Climate change is expanding the reach of aflatoxin, a chemical produced by a gray-green mold that infects corn crops and could threaten widespread damage to the country’s lucrative Corn Belt. According to new research, aflatoxin has been primarily confined to the South. But as hot and dry weather moves northward, fungal infections will move with it, hitting the Midwest more frequently and on a wider scale than previously seen.
The study, published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, found that under current climate change scenarios, aflatoxin contamination will increase in 89.5% of corn-growing counties in 15 states by the 2030s. This includes a number of states in the Corn Belt, such as Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana, which produce the majority of the United States’ corn — an $82 billion industry.
Although the U.S. has strong protections in place to prevent contaminated corn from reaching consumers, any increase in the food supply is concerning from a public health standpoint, said Felicia Wu, a food science professor at Michigan State University and one of the paper’s authors. “It’s a nasty thing to have in our crops,” Wu said.
Aflatoxin contributes to up to 155,000 cases of liver cancer per year, mostly in Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, where contaminated products can more easily reach consumers; outbreaks in Kenya and Tanzania have killed hundreds. In the U.S., the Food and Drug Administration limits aflatoxin levels to 20 parts per billion for corn that’s destined for products like tortilla chips or feed for dairy cows, which can transfer the toxin into their milk. But even levels below the legal limit can be harmful, Wu said, with children and immunocompromised people being particularly vulnerable. No treatments for aflatoxin poisoning currently exist.
It’s difficult to tell how much aflatoxin is ultimately reaching consumers. Storage facilities called grain elevators mix multiple batches of corn together to dilute aflatoxin amounts to stay under the FDA limit. But because of high rates of testing error, the actual levels could be higher, said Charles Hurburgh, a grain expert at Iowa State University.
“Normally the grain industry figures that the natural blending will hold the levels below FDA [limits] … and expect that when the grain finally gets to the user, it’ll be okay,” Hurburgh said. “It’s a little concerning to think that climate change may start gradually raising those levels.”
Aflatoxin is produced by two different types of fungi, Aspergillus flavus and Aspergillus parasiticus, and is an extremely potent liver carcinogen. These fungi, which target corn as well as tree nuts and cotton, thrive in hot and moist environments. But drought conditions can encourage their growth by weakening the plant and making it more susceptible to infection. In 2012, a wave of hot and dry weather led to an aflatoxin outbreak in the Midwest, causing more than $1 billion in losses — a scenario Wu said will happen more and more frequently with climate change.
In a 2016 study, Wu and several other researchers estimated that climate change-related aflatoxin contamination would end up costing farmers up to $1.68 billion per year; since most crops are subsidized by federal crop insurance, a large portion of that loss would then be passed on to taxpayers.
But Wu says there are steps farmers can take to lower the risk of aflatoxin contamination: those who have access to water can irrigate their corn when conditions get hotter and drier, while advances in plant breeding and genetic modification have developed strains that are both more drought-tolerant and resistant to fungal infections.
Robyn Allscheid, the director of research and productivity at the National Corn Growers Association says some producers are starting to think ahead in order to prevent the spread of aflotoxin, but she says that implementation hasn’t yet caught up with the research.
“These aren’t issues that are typically at the top of [growers’] minds,” she said. “We’re going to see sporadic losses still throughout the Midwest.”
September in Oklahoma is typically a rainy season, when farmers take advantage of the state’s third-wettest month to plant winter wheat. But last year, many were caught off guard by abnormally dry weather that descended without warning. In the span of just three weeks, nearly three-quarters of the state began experiencing drought conditions, ranging from moderate to extreme.
Fast-moving droughts like this one are developing more and more quickly as climate change pushes temperatures to new extremes, recent research indicates — adding a new threat to the dangers of pests, flooding, and more long-term drought that farmers in the U.S. already face. Known as “flash droughts,” these dry periods can materialize in as quickly as five days, often devastating agricultural areas that aren’t prepared for them.
During last year’s drought in Oklahoma, Jonathan Conder, a meteorologist for a local news station in Oklahoma City, marveled at the speed and severity of the event. Tulsa, the state’s second-largest city, went 80 days without more than a quarter-inch of rain, while temperatures in southwestern Oklahoma climbed into the triple digits.
“This is huge for Oklahoma,” Conder said during his broadcast on October 1. “Our agricultural community, the farmers who plant wheat, they may not even be able to plant if they don’t get two inches of rain.”
Flash droughts can dry out an area in the span of weeks. The top images show the impact of a flash drought in Oklahoma in 2012, compared to the same area two years later in the bottom row. Jeffrey Basara
The threshold for drought conditions differs by location, with the U.S. Drought Monitor using data on soil moisture, streamflow, and precipitation to categorize droughts by their severity. While typical droughts develop over months as precipitation gradually declines, flash droughts are characterized by a steep drop in rainfall, particularly during a season that normally receives plenty, along with high temperatures and fast winds that quickly dry out the soil. They can wither crops or prevent seeds from sprouting, delaying or diminishing the harvest.
Now, flash droughts are coming on faster and faster — making them more difficult to predict and more damaging, according to a recent study published in Nature Communications. The research, from scientists at the University of Texas and Hong Kong Polytechnic University, found that in the last 20 years, the percentage of flash droughts developing in under a week increased by more than 20 percent in the Central United States.
“There should be more attention paid to this phenomenon,” said Zong-Liang Yang, a geosciences professor at the University of Texas and one of the study’s co-authors, as well as “how to actually implement [these findings] into agricultural management.”
Scientists have long warned that warming temperatures and shifting rainfall patterns due to climate change pose a threat to the cash crops of the Midwest and Great Plains, primarily corn, wheat, and soybeans. But flash droughts are a relatively new area of research, Yang said, with the term gaining usage only in the last couple of decades.
The increase in their severity and frequency, though, is already being felt across the U.S. In 2012, a flash drought struck the Central U.S. in the middle of the growing season, causing an estimated $31.2 billion in crop losses. Another flash drought hit Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota in the spring of 2017, leading to more than $2.6 billion in agricultural losses, along with “widespread wildfires, poor air quality, damaged ecosystems, and degraded mental health,” according to a study published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.
Flash droughts are also a global problem, with Brazil, India, and multiple countries in Africa facing the worst impacts. In 2010, a flash drought followed by a heatwave in Russia temporarily halted wheat exports, a major disruption for communities across the Middle East that depend on the country’s grain.
The damage flash droughts can cause depends on the crop and the time of year, said Dennis Todey, director of the Midwest Climate Hub for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Corn is the most vulnerable during its pollination season in mid-summer, while soybeans are affected in August and wheat during planting season in the spring.
Drought is a natural part of the climate in this region, Todey said, particularly in the western part of the Corn Belt — a region that encompasses the Midwest and the Great Plains. Many farmers have learned to adapt and integrate dry conditions into their planting cycles. But what makes flash droughts so dangerous is their rapid onset, Todey said, leaving little time for agricultural producers to prepare.
“Drought most times is thought of as a slow-starting and then a slow-stopping event,” Todey said. “In a flash drought setting … instead of just starting to dry out gradually, you have surfaces that dry out very quickly, you have some newly planted crops that are starting to be stressed more quickly.”
Last September’s flash drought hit Oklahoma in a matter of weeks. Chad Small / Grist
Many farmers don’t know if they’re starting to experience a drought, though, until expected rains fail to appear. Rainfall in mid-October helped ease the flash drought that began in Oklahoma in September, but after that a much longer drought set in, said Keeff Felty, a fourth-generation wheat and cotton farmer in the southwestern part of the state. As a result, some of his crop never germinated, while his overall yield dropped when it came time for the harvest.
“There’s a lot of information out there, and you have to avail yourself of what works best for you, but you also have to be prepared for it to go totally south,” Felty said. “Nobody saw [the drought] coming, and it’s just a fact of the weather that we don’t have any control over it. It’s just life.”
Typical droughts can last months or even years — the western U.S. is currently experiencing its third decade of “megadrought” — while flash droughts can end more quickly, within weeks or months, Yang said. And they can hit in relatively wet areas, including the eastern part of the country, where drought conditions are much more rare than in the West.
The main reason they’re occurring faster, Yang said, is climate change. As the air warms, it can lead to more evaporation and dry out the soil. This can occur even in areas that can expect to receive more rainfall overall because of climate change, because scientists project that rainfall will be unevenly distributed — falling in more extreme events and making other parts of the year drier.
“Every [recent] decade we have seen is the warmest decade in history,” Yang said. And with the world on track to blow past a global temperature that’s 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than the pre-industrial average, he expects to see both flash droughts and longer droughts occurring more frequently.
Researchers are working on improving their models to better predict flash droughts, Yang said, with the help of new technologies such as more granular satellite monitoring and machine learning. The main marker they look for is high rates of evapotranspiration, when plants suck up water from the soil and then release it into the air through their leaves — a process that accelerates with high temperatures and winds and can be monitored with special cameras that detect fluorescence, or the heat emitted by plants.
If farmers can know when to anticipate a flash drought, Todey said, they can skip or delay planting, or reduce their fertilizer usage when they know a crop won’t grow. They can also adjust their planting schedule and take better care of their soil by minimizing tillage, which dries it out even more. But with less and less time to prepare for flash droughts, Todey said, some may have to make difficult choices about whether to plant at all.
“Agricultural producers naturally adapt to changing conditions,” Todey said. “But eventually there comes a point where [losses] become more frequent. People start going, ‘Okay, this isn’t working.’”
This story was originally published by Undark and is reproduced here as part of theClimate Deskcollaboration.
Across Midwestern farms, if Girish Chowdhary has his way, farmers will someday release beagle-sized robots into their fields like a pack of hounds flushing pheasant. The robots, he says, will scurry in the cool shade beneath a wide diversity of plants, pulling weeds, planting cover crops, diagnosing plant infections, and gathering data to help farmers optimize their farms.
Chowdhary, a researcher at the University of Illinois, works surrounded by corn, one of the most productive monocultures in the world. In the United States, the corn industry was valued at $82.6 billion in 2021, but it — like almost every other segment of the agricultural economy — faces daunting problems, including changing weather patterns, environmental degradation, severe labor shortages, and the rising cost of key supplies, or inputs: herbicides, pesticides, and seed.
Agribusiness as a whole is betting that the world has reached the tipping point where desperate need caused by a growing population, the economic realities of conventional farming, and advancing technology converge to require something called precision agriculture, which aims to minimize inputs and the costs and environmental problems that go with them.
No segment of agriculture is without its passionate advocates of robotics and artificial intelligence as solutions to, basically, all the problems facing farmers today. The extent of their visions ranges from technology that overlays existing farm practices to a comprehensive rethinking of agriculture that eliminates tractors, soil, sunlight, weather, and even being outdoors as factors in farm life.
But the promises of precision agriculture still haven’t been met: Because most of the promised systems aren’t on the market, few final prices have been set and there’s precious little real-world data proving whether they work.
“The marketing around precision agriculture, that it’s going to have a huge impact, we don’t have the data for that yet,” says Emily Duncan, a researcher in the Department of Geography, Environment and Geomatics at the University of Guelph in Canada. “Going back to the idea that we want to reduce the use of inputs, precision agriculture doesn’t necessarily say we’re going to be using less overall.”
Even so, Chowdhary, who is co-founder and chief technical officer of Earthsense, Inc., the company that makes those beagle-sized robots, is hopeful that the adoption of his robots will propel farmers well past precision agriculture, to think about the business of farming in a whole new way. Right now, he says, most farmers focus on yield, defining success as growing more on the same amount of land. The result: horizon-to-horizon, industrial monocultures saturated with chemicals and tended by massive and increasingly expensive machinery. With the help of his robots, Chowdhary foresees a future, instead, of smaller farms living more in harmony with nature, growing a diversity of higher value crops with fewer chemicals.
“The biggest thing we can do is make it easier for farmers to focus on profit, and not just on yield,” Chowdhary wrote in an email to Undark. “Management tools that help reduce fertilizer and herbicide costs while improving the quality of land and keeping yield up will help farmers realize more profit through fundamentally more sustainable techniques.”
Chowdhary’s robots may help farmers cut costs by, among other things, pulling weeds that compete with corn. For centuries, farmers tamed weeds with hoes and plows. World War II gave rise to the modern chemical industry, and the herbicides it produced made farmers perceive weeds as a non-issue, leaving the ground beneath crops like corn unnaturally bare and vastly increasing the yield per acre, revolutionizing the farm economy.
The “OZ” field robot at a technology show in a field in northern Saxony. The device can independently work the soil or remove weeds.
Sebastian Willnow / Picture Alliance via Getty Images
Nature is persistent, however, and inevitably weeds evolved that resist herbicides. To compensate, suppliers blend powerful and increasingly expensive herbicidal cocktails and genetically modify seed to be chemically resistant. That agricultural arms race traps farmers in a cycle of rising costs, threatens precious water resources, and only works until, as Iowa farmer Earl Slinker puts it, “you go out and spray it one year and it doesn’t do anything.” The result is a smaller harvest, according to Slinker, which in the low-profit-margin business of farming can mean disaster.
The question that underlies all the theorizing is both economic and cultural: Are farmers going to buy in?
“The challenge is demonstrating the benefits to farmers and making these things easy to adopt,” says Madhu Khanna, who studies technology adoption at the University of Illinois Department of Agriculture and Consumer Economics. “For most of these technologies, the benefits are uncertain.”
In agriculture, the conventional wisdom is that the outcome of the race to the farm of the future will be determined by clear-eyed economic decision-making. If robotics and artificial intelligence make business sense, the market will develop. “Farmers and growers are very smart about that,” says Baskar Ganapathysubramanian of Iowa State University’s Artificial Intelligence Institute for Resilient Agriculture. “From hardware and software perspective, if there’s a clear value proposition,” he adds, “they’re going to choose it.”
The growth numbers suggest farmers are open to the potential benefits of advanced technology. Overall, farmers spent almost $25 billion on tractors and other farm equipment in 2020. While Covid-19 slowed the adoption of robotics, farms worldwide are expected to incorporate the technology into their operations faster than the industrial market — increases of 19.3 percent and 12.3 percent, respectively, over five years. The global research firm MarketsandMarkets estimates that spending on robots will go from nearly $5 billion in 2021 to almost $12 billion in 2026. One result of that optimism, according to CropLife, a U.S. agribusiness publication, is that the third quarter of 2021 saw more venture capital investment in agriculture technology startups than ever: more than $4 billion.
“So few people have experience with farming,” says Joe Anderson, an agricultural historian and professor at Mount Royal University in Calgary. “They assume there’s more stasis than there has been. There are lots of innovations. There have been lots of changes.”
The tractors dragging huge implements across fertile fields feature technology that has outpaced even the most advanced automobiles. Many are steered by GPS, following paths mapped out over years of planting and harvest, rendering the farmer in the air-conditioned, video-equipped cab not much more than a passenger.
“You put your first pass and the next ones will follow right along,” says Slinker, who farms 500 acres outside Grundy Center, Iowa. “I just put on a little Keith Jarrett and sit back and travel across the field.”
In the autumn, harvesting machinery guides itself along those same tracks, sensing and recording the productivity of every square foot of field. That data can be used to calculate how much of which hybrid seed should be planted next year, determine how heavily it should be fertilized to reach its fullest potential, and identify small patches of ground that aren’t productive enough to be profitably planted.
“When I stop and think about an autonomous tractor, that seems like a really big leap,” Sarah Schinkel, who leads John Deere’s technology stack innovation group, said at the National Farm Machinery Show in February, “but when I stop and think about it and how much automation is already a part of our equipment, maybe it’s not that big of a leap.”
Deere is doing a limited release of its first fully autonomous tractor this year, with greater availability in 2023 and beyond. In contrast to the small-robot vision of researchers like Chowdhary, it’s a remake of the company’s popular Model 8R tractor, which weighs 14 tons. It fits neatly into the existing agribusiness model, but even with that adoption advantage no one expects a fast transition. Farm equipment has an amazingly long lifespan, at least compared to consumer products like cars. Modern tractors routinely operate for 4,000 hours, and a well-maintained model can last 10,000 — or approximately 25 years.
“Even though you may think you’d be interested in getting some new robotic equipment,” says Scott Swinton, a distinguished professor in Michigan State University’s Department of Agriculture, Food, and Resource Economics, “a lot depends on where you are in the depreciation and use cycles for the equipment you have. So we see a lot slower adoption than you do in genetics or chemicals.”
And there is another thing: Critics note that robotics, even if widely adopted, won’t address some of the underlying inadequacies of conventional agriculture.
“When we think about this global challenge of feeding everyone our current system is not set up to do that,” says Duncan. “The fix isn’t to throw more tech at it. It’s to question the system.”
The Midwestern corn-and-soybeans row-crop sector is just a fraction of all of agriculture, which in the U.S. was valued at over $205 billion in 2020. Much of that is what farmers refer to as horticultural crops — fruit, vegetables, and other produce.
“The important distinction is between field crops that are highly mechanized like corn and horticultural crops that require special treatment,” says Swinton. “They are higher value and can tolerate higher investments in equipment. It’s equipment that does weeding in vegetable crops, some robotic harvesting of, say, asparagus or broccoli, some robotic pickers of tree fruits. These are all in areas where you need somewhat skilled labor, and labor can be hard to get.”
The problem is, the planting and harvesting of horticultural crops that is handled so easily by people flummoxes robots. George Kantor, a research professor in Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute, says it will be necessary to change farms to suit robots. Consider, he suggests, the unremarkable act of picking an apple. What a human laborer can accomplish almost without a thought is nearly impossible for a machine. Locating each piece of fruit, gauging its ripeness, and reaching through a tangle of leaves and branches to gently pluck it from the tree — it’s easier, he says, to train the tree than it is to train the robot. In the case of apples, that means sculpting the orchard into what he calls “fruiting walls”.
“Their tree canopy is trained to be essentially a two-dimensional object,” Kantor says. “It’s a wall with a bunch of apples hanging off of it. We don’t have anything that can harvest your grandfather’s apple tree, that can reach inside the canopy and pick an apple. But these fruiting walls, it’s a much easier problem.”
