This story is part of Record High, a Grist series examining extreme heat and its impact on how — and where — we live.
President Joe Biden was unequivocal when asked, during an interview with the Weather Channel last week, if he was “prepared to declare a national emergency with respect to climate change.”
“I’ve already done that,” he answered without hesitation.
But the president has not, in fact, declared a national emergency for climate change, despite claiming that he’s “practically” done so. Activists, several Democratic lawmakers, and climate scientists have in recent weeks renewed calls for Biden to take that very step, an act that would unlock sweeping executive authorities to halt fossil fuel production and ramp up manufacturing of clean energy technologies.
Though such calls have been made since the day Biden took office, the hottest June and July in history has prompted frustration bordering on outrage with his administration’s response to deadly heat and the climate change driving it. Environmental advocates say that although the president acknowledges the climate crisis in his rhetoric, his administration continues to expand fossil fuel production.
“As long as we are producing and exporting these fossil fuels, the planet will continue to cook,” Jean Su, a senior attorney and energy justice director at the Center for Biological Diversity, told Grist.
Su and other environmental lawyers say declaring a climate emergency would be fairly straightforward. Under the National Emergencies Act, Biden could issue a declaration that would activate provisions in existing laws to take drastic measures to address climate change. The president could, for example, halt crude oil exports by reinstating a ban that Congress lifted in 2015. He also could suspend offshore oil and gas drilling in over 11 million acres of federal waters, owing to a clause in those leases that allows the president to suspend operation during a national emergency.
For example, once a climate emergency is declared, Biden could divert billions of dollars from the military toward constructing renewable energy projects. Under the Defense Production Act, a law invoked by the Trump administration to boost the supply of Covid-19 medical supplies, Biden could order businesses to manufacture more clean energy and transportation technologies. He also could extend loan guarantees to industries crucial to decarbonizing the electrical grid and transportation sector, further boosting the supply of renewable power.
Biden would, of course, face considerable blowback. Dan Farber, an environmental law professor at UC Berkeley, told Grist that a climate emergency declaration could prompt legal challenges that might land before a conservative Supreme Court. He noted that in the last few years, the court has struck down broad measures taken by the Biden administration to respond to the Covid-19 pandemic, including a vaccination mandate for large employers and a moratorium on evictions.
“I think that makes it iffy whether the Supreme Court really would allow sweeping use of any of these emergency powers in a climate emergency,” Farber said.
Su noted that while litigation always is a potential response to any policy, the powers invoked by an emergency declaration would be easily defended in court. “We’re not looking at somersaults and breathing creative definitions into words. These are really straightforward statutory language questions,” Su said.
The Supreme Court has never overturned a presidential emergency declaration, but there are hurdles beyond that arena, including backlash from Congress, which might threaten the chances of passing future climate legislation. Voters might balk as well, making any declaration a potentially risky move as Biden seeks re-election next year.
But the biggest obstacle to a climate emergency declaration may be the Biden administration itself. Declaring an emergency — and invoking all its potential authorities — sits in direct opposition to its stance on fossil fuels, which so far has fostered the industry’s growth. It has in just the past year approved new oil drilling in Alaska, supported a booming liquified natural gas export industry along the Gulf Coast, and fast-tracked completion of the Mountain Valley methane pipeline in West Virginia.
“This administration claims to be climate champions, and yet they have constantly approved things like the Mountain Valley Pipeline,” said Roishetta Sibley Ozane, founder and director of the Vessel Project, a mutual aid and environmental justice organization in Louisiana. “If you’re going to be a climate champion, you can no longer be approving new fossil fuel infrastructure.”
Given these challenges, Biden might have an easier time — and provide more immediate relief for communities — by declaring an emergency for heat rather than climate change. He could do so under the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act of 1988. The law authorizes the federal government to provide financial and other forms of assistance to states, tribes, territories, and cities when the president declares a natural disaster or emergency.
While the Stafford Act doesn’t explicitly name heat as a disaster covered under the law, Farber and Su say there’s nothing in the statute that prevents extreme heat from qualifying. Much like declaring a disaster for, say, a hurricane, doing so for heat could enable the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, to provide relief funding for supplies like power generators and emergency responses like medical care or repairing heat-stressed power grids.
