“If we are finally going to start taking the IPCC’s findings seriously, it follows that we must begin advancing far more aggressive climate stabilization solutions than anything that has been undertaken thus far,” writes Robert Pollin.
In the wake of a United Nations report that activists said showed the “bleak and brutal truth” about the climate emergency, a leading economist on Friday highlighted a step that supporters argue could be incredibly effective at combating the global crisis: nationalizing the U.S. fossil fuel industry.
“With at least ExxonMobil, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips under public control, the necessary phaseout of fossil fuels as an energy source could advance in an orderly fashion.”
Writing for The American Prospect, Robert Pollin, an economics professor and co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, noted the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and high gas prices exacerbated by Russia’s war on Ukraine.
“If we are finally going to start taking the IPCC’s findings seriously,” Pollin wrote, “it follows that we must begin advancing far more aggressive climate stabilization solutions than anything that has been undertaken thus far, both within the U.S. and globally. Within the U.S., such measures should include at least putting on the table the idea of nationalizing the U.S. fossil fuel industry.”
“With at least ExxonMobil, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips under public control, the necessary phaseout of fossil fuels as an energy source could advance in an orderly fashion”
Asserting that “at least in the U.S., the private oil companies stand as the single greatest obstacle to successfully implementing” a viable climate stabilization program, Pollin made the case that fossil fuel giants should not make any more money from wrecking the planet, nationalization would not be an unprecedented move in the United States, and doing so could help build clean energy infrastructure at the pace that scientists warn is necessary.
The expert proposed starting with “the federal government purchasing controlling ownership of at least the three dominant U.S. oil and gas corporations: ExxonMobil, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips.”
“They are far larger and more powerful than all the U.S. coal companies combined, as well as all of the smaller U.S. oil and gas companies,” he wrote. “The cost to the government to purchase majority ownership of these three oil giants would be about $420 billion at current stock market prices.
Today at @TheProspect, Robert Pollin takes a big swing and explains how and why to nationalize the nation's fossil fuel companies, protecting consumer wallets while transitioning to renewables:https://t.co/h4nfEiwz0A
Emphasizing that the aim of private firms “is precisely to make profits from selling oil, coal, and natural gas, no matter the consequences for the planet and regardless of how the companies may present themselves in various high-gloss, soft-focus PR campaigns,” Pollin posited that “with at least ExxonMobil, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips under public control, the necessary phaseout of fossil fuels as an energy source could advance in an orderly fashion.”
“The government could determine fossil fuel energy production levels and prices to reflect both the needs of consumers and the requirements of the clean-energy transition,” he explained. “This transition could also be structured to provide maximum support for the workers and communities that are presently dependent on fossil fuel companies for their well-being.”
Pollin pointed out that some members of Congress are pushing for a windfall profits tax on Big Oil companies using various global crises—from Russia’s war to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic—to price gouge working people at the gas pump. The proposal, he wrote, “raises a more basic question: Should the fossil fuel companies be permitted to profit at all through selling products that we know are destroying the planet? The logical answer has to be no. That is exactly why nationalizing at least the largest U.S. oil companies is the most appropriate action we can take now, in light of the climate emergency.”
The economist highlighted the long history of nationalizing in the United States, pointing out that “it was only 13 years ago, in the depths of the 2007–09 financial crisis and Great Recession, that the Obama administration nationalized two of the three U.S. auto companies.”
In addition to enabling the government to put the nationalized firms’ profits toward a just transition to renewables, Pollin wrote, “with nationalization, the political obstacles that fossil fuel companies now throw up against public financing for clean energy investments would be eliminated.”
Nationalization “is not a panacea,” Pollin acknowledged. Noting that “publicly owned companies already control approximately 90% of the world’s fossil fuel reserves,” he cautioned against assuming such a move in the U.S. “will provide favorable conditions for fighting climate change, any more than public ownership has done so already in Russia, Saudi Arabia, China, or Iran,” without an administration dedicated to tackling the global crisis.
Pollin is far from alone in proposing nationalization. Writing for Jacobin last month, People’s Policy Project founder Matt Bruenig argued that “an industry that is absolutely essential to maintain in the short term and absolutely essential to eliminate in the long term is an industry that really should be managed publicly.”
“Private owners and investors are not in the business of temporarily propping up dying industries, which means that they will either work to keep the industry from dying, which is bad for the climate, or that they will refuse to temporarily prop it up, which will cause economic chaos,” he wrote. “A public owner is best positioned to pursue managed decline in a responsible way.”
In a piece for The New Republic published in the early stage of the pandemic a few years ago, climate journalist Kate Aronoff—like Pollin on Friday—pointed out that nationalization “has a long and proud tradition of navigating America through times of crisis, from World War II to 9/11.”
As Aronoff—who interviewed New College of Florida economist Mark Paul—reported in March 2020:
In a way, nationalization would merely involve the government correcting for nearly a century of its own market intervention. All manner of government hands on the scales have kept money flowing into fossil fuels, including the roughly $26 billion worth of state and federal subsidies handed out to them each year. A holistic transition toward a low-carbon economy would reorient that array of market signals away from failing sectors and toward growing ones that can put millions to work right away retrofitting existing buildings to be energy efficient and building out a fleet of electric vehicles, for instance, including in the places that might otherwise be worst impacted by a fossil fuel bust and recession. Renewables have taken a serious hit amid the Covid-19 slowdown, too, as factories shut down in China. So besides direct government investments in green technology, additional policy directives from the federal level, Paul added, would be key to providing certainty for investors that renewables are worth their while: for example, low-hanging fruit like the extension of the renewable tax credits, now on track to be phased out by 2022.
While Pollin, Bruenig, and Aronoff’s writing focused on the United States, campaigners are also making similar cases around the world.
In a June 2021 opinion piece for The Guardian, Johanna Bozuwa, co-manager of the Climate & Energy Program at the Democracy Collaborative, and Georgetown University philosophy professor Olúfẹ́mi O Táíwò took aim at Royal Dutch Shell on the heels of a historic court ruling, declaring that “like all private oil companies, Shell should not exist.”
“Governments like the Netherlands could better follow through on mandates to reduce emissions if they held control over oil companies themselves,” the pair added. “It is time to nationalize Big Oil.”
net-zero by 2050 was a joke, but nobody’s laughing
Attitude matters. Imagine that in the run-up to the 20xx Olympics your country declared: we will strive to not-lose and achieve net-zero gold medals!
OK maybe not the best metaphor but still – why aim to not trigger armageddon by… 2050?
It is international scientific consensus that, in order to prevent the worst climate damages, global net human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) need to fall by about 45 percent from 2010 levels by 2030, reaching net zero around 2050. –
Once that lofty non-goal was agreed upon by governments across the globe, it quickly became apparent that virtually none of them were doing anywhere near what it would take to get to said uninspired non-goal.
The idea was (and still is) to drag and under-achieve as long as politically possible and then suddenly, in the final stretch, accelerate efforts (with resources controlled by future politicians) and reach net-zero. And then declare victory.
People want more than net-zero. People need more than net-zero. At the very least there has to be a better name, and a serious plan to make it actually happen.
You are going to hear a lot about minus-zero carbon soon. The reason is a good one. When the stakes are as high as the extinction of all life on earth, just getting to a tie score is not a good plan. So those who are in the trenches, working on solutions for global warming and reducing the carbon footprint, are search also for better ways to communicate what the goal is and what it means.
This, hopefully, can lead to a focus on a goal, or at least the articulation of a desire, that can inspire people to become highly active, even agitated, perhaps even alarmed, and begin the hard work and striving that it will take to get to a net-positive outcome for all of us.
And, who exactly decided that it would be a good idea to prolong the carbon carnival as long as possible in the first place? Carbon emitters and oil profiteers perhaps?
60 years of feet dragging, obfuscation and deliberate blocking of any solutions threatening the status quo have already come and gone.
Also, if energy is clean and abundant, why not use more? Energy is good, more energy use, if clean and sustainable, could be better. It can give us amazing things. Efficient use is good too, of course, but this is a mind-set issue. This is thought error or a thought liberation.
Minus-zero carbon x 100% (with 200% energy availability) is a much better goal and represents a thought liberating idea.
Perfection can’t be the enemy of good in the energy arena
Do we need architects and inventors, innovators and scientists, and massive amount of ammunition in the form of trillions of dollars in funding, from both public and private sources? Hell yes.
And must these magicians and Mavericks do amazing things that were believed impossible just a short while ago? Absolutely. Is this a ‘moon-shot’ to, not just save, but catapult humanity into a better future? You bet-ur-a%$ it is.
That means that the challenges of finding better tech, examples such as for soil regeneration, or more efficient battery storage, or for alternatives to rare earth metals, if they are too, um, rare need to be figured out and set into motion, fast. It means inventing and discovering tech that does not exist, that has not been tried or even sought after, why never sought? Because oil was cheap and available, so don’t stress it, Bub.
And, there are those out there, already today, that are thinking beyond net-zero in 2050. There are those that want more, that know that we need more. Those that understand that political inertia and corrupt vested interests are not the excuses we want written on our tombstones.
And why not look for half-full glasses or beliefs manifested into action? Why not aim for something that makes us want to get up, stand up, and make something possible that looks like hope and feels like success and winning?
Decentralized solutions are coming, in every part of life
The reality is that it is not only the world’s energy infrastructure that needs a total makeover. Financial inequality, political and economic systems are fragile and failing, regardless where.
There is a whiff of collapse that could turn into a whirlwind and then could derail any progress made, as we plunge into dark ages, even before factoring in the catastrophic climate challenges.
We need new, innovative ways to learn, to communicate, interact and collaborate. And these are emerging – if you don’t believe in crypto, web3 or any other new directions that many are seeing as alternatives to broken systems of the past, you at least have to acknowledge that actively looking for a better way, one that does represent a solution, is what is needed even as the current systems are failing us.
So if you don’t agree with the ideas for change and proposed ways to improve methods for human interaction and coexistence, come up with new ideas and put them forth, ok?, maybe we have to try and strive and stumble until a truly better way presents itself.
Give yourself and all you have into actions that will finally change the direction from one that spells doom, in this case continuing to burn carbon in insanely massive amounts while we fight, disagree and kill one another (war, etc.), to something new, something that at least could have a chance to win the peace.
Losing is unacceptable for-real this time. Winning isn’t everything, no sir, it’s the only thing. And starting on 04-22-2022 this net-zero BS needs to be sent to Mars, or perhaps Uranus.
Meanwhile here on earth we gotta get busy building the only thing that will prevent oblivion: a tiny taste of utopia that will grow from a seed into a raging forest of real, not fossilized, success.
Reducing fossil fuel use is important, but it’s more important to increase zero carbon energy production
Increasing sustainable energy production is possibly the most important goal for the world today. This idea is mostly couched, however, in negative terms, the idea that without a shift to clean, green sustainable sources climate change will destroy the future.
This is an important and essentially true statement.
However the automatic association of sustainable energy as being inevitably connected to less energy availability is a false premise. One that can be proven wrong with positive action towards building clean energy infrastructure, not as a defensive, desperate survival goal, but as a natural expansion of more energy and power that could lead to increased prosperity for the human race.
Deeply embedded thought patterns prevent us, perhaps, from imagining a world where more energy is not associated with more pollution, eventual depletion of a finite and limited resource and ultimately death, destruction and a CO2 induced climate catastrophe.
Optimism and abundance are linked with hope and a dream of a better standard of living for all. That dream is possible not with less energy use, but rather, more and cheaper energy availability that can be created by building a global, sustainable, renewable energy infrastructure.
A change in thought and perspective is necessary and could be more powerful than the sun
Utopia is a word that will get you laughed at, while oblivion is becoming the expected outcome of our century. Predicted by R. Buckminster Fuller in his book ‘Utopia or Oblivion‘, the choice we face in this century is not oblivion and catastrophic suffering or ‘business as usual’, it is not survival vs extinction, it is survival by unleashing utopian potential or total annihilation.
The paradox of sustainable energy is that, without it becoming the primary energy production system for the planet, combined with reduced consumption of fossil fuels until 100% sustainability is reached, oblivion or at least massive pain is assured; while at the same time, achieving 100% carbon free, clean energy from sustainable sources like solar, wind and geothermal, can create virtually unlimited increases in beneficial uses of energy, leading to an almost utopian potential for quality of life.
Thinking is the Difference Between Utopia or Oblivion
The clarity of realizing that clean sustainable energy ubiquity means unlimited energy consumption is non-destructive, and can end the malthusian nightmare of finite resources, that so many have fought over and even died for, is truly mind altering.
More is less, is another way to say it. Or at least more consumption and benefits, but none of the negative costs to the environment that we have come to see as inextricably linked to fossil fuel energy production and use.
At the same time it also harkens back to Elon Musk and Tesla’s mission statement. Tesla has had a vision for sustainable energy that is S3XY; more luxury, more beauty, more fun.
That mind-set, a mind set of abundant clean unlimited energy from sustainable sources, used to power beautiful powerful EVs, has made the company the enormous success that it is and ushered in an era EV production as job #1 throughout the entire auto industry.
The genius of this perspective centers on the idea that humans, when striving toward a positive goal, are always more powerful and successful than they are when simply trying to avoid a negative outcome.
Interestingly, the dream of reaching Mars, Musk’s other stated goal, is both positive and negative, since one reason for the urgent need to establish colonies there could be the destruction of earth due to climate disaster, caused by a failure to create a sustainable clean energy infrastructure in time.
