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Category: Climate & Energy

  • Can a city truly be 100% renewable? It’s complicated.

    In 2014, Burlington, Vermont, the birthplace of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream and the stomping grounds of Senator Bernie Sanders, announced that it had reached an energy milestone. The city of 42,000, which hugs the shore of Lake Champlain, produced enough power from renewable sources to cover all its electricity needs. Burlington, the city government proclaimed, was one of America’s first “renewable cities.”

    Since then, Burlington has been joined by Georgetown, Texas, Aspen, Colorado, and a few other small towns across the country. And though some cities have a head start — Burlington benefits from a huge amount of hydroelectric power and ample wood for biomass burning — many that rely on fossil fuels for power are joining in. Today, more than 170 cities and towns across the U.S. have promised to shift their power supply from coal and natural gas to solar, wind, and hydropower. St. Louis, which currently gets only 11 percent of its power from renewables, says that it will run purely on renewables by 2035; coal-dependent Denver has promised to do the same by 2030.

    “Cities are setting these goals and striving to go from a very small percentage of renewables to 100 percent on an extremely ambitious timeline,” said Lacey Shaver, city renewable energy manager at the World Resources Institute, via email. “It’s an exciting time for city energy work.”

    But are 100 percent renewable cities actually … 100 percent renewable? The reality is a bit complicated — and it shows the challenges of true, “deep” decarbonization of electricity in the United States.

    First, shifting to clean electricity doesn’t mean that a city zeroes out its carbon footprint — residents could still be driving gas-guzzling cars or heating their homes with natural gas. Even most claims of running on “clean” electricity come with caveats: What cities actually mean is that they purchase enough electricity from wind, solar, or other clean sources to balance out the power that they use over the course of the year. For places filled with renewables, like Vermont, that’s not such a big deal. But in other areas, a city might not be using all renewable electricity in real-time. Even when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing, electrons still need to be flowing through the grid to keep the lights on. And at the moment, a lot of that more consistent energy comes from non-renewable sources, mainly natural gas and coal.

    “There’s really no city that operates as an island in electricity,” said Joshua Rhodes, a research associate at the University of Texas at Austin. “You’re going to be connected to a larger grid.” There’s no such thing as “fossil fuel electrons” and “renewable electrons” — all power mixes together once it reaches the grid. That means even a 100 percent renewable town might, from time to time, be sourcing its electricity from fossil fuels. Because of this, Rhodes says that goals to run purely on renewables are more like accounting mechanisms than a pure description of a city’s energy sources.

    At the moment, this isn’t a big problem: Most cities have a long way to go even to get to that stage. The U.S. electricity grid is still over 60 percent powered by fossil fuels, and most cities get only around 15 percent of their power from renewables. When municipal governments buy renewable energy — even if they are still hooked into the larger grid — they add to the demand for wind and solar installations. But in the long run, experts say that this strategy is not going to get the country entirely off fossil fuels.

    When cities manage this kind of renewable-energy balancing act, they’re “disconnecting something that is super important,” said Nestor Sepulveda, an associate at McKinsey and the author of an influential paper on decarbonizing the electricity grid. “You lose chronology — when energy is being produced and consumed.” Renewables like wind and solar are only available at certain times of the day, but a truly “clean” grid would have carbon-free sources of electricity ready to go at all times.

    Local governments haven’t yet tried to meet this much higher bar, and it’s hard to blame them. A lot of the technologies required for clean, round-the-clock electricity aren’t quite ready yet. According to Jesse Jenkins, professor of engineering at Princeton University, that could include giant batteries, nuclear and geothermal energy, as well as hydrogen fuel and maybe even natural gas combined with carbon capture.

    But these energy sources are either not ready for widespread use or are so expensive that they are cost-prohibitive. “They’re really not ready to scale,” Jenkins said. If the U.S. is serious about zeroing out emissions, he added, “we need to spend the next decade very proactively — pushing these technologies forward and seeing which ones succeed, how quickly they mature, and how fast we can scale them up in the future.”

    There are some promising signs. During his campaign, President-elect Joe Biden promised to eliminate all emissions from the electricity grid by 2035 — a tall order, but one that is technically possible with huge investments in clean energy. And even if Biden is partly stymied by a divided Congress, he may be able to work with Republicans to boost research and development into the technologies needed to green the grid.

    “Renewables have had great progress over the past decade,” Sepulveda said. “And that’s great.” But total decarbonization will require clean energy other than solar and wind, he added. The question is who’s going to come up with it — and if it will be soon enough.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Floating ‘mini-nukes’ could power countries by 2025, says startup

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

    Floating barges fitted with advanced nuclear reactors could begin powering developing nations by the mid-2020s, according to a Danish startup company.

    Seaborg Technologies believes it can make cheap nuclear electricity a viable alternative to fossil fuels across the developing world as soon as 2025.

    Its seaborne “mini-nukes” have been designed for countries that lack the energy grid infrastructure to develop utility-scale renewable energy projects, many of which go on to use gas, diesel, and coal plants instead.

    The ships are fitted with one or more small nuclear reactors, which can generate electricity and transmit the power to the mainland. The first ship of this kind began supplying heat and electricity to the Russian port of Pevek on the East Siberian Sea in December 2019.

    Troels Schönfeldt, the chief executive of Seaborg, said the company’s 100-megawatt compact molten salt reactor would take two years to build and would generate electricity that would be cheaper than coal-fired power.

    Seaborg has raised about €20 million ($24 million) from private investors, including the Danish retail billionaire Anders Holch Povlsen, and received the first of the necessary regulatory approvals within a four-phase process from the American Bureau of Shipping this week.

    Most developing nations have been unable to pursue nuclear energy because it requires a carefully managed regulatory regime to prevent nuclear accidents or proliferation of materials that could be used to create nuclear weapons.

    Seaborg hopes to begin taking orders by the end of 2022 for the nuclear barges, which would be built in South Korean shipyards and towed to coastlines where they could be anchored for up to 24 years, he said.

    The “turn-key solution” is important to fast-growing developing economies to power their nascent industries, purify drinking water, and produce clean-burning hydrogen as demand for energy access rockets in the years ahead.

    “The scale of the developing world’s energy demand growth is mind-boggling,” Schönfeldt said. “If we can’t find an energy solution for these countries, they will turn to fossil fuels and we surely won’t meet our climate targets.”

    The International Energy Agency has found that the accelerating demand for electricity — due to a growing global population and rising levels of affluence — is on course to outpace the growth of renewable energy and increase reliance on fossil fuels.

    Although nuclear energy has been used onboard seaborne vessels for decades to power submarines and “icebreaker” tankers, Seaborg’s design would be one of the first examples of a commercially available nuclear barge used to provide electricity to the mainland.

    Chris Gadomski, a nuclear analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance, said: “The concept of a floating nuclear power plant has been around for a long time, and makes a lot of sense. But there are concerns.” There was inherent risk involved with nuclear reactor technologies and floating power plants, so combining two could raise serious questions for investors and governments, he said.

    “In places like the Philippines and Indonesia it makes a lot of sense. But it wasn’t so long ago that the Philippines was the site of a major tsunami, and I don’t know how you would hedge against a risk like that,” he added.

    Jan Haverkamp, from Greenpeace, said floating reactors were “a recipe for disaster” including “all of the flaws and risks of larger land-based nuclear power stations.” “On top of that, they face extra risks from the unpredictability of operation in coastal areas and transport — particularly in a loaded state — over the high seas. Think storms, think tsunamis,” he said.

    Schönfeldt said the advanced reactor was designed to be as safe as possible in a worst-case scenario accident, with a system causing the radioactive material to form a solid rock outside of the reactor core so it cannot disperse into the air or sea as a catastrophically harmful gas or liquid.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Congress takes action against ‘super greenhouse gases’ in coronavirus stimulus

    This week, with Americans distracted by tinsel, wrapping paper, and the prospect of a much-needed $600 stimulus check, Congress achieved something that in recent years has seemed impossible: It passed legislation that will cut greenhouse gas emissions and boost clean energy spending at the same time.

    Climate and energy provisions were folded into Congress’s $900 billion coronavirus stimulus package, which passed Monday night after days of political wrangling. Those components of the bill — which authorize $35 billion in clean energy spending and require the U.S. to phase down emissions of a greenhouse gas thousands of times more potent than carbon dioxide — represent the most significant action Congress has taken on global warming in over a decade.

    And they provide a signal for what might be possible in the years ahead.

    “Obviously, this doesn’t solve the climate crisis by any means,” said Leah Stokes, professor of political science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “But I think it’s really great that Congress actually managed to do something for the end of the year. And it’s good news that we’re capable of doing something bipartisan.”

    The most significant part of the bill for the rapidly overheating planet is a requirement for U.S. companies to cut production and use of hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, by 85 percent over the next 15 years. HFCs — which are commonly used in refrigerators and air-conditioning systems — were supposed to be a safe alternative to chlorofluorocarbons, the chemicals that deplete the ozone layer. But scientists discovered that when released into the atmosphere, HFCs are 1000 to 3000 times more effective than carbon dioxide at trapping heat. They are now the fastest-growing greenhouse gas in the world.

    HFCs are regulated internationally by the Kigali Amendment, a 2016 update of the ozone-protecting Montreal Protocol, which was enacted in the late-1980s. Although over 100 nations have ratified the amendment — thus promising to cut global HFC emissions 80 percent or more by 2050 — the big emitters like the U.S., China, and India haven’t yet signed onto the effort.

