL pipeline in September 2011. Luis M. Avarez / AP Photo

But the events in Wanblee did capture the attention of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which began tracking Native groups campaigning against the pipeline in early 2012. According to documents obtained by Grist and Type Investigations through a Freedom of Information Act request, the FBI’s Minneapolis office opened a counterterrorism assessment in February 2012, focusing on actions in South Dakota, that continued for at least a year and may have led to the opening of additional investigations. These documents reveal that the FBI was monitoring activists involved in the Keystone XL campaign about a year earlier than previously known. 

Their contents suggest that, long before the Keystone and Dakota Access pipelines became national flashpoints, the federal government was already developing a sweeping law enforcement strategy to counter any acts of civil disobedience aimed at preventing fossil fuel extraction. And young, Native activists were among its first targets.

“The threat emerging … is evolving into one based on opposition to energy exploration related to any extractions from the earth, rather than merely targeting one project and/or one company,” the FBI noted in its description of the Wanblee blockade.

The 15-page file, which is heavily redacted, also describes Native American groups as a potentially dangerous threat and likens them to “environmental extremists” whose actions, according to the FBI, could lead to violence. The FBI acknowledged that Native American groups were engaging in constitutionally protected activity, including attending public hearings, but emphasized that this sort of civic participation might spawn criminal activity. 

To back up its claims, the FBI cited a 2011 State Department hearing on the pipeline in Pierre, South Dakota, attended by a small group of Native activists. The FBI said the individuals were dressed in camouflage and had covered their faces with red bandanas, “train robber style.” According to the report, they were also carrying walking sticks and shaking sage, claiming to be “Wounded Knee Security of/for Mother Earth.”

“The Bureau is uncertain how the NA group(s) will act initially or subsequently if the project is approved,” the agency wrote. 

Members of the Oglala Lakota Tribe participate in a protest against the proposed Keystone XL pipeline on October 13, 2014, in Pierre, South Dakota. Andrew Burton / Getty Images

The FBI also singled out the “Native Youth Movement,” which it described as a mix between a “radical militia and a survivalist group.” In doing so, it appeared to conflate a specific activist group originally founded in Canada in the 1990s with the broader array of young Native activists who opposed the pipeline decades later. Young activists would play an important role in the Keystone XL campaign and later on during protests against the Dakota Access pipeline at Standing Rock, but the movement had little in common with militias or survivalists, terms typically used to describe far-right groups or those seeking to disengage from society. 

The FBI declined to respond to questions for this story. In an emailed statement, a spokesperson for the Minneapolis field office said the agency does not typically comment on FOIA releases and “lets the information contained in the files speak for itself.”

The FBI was not the only federal agency keeping tabs on Keystone XL pipeline protesters in the early years of the anti-pipeline movement. According to additional records obtained by Grist and Type Investigations, an obscure intelligence division within the U.S. State Department, which had jurisdiction over the pipeline because it crossed an international boundary, collected hundreds of pages of records on Keystone activists, landing one of them in jail on charges of trespassing (which were eventually dropped). Working in tandem with the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, the State Department created an email account to “track all Keystone XL protest incidents” and monitored events in cities across the country, including in Philadelphia, San Francisco, Houston, and Honolulu. The task force even highlighted candlelight vigils held in several major cities in 2014, describing one group of protesters as “peaceful, holding candles and signs.” These records reveal for the first time that the State Department was also involved in monitoring activists from late 2013 through the Obama administration’s decision to reject the pipeline in November 2015, though the case file wasn’t officially closed until November 2016. 

A U.S. Park Police officer motions journalists away from a group of environmental activists gathered outside the White House in Washington, D.C., in August 2011. J. Scott Applewhite / AP Photo

The State Department was especially interested in the work of environmental groups D.C. Action Lab and 350.org, as well as the “pledge of resistance,” organized by groups including CREDO, a mobile phone company that supports progressive causes, which called for activists to engage in civil disobedience to stop President Barack Obama from approving the Keystone XL pipeline. By late 2015, tens of thousands of people had signed the pledge and environmental groups held direct action trainings in dozens of cities. Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security and state and local law enforcement agencies along the proposed pipeline route, according to previous reporting in The Guardian and other news outlets, were also intimately involved in investigating these activities, creating an unprecedented domestic surveillance network that is only now fully coming into focus.

In a written response, a State Department official said the purpose of tracking Keystone XL protesters was to “provide law enforcement with situational awareness of activities that could impact the security of State Department personnel, facilities, or activities.”

The department said it takes any potential threats against its personnel in the United States seriously but declined to comment on whether Keystone XL pipeline protesters had engaged in such behavior. In addition, the department declined to comment on why it singled out specific groups such as D.C. Action Lab and 350.org, as well as the CREDO campaign. The department said it is committed to upholding freedom of speech and assembly, “while also maintaining our security responsibility of protecting our facilities and U.S. personnel from those who may violate applicable laws.”

Environmental activists and attorneys who reviewed the new documents told Grist and Type Investigations that law enforcement’s approach to the Keystone XL campaign looked like a template for the increasingly militarized response to subsequent environmental and social justice campaigns — from efforts to block the Dakota Access pipeline at Standing Rock to the ongoing protests against the police training center dubbed “Cop City” in Atlanta, Georgia, which would require razing at least 85 acres of urban forest. 

Private security guards hold back dogs near Dakota Access Pipeline protesters near Cannon Ball, North Dakota, on September 3, 2016. Robyn Beck / AFP via Getty Images Protesters gathered in front of the New York City Public Library for a rally against the Dakota Access Pipeline are seized by police officers in March 2017. Andy Katz / Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images

The FBI’s working thesis, outlined in the new documents, that “most environmental extremist groups” have historically moved from peaceful protest to violence has served as the basis for subsequent investigations. “It’s astonishing to me how such a broad concept basically paints every activist and protester as a future terrorist,” said Mike German, a former FBI special agent who is now a fellow at the nonprofit Brennan Center for Justice.

Sabrina King, an organizer with the conservation group Dakota Rural Action from 2012 to 2016, who went on to work for the ACLU in South Dakota, North Dakota, and Wyoming, spent nearly a month at Standing Rock. She believes the FBI’s characterization of the activist community — and Native youth in particular — as potential extremists helped set the stage for the increasingly aggressive government actions, including the use of FBI informants and heavily armed state and local police departments, directed at environmental protesters around the country in later years, from Standing Rock to the Line 3 pipeline in Minnesota.

“This is the direct line to Standing Rock,” said King, who reviewed the newly obtained FBI documents. “None of that just happened. These law enforcement agencies had literally been training for [years] for Keystone, but then they used it on Dakota Access.” 

In the years after the Wanblee blockade, the campaign opposing Keystone XL gained broad public appeal. It tapped into both local concerns over damage to land and water and also a rapidly growing national movement to end fossil fuel extraction altogether. It minted a multigenerational coalition of activists, many of whom had not been previously engaged in environmental politics.

The campaign also openly embraced nonviolent direct action, which marked a new chapter for some environmental organizations. In 2013, for example, the Sierra Club broke its long-standing prohibition on members engaging in civil disobedience — earning it a mention in the newly obtained FBI files. That year, activists, including the Sierra Club’s then-executive-director Michael Brune, used zip ties to attach themselves to the White House fence, resulting in mass arrests. The campaign included mainstream liberals who supported Obama and felt he could be persuaded to block the pipeline, as well as veterans of the environmental movement who had long been willing to engage in confrontational direct action. 

From left to right: Social justice activist Julian Bond, Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune, and activist Bill McKibben are arrested as they refused to leave the sidewalk in front of the White House on February 13, 2013. Michael S. Williamson / The Washington Post via Getty Images

This alliance posed an unexpected threat to companies involved in fossil fuel extraction, including TransCanada, the company behind the pipeline, and set off alarms within the federal government. Hundreds of pages of FBI and State Department files released through the Freedom of Information Act over the last decade highlight an increasingly close relationship between law enforcement agencies and the fossil fuel industry. The newly obtained documents show that, as early as 2012, the FBI was describing TransCanada, a multinational corporation headquartered in Calgary, Canada, as a “domain stakeholder” with direct access to the White House.

“Resistance to the Keystone XL pipeline was really the first pipeline campaign that I recall that there was organization on both sides of the fight,” said Lauren Regan, executive director of the nonprofit Civil Liberties Defense Center, which provided legal support to dozens of activists arrested during the campaign. “As we were collecting public records documents, organizers were shocked at how much running time TransCanada had with state and federal governments before any of them sensed that something was happening.”