Where the agricultural labor shortage is most intense, robotics are gaining ground the fastest. Robert Hagevoort, an extension dairy specialist and professor at New Mexico State University, says the nature of dairy farming makes its labor crisis among the worst in agriculture’s sectors. Cows need to be milked twice a day, he says, every day, creating a lifestyle that is a tough sell to young people choosing a career. The labor shortage is contributing to the decrease in the number of dairy farms.
“In some places,” he says, “some of those producers with land they bought by the acre for agriculture end up selling it by the square foot for real estate development.”
Robotics have offered a lifeline to some dairy farmers. But contrary to the idealized vision of smaller, more local, family farms, robotics have nudged dairy toward larger operations.
“If you went into farming because you wanted to do your own thing and be by yourself like my father did,” says Christopher Wolf, professor of agricultural economics at Cornell University, “that’s not the job anymore. It’s a different skill set. You’re going to be part of a management team.”
Wolf grew up in Wisconsin at a time when 150 cows was a large herd, but still manageable by a single large family. Adding robots to dairy farming creates the same potential economies of scale that have industrialized row crops like corn and soybeans. A single robotic milker can care for over 60 cows, and the second milker is cheaper than the first, and the third cheaper than the second. In advanced milking parlors dozens of milkers can be linked together and managed by only a few technicians working predictable eight-hour shifts and having barely any contact with the cows.
“If you’re set up that way you can also take a vacation,” says Wolf. “I knew dairy farmers growing up who hadn’t taken a vacation in 20 years.”
At the farthest reaches of robotic farming are the developers who are completely abandoning almost every aspect of traditional farming. Iron Ox, a California start-up that just received a $53 million infusion of capital from Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures fund, grows high-value fresh produce in completely controlled, indoor environments.
“Most approaches to automating parts of agriculture are one robot that does one operation,” says Brandon Alexander, CEO of the company. “The reason that hasn’t succeeded is at the end of the day plants are complex things. If you’re really going to automate it, you have to design the entire process from the ground-up for automation.”
That will likely happen first in an agricultural sector with few traditions to change, a very small installed technical base to replace, and a high rate of potential return — which is a pretty apt description of the embryonic cannabis industry. Legal cannabis is already the U.S.’s fifth most valuable crop, and producers are adopting new technology in ways traditional farmers are not.
“There’s not a strong bias looking backwards at how the crop is produced,” says Kantor. “The other thing of course is we talk about high value crops. Grapes are high value crops, leafy greens are high value crops, but cannabis is in a whole other league. It’s going to drive a lot of interesting technologies.”
A study by the University of Illinois estimates that the cost of seed, fertilizer, herbicides, and other farming inputs for corn and soybean production are going to rise over 30 percent between 2020 and the 2022 planting season. The study predicts per acre return — roughly the equivalent of gross profit — for corn will drop from $378 to $61 per acre in 2022.
“From a farmer’s perspective they know they need help,” says Alexander. “The average grower recognizes that something pretty drastic needs to change if we’re going to feed a growing population.”
But according to Terry Griffin, a cropping systems economist at Kansas State University, economists too often assume farmers will behave like businesses, when they often behave more like consumers. “Different people measure value differently,” Griffin says. “Some farm management goes to having the greatest net return. Some might want the newest equipment or the best environmental metrics. For every individual it’s a different value proposition.”
Khanna cites another factor that is often forgotten: consumer perceptions. If consumers start to demand, for example, more crops produced without today’s heavy application of chemicals, it could drive adoption of robotics.
The “FSE 2” field robot at a 2021 technology show in a field in northern Saxony. The device can work the soil independently.
Sebastian Willnow / Picture Alliance via Getty Images
“We underestimate consumers,” she says, in reference to the role they can play in creating this market. “As there is more demand for sustainably produced agricultural products, there will be a greater shift toward documenting what farmers are doing. Policies will do that too, but a lot of the change is going to be driven by consumer and market pressures.”
“I don’t think there will be one model of agriculture in the future, but there is a push to move away from the industrial model of farming,” says Hermione Dace, a policy analyst at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change in London. “Traditional farming will still exist, but there will be less of it. Robotics will help traditional farmers apply inputs more precisely and reduce the environmental impact of farming as well as saving cost.”
Nidhi Kalra, a senior information scientist at the Rand Corporation, a public policy think tank, says the current moment in agriculture recalls the Gartner Hype Cycle, a formulation of the adoption of new technology “which is basically that new tech comes in, dreams are vastly overinflated, those technologies crash and people say it’s garbage, and then you come out of the valley and the tech starts doing useful things in the world.”
If she’s right, today’s excited anticipation of agriculture’s robotic utopia-to-come will inevitably give way to disillusionment as seemingly world-changing ideas amount to very little.
Kantor believes there have already been three or four robotic waves. In the 1950s, Walt Disney created Tomorrowland, the first really vivid demonstration of what very human robots might one day do. It generated a lot of excitement, but what came out of that period were industrial robots, bolted to factory floors and accomplishing a single rote task. Roughly every decade since then there’s been some new technology that opened wider possibilities. He cites the personal computer, ATMs, and shopping kiosks.
“Now we’re in a self-driving car wave and agriculture wave, and it’s going to recede,” he says. “I like to think of it as tides, waves washing up on the beach, and there’s a lot of excitement and then the waves recede, and one or two things are left behind and are useful.”
It ultimately will come down to what farmers choose. On his farm in Iowa, Slinker thinks of himself as pretty typical. He’s not on the cutting edge of technology, but he adopts what makes sense to him and what he has seen work for farmers he knows. But he will keep some things, too, even when it’s not completely rational.
And so, along with the modern equipment he uses to operate his farm, he holds onto an old tractor that belonged to his father. That tractor may not be part of the billion-dollar calculations being made on his behalf by people who spend more time in research labs and conference rooms than they do on the farm, but it should be. It’s handy for hauling small loads without putting hours on his bigger, more expensive tractors. And it reminds Slinker, he says, of why he got into farming in the first place, and that’s something he’d like to preserve.
Tom Johnson writes about technology, business, and whiskey in Louisville, Kentucky. He has written or co-written dozens of historical and military documentaries, and been published in Los Angeles, Newsday, Vineyard & Winery Management, Bourbon+, and other publications.
UPDATE: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that agriculture in the U.S. was valued at over $205 million in 2020. The correct figure is $205 billion.
At 43 and 45 years old, husband and wife farmers Angie and Wenceslaus Provost, Jr., hope they live to see age 70.
They don’t fear terminal illness or a farm accident that could consign them to an early grave.
Instead, they fear stress could do them in. Years of trying to protect family land from encroaching banks and government agencies have worn on them, despite their love of farming.
After years of mounting debt with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and a bank, the New Iberia, La. sugar cane farmers filed a September 2018 lawsuit against a USDA-approved lender. The suit alleges that Wenceslaus, known as “June,” was all but run out of the profession in 2015 after the bank reduced his crop loans over successive years, effectively underfunding his farm operation.
A record-shattering heat wave is devastating parts of India and Pakistan, putting more than a billion people at risk and unleashing a surge of related problems. For decades, experts have warned that climate change would make heat waves like this more frequent and more intense — a prediction now playing out in real time.
Last month, northwest and central India experienced the hottest April since record-keeping began 122 years ago. On May 1, the temperature in Nawabshah, Pakistan, climbed to 121.1 degrees Fahrenheit, likely the hottest temperature recorded so far this year in the northern hemisphere. Other cities and towns across the region also suffered through record-breaking temperatures.
“This heatwave is definitely unprecedented,” Chandni Singh, a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, and a senior researcher at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, told CNN. “We have seen a change in its intensity, its arrival time, and duration. This is what climate experts predicted and it will have cascading impacts on health.”
In the western Indian state of Gujarat, “we are getting many patients who have suffered heat stroke or other heat-related problems,” Mona Desai, former president of Ahmedabad Medical Association, told Reuters. She said that more than half of the patients were children — an age group particularly vulnerable to extreme heat — who were experiencing vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal issues, weakness, and other symptoms.
Early reports indicate 25 people have died of heatstroke in Maharashtra, a state in western India, since late March. The true toll across the region will likely be much higher; a recent study found that over the past 50 years heatwaves have killed over 17,000 people across the country. “This heatwave is testing the limits of human survivability,” Singh told CNN.
In some parts of India the demand for electricity has spiked, leading to widespread power outages. CNN reported that three out of five of Delhi’s power plants were critically low on coal last week, and that the country has canceled hundreds of passenger trains in a scramble to clear the tracks and expedite coal shipments.
The extreme heat has decimated agricultural areas, reducing yield from wheat crops by up to 50 percent in some areas and killing off nearly all fruit harvests in others. “We don’t know what to do,” Haji Ghulam Sarwar Shahwani, a farmer who grows apples, told The Guardian. “Farmers have lost billions because of this weather. We are suffering and we can’t afford it.”
In Pakistan, Sherry Rehman, the country’s minister for climate change, warned that glaciers in the northern region were melting quickly, and that flash floods caused by glacial lake outbursts could wreak havoc on mountain communities.
Disasters exacerbated by climate change are making life for over a billion people in India and Pakistan extremely challenging, though they have done little to cause the global problem. India and Pakistan are responsible for only a sliver of cumulative greenhouse gas emissions — about 3.4 percent and .7 percent, respectively. In recent years, India has emerged as a super-emitter due to its heavy reliance on coal, but its per capita emissions are less than 2 metric tons per year. (The U.S.’s per capita emissions are over 15 metric tons per year.)
The most recent IPCC report warned that the world must make “rapid and deep” cuts to emissions — achievable only if we immediately phase out fossil fuels — in order to stave off even worse consequences of climate change. Rehman told The Guardian that she hopes this deadly heat wave will serve as a wake-up call. “Climate and weather events are here to stay and will in fact only accelerate in their scale and intensity if global leaders don’t act now,” she said.
Laketown, Wisconsin, is a rural community of 949 people, spread out among the green fields and ample lakes of the state’s northwestern corner, just over an hour outside of Minneapolis. Lisa Doerr has lived there since 2001, when she and her husband started growing hay and grass for livestock and raising horses. The town and its surrounding area, the St. Croix River Valley, are home to lots of small farmers like them; much of the food people eat here is grown locally.
“It’s not a big corporate place,” Doerr said. “There’s a lot to protect here.”
Now, Laketown is at the center of a battle over this rural character, as the town aims to limit pollution from large, industrial livestock farms, also known as concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs. Over the past few months, Laketown and two nearby towns, Trade Lake and Eureka, have passed laws regulating how CAFOs can operate, requiring them to show how they will dispose of dead animals and avoid polluting groundwater. But these policies have faced stiff pushback from the state’s powerful agricultural lobby, which has called the new regulations illegal.
In the past decade, the industrialization of agriculture has led to a sharp rise in the number of CAFOs, as large livestock operations offer cheaper meat and crowd out smaller farmers. Between 2012 and 2017, the number of animals living on factory farms grew by 14 percent, even as the overall number of operations shrank. From North Carolina to Iowa, CAFOs have been found to pollute drinking water, release noxious gases, and encourage the spread of disease due to the animals’ confined conditions. In March, a nationwide outbreak of avian flu led an egg farm in Wisconsin to kill 2.7 million chickens, creating intolerable smells for a community downwind of the site where their bodies were dumped.
Even when CAFOs legally dispose of animal waste — usually by spreading it on nearby fields as fertilizer — the sheer volume of manure can overload local streams and groundwater supplies with nitrates and bacteria, said Adam Voskuil, a Wisconsin-based attorney with the nonprofit Midwest Environmental Advocates. That’s especially problematic in states like Wisconsin, where more than 900,000 residents rely on private wells for their drinking water.
“There’s a health concern associated with that aggregation of contaminants and its transport into private households,” Voskuil said.
Aerial view of a concentrated animal feeding operation, or CAFO, in Wisconsin.
Grist / Amelia Bates
In light of these risks, Polk County — where Laketown is located — enacted a one-year moratorium on CAFOs in 2019 to give it time to study the problem and develop a solution. The issue grew more urgent after an Iowa-based company announced plans to build a hog farm in nearby Trade Lake, which would house 26,000 pigs and produce 9 million gallons of waste each year. In 2021, Laketown and five other communities formed the Large Livestock Town Partnership to research potential problems with CAFOs and develop a model ordinance that individual towns could adopt to regulate them.
The ordinance requires livestock operations with more than 700 animal units to apply for a permit from the town and pay an application fee. The owner has to share the facility’s plans to prevent the spread of infectious diseases, implement a waste management strategy, contain toxic air pollution and odors, report unusual animal deaths, maintain fire safety, and avoid damaging any nearby water resources, as well as demonstrate that the project will provide a net benefit to the town. The application has to be signed by at least one “qualified and professionally licensed” engineer or geoscientist who has reviewed the proposal.
Since Laketown passed its ordinance in February and two other towns followed in March, their efforts have faced stiff resistance. On April 13, two dairy lobbying groups wrote a letter to the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection, or DATCP, asking the state to review the ordinances and arguing that the “towns have clearly ignored current laws, regulations and related review and approval processes.” And late last month, two other dairy associations — Venture Dairy Cooperative and the Wisconsin Dairy Alliance — wrote to Laketown directly, telling the town clerk that the CAFO ordinance “contains at least 16 provisions that are preempted by state law and illegal,” including imposing fees and requiring plans for odor prevention.
In a statement, DATCP spokesperson Sam Otterson said the department is “gathering information and identifying the issues so that a legal review can determine the scope of Department authority and duty under applicable law and code provisions.”
At the heart of the conflict is a 2004 law that prevents local governments from enacting stricter regulations for CAFOs than the state standards, which require CAFOs to submit “nutrient management plans” to show how they’ll dispose of their waste, set minimum “setbacks” or distances between these facilities and nearby properties, and establish standards for manure storage. If facilities meet these criteria, towns are required to issue them permits.
Though the law allows exceptions if local governments can “clearly show that the requirements are needed to protect public health or safety,” Doerr, who chaired the Large Livestock Town Partnership, said the new ordinances don’t regulate where CAFOs are sited — only how they operate. Requiring them to have a plan to minimize air pollution, ensure fire safety, and deal with biohazards such as an avian flu outbreak is part of the towns’ police powers and necessary to protect citizens, she and others have argued.
Lisa Doerr grows livestock feed and raises horses on her farm in Laketown, Wisconsin.
Lisa Doerr
“We have attorneys that have looked at [the ordinance],” said Don Anderson, chair of the Eureka town board. “They helped us formulate it, and are quite confident that it’s within the law.”
Wisconsin isn’t the only state where local governments are facing off against industry-friendly state regulations for CAFOs. In Missouri, where an industrial hog farm spilled more than 300,000 gallons of waste into local streams last spring, a 2019 law bars counties from issuing rules for CAFOs that differ from the state’s policies in any way. Two counties sued to challenge the law, which is headed to the state Supreme Court.
All 50 states have passed some form of “right-to-farm” laws, which protect livestock operations from being sued over “nuisances” like odors or pollution. And within Wisconsin, state officials are fighting to regulate CAFOs even under the scope of their current authority. Late last month, one of the state’s largest dairy farms sued the state Department of Natural Resources for denying its request to nearly double in size.
For Doerr and other Laketown residents, legal threats are a consequence of challenging the agricultural industry, which they say is not held accountable for its impact on health and the environment.
“It’s pretty much our life’s work that we have invested in this farm,” Doerr said. “And we really aren’t going to sit here and have them tell us that they’re going to bring in some giant corporations and put a CAFO at the end of our driveway.”
The Western Australian government will announce $37 million in funding for mineral exploration and AgTech as part of the state budget next Thursday. The state government will commmit $12 million over four years to a WA-Array seismic survey which will search for minerals deeper than most existing mineral deposits. A grid of 165 seismometers in…
This storywas originally published by WIRED and is reproduced here as part of theClimate Deskcollaboration.
The borders of the Corn Belt have always been fuzzy. The sprawling patchwork of cornfields that spreads across the Midwestern United States is one of the most productive agricultural regions on Earth. Over 36 percent of the world’s corn comes from the U.S., and almost all of that is grown in the handful of states nestled between the Great Plains to the west and the Appalachian Mountains to the east.
But the Corn Belt is on the move. Over the past couple of decades, farmland devoted to corn production has been creeping northwards and westwards. In North and South Dakota, grasslands that were formerly used for cattle grazing or set aside for conservation have been converted to cornfields. Between 2005 and 2021, the area of land harvested for corn in the U.S. increased by around 14 percent.
One of the big drivers of this shift has been bioethanol — transportation fuel usually made from fermented corn. Since 2005 the U.S. government’s Renewable Fuel Standard, or RFS, has mandated that gasoline producers blend corn ethanol into their fuel. The amount the RFS requires to be mixed in has ratcheted up each year from the policy’s start, and since 2016 gasoline producers have been instructed to blend 15 billion gallons of corn ethanol annually into transportation fuel. The RFS was supposed to reduce reliance on fuel imports and lessen the environmental impact of the transportation sector, but when it was introduced, some scientists warned that it might end up increasing overall emissions. Now it looks like those predictions have come to pass.
In February 2022, Tyler Lark, a scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, published a study analyzing the impact of the RFS. Lark and his colleagues researched the impact that the policy had on crop prices and farm expansion between 2008 and 2016, comparing the real-world situation to a counterfactual one where biofuel production was kept at levels mandated in an earlier version of the RFS.
Lark’s study found that the RFS significantly pushed up the price of corn. This incentivized the expansion of total U.S. cropland by 2.1 million hectares between 2008 and 2016 — an increase of 2.4 percent. Often the areas newly converted to cropland were grasslands on the western edge of the Corn Belt. “Over millennia these grasslands have created really carbon-rich soils. And what happens is when you plow that up you expose a lot of it and make it vulnerable to being released into the atmosphere,” says Lark.
The supposed benefit of biofuel is that, although it still releases carbon dioxide when it burns, that carbon was drawn down from the atmosphere by the plants that make up the fuel rather than being released from oil that was once underground. But growing fuel creates emissions too. The biggest problem is when land that used to be a carbon sink is plowed up to plant crops, but manufacturing fertilizer is also a major source of emissions, and applying that fertilizer to land also releases greenhouse gasses in the form of nitrous oxide emissions.