It is the power and dream of much more abundant energy that can remove the idea from our minds that energy consumption is inherently bad, just because it does have negative ramifications galore when the source for that energy is dirty fossil fuels.
The Utopian Mindset must begin to permeate our consciousness if we are to overcome the challenges of 2000-2050 and beyond
Energy abundance is not the only type of abundance that our minds must learn to accept as possible for our species if we hope to turn things around. Bitcoin, for example, is currently being scapegoated in the media generally and is having endless disinformation hurled at its proof of work mining system based on the premise that it uses “too much” energy and too much of that energy is sourced from fossil fuels at this time.
But why not focus on the real problem? Why not see that a monumental and heroic effort to rid the world of dependence on “bad” and ultimately finite and limited sources of energy from fossil fuels and shift, ultimately, 100% of production to clean and renewable sources, needs to be job #1 for team earth?
Again, in an all-or-nothing scenario there is no option to equivocate. The negative reasons that fossil fuels must be phased out as soon as possible (‘the stick’ as per Cleo Abram in her video below) become more inevitable each minute and are already threatening everything humans have accomplished to date.
The positive motivation is less obvious for most at this point (‘the carrot’) and yet is ultimately more powerful (S3XY!) since it carries with it the hope that we can not only avert disaster, death and destruction, but can build a clean, abundant and infinitely expandable energy supply that could be used to build the first tentative steps toward a utopian dream.
Six months ago, negotiators at the United Nations’ Glasgow climate summit celebrated a series of new commitments to lower global greenhouse gas emissions and build resilience to the impacts of climate change. Analysts concluded that the new promises, including phasing out coal, would bend the global warming trajectory, though still fall short of the Paris climate agreement.
In the U.S., the Biden administration has struggled to get its promised actions through Congress. Last-ditch efforts have been underway to salvage some kind of climate and energy bill from the abandoned Build Back Better plan. Without it, U.S. commitments to reduce emissions by over 50% by 2030 look fanciful, and the rest of the world knows it – adding another blow to U.S. credibility overseas.
As a former senior U.N. official, I’ve been involved in international climate negotiations for several years. At the halfway point of this year’s climate negotiations, with the next U.N. climate conference in November 2022, here are three areas to watch for progress and cooperation in a world full of danger and division.
In the short term, Europe’s pivot means much more energy efficiency – the International Energy Agency estimates that the European Union can save 15%-20% of energy demand with efficiency measures. It also means importing oil and gas from elsewhere.
There are issues to solve. As Europe buys up gas from other places, it risks reducing gas supplies relied on by other countries, and forcing some of those countries to return to coal, a more carbon-intense fuel that destroys air quality. Some countries will need help expanding renewable energy and stabilizing energy prices to avoid a backlash to pro-climate policies.
Their promises faced cries of “greenwash” from many climate advocacy groups. Some efforts are now underway to hold companies, as well as countries, to their commitments.
A U.N. group chaired by former Canadian Environment Minister Catherine McKenna is now working on a framework to hold companies, cities, states and banks to account when they claim to have “net-zero” emissions. This is designed to ensure that companies that pledged last year to meet net-zero now say how, and on what scientific basis.
For many companies, especially those with large emissions footprints, part of their commitment to get to net-zero includes buying carbon offsets – often investments in nature – to balance the ledger. This summer, two efforts to put guardrails around voluntary carbon markets are expected to issue their first sets of guidance for issuers of carbon credits and for firms that want to use voluntary carbon markets to fulfill their net-zero claims. The goal is to ensure carbon markets reduce emissions and provide a steady stream of revenue for parts of the world that need finance for their green growth.
Climate change influencing elections
Climate change is now an increasingly important factor in elections.
French President Emmanuel Macron, trying to woo supporters of a candidate to his left and energize young voters, made more dramatic climate pledges, vowing to be “the first major nation to abandon gas, oil and coal.”
With Chile’s swing to the left, the country’s redrafted constitution will incorporate climate stewardship.
In Australia, Scott Morrison’s government – which supported opening one of the world’s largest coal mines at the same time the Australian private sector is focusing on renewable energy – faces an election on May 21, 2022, with heatwaves and extreme flooding fresh in voters’ minds. Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro faces opponents in October who are talking about protecting the climate.
Elections are fought and won on pocketbook issues, and energy prices are high and inflation is taking hold. But voters around the world are also experiencing the effects of climate change firsthand and are increasingly concerned.
The next climate conference
Countries will be facing a different set of economic and security challenges when the next round of U.N. talks begins in November in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, compared to the challenges they faced in Glasgow. They will be expected to show progress on their commitments while struggling for bandwidth, dealing with the climate emergency as an integral part of security, economic recovery and global health.
There is no time to push climate action out into the future. Every decimal point of warming avoided is an opportunity for better health, more prosperity and better security.
What does a sustainable civilisation look like and how do we get there? A burgeoning movement of artists and activists is seeking answers.
“It is 2050. In most places in the world, the air is moist and fresh, even in cities. It feels a lot like walking through a forest, and very likely this is exactly what you are doing. The air is cleaner than it has been since before the Industrial Revolution. We have trees to thank for that. They are everywhere.”
In the current moment, these words from Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac’s 2020 book The Future We Choose might seem like pure fantasy. The world they describe seems so far from the present, where over 90% of the Earth’s population breathes air deemed unsafe by the World Health Organization, scientists warn that humans are causing “irreversible” changes to the climate and nature is declining globally at an unprecedented rate.
But a burgeoning artistic and political movement known as “solarpunk” is trying to bring this lush, verdant world closer to reality.
Solarpunk imagines an optimistic future where humans have overcome the major environmental and social crises of our time and in the process created a safe, just world powered by clean energy and organised around collaborative social ideals.
It rejects the pessimism of cyberpunk, which paints the future as a corporate-controlled and environmentally degraded dystopia. As stated in a manifesto written collectively by the online solarpunk community, “as our world roils with calamity, we need solutions, not only warnings”.
The concept of solarpunk originally emerged in the late 2000s, when a handful of artists on the social media platform Tumblr began sharing drawings of futuristic green cities. Over time, the aesthetic and ethos evolved into a more robust vision for the world, and in the process has been embraced by other art forms. There are now published collections of solarpunk literature, subgenres of music, movements within architecture and even tabletop role-playing games.
At the core of this vision is the idea that humans can coexist in harmony with the rest of nature. A solarpunk world is one where vast swathes of land have been returned to wilderness, rooftop gardens dot the skylines of high-tech cities and vertical farms provide food to their residents.
Responsible use of technology is also a prominent theme. Solar, wind and wave power have entirely replaced fossil fuels as sources of energy, while widespread 3D printing has made it much easier to produce things locally, creating resilient, self-sufficient communities.
Increasingly, artists and writers in the solarpunk movement also describe a world that is just and safe for marginalised groups – especially those facing the brunt of the climate and ecological crisis today. “BIPOC [black, indigenous and people of colour] and queer people are safe in solarpunk futures,” says Brianna Castagnozzi, co-editor-in-chief of Solarpunk Magazine.
Although it may seem utopian and idealistic, solarpunk attempts to answer real questions being asked more and more often in light of the unfolding climate and ecological crisis. What can be saved? What does a truly sustainable civilisation look like? How do we get there?
It may be a big ask, but it’s increasingly clear that the scale of the environmental crises facing humanity demands transformational changes to the way we live, as well as the way we think. Art has the power to shape our attitudes, so perhaps it’s time – as Nigerian poet Ben Okri said recently – for artists of all kinds to “dedicate our lives to nothing short of re-dreaming society”.
“The 1.5°C figure is not some random statistic,” said the head of the World Meteorological Organization. “It is rather an indicator of the point at which climate impacts will become increasingly harmful for people and indeed the entire planet.”
The World Meteorological Organization warned Monday that the planet now faces a 50% chance of temporarily hitting 1.5°C of warming above pre-industrial levels over the next five years, another signal that political leaders—particularly those of the rich nations most responsible for carbon emissions—are failing to rein in fossil fuel use.
“For as long as we continue to emit greenhouse gases, temperatures will continue to rise.”
In 2015, by comparison, the likelihood of briefly reaching or exceeding 1.5°C of global warming over the ensuing five-year period was estimated to be “close to zero,” the WMO noted in a new climate update. The report was published amid a deadly heatwave on the Indian subcontinent that scientists say is a glimpse of what’s to come if runaway carbon emissions aren’t halted. Thus far, the heatwave has killed dozens in India and Pakistan.
Signatories to the Paris climate accord have agreed to act to limit the global average temperature increase to well below 2°C—preferably to 1.5°C—by the end of the century. Climate advocates have deemed the 1.5°C target “on life support” following world leaders’ refusal to commit to more ambitious action at the COP26 summit in Glasgow late last year.
“We are getting measurably closer to temporarily reaching the lower target of the Paris Agreement,” Petteri Taalas, the secretary-general of the WMO, said in a statement Monday. “The 1.5°C figure is not some random statistic. It is rather an indicator of the point at which climate impacts will become increasingly harmful for people and indeed the entire planet.”
“For as long as we continue to emit greenhouse gases, temperatures will continue to rise,” Taalas added. “And alongside that, our oceans will continue to become warmer and more acidic, sea ice and glaciers will continue to melt, sea level will continue to rise and, our weather will become more extreme. Arctic warming is disproportionately high and what happens in the Arctic affects all of us.”
BREAKING from the World Meteorological Organization @WMO: There is now a 50% probability that at least one of the next 5 years will temporarily reach the Paris Agreement threshold of 1.5°C. In 2015 this chance was estimated to be zero.Our house is truly on fire. #ClimateEmergencyhttps://t.co/u5sTx63weR
— Scientist Rebellion (@ScientistRebel1) May 10, 2022
Dr. Leon Hermanson, a climate expert at the U.K. Met Office who led the WMO report, stressed that a short-lived breach of the 1.5°C threshold would not mean that the world is guaranteed to fall short of the Paris accord’s most ambitious warming target, which climate experts and campaigners have long decried as inadequate.
Such a breach, however, would “reveal that we are edging ever closer to a situation where 1.5°C could be exceeded for an extended period,” said Hermanson.
The WMO’s latest research also estimates that there is a 93% chance that at least one year between 2022 and 2026 will be the warmest on record. Currently, 2016 and 2020 are tied for the top spot.
Even if global warming is limited to 1.5°C by 2100, countless people across the globe will still face devastating heatwaves, droughts, and other extreme weather, with the poor facing the worst consequences.
Meanwhile, key ecosystems could be damaged beyond repair in a 1.5°C hotter world. One recent study found that 99% of the world’s coral reefs would experience heatwaves that are “too frequent for them to recover” if the planet gets 1.5°C warmer compared to pre-industrial levels.
Scientists behind the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report cautioned last month that if there’s to be any hope of keeping warming to 1.5°C or below by 2100, “it’s now or never.”
“Without immediate and deep emissions reductions across all sectors, it will be impossible,” said Jim Skea, co-chair of IPCC Working Group III.
Originally published on Common Dreams by JAKE JOHNSON and republished under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
The award-winning documentary titled YOUTH v GOV premiered globally on the streaming platform Netflix Friday as the youth plaintiffs featured in the film await a decision that could put their historic climate lawsuit on a path to trial.
“In under two hours, you get an inside look at nearly seven years of Juliana v. United States,” said Julia Olson, executive director and chief legal counsel at Our Children’s Trust, in a statement about the independent film. “And it’s not over. We are determined to get to trial because our young clients deserve to take the stand and have their evidence heard by a judge.”
The documentary—directed by scientist and filmmaker Christi Cooper—focuses on the federal suit filed in 2015 and its 21 plaintiffs. The Our Children’s Trust legal team, which represents the young people, argues that by contributing to the climate emergency, the U.S. government is violating their clients’ constitutional rights to life, liberty, and property, and failing to protect essential public trust resources.
Shortly after settlement negotiations between the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and attorneys for the Juliana youth ended without resolution last November, federal lawmakers and advocacy groups sent President Joe Biden and other leaders in his administration letters in support of the plaintiffs.
“The question now is whether the Biden administration will keep fighting tooth and nail to keep them silenced, and whether our courts will stand up for their constitutional rights,” Olson said Friday. “After 50 years of the government—both Democrats and Republicans—knowingly making the climate crisis worse, I’m not betting on partisan politics. But I do have faith in the judiciary.”
The plaintiffs—now ages 14 to 26—are waiting for a court to rule on a motion to amend their complaint, which could put the case on track for a trial.
Take a peek at the stories of the youth who sued the U.S. government through a campaign supported by @youthvgov and WITNESS!
Since talks with the DOJ concluded, climate scientists have reiterated warnings about the need for systemic changes on a global scale, Congress has failed to pass a package containing key climate measures, and Biden has facedcriticism for not taking executive action to address the planetary emergency.
“I think for a lot of young people right now, life is really scary, because we’ve never seen a moment like this in history, and our feelings about our life and our future [are] all because of choices that we had no participation in,” says 26-year-old Kelsey Juliana—the named plaintiff in the case—during the first two minutes of the film.
“And so the plaintiffs joined this case,” Juliana adds, “because we all know who’s to blame and what needs to be done.”
The Netflix release of the film—which has won over two dozen awards at film festivals worldwide—was met with excitement by climate action advocates.