Previously reported documents show that, less than two months after the FBI opened its investigation into Native activists, the agency held a “strategy meeting” with TransCanada and industry partners in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, an hour away from Cushing, where many of the nation’s major pipelines converge. (In 2012, Obama delivered a campaign speech in Cushing announcing that he would fast-track the southern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline.) Representatives from the Department of Homeland Security, the National Guard, and state and local police departments were also present. Indeed, the author of the February 2012 FBI file from the bureau’s Minneapolis field office noted that they would be attending the “regional working group meeting” to “ensure coordination and resource management between bureau field offices affected and the domain stakeholder, TransCanada Corporation.” 

By the end of 2012, the FBI’s Houston field office also began collecting information for a domestic terrorism assessment that focused on Tar Sands Blockade, a scrappy coalition committed to nonviolent direct action, which had been at the center of the campaign to block construction of the pipeline in Texas. In one of their most prominent actions, Tar Sands Blockade had teamed up with a private landowner and set up tree-sits in the pathway of the pipeline. The FBI closely tracked protest activity among members of the group, one of whom later ended up being placed on a U.S. government watchlist for domestic flights, and cultivated at least one informant, according to files obtained in 2015 and previously reported in The Guardian. The investigation was initially opened without prior approval from the chief division counsel and the special agent in charge, in violation of FBI rules pertaining to “sensitive investigative matters” involving the activities of political organizations.

Protester Perry Graham climbs a flagpole to hang a sign to protest a pipeline by LyondellBasell, on March 27, 2013, in Houston. Nick de la Torre / Houston Chronicle via Getty Images

Meanwhile, starting in late 2012, TransCanada began delivering its own briefing to local law enforcement agencies along the proposed pipeline route. The PowerPoint presentations, which included profiles of organizers at 350.org, Rainforest Action Network, and Tar Sands Blockade, encouraged law enforcement to pursue federal anti-terrorism charges in conjunction with the FBI.

At the same time, tribes and landowners in South Dakota were busy raising awareness about the pipeline and the threats it posed to groundwater and Indigenous treaty rights. In September 2011, the Rosebud Sioux Tribe, along with First Nation Chiefs of Canada, held an “emergency summit” in South Dakota, after which they issued the Mother Earth Accord, also referenced in the new FBI files. The agreement, signed by most tribes in the state, called for a moratorium on tar sands development and an end to the shipping of equipment for the pipeline through the United States and Canada. 

The blockade in Wanblee was one of several actions the FBI cited to support its conclusion that the movement could potentially turn to violence. The counterterrorism assessment documents other public meetings, including a protest held by the Oglala Lakota Nation in early February 2012, that the FBI acknowledged was “protected First Amendment activity.” The FBI warned that, after Wanblee, any commercial vehicles associated with the pipeline could now be held “hostage” by Native Americans “who oppose the exploration, extraction, refinement, and/or distribution of petroleum-based products.” The FBI file included the names of those arrested and noted that South Dakota’s U.S. attorney had considered prosecuting the activists under the Hobbs Act, a 1946 law designed to prevent racketeering in interstate commerce, typically through robbery or extortion. Violating the act can carry a punishment of up to 20 years in prison. 

Along with monitoring protest activity, the agency was particularly concerned with the activities of Native youth. Certainly, Native youth played an important role in the Keystone XL campaign, and later in organizing opposition to the Dakota Access pipeline. But their actions hardly seemed like the work of a radical militia. In 2015, members of the Lakota Nation’s Cheyenne River Sioux tribe formed the One Mind Youth Movement, a kind of mutual aid society for teens struggling with suicide and depression. Eventually they turned their attention to the Keystone XL campaign and began networking with activists in other parts of the country and around the world. At Standing Rock, members of One Mind formed the International Indigenous Youth Council, which was known for its efforts to defuse tensions between law enforcement and protesters, even drawing criticism from some activists who felt they were too conciliatory. 

The FBI saw things differently. According to the newly obtained files, the Minneapolis office appears to have opened another inquiry into what it described as the “Native Youth Movement” to “marshal information about extremist groups in Indian Country targeting a myriad of issues, to include threats to the proposed Keystone XL pipeline.” Those records may never be released, however. The FBI denied a Freedom of Information Act request for the material, and asserted that releasing the “investigative file” would reveal intelligence sources and methods or law enforcement techniques and procedures. In October, the Department of Justice rejected an appeal filed by Grist and Type Investigations, stating that “disclosure of the information withheld would harm the interests protected by these exemptions.”

Shortly after Obama and the State Department rejected the Keystone XL pipeline in 2015, Paula Antoine, the director of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe Sicangu Oyate Land Office, headed north to the Standing Rock reservation to meet with elders interested in establishing a prayer camp on the banks of the Missouri River. During the fight over Keystone XL, Antoine had helped to set up the first “spirit camp” near the community of Ideal, South Dakota, where she was raised. The idea caught on. Lewis Grassrope, a member of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribal Council, set up a camp on land belonging to his mother a few miles from the Missouri River. A third camp was erected on the Cheyenne Sioux Reservation. Each served as a gathering place for organizers and activists involved in the Keystone XL campaign. Now, activists spearheading the campaign to block the Dakota Access pipeline wanted to do the same thing.

“To me it [KXL] was like the precursor to No DAPL,” Grassrope said, referring to the campaign to block the Dakota Access pipeline. “We knew that the fight was coming, we just didn’t know when.”

Lewis GrassRope speaks at a 2023 political event in Philadelphia. Gilbert Carrasquillo / GC Images

The spirit camp at Standing Rock started out small and was maintained by a group of local activists and their allies. But by the fall of 2016, it had become the focal point of the growing movement to block the pipeline. Thousands of people taking on the mantle of “water protectors” eventually descended on the region. Standing Rock would capture the world’s attention.

But as the newly obtained files show, after years of tracking Keystone XL protesters, the fossil fuel industry and law enforcement had prepared for this moment. Energy Transfer Partners, the company building the pipeline, hired a private security firm that monitored activist groups and produced dozens of intelligence reports, which were later leaked and reported by The Intercept. This information was shared with law enforcement and the FBI, blurring the lines between public and private partnerships, with the fossil fuel industry at the center. The security firm, TigerSwan, collected intelligence on activists and used an ex-Marine to infiltrate anti-pipeline actions. At the same time, a Department of Homeland Security-funded fusion center in North Dakota developed a “links chart” to map out the leadership of the movement, focusing almost exclusively on Native American activists. 

“We all had people following us,” said Antoine. “They knew who we were.”

Read Next How an energy giant helped law enforcement quell the Standing Rock protests Alleen Brown & Naveena Sadasivam

As the encampment grew, the National Guard was eventually enlisted in what became one of the largest police and military deployments in North Dakota’s history, according to historian Nick Estes’s Our History is the Future, his book about the pipeline fight. “Cops in riot gear conducted tipi-by-tipi raids … They dragged half-naked elders from ceremonial sweat lodges, tasered a man in the face, doused people with CS gas and tear gas, and blasted adults and youth with deafening LRAD sound cannons,” Estes writes. Law enforcement also appeared to undermine parts of the movement from the inside. Red Fawn Fallis, a Lakota activist, was sentenced to a nearly five-year prison term for possession of a handgun, following a skirmish with police at Standing Rock. According to reporting by Will Parish in The Intercept, she had been involved in a romantic relationship with an FBI informant. It was later revealed that the weapon belonged to him. 

Even after the camps at Standing Rock had been broken down and the last protesters had gone home, the surveillance continued. Grassrope, now 46, returned to the spirit camp he’d established on the Lower Brule reservation and, along with a handful of others, lived in tipis, yurts, and military tents. One day, the FBI called and said they wanted to inspect the camp. “They were pinpointing certain camps created after Standing Rock,” Grassrope said, which they believed were preparing to turn their attention, once again, to the Keystone XL pipeline, which then-President Donald Trump had revived. 

Lauren Regan of the Civil Liberties Defense Center said that the fossil fuel industry and law enforcement agencies have continued to strengthen their partnership. In particular, the oil and gas industry’s information-sharing networks have become more sophisticated. In some cases, corporations have made direct payments to state and local law enforcement. For example, Enbridge, a Canadian multinational that recently upgraded its Line 3 pipeline, which cuts through tribal land in Minnesota, reimbursed state and local law enforcement to the tune of more than $8.5 million for their work policing protests against the pipeline.