    The Congressional bill could change all that. “With the bill having just passed with bipartisan support, there’s every reason to expect [the Kigali Amendment] will go through the Senate without much controversy,” said David Doniger, a senior director of climate and energy at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “And then it should unlock ratification by other big countries.”

    According to one study, phasing out HFCs around the world would avert 0.5 degrees Celsius of global warming — no small feat on a planet that has already warmed 1.2 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times.

    The relief bill also includes crucial tax credit extensions for renewable energy, and approximately $35 billion in authorized spending for research and development. Of that, $4 billion is earmarked for renewables; $6 billion for carbon capture and storage; $6.6 billion for the development of advanced nuclear technologies; and $2.9 billion for advanced research projects in energy.

    Those provisions tucked into the coronavirus stimulus represent the first significant energy spending in over a decade. Back in 2009, President Obama’s Recovery Act included $90 billion for renewable energy generation, energy efficiency, and modernizing the country’s electricity grid. But since then, Congress has been reluctant to fund anything other than intermittent and occasional extensions of clean energy tax credits.

    Still, the new bill isn’t a major victory for those hoping for any meaningful climate action. A lot of the spending is in the form of authorizations, which means that the money hasn’t officially been spent yet. “History shows us that there are many, many examples of authorizations that are not fully appropriated or not appropriated at all,” said Greg Dotson, a former Congressional staffer during the Obama administration and current professor of law at the University of Oregon. “An authorization by itself will not improve the nation’s energy situation.”

    Dotson notes that a lot of the bill’s focus is on research, development, and other long-term projects — not deploying technology to get emissions reductions today. “You can tell this bill was a negotiation by people with different goals,” he said. “It’s generally a positive step. But it doesn’t reflect the urgency of getting emissions reductions that we really need to achieve.”

    For example, according to Stokes, the bill does not include funds for the deployment of electric vehicles, or a federal tax credit for EVs. And comprehensive legislation to address the inequalities of climate change — through cleaning up air pollution in low-income communities — didn’t make it into the stimulus bill either. (The package does include $1.7 billion to help seal up drafty homes and install renewables for poorer households.)

    The biggest question moving forward is whether the next Congress — which will take office in early January, two weeks before President-elect Joe Biden is sworn in — will build on this energy bill, or turn away from climate action altogether.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • These ladies love natural gas! Too bad they aren’t real.

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

    The website Women for Natural Gas is a pink-tinged, fancy-cursive-drenched love letter to the oil and gas industry. A prominently featured promo video shows women in hard hats and on rig sites. “Who’s powering the world? We are!” enthuses the narrator. Viewers can click through to a “Herstory” timeline of women working in the oil sector. Another page, about the group’s grassroots network of supporters, announces, “We are women for natural gas,” and shows three professionally dressed ladies alongside their testimonials. There’s a Carey White gushing, “The abundance of oil and gas in Texas helps keep prices at the pump lower.” One Rebecca Washington raves, “Natural gas is a safe, reliable source of energy that provides countless numbers of jobs.”

    But there’s a catch: The women don’t exist.

    A few months ago, I received a tip to look into the website’s testimonials — my tipster suggested that the group was using stock photos to represent the women who had supposedly contributed testimonials about natural gas. A reverse image search revealed that two of the images were indeed stock photos. The third, supposedly of a woman named Carey White, was the professional headshot of Jessi Hempel, a senior editor at-large at LinkedIn. The photo had been published in a brochure when she appeared at a 2020 Tupelo, Mississippi conference for landscape architects.

    Texans for Natural Gas, Youtube

    When I contacted Hempel, she said she had never contributed any photo or testimonial to Women for Natural Gas. She said she found it “incredibly disturbing” that the group was using her image without her permission. “Thank you so much for discovering my image on a website I guarantee you I never would have clicked on,” she told me. Texans for Natural Gas, an oil and gas industry group that created Women for Natural Gas, never responded to Hempel’s or Mother Jones’ inquiries about the photo. The group did eventually swap out Hempel’s image, but only after being contacted twice by a lawyer for Hempel’s employer, LinkedIn. Even then, the testimonial attributed to Carey White remained unchanged — the only difference was that it was accompanied by a new smiling woman’s headshot.

    A closer examination of Women for Natural Gas revealed that for the last year, the group has cycled through different headshots of women and quotes. My reporting suggests that it’s unlikely that the testimonials are genuine. Back in May, the site showed testimonials from Natalie White, Carey White and Natalie Smith, with identical quotes for the two Natalies (notwithstanding the overlapping names). By August, the names had diversified, a little, to Rebecca Washington, Natalie Smith, and Carey White, and the identical quotes had also changed again.

    The original shop hired for Texans for Natural Gas communications is FTI Consulting, a global consultancy with fossil fuel clients and the subject of Hiroko Tabuchi’s New York Times investigation last month. Tabuchi found that FTI has set up at least “15 current and past influence campaigns promoting fossil-fuel interests in addition to its direct work for oil and gas clients.” These campaigns are run by paid consultants, Tabuchi writes, and “often obscure the industry’s role, portraying pro-petroleum groups as grass-roots movements.”

    The NYT reported that FTI Consulting’s spokesperson Matt Bashalany admitted to Texans for Natural Gas’ use of stock photos, but maintained the supporters and testimonials were real. I went back to FTI Consulting to ask whether they would stand by the claim, given the screenshots I had of the website swapping out photos and quotes throughout the year.

    In response, FTI Consulting distanced itself from the project all together. Bashalany emphasized that the website was created by a separate contractor hired directly by the client, and that the testimonials came in through an online form managed by a website contractor. Bashalany directed me to the oil and gas companies that sponsor Texans for Natural Gas, listed on the website, which include XTO Energy (a subsidiary of ExxonMobil), EOG Resources, and Apache Energy). Texans for Natural Gas never returned my calls and emails, and the oil companies declined to comment for the story.

    As of publishing, the site still had the three testimonials up, but removed the headshots all together for pink cartoonish outlines of women.

    As I dug deeper into Texans for Natural Gas, I found other examples of the group courting women. Some were on FrackFeed, the group’s jokey, cringey meme feed with its own website and an Instagram account of more than 4,000 followers.

    On other platforms, Texans for Natural Gas posts memes that downplay the amount of methane that leeches from natural gas operations set against feminine backdrops of fields of flowers and sunsets:

    I asked Texans for Natural Gas why it was particularly interested in reaching women, but neither the group nor its sponsors got back to me. It’s worth noting that over the last few years, the oil and gas industry has been plagued by sexual harassment suits. Employees accused the company Anadarko, acquired last year by Occidental Petroleum, of having “a culture of treating women as sexual playthings who are present at work merely for men’s sexual gratification.” And one female oil worker filed a $100 million suit against the oilfield services company Schlumberger in June, alleging, “Women who work on oil rigs are sexually assaulted, sexually harassed, groped, leered at, and treated as sexual objects by their male colleagues.”

    The women-centered messaging could be a clumsy attempt to distract from those scandals. More likely, though, Texans for Natural Gas is simply hoping to convince the public that women are creating a political demand for a future with natural gas. Other industries have employed this strategy, too: As I reported this year, gas-powered utilities have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on marketing campaigns that hire social media influencers to make cooking with gas stoves seem cool and trendy, despite the indoor air pollution they create. These industries have reason to be worried: Republican and Democratic women tend to care more about the environment and climate change, polling shows. The Guardian has reported on internal polling by the Partnership for Energy Progress, a northwestern coalition of gas utilities and natural gas companies, identifies women between ages 35 and 54 who own homes and have college degrees as “flight risks,” meaning they could soon stop supporting gas stoves and fossil fuels in buildings for environmental reasons.

    Indeed, the claim that natural gas is environmentally friendly is disingenuous. Though it was once seen as the lesser of two evils compared to coal’s high carbon pollution, we’ve learned over the past decade that natural gas has come at a high cost. We’ve vastly undercounted the amount of methane escaping from these operations by as much as 60 percent, reporting from the Environmental Defense Fund shows, as the industry has been largely left to regulate itself. Texans for Natural Gas, run by oil and gas companies, has an interest in downplaying these risks to keep the status quo of a self-regulated industry.

    That the gas industry is peddling dubious claims to women is part of a broader pattern: From alternative health products to far-right conspiracy theories, women have emerged as a prime target for purveyors of disinformation. Indeed, Hempel told me that what bothered her most about the incident was that her photo was being used under a false pretense to spread spurious claims. “How many other places am I taking for granted that somebody is who they say they are, and trusting that an organization is representing that interest?” she said. “How many things do I take for granted when I am gathering information in my professional practice and in my daily life that are total hoaxes?”

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The federal reserve just took a major step forward on climate

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

    The Federal Reserve on Tuesday took its most significant step forward on climate change, announcing that it joined a group of some 75 other central banks focused on rooting out the risk warming poses to the global financial system.

    The U.S. central bank’s five-member governing board voted unanimously last week to become a formal member of the Network of Central Banks and Supervisors for Greening the Financial System, known by the acronym NSGS. The international coalition was founded in 2017 to exchange “ideas, research, and best practices on the development of environment and climate risk management for the financial sector.”

    The mounting billion-dollar disasters wrought by rising global temperatures are only one part of the climate threat to the global banking and finance system. Despite recent steps by some lenders to restrict investments in the dirtiest fossil fuels, particularly coal, financial giants keep giving money to oil and gas companies whose value is largely dependent on the projected ability to profit from new drilling projects during the decades to come. If governments reduce fossil fuel use at the rate scientists say is needed to keep warming in a relatively safe range, those investments could become virtually worthless, potentially causing a financial collapse even more severe than the mortgage-backed securities crisis that triggered the Great Recession more than a decade ago.