“Put this on your must watch list this weekend!” tweeted the Wisconsin Environmental Health Network. “Let’s get this important documentary into Netflix’s trending now category!”
Noting that one of the plaintiffs—21-year-old Xiuhtezcatl Martinez—is based in Boulder, Matt Benjamin, a member of the Colorado city’s council, also highlighted the doc on Twitter.
“Make sure to check out this film streaming tonight on Netflix,” he said. “It’s inspirational. It’s emotional. It fills me with hope that our younger generations will take control of their future.”
Originally published on Common Dreams and republished under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
Around the world, many countries are becoming less democratic. This backsliding on democracy and “creeping authoritarianism,” as the U.S. State Department puts it, is often supported by the same industries that are escalating climate change.
It’s a dangerous shift, both for representative government and for the future climate.
Corporate capture of environmental politics
In democratic systems, elected leaders are expected to protect the public’s interests, including from exploitation by corporations. They do this primarily through policies designed to secure public goods, such as clean air and unpolluted water, or to protect human welfare, such as good working conditions and minimum wages. But in recent decades, this core democratic principle that prioritizes citizens over corporate profits has been aggressively undermined.
Today, it’s easy to find political leaders – on both the political right and left – working on behalf of corporations in energy, finance, agribusiness, technology, military and pharmaceutical sectors, and not always in the public interest. These multinational companies help fund their political careers and election campaigns to keep them in office.
When it comes to the political parties, it’s easy to find examples of campaign finance fueling political agendas.
In 1988, when NASA scientist James Hansen testified before a U.S. Senate committee about the greenhouse effect, both the Republican and Democratic parties took climate change seriously. But this attitude quickly diverged. Since the 1990s, the energy sector has heavily financed conservative candidates who have pushed its interests and helped to reduce regulations on the fossil fuel industry. This has enabled the expansion of fossil fuel production and escalated CO2 emissions to dangerous levels.
The industry’s power in shaping policy plays out in examples like the coalition of 19 Republican state attorneys general and coal companies suing to block the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.
Corporate interests have also fueled a surge in well-financed antidemocratic leaders who are willing to stall and even dismantle existing climate policies and regulations. These political leaders’ tactics have escalated public health crises, and in some cases, human rights abuses.
Brazil, Australia and the US
Many deeply antidemocratic governments are tied to oil, gas and other extractive industries that are driving climate change, including Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq and China.
In “Global Burning,” I explore how three leaders of traditionally democratic countries – Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, Scott Morrison of Australia and Donald Trump in the U.S. – came to power on anti-environment and nationalist platforms appealing to an extreme-right populist base and extractive corporations that are driving climate change. While the political landscape of each country is different, the three leaders have important commonalities.
Bolsonaro, Morrison and Trump all depend on extractive corporations to fund electoral campaigns and keep them in office or, in the case of Trump, get reelected.
For instance, Bolsonaro’s power depends on support from a powerful right-wing association of landowners and farmers called the União Democrática Ruralista, or UDR. This association reflects the interests of foreign investors and specifically the multibillion-dollar mining and agribusiness sectors. Bolsonaro promised that if elected in 2019, he would dismantle environmental protections and open, in the name of economic progress, industrial-scale soybean production and cattle grazing in the Amazon rainforest. Both contribute to climate change and deforestation in a fragile region considered crucial for keeping carbon out of the atmosphere.
Bolsonaro, Morrison and Trump are all openly skeptical of climate science. Not surprisingly, all have ignored, weakened or dismantled environmental protection regulations. In Brazil, that led to accelerated deforestation and large swaths of Amazon rainforest burning.
In Australia, Morrison’s government ignored widespread public and scientific opposition and opened the controversial Adani Carmichael mine, one of the largest coal mines in the world. The mine will impact public health and the climate and threatens the Great Barrier Reef as temperatures rise and ports are expanded along the coast.
Notably, all three leaders have worked, sometimes together, against international efforts to stop climate change. At the United Nations climate talks in Spain in 2019, Costa Rica’s minister for environment and energy at the time, Carlos Manuel Rodriguez, blamed Brazil, Australia and the U.S. for blocking efforts to tackle climate injustice linked to global warming.
Brazil, Australia and the U.S. are not unique in these responses to climate change. Around the world, there have been similar convergences of antidemocratic leaders who are financed by extractive corporations and who implement anti-environment laws and policies that defend corporate profits. New to the current moment is that these leaders openly use state power against their own citizens to secure corporate land grabs to build dams, lay pipelines, dig mines and log forests.
Fortunately, there is a lot that people can do to protect democracy and the climate.
Replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy and reducing the destruction of forests can cut greenhouse gas emissions. The biggest obstacles, a recent U.N. climate report noted, are national leaders who are unwilling to regulate fossil fuel corporations, reduce greenhouse gas emissions or plan for renewable energy production.
The path forward, as I see it, involves voters pushing back on the global trend toward authoritarianism, as Slovenia did in April 2022, and pushing forward on replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy. People can reclaim their democratic rights and vote out anti-environment governments whose power depends on prioritizing extractive capitalism over the best interests of their citizens and our collective humanity.
In the global effort to transition from fossil fuels to clean energy, achieving a “100% renewables” electricity system is considered ideal.
Some Australian states have committed to 100% renewable energy targets, or even 200% renewable energy targets. But this doesn’t mean their electricity is, or will be, emissions free.
Electricity is responsible for a third of Australia’s emissions, and making it cleaner is a key way to reduce emissions in other sectors that rely on it, such as transport.
So it’s important we have clarity about where our electricity comes from, and how emissions-intensive it is. Let’s look at what 100% renewables actually implies in detail.
Is 100% renewables realistic?
Achieving 100% renewables is one way of eliminating emissions from the electricity sector.
It’s commonly interpreted to mean all electricity must be generated from renewable sources. These sources usually include solar, wind, hydro, and geothermal, and exclude nuclear energy and fossil fuels with carbon capture and storage.
But this is a very difficult feat for individual states and territories to try to achieve.
The term “net 100% renewables” more accurately describes what some jurisdictions — such as South Australia and the ACT — are targeting, whether or not they’ve explicitly said so.
These targets don’t require that all electricity people use within the jurisdiction come from renewable sources. Some might come from coal or gas-fired generation, but the government offsets this amount by making or buying an equivalent amount of renewable electricity.
A net 100% renewables target allows a state to spruik its green credentials without needing to worry about the reliability implications of being totally self-reliant on renewable power.
So how does ‘net’ 100% renewables work?
All east coast states are connected to the National Electricity Market (NEM) — a system that allows electricity to be generated, used and shared across borders. This means individual states can achieve “net 100% renewables” without the renewable generation needing to occur when or where the electricity is required.
The ACT government buys renewable energy from generators outside the territory, which is then mostly used in other states, such as Victoria and South Australia. Meanwhile, people living in ACT rely on power from NSW that’s not emissions-free, because it largely comes from coal-fired power stations.
This way, the ACT government can claim net 100% renewables because it’s offsetting the non-renewable energy its residents use with the clean energy it’s paid for elsewhere.
SA’s target is to reach net 100% renewables by the 2030s. Unlike the ACT, it plans to generate renewable electricity locally, equal to 100% of its annual demand.
At times, such as especially sunny days, some of that electricity will be exported to other states. At other times, such as when the wind drops off, SA may need to rely on electricity imports from other states, which probably won’t come from all-renewable sources.
So what happens if all states commit to net 100% renewable energy targets? Then, the National Electricity Market will have a de-facto 100% renewable energy target — no “net”.
That’s because the market is one entire system, so its only options are “100% renewables” (implying zero emissions), or “less than 100% renewables”. The “net” factor doesn’t come into it, because there’s no other part of the grid for it to buy from or sell to.
How do you get to “200% renewables”, or more?
It’s mathematically impossible for more than 100% of the electricity used in the NEM to come from renewable sources: 100% is the limit.
Any target of more than 100% renewables is a different calculation. The target is no longer a measure of renewable generation versus all generation, but renewable generation versus today’s demand.
Australia could generate several times more renewable energy than there is demand today, but still use a small and declining amount of fossil fuels during rare weather events. Shutterstock
Tasmania, for example, has legislated a target of 200% renewable energy by 2040. This means it wants to produce twice as much renewable electricity as it consumes today.
But this doesn’t necessarily imply all electricity consumed in Tasmania will be renewable. For example, it may continue to import some non-renewable power from Victoria at times, such as during droughts when Tasmania’s hydro dams are constrained. It may even need to burn a small amount of gas as a backup.
This means the 200% renewable energy target is really a “net 200% renewables” target.
Meanwhile, the Greens are campaigning for 700% renewables. This, too, is based on today’s electricity demand.
In the future, demand could be much higher due to electrifying our transport, switching appliances from gas to electricity, and potentially exporting energy-intensive, renewable commodities such as green hydrogen or ammonia.
Targeting net-zero emissions
These “more than 100% renewables” targets set by individual jurisdictions don’t necessarily imply all electricity Australians use will be emissions free.
It’s possible — and potentially more economical — that we would meet almost all of this additional future demand with renewable energy, but keep some gas or diesel capacity as a low-cost backstop.
This would ensure continued electricity supply during rare, sustained periods of low wind, low sun, and high demand, such as during a cloudy, windless week in winter.
The energy transition is harder near the end — each percentage point between 90% and 100% renewables is more expensive to achieve than the previous.
That’s why, in a recent report from the Grattan Institute, we recommended governments pursue net-zero emissions in the electricity sector first, rather than setting 100% renewables targets today.
For example, buying carbon credits to offset the small amount of emissions produced in a 90% renewable NEM is likely to be cheaper in the medium term than building enough energy storage — such as batteries or pumped hydro dams — to backup wind and solar at all times.
The bottom line is governments and companies must say what they mean and mean what they say when announcing targets. It’s the responsibility of media and pundits to take care when interpreting them.
Photo Credit / Living Habitats and National Wildlife Federation
Magnificent bridge for LA wildlife survival
In conjunction with the #SaveLACougars movement, the National Wildlife Federation (NWF) and partners will begin the start of construction officially on April 22 to commemorate Earth Day. The groundbreaking will mark the world’s largest wildlife crossing which will cover 10 lanes of traffic on the very busy 101 freeway near Los Angeles. The project is currently slated for completion by early 2025 and has been dubbed as the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing.
The Wildlife crossing will cost nearly $90 million, with 60% of the price already covered by private donations and the remainder from public funds meant for conservation purposes. Philanthropist Wallis Annenberg donated $25 million to the project
The overpass proposal and funding was inspired by a Los Angeles cougar named P-22 who crossed two freeways to settle in Griffith Park. Unfortunately most wildlife aren’t as lucky to make it safely and roam as nature intended, and this crossing will finally represent a potential solution to this problem.
“This crossing will save the local mountain lion population from extinction, stand as a global model for urban wildlife conservation — and show us that it’s possible for a structure of this magnitude to be built in a such a densely populated urban area”
-Beth Pratt, California Executive Director for NWF
The positive environmental impact will be coupled with an aesthetic improvement that should also please humans, based on the renderings above. With some of the most congested freeways in the world in and around LA, this exception to the endless asphalt sprawl would be a welcome change from the status quo. The crossing is slated to be completed within three years.
The latest reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change show that to avoid massive losses and damage from global warming, nations must act quickly to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. The good news is that experts believe it’s possible to cut global greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030 through steps such as using energy more efficiently, slowing deforestation and speeding up the adoption of renewable energy.
Many of those strategies require new laws, regulations or funding to move forward at the speed and scale that’s needed. But one strategy that’s increasingly feasible for many consumers is powering their homes and devices with electricity from clean sources. These four articles from our archives explain why electrifying homes is an important climate strategy and how consumers can get started.
1. Why go electric?
As of 2020, home energy use accounted for about one-sixth of total U.S. energy consumption. Nearly half (47%) of this energy came from electricity, followed by natural gas (42%), oil (8%) and renewable energy (7%). By far the largest home energy use is for heating and air conditioning, followed by lighting, refrigerators and other appliances.
The most effective way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from home energy consumption is to substitute electricity generated from low- and zero-carbon sources for oil and natural gas. And the power sector is rapidly moving that way: As a 2021 report from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory showed, power producers have reduced their carbon emissions by 50% from what energy experts predicted in 2005.
“This drop happened thanks to policy, market and technology drivers,” a team of Lawrence Berkeley lab analysts concluded. Wind and solar power have scaled up and cut their costs, so utilities are using more of them. Cheap natural gas has replaced generation from dirtier coal. And public policies have encouraged the use of energy-efficient technologies like LED light bulbs. These converging trends make electric power an increasingly climate-friendly energy choice.
The U.S. is using much more low-carbon and carbon-free electricity today than projected in 2005. Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, CC BY-ND
2. Heat pumps for cold and hot days
Since heating and cooling use so much energy, switching from an oil- or gas-powered furnace to a heat pump can greatly reduce a home’s carbon footprint. As University of Dayton sustainability expert Robert Brecha explains, heat pumps work by moving heat in and out of buildings, not by burning fossil fuel.
“Extremely cold fluid circulates through coils of tubing in the heat pump’s outdoor unit,” Brecha writes. “That fluid absorbs energy in the form of heat from the surrounding air, which is warmer than the fluid. The fluid vaporizes and then circulates into a compressor. Compressing any gas heats it up, so this process generates heat. Then the vapor moves through coils of tubing in the indoor unit of the heat pump, heating the building.”