More broadly, using the playbook that TransCanada developed, the industry has continued to push lawmakers to pursue enhanced felony charges for pipeline protesters. Lawmakers in nearly 20 states have passed legislation criminalizing actions that target “critical infrastructure.” 

Read Next After infiltrating Standing Rock, TigerSwan pitched its ‘counterinsurgency’ playbook to other oil companies Alleen Brown & Naveena Sadasivam

“It was definitely part of the state and law enforcement strategy to escalate repression to the point people wouldn’t want to continue taking action,” said Ethan Nuss, a senior campaigner at Rainforest Action Network who was involved in protests targeting the Keystone XL pipeline and Line 3. 

Since the Keystone and Dakota Access pipeline fights, the law enforcement response to the environmental movement, and mass protest in general, has remained severe. In January 2023, six Georgia state troopers shot and killed Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, a 26-year-old medic involved in protests around the building of the police training center in Atlanta known to activists as Cop City. An autopsy requested by the family revealed that Tortuguita, as Terán was known, was likely sitting on the ground with both arms raised when they were killed, and an autopsy by DeKalb County found that they had been shot at least 57 times — the first time an environmental activist has been shot and killed by police on U.S. soil. Meanwhile, the state has charged dozens of protesters in Atlanta with domestic terrorism. And according to reporting by Grist and Type Investigations, the FBI has been tracking disparate groups involved in the campaign, some as far away as Chicago. 

Despite this crackdown, however, actions targeting fossil fuel infrastructure continue to pop up across the country. In October, police in Virginia arrested three activists and charged them with trespassing and obstruction after they attached themselves to equipment used in building the last leg of the Mountain Valley Pipeline. Fast-tracked as part of negotiations over the Inflation Reduction Act, the 303-mile pipeline stands to release up to 40 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent into the atmosphere every year once it is completed, according to its environmental impact statement. The developer has since sued two of the protesters, citing congressional approval of the project and arguing that the action caused “substantial delays and expenses” for the company. 

“With the global warming crisis at its height, these fights are going to happen more regularly,” said Grassrope. “We have to move faster. That is what it comes down to.” 

For the activist community, the Keystone XL campaign still serves as a source of inspiration. When the project was officially terminated in June 2021, Paula Antoine took her granddaughter out to the spirit camp on the Rosebud Sioux reservation. She made an offering and prayed, as she had many times before, for the continued protection of the land.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How the US government began its decade-long campaign against the anti-pipeline movement on Feb 14, 2024.

Javier Bello could scarcely believe what he was seeing in the waters off the coast of Veracruz, Mexico. Where the Canadian fossil fuel company TC Energy had claimed there was little more than mounds of sand, he saw a thriving ecosystem. Sunbeams sliced through the water, and fish danced between the delicate array of wire and black corals 328 feet below the surface. “It was incredible,” he said.

Peering from a submarine, the marine scientist was among the first to lay eyes on a marine habitat that he and others fear will be devastated by the construction of a natural gas pipeline. The whole point of the voyage, in which scientists, fishers, and activists converged aboard the Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise for three weeks last June, was to show what could be lost by the project.

“We don’t often have access to these kinds of research opportunities in Mexico,” Bello said, “so it is a really good example of nongovernmental organizations working with universities to make things happen together.” 

TC Energy — the company behind the Keystone XL pipeline — has proposed an extension of a natural gas pipeline that would stretch roughly 497 miles from the coastal towns of Tuxpan to Coatzacoalcos in the Mexican state of Veracruz. The company has claimed that there is nothing of significance on the seafloor along its planned route, and that construction will not harm existing marine protected areas. But Bello says researchers have always had an inkling that the reefs extended beyond the protected areas. 

The exact coordinates of the pipeline remain classified, but information leaked to Greenpeace  by an anonymous government official pointed to a general area — about 400 feet (120 meters) from shore — which guided the Arctic Sunrise’s route. Previously, researchers had not had the resources needed to study those depths, but the glimpses by the Arctic Sunrise’s research team revealed a rich and vibrant ecosystem that extends beyond the protected areas — one that scientists like Bello would like to have the opportunity to continue to study. 

But unease about the project extends beyond protecting and studying corals and fish. Pipeline opponents believe that in addition to environmental destruction, the project will disrupt the livelihoods of local communities and keep Mexico reliant upon fossil fuel, further exacerbating the effects of climate change.

In July of 2022, TC Energy announced a partnership with Mexico’s CFE, the state-owned electric utility, to build an extension to its Sur de Texas-Tuxpan Gas Pipeline. With an estimated cost of $5 billion, TC Energy announced a public offering of common shares to help fund the project the next month. 

Following the investment announcements, 18 environmental organizations led by the Centro Mexicano de Derecho Ambiental warned of the pipeline’s grave risk to the surrounding coral reef corridor. They alleged that TC Energy and CFE were trying to avoid scrutiny of the project’s impact by presenting an environmental impact assessment fragmented into two pieces, one for each stage of the pipeline — terrestrial and aquatic.

“In the ocean, our main concern is that the pipeline will be built right on top of the reefs, which is very possible,” said Pablo Ramirez, a climate and energy campaigner with Greenpeace Mexico. “But even if they only build near the reefs rather than on top, the sediments could affect the reef, which is very concerning.” 

Ramirez notes that Greenpeace acquired leaked documents that laid out TC Energy’s  environmental review process. Of particular concern is the assessment methodology it used in determining the suitability of the proposed “dumping polygon,” where sediment dug up to make way for the pipeline will be placed. The leaked information reveals that, per TC Energy’s assessment request, Mexicos’ Safety, Energy and Environment Agency (ASEA) dropped a 50-meter rope to see what was beneath the surface and, because the rope did not reach the seafloor, concluded that the site lacked evidence of an active ecosystem. 

In an email to Grist, a TC Energy spokesperson noted that “this project was specifically designed with sustainability in mind. We believe in evidence and science-based decision making. … This marine project route is one of the most studied routes ever undertaken.” 

But the proximity of the proposed dumping polygon to the reef alarmed environmentalists, and when Greenpeace sought clarification, Ramirez says, TC Energy responded by providing heavily redacted paperwork, further heightening the organization’s apprehensions.

“That’s when we decided to go into the ocean and check it out for ourselves,” said Ramirez.

What they found were thriving, previously unexplored reefs — a continuation of a highly biodiverse reef system with many endemic species. Bello notes that his primary worry is the absence of transparency between the fossil fuel industry and scientists in cementing the pipeline. “There is a lack of knowledge,” he said. “They aren’t giving access to enough of the information, and during the operation of the pipeline, there could be accidents that would come with great consequences for the corals and ecosystem.” 

A Greenpeace submersible studies the reef 100 meters below the surface. Ivan Castaneira / Greenpeace

While there is still time to stop the project, ASEA has already approved stages one and two, which account for construction on land. Through litigation and advocacy campaigns, Greenpeace and other environmental groups aim to delay the project as long as they can, hoping that Mexico’s next president will be more amenable to killing the project.

Ramirez notes that for locals, the pipeline is an infringement on their land and a threat to the livelihood of over 70,000 people whose sole income depends on fish. The threat is particularly acute for the communities of El Bosque and Las Barrancas, which could lose their fish stocks if the pipeline disrupts the marine ecosystems. At the same time, they are losing land to an advancing sea and coastal erosion, driven by reliance on fossil fuels like the natural gas the pipeline will carry. The coastlines of Mexico are heavily impacted by storms and rising sea levels — and reefs, which buffer shorelines, can help to protect coastal communities from increasingly violent storms. 

Ramirez also expresses concern that the communities along the pipeline’s route haven’t been  fully informed of the risks. “The companies talk to local communities about all of the so-called benefits, but when we went to the communities afterward and presented that the projects are to transport methane, which can be explosive, the locals were very shocked.” 

“We didn’t even know about the pipeline production,” Lupe Cobos, a resident of El Bosque, told Grist. “And in a community that is facing major effects of climate change — we are literally losing our homes — that is important information.” 

Since Greenpeace representatives have begun speaking with Veracruz locals about the potential risks, Ramirez says, the community has become keen on the organization’s efforts. But in this area, resistance to development can be dangerous. Although Greenpeace has not had reports of anything untoward regarding this pipeline, the risk is still foremost in the minds of locals. 

“There is a lot of violence and repression for this kind of resistance,” Ramirez continues, “so we’re still trying to figure out the best way to do it, and how Greenpeace can assume the risk.”