    “As we develop our understanding of how best to assess the impact of climate change on the financial system, we look forward to continuing and deepening our discussions with our NGFS colleagues from around the world,” Federal Reserve Board Chair Jerome Powell, a President Donald Trump appointee, said in a statement Tuesday.

    The announcement comes five days after dozens of House Republicans sent a letter to Powell and the Fed Vice Chair of Supervision Randal Quarles urging against joining the NGFS “without first making public commitments to only accept and implement in the U.S. recommendations that are in the best interest of our domestic financial system.” The letter warned of climate scenarios projected by the banks that could hurt “politically unpopular” industries such as coal, oil, and gas.

    “Over the last several years, we have seen banks make politically motivated and public relations-focused decisions to limit credit availability to these industries,” the lawmakers wrote. “Politicizing access to capital and choking off funding to industries that millions of Americans rely on is unacceptable, especially in times of economic and financial uncertainty.”

    The Fed has been long expected to enlist in the NSGS, which it began talks with more than a year ago, joining peers such as the Bank of England and Bank of Japan. Last month, the European Central Bank set out guidelines for climate stress tests it plans to impose on banks in the Eurozone starting in 2022. European regulators, meanwhile, have spent years developing and seeking to standardize definitions of what qualifies as a truly “green” investment.

    The U.S. is nowhere close to that, making the Fed’s ascent to the NSGS akin to President-elect Joe Biden’s plan to restore his country’s place in the Paris climate accords. Trump announced the U.S. withdrawal from those agreements early in his term.

    “The U.S. is the gorilla in the room that hasn’t joined,” said Dylan Tanner, executive director of Influence Map, a British nonprofit that researches climate policies at central banks. “It’s almost like rejoining the Paris Agreement, it’s a natural thing to do under the next administration.”

    As part of the Trump administration’s coronavirus relief efforts, the Fed took on billions in distressed fossil fuel debt; meanwhile, solar and wind companies laid off workers and struggled to stay afloat. The Biden administration is expected to take a starkly different approach, making climate change a top issue across federal agencies, including the Treasury Department.

    Biden could reappoint Powell to the Fed, whose push to keep interest rates low won praise from Janet Yellen, his predecessor and Biden’s pick for Treasury secretary. But other Biden appointments to the Fed’s board of governors are likely to face greater scrutiny of their positions on climate.

    “We applaud the Fed and encourage it to continue raising its ambitions,” said Steven Rothstein, a managing director at the climate-focused investor advocacy group Ceres. “Given that it is responsible for the safety and security of the world’s largest economy, we hope that it will not only catch up with central banks around the world, but, in time, lead the way in addressing systemic financial risk. Our economy deserves no less.”

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • What happens when the fallout from the nation’s largest industrial disaster goes nuclear?

    In the same document, Steven Alexander, head of contaminants at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, also urged TVA to “consider radionuclide analyses of the dredged material as well as existing sediments that may be removed during the dredging process.” TVA told Alexander that their first of three phases of dredging wouldn’t disturb legacy contaminants. But they acknowledged that the second phase, which involved digging deeper into the riverbed closer to the Clinch, might. TVA said they’d focus on “minimizing disturbance of legacy sediment.”

    Dredging this sediment, mixing it in with the recovered coal ash, and categorizing the concoction of Kingston’s coal ash and old nuclear waste as “newly-generated hazardous waste” could have been catastrophic for TVA — the nuclear sediments would have touched almost every part of the cleanup operation.

    Consider the legacy waste in the riverbed as a handful of sand. After it leaves the river, the ultra-fine material encounters Kingston’s long assembly line: First, it’s dredged by operators like Thacker. Then long pipes shoot it from the river into a series of canals and holding ponds, further mixing it in with the coal ash. Massive machines like dump trucks and trackhoes disperse it onto a plateau that TVA called the Ball Field. There, the tiny particles dry in pancake-like piles across the plain. On particularly windy days, they spin into dust devils with the ash, covering the sky like curtains 100 feet in the air. Once it’s dry enough, the combined coal ash and nuclear material is scooped onto a rail line for shipment to a solid waste landfill 350 miles south in Uniontown, Alabama.

    A house sits adjacent to the cleanup zone of the Kingston coal ash spill. Shawn Poynter

    Between the Emory and this landfill, hundreds of workers handled the ash. Fugitive dust escaped to nearby communities across two states. Nearly 40,000 train cars eventually dumped the ash in Uniontown, a low-income, 90-percent-Black community near Selma. Prior to the first shipment in June 2009, the ash was tested for radionuclides to make sure it fell below Alabama’s threshold for radium. Samples showed radium levels up to two times the Alabama Department of Public Health’s limit. But the company that owned the landfill argued it should be exempt from the limit, because its own evaluation determined that workers were safe at exposure levels over eight times Alabama’s limits. The state’s public health department granted its request, doubling the threshold for radium exposure.

    That same summer, all workers hired at Kingston were required to take a 40-hour training in Hazardous Waste Operations and Emergency Response, or HAZWOPER, approved by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA. Though coal ash is not a federally regulated hazardous waste, the training was required because materials within the ash (like arsenic, cadmium, chromium, copper, lead, mercury, nickel, selenium, and zinc) are individually regulated as hazardous. Most workers took the training in a nearby laundromat or at a local school. Brad Green, a foreman at the Kingston site, testified in the 2018 trial that it was hard to stay awake during the training because workers thought the information about hazardous waste did not pertain to them. “It wasn’t nothing about coal fly ash,” he said. None of the workers who spoke to me heard anything from their supervisors, or those conducting the training, about possible exposure to hazardous waste at Kingston, and they were not given the baseline or follow-up physicals that are legally required at official hazardous waste sites.

    Within four years, workers were sharing stories of plummeting testosterone levels, a symptom that multiple studies have linked to radiation exposure like that experienced by male cancer survivors who have undergone chemotherapy. Men in their 30s and early 40s started taking testosterone injections. Brewer, the truck driver, had his levels plummet by 75 percent. Now, at 46 years old, he takes a shot for his testosterone every other week. Thacker, the dredge operator, was told by his doctor that he had the testosterone levels of a man twice his age. When he reported this symptom to Jacobs, however, Thacker says he was laughed out of their offices.

    A response crew setup at the TVA Fossil Plant in Kingston, Tennessee, to deal with the recent coal fly ash slurry spillA response crew at the TVA Fossil Plant in Kingston, Tennessee, works on issues related to the coal ash spill. Shawn Poynter

    Dismissal of worker health concerns by TVA is well-documented in recent years. In June 2013, another truck driver named Joe Pursiful submitted an official complaint claiming that a supervisor mocked men on site complaining about low testosterone. “It’s a joke,” the supervisor told Pursiful. “I’ll take up their slack.” (Pursiful died earlier this month, at the age of 61.) In an anonymous complaint to TVA’s Office of Inspector General the following month, another worker claimed that he and others were experiencing bronchial infections, sinus infections, and low testosterone. Nobody took their symptoms seriously. A different supervisor said “the workers were making up the health issues to avoid being laid off,” according to the text of the complaint.

    Meanwhile, OSHA did little to ensure its training was implemented. Two months after the spill, OSHA received an anonymous complaint that employees were working in hazardous conditions due to TVA’s negligence. But the agency chose not to act. “OSHA has decided not to conduct an inspection in response to this report,” an agency official wrote to TVA. “However, since the allegations of the violation of standards have been made, you should investigate the alleged violations.” Even as TVA was responsible for investigating itself, the utility was paying Jacobs $12,500 for every month that zero OSHA violations were identified at the site. (According to the Jacobs spokesperson, there were no OSHA violations during the time the contractor was on site.)

    A spokesperson for the Department of Labor, the cabinet agency that oversees OSHA, did not respond to Grist and the Daily Yonder’s inquiry about the complaint in question but suggested that standard procedures were followed. “OSHA investigates all safety and health violation allegations within the agency’s jurisdiction,” the spokesperson wrote.

    TVA was forced to institute HAZWOPER training in the summer of 2009 because of a new EPA order that governed the site. The order, which stemmed from the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, Respondent, and Liability Act, or CERCLA, entered Kingston into the nation’s Superfund program. Enrolling in Superfund, which typically monitors hazardous waste sites like old chemical plants and defunct nuclear stations, turned out to be both a blessing and a curse for TVA. On the plus side, CERCLA granted TVA access to a pot of federal cleanup money. On the other, it made the consequences of discovering hazardous material above certain thresholds even more severe.

    If hazardous materials were found co-mingling with the coal ash, Superfund law could trigger a change in how the site was managed, officially recategorizing Kingston as a hazardous waste site. The entire cleanup operation would fall under more stringent, more expensive, and more time-consuming guidelines. Cleanup workers, for example, would be required to wear respirators and limit their exposure time. TVA could be vulnerable to new legal claims in both Tennessee and Alabama for initially treating the waste as though it were non-hazardous. (An EPA spokesperson declined to answer specific questions, but he confirmed that the agency approved all cleanup procedures and claimed that TVA was the “lead federal agency” implementing the order.)