In summer, the process reverses: Heat pumps take energy from indoors and move that heat outdoors, just as a refrigerator removes heat from the chamber where it stores food and expels it into the air in the room where it sits.
Another option is a geothermal heat pump, which collects warmth from the earth and uses the same process as air source heat pumps to move it into buildings. These systems cost more, since installing them involves excavation to bury tubing below ground, but they also reduce electricity use.
3. Cooking without gas – or heat
For people who like to cook, the biggest sticking point of going electric is the prospect of using an electric stove. Many home chefs see gas flames as more responsive and precise than electric burners.
But magnetic induction, which cooks food by generating a magnetic field under the pot, eliminates the need to fire up a burner altogether.
“Instead of conventional burners, the cooking spots on induction cooktops are called hobs, and consist of wire coils embedded in the cooktop’s surface,” writes Binghamton University electrical engineering professor Kenneth McLeod.
Moving an electric charge through those wires creates a magnetic field, which in turn creates an electric field in the bottom of the cookware. “Because of resistance, the pan will heat up, even though the hob does not,” McLeod explains.
Induction cooktops warm up and cool down very quickly and offer highly accurate temperature control. They also are easy to clean, since they are made of glass, and safer than electric stoves since the hobs don’t stay hot when pans are lifted off them. Many utilities are offering rebates to cover the higher cost of induction cooktops.
4. Electric cars as backup power sources
Electrifying systems like home heating and cooking made residents even more vulnerable to power outages. Soon, however, a new backup system could become available: powering your home from your electric vehicle.
With interest in electric cars and light trucks rising in the U.S., auto makers are introducing many new EV models and designs. Some of these new rides will offer bidirectional charging – the ability to charge a car battery at home, then move that power back into the house, and eventually, into the grid.
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Only a few models offer this capacity now, and it requires special equipment that can add several thousand dollars to the price of an EV. But Penn State energy expert Seth Blumsack sees value in this emerging technology.
“Enabling homeowners to use their vehicles as backup when the power goes down would reduce the social impacts of large-scale blackouts. It also would give utilities more time to restore service – especially when there is substantial damage to power poles and wires,” Blumsack explains. “Bidirectional charging is also an integral part of a broader vision for a next-generation electric grid in which millions of EVs are constantly taking power from the grid and giving it back – a key element of an electrified future.”
Editor’s note: This story is a roundup of articles from The Conversation’s archives.
In face of the “escalating climate emergency,” the advocacy group Scientist Rebellion warns that IPCC summary to global policymakers remains “alarmingly reserved, docile, and conservative.”
Amid a weeklong global civil disobedience campaign to demand climate action commensurate with mounting evidence about the need for swift decarbonization, Scientist Rebellion is highlighting specific gaps between what experts say is necessary and what governments allowed to be published in a summary of the United Nations’ latest climate assessment.
“We need a billion climate activists…The time is now. We’ve waited far too long.”
The landmark report on mitigation by Working Group III of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—part of the U.N.’s sixth comprehensive climate assessment since 1992 and possibly the last to be published with enough time to avert the most catastrophic consequences of the planetary crisis—was compiled by 278 researchers from 65 countries.
The authors, who synthesized thousands of peer-reviewed studies published in the past several years, make clear over the course of nearly 3,000 pages that “without immediate and deep emissions reductions across all sectors, limiting global warming to 1.5°C is beyond reach.”
Meanwhile, a 64-page Summary for Policymakers (SPM) of the report—a key reference point for governments—required the approval of all 195 member states of the IPCC and was edited with their input.
Following a contentious weekend of negotiations in which wealthy governments attempted to weaken statements about green financing for low-income nations and fossil fuel-producing countries objected to unequivocal language about the need to quickly eliminate coal, oil, and gas extraction, the IPCC document was published several hours later than expected on Monday.
“Despite the escalating climate emergency and the total absence of emissions cuts, the framing of the final version of the SPM is still alarmingly reserved, docile, and conservative,” Scientist Rebellion, an international alliance of academics who are advocating for systemic political and economic changes in line with scientific findings, said Tuesday in a statement.
“The science has never been clearer: to have any chance of retaining a habitable planet, greenhouse gas emissions must be cut radically now,” the group continued. “Limiting warming to 1.5°C and responding to the climate emergency requires an immediate transformation across all sectors and strata of society, a mobilization of historic proportions: a climate revolution.”
“The IPCC [has] avoided naming the major culprits for 30 years, which is one reason for the absence of real emissions cuts,” the group added. “Facts detailing the complicity of the world’s richest countries in fueling the climate crisis have been watered down by the IPCC’s political review process.”
Scientist Rebellion proceeded to contrast the final version of the SPM—”the document that garners almost all attention”—to an early draft of a summary of the Working Group III report on mitigation that IPCC authors associated with the group leaked last August out of concern that their conclusions would be diluted by policymakers.
Peter Kalmus, a Los Angeles-based climate scientist and author who is participating in this week’s direct actions, told Common Dreams that the shortcomings of governments and policymakers have driven him to act.
Kalmus said he was willing to engage in civil disobedience and risk arrest this week, “because I’ve tried everything else I can think of over the past decade and nothing has worked. I see humanity heading directly toward climate disaster.”
With humanity “currently on track to lose everything we love,” he said, the scientific community must intensify its efforts.
“If we don’t rapidly end the fossil fuel industry and begin acting like Earth breakdown is an emergency, we risk civilizational collapse and potentially the death of billions, not to mention the loss of major critical ecosystems around the world,” said Kalmus. “This is so much bigger than me. Expect climate scientists to be taking such actions repeatedly in the future and in large numbers.”
On Wednesday, direct actions by scientists took place in Berlin, Germany; The Hague, Netherlands; Bogata, Colombia, and other cities.
In its Tuesday assessment, Scientist Rebellion documented how the political review process weakened or eliminated language about carbon inequality and the need for far-reaching socio-economic transformation to slash greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution in the final SPM:
Example 1: Section B6 of the report originally stated that “institutional inertia and a social bias towards the status quo are leading to a risk of locking in future GHG emissions that may be costly or difficult to abate.” This has been replaced with “global GHG emissions in 2030 associated with the implementation of nationally determined contributions… would make it likely that warming will exceed 1.5°C during the 21st century.” The final version also no longer mentions that “vested interests” and a focus on an “incremental rather than a systemic approach” are limiting factors to ambitious transformation.
Example 2: The leaked SPM stated that “within countries, inequalities increased for both income and GHG emissions between 1970 and 2016, with the top 1% accounting for 27% of income growth,” and that “top emitters dominate emissions in key sectors, for example the top 1% account for 50% of GHG emissions from aviation.” Neither statement appears in the final version.
“While the SPM—being approved line-by-line by all governments—is reserved, docile, and conservative, the situation is clear,” said Scientist Rebellion.
The group went on to quote U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, who said Monday that “we are on a fast track to climate disaster.”
Limiting global heating to the boundaries set out under the Paris Agreement now requires an immediate shift into emergency mode, a transformation across all sectors and stratas of society, a mobilization of historic proportions — in short, a climate revolution. #ClimateCrisis 2/2 pic.twitter.com/wxvNBUee2q
— Scientist Rebellion (@ScientistRebel1) April 5, 2022
As Common Dreamsreported Monday, more than 1,000 scientists in at least 25 countries on every continent in the world are expected to participate in strikes, occupations, and other actions this week to highlight “the urgency and injustice of the climate and ecological crisis,” and several demonstrations are already underway.
Guterres, for his part, said Monday that “climate activists are sometimes depicted as dangerous radicals, but the truly dangerous radicals are the countries that are increasing the production of fossil fuels.”
For his part, Kalmus acknowledged it was going to take much more than a series of direct actions by scientists to turn the tide against inaction.
“We need a billion climate activists,” Kalmus said. “I encourage everyone to consider where we’re heading as a species, and to engage in civil disobedience and other actions. The time is now. We’ve waited far too long.”
“Mobilize, mobilize, mobilize,” he said, “before we lose everything.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by KENNY STANCIL and republished under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
Large-scale deployment of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) methods is now “unavoidable” if the world is to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions, according to this week’s report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
The report, released on Monday, finds that in addition to rapid and deep reductions in greenhouse emissions, CO₂ removal is “an essential element of scenarios that limit warming to 1.5℃ or likely below 2℃ by 2100”.
CDR refers to a suite of activities that lower the concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere. This is done by removing CO₂ molecules and storing the carbon in plants, trees, soil, geological reservoirs, ocean reservoirs or products derived from CO₂.
As the IPCC notes, each mechanism is complex, and has advantages and pitfalls. Much work is needed to ensure CDR projects are rolled out responsibly.
How does CDR work?
CDR is distinct from “carbon capture”, which involves catching CO₂ at the source, such as a coal-fired power plant or steel mill, before it reaches the atmosphere.
There are several ways to remove CO₂ from the air. They include:
terrestrial solutions, such as planting trees and adopting regenerative soil practices, such as low or no-till agriculture and cover cropping, which limit soil disturbances that can oxidise soil carbon and release CO₂.
geochemical approaches that store CO₂ as a solid mineral carbonate in rocks. In a process known as “enhanced mineral weathering”, rocks such as limestone and olivine can be finely ground to increase their surface area and enhance a naturally occurring process whereby minerals rich in calcium and magnesium react with CO₂ to form a stable mineral carbonate.
chemical solutions such as direct air capture that use engineered filters to remove CO₂ molecules from air. The captured CO₂ can then be injected deep underground into saline aquifers and basaltic rock formations for durable sequestration.
ocean-based solutions, such as enhanced alkalinity. This involves directly adding alkaline materials to the environment, or electrochemically processing seawater. But these methods need to be further researched before being deployed.
Where is it being used right now?
To date, US-based company Charm Industrial has delivered 5,000 tonnes of CDR, which is the the largest volume thus far. This is equivalent to the emissions produced by about 1,000 cars in a year.
There are also several plans for larger-scale direct air capture facilities. In September, 2021, Climeworks opened a facility in Iceland with a 4,000 tonne per annum capacity for CO₂ removal. And in the US, the Biden Administration has allocated US$3.5 billion to build four separate direct air capture hubs, each with the capacity to remove at least one million tonnes of CO₂ per year.
However, a previous IPCC report estimated that to limit global warming to 1.5℃, between 100 billion and one trillion tonnes of CO₂ must be removed from the atmosphere this century. So while these projects represent a massive scale-up, they are still a drop in the ocean compared with what is required.
In Australia, Southern Green Gas and Corporate Carbon are developing one of the country’s first direct air capture projects. This is being done in conjunction with University of Sydney researchers, ourselves included.
In this system, fans push atmospheric air over finely tuned filters made from molecular adsorbents, which can remove CO₂ molecules from the air. The captured CO₂ can then be injected deep underground, where it can remain for thousands of years.
Opportunities
It is important to stress CDR is not a replacement for emissions reductions. However, it can supplement these efforts. The IPCC has outlined three ways this might be done.
In the short term, CDR could help reduce net CO₂ emissions. This is crucial if we are to limit warming below critical temperature thresholds.
In the medium term, it could help balance out emissions from sectors such as agriculture, aviation, shipping and industrial manufacturing, where straightforward zero-emission alternatives don’t yet exist.
In the long term, CDR could potentially remove large amounts of historical emissions, stabilising atmospheric CO₂ and eventually bringing it back down to pre-industrial levels.
The IPCC’s latest report has estimated the technological readiness levels, costs, scale-up potential, risk and impacts, co-benefits and trade-offs for 12 different forms of CDR. This provides an updated perspective on several forms of CDR that were lesser explored in previous reports.
It estimates each tonne of CO₂ retrieved through direct air capture will cost US$84–386, and that there is the feasible potential to remove between 5 billion and 40 billion tonnes annually.
Concerns and challenges
Each CDR method is complex and unique, and no solution is perfect. As deployment grows, a number of concerns must be addressed.
First, the IPCC notes scaling up CDR must not detract from efforts to dramatically reduce emissions. They write that “CDR cannot serve as a substitute for deep emissions reductions but can fulfil multiple complementary roles”.
If not done properly, CDR projects could potentially compete with agriculture for land or introduce non-native plants and trees. As the IPCC notes, care must be taken to ensure the technology does not negatively affect biodiversity, land-use or food security.
The IPCC also notes some CDR methods are energy-intensive, or could consume renewable energy needed to decarbonise other activities.
It expressed concern CDR might also exacerbate water scarcity and make Earth reflect less sunlight, such as in cases of large-scale reforestation.
Given the portfolio of required solutions, each form of CDR might work best in different locations. So being thoughtful about placement can ensure crops and trees are planted where they won’t dramatically alter the Earth’s reflectivity, or use too much water.
Direct air capture systems can be placed in remote locations that have easy access to off-grid renewable energy, and where they won’t compete with agriculture or forests.
Finally, deploying long-duration CDR solutions can be quite expensive – far more so than short-duration solutions such as planting trees and altering soil. This has hampered CDR’s commercial viability thus far.
But costs are likely to decline, as they have for many other technologies including solar, wind and lithium-ion batteries. The trajectory at which CDR costs decline will vary between the technologies.
Future efforts
Looking forward, the IPCC recommends accelerated research, development and demonstration, and targeted incentives to increase the scale of CDR projects. It also emphasises the need for improved measurement, reporting and verification methods for carbon storage.