In 2010 the Environmental Protection Agency, which sets the amount of corn ethanol required by the RFS, estimated that by 2022 corn ethanol would have total life-cycle emissions 20 percent lower than gasoline. But these projections didn’t account for the dramatic effect the RFS would have on land use in the US.
“I don’t think people expected as much land to come back into production,” says Lark. His study found that the RFS increased corn prices by 30 percent and the price of other crops by 20 percent. In response, farmers who previously used their land for cattle grazing or who were involved in conservation schemes started growing crops instead. All this land-use change has essentially outweighed the reductions in greenhouse gas emissions that come from growing fuel instead of pumping it out of oil wells.
Lark’s study comes at a decisive time for the future of corn ethanol. Later this year, the EPA will decide how much biofuel should be blended into U.S. transportation fuel from 2023 onwards. And on April 12 the White House temporarily waived the summertime ban on E15 — fuel made from gasoline blended with between 10.5 and 15 percent ethanol. In the U.S., E15 is banned over the summer months because of the way it reacts with sunlight to create smog, but lobbyists and some lawmakers have argued that removing the ban will ease the country’s reliance on Russian oil and keep down gasoline prices. Earlier this month, Congress voted to ban imports of oil, gas, and coal from Russia.
Increasing corn ethanol production would be a big mistake, says Jason Hill, a biofuels expert at the University of Minnesota. “The science has long pointed out that this is not where we want to go,” he says. “In the long run corn, ethanol has done almost nothing for our energy independence, and it has a large, disproportionately negative impact on the environment and food security.”
The projected impact of corn ethanol differs depending on how you estimate those emissions. In early April a group of U.S. senators representing Corn Belt states wrote a letter to the EPA urging it to adopt a model that shows biofuels have a considerably better environmental impact than Lark’s study suggests. But in March, Hill published an op-ed in the scientific journal PNAS calling for greater scrutiny of the models used by regulators like the EPA to assess biofuels. Lark’s study “supports other recent concerns that these commonly used models underestimate the emissions consequences of land-use change, which in turn leads to their overestimating the climate change benefits of corn ethanol,” Hill wrote.
“Models are always incomplete. They are usually lacking important data that ideally they would have, but which doesn’t exist or doesn’t exist as broadly across the world as you’d like,” says Richard Plevin, a former academic who specializes in biofuel modeling and now works as a consultant. In 2006 he was part of a team at the University of California, Berkeley that published a study concluding that corn-based ethanol could have lower environmental impacts than gasoline.
Since then Plevin’s position has changed completely. “My conclusion at the end of all this is it’s misguided,” he says. The problem, Plevin argues, is that it’s impossible to accurately estimate the overall emissions that result from using biofuels. The effects of biofuel mandates can ripple out in unpredictable ways. If biofuel displaces gasoline in one country, then this could suppress the price of gasoline elsewhere in the world and lead to people increasing their fuel use. Add in a war, or trade embargoes, and the whole dynamic can flip again. “You can assume 10 different scenarios about the way things are going to unfold and you’ll get 10 different answers, and they might all be equivalently realistic. How do you build a policy around that?”
For Plevin this leaves us with an obvious choice: reducing our dependence on liquid fuels altogether. “If I were king for a day, I would be putting all my effort into electrification right now,” he says. Hill agrees. “It’s no longer corn ethanol versus gasoline. They have the same interest, and they’re both feeling pressure from electrification, which is their common enemy,” he says.
There are other impacts of bioethanol too. Global food prices jumped by a record 13 percent last month. Diverting some U.S. corn away from bioethanol and toward food would help keep prices lower and replace lost exports from Ukraine and Russia. “There is all this competition for the land,” says Annie Levasseur, a professor at L’École de Technologie Supérieure, an engineering faculty based in Montreal. “If we want to look at the impact of increasing biofuel, then we will need cropland, and there will be this displacement.”
Levasseur and Hill are both part of a committee put together by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, or NASEM, to assess current methods for analyzing the impact of low-carbon transportation fuels. The committee’s report, which will be published in the third quarter of 2022, “contains information that the EPA may wish to take into consideration if it decides to develop a new RFS or a low-carbon fuel standard,” says Camilla Yandoc Ables, a senior program officer at NASEM.
In Lavasseur’s opinion, bioethanol production is already high and shouldn’t be increased. Instead, the U.S. government should be looking at other ways to reduce transportation emissions. “We cannot keep increasing demand for energy and then transform everything to biofuel,” she says. “We really need to decrease the demand.”
The apple trees looked half-dead. They formed a neat line in a scrubby lot on a quiet neighborhood street. I felt compelled to pat their scrawny trunks and say, “It’s going to be OK.” The bare branches shook in the hard wind — a reminder that this bleak Sunday morning was one I’d have otherwise spent on the couch, rather than venture into the misery that is Milwaukee in late February. Yet, there I was in that frigid, dreary, windblown urban orchard because late winter is an excellent time to prune fruit trees.
My instructions arrived the night before. “Wear plenty of clothes,” texted Jan Carroll, my pruning teacher, a retired-nurse-turned-arborist. I layered like my life depended on it: two pairs of socks and leggings, a t-shirt and flannel shirt, wool sweater, overalls, puffer coat, canvas jacket, and shearling gloves. Carroll eyed my uniform approvingly, although she kept a bag of mittens and hats in the trunk, just in case a volunteer arrived under-dressed.
Late winter is the best time to prune because trees are still dormant and won’t feel the cuts. By spring, they will have hopefully forgotten that you’ve lopped off their branches and won’t try to replace them, instead using their energy for things like growing flowers and fruit. So I sharpened my shears, and from February through April this year, met Carroll at orchards across the city to prune.
Retired-nurse-turned-arborist Jan Carroll gives instructions to a volunteer pruner in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Lina Tran / Grist
Milwaukee’s orchards began filling vacantlots around six or seven years ago in a burst of urban agricultural activity. There are orchards with as many as 30 trees, others as few as six. There’s an orchard where each tree is dedicated to a child lost to gun violence, each possessing a plaque bearing their name. The trees represent efforts from a mix of nonprofits and city and county programs to beautify green spaces and develop local food systems in neighborhoods with limited access to grocery stores.
The groups planted more than 1,500 apple, pear, plum, and cherry trees, with the understanding that community partners, schools, and churches would care for them. But many people lost interest or underestimated the work, said Carroll, an avid gardener who’d been involved as a volunteer with the prominent local nonprofit Growing Power. If not for her efforts, the trees I visited would have mostly been abandoned.
Despite growing evidence that tree-planting campaigns aren’t very effective, planting trees remains extremely popular. Take, for example, the tree pledges that inevitably crop up before Arbor Day — the last Friday of April — each year: Sony’s PlayStation recently promised to plant up to 288,000 trees. Soon after, Williams-Sonoma made a 6-million-tree pledge. From what I’ve seen, planting is the easy part. If we want to take advantage of all that trees have to offer, we’ll have to work for it.
A row of trees in an alleyway in Milwaukee. Most people don’t realize how much care a tree needs after it’s been planted.
Lina Tran / Grist
After Growing Power shut down in 2017, Carroll, who would soon retire from a 30-year-long career as an OB/GYN nurse, identified the “orphaned” orchards and began caring for them herself, learning how to prune through YouTube, an extension class, and frequent calls to local fruit-farming gurus. She jokes that she’s a sheepdog: Whether helping deliver babies or tending trees, she loves to be of use. “It’s not like trees are namby pamby babies,” Carroll said. They can grow on their own. But if you want them to produce fruit — good fruit — they need attention. Pruning thins and shapes the canopy so that each blossom gets plenty of air and light. Without it, trees become damp and dark, leaving fruit vulnerable to pests.
The plight of Milwaukee’s fruit trees is a common story: Trees get planted, but few resources are dedicated to caring for them, so they’re often neglected. “When I met Jan and saw the work she was doing — before that, I had no idea that this was a need,” said Samson Srok, the green space coordinator at the environmental nonprofit Groundwork Milwaukee, which has begun partnering with Carroll on pruning workshops. “Tree care takes skill that takes time and effort to learn, and then years of practice until you really know what you’re doing. Folks don’t have that realization when they’re planting trees.”
City trees offer many benefits. They suck carbon dioxide from the air and lock it in their trunks and roots. They provide shade and moisture, keeping cities cool, and their roots capture runaway stormwater, which erodes and pollutes waterways. Trees boost air quality, and even foster people’s emotional health and well-being.
That’s a lot to ask of trees that don’t get much in return. Ryan Murphy, an urban forestry researcher at the University of Minnesota, said cash-strapped cities rarely have the budget to properly care for trees. With invasive pests like emerald ash borer decimating urban forests, “a lot of their resources are just going to maintaining or to removing trees in the mature canopy,” he said.
That leaves little attention for young trees, whose early years are critical. At that age, they can be coaxed into shapes that will sustain mature canopies later in life. The same thing plays out at a residential level, where trees are rarely watered after they’re planted. “It’s surprising how many people think that you can just plant a tree and walk away,” said Gillian Hodler, the community engagement coordinator at the Austin-based organization TreeFolks, which gives away trees and leads reforestation efforts. TreeFolks estimates survival rates for the trees they give away range from 40 to 60 percent.
The fact is, it’s not easy being a city tree. Many are grown in fields or nurseries before they’re uprooted for a move to the big city — a shocking experience. Dangers lurk at every street corner. There’s drought, debris, road salt, poor soil, and dirty air. There are errant lawnmowers, reckless drivers, hungry deer and mice.
A row of bare trees lines a street in a neighborhood in northwest Milwaukee.
Lina Tran / Grist
So, how can you improve a tree’s odds of survival? It starts at planting. “They say you can take a $1 tree, and if you put it in a $5 hole, you will have a beautiful tree,” Carroll said at a pruning workshop I attended. On the other hand, plop a $5 tree in a $1 hole, and you will get a sad stick. Countless trees have been crippled by a bad hole. Maybe it was too shallow or skinny, or the tree was planted too deep, which cuts off its air supply. For container-grown trees, roots need to be spread out before they’re planted. Failing to do so with maple trees has led to an epidemic of stem-girdling roots, which encircle and strangle the trunk, forcing people to remove afflicted maples before they fall. “These corrections don’t take that much time,” Murphy said. “We’re talking about half the tree’s life that you could extend just by a couple minutes right at planting.”
Cities should also consider what kind of trees they’re planting. Certain species go in vogue for their canopies or fall colors. But diversity is crucial. Prized for its stately canopy, the American elm was overplanted, only to be wiped out by Dutch elm disease. Then ash trees got popular, and the same story is playing out with the emerald ash borer. “We’re learning that a diversified urban forest is critical not just for canopy coverage, but also the budgets and the finances inherent in an urban forest program,” Murphy said.
And, there’s the matter of where the trees go. Across the U.S., lack of tree cover often mirrors race and income. One recent survey found neighborhoods where residents are mostly people of color have, on average, 33 percent less tree canopy than mostly white neighborhoods. Neighborhoods where 90 percent or more residents live in poverty have 65 percent less tree cover than their wealthier counterparts. This has established a patchwork of urban heat islands, where residents experience extreme heat trapped by concrete and asphalt.
In Milwaukee, most of the trees that Carroll tends to are in the north side’s mostly Black and low-income neighborhoods, a five- or 10-minute drive away from her home in Riverwest. Carroll fastidiously maintains the orchards’ appearances. She piles mulch obtained from the city around each tree, removes the dead and dying trees, and swaddles the skinniest trunks with netting to shield them from weed whackers. “If it looks like a trashy, overgrown mess, that is how people will treat it,” she said. “Anytime you can show people that this dinky, scrawny tree is somebody’s pride and joy, you will come out better for it.”
Pruning makes the trees look more orderly, too. But really, the idea is to organize a tree, encouraging it to funnel its energy into the most productive branches. There are basic rules. Remove the broken, damaged branches. Snip the shoots going straight up — they can’t support the weight of fruit. Don’t let arms criss-cross because they’ll shade each other out. But plenty of limbs don’t fall into these neat categories.
Starting out, I hesitated before making cuts. I walked circles around each tree, sometimes carving a path through the snow, surveying a branch from all sides: What looks crooked from one angle seems straight from another. The stakes feel high when you’re cutting into a living thing. I frequently consulted Carroll, who would wander over in her bright blue coat and surprise me by taking off more than I’d dared. She taught me to consider the trajectory of each branch and picture how it might grow over the next year — a puzzle of both space and time. Each pruner has their own style; hers is aggressive. When you’re done, she told me, “you should be able to throw a cat through the branches.”
Grist reporter Lina Tran uses loppers to prune an apple tree in Milwaukee.
Courtesy of Lina Tran
Everywhere we went, someone in the neighborhood stopped to say hi to Carroll. Others paused on their brisk morning walks to look curiously at our crew, which had grown to three volunteers. Pruning tends to look like something one shouldn’t be doing in public, whether you’re waving a branch-cutter overhead or wobbling on a step ladder, sawing off the top of a tree. After each session, we piled the shorn branches neatly by the sidewalk. (Carroll has a friend who would swing by later, picking them up to feed his goats.)
Pruning soon altered the way I saw trees in the city. I pitied the overgrown ones, so clearly in want of a good trim. Hodler, the TreeFolks coordinator, had told me there were volunteers who enjoyed the work so much they’d been coming for 30 years. “It’s really addictive to have the feeling that you did something tangible that you know has a real effect in the world,” she said. I could appreciate that, after knowing the satisfaction of an array of tidied trees.
Many cities have volunteers and nonprofits caring for their urban forests. Trees New York, which was founded in response to cutbacks in the city’s budget for tree care, has trained a legion of citizen pruners. Similar programs can be found in Los Angeles, Ann Arbor, and the Twin Cities. Samson Srok, from Groundwork Milwaukee, says the prevalence of abandoned trees makes sense, considering the heavy reliance on volunteers. “The biggest radical solution would be a reorganization of how we assign value to land and to green space work as a whole,” Srok said.
Even the best intentions sometimes fizzle out. That’s what I observed across Milwaukee’s orchards. We picked up trash everywhere we went. Orchard signs haven’t been maintained. Plastic spacers to keep branches apart indicated someone had taken the time to insert them at one point. But they neglected to remove them, so trees swelled around the plastic like a bruise.
As cities turn more and more to trees and green infrastructure to adapt to climate change, Diane Pataki, director of Arizona State University’s school of sustainability, agrees that we need new ways to manage these resources. Trees pose a challenge because they don’t fall neatly into bureaucracy’s compartments. They provide services, but unlike pipes and gutters, they’re alive. “It’s been hard for cities to figure out a way to take care of them because they’re dynamic and they need a lot of care,” Pataki said. “They do unexpected things.”
Watching things evolve is Carroll’s favorite part of her work with the trees. As a gardener, she’d loved seeing banana peels and apple cores melt into compost. Through the orchards, she got to witness trees mature and to meet the community members transforming empty lots into spaces of abundance.
Retired-nurse-turned-arborist Jan Carroll prunes apple trees in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Lina Tran / Grist
By mid-April, trees across Milwaukee had budded. On the last day of pruning, we went to an apple orchard bordered by a busy street and quiet creek. Carroll told us to avoid bumping the buds, in order not to damage the flowers that would bloom into fruit. By then, pruning had begun to feel less like doing something to the trees and more like something I offered, in the hopes that they’d produce lots of fruit, that they’d stick around for years to come.
We’d take a break for a few weeks, then meet again. Carroll said spring and summer would bring new tasks: mulching, fending off bugs. I’ll go back in the summer when I hope the branches will be draped in leaves, heavy with apples and plums. I want to see where they grow.
A new United Nations report released Wednesday shows farming, mining, and logging has marred more than half of the planet. In a portrait of land degradation across the globe, the report describes entire forests razed for timber or pasture; sensitive grasslands and wetlands lost to sprawling cities; and over-exploited lands that have dried up into desert.
People have altered 70 percent of Earth’s lands from their natural state and degraded up to 40 percent. This threatens “many species on Earth, including our own,” the report warns. If these trends continue, experts expect growing disruptions to human health, food supplies, migration, and biodiversity loss driven by climate change, in what the authors calls a “confluence of unprecedented crises.”
“The human-environment relationship must drastically change to avoid catastrophic tipping points whereby the human power of exploitation is overwhelmed by the power of nature,” the report says, noting that half of humanity already feels the effects of degraded land.
The report, called the Global Land Outlook 2, comes from the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification and follows a landmark UN report earlier this month that called for “rapid and deep” emissions cuts to avoid the worst effects of global warming. The authors stressed that combating the erosion of the world’s lands actually makes a lot of economic sense: More than half of the global economy — about $44 trillion a year — relies on the natural world. At the same time, restoring lands and protecting forests could stem the rippling effects of poverty, hunger, conflict, and disease. And that, in turn, could contribute more than a third of the efforts needed to sequester carbon and limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
More than anything, industrial agriculture has played an outsized role. The cultivation of cattle, palm oil, and soybeans in particular has led to depleted freshwater, widespread deforestation, and rampant extinctions, all of it underwritten by $700 billion in government subsidies each year that support unsustainable, polluting practices. In turn, this has unleashed tons and tons of greenhouse gasses each year.
In a press briefing on Wednesday, Ibrahim Thiaw, executive secretary of the U.N. organization, said that for too long, people have mined the earth, used its resources, and thoughtlessly discarded the rest. He pointed to his suit jacket: “This is fiber, this is cotton, this is land, this is water, this is carbon.” Thiaw said humanity must abandon this approach and adopt a more sustainable mindset of management.
The report warns that if nothing changes, by 2050, we can expect significant hits to crop yields, the degradation of an additional expanse of land the size of South America, and the loss of carbon locked up in poor soils and threatened peatlands. On the other hand, committing to conservation and restoring about a third of the world’s lands would not only improve yields and lock in carbon, but also prevent a third of expected extinctions.
The authors used “restoration” to refer to sustainable management of land and water. That includes practices like “rewilding” natural areas, protecting wetlands and waterways, prioritizing ecosystems in agriculture, and building green spaces in cities. They pointed to a number of success stories, such as efforts to rewild Argentina’s Iberá wetlands and prepare for dust storms in Kuwait.