    Understanding the EPA order requires jumping down a legal rabbit hole. In 1976, Congress passed the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, or RCRA, which separated household and industrial waste into two separate categories: hazardous and non-hazardous. The mining industry, fearful that increased regulation of its waste materials would run up costs, lobbied Congress for a loophole. Four years later, lawmakers approved an amendment that essentially excluded mining waste from being deemed hazardous, even though much mining activity involves materials considered hazardous under RCRA law. Coal ash, in particular, contains dozens of constituents the EPA considers hazardous.

    While the EPA does not list coal ash or coal-fired power plants as a typical source of radiation or radioactive waste, the ash can contain elements emitting radioactivity at 10 times their naturally occurring levels. These higher levels are due to unstable atoms undergoing radioactive decay; their frequencies can be dangerous for people who touch, ingest, or are simply near them. But lobbying from the coal industry has kept more than 3 billion tons of coal ash over 1,400 U.S. sites largely exempt from federal regulation. (In 2015, the Obama administration tried to force the closure of unlined coal ash ponds with new regulation, but the Trump administration weakened the rule this year, installing a loophole that could extend the lives of the ponds.)

    “All energy utilities are having a problem admitting that they’ve been using material for the last 50 years that should be kept away from the environment, and weak regulations allow them to do that,” said Avner Vengosh, a professor of geochemistry and water quality at Duke University. “For them, saying it’s hazardous material is the last thing they would do.”

    photo of an office space in TVA fossil fuel plantAn office space at the TVA Fossil Plant looks out at the Kingston coal-fired facility. Shawn Poynter

    Discovering legacy contamination — hazardous waste not subject to the loophole for coal ash — might have required TVA to do just that. The EPA’s Dee Stewart had warned TVA about the “potential implications” of nuclear legacy waste mixing in with their “non-hazardous” waste. According to TVA’s responses to Stewart’s comments, the utility teamed up with the DOE to analyze sediment samples from the Emory and Clinch Rivers for legacy contaminants. A TVA report published in early 2011 states that ash sampling showed cesium-137 within the Emory, but not in the ash taken out of the river. This discovery led to the work stoppage on the final section of the Emory, but it’s unclear if it had any other effect on the way the broader cleanup operation was conducted.

    Additional internal documents obtained by Grist and the Daily Yonder demonstrate that TVA was aware that worker exposure to cesium-137, or other forms of legacy contamination, could be a financial and legal nightmare. In July 2009, two months after the CERCLA order, TVA officials gave a confidential internal presentation in which they said that one of the most severe risks to their bottom line would be stopping or altering the cleanup plan they’d already put into place.

    In an affidavit from the 2018 trial, a foreman indicated that this fear had been internalized by workers on the ground. According to the affidavit, a Jacobs safety manager, with the support of TVA supervisors, ordered his workers to remove personal protective equipment and destroy common dust masks. (At the onset of the cleanup, many workers had supplied their own safety gear or acquired it from Kingston’s utility room.) The supervisor allegedly stated “that the site was a CERCLA site and that if they wore dust masks or respiratory protection, it would change the status of the site.” A heavy equipment operator recalled at trial that this same safety manager once told him: “If these people knowed what was in this ash, they’d quit.”

    In response to allegations that appropriate personal protective equipment was not provided and even discouraged due to the site’s regulatory status, the Jacobs spokesperson told Grist that “the site’s designation as a CERCLA site was not and could not have been based on the use of respiratory protection.” She added that, although plaintiffs alleged they were denied dust masks during the 2018 trial, “we are not aware of any instance in which respiratory protection was denied to a worker who requested it and met the applicable criteria” under the site’s official safety plan.

    According to court records, however, early versions of this plan did not list all the constituents in coal ash, including radioactive material. Only four employees ever managed to obtain Jacobs’ approval to secure and use dust masks, though records indicate that dozens asked. Court records also confirm that dust masks were destroyed on site by Jacobs supervisors. No one at the spill site ever received a respirator.

    During TVA’s 2009 presentation in the wake of the CERCLA order, the utility worried that the number of health problems could rise if levels of radiation and heavy metals in the coal ash “are deemed to be higher than first reported.” Such radiation levels could lead to another risk: class action lawsuits.

    According to recently reported documentation that dates back to the year after the spill, radiation levels were, in fact, much higher than first reported.

    photo of Dan NicholsDan Nichols Grist / Courtesy of Dan Nichols

    In 2017, a former chemist named Dan Nichols stumbled upon a news story that revealed the existence of the additional health problems TVA feared. High levels of uranium had been measured in the urine of a former cleanup worker named Craig Wilkinson. Like Thacker, Wilkinson had worked the night shift. After dredges piped the coal ash back onshore, Wilkinson used heavy equipment to scoop, flip, and dry the wet ash along the Ball Field.

    Although Wilkinson worked at the Kingston site for less than a year, he quickly developed health issues, including chronic sinus infections and breathing problems that eventually led to a double-lung transplant. Frustrated by his sudden decline in health, Wilkinson shelled out over $1,000 for a toxicology test because he wanted to know what occupational hazards might be lingering in his body.

    After reading Wilkinson’s story, Nichols sat stunned. Though he was not associated with the spill, he’d been unable to shake his obsession with the Kingston disaster. Nichols had worked as a Memphis-based field chemist for a wastewater technology company, and he was used to studying lab reports on industrial water supplies and samples. For years he’d been trying to solve a mystery that no one else seemed to be aware of: why Kingston regulators deleted and then altered a state-sanctioned report showing extremely high levels of radiation at the cleanup site.

    Roughly a month after the spill, Nichols read a Duke University press release stating that ash samples collected at Kingston by a team led by Vengosh, the geochemist, showed radium levels well above those typically found in coal ash. Nichols knew that the state environmental regulator, the Tennessee Department for Environment and Conservation, or TDEC, was also testing soil and ash samples at the site. After seeing Vengosh’s high radium readings, he wondered if TDEC’s report would also show high levels of either radium or uranium. (Radium is a decay element of uranium.) Later that spring, Nichols visited TDEC’s website and discovered the test results.

    “I opened it up and went to uranium, and it was just off the charts,” Nichols recalled. In a 2020 affidavit, Nichols reported that these levels were “extremely high so as to be alarming.” At least 27 soil and ash samples were collected from at least 20 different sites surrounding Kingston beginning January 6, 2009. The levels ranged from 84 parts per million (ppm) to 2,000 ppm. The average level was over 500 ppm, as much as 50 times the typical uranium content found in coal ash.

    The next morning, when Nichols slumped back into his computer chair and refreshed TDEC’s website, he saw that the report had been changed. The high uranium readings had plummeted. Now the average uranium levels in the ash were 2.88 ppm, a tenth of the typical uranium content found in coal ash and illogically, below levels naturally occurring in soil. Luckily, Nichols had downloaded the unaltered report the night before.

    A month later, Nichols sent the two lab reports to one of the attorneys representing Tennessee residents affected by the spill in a lawsuit they’d brought against TVA. According to Nichols, the lawyers weren’t interested. Nevertheless, Nichols was determined to find more proof of the unusually high levels of on-site radiation. In between cutting hay and spraying weeds on his family farm, he spent years poring over information online about TVA, coal ash, and uranium before he stumbled across Wilkinson’s story.

    A close-up photo of sludge from TVA plantA broken dike at the Kingston Fossil Plant released an estimated 1.1 billion gallons of coal ash into its surroundings. Shawn Poynter

    Back in 2014, Wilkinson’s urine tested for unusually high levels of both mercury and uranium. The mercury is more easily explained: The most common cause of mercury contamination, according to the EPA, is coal-fired power plant emissions, which account for 44 percent of all man-made mercury pollution. The 2008 spill released 29 times the mercury reported at the Kingston site for the entire decade before it, and TVA documents show high levels of additional legacy mercury were present in the Clinch River and could have migrated into the Emory. Today, Wilkinson has symptoms attributable to methylmercury poisoning including blurry vision, fatigue, a hearing impairment, memory loss, and loss of coordination that caused him to fall out of the machines he operated until retiring on disability in 2015.

    But most shocking to Nichols was the high level of uranium in Wilkinson’s body — it was 10times the U.S. average, and identical to the median levels that one study found in workers exposed to the substance. Prolonged occupational exposure to uranium is strongly linked to chronic kidney disease, which Wilkinson suffers from. Because Wilkinson’s toxicology results were taken four years after he left Kingston, they likely show lower uranium levels than what he and other cleanup workers initially had.

    Wilkinson’s results left no doubt in Nichols’ mind that the original uranium readings he’d saved were significant. A reporter for the Knoxville News-Sentinel, Jamie Satterfield, contacted him after the report he saved showed up in court proceedings. Satterfield published a story about the altered uranium readings in May of this year.

    In response to her story, TDEC told the News-Sentinel that its updated uranium readings, which plummeted by 98 percent, were due to a change in the sampling method used for the tests. (Satterfield also reported that radium levels had been lowered between the initial TDEC report Nichols downloaded and the updated one; the department attributed this to a “data entry error.”) In an email response to Grist and the Daily Yonder, a TDEC spokesperson elaborated that the sampling lab, which was neither staffed nor supervised by TDEC, “discovered there were interferences in the analysis of soil and ash samples for uranium” and subsequently changed the method of analysis from one EPA-approved protocol to another. The new results were then published without public notice of the alteration.

    “Changing lab reports is a very serious thing,” Nichols said. “But I can assure you data entry errors don’t cause a man to test for unusually high levels of uranium. That’s [TDEC’s] big problem.”