But the challenges with declaring heat as a disaster might be more administrative than legal. To receive assistance, cities, tribes, and states need to prove that an emergency exceeds their current funding and resource capacity. It can be difficult to tally up the costs of extreme heat, which is less likely to destroy property and more likely to take a toll on public health and productivity. As heat continues to strain electrical systems and send people to hospitals, however, those costs are only becoming more tangible.
Environmental activists say it’s a reminder that the crisis of extreme heat will only get worse until President Biden takes decisive action.
“We absolutely need emergency funding to deal with people dying on the streets right now,” Su said. “But we also need to deal with the root of the crisis, which is fossil fuels.”
To visit the country’s newest hub for exporting liquefied gas to Europe, follow the Mississippi River southeast from New Orleans, past the recently shuttered Phillips 66 refinery in Alliance and into Plaquemines Parish, a ribbon of land that flanks the lower Mississippi River before dropping off into the Gulf of Mexico. There, strip malls and highways give way to wide expanses of cypress and low marshes that are home to white-tailed deer, alligators, and pelicans. The border between land and water, solid ground and swamp, seems to dissolve. In this part of the Louisiana coast, most exit roads lead over levees and into wetlands traversed by local fishermen and pipeline workers. You’ll pass small fishing hamlets, clusters of trailers lining bayous, and carcasses of old houses.
Towering over this patchwork of lowland and swamp is a massive liquefied natural gas export terminal owned by the Virginia-based Venture Global LNG, one of three in Louisiana. Built on 630 acres of former swampland, an area larger than New Orleans’ French Quarter, the facility known as Plaquemines LNG extends along more than a mile of the Mississippi River. It encompasses thousands of feet of coiled steel pipes for supercooling gas, 130-foot cylindrical storage tanks, and flare stacks that expel tall, airborne flames while the plant operates. At a break in the levee wall that surrounds the property, a sign warns of the hazards inside: “WORK THE PLAN. DON’T RUSH. GET HOME SAFE.” A large metal pipe extends out of the facility and over the highway, bound for the river.
Two of Plaquemines LNG’s 130-foot cylindrical storage tanks tower above the swamp. Grist / Lylla Younes
Venture Global’s terminal in Plaquemines Parish will cool natural gas down to its liquid form so it can be loaded onto ships and exported around the world. When the facility becomes operational in 2025, tanker ships will be able to plug into it and offload more than 25 million tons of natural gas each year, enough to power more than 15 million homes over the same period. The opening will represent a triumph for gas drillers that have sought to sell more of their product abroad and for President Joe Biden, who has championed American gas exports to ensure “the reliable supply of global energy” as Europe weans itself off gas imported from Russia following that country’s invasion of Ukraine.
In the 18 months since construction on Plaquemines LNG began, Venture Global has transformed the lives of people who have lived in the 23,000-person parish for generations. The streets around the plant became choked with truck traffic, the marsh threaded with pipelines, and the quiet was replaced with the din of construction. Acres of wetland disappeared beneath concrete. The broad ocean skyline of the parish vanished behind a maze of steel. And Venture Global is already working on another plant in the parish, known as Delta LNG.
“I said it would never happen, then you wake up and here it is,” said Henry McAnespy, a fisherman who grew up in the parish and lives down the road from the project. He described the roar of pipeline workers’ airboats at 6 a.m. each morning and the light pollution from the company’s round-the-clock construction. “I live in a place that never gets dark no more.”
A father and son shrimp in Calcasieu Lake.
Grist / Lylla Younes
A father and son go shrimping in Calcasieu Lake. Grist / Lylla Younes
Grist / Lylla Younes
Fishermen hold up an alligator gar, a type of fish native to the Louisiana marsh. New liquefied natural gas plants now threaten those wetlands. Grist / Lylla Younes
Fishermen hold up an alligator gar, a type of fish native to the Louisiana marsh. New liquefied natural gas plants now threaten those wetlands.