“It’s not complicated,” Thiaw said. “It is actually low-tech, and it is accessible and achievable.” That is, if humanity can muster up the political will.
Earlier this month, as water levels in the Lake Powell reservoir fell to record lows amid the ongoing Western drought, the federal government asked seven states that rely on the Colorado River to work out an emergency conservation deal. The states had been scheduled to receive river water that was stored in the lake, but releasing the water would have drained the reservoir further, threatening its ability to generate hydroelectric power for millions of people and raising utility bills for towns and tribes across the West. The feds also revealed that declining reservoir levels would endanger the tubes that carry water past the dam’s hydropower turbine, potentially depriving multiple communities of drinking water and compromising “public health and safety.”
Late last week, the states agreed to forfeit their water from Lake Powell in order to ensure that the reservoir can still produce power. The deal puts a finger in the metaphorical dike, postponing an inevitable reckoning with the years-long drought that has parched the Colorado River — and a wrenching tradeoff between power access and water access for millions. It does so, in part, through an unusual act of hydrological accounting.
The deal has two parts. The first and more straightforward part is that the federal government will move 500,000 acre-feet of water (about 162 billion gallons) from the Flaming Gorge Reservoir into Lake Powell, bumping up water levels in the latter body. Flaming Gorge, which stretches across Wyoming and Utah, is mostly used for water recreation, so the immediate effects of the transfer will be minimal. The feds could do more of these water transfers later in the year if things get worse, drawing on water from other nearby reservoirs.
The second part is more complicated — and less helpful. In ordinary circumstances, the Bureau of Reclamation releases water from Lake Powell into an even larger reservoir called Lake Mead, from which it then flows to households and farms across the Southwest. As part of the deal, the states that rely on Mead water are agreeing to leave about 480,000 acre-feet of that water in Lake Powell, thus lowering the water levels in Mead. (Reclamation already announced earlier this year that it would delay the release of 350,000 acre-feet of water in Powell in anticipation of spring snow runoff.)
The problem is that Lake Mead’s falling water level has huge implications for water access in the Southwest. Pursuant to a drought contingency plan worked out back in 2019, declines in Mead trigger mandatory water reductions for states like Nevada and Arizona. The first of these reductions arrived last year, when the river entered a so-called “Tier 1” shortage, resulting in a 30 percent cut to Arizona’s water allocation. This has forced farmers in the Phoenix area to fallow their cotton and alfalfa fields. Officials expect the river to enter a Tier 2a or 2b shortage in the coming years, which would mean even larger cuts. Keeping water in Lake Powell makes it more likely the reservoir will reach that threshold.
The deal contains an eyebrow-raising workaround for this. In exchange for leaving the water in Lake Powell rather than having it flow to Lake Mead, the states get something in return: Officials at the Bureau of Reclamation will act as if that the water did go to Mead, thus treating Mead’s water level as though it’s higher than it really is. The hope here is to avoid triggering the cuts that would accompany a Tier 2b shortage declaration, even though the actual water level in the reservoir will likely fall low enough to warrant such cuts.
Grist / Amelia Bates
In other words, the states have agreed to ensure Lake Powell has more water than it should, and in return they get to pretend as though Lake Mead has more water than it does. The deal protects the towns and tribal communities that rely on Powell for water, but only for a short time: The ongoing drought has shown no signs of letting up, and it’s only a matter of time before water levels in Powell fall back into the danger zone, jeopardizing hydropower access and drinking water quality.
The Bureau of Reclamation did not respond to Grist’s requests for comment. An announcement confirming the agreement is expected later this week.
For the millions of people who rely on Lake Mead, meanwhile, the deal just postpones a shortage declaration that was bound to arrive in a few years anyway. It may give states like Arizona more time to figure out how to cope with declining water allotments, but it won’t stop cotton fields from going fallow or absolve suburbs like Scottsdale of the need to drastically reduce their water usage.
For as long as there’s a drought on the Colorado, federal officials will have to choose between hydroelectric power in communities that depend on Lake Powell and water access in those that rely on Lake Mead. The sudden advent of this new short-term deal shows not only that these decisions are not going away, but that they will arrive faster than any of the parties on the river ever thought they would.
Bolivia’s MAS government has created the Bolivian Agricultural Production Company through decree to strengthen food sovereignty and boost agricultural production. This company, which will be under the supervision of the Ministry of Rural Development and Lands, will have the purpose of generating economic surpluses to promote productive economic development to finance the country’s social policies. Its main activity will be the production, processing and transformation of agricultural and livestock products, as well as the marketing of its products in the domestic and foreign markets.
Jody Weible keeps a jar on her front porch that she refuses to open, because the smell would make her eyes water and her throat close up. Inside is a goopy mixture of fermented corn seeds that she collected nearly four years ago from a field near her home in Mead, Nebraska, a town of about 600 people. The seeds had been applied to the soil as an “amendment” to boost fertility, but they were actually waste from a nearby ethanol plant, AltEn — waste that contained staggeringly high levels of toxic pesticides.
For nearly a decade, AltEn collected leftover seeds from around the country to use as the base for its ethanol, a corn-based fuel that’s mixed into gasoline. A byproduct was the fermented seed mixture, stored in a pastel-green pile that at one point took up 30 acres of the property. The smell it gave off was “acidic, rotten, dead,” Weible told Grist from her home less than a mile away from the plant. Residents kept their windows closed because of the stench; birds stopped coming to feeders. One woman said her dogs started having neurological problems after eating some of the waste.
The seeds AltEn used were coated with a class of chemicals known as neonicotinoids, or “neonics,” an insecticide that’s been linked to a nationwide pollinator decline and is under consideration for regulation by the Environmental Protection Agency. Residents of Mead suspected AltEn’s pesticide-laced byproduct was killing nearby bee colonies and polluting their water. State regulators finally shut the operation down in February 2021, and are now suing the company for allegedly violating the Nebraska Environmental Protection Act. But the shuttered site continues to pose a hazard to the community.
A few days after it closed, a frozen pipe ruptured at the plant, sending 4 million gallons of wastewater into local rivers and streams. Today, over a year later, pesticide-laden seed waste remains at the site. It’s been covered in a gray mixture of cement, clay, and polyester – an attempt to temporarily trap the toxic material while a longer-term solution is being developed. But researchers and environmental groups warn that the cleanup of AltEn is not happening quickly enough, and that neonics continue to leak into local streams and groundwater.
Tears in the liners of at least two lagoons “compromise[d] the integrity of the structure” and could have allowed the wastewater to seep into the ground.
Alan Aanerud / Nebraska Department of Environment and Energy
Experts said the situation in Mead should be seen as a wake-up call. It’s not clear how many of the country’s 210 ethanol refineries besides AltEn have utilized treated seeds; Nebraska’s lawsuit against the company mentioned one other plant, but didn’t identify it. But there’s not much preventing them from doing so — Nebraska is the only state to ban the practice, which it did just last year after the problems with AltEn came to light.
Environmental regulators last September detected neonics and fungicides 40 feet below ground at a drinking water well six miles downstream from the ethanol plant, according to the Lincoln Journal-Star. While the levels are still low and technically considered “safe” by the EPA, the results of the testing are far from comforting, warned John Schalles, a biologist at Creighton University in Omaha and member of a research group that’s monitoring the AltEn site. Rather, they are an indicator that the process of contamination is just beginning; toxins can take years to filter down through the soil and into the aquifer.
“In toxicology, the longer the exposure to anything like this, the worse it’s going to get,” Schalles told Grist. “We need to cut off the source of the exposure, which is all these waste products, both liquid and solids.”
For years, liquid waste was stored on the site in three lagoons. Testing by state regulators in 2019 detected neonics at over 5,000 times the level considered “safe” by the federal government. The Nebraska Department of Environmental Quality found concentrations of clothianidin at 58,400 parts per billion and thiamethoxam at 35,400 in one of the lagoons. To avoid harm to aquatic life, the U.S. EPA caps levels of these two neonics at 11 and 17.5 parts per billion, respectively. Inspections found multiple tears in the liners of at least two lagoons that “compromise[d] the integrity of the structure” and could have allowed the wastewater to seep into the ground, according to the state’s lawsuit against the company.
Protestors rally at the Nebraska state capitol in Lincoln in February, calling on lawmakers to establish a special committee to investigate the public health risks of AltEn’s pollution.
Courtesy of the the Office of Senator Carol Blood
Residents like Weible are frustrated with the lack of accountability for AltEn, which racked up multiple environmental violations over the years but was allowed to continue operating.
“There’s no punishment,” Weible said. “They just get away with it. It’s disheartening, and it makes it hard to trust the [regulatory] process.”
The agricultural industry has enthusiastically embraced pesticide-treated seeds in recent decades. Seed producers apply chemical treatments, including neonics and fungicides, to the seeds they sell farmers, often before any pest issues are even detected. The sale of seeds treated with neonics tripled from 2004 to 2014, and more than 90 percent of all corn in the United States is grown with them. But as evidenced by the situation in Mead, this strategy has come at a cost, said Sarah Hoyle, a pesticide program specialist for the Xerces Society, a nonprofit focused on insect and other invertebrate conservation.
Because the chemicals are water-soluble, they’re known as “systemic” pollutants, Hoyle said, meaning they stay with the plant as it grows and then can be passed on to whichever organism comes into contact with it. That’s what makes them so dangerous for bees, as well as other insects and aquatic invertebrates. Neonics are also toxic to humans. Though research on their long-term effects is still ongoing, scientists know they target the nervous system, and they have been linked to birth defects, developmental delays in children, and even an increased risk of breast cancer. But despite these risks, the EPA doesn’t regulate treated seeds as pesticides because of an exemption for “treated articles” that doesn’t take into account how the chemicals stay in the plants as they grow.
Mead, Nebraska is located in an agricultural area heavily reliant on corn farming, including for ethanol.
Nati Harnik/Associated Press
What happened in Mead shows how the “mishandling of treated seed can result in pretty significant contamination that disrupts ecosystems and can put communities at risk,” Hoyle said. “We’re also seeing from this example how challenging it is to clean up these pesticides once they’re in the environment.”
AltEn’s plant in Mead opened in 2015 and produced approximately 24 million gallons of ethanol a year until its closure in 2021. For most of that time, it advertised itself as a recycling location for treated seeds. Agricultural giants such as Bayer and Syngenta sent AltEn their leftover seeds free of charge, which saved the companies money on disposal costs and gave AltEn free feedstock for its ethanol.
Production of the biofuel starts when corn or seeds are ground down and heated in water to break down the starch into sugar. The mixture is then left to ferment, further breaking down the sugars into ethanol, which is then distilled into a pure form that’s mixed with gasoline. That process leaves behind a solid mash of leftover corn and seeds, as well as liquid waste, all of which must be disposed of somehow.
The Nebraska Department of Environment and Energy, or NDEE, has maintained that it did not know AltEn was accepting seeds treated with pesticides, although the company made those plans clear in its initial permit application in 2012. Now, those chemicals are everywhere, entering Mead’s groundwater, streams, and soils. For years, AltEn left an 84,000-ton pile of fermented seed waste, known as “wet cake,” in an unlined waste pit on site. This would have allowed water-soluble neonics to leach into the soil and potentially reach the groundwater, Schalles said.
AltEn stored waste in three large lagoons and a solid pile called “wet cake.”
Alan Aanerud / Nebraska Department of Environment and Energy
When it rained, runoff from the wet cake also likely transported pesticides and fungicides straight into local waterways, he added. Schalles’ research found four potential pathways from the AltEn site, all of which feed into the Platte River, a water source for numerous Nebraska cities, about 20 miles south of Mead. During dry spells, toxic dust could carry contaminants off of the pile through the air.
Up until 2019, the company also sold wet cake containing a whopping 427,000 parts per billion of clothianidin and 81,500 parts per billion of thiamethoxam to local farmers to apply directly to their fields to improve the quality of their soil, the state’s lawsuit alleges — about 85 times higher than the maximum amount allowed by law. AltEn also sprayed its own corn crops that it used for its ethanol production with the liquid waste, state regulators found, including for more than a year after officials told the company to stop.
Efforts to clean up the waste are starting to gain steam; contractors coated the wet cake pile with the hard cement, clay, and polyester covering, known as Posi-Shell, in late February to insulate it from stormwater and prevent gases from escaping. But the coating doesn’t address groundwater seepage. The cleanup campaign so far is also entirely voluntary, funded by the same companies that provided the seeds in the first place — with no funding from AltEn.
Requests for comment from AltEn and its lawyers went unanswered. The NDEE also declined to comment for this article, citing pending litigation. But the agency acknowledged in a January 24 letter to the seed companies, known as the AltEn Facility Response Group, that their cleanup plan isn’t a long-term solution.
John Schalles’ research found four potential flow paths for pesticide-laden waste from the AltEn plant.
John Schalles
“A compromised cover could lead to increased odors or generate potentially contaminated stormwater,” an NDEE official, Thomas Buell, said in the letter. The strategy also doesn’t include any information on how long the waste will remain at the site and how the group eventually plans to get rid of it, Buell wrote. NDEE’s director, Jim Macy, said during a public hearing in the state legislature on February 24 that he expects the group to submit a final remediation plan in the next few months.
To assess the extent of the contamination and its effects on the environment and human health, a team of researchers led by the University of Nebraska has been working to monitor the area since last spring. The group has been collecting soil and water samples, and is sending out surveys to local residents to learn about potential health impacts, according to Nebraska Public Media. But health issues resulting from neonicotinoid exposure could take decades to detect and treat, Schalles said, requiring continual funding from the state.
Receiving that support has been an uphill battle; in April, the Nebraska legislature approved a bill to supply the University of Nebraska researchers with $1 million, enough to fund the project for about a year. A previous bill to provide $10 million in funding failed in the Nebraska legislature last month.
Residents are also trying to hold state regulators accountable for allowing AltEn to pollute for so long, said Al Davis, a former state senator and lobbyist for the Sierra Club in Nebraska. He said the state was aware of the issues at the AltEn refinery for years but failed to impose penalties, potentially out of deference to the ethanol industry, a powerful player in Nebraska’s economy. On February 14, dozens of people attended a “Stop the AltEn Cover-up” rally at the state capitol and urged lawmakers to establish a special committee to investigate the causes and effects of the crisis.
Funding and transparency would be a good start, Davis said, though he believes federal aid and EPA oversight is also needed to deal with the scope of the contamination. Others have floated the possibility of the AltEn facility becoming a Superfund site, which would either force whichever company is found responsible for the contamination to pay for the cleanup, or give the EPA the funding and authority to do so.
Contractors coated the wet cake pile with a hard cement, clay, and polyester covering, known as Posi-Shell, in late February to insulate it from stormwater and prevent gases from escaping.
John Schalles
“We’ve got a lot of great, intelligent, educated people here, but I don’t think we have the capability to address a problem this huge,” Davis said, calling the NDEE’s hesitation to penalize AltEn a “demonstrated lack of leadership.”
Residents like Weible are frustrated at the slow pace of change. The lawsuit filed last year by Nebraska’s attorney general Doug Peterson has dragged on without visible progress and the company has avoided paying penalties. She and others, including Davis, believe criminal charges against AltEn’s owners could be the only recourse left for Mead residents. Seed companies involved in the cleanup allege that AltEn has been selling its assets, according to a lawsuit they filed in February accusing the ethanol company of fraud. But Davis said the company likely doesn’t have the funds to remediate the area and pay for health monitoring even if the courts ordered it to.
In the meantime, coating the wet cake has temporarily stopped the odors. The EPA conducted air monitoring in September and didn’t detect any pollutants in amounts that would pose an “immediate health threat,” but Weible still fears that her community has been saddled with a legacy of contamination.
“We have people that have moved away,” she told Grist. “We have people that have come to live here and looked at places to buy or rent, and it was a particularly bad [air] day. And they went, ‘Oh, no, we don’t want to live here.’”
3Mins Read Human-caused climate change and agriculture are wiping out the planet’s bug populations, specifically key pollinators. And scientists say there’s reason to be concerned. Less than half a century ago, a ride through rural areas would see a smattering of bugs that met their untimely fate on car windshields. That’s no longer the case these days; […]
As Ukraine continues to fight against Russian forces, experts warned of potential fallout for the U.S. agriculture industry. The same day as Putin’s announcement, Ukraine’s military halted all commercial activities at its ports in the Black Sea. Also that day, a missile struck a ship chartered by Cargill, according to Reuters. Multinational agricultural corporations stopped operations in Ukraine as farmers expect the Russian invasion of the country — and the subsequent economic sanctions — to drive up already high prices for fertilizer, a key input for U.S. growers, according to interviews and company statements.
In mid-March, about 80 people gathered in the auditorium of a local high school in Licking County, Ohio, a rural area about 40 minutes outside the state capital. The public hearing, set up to discuss a proposed 350-megawatt solar project, lasted more than four hours.
Supporters of the project said it would bring in much-needed tax revenue for local schools and promote energy independence in a state reliant on coal and natural gas. Opponents raised concerns about the loss of 1,880 acres of prime farmland, the impact on property values, and the potential environmental effects of the development.
“It’s becoming like the Hatfields and McCoys,” one resident told the Newark Advocate at the meeting, referring to the infamous feud between two families in Appalachia in the late 1800s. “This is destroying the community. Family members are pitted against each other. Church members are pitted against each other. And it’s neighbor against neighbor.”
The United States is experiencing a boom in utility-scale renewable energy projects, as solar and wind prices continue to fall and the Biden administration pushes for a fossil fuel-free electricity sector by 2035. Throughout the process, developers seeking vast expanses of cheap land for utility-scale facilities have faced pushback from the likes of Massachusetts fishermen, coal plant supporters, and environmental groups concerned about desert tortoises. Now, rural communities around the Midwest are mobilizing to restrict or ban large renewable energy projects. Experts say that some residents have been swayed by misinformation about the health impacts of solar and wind. But for most, the issue is tied to concerns about the loss of agricultural land in a region long-defined by its farming roots.