Veracruz is no stranger to the oil industry. Promises of development and benefits from oil have been pledged to locals for more than a century — and yet more than 60 percent of Mexican households live in energy poverty due to accessibility, affordability, or both. According to Ramirez, Greenpeace has heard anonymous reports from residents that TC Energy has already approached fishing communities in the state of Tabasco, offering them money in exchange for their assurance not to oppose the project. (TC Energy did not respond to Grist’s emailed question about the allegation.)

“We have to fight this narrative that they actually want to help the communities,” Ramirez said. “Because at the end of the day, this kind of energy model is leaving the communities behind.” He believes shifting to renewables would be a better strategy to promote energy security and independence for Mexico.

He notes the effects of the 2021 Texas winter freeze, when Mexico lost its gas supply due to frozen pipelines in the U.S. When the states were forced to prioritize national consumption, around 5 million people in Mexico lost power; although most of the affected customers had their power restored within the day, even more people were then affected by temporary planned outages as the National Energy Control Center struggled to maintain a reliable supply. 

Additionally, the new infrastructure would go against the international goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, as set forth in the Paris agreement. At COP28, the annual U.N. climate conference at the end of last year, countries — including Mexico — participated in the first “global stocktake,” assessing progress toward the Paris Agreement goals. The resulting agreement named fossil fuels as the driver of climate change for the first time, and called on countries to begin “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems.” 

“The fossil fuel model does not fulfill Mexico’s needs,” said Ramirez. “Increasing our gas consumption means that we will remain dependent on U.S. and Canadian gas. We need to change the focus of the model where the betterment of the people is front and center of energy policy.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A company said there was only sand in the path of its new pipeline. Scientists found a thriving ecosystem. on Feb 14, 2024.

When Cleophus Sharp was four years old, his parents rushed him to the hospital in Houston because he couldn’t catch his breath, no matter how much he tried. Sharp, who grew up in the historically Black neighborhood of Pleasantville in Houston, Texas, says he almost died because the air in his community was toxic. Sharp spent two weeks in an oxygen tent before returning home. 

Through his organizing work, Sharp later learned air pollution in his neighborhood likely led to him developing asthma. Pleasantville is bisected by several large freeways, and near an international shipping nexus adjacent with frequent truck traffic. “Those industries that were polluting [were] only three miles from us,” Sharp said.

Cordoned off by two major highways, saddled with industrial chemical manufacturing plants and recycling centers, and situated next to two major trade terminals, Pleasantville ranks in the 99th percentile for national climate vulnerability, according to the U.S. Climate Vulnerability Index, a tool developed by the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund in partnership with Texas A&M University and a range of community groups like Achieving Community Tasks Successfully, the nonprofit where Sharp serves as a board member. The Climate Vulnerability Index is a first-of-its kind mapping tool that allows users to explore social, environmental, economic, and health conditions of every census tract in the U.S. 

Sharp’s health concerns are shared by many. For decades, residents of Pleasantville have been forced to contend with polluted air and soil, disinvestment in public programs and services, and a lack of empirical data to demonstrate what residents know to be true: Pleasantville’s environmental conditions were making far too many of them sick. 

“Part of the issue is a nonprofit organization has never had access to these types of resources before to prove that point,” Sharp said. “We only can tell you, ‘so many people died from this, and so many people have this issue.’” He says the mapping index will make a “huge difference” for communities like Pleasantville across the country, helping them point to the source of pollutants and help demonstrate to zoning boards and permitting bodies why additional pollution should not be approved in already-overburdened places. 

Grace Tee Lewis, a senior health scientist at Environmental Defense Fund who championed the idea of the mapping tool, said that the index may help community advocates like Sharp illustrate for elected officials and public agencies the connections between innate threats, like weather, and vulnerabilities through social and economic policies over time. 

“I think that some of these intersections — where climate, environment, and existing inequities have been systematically disenfranchising communities — really have to be at the forefront of the policies that we prioritize to try to break the cycle of disadvantage,” Tee Lewis said. 

The inspiration for the index came from other tools that compile environmental and climate data by neighborhood, like the Environmental Protection Agency’s Environmental Justice Screening and Mapping Tool or CalEnviroScreen, California Communities Environmental Health Screening Tool, Tee Lewis says. But few tools take as comprehensive an approach as the new index, which accounts for elements of public funding and policy that impact both how much a community might be impacted by a disaster — and how difficult it will be for them to recover. For instance, no other tool incorporates environmental data with data of the legacies of racist policies, like the intentional segregation of redlining. Without this kind of data, Tee Lewis worried that people were missing out on funding or interventions that actually matched their needs. Because one of the project’s central goals was to support the work of community organizations, Tee Lewis and her team thought it imperative that they partner with under-resourced places to learn which environmental or social factors should be included. 

Tee Lewis reached out to community leaders like Sharp, who sits on the board of a Pleasantville-based community empowerment organization called Achieving Community Tasks Successfully (ACTS). Feedback from ACTS and other grassroots organizations helped Tee Lewis and the other researchers understand that it was critical to include not only existing sources of pollution, but also what daily factors might be contributing to environmental vulnerability, Tee Lewis said. For instance, the index tracks the percentage of people living with chronic diseases, who can be particularly susceptible to climate and pollution impacts. 

These conversations broadened what the index would later define as ‘vulnerability’ to include metrics of public transit availability and access, the percentage of children taking medication to treat cognitive behavioral differences, rates of homelessness, or even the number of religious and civic organizations within a community. 

After including these factors into their scoring methodology, researchers found that communities with the highest scores are those with “long-standing environmental justice concerns and health disparities, [and] communities that have had a history of inequity,” Tee Lewis said. 

By toggling or layering different vulnerability factors on the map, like chronic disease and housing vulnerability, users may be able to tell a story through the data that can help illustrate how this historic harm has systemic present-day impacts. For instance, redlining, the practice of discriminatory mortgage lending policies enacted throughout the mid-20th century, is closely related to the climate impacts communities face today, Tee Lewis says.

Sharp’s childhood home in Pleasantville, for example, was one of the only neighborhoods where Black Houstonians were able to purchase homes in the 1940s with cement foundations. His family moved there in part because they could live safely. “They were able to live a comfortable life, and the people came together to build a close knit neighborhood [where] people looked out for each other,” Sharp said. 

A Pleasantville sign placed in front of a dredge spoil mound in the community. Annie Mulligan / EDF

But racist zoning and policy decisions threatened the burgeoning community. A “Welcome to Pleasantville” sign once stood atop the Ship Channel’s dredge refuse. In 1957, the area flooded, sending toxic sludge across 40 blocks and displacing the sign.  Two major highways constructed in 1958 and 1974 added significant air pollution. In 1995, a chemical warehouse owned by Houston Distribution Inc. caught fire three times. Legislators recently decided to widen and deepen the Houston Ship Channel. Some local residents are fighting the decision, as it would require the Army Corps of Engineers to excavate potentially toxic bayou sediment that would then be placed in containment zones almost exclusively located in environmental justice communities, like Pleasantville. If this project were approved, the existing dredge pile would double in size.

For too long, it’s been hard for decision-makers to see information about how environmental injustice, racial discrimination, and climate change are interconnected, says risk analysis expert Weihsueh Chiu, a professor at Texas A&M University, who worked with Tee Lewis to develop the index. 

The index can help draw attention to climate risks that might otherwise have gone under the radar, like English fluency, considering that the Federal Emergency Management Agency is notoriously underprepared to assist Spanish-speaking survivors of environmental disasters. “This tool allows you to kind of both zoom in and zoom out,” Chiu said. Some places, like Vermont, for instance, may initially seem to have fewer risks, but the tool may help draw attention to clusters of chronic disease amid an otherwise healthy — or at least perceived to be — state. 

Chiu hopes this is just the first step, and in future the team plans to continue to add to the conditions that users can explore, such as proximity to warehouses. There isn’t a national inventory of warehouse locations, and Chiu has been relying on Google Earth images to locate warehouses in individual communities, such as Will County, Illinois, where warehouses have been springing up like mushrooms due to its location at the intersection of two large interstate highways used for shipping. In some cases, volunteers have driven out to some of these sites to confirm that the warehouses indeed exist. 

Going forward, the team will continue to add to and edit the tool as needed. But already, the index has the opportunity to close the gap between the lived experiences of community members and environmental policy enacted in the legislature. “That was the legwork that we were trying to do as a service to communities, especially disadvantaged communities,” Chiu said. 

In a different way, Sharp hopes that the index will serve as a mirror for residents who are affected by pollution, so that they won’t get caught thinking that health issues are inevitable. “People have lupus, they have upper respiratory problems, and they just think people dying from cancer is normal. They don’t realize that the cancers are from some of the stuff in the air that they’ve been breathing for years.”