Grist / Lylla Younes
Emboldened by a surge in global demand for natural gas, a small group of companies rushed to build an industry along the Gulf Coast, from the southern tip of Texas to southeastern Louisiana, carving up thousands of acres of vulnerable shoreline to clear the way for massive plants and send American fossil fuels overseas. Liquefaction terminals are among the most complex industrial facilities in existence, with footprints that rival those of the largest chemical plants and oil refineries; the first to open — Cheniere Energy’s plant in southwest Louisiana — encompassed an area the size of nearly 700 football fields.
Building them often requires dredging through shorelines and wetlands to build loading docks and lay hundreds of miles of pipelines. Seven of these facilities have started up in the continental United States in as many years, and at least two dozen more are in various stages of planning and construction along the Gulf Coast. A decade ago, the United States had never exported LNG, but earlier this year it became the world’s top exporter of the fuel, surpassing the gas-rich nation of Qatar.
The growth of the LNG industry in the United States has reordered world markets, offering a new energy source to Europe and Asia even as gas exports drive up domestic energy prices. But it’s on the Gulf Coast, and in particular on the rural fringes of the Louisiana coast, that the consequences of the boom have been most visible. Grist reviewed dozens of state and federal records and found that in their haste to greenlight new terminals, regulators are exposing residents of coastal parishes to new and dangerous sources of air pollution from flares and leaks. Louisiana environmental regulators recently cited numerous violations at Venture Global’s LNG terminal in Cameron Parish, but has allowed the company’s project near McAnespy’s home in Plaquemines, on the other side of the state, to move forward. And as gas exporters build their plants on eroding swampland, they are increasing the risk of catastrophic accidents and explosions during floods and hurricanes. People like McAnespy, who live in neighborhoods surrounding the terminals, are right in the blast zone.
“It’s not just that each of these facilities is like a giant death star on sinking land, it’s that there’s so many of them,” said Elizabeth Calderon, a senior attorney at the environmental nonprofit Earthjustice who has worked on cases challenging LNG terminals in south Louisiana. “This is how sacrifice zones are created.”
Grist / Lylla Younes
When John Allaire bought his 300-acre property along the Gulf of Mexico in the 1990s, the southwest coast of Louisiana was a very different place. There was no industry in sight, just wide expanses of wild grasses and wetlands leading to belts of oak trees, known as cheniers, that lined the sandy shore near the Texas state line. Since then, coastal erosion has wiped away almost all those old growth forests, and much of the landscape has been cleared for the construction of new LNG terminals like the one Venture Global built near the border of his property.
Allaire lives in Cameron Parish, a once sleepy area dotted with fishing hamlets that has transformed over the last decade into one of the world’s most important hubs for exporting natural gas. Three terminals currently operate in the 5,000-person parish; another seven are on the way. If Cameron Parish is where gas companies go to set up shop, carving out pipeline networks and erecting massive liquefaction terminals, then the city of Lake Charles an hour to the north is where they broker business deals. Long a site of petrochemical development and its accompanying pollution,Lake Charles is trying to capitalize off the prime coastal real estate to its south, with local politicians luring gas executives from Germany to Japan with events like the so-called “Americas LNG & Gas Summit & Exhibition,” which they’ve hosted two years in a row at the Golden Nugget Hotel and Casino.
John Allaire stands near Calcasieu Pass, one of three terminals in operation in the 5,000-person parish. Grist / Lylla Younes
Local officials have celebrated the announcement of every new LNG development in the area, calling the industry a boon for economic growth and employment. Some residents like Allaire have a different perspective. As soon as the Venture Global terminal known as Calcasieu Pass began operating near his home in early 2022, Allaire witnessed a string of problems.
“Right away you had black smoke, alarms going off at the plant, and flares going constantly,” he said.
Liquefying gas is a dirty process. Terminals like Calcasieu Pass operate nearly around the clock, sucking in gas from a national network of pipelines and liquefying it so it can be loaded onto ships. When there’s too much gas backed up in the pipes, or when other refrigerant chemicals start to build up, the company prevents explosions by burning off gas, which sends orange flames shooting into the sky from the company’s flare towers.