In March, researchers from Columbia Law School found that 121 local governments in 31 states have developed restrictions on new renewable energy projects, a 17.5 percent increase from just six months ago. About half of those local laws are in the Midwest. A congressman from Wisconsin proposed a nationwide ban on tax incentives that encourage renewable energy development on farmland, while community groups have packed local meetings to oppose solar and wind farms in Indiana, Ohio, and Iowa. One Michigan man filed recall petitions against all five members of his township board, saying they failed to properly regulate wind and solar development or “provide sufficient protections for the health, safety, and welfare” of residents.
Solar energy in particular has taken a lot of the heat, even in states that have long embraced wind. Iowa was the first state to generate more than 30 percent of its electricity from wind turbines, and has more wind energy installed than any other state except Texas. But while farming can take place alongside wind turbines, solar farms typically take agricultural land out of large-scale production. In response, Iowa legislators introduced a bill earlier this year that would have prevented solar farms from being built on land that’s considered particularly good for farming — about two-thirds of the state’s counties.
The bill would also require solar panel fields to be at least 1,250 feet away from the nearest neighboring landowner. Iowa law only requires oil and gas wells, by contrast, to be 330 feet from any nearby property.
Rural residents are far from united in this opposition, said Lindsay Mouw, a clean energy policy associate at the Nebraska-based nonprofit Center for Rural Affairs. Many support renewable energy projects because of the extra income they provide, especially as farming becomes less financially viable and soil becomes increasingly degraded. But while every rural landowner is able to decide for themselves whether or not to sell their land to renewable energy companies, those choices can affect others nearby who may not feel the same way, Mouw added.
“I think it’s more of a concern of neighboring landowners who do not want to see their farmland surrounded by solar panels and have this idyllic vision of Iowa … being a corn-producing state,” Mouw said.
Some Midwestern states, such as Indiana, have encouraged wind and solar development, only to face pushback from farmers and local officials who wanted local control over renewable projects. Other opponents are not actually farmers, but residents of suburban communities affected by urban sprawl from nearby metropolitan areas and concerned about the impact of renewable energy projects on their views and property values, said Kerri Johannsen, energy program director for the Iowa Environmental Council. (Though the impact on home values varies – studies from Europe found that wind turbines and solar panels decreased nearby home prices by 2 to 5 percent, but others from Massachusetts found no significant difference.)
A solar farm sits within agricultural land in Ohio. Nicholas Smith / Getty Images
Behind a lot of this opposition are social media campaigns spreading conspiracy theories and misinformation, particularly about the health effects of wind and solar. Fears about wind turbine noise causing birth defects or shadows from turbine blades inducing seizures – neither of which have scientific backing – permeate Facebook groups where residents organize against renewable projects, a report from National Public Radio found.
“It is a new process, and there’s just a lot of unknowns,” Mouw said. “It’s a big challenge for county commissioners to become experts on the renewable energy industry.”
Though restrictive bills such as those introduced in Iowa or Kansas haven’t seen much progress, opposition at the local level can still discourage renewable development. Some developers have canceled or moved projects in states like Indiana, where more than 30 counties have policies restricting solar or wind development, according to the Indianapolis Star-Tribune. And with pushback ramping up, the next question is whether the U.S. will be able to meet its renewable energy goals without local buy-in, Johannsen said.
“The transition to clean energy is so important for our future, that I do get concerned when I see policies proposed that could stop or stifle renewable development here,” Johannsen said. “At the same time, I’ve been immersed in some of these conversations long enough to feel optimistic that we’re going to be able to keep moving forward.”
Farmers, ranchers, and other rural community members across five Great Plains states and Illinois — many of whom were previously sued by developers of the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines wanting to build through their land — are finding their property, safety and livelihoods encroached upon yet again by corporations. This time, they’re coming up against developers, many with fossil fuel ties, who are seeking to cash in on climate solutions tax credits to build a massive network of carbon dioxide (CO2) pipelines across the United States.
The concept of whisking away carbon pollution from industrial facilities to inject into caverns below the Earth’s crust for storage is at least a 15-year-old concept. In 2007, Lee Raymond, the former CEO of ExxonMobil called the practice “the Holy Grail on coal-fired power plants,” noting, however, that more comprehensive carbon capture, transit and sequestration systems for other industrial facilities would be a “huge, huge undertaking” that has “never been demonstrated at scale.”
Since then, various iterations of maps have emerged in government documents and those produced by energy-focused nonprofits including the Clean Air Task Force and the Carbon Capture Coalition, offering a snapshot into a potential future network of tens of thousands of miles of carbon dioxide pipelines and utilization or disposal sites. The maps depict nodes and arteries snaking from southern Maine and northern Montana all the way to the Gulf Coast, and waggling through Idaho, the Pacific Northwest and California.
Among the largest pipe systems in the works is the Midwest Carbon Express, which is being developed by Summit Carbon Solutions. As the Des Moines Register reported, $250 million of the $4.5 billion project will be funded by the largest oil driller in North Dakota, Continental Resources, whose founder, Harold Hamm, helped popularize fracking. The network is designed to shuttle carbon pollution from ethanol plants in Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska and South Dakota some 2,000 miles, to be sunk underground in Bismarck, North Dakota.
Another CO2 pipeline planned for the area, but extending further southeast into Illinois, is called the Heartland Greenway. It’s a project of Navigator CO2 Ventures, and is designed to accomplish a similar objective, ultimately storing CO2 below ground in central Illinois. The Heartland Greenway is expected to be 1,300 miles long.
As currently planned, the Midwest Carbon Express is slated to cross through the sandy soil of the Krutz family farm in Orchard, Nebraska, where Beverly Krutz, a retired second-grade teacher, lives with her husband, Robert Krutz, an ex-dairy farmer. The couple grows native grasses to feed cattle, which they’ve been doing for 36 years. “This is what we live and survive for,” Beverly Krutz told Truthout.
Back in 2015, the couple refused to negotiate the sale of an easement — legal access to a portion of their property — to TC Energy, the company that sought to build the now-canceled Keystone XL pipeline. Representatives repeatedly showed up on their land uninvited, parking 10 vehicles deep along the road abutting the Krutzes’ pasture, ducking under the fence, escorted by the sheriff, and surveying the land against the Krutzes’ will.
Developers were granted the power of eminent domain, which they used to sue the Krutzes. They won, and gained access to the Krutzes’ land.
But in July 2021, the Keystone XL pipeline was canceled. On account of a new legal “easement team” co-op formed by a firm called Domina Law, the Krutzes, along with dozens of other landowners, got their easements back. TC Energy was forced to pay all the families’ legal fees.
They thought they’d dodged a bullet, but just weeks later, in August 2021, the Krutzes got another letter, which eerily resembled the one from TC Energy. This time, it was Summit Carbon Solutions that wanted to survey their land and negotiate an easement.
“It feels like you’re a little pawn. The big people get to step on you all the time,” Bob Krutz said. “You’re nothing but a pebble on the ground.”
In addition to their opposition to the concept of eminent domain for private gain, the Krutzes can’t imagine their sandy soil would keep a pipeline down for long. When Nebraska was hit by historic flooding in 2019, most of their pasture was underwater. Had the Keystone XL been built, the Krutzes said, “anything that would have been buried … would have been on top of the ground.”
The Krutzes worry first and foremost about the risk of an explosion, citing the rupture of a CO2 pipeline in Satartia, Mississippi, in 2020, which sickened dozens. That incident was the first of its kind anywhere in the world, as the head of the World Health Organization, Marcelo Korc, told HuffPost.
Their worries are grounded in developers’ apparent rush to cash in on “45Q” tax credits, first made available in 2008, which enable companies to earn around $30 per metric ton of CO2 sequestered each year. Bolstered by the Biden administration, that payment is on track to increase to $50 per metric ton by 2026. So, if an average coal-burning power plant is outfitted with the technology to capture and bury even just half of the plant’s annual CO2 emissions, developers involved would be eligible for an estimated $100 million in tax credits for one year (in 2026 dollars), or $1.2 billion over the first 12 years of the pipeline’s life. To qualify for the credit, facilities must be built by 2026. So, the gold rush is on.
The systems have many skeptics. Climate experts acknowledge that CO2 does indeed need to be removed from the atmosphere. But many of the highest-profile projects have been found to ultimately release more carbon dioxide than they store. At an ExxonMobil carbon capture project near LaBarge, Wyoming, only three percent of captured CO2 has actually been permanently sequestered underground, while the remainder has been used to inject into the earth to recover more oil from depleted wells, or vented into the atmosphere, according to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.
Carbon dioxide has distinctly different properties from the kinds of petroleum-based liquids that currently run through our pipeline networks. According to Pipeline Safety Trust, when CO2 is released from a pipeline, it’s heavier than air. Invisible plumes can crawl across various types of terrain, then settle in low-lying areas, like valleys and ravines. The gas is an asphyxiant and can lead to death, in addition to depriving emergency response vehicles of oxygen and stalling them, significantly slowing or impeding rescue operations.
In the midst of the flurry of proposed lines, existing policies do not ensure the safe transport of the gas, Bill Caram, executive director of the Pipeline Safety Trust, said in a statement in March, ahead of the release of a full report on the matter. “There are little to no regulations around appropriate siting, limiting dangerous and corrosive impurities, or building the pipelines to withstand the unique properties of transporting high pressure CO2,” Caram said.
While the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration — the federal agency charged with regulating pipelines — does regulate pipes transporting CO2 at concentrations above 90 percent, developers dealing with less-pure CO2 can currently operate without complying with any oversight, the report details.
Kert Davies is director of the Climate Investigations Center, which filed a flurry of Freedom of Information Act requests in 2021 to state and federal agencies to obtain more comprehensive information on the hushed network of carbon capture pipelines across the U.S., following the explosion in Sartartia. Davies told Truthout that the existing plans are on track to add additional risks for residents of rural and urban areas already overburdened with industrial facilities — “where everything else has been put.”
“You’re going to put [them] in poor people’s neighborhoods, along industrial corridors that are already heavily impacted communities,” Davies said. “You’re not going to put [them], you know, through Lexington, Massachusetts.”
The documents the Climate Investigations Center obtained allude to some 100,000 miles of CO2 pipelines in total. “It means there’s going to be a thousand eminent domain fights across the country,” Davies added.
One of these fights is brewing in Dickson County, Nebraska, where Shelli Meyer grew up helping to raise cattle and hogs. Meyer’s farm has been in the family for four generations. Just days ahead of the holidays, in December 2021, her father handed her a letter that had arrived from Heartland Greenway. “The look on his face I’ll never forget,” she said. “All he could see in the letter was ‘eminent domain.’”
Meyer’s grandparents had managed to hold onto their farm through the farm crisis of the 1930s. Her parents did the same during a wave of farm bankruptcies in the 1980s, which ultimately resulted in the number of U.S. farms dropping from 300,000 to 30,000. The thought of having a portion of that land seized to bury a pipeline with unknown risks after the “blood, sweat and tears” it’s taken to keep the farm afloat has been devastating, filling the family and surrounding community with “stress and anxiety,” Meyer said.
When a developer is granted the power of eminent domain by a state agency, it is required to prove its project is for “public use.” Much like midstream oil and gas pipeline developers that came before them, developers like Summit and Navigator appear to be leaning on the argument that thousands of jobs will be created through the pipeline’s construction and operation.
They’re also making the case that the project will support farming communities, which Meyer doesn’t buy. One flier she received from Summit reads: “Our project is a win for every farmer in Nebraska, as well as a critical step in helping future generations of farmers enjoy strong corn prices and high land values for decades to come.”
Meyer says that this is illogical, and it’s insulting that developers think farmers will fall for it. In actuality, some landowners worry their insurance companies might drop their policies if a CO2 pipeline is built through their property, and they’d be left uninsured, which would have grave implications for property values.
In the coming months, landowners including the Krutzes and Meyer will connect as best they can with others in the same position in Nebraska and beyond. Organizations including the Sierra Club and Dakota Rural Action are preparing for hearings in Iowa and South Dakota, scheduled for the fall. Meyer, the Krutzes and dozens of other residents will turn to the Nebraska arm of an innovative legal co-op which helped cancel and reverse easements for landowners impacted by Keystone XL, the Mountain Valley and Atlantic Coast pipelines.
“The bright side is that landowners, I think because of Dakota Access, because of Keystone XL, because of all these other pipelines around the country have seen the damage that pipelines do to property, especially farmland, that they’re really stepping up and standing up,” Jane Kleeb, of Bold Nebraska, a citizen advocacy group, said. “But our federal and state governments are way behind where the citizens are.”
After years of controversy, the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board assured the public in the fall that eating California crops grown with oil field wastewater “creates no identifiable increased health risks,” based on studies commissioned as part of an extensive Food Safety Project.
Yet a review of the science and interviews with a public health scientist affiliated with the project and other experts show that there is scant evidence to support the board’s safety claims.
The “neutral, third-party consultant” the board retained to conduct the studies, GSI Environmental, has regularly worked for the oil industry. That work includes marshaling evidence to help Chevron, Kern County’s biggest provider of produced water, and other oil giants defend their interests in high-stakes lawsuits around the country and globe.
GSI did not tell water board officials about its ties to the oil industry, which shared the roughly $3.4 million in costs for the firm’s studies and related work with the water districts that benefit from the distribution of wastewater from oil extraction, known as “produced water.”
One member of the board’s Food Safety Expert Panel that reviewed GSI’s studies was nominated by Chevron and initially paid by the oil industry, and a second panel member worked as a consultant for an oil company selling produced water.
Still, the expert panel’s own review concluded that GSI’s studies could not answer fundamental safety questions about irrigating crops with produced water.
Thomas Borch of Colorado State University, a leading expert on treating and reusing produced water for crop irrigation who was not involved in the project, said that based on the data GSI had and the way they designed the experiments, “they were not able to draw the conclusions they did. Period.”
Robert Scofield, who led the work for GSI, said in a statement via email that his firm agreed with the water board that the studies were performed in “the most technically sound manner.”
Clay Rodgers, the water board official who oversaw the Food Safety Project, said he promised the board that if any evidence were ever discovered that produced water was harming people consuming crops, “we would stop it immediately.”
Under the water board’s direction, GSI compiled a list of hundreds of chemicals used in oil operations, then focused on those that might pose health risks. But an absence of information to assess safety dogged the project from the start. Many of the chemicals had never been studied before, or lacked critical details about their use, the board’s panel of experts noted, because the oil companies said doing so would reveal trade secrets.
“Already there was a data gap there because some of those chemicals don’t have reliable toxicity information,” said John Fleming, senior scientist with the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute.
Pump jacks extract oil from Chevron’s Kern River Oil Field, near Bakersfield, California. Liza Gross
The findings of the board and its expert panel found no food safety or public health concern, said David Ansolabehere, general manager of the Cawelo Water District, which has taken produced water from Chevron for decades. “Cawelo will continue to test the water based on the regional board’s permit requirements.”
Chevron tested for all additives used in the Kern River field for which a testing method approved by the Environmental Protection Agency exists, said Jonathan Harshman, communications advisor for Chevron’s San Joaquin Valley Business Unit.
Yet more than a fifth of the chemicals GSI identified — and 60 percent of those deemed most likely to pose a health risk — lacked both toxicity information and approved testing methods. The water board conceded that the data gaps left “potentially significant unknowns” about the chemicals’ safety.
“When they say this is safe,” Fleming said, “it’s based on what chemicals they were able to test.”
That means the “no identifiable increased health risks” assertion applies to just a fraction of potential chemicals in produced water applied to crops.
Oil’s profligate water use
In early August, during one of the driest summers on record, Wasco farmer Nate Siemens received a troubling notice from his irrigation district, which is regulated by the Central Valley water board. “Please be aware that this water includes some amount of reclaimed oilfield production water,” it said.
Siemens, an organic agriculture consultant with the Rodale Institute, was shocked. Siemens needed that water. But he’s transitioning his family’s Fat Uncle Farms to organic and wasn’t keen on using the oil industry’s wastewater to irrigate his almonds.
Siemens’ farming roots in the region predate the rise of Kern County’s oil industry, which produces more than 70 percent of the state’s oil. He was well aware that climate-polluting pump jacks operate among corporate farms growing miles of water-intensive almonds and pistachios, California’s most valuable export crops. But he had no idea just how entrenched oil operations had become in the county’s $7.6 billion agricultural industry until he received that notice.
About 30 miles southeast of Siemens’ farm, thousands of densely packed pump jacks stretch as far as the eye can see toward the horizon, bobbing robotically as they suck oil and water from wells carved into the denuded landscape of the Kern River Oil Field.
Pump jacks have pried more than 2 billion barrels from the field since oil was discovered here in 1899. But wresting Kern’s notoriously viscous crude from receding oil reserves requires injecting ever increasing amounts of water and hot steam underground.
That water returns to the surface along with groundwater. The mixture contains arsenic, uranium, and other naturally occurring toxic elements, along with potentially hundreds of chemicals used in the extraction process. Since 1985, the ratio of water to oil recovered has more than doubled, from seven barrels of water per barrel of oil to 18 barrels today.
In a region with less than nine inches of rain in a normal year—the definition of a desert—getting enough water is a perennial concern. Nearly 30 years ago, Chevron struck what a former Cawelo Water District manager called a “win-win” deal to deliver some of the massive amounts of wastewater produced every day to farmers’ fields.
Every year, more than 38,000 acre-feet of produced water from Chevron and other oil companies hydrates California farmland, including roughly 11 percent of Kern County’s irrigated farmland. That’s enough to cover about 38,000 football fields with a foot of water, or more than 12.4 billion gallons.
Chevron treats produced water from its Kern River Oil Field by removing oil from water through gravity separation, then skimming off solids and residual oil before filtering it through walnut hulls. The water then travels several miles by pipeline to a Cawelo holding pond, where it’s blended with surface and groundwater and sent to irrigation canals.
The first time Seth Shonkoff, a public health scientist with the nonprofit Physicians, Scientists, and Engineers (PSE) for Healthy Energy and a member of the expert panel, visited the Cawelo holding pond several years ago, he smelled an “extraordinarily strong” whiff of asphalt and crude oil. The same odors were much less offensive when he visited the pond with the panel a few years later.