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Climate Vulnerability Index illuminates inequities on Feb 13, 2024.

It took Washington state more than a decade to put a price on carbon pollution. The effort to make corporations pay for the greenhouse gases they produce started in 2009 with a string of failed bills in the legislature. Frustrated, climate advocates in Washington took the idea directly to voters, putting initiatives on the ballot in 2016 and again in 2018, but both ballot measures flopped — the first defeated by infighting among environmentalists, the second by a $30 million publicity campaign paid for by oil money.

So it was a surprise when the state legislature finally managed to pass a cap-and-trade program in 2021, requiring that Washington slash its carbon emissions nearly in half by 2030, using 1990 levels as the baseline. Even more surprising, perhaps, was that the law was supported by BP, the same oil giant that had spent $13 million to kill one of the ballot initiatives three years earlier. Now the landmark law, the Climate Commitment Act, is under attack, threatened by a repeal effort bankrolled by a hedge-fund manager, and representatives for oil companies say they have nothing to do with it. In fact, oil giants want to keep it alive.   

“We have never been against the Climate Commitment Act,” said Kevin Slagle, vice president of communications for the Western States Petroleum Association, a lobbying group that represents oil companies including ExxonMobil, Chevron, and Shell. 

In 2023, its first year in operation, the state’s program generated more than $2 billion for projects to clean up transportation, shift to clean energy, and help communities adapt to the effects of a changing climate. But this fall, voters will get a chance to shut it all down. A ballot initiative started by Brian Heywood, a hedge fund manager exasperated with Washington state’s taxes and liberal politics, would kill the law and block the state from ever instituting a cap-and-trade program again. 

The existing legislation requires companies to buy pollution “permits” at quarterly auctions, a way to encourage emissions reductions and generate money for climate solutions. Heywood argues that the program has helped give the state some of the highest gas prices in the country and says that Governor Jay Inslee and other officials weren’t upfront about its potential effects on consumers. Last month, the state certified that the measure had gathered enough signatures to head to the ballot this fall.

Heywood’s campaign, called “Let’s Go Washington,” raised $7 million last year to qualify a total of six initiatives for the ballot. The proposals would repeal the state’s capital gains tax and reverse policing restrictions, among other things. Some $6 million of that money came from Heywood, but other donors include the state Republican Party and the Washington Bankers Association. The closest it gets to oil money is a $25,000 contribution from Five Point Capital, a private investment firm in Houston with a focus on oil, natural gas, and water infrastructure. The newly formed “No on 2117” committee opposing Heywood’s initiative has raised $1 million so far this year from the co-founder of Tableau Software, Chris Stolte, plus a $1,500 contribution attributed to Trudi Inslee, the governor’s wife.

While the Western States Petroleum Association isn’t backing the repeal, that doesn’t mean oil companies are happy with the current program. Slagle describes it as broken because the auctions have yielded high prices for pollution permits. His lobbying group has been releasing advertisements that align with Heywood’s message, connecting the climate law to high gas prices. It’s hard to know exactly how much the program has driven up prices, but estimates range from about a quarter to 50 cents a gallon, depending on whom you ask.

Slagle doesn’t agree with Heywood’s approach, though: He wants to work with legislators to address these shortcomings, not throw the law out. “I think what’s missed is that this can be solved without an initiative, right?” Slagle said. “This is what we’re saying. We’re actually in the middle of this, saying, ‘Hey, let’s fix this program.’”

BP, which left the Western States Petroleum Association in 2020 over the trade group’s opposition to certain climate policies in Washington state, is also in favor of keeping the Climate Commitment Act alive. “We believe that the market-based, economy-wide carbon pricing program will work, and we oppose the initiative to overturn it,” a spokesperson said in an email to Grist. 

The stakes of the repeal are high: Eliminating the cap-and-invest program would rip a $5 billion hole in the state’s transportation budget, taking away free public transit rides for young people, funding for bus routes, and more. The legislature would have to rework the budget, making tough calls on what bridges they want to replace and what roads they’ll have to close because they can’t be repaired, said Lennon Bronsema, vice president of campaigns at the Washington Conservation Action, a nonprofit that’s part of the No on 2117 committee.

People walk at Alki Beach Park in September 2020 as smoke from wildfires fills the air in Seattle. Lindsey Wasson / Getty Images

Voting down the law would also take away funding for improving air quality in the state’s most polluted communities. “Those people who want to repeal the Climate Commitment Act are going to try to foist down our throats, and our kids’ lungs, more pollution,” said Governor Inslee in comments to the press last month. “They want to destroy our protection for our kids’ breathing.” And it would add more carbon to the atmosphere as the state struggles with the effects of climate change: freak heat waves, unusually large and destructive forest fires, and declining snowpack on mountains, a key water source for the region.

The repeal could have repercussions at the national level, too. New York recently unveiled plans for a cap-and-invest program, and officials are monitoring the backlash in Washington state. “If this repeal initiative succeeds, it would be a blow to that momentum,” said Caroline Jones, a senior analyst at the Environmental Defense Fund. Last year, an Environmental Defense Fund analysis found that the United States can’t meet its international commitments under the Paris Agreement without follow-through from states on their goals. Washington is one of the few states on track to meet its carbon-cutting targets, thanks largely to the Climate Commitment Act, Jones said.

So how did the state end up with a law that Jones considers a “gold standard” for state climate policy — and also something that oil companies support?

For the oil industry, part of the appeal lies in the law’s exemptions. Since BP and other crude refiners fall under the category of “emissions-intensive, trade-exposed” industries, they get some pollution permits free, making it cheaper to comply with the law. When the cap-and-invest program was rolled out, about 50 percent of the credits were handed out to major polluters to use, said Caitlin Krenn, a climate and clean energy campaign manager at Washington Conservation Action. 

Refineries get 100 percent of their allowances at no cost for the first four years of the program — after that, it’ll go down to 97 percent. That’s because of fears that these facilities would relocate elsewhere if Washington put strict regulations on them. But the fuel suppliers of gas and diesel, which might be owned by the same company that operates a refinery, don’t get any credits for free, Krenn said.

After the Climate Commitment Act passed in 2021, BP, which owns the state’s largest oil refinery near Bellingham, spent about $270 million on efficiency upgrades at its facility, estimated to reduce the refinery’s emissions by 7 percent. Cutting its emissions earlier than necessary gave BP the leeway to bank, trade, or sell its allowances. “The Climate Commitment Act rewards us for that. So, it’s not just a stick. It’s also a carrot,” Tom Wolf, a BP government relations manager for the West Coast, told the Seattle Times several months after Inslee signed the legislation into law. “We were doing this anyway … but there’s no doubt that it [the act] makes it even better.” 

If the Climate Commitment Act gets shot down in November, it would also make it hard for companies to plan for the future. “If the program disappeared, then we’re kind of back at square one,” said Slagle, of the Western States Petroleum Association. “And so then, what might happen down the road?”

Read Next Washington’s cap on carbon is raising billions for climate action. Can it survive the backlash? Kate Yoder

Businesses have long advocated for a market-based approach to climate policy instead of what they see as heavy-handed regulatory measures. That’s part of the reason the Climate Commitment Act ended up structured as it is, with prices set at auctions and polluters able to buy and sell permits. 

“It is a solution that is market-based, right? That is what business needed to have some predictability around this,” Bronsema said. “The alternative is an incredibly heavy hammer from the government that might bring down emissions but isn’t going to help provide all the benefits that the Climate Commitment Act does.”

What the oil industry doesn’t like about the current program is the costs. At the first auction a year ago, the price of emitting a ton of carbon landed at $49, nearly double the average price in California’s cap-and-trade market at the time. Over the course of the year, the price rose to $63 a ton, triggering extra “emergency” auctions meant to ensure businesses can access enough allowances at reasonable prices. 

Washington is currently pursuing linking its carbon market with ones in California and Quebec, a move Slagle favors since it’s likely to bring down the cost of allowances. That whole process, though, may be getting slowed down by the repeal initiative.

Early polling shows that proponents of the repeal, Initiative 2117, have some convincing to do. In a poll released last October, 41 percent of Washingtonians would vote yes on the repeal versus 49 percent who would vote it down. That leaves almost 10 percent undecided, and historically, voters in the state have tended to reject initiatives, according to analysis by Washington Conservation Action. Washington politics has changed since the late 1990s and mid-2000s, when voters approved initiatives to get rid of vehicle taxes and limit property taxes, sponsored by anti-tax advocate Tim Eyman. 