As a former oil and gas engineer, Allaire knows that a certain level of flaring is to be expected when workers attempt to control pressure variations within their equipment, but too much flaring can be a sign of larger problems. Flaring releases a cocktail of pollutants like carbon monoxide, black carbon, and volatile organic compounds like benzene and formaldehyde. These chemicals are especially dangerous for vulnerable people like pregnant women, whose odds of having a premature birth can double from regular exposure to pollution from flares.
A flare shoots out of a smokestack at Venture Capital’s Calcasieu Pass LNG terminal on July 19, 2022. Courtesy of John Allaire
A flare shoots out of a smokestack at Venture Capital’s Calcasieu Pass LNG terminal on Feburary 12, 2023. Courtesy of John Allaire
Soon after Calcasieu Pass was up and running last year, Allaire began photographing the flares, which often burned throughout the day and into the night. His kitchen table is now littered with printouts of these timestamped images, which, added together, reveal the frequency of the plant’s mishaps. A report by the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, an environmental nonprofit, found that the facility violated the Clean Air Act by exceeding the pollution thresholds specified in its permit more than 2,000 times last year, according to the facility’s own records reviewed by Grist. This flaring led to the release of numerous chemicals, including between 19,000 and 37,000 pounds of nitrogen dioxide, a greenhouse gas that has been linked to chronic lung disease.
Despite these violations at Venture Global’s first terminal in the state, the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality has signed off on the construction of Venture Global’s second facility in Plaquemines Parish, which the company itself describes as “technologically identical” to the first one near Allaire’s home in southwest Louisiana.
“Talk about an experiment,” Calderon of Earthjustice said of Venture Global’s two newest enterprises. “They want to be allowed to emit air pollution at the levels of their failed engineering rather than at the levels they promised.”
Last month, in a rare move, the same state agency issued a compliance order against Venture Global for “preventable” and “unauthorized” violations at Calcasieu Pass. In the order, regulators detailed the company’s “failure to timely report” its emissions and alleged that it misrepresented the extent to which its equipment had malfunctioned.
An aerial view of the construction of Calcasieu Pass over time. Planet Labs PBC / Grist / Lylla Younes
Neither the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality nor Venture Global responded to multiple requests for comment on the company’s permit violations or any other details in this story. In a written response to the department, Venture Global’s lawyers said they will likely dispute certain portions of the order.
Flaring is just one of multiple ways that LNG terminals release toxic chemicals into their surroundings. Supercooling natural gas until it becomes a liquid at minus 260 degrees Fahrenheit relies on engines known as turbines that burn fuel to produce massive amounts of electricity. The turbines at Calcasieu Pass near Allaire’s house have a generation capacity of 720 megawatts, enough to power more than 500,000 homes at once.
The Environmental Protection Agency considers gas turbines major sources of toxic air pollution, since the combustion process releases a slew of cancer-causing chemicals such as benzene and formaldehyde. That pollution can travel dozens of miles away, diminishing air quality in more densely populated inland areas like Lake Charles. What’s more, enforcement records from the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality indicate that these machines are prone to malfunctions, sometimes for long stretches of time. Last year, three gas turbines at Calcasieu Pass failed repeatedly over two straight months, emitting thousands of pounds of pollutants into the air.
Emissions from LNG terminals across Louisiana and Texas are putting an outsize burden on lower-income neighborhoods. In Cameron Parish where Allaire lives, the median income is $64,000, but more than 14 percent of people are below the federal poverty line, $30,000 for a family of four. A federal analysis of the Venture Global plant in Plaquemines found that two-thirds of residents in a census block near the terminal live below the poverty line.
Advocates see the LNG buildout as part of a larger industrial expansion that has also disproportionately affected Black people. The cluster of terminals in Cameron Parish is just south of Lake Charles, where nearly half of all residents are Black. There, emissions from LNG terminals are compounded by already high pollution levels drifting in from the nearby town of Westlake, where a maze of chemical complexes emits thousands of pounds of cancer-causing chemicals such as vinyl chloride and 1,3-butadiene every year, causing the air to smell like burnt plastic.
“Our children are dying from asthma,” said Roishetta Sibley Ozane, an activist from Lake Charles who runs the Vessel Project of Louisiana, a local environmental organization. “People have cancer. And yet these industries are allowed to pollute and emit all of this right in our community and nothing is being done about it because it’s going under the radar.”