More work is needed to ensure CDR projects are deployed responsibly. CDR deployment must involve communities, policymakers, scientists and entrepreneurs to ensure it’s done in an environmentally, ethically and socially responsible way.
To most people, a solar farm or a geothermal plant is simply a power producer. Scientists and engineers see far more potential.
They envision offshore wind turbines capturing and storing carbon beneath the sea, and geothermal plants producing essential metals for powering electric vehicles. Electric vehicle batteries, too, can be transformed to power homes, saving their owners money.
photo credit / pexels
With scientists worldwide sounding the alarm about the increasing dangers and costs of climate change, let’s explore some cutting-edge ideas that could transform how today’s technologies reduce the effects of global warming, from five recent articles in The Conversation.
1. Solar canals: Power + water protection
What if solar panels did double duty, protecting water supplies while producing more power?
California is developing the United States’ first solar canals, with solar panels built atop some of the state’s water distribution canals. These canals run for thousands of miles through arid environments, where the dry air boosts evaporation in a state frequently troubled by water shortages.
“In a 2021 study, we showed that covering all 4,000 miles of California’s canals with solar panels would save more than 65 billion gallons of water annually by reducing evaporation. That’s enough to irrigate 50,000 acres of farmland or meet the residential water needs of more than 2 million people,” writes engineering professor Roger Bales of the University of California, Merced. They would also expand renewable energy without taking up farmable land.
Putting solar panels over shaded water can also improve their power output. The cooler water lowers the temperature of the panels by about 10 degrees Fahrenheit (5.5 Celsius), boosting their efficiency, Bales writes.
2. Geothermal power could boost battery supplies
For renewable energy to slash global greenhouse gas emissions, buildings and vehicles have to be able to use it. Batteries are essential, but the industry has a supply chain problem.
Most batteries used in electric vehicles and utility-scale energy storage are lithium-ion batteries, and most lithium used in the U.S. comes from Argentina, Chile, China and Russia. China is the leader in lithium processing.
Geologist and engineers are working on an innovative method that could boost the U.S. lithium supply at home by extracting lithium from geothermal brines in California’s Salton Sea region.
Brines are the liquid leftover in a geothermal plant after heat and steam are used to produce power. That liquid contains lithium and other metals such as manganese, zinc and boron. Normally, it is pumped back underground, but the metals can also be filtered out. https://www.youtube.com/embed/oYtyEVPGEU8?wmode=transparent&start=0 How lithium is extracted during geothermal energy production. Courtesy of Controlled Thermal Resources.
“If test projects now underway prove that battery-grade lithium can be extracted from these brines cost effectively, 11 existing geothermal plants along the Salton Sea alone could have the potential to produce enough lithium metal to provide about 10 times the current U.S. demand,” write geologist Michael McKibben of the University of California, Riverside, and energy policy scholar Bryant Jones of Boise State University.
President Joe Biden invoked the Defense Production Act on March 31, 2022, to provide incentives for U.S. companies to mine and process more critical minerals for batteries.
3. Green hydrogen and other storage ideas
Scientists are working on other ways to boost batteries’ mineral supply chain, too, including recycling lithium and cobalt from old batteries. They’re also developing designs with other materials, explained Kerry Rippy, a researcher with the National Renewable Energy Lab.
Concentrated solar power, for example, stores energy from the sun by heating molten salt and using it to produce steam to drive electric generators, similar to how a coal power plant would generate electricity. It’s expensive, though, and the salts currently used aren’t stable at higher temperature, Rippy writes. The Department of Energy is funding a similar project that is experimenting with heated sand. https://www.youtube.com/embed/fkX-H24Chfw?wmode=transparent&start=0 Hydrogen’s challenges, including its fossil fuel history.
Renewable fuels, such as green hydrogen and ammonia, provide a different type of storage. Since they store energy as liquid, they can be transported and used for shipping or rocket fuel.
Hydrogen gets a lot of attention, but not all hydrogen is green. Most hydrogen used today is actually produced with natural gas – a fossil fuel. Green hydrogen, in contrast, could be produced using renewable energy to power electrolysis, which splits water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen, but again, it’s expensive.
“The key challenge is optimizing the process to make it efficient and economical,” Rippy writes. “The potential payoff is enormous: inexhaustible, completely renewable energy.”
4. Using your EV to power your home
Batteries could also soon turn your electric vehicle into a giant, mobile battery capable of powering your home.
Only a few vehicles are currently designed for vehicle-to-home charging, or V2H, but that’s changing, writes energy economist Seth Blumsack of Penn State University. Ford, for example, says its new F-150 Lightning pickup truck will be able to power an average house for three days on a single charge. https://www.youtube.com/embed/w4XLBOnzE6Q?wmode=transparent&start=0 How bidirectional charging allows EVs to power homes.
For example, he writes, “some homeowners might hope to use their vehicle for what utility planners call ‘peak shaving’ – drawing household power from their EV during the day instead of relying on the grid, thus reducing their electricity purchases during peak demand hours.”
5. Capturing carbon from air and locking it away
Another emerging technology is more controversial.
Humans have put so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere over the past two centuries that just stopping fossil fuel use won’t be enough to quickly stabilize the climate. Most scenarios, including in recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, show the world will have to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, as well.
The technology to capture carbon dioxide from the air exists – it’s called direct air capture – but it’s expensive.
Engineers and geophysicists like David Goldberg of Columbia University are exploring ways to cut those costs by combining direct air capture technology with renewable energy production and carbon storage, like offshore wind turbines built above undersea rock formations where captured carbon could be locked away.
The world’s largest direct air capture plant, launched in 2021 in Iceland, uses geothermal energy to power its equipment. The captured carbon dioxide is mixed with water and pumped into volcanic basalt formations underground. Chemical reactions with the basalt turn it into a hard carbonate.
Goldberg, who helped developed the mineralization process used in Iceland, sees similar potential for future U.S. offshore wind farms. Wind turbines often produce more energy than their customers need at any given time, making excess energy available.
“Built together, these technologies could reduce the energy costs of carbon capture and minimize the need for onshore pipelines, reducing impacts on the environment,” Goldberg writes.
Editor’s note: This story is a roundup of articles from The Conversation’s archives.
Scientists at a laboratory in England have shattered the record for the amount of energy produced during a controlled, sustained fusion reaction. The production of 59 megajoules of energy over five seconds at the Joint European Torus – or JET – experiment in England has been called “a breakthrough” by some news outlets and caused quite a lot of excitement among physicists. But a common line regarding fusion electricity production is that it is “always 20 years away.”
photo collage / Lynxotic / adobe stock
We are a nuclear physicist and a nuclear engineer who study how to develop controlled nuclear fusion for the purpose of generating electricity.
The JET result demonstrates remarkable advancements in the understanding of the physics of fusion. But just as importantly, it shows that the new materials used to construct the inner walls of the fusion reactor worked as intended. The fact that the new wall construction performed as well as it did is what separates these results from previous milestones and elevates magnetic fusion from a dream toward a reality.
Fusing particles together
Nuclear fusion is the merging of two atomic nuclei into one compound nucleus. This nucleus then breaks apart and releases energy in the form of new atoms and particles that speed away from the reaction. A fusion power plant would capture the escaping particles and use their energy to generate electricity.
The fuel for current and future reactors are two different isotopes of hydrogen – meaning they have the one proton, but different numbers of neutrons – called deuterium and tritium. Normal hydrogen has one proton and no neutrons in its nucleus. Deuterium has one proton and one neutron while tritium has one proton and two neutrons.
For a fusion reaction to be successful, the fuel atoms must first become so hot that the electrons break free from the nuclei. This creates plasma – a collection of positive ions and electrons. You then need to keep heating that plasma until it reaches a temperature over 200 million degrees Fahrenheit (100 million Celsius). This plasma must then be kept in a confined space at high densities for a long enough period of time for the fuel atoms to collide into each other and fuse together.
To control fusion on Earth, researchers developed donut-shaped devices – called tokamaks – which use magnetic fields to contain the plasma. Magnetic field lines wrapping around the inside of the donut act like train tracks that the ions and electrons follow. By injecting energy into the plasma and heating it up, it is possible to accelerate the fuel particles to such high speeds that when they collide, instead of bouncing off each other, the fuel nuclei fuse together. When this happens, they release energy, primarily in the form of fast-moving neutrons.
During the fusion process, fuel particles gradually drift away from the hot, dense core and eventually collide with the inner wall of the fusion vessel. To prevent the walls from degrading due to these collisions – which in turn also contaminates the fusion fuel – reactors are built so that they channel the wayward particles toward a heavily armored chamber called the divertor. This pumps out the diverted particles and removes any excess heat to protect the tokamak.
The walls are important
A major limitation of past reactors has been the fact that divertors can’t survive the constant particle bombardment for more than a few seconds. To make fusion power work commercially, engineers need to build a tokamak vessel that will survive for years of use under the conditions necessary for fusion.
Around 2011, engineers at JET upgraded the divertor and inner vessel walls to tungsten. Tungsten was chosen in part because it has the highest melting point of any metal – an extremely important trait when the divertor is likely to experience heat loads nearly 10 times higher than the nose cone of a space shuttle reentering the Earth’s atmosphere. The inner vessel wall of the tokamak was upgraded from graphite to beryllium. Beryllium has excellent thermal and mechanical properties for a fusion reactor – it absorbs less fuel than graphite but can still withstand the high temperatures.
The energy JET produced was what made the headlines, but we’d argue it is in fact the use of the new wall materials which make the experiment truly impressive because future devices will need these more robust walls to operate at high power for even longer periods of time. JET is a successful proof of concept for how to build the next generation of fusion reactors.
The next fusion reactors
The JET tokamak is the largest and most advanced magnetic fusion reactor currently operating. But the next generation of reactors is already in the works, most notably the ITER experiment, set to begin operations in 2027. ITER – which is Latin for “the way” – is under construction in France and funded and directed by an international organization that includes the U.S.
ITER is going to put to use many of the material advances JET showed to be viable. But there are also some key differences. First, ITER is massive. The fusion chamber is 37 feet (11.4 meters) tall and 63 feet (19.4 meters) around – more than eight times larger than JET. In addition, ITER will utilize superconducting magnets capable of producing stronger magnetic fields for longer periods of time compared to JET’s magnets. With these upgrades, ITER is expected to smash JET’s fusion records – both for energy output and how long the reaction will run.
JET’s recent record has shown that years of research in plasma physics and materials science have paid off and brought scientists to the doorstep of harnessing fusion for power generation. ITER will provide an enormous leap forward toward the goal of industrial scale fusion power plants.
“Climate change is here and now,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal. “If a 1,200 year mega-drought isn’t enough to make people realize that, I don’t know what is.”
The megadrought which has gripped western U.S. states including California and Arizona over the past two decades has been made substantially worse by the human-caused climate crisis, new research shows, resulting in the region’s driest period in about 1,200 years.
Scientists at University of California-Los Angeles, NASA, and Columbia University found that extreme heat and dryness in the West over the past two years have pushed the drought that began in 2000 past the conditions seen during a megadrought in the late 1500s.
“We’re sort of shifting into basically unprecedented times relative to anything we’ve seen in the last several hundred years.”
The authors of the new study, which was published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change, followed up on research they had conducted in 2020, when they found the current drought was the second-worst on record in the region after the one that lasted for several years in the 16th century.
Since that study was published, the American West has seen a heatwave so extreme it sparked dozens of wildfires and killed hundreds of people and droughtconditions which affected more than 90% of the area as of last summer, pushing the region’s conditions past “that extreme mark,” according to the Los Angeles Times.
The scientists examined wood cores extracted from thousands of trees at about 1,600 sites across the West, using the data from growth rings in ancient trees to determine soil moisture levels going back to the 800s.
They then compared current conditions to seven other megadroughts—which are defined as droughts that are both severe and generally last a number of decades—that happened between the 800s and 1500s.
The researchers estimated that the extreme dry conditions facing tens of millions of people across the western U.S. have been made about 42% more severe by the climate crisis being driven by fossil fuel extraction and emissions.
“The results are really concerning, because it’s showing that the drought conditions we are facing now are substantially worse because of climate change,” Park Williams, a climate scientist at UCLA and the study’s lead author, told the Los Angeles Times.
In the region Williams and his colleagues examined, the average temperature since the drought began in 2000 was 1.6° Fahrenheit warmer than the average in the previous 50 years. Without the climate crisis driving global temperatures up, the West would still have faced drought conditions, but based on climate models studied by the researchers, there would have been a reprieve from the drought in 2005 and 2006.
“Without climate change, the past 22 years would have probably still been the driest period in 300 years,” Williams said in a statement. “But it wouldn’t be holding a candle to the megadroughts of the 1500s, 1200s, or 1100s.”
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) said the new research must push the U.S. Congress to take far-reaching action to mitigate the climate crisis, as legislation containing measures to shift away from fossil fuel extraction and toward renewable energy is stalled largely due to objections from Republicans and right-wing Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia.
“It’s time for Congress to act by making meaningful investments into climate action—before it’s too late,” she said.
Climate change is here and now.
If a 1,200 year mega-drought isn't enough to make people realize that, I don't know what is. It's time for Congress to act by making meaningful investments into climate action — before it's too late.https://t.co/jExzMKUXxr
The drought has had a variety of effects on the West, including declining water supplies in the largest reservoirs of the Colorado River—Lake Mead and Lake Powell— as well as reservoirs across California and the Great Salt Lake in Utah.