    Unbeknownst to Nichols, Russell Johnson, the district attorney with jurisdiction over Roane County, where Kingston is located, had informed TDEC’s commissioner in 2017 that he was beginning a criminal probe into the Kingston cleanup. “I am deeply concerned with the apparent intentional conduct of the cleanup contractors and their supervisors, actions that took place in Roane County, conduct that may indeed have caused serious bodily injury or possibly even death to a number of people,” Johnson wrote in a letter to TDEC.

    In concert with the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, Johnson began investigating whether TVA or its contractors “suppressed information” as part of the coverup alleged in the 2013 worker lawsuit against Jacobs. They now have Nichols’ evidence as well. But despite this ongoing investigation, it’s unclear if workers will ever learn for certain whether or not they were exposed to dangerous substances besides the coal ash itself. (Bob Edwards, an assistant district attorney working under Johnson, told Grist and the Daily Yonder that the district attorney’s office could not comment on a pending investigation.)

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Everything I learned from ‘The O.C.’ in 2020

    September 2003 marked two watershed moments in my life: I started high school, and I was introduced to Ryan Atwood, Seth Cohen, Marissa Cooper, and Summer Roberts, the cast of the unforgettable teen soap opera, The O.C.

    For those who, like me, find no purer comfort than simple, completely implausible drama, the show was absolute perfection. Hot jailbird brothers, tragic surfers, the most endearing MILF character ever written for primetime television — it truly had it all. For four years straight, my friend Katie and I religiously tuned in to the weekly crises and triumphs of those fictional Orange County high schoolers. After every episode, we would walk around the block in the freezing cold, awash in her cigarette smoke, discussing the developments of the evening’s episode alongside the less salacious mini-dramas of our own lives.

    I found the fictionalized, vodka-soaked version of Newport Beach a welcome retreat, partially because it looked nothing like my gloomy Pittsburgh public school reality and partially because I wanted to believe that my moody teen self was as compelling as pouty, lanky Marissa. (This was not the case.) So it is hardly surprising that half a lifetime later, I found myself returning to Newport’s poolsides in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Everyone has their own form of escapism, and for me — sad, alone in my Seattle apartment, and overwhelmed with free time — there was no better mental vacation than revisiting the show’s tortured teenage love triangles, listless weeping, and punny quips.

    WEDNESDAY
    Is climate change coming for the Christmas rom-com?
    In this year’s festive romances, you can count on two things: true love and tons of snow.
    By Shannon Osaka

    But I returned to the O.C. a more complex woman than my younger self, thank God. Less wracked by the self-inflicted woes of my own personal life and more distraught by those of the world, I found myself drawing fewer parallels to my terrible teen relationships and more time fascinated by how the characters come to terms with real-world conflicts — including, ugh, climate change.

    This wasn’t a connection I set out to make — in fact, quite the opposite. I was attempting to escape from the realities of some very dark months, including my daily work reporting on climate change. And for all my years identifying with Marissa’s angsty and self-destructive tendencies, and I had completely forgotten the plotline in which Summer Roberts (played by Rachel Bilson), Newport’s most bronzed and materialistic daughter, becomes a die-hard environmentalist.

    When we meet Summer in the first season of The O.C., her self-proclaimed interests are “tanning, shopping, and celebrity gossip.” She is a lip gloss-laden encapsulation of the vapid McMansion SoCal culture of the early aughts. But zoom ahead to the start of the fourth season, and she is rushing out onto the quad to defend the rights of chickens, clad in a t-shirt that reads “More Trees, Less Bush.” (A slogan somewhat at odds with the fact that she has also stopped shaving her legs.)

    Summer’s activist turn is, of course, a symbol of her emergence from a cocoon of shopping-obsessed narcissism and transformation into a more responsible, mature adult. It’s also framed as a kind of coping mechanism for (spoiler alert!) her best friend and show protagonist Marissa’s fiery death. Summer attempts to resolve her grief by hurling herself into environmental activism at Brown University. She chains herself to campus trees, demonstrates against the use of cages on poultry farms, and plasters her dorm walls with posters of forests and trees. She embraces nihilistic references to the subsummation of her beloved beaches and malls and lacrosse fields by a Pacific Ocean swollen from melting polar ice caps. Imagine your personal tragedies being so terrible that it’s preferable to think about immobilized chickens and the mass destruction of the California coast! Poor Summer!

    From the vantage of 2020, there’s a lot one could ridicule about the O.C.’s take on environmentalism — freeing rabbits from a lab? A fondness for didgeridoos, for some reason? — especially in comparison with the systemic awareness that the youth climate movement of today seems to carry. And yet, it painted a fairly accurate picture of the general (lack) of environmental awareness of the time. Even though the gradual accumulation of carbon emissions in the atmosphere has been progressing for quite some time — like, centuries, as Summer would inform you — and scientists have been warning us that a warmer atmosphere will make Earth unlivable for decades, that wasn’t as front-and-center in our minds 17 years ago. For all of the early aughts, I was blissfully unaware of the urgency of climate change. Indeed, I don’t even remember any of my peers really thinking about climate change as anything more than an offhand joke in reference to being able to tan outside in April.

    At the time it first aired, The O.C. garnered attention in some cultural criticism circles for its seamless blend of irony-worshipping hipsterism with sun-worshipping Californians; Think Urban Outfitters meets Hollister, for those old enough to remember when the two brands were differentiable. For much of the show, trying not to care too much — about people’s opinions, or the world writ large — was the teens’ go-to defense mechanism of choice. For example, in the fourth season, there’s a quick exchange between nerdy outcast Seth and the newly eco-conscious Summer in which she rails against the lack of local recycling options. Seth (played by actor Adam Brody) suggests his longtime girlfriend call the local councilperson. She enthusiastically agrees, but he clarifies that he was being sarcastic.

    “I don’t do sarcasm anymore, I’m post-ironic,” she says, to which Seth replies: “You mean … earnest?”

    For all The O.C.’s devotion to outdated early-aughts ethos, there’s something timeless in the way it captures the classic teenage navigation of social responsibility and personal irresponsibility. There is a line in Doreen St. Felix’s review of the teen drama of the moment, the Drake-produced Euphoria, referring to the promise of Gen Z: “They will avoid the mistakes of their sinner predecessors—the gig economy and the Internet’s irony-poisoning, climate-change ambivalence, and millennial listlessness.” But her review also goes on to describe the ways in which Euphoria contradicts this expectation, reveling in the dark and drug-addled dysfunction of Tik-Tok era teens.

    Self-absorption is a fundamental feature of teen dramas, going back to the genre’s foundational text, Romeo and Juliet. That’s not an adolescent failing, it’s a necessary step in their evolution. Young people are naturally caught up in how much they’re changing, trying to wrap their hormone-drunk heads around what the world expects of them, and most of growing up is just becoming aware that there are world problems more complicated and deserving of all-consuming attention than an unrequited crush.

    A common refrain from teen climate activists of today is that they have been forced to grow up too fast, deprived of these years of dumb decisions, self-centeredness, and devotion to small dramas due to the sheer urgency of the climate crisis. They have no time for snide detachment.

    I look at someone like teen climate activist Greta Thunberg and feel a twinge of embarrassment for my high school self: so much time spent moping around over the events of some loathsome party or another. But this year, being (very) aware of the world’s problems, the fires and the virus and the hurricanes and the violence, felt so unbearable at so many moments, that retreating to a time when my greatest concerns were all contained within my own little life felt bizarrely comforting.

    Pretending I could relate to a moody teen once again was a welcome relief. My wish for teens of the future isn’t just a stable atmosphere; it’s that they, too, can enjoy the luxury of being completely wrapped up in silly, spectacular, utterly selfish drama.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • As South Africa clings to coal, a struggle for the right to breathe

    This story was originally published by Yale Environment 360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

    Thomas Mnguni often woke to find the windows and floors of his home covered in a layer of black dust. Living between two coal mines and a landfill in Middelburg, South Africa, he and his family breathed some of the country’s most polluted air.

    When Mnguni’s son developed symptoms of asthma, a doctor recommended that the family move to a different part of town. Now living about six miles from the mines, the 14-year-old is doing better. But others in the area aren’t so fortunate. Residents of Middelburg and other communities in an industrialized swath of the Highveld, a plateau in central South Africa, are well acquainted with air pollution and its toll on health. The area — located east of Johannesburg and with a population of 4.7 million — is riddled with coal mines, coal-fired power plants, petrochemical facilities, metal smelters, chemical producers, and other industrial complexes. Mnguni, in his work as a community campaigner for the environmental group groundWork, has met many others dealing with the health consequences of the poor air quality, ranging from asthma to lung cancer.

    Researchers estimate that heightened air pollution levels in the Highveld cause hundreds of early deaths every year. A 2019 Greenpeace report ranked the region among the highest in the world for emissions of two dangerous pollutants, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide. “It’s emblematic of one of the worst situations of air pollution in the world,” says David Boyd, a United Nations specialist on human rights and the environment. A substantial portion of the Highveld’s population lives in townships — underdeveloped areas on the outskirts of towns— among the mines or in the shadows of industrial facilities.

    The Highveld’s rampant pollution is largely a product of South Africa’s longstanding dependence on coal, which provides nearly 90 percent of the country’s electricity. Close ties between members of South Africa’s ruling party and the coal sector have perpetuated its dominance, enriching a few to the detriment of many. With about half of the country’s recoverable reserves, the Highveld is where the majority of the extraction and burning takes place. In the past century, billions of tons of coal have been dug out of the region’s shallow seams through open-cast and underground mines, and industrial facilities have bloomed near the vast, cheap energy source.