“People really want to know, like, ‘This is a good idea to repeal this,’” Bronsema said. “And I think we have a strong case that it’s not a great idea.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Washington’s key climate law is under attack. Big Oil wants it to survive. on Feb 13, 2024.

To get to the Super Bowl on time, Taylor Swift took a private jet from Tokyo to Los Angeles and then hustled to Las Vegas. The carbon removal company Spiritus estimated that her journey of roughly 5,500 miles produced about 40 tons of carbon dioxide — about what is generated by charging nearly 5 million cell phones. But don’t worry, the company assured her critics: It would take those emissions right back out of the sky.

“Spiritus wants to help Taylor and her Swifties ‘Breathe’ without any CO2 ‘Bad Blood,’” it said in a pun-laden pitch to reporters. “It’s a touchdown for everyone.”

The startup is among dozens, if not hundreds, of businesses trying to permanently remove climate-warming gases from the atmosphere. Its approach involves drawing carbon directly from the air and burying it, but others sink it in the ocean. Last week, Graphyte, a venture backed by Bill Gates, began compacting sawdust and other woody waste that are rich in carbon into bricks that it will bury deep underground. 

Spiritus says “sponsoring carbon offsets is a step toward environmental responsibility, not an endorsement of luxury flights” and added that “celebrities are going to take private jets regardless of what Spiritus does.” Even before the company stepped in, Swift reportedly planned to purchase offsets that more than covered her travel. But some climate experts say moves like Spiritus’ illustrate the dangerous direction the rapidly growing carbon dioxide removal, or CDR, industry is headed.

“The worry is that carbon removal will be something we do so that business-as-usual can continue,” said Sara Nawaz, director of research at American University’s Institute for Carbon Removal Law and Policy. “We need a really big conversation reframe.”

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says carbon removal will be “required” to meet climate targets, and the United States Department of Energy has a goal of bringing the cost down to $100 per ton (a price point Spiritus claims it wants to deliver as well). What concerns Nawaz is the outsize role that private companies are currently playing. 

“It’s very market-oriented: doing carbon removals for profit,” Nawaz said. That reliance on the market, she elaborated, won’t necessarily lead to the just, equitable, and scalable outcomes that she hopes CDR can achieve. “We need to take a step back.”

Nawaz co-wrote a report released today titled “Agenda for a Progressive Political Economy of Carbon Removal.” In it, she and her co-authors lay out a vision for carbon removal that shifts away from market-centric approaches to ones that are government-, community-, and worker-led.

“What they suggest is quite radical,” said Lauren Gifford, associate director of the Soil Carbon Solutions Center at Colorado State University who was not involved in the research. She supports the direction the authors advocate, adding, “They actually give us a roadmap on how to get there, and that in itself is progressive.”

Nawaz compared carbon removal’s current trajectory to the bumpy path that carbon offsets has followed. That industry, in which organizations sell credits to offset greenhouse gas emissions, has been plagued by misleading claims and perverse incentives. It has also raised environmental justice concerns where offsets are disproportionately impacting frontline communities and developing nations. For example, Blue Carbon, a company backed by the United Arab Emirates, has been buying enormous swaths of land in Africa to fuel its offsets program. 

“We don’t want to do that again with carbon removal,” she said.

Philanthropy is one possible alternative to corporate carbon removal. The report cites a nonprofit organization called Terraset that puts tax-deductible donations toward CDR projects (including Spiritus’). But, Nawaz says, that approach won’t grow quickly or sustainably enough to remove the many gigatons of emissions needed to meaningfully address climate change. 

“That’s not a scalable approach,” she said. “We’re going to need so much more money.”

The report argues that communities and governments must play a central role in the industry. Nawaz cites community-driven carbon removal efforts out West, such as the 4 Corners Carbon Coalition, as examples of what might be possible on the local level. Nationally, she points to Germany’s transition away from coal as a way that governments can not only fund but fundamentally drive clean energy policy that puts workers at the fore.

Read Next A new alliance for ‘high quality’ carbon removal highlights tensions within the industry Emily Pontecorvo

To be sure, the United States is investing in carbon removal. The bipartisan infrastructure law and Inflation Reduction Act included billions of dollars for technology such as regional direct air capture hubs. But the legislation mostly positions the government as a funder or purchaser of carbon removal initiatives rather than a practitioner. 

“It’s, frankly, a pretty disappointing way it’s evolving,” said Nawaz, noting, for instance, that Occidental Petroleum is among those receiving federal funding for carbon removal. She would like to see the government take a more hands-on role. “Not just government procurement of carbon removal. But actually government-led research and early-stage implementation of carbon removal.”

Gifford agrees that there are dangers in the industry relying too much on the private sector. “There’s something really scary about putting the climate crisis in the hands of wealthy tech founders,” she said. But companies have also been at the forefront of advancing the field as well. “The climate crisis is one of these things that’s all-hands-on-deck.”

Those in the private sector say their efforts are critical to ensuring that carbon removal technology is developed and deployed as quickly as possible. “Our coalition represents innovators,” said Ben Rubin, the executive director of the Carbon Business Council, a nonprofit trade association representing more than 100 carbon management companies. ”There won’t necessarily be one silver bullet.”

“There’s a long history of public-private partnerships ushering in some of the world’s latest and greatest innovations,” added Dana Jacobs, the chief of staff for the Carbon Removal Alliance, which similarly represents startups in this space. “We think carbon removal won’t be any different.”

Nawaz and her colleagues want to shake that paradigm before it’s too deeply entrenched. The alternative could be continued unjust outcomes for marginalized people and limited progress on luxury emissions, such as Swift’s flight to the Super Bowl. 

“The idea is that carbon removal is a public good,” she said. “We shouldn’t have to rely on just the private sector to provide it.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Taylor Swift’s Super Bowl flight shows what’s wrong with carbon removal on Feb 13, 2024.

One in 5 species of migratory birds, fish, reptiles, mammals, and insects tracked by the United Nations is threatened with extinction due to escalating environmental pressures and overexploitation by humans, according to a landmark report published Monday.

The U.N. report, “State of the World’s Migratory Species,” represents the first-ever comprehensive assessment of the conservation status and population trends of species whose members “cyclically and predictably cross one or more national jurisdictional boundaries.” Some familiar examples include green turtles, snowy owls, and Monarch butterflies.

The U.N. Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals, or CMS, tracks more than 1,180 species that are already endangered or that would “significantly benefit” from being protected under an international agreement. The report finds that 44 percent of these species are experiencing population declines and 22 percent are threatened with extinction. Its release coincides with the beginning of a high-profile U.N. wildlife conservation conference in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, where experts are calling for greater international collaboration to combat climate change, habitat loss, pollution,  and excessive animal exploitation, such as hunting and fishing.

“Conservation of migratory species is extremely difficult because they cross nations, continents, even hemispheres,” Amanda Rodwald, director of the Center for Avian Population Studies at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, told Grist. “That requires a lot of coordination among different countries … and thinking across geopolitical boundaries.”

The report reinforces previous research on the deteriorating health of wild animal species worldwide, almost entirely due to human activities like agriculture, hunting, and fishing, as well as the pressures of climate change. In 2019, a separate U.N. panel reported that an “unprecedented” 1 million species globally were threatened with extinction. A subsequent study from late last year doubled that number to 2 million by taking into account a greater number of insects, which make up the majority of species worldwide.

Migratory species are particularly vulnerable to anthropogenic pressures. Their migratory journeys require large, intact tracts of land, water, or airspace — and these tracts are getting harder to come by, whether because of dams, boat traffic, roads, skyscrapers, or other development. According to the CMS report, 75 percent of listed migratory species are affected by lost, degraded, or fragmented habitats, which can prevent them from finding mating partners or food.

A previous report of the CMS, published during the U.N.’s annual climate conference in Dubai last December, highlighted how climate change is affecting the timing of some species’ migrations and making it harder for them to reproduce and survive. As climate change progresses, other studies suggest that fragmented landscapes will preclude species from moving to cooler areas where they are more likely to survive.

Amy Fraenkel, executive secretary of the CMS, addresses an audience in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. Photo by IISD / ENB / Anvar Zokirov

The most pervasive threat to migratory species, however, is overexploitation, which the new report says is affecting three-quarters of the species it tracks. It says humans are intentionally — and often illegally — hunting too many wild birds and terrestrial mammals for their populations to be able to recover. They’re also unintentionally killing too many marine species as bycatch — fish, dolphins, and other non-targeted animals that get caught in the industrial fishing process. Since the 1970s, populations of migratory fish species have declined by 90 percent, and nearly every fish species the CMS tracks now faces a “high risk of extinction.”