Either there’s natural variability in the water, Shonkoff said, or someone did something different before experts came to evaluate the operation.
Chevron claims that recycling produced water for irrigation allows the company to operate in a “sustainable manner,” by minimizing reliance on fresh water. Yet the massive energy requirements of the extraction process make Kern’s oil one of the world’s most climate-polluting fossil fuels, and Chevron one of California’s top greenhouse gas emitters.
“California has this green reputation, but if you scratch the surface on the oil industry in the state, you quickly discover that that’s not the case at all,” said Hollin Kretzmann, senior attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute.
“This is an industry from top to bottom that’s used to getting its way, whether that’s drilling in neighborhoods, or disposing of the wastewater in unlined pits, or using that wastewater for unsafe purposes,” Kretzmann said.
Unfit for purpose
The Central Valley water board said it focused on crops grown in oil wastewater to address public concerns, which included petitions with hundreds of thousands of signatures, protests outside the state Capitol and a bill to label food grown with the water.
Then-Assemblyman Mike Gatto (D-Los Angeles) introduced the bill in 2015, after learning that farmers could get organic certification for shunning pesticides while using produced water, and consumers would never know. “I thought that was a real problem,” said Gatto.
The same year, legislators called hearings to increase scrutiny of oil companies after learning their practices posed risks to protected groundwater, including potential drinking water and irrigation supplies.
“The commitment I made to our board was that if we ever discovered that there was an effect on people consuming crops grown with this, we would stop it immediately,” said Clay Rodgers, assistant executive officer of the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board, who oversaw the Food Safety Project.
Testing crops for harmful chemicals to figure out if they’re safe to eat may seem logical, but techniques to analyze food for oil-related chemicals are “light years” behind those for detecting the compounds in water and soil, Shonkoff said. He raised the problem repeatedly at panel meetings.
In the end, the panel agreed. Its first recommendation to the board was to discontinue crop sampling. It would be far more productive to focus on produced water and irrigated soil, the panel said, using approaches that can reveal the toxicity of the water and soil itself.
Warning sign at the Poso Creek Oil Field, north of Bakersfield in Kern County. Liza Gross
Instead, Shonkoff said, “most of the work that was done to test things for chemicals was done in food. Unfortunately, that was, in my professional opinion, a pretty big waste of time and resources.”
The data GSI compiled—including the list of chemicals and their hazard profiles—was “way too limited” to draw conclusions about lack of toxicity, said Borch, the Colorado State University professor and produced water expert.
“That doesn’t mean it’s toxic,” said Borch. But there was no way they could conclude that produced water posed no identifiable health risks based on the data they had and their experimental approach, he said.
That leaves Siemens, who’s transitioning to organic, in a tough spot. Although produced water isn’t specifically defined under organic standards, organic farmers can’t use water that contains arsenic, a constituent of Kern’s produced water, and most synthetic compounds, like those used in oil and gas operations.
Siemens stopped watering his orchard for a few weeks after his district notified him about the produced water. “And the trees suffered,” he said.
But as the almond harvest approached, Siemens couldn’t risk losing the trees. He used just enough of the water to keep them alive.
“We didn’t know what we were getting into,” he said. “We just didn’t have time to do the research.”
Even if Siemens had done the research, it might not have mattered.
“We could have done some much more impressive and well-designed studies to either conclude that we can continue to use this water or that we should maybe improve the way we treat the water before we reuse it,” said Borch. “We certainly don’t know enough to evaluate whether we need to be worried or not.”
A failure to disclose
One of the biggest hurdles to evaluating the safety of produced water has been oil companies’ unwillingness to reveal key details about the chemicals they put down wells.
Before joining the panel, Shonkoff was working on an independent study of fracking for the California Council on Science and Technology, or CCST, when he discovered a dataset he’d never seen before: a list of chemicals used in conventional oil development, from fields in Southern California. At the time, no other location in the country, and maybe the world, required chemical disclosure for conventional operations. The CCST assessment, commissioned by the state, revealed that testing and treatment of produced water used for irrigation might not remove or even detect chemicals used in fracking.
During fracking, operators inject a high-pressure mixture of water, chemicals, and sand deep underground to break and then prop open surrounding rock to extract oil or gas. Conventional operations, by contrast, inject high-pressure steam to loosen gooey oil. Wastewater from both conventional and fracking operations falls under the heading of “produced water.”
When Shonkoff dug into the newfound data, and read the permits and regulations for Kern County’s produced water, he realized Chevron and other oil companies could put nearly any additives they wanted down wells.
Although the water board prohibits using water from fracked wells for irrigation, fracking, and conventional operations employ many of the same chemicals, Shonkoff told the board at the panel’s first public meeting. And most compounds used in conventional extraction processes in Kern County, he said, lack the information needed to assess safety.
It’s imperative that oil companies disclose not just which chemicals they use in oil and gas production but also the volume and frequency of their use, Shonkoff said. Until then, he said, “I’m not quite sure that we can say with any real level of certainty that this is safe or unsafe.”
Rodgers of the water board said he’d obtained a list of all the chemical compounds oil companies use. But to avoid trade secret information, he said, the board could not get the recipe, which details how often a chemical is used and how much goes down wells.
Rodgers said he felt the highest priority was to get a list he could share with the panel members and the public and compensated for not getting the recipe by assuming all the chemicals were used.
But knowing the hazard associated with a chemical depends on knowing that recipe, the panel concluded. It also requires knowing chemicals’ breakdown products.
Chemicals are injected under intense heat and pressure into oil reservoirs, where they interact with scores of other compounds, before they’re pulled back to the surface and exposed to air. All these conditions can affect a chemical’s toxicity. And scientists have no good tools to understand how chemical interactions increase toxicity.
“This assumption that we should be looking for the chemicals that were added to oil and gas operations, and the assumption that they will continue to be those same chemicals after all the processes that they go through, is too big of a leap to make,” Shonkoff said. “Of course, you’re not going to find them, because they most certainly have transformed into other types of chemical constituents by the time things are being monitored and tested for.”
Some chemical additives might degrade into harmless substances, but others can prove more toxic. Shonkoff pointed to glutaraldehyde, a chemical widely used to kill microorganisms that gum up oil and gas extraction.
Glutaraldehyde is toxic to people, he said. Some of its breakdown products are even more toxic, some are less toxic and others are completely unknown because they haven’t been studied.
“When we’re talking about hundreds of chemicals, many of which we don’t have good toxicological information on,” Shonkoff said, “the idea that you can really understand the toxicological dimensions of their daughter products, and their transformation products in the presence of other chemicals, is outstripping what we know scientifically.”
Even a plant’s own metabolism can affect a chemical’s toxicity.
Plants could take up chemicals in one form and turn them into something else that’s more harmful, said Fleming of the Center for Biological Diversity. But if you’re just testing for a list of chemicals added to the well, he said, you’re testing for the wrong thing.
Robert Scofield, who led the work for GSI, agreed to answer questions only by email. Asked about the focus on testing crops, Scofield offered a carefully worded statement that ended: “We agree with the Water Board and their scientific advisor that this direct testing was the most technically sound manner to address the questions posed in the study.”
When asked about the failure to address chemicals’ breakdown products, he responded with the exact same statement.
“There’s a really big assumption baked into the GSI work,” said Shonkoff. The studies assume that the chemicals remain in the same form from the oil field to a consumer’s plate and that it’s sufficient to monitor those particular chemicals, he said. “And that’s obviously incorrect.”
Still waiting for answers
California supplies 99 percent of the world’s almonds and pistachios, mostly from Kern County.
Water board regulators say nothing has received more scrutiny than the oil field water that irrigates those crops. “We know more about that produced water than probably any other produced water in the world,” said Rodgers.
But the evidence is still so scarce, said Colorado State’s Borch, “you can argue both sides.”
There are no established tools to do a “real toxicity analysis,” Borch said, and there’s “not a good framework” to evaluate risk.
Thousands of densely packed pump jacks extract oil from Chevron’s Kern River Oil Field near Bakersfield, California. Liza Gross
In a study of treated produced water released into a stream for irrigation in Wyoming, Borch and his colleagues found that most of the chemicals they detected had no health safety standard. There were likely other chemicals and breakdown products “with unknown impacts” that had escaped detection, they noted in the 2020 study, published in Science of the Total Environment. In a related study published later that year, Borch’s team assessed the potential of treated produced water to cause cancer. Several different tests showed that the water caused increased mutation rates—an indication of cancer risk—even though most chemicals were present in low concentrations.
Many stakeholders stand to benefit if produced water can be reused safely, the scientists wrote. But if the practice is expanded prematurely, they warned, it could harm water quality as well as the health of soil, livestock, crops, and people who eat them.
People are still using benchmarks for water quality that were not developed with oil field wastewater in mind, Borch said, even though the complexity and chemical makeup of produced water is very different.
And simply looking to see whether chemicals are present, as the GSI studies did, doesn’t say anything about toxicity. Many compounds in the wastewater may be present in concentrations low enough to escape detection, said Borch. But that doesn’t mean they’re not toxic, he said. “It just means you don’t have the method that allows for extraction and analysis of the compounds.”
In a paper published in December, Borch and his colleagues presented a model for taking a holistic approach that exposes cells and lab organisms to produced water to detect harmful responses, along the lines Shonkoff had recommended.
Borch’s “adverse outcome” approach is also likely to catch the breakdown products the Food Safety Panel identified as a major testing inadequacy.
The Environmental Protection Agency is taking a similar approach, led by its Region 8 office in Colorado, as part of a national program to study the safety of produced water, said Tricia Pfeiffer, an environmental engineer in Region 8’s Technical Assistance Branch.
The effort is addressing the need to harness cutting-edge approaches for evaluating oil-related contaminants, and their byproducts, in produced water intended for reuse. That includes enlisting tools to analyze human cells to identify any worrisome changes caused by chemicals in produced water while applying complementary approaches to detect toxic constituents in the water.
“This is actual research,” Pfeiffer said. “It’s way more complicated than doing something that already has an analytical method.”
As we grapple with climate change issues, she said, “we’re looking for alternative water sources. And as a researcher, my biggest goal with this project is to help fill data gaps and make sure that we’re protective of human health and the environment.”
Borch said the technology exists to remove all sorts of contaminants from water, but it’s far more expensive than the low-cost methods used by Kern County oil companies. If people aren’t willing to pay the real costs of growing crops in a water-scarce region, he said, “maybe we shouldn’t even produce almonds because they use so much water.”
Choosing less water-intensive crops is critical to keeping land productive, said Siemens, the Wasco farmer who was shocked to learn that his water district was sending him oil field wastewater.
Siemens is moving away from thirsty almonds to dry-farming olives, mulberries, and figs, focusing on farming in ways that suit the region. Like raising goats.
“Goats would be happy to eat all these weeds out there,” Siemens said, pointing to the field behind his house. And lots of people in the valley would be happy to eat goat meat, he said. “You can go to any taqueria in the area and buy carne de cabra.”
Siemens’ vision of sustainable farming does not include taking the wastewater of an industry whose greenhouse gas emissions have helped fuel California’s relentless droughts and contaminated its precious groundwater supplies.
“We’re not just trying to meet a USDA organic standard,” Siemens said. “We’re trying to increase the vitality of this land for the future. Our kids live here, and I hope my grandkids will live here.”
That means protecting the soil and aquifers that helped turn Kern County into one of the richest agricultural regions in the world.
Meanwhile, the results of a truly independent analysis of whether oil field produced water is fit to irrigate crops sent around the world, Pfeiffer said, is still years away.
Anne Marshall-Chalmers, an Inside Climate News fellow, contributed to this report.
In 2021, the Biden administration approved $4 billion in loan forgiveness for Black farmers and other farmers of color, as part of the $1.9 trillion pandemic relief package. The aid was supposed to make up for decades of discrimination. However, White farmers have sued, and that aid has yet to be paid out as the issue makes it way through the courts.
Eddie Wise is one farmer who claimed to face discrimination. He was the son of a sharecropper. In 1996, he and his wife, Dorothy, bought a farm with a loan from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Twenty years later, the USDA foreclosed on the property and evicted him.
John Biewen of “Scene on Radio” teamed up with Reveal to investigate Wise’s claim of race-based discrimination. Wise’s story is one piece of the puzzle explaining how Black families went from owning nearly a million farms in 1920 to now fewer than 36,000.
The federal government has admitted it was part of the problem. In 1997, a USDA report said discrimination by the agency was a factor in the decline of Black farms. A landmark class-action lawsuit on behalf of Black farmers, Pigford v. Glickman, was settled in 1999. But advocates for Black farmers say problems persist.
This episode was originally broadcast in July 2017.
A new case study by NGOs detailing the environmental and social harm that would cause the Omega Biofuel refinery being built in Paraguay by the Brazilian company ECB has garnered an inaccurate response from the company in the form of a press release issued on 2 April 2022. The organizations behind the report–Centro de Estudios Heñói, Stay Grounded, Biofuelwatch and Global Forest Coalition–assert that Grupo BSBIOS Paraguay/ECB ignored several requests for comment and is denying the facts and merely engaging in greenwashing, a common practice for these biofuels projects that seek to obscure their true harm to biodiversity and human rights.
The organizations mentioned in the undated press release by Grupo BSBIOS Paraguay/ECB (signed by Analítica Comunicaçao), object to the company’s false statements.
“The idea that Rodale offered to us is that regenerative agriculture biologically creates more surface cover for plants, ending erosion and increasing beneficial microbial populations near the surface of the soil where plants grow. Thus, offering the plants protection. But what do beneficial microbial populations have to do with protection? When the soil microbiome is healthy and in balance, it directly, positively, impacts the health of the plants that grow in it and protects them from drought or pests, for example. It can shove out pathogens trying to attack plants, produce toxins to kill them off and trigger the plants to defend themselves. Amazing, right? Rodale went on to assert that the benefits of regenerative agriculture apply to our own bodies too. He stated that by us embracing a regenerative agricultural system, we will see ‘an improvement of personal hardiness and an ability to withstand crisis, accompanied by a boost in the body’s immune system’.”
“The idea that Rodale offered to us is that regenerative agriculture biologically creates more surface cover for plants, ending erosion and increasing beneficial microbial populations near the surface of the soil where plants grow. Thus, offering the plants protection. But what do beneficial microbial populations have to do with protection? When the soil microbiome is healthy and in balance, it directly, positively, impacts the health of the plants that grow in it and protects them from drought or pests, for example. It can shove out pathogens trying to attack plants, produce toxins to kill them off and trigger the plants to defend themselves. Amazing, right? Rodale went on to assert that the benefits of regenerative agriculture apply to our own bodies too. He stated that by us embracing a regenerative agricultural system, we will see ‘an improvement of personal hardiness and an ability to withstand crisis, accompanied by a boost in the body’s immune system’.”
A mile and a half below Doug Miller’s backyard in central Michigan lie the remnants of an ancient salty sea. When the waters receded around 350 million years ago, they left behind thick deposits of potash, a commonly used fertilizer. For Miller, a retired engineer, the stuff is out of sight, but top of mind, as the company Michigan Potash & Salt has sought to build a mining facility next door.
The facility would pull vast amounts of groundwater from the same aquifer as Miller’s. “I highly expect if they actually do this, my well would run dry,” he said.
The mine in the rural township of Evart has been in the works since 2012, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has raised the stakes. With its close ally Belarus, the two countries produce 40 percent of the world’s potash, which is rich in potassium, one of three essential plant nutrients. Prices were already on the rise, and shutting off major providers from global markets is expected to keep pushing them up. So the U.S., which imports nearly all of its potash, is looking to support domestic sources, like the planned mine next to Miller’s property.
For the Denver-based Michigan Potash & Salt, with 15,000 acres of mineral rights across Osceola and Mecosta counties, the Russian conflict is the latest reason why it needs to get its operations up and running ASAP. “Michigan Potash stands ready to support American farmers by replacing one-to-one all the potash imported from Russia,” said Theodore Pagano, the company’s founder and CEO, in a statement. In March, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced a $250 million investment to support all-American fertilizer companies like Pagano’s. Once it’s operating, Michigan Potash’s site is expected to be the largest source in the country by far.
To Miller and others in the area, the risks of mining and pumping out all that groundwater to extract the potash simply aren’t worth it. They worry about the potential damage to sensitive wetlands as well as their drinking water. They question whether the U.S. really needs potash from central Michigan when there’s plenty at well-established facilities just across the U.S.-Canada border.
“All of a sudden you get a war overseas, and he’s fanning the flames that we have to have domestic production,” said Ken Ford, a forester in Osceola County, referring to Pagano.
While the U.S. relies heavily on international potash — importing 94 percent of its annual use — 83 percent of it comes from Canada, home to the largest mines in the world and directly connected by rail to the Corn Belt. (In March, a union strike shut down the railway for two days, stoking concerns about the tenuous supply chain.) Russia and Belarus each represent 6 percent.
In December, Michigan Potash obtained the last of the permits it needs to begin construction. The company would use solution mining to free the potash from the deep earth, valued at $65 billion. That involves injecting pressurized streams of hot saltwater, or brine, underground to dissolve the salt beds. Then, that brine would be pumped back to the surface, where it’s dried at high heat to extract the crystallized potash. Table salt is a byproduct of the process, which the company would sell, too.
An aerial view of Bullkill Marsh, which surrounds the proposed mine.
Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation
This form of mining requires a lot of water: The Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy, or EGLE, has already granted permission for Michigan Potash to extract 725 million gallons of groundwater each year. That amounts to some 2 million gallons a day — far exceeding the withdrawal allotted to the Nestlé bottled water plant just a few miles away.
Michigan Potash says it would recycle as much water as possible, calling its system a “closed loop.” Their production would capture the hot steam from boiling the potash out of the brine, which would supplement their water use. But only so much can be recycled. When the brine can’t be reused anymore, they’d inject the wastewater back underground into deep wells. Overall, the company has proposed boring 11 wells: eight for mining and three for waste.
Ford, who’s on the board for the Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation said the site is unsuitable for mining. It slopes on all sides. And it’s in the middle of four creeks that wander through a large freshwater marsh before flowing into the Muskegon River. “They literally could not have picked a worse location for this,” Ford said.