According to the U.S. Drought Monitor, 96% of the Western U.S. is now “abnormally dry” and 88% of the region is in a drought.
“We’re experiencing this variability now within this long-term aridification due to anthropogenic climate change, which is going to make the events more severe,” Isla Simpson, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research who was not involved in the study released Monday, told the Los Angeles Times.
The researchers also created simulations of other droughts they examined between 800 and 1500, superimposing the same amount of drying driven by climate change. In 94% of the simulations, the drought persisted for at least 23 years, and in 75% of the simulations, it lasted for at least three decades—suggesting that the current drought will continue for a number of years.
Williams said it is “extremely unlikely that this drought can be ended in one wet year.”
“We’re sort of shifting into basically unprecedented times relative to anything we’ve seen in the last several hundred years,” Samantha Stevenson, a climate modeler at the University of California, Santa Barbara who was not involved in the study, told the New York Times.
Originally published on Common Dreams by JULIA CONLEY and republished under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license
Without more regulation, this will continue,” said one critic. “We need governments and regulatory bodies to step up and put an end to this greenwashing trend.”
A new study out Monday evaluates the public climate pledges made by 25 of the world’s biggest corporations and concludes they “cannot be taken at face value” because the vast majority of firms analyzed are exaggerating the nature of and progress toward their goals—a greenwashing trend that critics say will continue in the absence of stronger regulation.
“Setting vague targets will get us nowhere without real action, and can be worse than doing nothing if it misleads the public.”
Providing further evidence of the fallacies of “net-zero,”the Corporate Climate Responsibility Monitor 2022 finds that net-zero pledges made by several of the world’s largest companies aim to reduce aggregate greenhouse gas emissions across their full value chains by only 40%, at most, from 2019 levels—a far cry from the 100% implied when they claim to be pursuing “carbon neutrality.”
According to the assessment conducted by NewClimate Insitute in collaboration with Carbon Market Watch, just one company’s net-zero pledge was determined to have “reasonable integrity.” Three were deemed to have “moderate integrity,” 10 “low integrity,” and the remaining 11 “very low integrity.”
“We set out to uncover as many replicable good practices as possible, but we were frankly surprised and disappointed at the overall integrity of the companies’ claims,” lead author Thomas Day of NewClimate Institute said in a statement.
“As pressure on companies to act on climate change rises, their ambitious-sounding headline claims all too often lack real substance, which can mislead both consumers and the regulators that are core to guiding their strategic direction,” said Day. “Even companies that are doing relatively well exaggerate their actions.”
The analysis turned up zero pledges with “high integrity.” Maersk came out on top, with “reasonable integrity,” followed by Apple, Sony, and Vodafone with “moderate integrity.”
Meanwhile, the headline pledges of Amazon, Deutsche Telekom, Enel, GlaxoSmithKline, Google, Hitachi, IKEA, Vale, Volkswagen, and Walmart were rated as having “low integrity.” Those of Accenture, BMW Group, Carrefour, CVS Health, Deutsche Post DHL, E.ON SE, JBS, Nestlé, Novartis, Saint-Gobain, and Unilever were considered to have “very low integrity.”
Although all 25 companies examined in the report establish “some form of zero-emission, net-zero, or carbon-neutral target,” the authors note, just three companies—Maersk, Vodafone, and Deutsche Telekom—make clear commitments to decarbonizing 90% of their entire value chains.
By contrast, at least five companies would effectively decrease their emissions by less than 15%, often by excluding “upstream or downstream emissions”—pollution generated by activities indirectly linked to a company.
Day toldThe Guardian that “it’s short-term action that’s the most important thing, in the climate crisis.”
Nevertheless, noted the British newspaper, “the report show[s] that the companies surveyed would only cut their emissions by about 23% on average by 2030, falling far short of the figure of nearly halving in the next decade that scientists say is needed to limit global heating to 1.5ºC.”
Despite the damning findings, some companies doubled down on their claims of progress. In a statement shared with BBC, Amazon said: “We set these ambitious targets because we know that climate change is a serious problem, and action is needed now more than ever. As part of our goal to reach net-zero carbon by 2040, Amazon is on a path to powering our operations with 100% renewable energy by 2025.”
However, Amazon is one of several companies that have donated to right-wing Democratic Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.) and Joe Manchin (W.Va.), who teamed up with the GOP to torpedo the Build Back Better Act—a piece of legislation that, among other things, would have accelerated the clean energy transition.
According to climate justice advocates, net-zero pledges are inadequate because they are “premised on the notion of canceling out emissions in the atmosphere rather than eliminating their causes.” Because the practice enables powerful entities to continue with business as usual in some places as long as they fund projects that purportedly slash pollution in other places, there is little to no evidence that overall emissions will be sufficiently reduced.
The new study shows how several corporations are inflating the extent of their ambition and progress by taking advantage of ambiguous terms like net-zero and carbon-neutral and by disregarding upstream or downstream emissions.
“Many company pledges are undermined by contentious plans to reduce emissions elsewhere, hidden critical information, and accounting tricks,” states a summary of the report. It continues:
The exclusion of emission sources or market segments is a common issue that reduces the meaning of targets. Eight companies exclude upstream or downstream emissions in their value chain, which usually account for over 90% of the emissions under their control. E.ON may exclude market segments that account for more than 40% of its energy sales; Carrefour appears to exclude locations that account for over 80% of Carrefour branded stores.
24 of 25 companies will likely rely on offsetting credits, of varying quality. At least two-thirds of the companies rely on removals from forests and other biological activities, which can easily be reversed by, for example, a forest fire. Nestlé and Unilever distance themselves from the practice of offsetting at the level of the parent company, but allow and encourage their individual brands to pursue offsetting to sell carbon-neutral labeled products.
Some apparently ambitious targets may lead to very little short-term action. It may be possible for CVS Health to achieve their 2030 emission reduction target with limited additional action, since the target is compared to a base year with extraordinarily high emissions. GlaxoSmithKline may delay the implementation of key emission reduction measures until 2028/2029, ahead of its 2030 target.
As The Guardian reported, “Day said using offsetting tended to obscure whether companies were making genuine progress on cutting their own emissions, or hiding behind offsets to achieve a notional net-zero.”
“It’s better practice not to offset—it’s more transparent and constructive,” said the researcher. “Companies should not be claiming they are net-zero by 2030 unless they are reducing their emissions by 90% by then.”
The failure of so-called “corporate social responsibility” initiatives to deliver on promises to improve the well-being of workers and ecosystems is a longstanding pattern, which is why many progressive critics have called them public relations gimmicks.
According to the new report: “The rapid acceleration of corporate climate pledges, combined with the fragmentation of approaches means that it is more difficult than ever to distinguish between real climate leadership and unsubstantiated greenwashing. This is compounded by a general lack of regulatory oversight at national and sectoral levels. Identifying and promoting real climate leadership is a key challenge that, where addressed, has the potential to unlock greater global climate change mitigation.”
Gilles Dufrasne from Carbon Market Watch said that “misleading advertisements by companies have real impacts on consumers and policymakers.”
“We’re fooled into believing that these companies are taking sufficient action, when the reality is far from it,” said Dufrasne. “Without more regulation, this will continue. We need governments and regulatory bodies to step up and put an end to this greenwashing trend.”
“Companies must face the reality of a changing planet,” he added. “What seemed acceptable a decade ago is no longer enough. Setting vague targets will get us nowhere without real action, and can be worse than doing nothing if it misleads the public.”
In a Monday op-ed, Penn State University climate scientist Michael Mann and Climate Communication director Susan Joy Hassol drew attention to the devastation wrought by corporations that have denied facts to delay necessary political-economic transformations—pointing specifically to a 40-year-long disinformation campaign bankrolled by fossil fuel interests.
Much of the damage caused by extreme weather disasters “could have been avoided had we acted decades ago when the scientific community—and indeed fossil fuel industry’s own scientists—recognized we had a problem,” the pair wrote in The Hill. “While the best time to act boldly to prevent climate catastrophe was decades ago, the second-best time is now.”
Given that the 25 firms analyzed account for roughly 5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, researchers stressed how important it is for them to quickly adopt and scale up best practices.
“If we are to meet this monumental challenge, we will need to use all the arrows in the quiver,” wrote Mann and Hassol. “We must incentivize the energy industry to move aggressively toward clean, renewable energy.”
They concluded, “There is no time left to waste, and failure is not an option.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by KENNY STANCIL and republished under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
“The U.S. is actually expanding fossil fuel infrastructure,” the 18-year-old Swedish climate activist said in a new interview.
In an interview published in TheWashington PostMagazine on Monday, Swedish activist Greta Thunberg said it is “strange” that some consider U.S. President Joe Biden a climate leader even as his administration fails to take the ambitious steps necessary to tackle the intensifying planetary crisis.
When asked whether she is “inspired” by Biden or other world leaders, Thunberg pointed out that “the U.S. is actually expanding fossil fuel infrastructure” under the current administration.
“I’ve met so many people who give me very much hope and just the possibility that we can actually change things.”
“Why is the U.S. doing that?” she asked. “It should not fall on us activists and teenagers who just want to go to school to raise this awareness and to inform people that we are actually facing an emergency.”
“People ask us, ‘What do you want?’ ‘What do you want politicians to do?'” added Thunberg, who helped spark a global, youth-led climate protest movement with a solo strike outside of the Swedish Parliament building in 2018. “And we say, first of all, we have to actually understand what is the emergency.”
“We are trying to find a solution of a crisis that we don’t understand,” she continued. “For example, in Sweden, we ignore—we don’t even count or include more than two-thirds of our actual emissions. How can we solve a crisis if we ignore more than two-thirds of it? So it’s all about the narrative.”
While Biden has touted his decision to bring the U.S. back into the Paris agreement, his pledge to cut the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030, and other initiatives as a show of leadership in the face of an existential threat to humanity, his administration has also approved oil and gas drilling permits at a faster rate than former President Donald Trump’s did.
During Biden’s presidency, according to a report released earlier this month by the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has approved an average of 333 oil and gas drilling permits per month this year alone—40% more than it did over the first three years of Trump’s White House tenure.
“When it comes to climate change policy, President Biden is saying the right things. But we need more than just promises,” Alan Zibel, the lead author of the report, said in a statement. “The reality is that in the battle between the oil industry and Biden, the industry is winning. Despite Biden’s campaign commitments to stop drilling on public lands and waters, the industry still has the upper hand. Without aggressive government action, the fossil fuel industry will continue creating enormous amounts of climate-destroying pollution exploiting lands owned by the public.”
Thunberg’s interview with the Post came at the end of a year that saw planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions quickly rebound to pre-pandemic levels as the U.S. and other major nations continued to burn fossil fuels at an alarming and unsustainable rate.
As Glen Peters of the Center for International Climate Research noted Tuesday, “2021 saw the second-biggest absolute increase in fossil CO2 emissions ever recorded.”
Despite the failure of world leaders to act with sufficient urgency as the climate crisis fuels devastating extreme weather events across the globe, Thunberg said she is “more hopeful now” than she was when she kicked off her lonely school strike in 2018.
“In one sense, we’re in a much worse place than we were then because the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere are higher and the global emissions are still rising at almost record speed. And we have wasted several years of blah, blah, blah,” said Thunberg. “But then, on another note, we have seen what people can do when we actually come together.”
“I’ve met so many people who give me very much hope and just the possibility that we can actually change things,” she added. “That we can treat a crisis like a crisis.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by JAKE JOHNSON and republished under a Creative Commons license(CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
There’s a Neal Stephenson Renaissance Going on Due to one Single Word
Metaverse. In case you’ve not heard of it, metaverse is the term that was coined by Stephenson in his dystopian novel “Snow Crash” to denote a virtual artificial world of corporate exploitation. In all its ironic glory the name, or a shortened version thereof, “Meta” was appropriated as a re-branding vehicle for that empire of corporate greed and exploitation… Facebook.
So then, what better backdrop for the new novel to launch, and with a potentially even more timely theme, could there be other than, namely, the looming destruction our planet faces due to climate change and excessive carbon emissions. Moreover, the lack of human cooperation needed to overcome greed and stupidity in order to resume ourselves.
If this particular perspective on a fictional, but perhaps, soon, all too real, set of circumstances, is not spot on, there is nevertheless a great need for these questions to be addressed.
After all it is ultimately the cooperation and consensus of the entire planet that will be necessary to find, and more importantly, implement a solution that will prevent armageddon.
Perhaps the newly intensified focus on the future – fantasies, but also concerns and disaster aversion planning, is just what is needed. Perhaps authors, artists, engineers and even an average citizen can begin today and find the thread of change in thinking, and ultimately, living that’s needed for all our survival.
From Bookshop.org:
One man – visionary billionaire restaurant chain magnate T. R. Schmidt, Ph.D. – has a Big Idea for reversing global warming, a master plan perhaps best described as “elemental.” But will it work? And just as important, what are the consequences for the planet and all of humanity should it be applied?
Ranging from the Texas heartland to the Dutch royal palace in the Hague, from the snow-capped peaks of the Himalayas to the sunbaked Chihuahuan Desert, Termination Shockbrings together a disparate group of characters from different cultures and continents who grapple with the real-life repercussions of global warming. Ultimately, it asks the question: Might the cure be worse than the disease?