The decline of migratory species also has severe implications for humans. As noted in the new report, migratory species provide critical “ecosystem services” that benefit humans by dispersing seeds and pollinating food crops that people eat, as well as supporting livelihoods for fishers and farmers and maintaining healthy ecosystems. “If environments aren’t healthy for other species, then they’re unlikely to be healthy for people,” Rodewald said. 

Migratory species can also directly mitigate climate change. Large migratory animals — like humpback whales, for example — sequester carbon in their bodies and then transfer it into long-term storage in the soil or seabed after they die. Other migratory animals preserve carbon storage in grasslands by walking on and compacting the snow or soil, or producing nutrient-rich feces that keep plants healthy and prevent erosion.

To reverse migratory species’ decline, the CMS lists more than two dozen priority actions for policymakers. These include cracking down on illegal and unsustainable hunting, fishing, and bycatch; creating and protecting more natural habitats; and phasing out toxic pollution from sources like plastics, pesticides, and lead weights used in fishing. The report also recommends global coordination to limit light and noise pollution, which kill millions of birds and marine animals every year.

Crucially, many of the interventions recommended by the CMS would have co-benefits for the climate. Restoring mangrove ecosystems, for instance, could support migratory green turtles and dugongs while also pulling carbon out of the atmosphere and storing it into biomass. And stopping destructive overfishing practices can protect fish while helping to preserve the ocean’s crucial role as a carbon sink.

The U.N.’s conservation conference in Uzbekistan began on Monday and is scheduled to end on Saturday. Delegates are expected to review more specific action plans for a number of particularly vulnerable migratory species, and to consider new species for inclusion under the CMS — the report says there are nearly 400 “threatened and near-threatened” species that could benefit from being listed. Nonbinding global guidelines for light pollution, under development since last year, are also expected to be presented for adoption. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline 1 in 5 UN-tracked migratory species at risk of extinction on Feb 13, 2024.

Dirt, it turns out, isn’t just worm poop. It’s also a humongous receptacle of carbon, some 2.5 trillion tons of it — three times more than all the carbon in the atmosphere.

That’s why if you ask a climate wonk about the U.S. farm bill — the broad, trillion-dollar spending package Congress is supposed to pass this year (after failing to do so last year) — they’ll probably tell you something about the stuff beneath your feet. The bill to fund agricultural and food programs could put a dent in the country’s greenhouse gas emissions, some environmental advocates say, if it does one thing in particular: Help farmers store carbon in their soil. 

The problem is, no one really knows how much carbon farmers can store in their soil. 

“There’s still a ton of research that’s needed,” said Cristel Zoebisch, who analyzes federal agriculture policy at Carbon180, a nonprofit that promotes carbon removal.

Farmers and ranchers interact with carbon more than you might think. Draining a bog to plant rows of soybeans, for example, unleashes a lot of carbon into the air, while planting rows of shrubs and trees on a farm — a practice called alley cropping — does just the opposite, pulling the element out of the air and putting it into the earth. If America’s growers and herders made sure the carbon on their land stayed underneath their crops and their cows’ hooves, then some scientists say the planet would warm quite a bit less. After all, agriculture accounts for some 10 percent of the United States’ greenhouse gas emissions. 

“We’re really good at producing a lot of corn, a lot of soybeans, a lot of agricultural commodities,” Zoebisch said, but farmers’ gains in productivity have come at the expense of soil carbon. “That’s something we can start to fix in the farm bill.”

For more than a year, climate advocates have been eyeing the bill as an opportunity to increase funding and training for farmers who want to adopt “climate smart” practices. According to the Department of Agriculture, that label can apply to a range of methods, such as planting cover crops like rye or clover after a harvest or limiting how much a field gets tilled. Corn farmers can be carbon farmers, too. 

But experts say the reality is a bit more opaque. There’s still a lot that scientists don’t know about how dirt works, and they disagree about the amount of carbon that farmers can realistically remove from the air and lock up in their fields. 

Zoebisch and other advocates say that for the farm bill to be a true success, it’ll have to go even further than incentivizing carbon farming. Congress, they say, should also fund researchers to verify that those practices are, in fact, removing carbon from the atmosphere.  

Ranchers in New Mexico learn about soil health and “regenerative” grazing, which has been touted as a way to store carbon in the ground. Mario Tama / Getty Images

Right now, there’s pretty much no good way for a farmer to know how much carbon they’re storing on their land. Current techniques for sampling soil and measuring carbon levels are really expensive and require equipment that’s hard to use, Zoebisch said. It’s a lot more complicated than sending buckets of dirt to a room full of scientists. Researchers need to drill more than a foot deep into the ground and exhume a ‘core’ that has to be handled with care to avoid compacting or disturbing the soil on its way to a lab. 

“There are so many points where errors could be introduced,” Zoebisch said.  

Several companies are trying to make the process easier and cheaper, but new technologies haven’t scaled up yet. Beyond taking physical measurements, the USDA uses a model to estimate levels of soil carbon that’s based on severely limited data, and its projections are highly uncertain, so that it’s pretty much useless at the local level, said Jonathan Sanderman, a soil scientist and carbon program director at the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Massachusetts. “You can’t really tell a farmer, ‘This is the exact benefit.’”

Scientists largely agree that cover crops help sequester some amount of carbon, but just how much is up for debate, and it varies by geography, soil type, and numerous other factors. Planting cover crops in fertile Iowa might not have the same effect as planting them in the sandy soils of Southern California. 

“There is uncertainty in the literature, but from a first-principles standpoint it makes sense that cover crops should gain carbon, because you’re capturing CO2 out of the atmosphere — a couple tons per hectare — that you wouldn’t have captured” otherwise, Sanderman said. “It’s the nuance we don’t understand.”

Timothy Searchinger, an agriculture and forestry researcher at Princeton University and the World Resources Institute, said he’s a fan of cover crops because they prevent precious topsoil from getting washed or blown away and nitrogen from polluting rivers and streams, but he thinks their potential climate benefits — and those of other practices like reducing tillage — are often exaggerated. Rather than fixate on soil carbon, he said the farm bill should focus on making agriculture more efficient. Helping farmers produce more food on existing farmland could save carbon-rich forests and peatlands from being cleared to meet demand for crops and livestock. 

Still, Searchinger acknowledged there might be at least a little potential to store carbon on agricultural lands, and said he didn’t want the USDA to stop assisting farmers who want to plant cover crops or try out other climate-smart practices. 

Congress allocated almost $20 billion through the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022 to programs that do just that. Some $300 million of it is going to the USDA to ramp up efforts over the coming years to measure carbon in the soil. Currently, the agency draws on long-term data from only 50 sites across the country, Sanderman said. The Inflation Reduction Act funding could increase that number to several thousand.

That money was “an incredible first investment,” Zoebisch said. “This is going to be great for the next four years of funding. But then what happens after that?” Zoebisch and others want to see funding for soil carbon research made permanent in the farm bill.

Fulfilling that wish — and the many others held by climate advocates — hinges most of all on a divided Congress’ ability to reach an agreement. The farm bill expired at the end of September, when lawmakers were busy fighting over other things, like how to avoid a government shutdown and who should (or shouldn’t) be Speaker of the House. So instead of agreeing on a new bill, they extended the old one by a year. 

The extension kept money temporarily flowing to programs that prop up farmers and assist families in need of food. It didn’t, however, do anything to tackle climate change or advance anyone’s understanding of how much carbon is in the mush of decaying plants, bacteria, fungi, and worm poop beneath your feet. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How much carbon can farmers store in their soil? Nobody’s sure. on Feb 12, 2024.

Last week, a long, narrow section of the Earth’s atmosphere funneled trillions of gallons of water eastward from the Pacific tropics and unleashed it on California. This weather event, known as an atmospheric river, broke rainfall records, dumped more than a foot of rain on parts of the state, and knocked out power for 800,000 residents. At least nine people died in car crashes or were killed by falling trees. But the full brunt of the storm’s health impacts may not be felt for months. 

The flooding caused by intensifying winter rainstorms in California is helping to spread a deadly fungal disease called coccidioidomycosis, or Valley fever. “Hydro-climate whiplash is increasingly wide swings between extremely wet and extremely dry conditions,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at University of California, Los Angeles. Humans are finding it difficult to adapt to this new pattern. But fungi are thriving, Swain said. Valley fever, he added, “is going to become an increasingly big story.” 