    A landscape of rolling grasslands and farm fields is increasingly dominated by smokestacks and an ever-expanding network of mines. The Highveld is now home to 12 coal-fired power plants and a massive refinery that produces liquid petroleum from coal. This single facility, owned by the South African company, Sasol, generates more greenhouse gas emissions than entire countries such as Norway and Portugal.

    Last year, environmental groups, including groundWork and the Vukani Environmental Movement, filed suit against the South African government for its failure to clean up the choking air pollution, arguing that it violates the residents’ constitutional right to “an environment that is not harmful to their health and well-being.” The case will be heard in court in May, lawyers involved in the litigation recently announced.

    It’s the first court case in South Africa to challenge air pollution on the basis of this constitutional right, but the litigation could have implications internationally as well. While few countries recognize clean air as a fundamental right, more than 150 acknowledge the right to a healthy environment, according to Boyd. He says the South Africa case could make tackling air pollution a human rights obligation, adding, “Right now, it’s not clear that the right to a healthy environment includes the right to breathe clean air.”

    Rico Euripidou, groundWork’s environmental health campaigner, says that “the South African government has this notion in their minds that coal is a gift,” and notes that the ongoing pollution in the Highveld has much to do with industrial activity that benefits the country’s elites. In the first half of the 20th century, the state-owned utility, Eskom, used coal to provide low-cost electricity to gold and diamond mining operations. During the apartheid era, which lasted from 1948 to 1994, the government built more coal-fired power plants and created Sasol to turn coal into fuel, further linking state and corporate interests.

    The Highveld’s poor air quality is a problem that the South African government has recognized for more than a decade. In 2007, the government declared a 12,000-square-mile portion of the Highveld an air pollution hotspot and priority area that required special air quality management action. Five years later, the government published an air quality management plan that outlined goals to bring air quality into compliance with national standards by 2020.

    Air pollution in the Highveld regularly exceeds South Africa’s national air quality standards. In 2018, particulate matter sized 2.5 microns or less exceeded national air quality standards on at least 103 days, according to data from government air quality monitoring stations. These fine particles get into the deepest parts of the lungs and can even infiltrate the bloodstream, causing a variety of ailments, including cardiovascular disease and cancer. Since South Africa’s air quality standards are weaker than the World Health Organization’s (WHO) guidelines, these extreme levels present a significant health hazard, says Peter Orris, professor of environmental and occupational health sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In 2019, the Centre for Environmental Rights, the law firm leading the ongoing legal battle, asked Orris to review the health effects of pollutants from the region’s coal-fired power plants and refineries.

    eMalahleni South Africa power plantThe Kendal Power Station located in eMalahleni , part of the Highveld region turned over to mines and power plants in 2019. Photo credit should read WIKUS DE WET / AFP via Getty Images

    In a 2019 analysis, H. Andrew Gray, an air pollution expert consulting with the Centre for Environmental Rights, estimated that, at their peak, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide levels in the Highveld’s industrial region are 10 times higher than those the WHO considers safe for human health.

    In Middelburg, asthma is common, says Elise de Kock, a general practitioner at a local hospital. Compared to Johannesburg, asthma cases also tend to be more severe and often land people in the hospital, which she suspects may be due to the pollution. According to Gray’s report, fine particulate matter from the Highveld’s 12 coal-fired power plants and two refineries likely causes at least 300 early deaths per year.

    Thirteen years after the South African government vowed to clean up the Highveld’s air, there has been little progress. “We’re now getting to the end of 2020, and the majority of those goals haven’t been achieved,” says Timothy Lloyd, an attorney at the Centre for Environmental Rights who is handling the ongoing lawsuit. “We still see these really toxic levels of air pollution.”

    South Africa’s unemployment rate is roughly 30 percent, and groundWork’s Mnguni says people often move to the Highveld seeking work in coal-related industries, only to find themselves unable to leave. The hope of getting a job in the mines is the reason that Promise Mabilo, coordinator of the Vukani Environmental Movement, moved to the eMalahleni 23 years ago. Shortly after joining her in the Highveld, her son developed asthma and bronchitis. Growing up, his illness often kept him home from school, sometimes for months at a time, Mabilo says. The winter months, when meteorological phenomena called inversions trap pollution near the ground, are still difficult for him. On some days, the air is so thick “you can’t even see your neighbor,” she says.

    Through the litigation, groundWork and the Vukani Environmental Movement hope to see the federal government create regulations to enforce the management plan it created back in 2012. Right now, it’s just “a paper tiger sitting in someone’s office,” says groundWork’s Euripidou. From April 2016 to December 2017, Eskom exceeded its emissions limits for particulate matter, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen oxides more than 3,000 times, according to an analysis commissioned by the Centre for Environmental Rights.

    Air quality monitoring is also lacking. Many of the region’s monitoring stations are not functional, according to the government’s midterm review of the Highveld management plan. And although the government tightened sulfur dioxide emissions standards for combustion installations in April, the limits are still significantly weaker than China’s and India’s — two other developing nations with high levels of pollution.

    Meanwhile, the government allows some of the region’s biggest polluters to dodge complying with emissions limits. In 2013, Eskom submitted applications to postpone compliance at 11 of its coal-fired power plants located in the Highveld Priority Area, which the government largely granted. According to a public inquiry, Eskom also was involved in former President Jacob Zuma’s corrupt use of public enterprises. In 2015, while Zuma was in office, the utility awarded a lucrative contract to a mining company owned by his son and his wealthiest supporters, the Gupta family, despite its low-quality coal, according to media reports. In recent years, Eskom has submitted additional applications to postpone, suspend, or alter emissions limits at some of its plants, which are now being reviewed.

    Eskom estimates that bringing its entire fleet of power stations into compliance with emissions limits for all pollutants would cost about 300 billion rand ($19.4 billion), says Deidre Herbst, Eskom’s environmental manager. Instead, the company plans to pursue a lower-cost option by retrofitting plants to control particulate matter, which has a significant impact on health, and decommissioning 10 of its coal-fired power plants in or near the Highveld by 2040, she says.

    For now, however, coal remains the country’s favored energy source. According to a federal energy plan, it will make up the bulk of South Africa’s energy mix at least until 2030. Mnguni hopes that a favorable court ruling on the 2019 suit will force the government to hold polluters accountable. But so far, the government’s track record isn’t encouraging. “They seem to be defending industries more than defending basic human rights,” he says.

    Meanwhile, as residents wait for change, they are stuck relying on the same industries that make them sick. “We are trapped in this place,” says Mnguni.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • ‘The planet is broken,’ U.N. chief says

    As if we didn’t have enough reasons to hate 2020, the United Nations just offered one more. On Wednesday, the U.N. and the World Meteorological organization released a report on the “state of the climate” and – surprise, surprise – it looks bleak. The year from hell is on course to be the third warmest on record, viruses are jumping out of nature to attack us, and the world has already warmed 1.2 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times.

    “To put it simply, the state of the planet is broken,” said U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, in a speech at Columbia University. “Humanity is waging war on nature.”

    The report lays out some of the most devastating – and shocking – effects of climate change over the past year. Heavy rain and flooding overwhelmed large areas of Africa and Asia, searing heat surged across even the coldest regions of the globe (a town in the Arctic circle recorded a temperature of 100.4 degrees in June), and the Atlantic Ocean spawned a record 30 named hurricanes.

    And even though humanity pumped slightly less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere this year as a result of the COVID-19 lockdowns, the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere continues to rise. The report says that the three largest contributors to global warming – carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide – all reached new heights in 2020.

    While governments have offered big promises for how they’re going to combat the crisis, those pledges have yet to turn into action to match the scale of the problem. “Climate policies have yet to rise to the challenge,” Guterres said. “Emissions are 62 percent higher now than when international climate negotiations began 1990.”

    According to another report released by the U.N. Environment Program and its partners, eight of the largest producers of fossil fuels (including the United States, Australia, India, and China) are planning to increase their production of coal, oil, and gas by 2 percent annually. That’s despite the fact that fossil fuel production needs to fall by 6 percent per year over the next decade to keep warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius.

    Those eight countries account for 60 percent of the world’s overall fossil fuel supply, and if they follow through on their energy plans – most of which were in place before the pandemic – we can kiss the 1.5-degree goal goodbye. The report also shows that, despite widespread calls for recovery from the coronavirus pandemic to be “green,” the world’s richest countries (the G20) have committed much more stimulus money to producing and consuming fossil fuels ($233 billion) than to boosting green energy ($146 billion).

    The numbers paint a dark picture, but the situation isn’t hopeless. Guterres said that countries need to start backing their promises with action before the next major climate meeting in Glasgow a year from now. “Every tenth of a degree of warming matters,” he said.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • These oil and gas veterans are trying to clean up the industry’s mess, one well at a time

    In that case, a landowner might be waiting a long time. The state currently has just over 800 wells on its list of plugging projects, according to a spokesperson for the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, the state agency that regulates the oil and gas industry, and more than 12,000 more on its list of “orphaned” wells. (In Oklahoma, that term refers to abandoned wells that could technically be “adopted” and pumped again — but the spokesperson said “many of them” are fated to move over to the state’s plugging list.) In 2019, the state plugged just 138 abandoned wells.