Epic in scope while heartbreakingly human in perspective, Termination Shock sounds a clarion alarm, ponders potential solutions and dire risks, and wraps it all together in an exhilarating, witty, mind-expanding speculative adventure.
If we continue not acting against the real cause of the climate crisis—the capitalist mode of production and the capitalist worldview—they will take it as a social license to carry on with collapse.
This past week’s flurry of announcements over “ambitious action” by governments during the COP26 in Glasgow has been justly received with scepticism by climate justice activists and the general public (and enthusiastic support by the media in general). During this same period important revelations of the massive gap in terms of necessary emission cuts and country’s plans emerged, as the broader rejection of greenwashing became pervasive. The narrative of false solutions and green capitalism doesn’t work. Yesterday, the revelation that over 800 oil & gas wells are being planned for drilling still this year and in 2022, in the report “Drill, Baby, Drill“, makes it clear that the proceedings of COP26 are mostly propaganda, as the only real, mandatory and contractualized plan global capitalism has for the climate crisis is collapse.
The reason why the climate crisis is not being solved is because it will lead to the biggest shift in power in the history of humanity, it will lead to the biggest transfer of wealth and loss of profit in history.
The scenario is the most dire ever. Not only the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is at its highest for millions of years, temperatures keep pushing closer to 1.5ºC and emissions are rising once again after the Covid hiatus. The IPCC scientists have leaked the second draft of Group II’s report, which states that “estimates of committed CO2 emissions from current fossil energy infrastructure are 658 GtCO2 […] nearly the double the remaining carbon budget,” revealing that “others [scientists] stress that climate change is caused by industrial development and more specifically the character of social and economic development produced by the nature of the capitalist society, which they therefore view as ultimately unsustainable.” In a few months, we will understand the level of political and business editing in the final report that finally comes out.
Yet, current infrastructure is not enough for global capitalism. In the “Drill, Baby, Drill” report, made public by the Glasgow Agreement at the COP26 Coalition’s People Summit, a still bigger measure of incoherence appears. There are 816 new oil & gas wells being planned and drilled until the end of the year and in 2022. These are located in 76 countries all around the world, countries whose governments are currently sitting in the halls of the COP26 in Glasgow, to “negotiate” a solution for the climate crisis.
The host UK appears close to the top of desired new wells, with 36, mostly offshore, in the basins of Central Graben, Moray Firth, the North Sea and Shetland. It is very likely that while Boris Johnson was doing his James Bond gag on stage, at least some four wells were being drilled to add to British fossil fuel reserves, making him a sort of meta-Bond villain. The top of the ranking for most wells planned goes to Australia and Russia, with 80 wells each, closely followed by Mexico with 78. Australia, Russia, Mexico, Indonesia, USA, Norway, UK, Brazil and Myanmar plan to drill over 500 oil & gas wells between now and the end of 2022. The report points out that this is very likely an underestimation. The companies most involved in drilling these wells are the gallery of the usual suspects: ENI, Petronas, Shell, Equinor, Total, Pemex, BP, Pertamina, Chevron and ExxonMobil. There are at least 67 wells planned above the Arctic Polar Circle. Total and ExxonMobil are in a contest to drill the deepest well ever in the ocean (Total is going for 3628m deep in Angola, and ExxonMobil is going for 3800m deep in Brazil). Many of these companies are spending millions every year on propaganda for carbon neutrality and other false solutions, blocking real action and expanding their operations.
The report also includes a sample of wells drilled in 2021 so far, with China on top, followed by Turkey, Russia, Norway, Indonesia, Mexico, Pakistan, Australia and Egypt, the host for the next COP.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. It is the way this system operates: just enough propaganda of “ambition” and technofixes to keep fossils flowing as ever, while the climate collapses. The information does provide us with a question: if the on climate change debate is framed by companies and governments around the terms of net-zero, carbon credits, carbon taxes and offsettings, rather than stopping emissions, when will it ever come to the real problem of the climate crisis? Well, never. And that is the purpose.
Governments and companies are actively engaged in not cutting emissions, but also in effectively increasing them. Each and every one of these wells is a public crime against Humanity and all species on this planet, advertised in advance. It is good that we know them, though, for it is better to know fossil capitalism’s plans to collapse us beforehand and in as much detail as possible. That is why the call on the report does not go out to governments and fossil companies to suddenly act after over three decades of expanding fossil use. The call goes out to the climate justice movement and civil society: spread this information far and wide, act on it, campaign on it, block, stop and detain all of these projects. Other millions of fossil and fossil-based projects compose the menu of collapse daily confirmed by governments and companies. They are the legally binding commitment for our collapse and need to be stopped.
The overwhelming agreement on the reason why the climate crisis is not being fixed is becoming as high as the overwhelming scientific agreement on the cause of the climate crisis. The reason why the climate crisis is not being solved is because it will lead to the biggest shift in power in the history of humanity, it will lead to the biggest transfer of wealth and loss of profit in history. That means very little to the majority of the human population, as we will be the beneficiaries of this shift, of this transfer, of this redistribution. If we solve this crisis, we will have the chance to heal our battered planet. That is why their plan means collapse: they refuse to abdicate an inch of their brutal privilege and power. If we continue not acting against the real cause of the climate crisis—the capitalist mode of production and the capitalist worldview—they will take it as a social license to carry on with collapse. Even without social license, their plan will always lead to collapse. It’s not circumstantial, it is the core of this system. We need to collapse them.
Originally published on Common Dreams by JOÃO CAMARGO and republished under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
From the urban sprawl of Houston to the riverways of Virginia, air pollution from industrial plants is elevating the cancer risk of an estimated quarter of a million Americans to a level the federal government considers unacceptable.
Some of these hot spots of toxic air are infamous. An 85-mile stretch of the Mississippi River in Louisiana that’s thronged with oil refineries and chemical plants has earned the nickname Cancer Alley. Many other such areas remain unknown, even to residents breathing in the contaminated air.
Until now.
ProPublica undertook an analysis that has never been done before. Using advanced data processing software and a modeling tool developed by the Environmental Protection Agency, we mapped the spread of cancer-causing chemicals from thousands of sources of hazardous air pollution across the country between 2014 and 2018. The result is an unparalleled view of how toxic air blooms around industrial facilities and spreads into nearby neighborhoods.
At the map’s intimate scale, it’s possible to see up close how a massive chemical plant near a high school in Port Neches, Texas, laces the air with benzene, an aromatic gas that can cause leukemia. Or how a manufacturing facility in New Castle, Delaware, for years blanketed a day care playground with ethylene oxide, a highly toxic chemical that can lead to lymphoma and breast cancer. Our analysis found that ethylene oxide is the biggest contributor to excess industrial cancer risk from air pollutants nationwide. Corporations across the United States, but especially in Texas and Louisiana, manufacture the colorless, odorless gas, which lingers in the air for months and is highly mutagenic, meaning it can alter DNA.
In all, ProPublica identified more than a thousand hot spots of cancer-causing air. They are not equally distributed across the country. A quarter of the 20 hot spots with the highest levels of excess risk are in Texas, and almost all of them are in Southern states known for having weaker environmental regulations. Census tracts where the majority of residents are people of color experience about 40% more cancer-causing industrial air pollution on average than tracts where the residents are mostly white. In predominantly Black census tracts, the estimated cancer risk from toxic air pollution is more than double that of majority-white tracts.
After reviewing ProPublica’s map, Wayne Davis, an environmental scientist formerly with the EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, said, “The public is going to learn that EPA allows a hell of a lot of pollution to occur that the public does not think is occurring.”
Our analysis comes at a critical juncture for the fate of America’s air. After decades of improvement, air quality has, by some metrics, begun to decline. In the last four years, the Trump administration rolled back more than a hundred environmental protections, including two dozen air pollution and emissions policies.
The EPA says it “strives to protect the greatest number of people possible” from an excess cancer risk worse than 1 in a million. That risk level means that if a million people in an area are continuously exposed to toxic air pollutants over a presumed lifetime of 70 years, there would likely be at least one case of cancer on top of those from other risks people already face. According to ProPublica’s analysis, 74 million Americans — more than a fifth of the population — are being exposed to estimated levels of risk higher than this.
EPA policy sets the upper limit of acceptable excess cancer risk at 1 in 10,000 — 100 times more than the EPA’s more aspirational goal and a level of exposure that numerous experts told ProPublica is too high. ProPublica found that an estimated 256,000 people are being exposed to risks beyond this threshold and that an estimated 43,000 people are being subjected to at least triple this level of risk. Still, the EPA sees crossing its risk threshold as more of a warning sign than a mandate for action: The law doesn’t require the agency to penalize polluters that, alone or in combination, raise the cancer risk in an area above the acceptable level.
In response to ProPublica’s findings, Joe Goffman, acting assistant administrator for the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation, said in an emailed statement, “Toxic air emissions from industrial facilities are a problem that must be addressed.” Under President Joe Biden’s administration, “the EPA has reinvigorated its commitment to protect public health from toxic air emissions from industrial facilities — especially in communities that have already suffered disproportionately from air pollution and other environmental burdens.”
ProPublica’s reporting exposes flaws with EPA’s implementation of the Clean Air Act, a landmark law that dramatically reduced air pollution across America but provided less protection to those who live closest to industrial polluters.
The 1970 law resulted in outdoor air quality standards for a handful of widespread “criteria” pollutants, including sulfur dioxide and particulate matter, which could be traced to exhaust pipes and smokestacks all over the country and were proven to aggravate asthma and lead to early deaths. But 187 other dangerous chemicals, now known as hazardous air pollutants or air toxics, never got this level of attention. At the time, the science demonstrating the harms of these compounds, which primarily impact people in neighborhoods that border industrial facilities — so-called fence-line communities — was still in its early stages. The EPA did not receive enough funding to set the same strict limits, and industry lobbying weakened the agency’s emerging regulations.
In 1990, Congress settled on a different approach to regulating air toxics. Since then, the EPA has made companies install equipment to reduce their pollution and studied the remaining emissions to see if they pose an unacceptable health risk.
The way the agency assesses this risk vastly underestimates residents’ exposure, according to our analysis. Instead of looking at how cancer risk adds up when polluters are clustered together in a neighborhood, the EPA examines certain types of facilities and equipment in isolation. When the agency studies refineries, for example, it ignores a community’s exposure to pollution from nearby metal foundries or shipyards.
Matthew Tejada, director of the EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice, told ProPublica that tackling hot spots of toxic air will require “working back through 50 years of environmental regulation in the United States, and unpacking and untying a whole series of knots.”
“The environmental regulatory system wasn’t set up to deal with these things,” he said. “All of the parts of the system have to be re-thought to address hot spots or places where we know there’s a disproportionate burden.”
The Clean Air Act rarely requires industry or the EPA to monitor for air toxics, leaving residents near these plants chronically uninformed about what they’re breathing in. And when companies report their emissions to the EPA, they’re allowed to estimate them using flawed formulas and monitoring methods.
“These fence line communities are sacrifice zones,” said Jane Williams, executive director of California Communities Against Toxics. “Before there was climate denial, there was cancer denial. We release millions of pounds of carcinogens into our air, water and food and act mystified when people start getting sick.”
Brittany Madison is worried about the air. Madison, who is 31, lives in Baytown, Texas, a city next to the Houston ship channel where the skyline is dense with the glittering towers of chemical plants. In the apartment she shares with her 7-year-old son, her 39-year-old sister and her nieces and nephew, the low, steady hum of air purifiers is unremitting. Her 3-year-old niece, K’ryah, has suffered from debilitating asthma attacks since she was born. Even on good days, the family tries to keep K’ryah indoors as much as possible. On bad days, they shut the windows. And about once a month, they rush her to the hospital, where she’s given oxygen and injected with steroids.
Madison, who’s six months pregnant, loves taking long walks and watching the kids at the playground, but lately she’s been spending more and more time inside. Her home lies a few miles north of ExxonMobil Baytown Complex, one of the largest refineries in the world. Over the years, Exxon’s massive petrochemical operation has sent millions of pounds of toxic chemicals into the sky during accidents, unplanned discharges and fires. (ExxonMobil did not respond to requests for comment.) After a particularly smoky fire in 2019, Madison came down with a migraine, her first. Her son, who didn’t know the word for headache, told her that his brain was hurting.
Madison began to wonder if living near all these pipes and tanks and towers had something to do with the health conditions that afflicted her neighborhood. Air toxics are associated with a host of adverse effects that range from headaches and nausea to lung damage, heart failure and death, and they’re especially hazardous for kids and the unborn. A study by the University of Texas School of Public Health found that children living within 2 miles of the Houston ship channel had a higher risk of developing acute lymphocytic leukemia. Madison’s father, who worked at several nearby plants, died from a heart attack at 43. Friends and family have died of cancer. “You wonder what causes it. Is it the air we breathe? Or the food?” Madison asked. “There are just all these different questions that no one has answers to.”
The cancer risks from industrial pollution can be compounded by factors like age, diet, genetic predisposition and exposure to radiation; the knock-on effect of inhaling toxic air for decades might, for example, mean the difference between merely having a family history of breast cancer and actually developing the disease yourself. While the cancer and asthma rates in Houston’s Harris County are comparable with those in the rest of the state, Texas officials have identified cancer clusters in several of the city’s neighborhoods.