Cases of Valley fever in California broke records last year after nine back-to-back atmospheric rivers slammed the state and caused widespread, record-breaking flooding. Last month, the California Department of Public Health put out an advisory to health care providers that said it recorded 9,280 new cases of Valley fever with onset dates in 2023 — the highest number the department has ever documented. In a statement provided to Grist, the California Department of Public Health said that last year’s climate and disease pattern indicate that there could be “an increased risk of Valley fever in California in 2024.”

“If you look at the numbers, it’s astonishing,” said Shangxin Yang, a clinical microbiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “About 15 years ago in our lab, we only saw maybe one or two cases a month. Now, it’s two or three cases a week.” 

Valley fever — named for California’s San Joaquin Valley, where the disease was discovered in a farmworker in the late 1800s — is caused by the spores of a fungus called Coccidioides. When inhaled, the spores can cause severe illness in humans and some animal species, including dogs. The fungus is particularly sensitive to climate extremes. Coccidioides doesn’t thrive in regions of the U.S. that get year-round rain, nor can it withstand persistent drought. 

Patients in California undergo treatment for Valley fever. Brian Vander Brug / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

What the spores really love is exactly the type of rain-drought cycle that California is caught in. Until last year’s series of drought-busting atmospheric rivers, California was in the throes of a long-term drought pattern; 2000 to 2021 was the driest two-decade stretch in the Southwest in 12 centuries. Climate models predict the Golden State will endure more droughts in the future. Rising global temperatures fuel dry conditions by sucking moisture out of the soil and depleting California’s water reserves. Meanwhile, the warmer atmosphere is also supercharging atmospheric rivers as they move from the tropics to the West Coast, causing the “rivers in the sky” to unleash more rain than they would on a planet untouched by human-made warming.

The oscillation between extreme dryness and extreme wetness causes Coccidioides to flourish. During rain events, flushes of fungi colonize the soil. As the ground dries out, the invisible spores can be lifted out of the soil by a bulldozer, a rake, a hiking boot, an earthquake, or even a strong gust of wind. When those flying spores land in soil, they begin to reproduce. If they’re sucked through an open mouth or nostril, they colonize the lungs. 

The progression of the illness in humans depends on the strength of the individual’s immune system: The majority of people who contract Valley fever — some 60 percent — will never know they crossed paths with killer spores, because their immune system is able to rapidly vanquish the fungal intruder. But quashing Valley fever isn’t always a given, even for healthy individuals. The disease disproportionately impacts Latinos, Filipinos, Black people, Native Americans, and pregnant people for reasons researchers and physicians are still trying to puzzle out. 

When it causes symptoms, Valley fever starts with a fever, headache, or cough — similar to the symptoms of COVID-19, a disease it is often confused with. If the immune system can’t fight off the Coccidioides spores, the illness can move past its initial phase and become a chronic condition that produces a severe cough, chest pain, weight loss, pneumonia, and nodules in the lungs. This stage, known as disseminated Valley fever, can also cause skin lesions and ulcers, swollen joints, meningitis — swelling of the membranes surrounding the spinal cord and brain — and even death. Between 1 and 5 percent of Valley fever cases reach the disseminated stage. Antifungal medications can help hold Valley fever at bay, but recovery ultimately depends on the individual’s immunological defenses. There is no cure for the disease, and approximately 200 people in the United States die from disseminated Valley fever every year. 

Researchers surveying for Coccidioides collect samples from rodent holes in the Carrizo Plain National Monument in Santa Margarita, California. Carolyn Van Houten / The Washington Post via Getty Images

There’s evidence that Coccidioides is already taking advantage of a warming U.S. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that Valley fever cases in the U.S. rose from 2,271 in 1998 to 20,003 cases in 2019 — a 780 percent increase. In Arizona, where two-thirds of Valley fever diagnoses typically occur, cases rose 600 percent. But Coccidioides spores have cropped up in new regions in recent years, expanding through Southern California and into Northern California, even up into the drier parts of Oregon and Washington states. The rate of growth of Valley fever in California is higher than in Arizona; cases there rose more than 1,000 percent over the same time period.  “What kind of disease do you see a 1,000 percent increase in a matter of two decades?” Yang asked. “This is one of the few.” 

Some percentage of these cases can be attributed to increased public awareness of the disease and a related uptick in testing for it. But the size of the spike, experts told Grist, cannot be explained by testing rates alone. Climate change, researchers hypothesize, is supercharging Valley fever, and increasingly intense atmospheric rivers — responsible for roughly 50 percent of the West Coast’s annual water supply — are creating ideal conditions for the spores to spread. 

The scale of Valley fever in California in the coming years depends in large part on what happens to the state’s soil. “Many areas that have blooms of the Valley fever fungus never get disturbed, so it’s not an issue,” said Antje Lauer, an environmental microbiologist at California State University Bakersfield. Housing and energy infrastructure and other landscape-level changes kick up soil and produce dust. She worries that as developers build more infrastructure and expand into virgin areas of the state, and as climate change creates ever more convenient conditions for Coccidiodes, Valley fever will pose an increasingly profound threat to public health. Last year was a harbinger of things to come, Lauer said. “We will see more cases.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Intensifying atmospheric rivers are leading to a surge in Valley fever cases in California on Feb 12, 2024.

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

Scientists are working on an unusual plan to prevent Antarctic glaciers from melting. They want to build a set of giant underwater curtains in front of ice sheets to protect them from being eroded by warm sea water.

Ice in polar regions is now disappearing at record rates as global warming intensifies, and urgent action is needed to slow down this loss, the international group of ­scientists has warned.

Their proposed solution is the construction of a 62-mile-long (100 km) curtain that would be moored to the bed of the Amundsen Sea. It would rise by about 656 feet (200 meters) from the ocean floor and would partially restrict the inflow of relatively warm water that laps at the bases of coastal Antarctic glaciers and undermines them.

The Seabed Curtain project, if implemented, would be one of the biggest geo-engineering programmes ever undertaken. “It would be a giant project — but then we face a gigantic problem,” glaciologist John Moore of Lapland University told the Observer last week.

“The melting of glaciers in Antarctica would could trigger catastrophic flooding around the planet and result in hundreds of millions of people losing their homes. That will be incredibly bad for civilization as we know it, so we need to do something.”

A massive crack running across Antarctica’s Pine Island Glacier can be seen in this satellite image. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

The curtain proposed by Moore — who is working with scientists at the University of Cambridge and other ­centers in the US — would stretch along the seabed opposite the Thwaites and Pine Island glaciers. These act as plugs that prevent the giant ice sheets behind them from sliding into the ocean.

Scientists warn that the loss of the Thwaites and Pine Island glaciers could be enough to raise sea levels round the world by three meters if they melted, a prospect now considered to be a real threat as global warming takes a grip of the region and causes sea temperatures to rise.

“Glaciers are affected by warmer air which melts their surfaces but they are also eroded at their bases by warm seawater,” said Shaun Fitzgerald, director of the center for climate repair at the University of Cambridge, one of the partners in the scheme. And as the oceans warm as the planet heats up due to climate change, the more intense is the erosion of ice at the bases of these glaciers.”

Building a curtain that restricts the flow of warm water on to the Antarctic coast could slow the undermining of these glaciers and so reduce the risk of their catastrophic disappearance, say the scientists. They envisage building a series of seabed curtains and are set to begin research to pinpoint the best materials for their construction.

“We are not going to do this with a single sheet of fabric, and we are not looking at perfect, sealing membrane,” added Fitzgerald.

One idea would be to use air as a barrier for protecting glaciers. A pipe – with holes drilled along it – would be laid down along the seabed and air pumped through it. The curtain of air bubbles that would rise from it might then be able to hold back the ingress of warm seawater.

“We don’t know if that will work since we are only at a very early stage in our work,” added Fitzgerald.

“We need to study how salinity affects water flow and carry out all sorts of computer simulations and the testing of mathematical models. Then we will be ready for the first physical tests.”

These tests are scheduled to be carried out on the River Cam later this year, when various models will be tested underwater.

“After that we will begin to work on a bigger scale,” added Moore. “We might go to a fjord in Norway to build a prototype, for example.

“Certainly this is not going to be something that will be completed in a hurry. It will take many years. On the other hand, we do need to start planning now.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How do you stop a glacier from melting? Put up an underwater curtain. on Feb 11, 2024.