    This isn’t just a problem for Oklahoma. There were more than 50,000 wells on state cleanup lists across the country in 2018, and states estimated there were somewhere between 200,000 to 750,000 more abandoned wells that weren’t in their records. If you include wells that are “idle,” meaning they may still have an owner but haven’t produced any oil or gas in years — and are at risk of getting thrust into state hands if their owners go bankrupt — the count reaches around 2.1 million, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

    When wells are left unsealed, they can become pathways for oil, gas, or briny water to migrate into groundwater and soil. The equipment is a hazard for wildlife, livestock, and unsuspecting humans. But increasing attention is being paid to another risk — an unknown number of unplugged wells leak methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, 86 times more effective at heating up the planet than carbon dioxide over the first 20 years it’s in the atmosphere. At high enough concentrations, methane carries a risk of explosion, and it’s often accompanied by other chemicals that are dangerous to human health, like benzene, a known carcinogen linked to leukemia and low birth weights.

    Bobby Wright, center, poses with his father, Bob, left, and his grandfather, Troy Lewellen. OAP Fund

    After helping Lewellen, the Wrights became interested in the problem of abandoned wells — which started to look, to them, like an opportunity. Plugging them was something they had the skills and contacts to facilitate, if they could raise the money to do it. It would also be a way for them to give back to their community and the environment after careers working in oil and gas. In April, they filed for nonprofit status. But they weren’t the first. At least two other nonprofits, Native State in Texas and the Well Done Foundation in Montana, both also founded by oil and gas industry insiders, have formed in the past year with the same mission. The Wrights named their organization OAP Fund, short for “Orphaned and Abandoned well Plugging Fund.”

    “In hindsight,” Wright said, “maybe we should not have put it as ‘fund.’ That tends to make people think we already have the money.”

    Money is at the heart of the abandoned wells problem. The number of wells has already ballooned far beyond what state budgets and manpower can handle, and experts say it’s on the verge of multiplying. “The numbers are staggering,” Greg Rogers, a senior advisor at the financial think tank Carbon Tracker, told Grist. “There’s no war chest at the corporate level or the state level to pay for that.”

    There’s interest in bankrolling solutions at the federal level, but it’s unclear whether the money will ever come through. In July, the House of Representatives passed a bill that would provide states with $2 billion over five years to create jobs plugging abandoned wells. Its approval came with almost no Republican support, and the legislation has since stalled in the Senate.

    In the meantime, the Wrights and others like them are searching for other funding streams to support their mission — and they’re trying to figure out whether there may still be ways to extract value from the holes themselves.

    Close up photo of abandoned oil wellAbout a quarter-mile from Troy Llewellen’s house on his ranch were three old oil wells — two of which, including this one, were abandoned. OAP Fund

    Curtis Shuck used to be president of an oilfield services company in North Dakota. But it wasn’t until he had left the industry to start his own consulting firm that he got his first glimpse of the abandoned well problem. He was visiting farmers in Toole County, Montana, trying to source grain for the Port of Northern Montana — an inland logistics hub where trains and tractor-trailers exchange goods and machinery — when he learned that they were dealing with hazardous old oil equipment left behind on their land.

    In 2019, Curtis Shuck, a former president of an oil field services company, founded the Well Done Foundation to plug abandoned wells. Well Done Foundation

    “This is not right at any level,” he thought. So last fall, Shuck started the Well Done Foundation with the goal of raising money to plug wells. Knowing some of them were leaking methane, he thought he might be able to fund the projects, at least in part, through the carbon market. That thinking led him to Eric Ripley at the American Carbon Registry.

    The American Carbon Registry, or ACR, is a nonprofit that develops standards for carbon offsets and maintains a list of accredited projects. Companies or individuals looking to neutralize their contribution to climate change can purchase credits through the registry, helping to fund projects that reduce emissions, like forests that are managed to store more carbon, or dairies that capture the methane from their manure pits. Ripley, ACR’s director of industrial programs, had already been thinking about abandoned wells before connecting with Shuck. He wasn’t convinced that the potential revenue from carbon credits — which are tied to the amount of methane a project mitigates — would be enough to cover the cost of the project itself. But Shuck’s nonprofit, mission-based model changed that math, since Shuck could raise the rest of the required funding through donations. “The carbon finance piece could just be one leg of a stool to get these projects financed,” Ripley said.

    photo of truck pulling large oil tankA large truck removes the tank at Big West Anderson #3 well in Toole County, Montana. Well Done Foundation

    Now ACR is developing a new methodology that will standardize the way abandoned well projects can participate in the registry, enabling the Well Done Foundation, OAP Fund, and others to sell credits through it. Well Done has already plugged three wells in Toole County through a mix of early fundraising success and some out-of-pocket spending by Shuck. But he has ambitions to expand to other states, and thinks the carbon offset market could be a game-changer. “We’re hopeful that by this time next year we’ll be out there doing our thing under a carbon finance program,” Shuck said. “Our vision is to be able to do this at a much larger scale.”

    How useful the carbon offset program will be in addressing the scale of the problem is unclear. The cost of plugging an oil or gas well varies, but states report average costs between $3,500 and $80,000 per well. (Wright said the average cost of plugging in Oklahoma is around $25,000.) Shuck’s goal is to raise $30,000 per well in Montana, which includes the cost of remediating the land afterward. These numbers are for mostly older, shallower wells — there’s little data on the cost of plugging modern shale wells, where the holes tend to be deeper and may even cut horizontally under the earth. Based on a small handful of plugging reports for deeper wells in Wyoming, Ohio, and Australia, Carbon Tracker found that costs grew exponentially with well depth.

    Wright’s father told Grist he knew of a recent plug job in Oklahoma that ended up costing $800,000. “Each well is kind of a one-off,” Bobby, or the younger Wright said. “You don’t know what’s going to happen down in the hole until you get in it.”

    Photo of man standing in front of abandoned oil well taking samplesWell Done Foundation volunteer Chris Steuer collects emission data from well Anderson #7 in Toole County. Well Done Foundation

    You also don’t know how much methane is coming out of the hole until you measure it — and that’s what will determine the amount of funding Shuck or others might be able to raise through carbon credits. Many projects won’t be eligible, since not all abandoned wells leak methane. Of those that do, many are emitting at such low rates that they wouldn’t generate enough credits to make sense as an offset project. Ripley said the best candidates will be the abandoned wells that researchers call “super emitters.” About 16% of leaks account for 98% of emissions from abandoned wells, according to one study.

    Based on published emissions data and current offset prices, Grist estimates that the credit sales from even the largest emitters may only generate a few thousand dollars. However, Ripley told Grist that based on unpublished field data, ACR believes it’s possible some wells could be worth tens of thousands.

    Scientists Grist interviewed for this story agree that it’s possible there are much larger emitters out there that they haven’t discovered yet. Mary Kang, a leading researcher on abandoned wells who is also helping ACR develop its offset methodology, told Grist that there are only about 600 published measurements of methane from abandoned wells in the U.S. and Canada. Considering there are millions of wells nationwide, “You can see how small that sample is and how likely it is that we might be missing some information,” she said. There are not yet any published measurements from Texas or Kansas, states that are home to a large percentage of the nation’s abandoned wells.

    A carbon offset program could create a market-based incentive to find the wells that are the worst emitters and plug them up. It could also prove to be a boon for science, helping to scale up monitoring of abandoned wells and improve greenhouse gas emissions models. And despite its limited application, there’s hope that it might also help stanch the tide of new abandoned wells ending up on state plugging lists to begin with.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Learning how to talk: What climate activists must do in the Biden era

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

    For four years the country has been governed by the GOP and only one guy has gotten to talk — disagree with him and you became a non-person.

    That’s not Joe Biden’s style, and it’s not in the Democratic Party’s cellular structure. Indeed, we’re only a few days in to the new world, and there’s already considerable talking underway. Shouting even. Figuring out how to handle it — how to make it constructive instead of destructive — is going to be a big part of making the next four years as productive as they can be. And since we desperately need them to be effective on climate — and on racial justice, on health care, on immigration — we better learn how to talk.

    One meta-argument is underway: “left” versus “center,” personified as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez versus some Congresspeople you’ve vaguely heard of from purplish districts who don’t like anyone talking about socialism. But while that splashy fight is drawing the attention of pundits, there’s another subtler communications question that has to get worked out: How do different parts of the Democratic coalition get across the things that really matter to them, like climate change, in a way that makes the point crystal clear, but doesn’t cut off the chance of future dialogue?

    This is inherently hard, because activists are deeply invested in the issues they work on — often they’re volunteers, always they’re passionate. As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor pointed out in a wise essay this week, the pent-up demand for change is almost beyond imagining. Therefore, the urge, when frustrated, to stalk away from your partner in a holy rage will always be there. But those of us who care deeply about climate are married to the Biden administration for at least the next four years — they know it, we know it. It’s not going to be a storybook relationship, but it can be more, rather than less, successful.

    One useful lesson from marriage is that when there are things you really care about, you have to have a way of getting that across. Here’s the climate example of the week: The Biden transition team signaled in Politico last weekend that they were thinking of returning Ernest Moniz to his Obama-era position atop the Department of Energy. For most Americans watching from the sidelines, this won’t even rise to the level where they’d notice; Moniz seems notable only for a haircut that makes him look like an extra from “Hamilton.” But for those of us engaged every day in this work, it’s an ominous sign: Moniz represents an old approach to our energy dilemmas, one that’s rooted in the use of natural gas and resistant to the all-in approach on renewables that activists (and scientists) recommend.