Large swaths of the Greater Houston area make up the third-biggest hot spot of cancer-causing air in the country, according to our analysis, after Louisiana’s Cancer Alley and an area around Port Arthur, Texas, which is on the Louisiana border. For many homes closest to the fence lines of petrochemical plants in cities like La Porte and Port Neches, Texas, the estimated excess risk of cancer ranges from three to six times the level that the EPA considers acceptable.
But because of the way that the EPA underestimates risk, the true dangers of living in a toxic hot spot are often invisible to regulators and residents.
The agency breaks things down into the smallest possible categories “to avoid addressing what we call cumulative risk,” said John Walke, an attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council who formerly worked as an EPA lawyer advising the Office of Air and Radiation. “But our bodies do not parse out air pollution according to rule labels or industrial equipment or industrial source categories.” The cancer risk from each facility or type of equipment may be at levels the agency considers “acceptable,” but taken together, the potential harms can be substantial.
The EPA initially sent ProPublica a statement saying that it “ensures that risks from individual source categories are acceptable and that the standards provide an ample margin of safety to protect public health.”
In another statement sent after an interview, the agency added, “We understand that communities often confront multiple sources of toxic air pollution and face cumulative risks greater than the risk from a single source.” The EPA added that it was working both to better harness the science on cumulative risks and “to better understand risks for communities who are overburdened by numerous sources of multiple pollutants.”
Madison can’t help but notice that when her family travels, K’ryah’s asthma improves. “The first chance I get, I’m moving far away from Texas and never looking back,” she said. “I love being outside. I love seeing the stars. I don’t want to feel like someone is pumping gas onto our front porch.”
The locations of the hot spots identified by ProPublica are anything but random. Industrial giants tend to favor areas that confer strategic advantages: On the Gulf Coast, for instance, oil rigs abound, so it’s more convenient to build refineries along the shoreline. Corporations also favor places where land is cheap and regulations are few.
Under federal law, the EPA delegates the majority of its enforcement powers to state and local authorities, which means that the environmental protections afforded to Americans vary widely between states. Texas, which is home to some of the largest hot spots in the nation, has notoriouslylaxregulations.
Between 2008 and 2018, lawmakers cut funding for state pollution-control programs by 35% while boosting the state’s overall budget by 41%, according to a report by the Environmental Integrity Project, an advocacy group founded by former EPA staffers. A Texas Tribune story from 2017 found that during the prior year, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality had levied fines in fewer than 1% of the cases in which polluters exceeded emission limits. Even when penalties are issued, many polluters see these fines as part of the cost of doing business, said Craig Johnston, a former lawyer at the EPA and a professor of environmental law at Lewis and Clark Law School.
Gary Rasp, a TCEQ spokesperson, told ProPublica that the agency “has taken actions to monitor, mitigate, and improve the air quality in fenceline communities.” The agency runs dozens of stationary air toxics monitors across the state, he added, and “by continuously evaluating air monitoring data, which is more accurate than modeling, TCEQ can identify issues.” The agency also inspects industrial facilities and “has an active enforcement program, referring particularly egregious cases to the Texas Office of the Attorney General.”
That the people living inside these hot spots are disproportionately Black is not a coincidence. Our findings build on decades of evidence demonstrating that pollution is segregated: People of color are exposed to far greater levels of air pollution than whites — a pattern that persists across income levels. These disparities are rooted in racist real estate practices like redlining and the designation of low-income neighborhoods and communities of color as mixed residential-industrial zones. In cities like Houston, for example, all-white zoning boards targeted Black neighborhoods for the siting of noxious facilities, like landfills, incinerators and garbage dumps. Robert Bullard, a professor of urban planning and environmental policy at Texas Southern University, has called the practice “PIBBY” or “Place In Blacks’ Back Yard” — a spin on the acronym “NIMBY” (“Not In My Back Yard”).
Many of the neighborhoods that border chemical plants are low-income and lack the same resources, access to health care and political capital that wealthier neighborhoods can bring to fights against intrusive commercial activities. In places like Baytown, working-class people depend on the very companies that sicken them to earn a living. Over the years, the shadow of industry can permanently impair not just a neighborhood’s health but also its economic prospects and property values, fueling a cycle of disinvestment. “Industries rely on having these sinks — these sacrifice zones — for polluting,” said Ana Baptista, an environmental policy professor at The New School. “That political calculus has kept in place a regulatory system that allows for the continued concentration of industry. We sacrifice these low-income, African American, Indigenous communities for the economic benefit of the region or state or country.”
Tejada, the EPA’s director of environmental justice, said that the Biden administration and the EPA are focused on confronting these disparities. “These places didn’t happen by accident. The disproportionality of the impacts that they face, the generations of disinvestment and lack of access are not coincidences. These places were created. And it is the responsibility of everyone, including the government — chiefly the government — to do something about it.”
The federal government has long had the information it would need to take on these hot spots. The EPA collects emissions data from more than 20,000 industrial facilities across the country and has even developed its own state-of-the-art tool — the Risk-Screening Environmental Indicators model — to estimate the impact of toxic emissions on human health. The model, known as RSEI, was designed to help regulators and lawmakers pinpoint where to target further air-monitoring efforts, data-quality inspections or, if necessary, enforcement actions. Researchers and journalists have used this model for various investigations over the years, including this one.
And yet the agency’s own use of its powerful modeling tool has been limited. There’s been a lack of funding for and a dearth of interest in RSEI’s more ambitious applications, according to several former and current EPA employees. Wayne Davis, the former EPA scientist, managed the RSEI program under the Trump administration. He said that some of his supervisors were hesitant about publishing information that would directly implicate a facility. “They always told us, ‘Don’t make a big deal of it, don’t market it, and hopefully you’ll continue to get funding next year.’ They didn’t want to make anything public that would raise questions about why the EPA hadn’t done anything to regulate that facility.”
Nicolaas Bouwes, a former senior analyst at the EPA and a chief architect of the RSEI model, recalled the occasional battle to get colleagues to accept the screening tool, let alone share its findings with the public. “There’s often been pushback from having this rich data sheet too readily available because it could make headlines,” he said. “What I find annoying is that the EPA has the same information at their disposal and they don’t use it. If ProPublica can do this, so can the EPA.”
In its statement, the EPA said that it plans to improve its approach for sharing air toxics data faster and more regularly with the public. “EPA has not published calculated cancer risks using RSEI modeled results,” it continued. “RSEI results are not designed as a substitute for more comprehensive, inclusive, or site specific risk assessments,” but as a potential starting point that should only be used “to identify situations of potential concern that may warrant further investigation.”
Indeed, our map works as a screening tool, not as a site-specific risk assessment. It cannot be used to tie individual cancer cases to emissions from specific industrial facilities, but it can be used to diagnose what the EPA calls “situations of potential concern.”
Our analysis arrives as America faces new threats to its air quality. The downstream effects of climate change, like warmer temperatures and massive wildfires, have created more smoke and smog. The Trump administration diluted, scuttled or reversed dozens of air pollution protections — actions estimated to lead to thousands of additional premature deaths. In 2018, then-EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt created a massive air toxics loophole when he rolled back a key provision of the Clean Air Act, known as “Once In, Always In,” allowing thousands of large polluters to relax their use of pollution-controlling equipment.
Biden has yet to close this loophole, but he has signaled plans to alleviate the disproportionate impacts borne by the people who live in these hot spots. Within his first few days in office, he established two White House councils to address environmental injustice. And in March, Congress confirmed his appointment of EPA administrator Michael Regan, who has directed the agency to strengthen its enforcement of violations “in communities overburdened by pollution.”
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Environmental advocates say that the Biden administration should lean on the EPA to test the air in toxic hot spots and take action against polluters who are violating their permits. It should also push for new rules that take into account the much greater risks posed when multiple facilities are grouped together in an area. Advocates also say the EPA should reexamine its tolerance of 1 in 10,000 as an acceptable excess cancer risk and extend the limit of 1 in 1 million to all, given how much the knowledge and technology surrounding air toxics has advanced since the 1980s. “We recognize that what was acceptable then is not OK now,” said Emma Cheuse, an attorney and air toxics expert at the advocacy group Earthjustice.
The EPA adopted the 1 in 10,000 threshold based on a 1988 agency report that listed the probability of dying from unusual things like “ignition of clothing,” “venomous plants” or drowning and then choosing a risk level roughly in the middle of the range. EPA’s decision was “essentially arbitrary,” said Patricia Ross McCubbin, a professor of environmental law at Southern Illinois University who’s researched the agency’s risk program.
Tejada said that the potential reevaluation of the EPA’s acceptable risk limit was “a big-time policy question.”
“We want to see progress” on hot spots, Tejada added, but given the complexity of the problems, he warned that progress could take time. “We’re not going to lie to anybody and say, ‘Well, by the end of this administration, everyone’s going to be fine.’ I don’t think anybody would buy that.”
Without stronger protections, many of the people living in fence-line communities worry about becoming collateral damage. For residents of Mossville, Louisiana, it is already too late.
Among the most polluted pockets of the country, the community in southwest Louisiana has all but disappeared amid the steady encroachment of the South African chemical giant Sasol. The company’s most recent construction led to a buyout of more than half of the area’s remaining residents. In the late 1990s, more than 500 people lived in Mossville. Residents say only 50 or so remain.
Mossville was founded by formerly enslaved people in the 1790s, long before the Civil War. Debra Sullivan Ramirez, 67, remembers her childhood there as a kind of idyll. She and her family lived off the land, with its shady swamps and leafy orchards. They grew their own fruits and vegetables, hunted and fished, and strained juice from Mayhaw trees to make jelly. After church on Sundays, Sullivan Ramirez remembers, she would fall asleep on her grandma’s front porch to the soothing hum of the Conoco chemical plant across the street.
In hindsight, there had always been warning signs. Fluorescent ponds. Plumes of yellow smoke. The occasional explosion in the sky. Not to mention all the sickness. Many of her neighbors suffered from respiratory problems and heart disease. Her father had diabetes, which may have been triggered by dioxin, a chemical that attacks the pancreas. Her sister Sandra died of ovarian cancer at 61. Her neighbor Kathy Jones died at 58 from an 8-pound tumor near her kidney.
“It wasn’t one block that didn’t have cancer,” Sullivan Ramirez said.
Over the years, Sullivan Ramirez herself has struggled with nerve degeneration and scleroderma, a rare condition that involves the tightening of the skin and connective tissues. While it can be difficult to link specific cases of disease to pollution exposure, the evidence in Mossville has accumulated: In a 1998 health survey conducted by the University of Texas, 84% of Mossville residents reported having headaches, dizziness, tremors and seizures. An EPA study from the same year found that the average level of dioxins in the blood of Mossville residents was dangerously high — triple that of the general U.S. population. Even small amounts of dioxin, one of the most poisonous chemicals released by facilities, can cause developmental problems, damage the immune system and lead to cancer. A 2007 report found that the types of dioxin compounds in the blood of Mossville residents matched those emitted by local industrial facilities.
In an emailed statement, Sasol noted that its property buyout stemmed from direct requests from Mossville residents and that the company offered owners more than the appraised value of their homes. “Sasol and its predecessor have produced or handled chemicals at our Lake Charles complex for more than 60 years. We understand the science and have controls in place to ensure our operations are safe, protective of the environment, compliant with regulations and sustainable over the long term,” wrote Sarah Hughes, a spokesperson for Sasol. “Sasol is proud of our engagement with our neighbors in Mossville and the positive impact it has had on many of its residents.”
Sullivan Ramirez is wary of too much talk. She knows that the new administration has promised something more for communities like hers, but she doesn’t want to get her hopes up. The presentations from captains of industry, the listening sessions with earnest bureaucrats, the proposals from slick attorneys, the promises tossed off by politicians — over the years, she’s heard it all.
The people of Mossville are right to be skeptical, the EPA’s Tejada acknowledged. “I would be skeptical if I was from Mossville,” he added. “They should be skeptical until we actually show up and do the things that they’ve been asking us to do for a long time. But there’s now a level of commitment to actually tangling with these issues in a really serious, substantive way.”
After years of activism in Mossville, Sullivan Ramirez moved to Lake Charles, just a short drive away. But she worries the industrial sprawl will one day overtake her new home. To Sullivan Ramirez, Mossville is “the key” — a warning of what the future holds for America’s other hot spots if business continues as usual.
“This is the 21st century,” she said. “The act of polluting our lands and robbing our communities — when will enough be enough?”
In wake of what she calls “failed” Cop26 in Glasgow, a fitting gesture of truth
In the video above the real story of NetZero by 2050 is told, without window dressing and in total honesty. Frustration with government responses to global warming are on the rise, as well they should be. The video is a light hearted and yet deadly serious take on the situation and how it is going to affect all of us who live on this planet.
Though delivered in the trademark style of TheJuiceMedia the facts that are contained in the colorful and grimly entertaining clip are 100% accurate. And that is why it is so important to watch, like and retweet.
It has always been the case, sadly, that no Government will take action against the carbon emitting and producing infrastructure that they are beholden to, until that action is demanded by million upon millions of world citizens, in other words the people that are being affected most by the negative effects of climate change that are already surrounding us.
The underlying plea of both activists like Greta and TheJuiceMedia is that we all have to step up and get loud – now, as the plan for NetZero 2050 is more of the same blah blah blah that Governments have been spewing for more than 30 years.