Members of the Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation fear the strain it would put on their watershed. They worry the sheer quantity of water used will dry up their wells and restrict water flows into the marsh. Sucking out vast quantities of water could force aquifers to migrate up, shuttling minerals and salts that would taint groundwater in a region where residents depend on private wells. “I don’t know what we’re supposed to do if the aquifer’s destroyed,” Miller said. “We’re out in the boondocks here. There’s no way we’re gonna get a municipal water source.”
A leak of the salty brine could also devastate their water supply, as well as the surrounding wetlands and waterways. Under high pressure, waste from injection wells can force its way out through cracks in the bedrock or old wells nearby, of which there are 36 around the proposed wells, according to an EPA survey. A ProPublica investigation found such leaks are fairly routine, growing more common as systems age.
In 2018, the Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation filed a complaint with the state environmental department, challenging Michigan Potash’s permits. A state judge rejected it last fall, clearing one of the company’s last hurdles. The group says the state hasn’t properly assessed the environmental impacts of the mining project. For instance, the state approved the company’s water permits through an online tool, without any formal review. That tool assesses how withdrawing water affects streamflow and fish population, but not the surrounding wetlands or underlying aquifers. Now, the environmental group is concerned Michigan Potash has no contingency plan for leaks or spills. (Calls and emails to the company and Pagano were not returned.)
A shallow creek in the area surrounding the proposed mine.
Doug Miller, Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation
Antoine Allanore, a metallurgy professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, sympathized with the locals’ concerns. Mining ventures demand high initial investments, and the price to keep mines running safely is steep. To guarantee profits, “some shortcuts will have to be taken,” he said. “That’s my experience in every mining project. If the risk is high, even though the risk is unlikely, I don’t know if any community will accept it.”
Potash mining isn’t new in Michigan, nor even in Osceola County. A husk of a mine built in the 1980s sits just a few miles away from the Evart site. The mine exchanged hands over the years, passing through Mosaic — one of the world’s biggest fertilizer producers — before its current owner, the global agricultural conglomerate Cargill, took over. But today, the facility is only used to produce salt, not potash. Major companies have struggled to turn a profit from mining potash in the area, Ford said, explaining why he and his colleagues are skeptical of Pagano’s ability to do so. That skepticism grew when they learned about a past failed potash venture of Pagano’s in North Dakota.
According to Ford, who also sits on the Osceola County Planning Commission, the commission has invited Michigan Potash to discuss the project, but the company declined the meeting.
With the necessary permits for construction in hand, Michigan Potash says it’s securing the last funds before breaking ground on the site that borders Miller’s property. The company scored a $50 million boost from Michigan lawmakers in March when they approved a $4.8 billion spending plan, including the subsidy for potash-mining.
The land surrounding Miller’s home of 50 years is filled with forests, seeps, and springs. The marsh nearby is a pitstop for many migrating waterfowl like geese, cranes, and trumpeter swans, and the ducks have just arrived for spring. Miller worries that it could all be spoiled by one brine-filled pipeline springing a leak. “This thing is carrying tens of thousands of gallons per minute,” he said. “That kind of scenario would just be a disaster.”
Without shrinking energy demand, reducing emissions rapidly by the end of this decade to keep warming below 1.5C will be almost impossible, the key UN body’s report said.
Even if all the policies to cut carbon that governments had put in place by the end of 2020 were fully implemented, the world will still warm by 3.2C this century.
At this point, only severe emissions cuts in this decade across all sectors, from agriculture and transport to energy and buildings, can turn things around, the report said.
IPCC vice-chair Dr Andy Reisinger told RNZ Morning Report the world was “pretty much out of time” to limit warming to 1.5C as agreed in Paris in 2015 and subsequently.
“What our report shows is that the emissions over the last decade were at the highest level ever in human history.
“But on the positive side, that level of emissions growth has slowed and globally we’ve seen a revolution in prices for some renewable energy technologies.” That had led to a rapid uptake of solar and wind energy technologies, he said.
“Also policies have grown. About half of global greenhouse gas emissions that we looked at in our report are now covered by some sort of laws that address climate change.”
The report said the world would need “carbon dioxide removal” (CDR) technologies – ranging from planting trees that soak up carbon to grow, to costly and energy-intensive technologies to suck carbon dioxide directly from the air.
Governments had historically seen these technologies as a “cop out” but they were needed alongside reducing emissions,” Reisinger said.
“The time has now run out. If we don’t achieve deep and rapid reductions during this decade, much more so than we’re currently planning to collectively, then limiting warming to 1.5 degrees is out of reach.
“And the world collectively has the tools to reduce emissions by about a half by 2030.”
Climate Change Minister James Shaw … “Our country has squandered the past 30 years.” Image: James Shaw FB page
NZ has ‘squandered 30 years’, says Shaw Climate Change Minister James Shaw says Aotearoa New Zealand has the political will to tackle climate change but it would have been a lot easier if it had begun decades ago.
“We are one of the highest emitting countries in the world on a per-capita basis and what that means is we’re now in a situation where having essentially fluffed around for three decades the cuts that we need to make over are now far steeper than they would have been.”
“Our country has squandered the past 30 years,” Shaw told Morning Report.
He said the Emissions Reduction Plan to be published next month would set out how the country would reduce emissions across every sector of the economy.
“I think what’s different about the plan that we’re putting out in May is that it’s a statutory instrument”, he said, and was required under the Zero Carbon Act. It would have targets to reduce emissions to the year 2025, 2030 and 2035.
New Zealand’s agricultural emissions had not reduced, he said. This was the year when final decisions would be made on whether agriculture was brought into the Emissions Trading Scheme, and the whole sector was involved in the process.
There were farms up and down the country doing a terrific job on emissions but like every sector there was a “noisy group” which was dragging the chain.
“I think the charge that Groundswell are laying that we are not listening to farmers is ‘total bollocks’, he said.
Shaw noted the IPCC report said 83 percent of net growth in greenhouse gases since 2010 had occurred in Asia and the Pacific — and that New Zealand, Australia and Japan, as a group, had some of the highest rates of greenhouse gas emissions per capita in 2019.
Cut consumer demand While past IPCC reports on mitigating carbon emissions tended to focus on the promise of sustainable fuel alternatives, the new report highlights a need to cut consumer demand.
Massey University emeritus professor Ralph Sims, a review editor of the IPCC report, said one of the overarching messages is that people needed to change behaviours.
Despite New Zealanders having an attitude that our impact was small, in fact the country had some of the highest carbon emissions per capita, he said.
“We need people to look at their lifestyles, look at their carbon footprints and consider how they may reduce them.”
One of the easiest for the individual was to avoid food waste, he said.
Sims was involved in the transport chapter and said it was a key area for New Zealand.
“It’s the highest growing sector, and makes up for 20 percent of the country’s emissions.”
Faster electric vehicles change
He did not believe the country was transitioning fast enough to electric vehicles, and government assistance needed to be ramped up.
Electric vehicle prices would also reduce over time and a second hand market would make them more affordable, he said.
Sims said New Zealand needed to “get out of coal” and some companies were already reducing their coal demand.
Though New Zealand’s coal industry was small, exploration was still on the table and just last year the Southland District Council granted exploration at Ohai, he said.
Methane emissions need to reduce by a third by 2030, which Sims said is “a major challenge, and highly unlikely” to be achieved in New Zealand.
Victoria University of Wellington professor of physical geography James Renwick said curbing greenhouse gas emissions was still possible, with immediate action.
“The advice from the Climate Change Commission does show that we can peak emissions in the next few years and reduce and get down to zero carbon dioxide hopefully well in advance of 2050,” he said.
“It’s impossible to overstate the dangerous threat we face from climate change and yet politicians and policy makers and businesses still don’t act when everything’s at stake. I haven’t really seen the political will yet but we really need to see action.”
Technologies available at present to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere were not able to operate at the scale needed to make a difference to the climate system, he said.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
As gas prices continue to soar following a ban on Russian oil imports, a bipartisan group of Midwestern lawmakers hopes the U.S. can replace the flow with something else: ethanol.
Last week, representatives from Minnesota, Iowa, and Illinois introduced the Home Front Energy Independence Act to encourage production of the mainly corn-based fuel, which is mixed with gasoline and sold alongside conventional gas at pumps across the country. The bill would make E15, a blend that contains 15 percent ethanol, available year-round. (The Environmental Protection Agency currently restricts retailers from selling during the summer to allay concerns about its contributions to smog.) It would also establish an E15 tax credit of at least five cents per gallon for blenders and retailers, extend other soon-to-expire tax credits for biofuels, and provide funding for biofuel infrastructure such as fuel tanks and pumps, which need upgrades to handle E15.
The bill mirrors legislation introduced in the Senate in early March, led by Senators Joni Ernst, an Iowa Republican, and Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat. Both pieces of legislation have sought to complement a ban on Russian, oil, gas, and coal that President Joe Biden announced on March 8.
“With the cost of this war hitting Americans at the gas pump, it’s time to bolster our fuel supply with home-grown biofuels,” Representative Cheri Bustos, an Illinois Democrat, said in a press release. “Not only would this cut gas prices for consumers, but it would also reduce emissions and support our family farmers.”
The White House has signaled that it’s open to expanded E15 sales, and the bill’s sponsors have argued that the U.S. already has enough excess ethanol capacity to make up for Russian oil imports. But some energy experts contend the country would actually have to expand ethanol production significantly to meet the shortfall, meaning the promised price relief could be elusive. Doubts about the environmental benefits of switching to ethanol are substantial, too: Growing, processing, and burning corn to produce ethanol may exacerbate climate change even more than the fossil fuels it could replace.
Since the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, Democrats and Republicans alike have decried America’s reliance on Russian oil, which forms about 8 percent of U.S. oil imports. But while some Democrats in Congress saw Biden’s ban as an opportunity to transition to a clean energy economy, many Republicans and the fossil fuel industry have seized on the moment to criticize renewable energy policies and call for increased oil production.
The ethanol bill takes a third path, but it’s not clear yet how much support it has in Congress outside of major corn-producing states, especially given that it combines previous pieces of legislation that were never passed. Much of the explicit support it’s received has been from the Renewable Fuels Association, or RFA, a trade group representing the ethanol industry.
“This commonsense legislation would bring immediate economic relief to American families who are experiencing unprecedented pain at the pump, while simultaneously reducing emissions of greenhouse gases and tailpipe pollutants linked to cancer, heart disease, and respiratory illnesses,” RFA President and CEO Geoff Cooper said in a statement on the group’s website. “Not only would the bill eliminate dependence on Russian oil imports, but it would also ensure that those imports are replaced by more affordable renewable fuels produced right here in America’s heartland.”
The RFA, which has separately urged Biden to use his emergency authorization powers to allow E15 to be sold year-round, stated that the U.S. already has enough ethanol to replace every lost barrel of Russian oil. But Chad Hart, an Iowa State University professor who specializes in agricultural economics, told the Iowa Capital Dispatch that ethanol production may need to increase by more than 30 percent to meet demand.
That expansion could worsen the climate crisis. Refining ethanol produces carbon dioxide, as does burning it — but because it’s made up of plants that pull carbon dioxide out of the air while they’re growing, it has long been considered greener than fossil fuels. Previous studies have found that the average carbon dioxide emissions from ethanol production and consumption are about 20 percent lower than those of gasoline, while the U.S. Department of Agriculture contends that they’re about 40 percent lower.
Other research has disputed this assertion. In February, researchers at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, found that ethanol incentives such as the Renewable Fuel Standard — which requires that 36 billion gallons of gasoline are replaced with ethanol each year — encouraged the expansion of corn production, converting carbon-rich forests and grassland into monocrop cornfields that made the fuel least 24 percent more carbon-intensive than gasoline. And that’s not counting the increased use of fossil-fuel-based fertilizers used to grow corn in the U.S., which emit the equivalent of 29.4 million tons of carbon dioxide each year and pollute nearby waterways.
The focus on using farmland to produce ethanol is especially misguided as the invasion of Ukraine threatens global food supplies, according to Silvia Secchi, a sustainability researcher at the University of Iowa. Ukraine is a major producer of wheat and corn, and food prices have soared since the invasion. Given this, Secchi said the U.S. should instead convert more of its corn fields to wheat, particularly to feed vulnerable areas such as the Middle East and Africa.
“It is absolutely ridiculous to be redirecting more of the US corn crop to ethanol while we actually need to do all we can to shore up world food supplies,” Secchi wrote in an email to Grist. “The US farm lobby and its advocates really do not seem to care about the real problems we face but instead want to keep producing a subsidized crop and an obsolete fuel.”
The September 2021 Scientific American included a description by the editors of the deplorable state of disaster relief in the US. They traced the root cause of problems with relief programs as their “focus on restoring private property,” which results in little attention to those “with the least capacity to deal with disasters.” The book Disaster Preparedness and Climate Change in Cuba: Adaptation and Management (2021) comes out the next month. It traced the highly successful source of the island nation’s efforts to the way it put human welfare above property. This collection of 14 essays by Emily J. Kirk, Isabel Story, and Anna Clayfield is an extraordinary assemblage of articles, each addressing specific issues.
Writers are well aware that Cuban approaches are adapted to the unique geography and history of the island. What readers should take away is not so much the specific actions of Cuba as its method of studying a wide array of approaches and actually putting the best into effect (as opposed to merely talking about their strengths and weaknesses). The book traces Cuba’s preparedness from the threat of a US invasion following its revolution through its resistance to hurricanes and diseases, which all laid the foundation for current adaptions to climate change.
Only four years after the revolution, in 1963, Hurricane Flora hit the Caribbean, killing 7000-8000. Cubans who are old enough remember homes being washed away by waters carrying rotten food, animal carcasses and human bodies. It sparked a complete redesign of health systems, intensifying their integration from the highest decision-making bodies to local health centers. Construction standards were strengthened, requiring houses to have reinforced concrete and metal roofs to resist strong winds.
Decades of re-designing proved successful. In September 2017 Category 5 Hurricane Maria pounded Puerto Rico, leading to 2975 deaths. The same month, Irma, also a Category 5 Hurricane, arrived in Cuba, causing 10 deaths. The dedication to actually preparing the country for a hurricane (as opposed to merely talking about preparedness) became a model for coping with climate change. Projecting potential future damage led Cubans to to realize that by 2050, rising water levels could destroy 122 coastal towns. By 2017, Cuba had become the only country with a government-led plan (Project Life, or Tarea Vida) to combat climate change which includes a 100 year projection.
Disaster Planning
Several aspects merged to form the core of Cuban disaster planning. They included education, the military, and social relationships. During 1961, Cuba’s signature campaign raised literacy to 96%, one of the world’s highest rates. This has been central to every aspect of disaster preparation – government officials and educators travel throughout the island, explaining consequences of inaction and everyone’s role in avoiding catastrophe.
Less obvious is the critical role of the military. From the first days they took power, leaders such as Fidel and Che explained that the only way the revolution could defend itself from overwhelming US force would be to become a “nation in arms.” Soon self-defense from hurricanes combined with self-defense from attack and Cuban armed forces became a permanent part of fighting natural disasters. By 1980, exercises called Bastión (bulwark) fused natural disaster management with defense rehearsals.
As many as 4 million Cubans (in a population of 11 million) were involved in activities to practice and carry out food production, disease control, sanitation and safeguarding medical supplies. A culture based on understanding the need to create a new society has glued these actions together. When a policy change is introduced, government representatives go to each community, including the most remote rural ones, to make sure that everyone knows the threats that climate change poses to their lives and how they can alter behaviors to minimize them. Developing a sense of responsibility for ecosystems includes such diverse actions as conserving energy, saving water, preventing fires and using medical products sparingly.
Contradictions
One aspect of the book may confuse readers. Some authors refer to the Cuban disaster prevention system as “centralized;” others refer to it as “decentralized;” and some describe it as both “centralized” and “decentralized” on different pages of their essay. The collection reflects a methodology of “dialectical materialism” which often employs the unity of opposite processes (“heads” and “tails” are opposite static states united in the concept of “coin”). As multiple authors have explained, including Ross Danielson in his classic Cuban Medicine (1979), centralization and decentralization of medicine have gone hand-in-hand since the earliest days of the revolution. This may appear as centralization of inpatient care and decentralization of outpatient care (p. 165) but more often as centralization at the highest level of norms and decentralization of ways to implement care to the local level. The decision to create doctor-nurse offices was made by the ministry which provided guidelines for each area to implement according to local conditions.
A national plan for coping with Covid-19 was developed before the first Cuban died of the affliction and each area designed ways to to get needed medicines, vaccines and other necessities to their communities. Proposals for preventing water salinization in coastal areas will be very different from schemas for coping with rises in temperature in inland communities.
Challenges for Producing Energy: The Good
As non-stop use of fossil fuels renders the continued existence of humanity questionable, the issue of how to obtain energy rationally looms as a core problem of the twenty-first century. Disaster Preparedness explores an intriguing variety of energy sources. Some of them are outstandingly good; a few are bad; and, many provoke closer examination.
Raúl Castro proposed in 1980 that it was necessary to protect the countryside from impacts of nickel mining. What was critical in this early approach was an understanding that every type of metal extraction has negatives that must be weighed against its usefulness in order to minimize those negatives. What did not appear in his approach was making a virtue of necessity, which would have read “Cuba needs nickel for trade; therefore, extracting Cuban nickel is good; and, thus, problems with producing nickel should be ignored or trivialized.”
In 1991, when the USSR collapsed and Cuba lost its subsidies and many of its trading partners, its economy was devastated, adult males lost an average of 20 pounds, and health problems became widespread. This was Cuba’s “Special Period.” Not having oil meant that Cuba had to abandon machine-intensive agriculture for agroecology and urban farming.
Laws prohibited use of agrochemicals in urban gardens. Vegetable and herb production exploded from 4000 tons in 1994 to over 4 million tons by 2006. By 2019, Jason Hickel’s Sustainable Development Index rated Cuba’s ecological efficiency as the best in the world.