    That’s why Evan Weber, political director of the Sunrise Movement — the youth-led movement that brought us the Green New Deal — immediately tweeted out: “No one with fossil fuel ties belongs in Biden’s cabinet … Moniz’s archaic energy views would build us a bridge to climate catastrophe.” That’s a blunt but not overbearing warning — it’s different from saying, “So-and-so must be Energy Secretary.” There are, realistically, a couple hundred people who could do the job, and so this preserves plenty of maneuvering room for the transition team.

    It also hints at the main reasons why this kind of move would be a troubling one for Biden to make. First, it’s a bad idea on policy grounds. Moniz is indeed archaic — technology has changed incredibly fast since the start of his term at DOE in the second Obama administration. Solar and wind power have seen costs fall on the order of 90 percent, which means we don’t actually need the natural gas “bridge” he sold the Obama administration on; the carbon capture projects he subsidized at DOE were vastly uneconomic. Second, it’s a bad idea optically — he’s taken lots of money to serve on the boards of various fossil fuel concerns, most notably the Southern Company. His friends will surely argue that all that cash has not affected his views, and perhaps they’re right — but it’s surely altered how the rest of us perceive him. At various points in the next four years, the Biden administration is going to have to give us bad news on the climate and energy front — the lack of a Senate majority almost guarantees that. It’s going to need a messenger who people have reason to trust, and Moniz isn’t it.

    Demonstrators call for a Green New Deal at a “Fire Drill Friday” protest in Washington, D.C. John Lamparski / Getty Images

    Those signals should be enough for a savvy transition team that is, one hopes, trying to keep Biden out of unnecessary battles, since there will clearly be more than enough trouble he can’t avoid. But the signal also comes from people who earned the right to be heard: The Sunrise Movement, in the wake of a tough primary loss for their guy Bernie Sanders, didn’t walk away. They partnered effectively with the Biden campaign, helping reach a shared policy platform and then delivering millions of phone-banking calls. They are, in other words, a power — probably the most important electoral force in the environmental movement at this point.

    Moniz’s backers, by contrast, come largely from a bloc of pretty centrist environmental think tanks with no mass following at all, and from the building trades unions who applaud his support for constructing lots of really big and expensive stuff, especially if it has to do with natural gas. Given that the North America’s Building Trades Unions didn’t endorse Biden until October 23 and that they’d been backing Trump from the first day of his new administration — well, it’s politically pretty clear that you have to dance with the one that brung you. Which is not to say you hang the building trades out to dry: Biden’s call for unity is real and important, and any plan for the future needs to be very focused on making sure that people currently building oil pipelines have something else to build instead.

    In fact, the ability to figure out a “just transition” is crucial to making progress at the speed we need to go — and it’s entirely possible that a guy from Scranton, with deep ties to Rust Belt unionism, is better positioned to do precisely this than most people in the environmental movement. It’s a place where he should be given some room to operate, especially since he’s been willing to say the essential thing out loud: that we must transition away from the oil industry. Those words in the last debate were powerful, and they did not doom him — not in Pennsylvania or Colorado or in other places with lots of fossil fuel jobs. He’s earned some credibility.

    The environmental movement will win any fight over Moniz, I imagine, but it won’t win every fight. Biden doesn’t have much margin — even if the Democrats somehow win both Georgia Senate seats and hence take control of a tied Senate, West Virginia’s Joe Manchin has said he won’t vote to end the filibuster — nor, likely, for anything that looks like a sweeping Green New Deal. And that’s a bitter shame, because it’s all desperately needed. But you live with the political reality you have while you try to build the political reality you need, and simply denouncing the Dems won’t get you any closer to the latter, emotionally satisfying as it may be. Waging important fights while not damaging the Biden presidency, and Democratic prospects in the midterms, and the next presidential election will be incredibly hard — but since climate legislation (and support for all other progressive legislation) depends on just that, we better figure out how.

    I have a few memories of the last time we were in this position, when Barack Obama was elected in 2008. It was a very different scene, of course: Occupy Wall Street hadn’t happened, Black Lives Matter had yet to be born, Bernie Sanders hadn’t yet run, and AOC had just turned old enough to vote, so there was less of a progressive movement, and much less of a climate movement. The Obama administration was in the midst of the headlong expansion of the oil and gas industry that would eventually make America the biggest hydrocarbon producer on the planet. Climate activists knew what was happening was wrong, but we debated long and hard about whether to take on the Keystone XL Pipeline because we also knew that it meant challenging a president popular with Democrats, the first African American president.

    So when we went to work we didn’t attack him — instead we explained that we were giving Obama the room to do what he’d said he wanted to do. When 1,254 went to jail after anti-fossil-fuel demonstrations in D.C. at the start of that campaign in 2011, most were wearing Obama buttons, because that’s what we’d asked them to do. A few months later, when we surrounded the White House — people five-deep around a mile-and-a-half perimeter — we said he might want to think of it not as a house arrest, but as a group hug. I’m not naïve — I know Obama didn’t really want protesters forcing his hand on what he thought was a secondary issue. (He was wrong about that, by the way — Keystone XL turned out to be a critical battle, demonstrating that it was possible to stand up to Big Oil, and hence helping spur crusades against every big new infrastructure project). But certainly it was better — and more tactically effective — to take him on in the spirit of unity, not the spirit of division.

    Opponents of the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines hold a rally in 2017 as they protest President Donald Trump’s executive orders advancing their construction. Saul Loeb / AFP via Getty Images

    Another way to keep the mood from turning impossibly bitter is to remember that Washington isn’t all that counts. In the climate fight, for instance, it’s clear that action from Wall Street is crucial too — the divestment push, now at $15 trillion in endowments and portfolios, has made a huge difference, as has the Stop the Money Pipeline coalition, which has started convincing financial institutions to ditch fossil fuels.

    And here the Biden administration can provide massive help: Mitch McConnell can’t stop the Treasury Department, the SEC, and the Fed from forcing banks to take climate risk seriously. People in the right positions who understand that risk, like Elizabeth Warren and former Federal Reserve Board member Sarah Bloom Raskin, will make that fight much easier by, say, requiring companies to disclose their climate risk, and by turning institutions like the Export-Import Bank away from fossil fuels. When Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England, started down this path five years ago, it sent tremors through the fossil fuel financial complex, and those would be seismic if they came from Wall Street, not just the City of London. It’s possible, in fact, that these could turn out to be the most important climate actions a Biden administration will ever take.

    This will always, inevitably, be a hard marriage. Denied action for so long, and in need of such deep change, the broad progressive movement will rightly demand a lot. Biden will have to deliver all he can. And we will need to figure out a way to keep it from turning into an ugly split that benefits no one.

    Editor’s note: Bill McKibben is a member of Grist’s Board of Directors.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Where the Great American Outdoors Act stands now

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

    In August, when President Donald Trump signed into passage the Great American Outdoors Act, Democrats warned that he was only doing so as a political favor for Colorado’s Cory Gardner and Montana’s Steve Daines, two vulnerable Western Republican senators who co-sponsored it in an attempt to keep their seats in the November election. (Gardner lost his bid for reelection.)

    Whatever Trump’s motives, the bipartisan bill was a huge victory for conservation, permanently funding the Land and Water Conservation Fund at $900 million annually and creating a separate pot of money, up to $9.5 billion, to be used for maintenance at national parks and other public lands over five years. Still it was a surprising shift for the Trump administration: Prior to announcing Trump’s support, his administration had previously recommended cutting the LWCF’s budget by 97 percent in the 2021 fiscal year.

    But now that Trump’s term is nearing its end, the law’s implementation is coming into focus after Interior Secretary David Bernhardt issued an order last week laying out how the Land and Water Conservation Fund will be managed. The fund has two separate objectives: One is to provide funding to states for their own recreation and conservation priorities, and the other is to enable public lands agencies to make land acquisitions, among other things.

    In a significant departure from the way the fund has been allocated in the past, states and municipalities will now be required to sign off on these federal land transfers, which could make it difficult for agencies like the National Park Service or Bureau of Land Management to acquire land from private parties. For example, if the federal government wanted to use LWCF funds to buy land from a property owner with parcels in a national forest, a state governor or county board could conceivably block the transaction, said Randi Spivak, public lands program director for the Center for Biological Diversity.

    Many environmental groups, including the Center for Biological Diversity and the Mountain Pact, a coalition focused on resilience in intermountain communities, viewed the move as being anti-public lands and unfaithful to the spirit of the law that was passed. In an Interior Department statement, however, Bernhardt defended the changes as a way to give states more authority over the purchase of federal land. “These actions ensure land acquisitions will increase recreation opportunities, enhance conservation benefits and provide flexibility to our partners in states and local communities to ensure this investment is managed and allocated in the best possible manner.”

    This strategy of working around existing environmental laws by simply providing new guidance over their implementation has been tried before. Last January, the Trump administration used the same tactic to influence the scope and breadth of a bedrock environmental law — the National Environmental Policy Act — by changing how it will be implemented in the future.

    But all of this recent drama around NEPA and the Land and Water Conservation Fund could amount to nothing after all, since a Biden administration will have the power to reverse course, either through similar executive (or secretarial) orders, or by rewriting the regulations. If Democrats pick up a majority in the Senate — a possibility that hinges on the Senate runoff races in Georgia — Congress also could play a role through the Congressional Review Act, which allows it to overturn rules made by federal agencies.

    Still, even as they look forward to the changing of the guard, environmental groups are calling on Bernhardt and the Trump administration to stick to the framework laid out in the initial legislation. Tracy Stone-Manning of the National Wildlife Federation told E&E News that her organization “look[ed] forward to working with a new secretary of the Interior to fix this order so the conservation program can reach its full potential.”

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.