By far the most important part of Cuba’s energy program was using less energy via conservation, an idea abandoned by Western “environmentalists” who began endorsing unlimited expansion of energy produced by “alternative” sources. In 2005, Fidel began pushing conservation policies projected to reduce Cuba’s energy consumption by two-thirds. Ideas such these had blossomed during the first few years of the revolution.
What one author refers to as “bioclimatic architecture” is not clear, but it could include tile vaulting, which was studied extensively by the Cuban government in the early 1960s. It is based on arched ceilings formed by lightweight terra cotta tiles. The technique is low-carbon because it does not require expensive machinery and uses mainly local material such as terra cotta tiles from Camagüey province. Though used to construct buildings throughout the island, it was abandoned due to its need for skilled and specialized labor.
Challenges for Producing Energy: The Bad
Though there are negative aspects to Cuba’s energy perspectives, it is important to consider one which is anything but negative: energy efficiency (EE). Ever since Stanley Jevons predicted in 1865 that a more efficient steam engine design would result in more (not less) coal being used, it has been widely understood that if the price of energy (such as burning coal) is cheaper, then people will use more energy.
A considerable amount of research verifies that, at the level of the entire economy, efficiency makes energy cheaper and its use goes up. Some claim that if an individual uses a more EE option, then that person will use less energy. But that is not necessarily so. Someone buying a car might look for one that is more EE. If the person replaces a non-EE sedan with an EE SUV, the fact that SUVs use more energy than sedans would mean that the person is using more energy to get around. Similarly, rich people use money saved from EE devices to buy more gadgets while poor people might not buy anything additional or buy low-energy necessities.
This is why Cuba, a poor country with a planned economy, can design policies to reduce energy use. Whatever is saved from EE can lead to less or low-energy production, resulting in a spiraling down of energy usage. In contrast, competition drives capitalist economies toward investing funds saved from EE toward economic expansion, resulting in perpetual growth.
Though a planned economy allows for decisions that are healthier for people and ecosystems, bad choices can be made. One consideration in Cuba is the goal to “efficiently apply pesticides” (p. 171). The focus should actually be on how to farm without pesticides. Also under consideration is “solid waste energy capacities,” which is typically a euphemism for burning waste in incinerators. Incinerators are a terrible way to produce energy since they merely reduce the volume of trash to 10% of its original size while releasing poisonous gases, heavy metals (such as mercury and lead), and cancer-causing dioxins and furans.
The worst energy alternative was favored by Fidel, who supported a nuclear power plant which would supposedly “greatly reduce the cost of producing electricity.” (p. 187) Had the Soviets built a Chernobyl-type nuclear reactor, an explosion or two would not have contributed to disaster prevention. Once when I was discussing the suffering following the USSR collapse with a friend who writes technical documents for the Cuban government, he suddenly blurted out, “The only good thing coming out of the Special Period was that, without the Soviets, Fidel could not build his damned nuclear plant!”
Challenges for Producing Energy: The Uncertain
Between the poles of positive and negative lies a vast array of alternatives mentioned in Disaster Preparedness that most are unfamiliar with. There are probably few who know of bagasse, which is left over sugar cane stalks that have been squeezed for juice. Burning it for fuel might arouse concern because it is not plowed into soil like what should be done for wheat stems and corn stalks. Sugar cane is different because the entire plant is hauled away – it would waste fuel to transport it to squeezing machinery and then haul it back to the farm.
While fuel from bagasse is an overall environmental plus, the same cannot be said for oilseeds such as Jatropha curcas. Despite the book suggesting the they might be researched more, they are a dead end for energy production.
Another energy positive being expanded in Cuba is farms being run entirely on agroecology principles. The book claims that such farms can produce 12 times the energy they consume, which might seem like a lot. Yet, similar findings occur in other countries, notably Sweden. In contrast, at least one author holds out hope of obtaining energy from microalgae, almost certainly another dead end.
Potentially, a very promising source for energy is the use of biogas from biodigesters. Biodigesters break down manure and other biomass to create biogas which is used for tractors or transportation. Leftover solid waste material can be used as a (non-fossil fuel) fertilizer. On the other hand, an energy source which one author lists as viable is highly dubious: “solar cells built with gallum arsenide.” Compounds with arsenic are cancer-causing and not healthy for humans and other living species.
The word “biomass” is highly charged because it is one of Europe’s “clean, green” energy sources despite the fact that burning wood pellets is leading to deforestation in Estonia and the US. This does not seem to be the case in Cuba, where “biomass” refers to sawdust and weedy marabú trees. It remains important to distinguish positive biomass from highly destructive biomass.
Many other forms of alternative energy could be covered and there is a critical point applying to all of them. Each source of energy must be analyzed separately without ever assuming that if energy does not come from fossil fuels it is therefore useful and safe.
Depending on How You Get It
The three major sources of alternative energy – hydroturbines (dams), solar, and wind – share the characteristic that how positive or negative they are depends on the way they are obtained.
The simplest form of hydro power is the paddle wheel, which probably causes zero environmental damage and produces very little energy. At the other extreme is hydro-electric dams which cross entire rivers and are incredibly destructive towards human cultures and aquatic and terrestrial species. In between are methods such as diverting a portion of the river to harness its power. The book mentions pico-hydroturbines which affect only a portion of a river, generating less than 5kW and are extremely useful for remote areas. They have minimal environmental effects. But if a large number of these turbines were placed together in a river, that would be a different matter. The general rule for water power is that causing less environmental damage means producing less energy.
Many ways to produce energy start with the sun. Cuba uses passive solar techniques, which do not have toxic processes associated with electricity. A passivehaus design provides warmth largely via insulation and placement of windows. Extremely important is body heat. This makes a passivhaus difficult for Americans, whose homes typically have much more space per person than other countries. But the design could work better in Cuba, where having three generations living together in a smaller space would contribute to heating quite well.
At the negative extreme of solar energy are the land-hungry electricity-generating arrays. In between these poles is low-intensity solar power, also being studied by Cuba.
The vast majority of Cubans heat their water for bathing. Water heaters can depend on solar panels which turn sunlight into electricity. An even better non-electric design would be to use a box with glass doors and a black tank to collect heat, or to use “flat plate collectors” and then pipe the heated water to an indoor storage tank. As with hydro-power, simpler designs produce fewer problems but generate less energy.
Wind power is highly similar. Centuries ago, windmills were constructed with materials from the surrounding area and did not rely on or produce toxins. Today’s industrial wind turbines are toxic in every phase of their existence. In the ambiguous category are small wind turbines and wind pumps, both of which Cuba is exploring. What hydro, solar and wind power have in common is that non-destructive forms exist but produce less energy. The more energy-producing a system is, the more problematic it becomes.
Scuttling the Fetish
Since hydro, solar and wind power have reputations as “renewable, clean, green” sources of energy, it is necessary to examine them closely. Hydro, solar and wind power each require destructive extraction of materials such as lithium, cobalt, silver, aluminum, cadmium, indium, gallium, selenium, tellurium, neodymium, and dysprosium. All three lead to mountains of toxic waste that vastly exceed the amount obtained for use. And all require withdrawal of immense amounts of water (a rapidly vanishing substance) during the mining and construction.
Hydro-power also disrupts aquatic species (as well as several terrestrial ones), causes large releases of greenhouse gases (GHGs) from reservoirs, increases mercury poisoning, pushes people out of their homes during construction, intensifies international conflicts, and have killed up to 26,000 people from breakage. Silicon-based solar panels involves an additional list of toxic chemicals that can poison workers during manufacture, gargantuan loss of farm and forest land for installing “arrays” (which rapidly increases over time), and still more land loss for disposal after their 25-30 year life spans. Industrial wind turbines require loss of forest land for roads to haul 160 foot blades to mountain tops, land loss for depositing those mammoth blades after use, and energy-intensive storage capacity when there is no wind.
Hydro, solar and wind power are definitely NOT renewable, since they all are based on heavy usage of materials that are exhausted following continuous mining. Neither are they “carbon neutral” because all use fossil fuels for extraction of necessary building materials and end-of-life demolition. The most important point is that the issues listed here are a tiny fraction of total problems, which would require a very thick book to enumerate.
Why use the word “fetish” for approaches to hydro, solar and wind power? A “fetish” can be described as “a material object regarded with extravagant trust or reverence” These sources of energy have positive characteristics, but nothing like the reverence often bestowed upon them.
Cuba’s approach to alternative energy is quite different. Helen Yaffe wrote two of the major articles in Disaster Preparedness. She also put together the 2021 documentary, Cuba’s life task: Combatting climate change, which includes the following from advisor Orlando Rey Santos:
“One problem today is that you cannot convert the world’s energy matrix, with current consumption levels, from fossil fuels to renewable energies. There are not enough resources for the panels and wind turbines, nor the space for them. There are insufficient resources for all this. If you automatically made all transportation electric tomorrow, you will continue to have the same problems of congestion, parking, highways, heavy consumption of steel and cement.”
Cuba maps out many different outlines for energy in order to focus on those that are the most productive while causing the least damage. A genuine environmental approach requires a Life Cycle Analysis (LCA, also known as cradle-to-grave accounting) which includes all mining, milling, construction and transport of materials; the energy-gathering process itself (including environmental disruption); along with after-effects such as continuing environmental damage and disposal of waste. To these must be added social effects such as relocating people, injury and death of those resisting relocation, destruction of sacred cites and disruption of affected cultures.
A “fetish” on a specific energy source denotes tunnel-visioning on its use phase while ignoring preparatory and end-of-life phases and social disruption. While LCAs are often propounded by corporations, they are typically nothing but window-dressing, to be pitched out of window during actual decision-making. With an eternal growth dynamic, capitalism has a built-in tendency to downplay negatives when there is an opportunity to add new energy sources to the mix of fossil fuels.
Is It an Obscene Word?
Cuba has no such internal dynamics forcing it to expand the economy if it can provide better lives for all. The island could be a case study of degrowth economics. Since “degrowth” is shunned as a quasi-obscenity by many who insist that it would cause immeasurable suffering for the world’s poor, it is necessary to state what it would be. The best definition is that Global Economic Degrowth means (a) reduction of unnecessary and destructive production by and for rich countries (and people), (b) which exceeds the (c) growth of production of necessities by and for poor countries (and people).
This might not be as economically difficult as some imagine because …
1. The rich world spends such gargantuan wealth on that which is useless and deadly, including war toys, chemical poisons, planned obsolescence, creative destruction of goods, insurance, automobile addiction, among a mass of examples; and,
Some mischaracterize degrowth, claiming that “Cuba experienced ‘degrowth’ during its ‘Special Period’ and it was horrible.” Wrong! Degrowth did not immiserate Cuba – the US embargo did. US sanctions (or embargo or blockade) of Cuba creates barriers to trade which force absurdly high prices for many goods. One small example: If Cubans need a spare part manufactured in the US, it cannot be merely shipped from the US, but more likely, arrives via Europe. That means its cost will reflect: [manufacture] + [cost of shipping to Europe] + [cost of shipping from Europe to Cuba].
What is amazing is that Cuba has developed so many techniques of medical care and disaster management for hurricanes and climate change, despite its double impoverishment from colonial days and neo-colonial attacks from the US.
Daydreaming
Cuba realizes the responsibility it has to protect its extraordinary biodiversity. Its extensive coral reefs are more resistant to bleaching than most and must be investigated to discover why. They are accompanied by healthy marine systems which include mangroves and seagrass beds. Its flora and fauna boast 3022 distinct plant species plus dozens of reptiles, amphibians and bird species which exist only on the island.
For Cuba to implement global environmental protection and degrowth policies it would need to receive financing both to research new techniques and to train the world’s poor in how to develop their own ways to live better. Such financial support would include …
1. Reparations for centuries of colonial plunder;
2. Reparations for the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, multiple attacks which killed Cuban citizens, hundreds of attempts on Fidel’s life, and decades of slanderous propaganda; and,
Why reparations? It is far more than the fact that Cuba has been harmed intensely by the US. Cuba has a track record proving that it could develop amazing technologies if it were left alone and received the money it deserves.
Like all poor countries, Cuba is forced to employ dubious methods of producing energy in order to survive. It is unacceptable for rich countries to tell poor countries that they must not use energy techniques which have historically been employed to obtain what is necessary for living. It is unconscionable for rich countries to fail to forewarn poor countries that repeating practices which we now know are dangerous will leave horrible legacies for their descendants.
Cuba has acknowledged past misdirections including an economy based on sugar, a belief in the need of humanity to dominate nature, support for the “Green Revolution” with its reliance on toxic chemicals, tobacco in food rations, and the repression of homosexuals. Unless it is sidetracked by by advocates of infinite economic growth, its pattern suggests that it will recognize problems with alternative energy and seek to avoid them.
In the video Cuba’s Life Task, Orlando Rey also observes that “There must be a change in the way of life, in our aspirations. This is a part of Che Guevara’s ideas on the ‘new man.’ Without forming that new human, it is very difficult to confront the climate issue.”
Integration of poor countries into the global market has meant that areas which were once able to feed themselves are are now unable to do so. Neo-liberalism forces them to use energy sources that are life-preservers in the short run but are death machines for their descendants. The world must remember that Che’s “new man” will not clamor for frivolous luxuries while others starve. For humanity to survive, a global epiphany rejecting consumer capitalism must become a material force in energy production. Was Che only dreaming? If so, then keep that dream alive!
Don Fitz (moc.loanull@nodztif)is on the Editorial Board of Green Social Thought, where a version of this article originally appeared. He was the 2016 candidate of the Missouri Green Party for Governor. His articles on politics and the environment have appeared in Monthly Review, Z Magazine, and Green Social Thought, as well as multiple online publications. His book, Cuban Health Care: The Ongoing Revolution, has been available since June 2020. Thoughts from Stan Cox and John Som de Cerff were very helpful for technical aspects of this review.
Data released last week reveals that 54 million acres of land managed by the Bureau of Land Management, or BLM, fail to meet the agency’s own “land-health standards.”
While standards vary between states and bioregions, they generally measure biological conditions, including soil health, water quality, plant species diversity, and the quality of habitat for threatened and endangered species. The standards define the minimum benchmarks land managers need to achieve and maintain in order for landscapes to function and be used sustainably.
The BLM oversees 246 million acres of land — the vast majority of it in the Western United States. The agency’s mission is to “sustain the health, diversity, and productivity of public lands for the use and enjoyment of present and future generations,” but according to records obtained by bipartisan watchdog organization Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, or PEER, it is failing to do so on nearly a quarter of the land that’s leased for grazing.
“We must all work together to improve conservation practices on public lands,” said Chandra Rosenthal, PEER’s Rocky Mountain Office director. “This map is a wakeup call for the BLM to not only improve and modernize their data collection and mapping efforts, but also to take action to address the vast amounts of degraded lands.”
PEER obtained 78,000 records spanning three decades through Freedom of Information Act requests. The data, which covers 13 Western states from 1997 to 2019 and holds information from every BLM field office in those states, plots 21,000 allotments on one interactive map.
“This map is useful for individuals to be able to see what’s going on around them, become active and really work to hold the BLM accountable in the areas that are important to them,” Rosenthal told High Country News. “It’s really empowering for people to be aware of what’s going on on their public lands.” (Disclosure: Rosenthal is a sibling of HCN’s managing digital editor.)
The data shows that vast areas of the land are degraded. Some acreage isn’t assessed at all, and of the roughly 109 million acres that are, half fail to meet rangeland health standards. Struggling allotments, while documented across the West, are predominantly found in cold desert ecoregions, often in the rain shadow of mountain ranges. These areas are characterized by lack of moisture and extreme temperature swings.
In six states — California, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, and Wyoming — more than 40 percent of assessed lands are failing land-health standards. In Nevada, 83 percent of assessed allotments do not meet standards, while data from Idaho recorded that 78 percent of assessed allotments failed rangeland health standards. In New Mexico, however, only 2 percent of assessed allotments are failing.
High Country News reached out to the BLM with questions prior to publication, and the agency responded with a written statement after the story originally went to press: “While we disagree with some of PEER’s conclusions as the analysis was at a large scale and missed some on the ground improvements, we acknowledge there is work to be done in the face of a changing climate and other challenges,” according to the statement. “The BLM will prioritize assessments for areas where land health standards have never been evaluated or where standards are not being met and is also working to improve how it reports land health data.”
Flourishing landscapes are integral to the public and economic health of the West’s communities and Indigenous nations, particularly those whose ancestral lands are involved. Research by Headwaters Economics and the Center for Western Priorities extensively documents the tremendous value that public lands hold for nearby gateway communities.
But a prolonged megadrought in the Western U.S. poses an ongoing threat to already stressed landscapes and the communities that depend on them, as do overlapping issues, including climate change, the spread of invasive species like cheatgrass, and the increasing frequency and intensity of wildfires.
PEER’s analysis finds that livestock grazing is the primary culprit behind land degradation. The BLM leases more than half of its acreage to ranchers as grazing allotments for cattle, sheep, and other livestock. Although everything from drought and wildfire to off-road vehicles can impact rangeland health, livestock grazing is a significant cause of the failing land-health standards of 72 percent of the public land. That’s about 40 million acres.
This finding is consistent throughout the West, sometimes at a large scale: A massive, over 950,000-acre allotment in the Rock Springs area of Wyoming is just one of the areas that identifies livestock grazing as a significant cause for declining land health. Other stressors such as invasive species, wild horses and extreme stream degradation account for the poor health of an additional 15 million acres.
BLM grazing lands that fail to meet standards overlap substantially with greater sage grouse breeding areas and habitat. Ecoregions like the Wyoming Basin, Northern Basin and Range, and Snake River Plains owe their failure to the presence of livestock on more than 40 percent of the lands assessed to date. Other animal species are implicated too; for example, some allotments in the home of the threatened desert tortoise are also failing to meet standards.
PEER shared its findings in a meeting in early January with top agency officials, including BLM Director Tracy Stone-Manning and Deputy Director of Policy and Programs Nada Culver.
“It was surprising to us that a lot of them didn’t even know there was grazing within wilderness areas,” Rosenthal said. “I feel like there’s a lot of unfamiliarity with the rangeland health standards data.” But Rosenthal also categorized the meeting as a “positive step” and said that she felt the leaders were “curious and interested in making change.”