Roishetta Sibley Ozane, second from left, stands with her daughters Keondrea, Kami, and Kamea at a demonstration calling for President Biden to declare a climate emergency.
Courtesy of Roishetta Sibley Ozane
In a petition sent to the EPA in late May, seven environmental organizations from the Gulf Coast, including Ozane’s, alleged that regulators in Louisiana and Texas are illegally granting permits to oil and gas companies, including LNG operators such as Venture Global. The petition charged that in giving them permits to build new infrastructure without first requiring them to demonstrate through modeling that their facilities will be in compliance with the law, Louisiana has violated the federal Clean Air Act, which prohibits granting a company a permit that will “cause or contribute” to a violation of federal air quality standards. The organizations sent a separate civil rights complaint to the agency in June, arguing that allowing the industrial buildout discriminates against majority-Black communities in Louisiana like Lake Charles.
Regulators in Louisiana and Texas declined to comment on the petition, and the EPA told Grist that it would not comment on an open civil rights complaint.
Allaire said that he plans to continue documenting Venture Global’s flares, and he worried aloud about a new fight on the horizon. Another company, Houston-based Commonwealth LNG, is about to break ground on an export terminal and pipeline network just over his property line. In 2021, Allaire turned away representatives from Commonwealth who offered to buy his land. He said that he refuses to leave, no matter the offer.
“This is a unique spot, all my kids grew up here,” Allaire said, gazing out his truck’s windshield at the bright green widgeon grass floating on the surface of his pond. “They grew up hunting and fishing and stargazing and campfiring. … It’s not for sale.”
John Allaire stands on his property in Cameron Parish. Grist / Lylla Younes
Grist / Lylla Younes
An alligator glides through the water in Plaquemines Parish. Nearby, a fisherman traps crawdads. Grist / Lylla Younes
Grist / Lylla Younes
Allaire said that after 40 years working in the oil and gas industry, the year and a half that he’s spent living near an LNG terminal has changed his mind about a few things. When he worked at an oil refinery in the 1980s and 1990s, he wasn’t aware that burning all that fuel would cause carbon to build up in the atmosphere, but now he’s certain about the industry’s impact on the climate. Though natural gas is a less carbon-intensive fuel than oil, burning it for electricity still releases carbon dioxide, and drilling for it can also cause significant leaks of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Yet the companies building LNG terminals in Cameron Parish are assuming that international demand for the fuel will be robust for decades to come.
“They’re selling it abroad to the highest bidder” with full knowledge of what it’s doing to the planet, Allaire said. He now sees oil as a finite resource, bound to dry up eventually, and believes that the country is going to have to switch to renewables at some point.
“It’s just a question of when,” Allaire said. “How much carbon do we put in the atmosphere hoping that it won’t have catastrophic effects?”
An abandoned structure on a property off Calcasieu Lake in Cameron Parish. Grist / Lylla Younes
Since Venture Global began constructing its first gas hub in Plaquemines Parish in 2022, Henry McAnespy’s life has changed in numerous ways. A commercial fisherman since high school, the 64-year-old laments the way the company dredged the marsh where he goes fishing to lay 36-inch-wide pipelines. The water pressure in his home, already low after Hurricane Ida damaged the parish’s water system two years ago, is even weaker now; McAnespy and other locals think it’s tied to the company using the limited resource to build its terminal.
But the thing that keeps him up at night is the fear that, at any moment, Venture Global’s mile-wide terminal up the road could explode.
“You don’t have a crystal ball, you can’t tell me what’s going to happen to this plant,” McAnespy said. “I don’t want to live by this and I don’t think any investor would move his family here either.”
An aerial view of Venture Global’s Plaquemines LNG facility shows Lake Hermitage Road and Henry McAnespy’s neighborhood. Planet Labs PBC / Grist / Lylla Younes
Of the five liquefied natural gas terminals in operation on the Gulf Coast, at least four have suffered some kind of leak or blast, whether due to extreme weather or a mechanical malfunction. Multiple incidents at LNG facilities on the Gulf have already demonstrated what happens when supercooled gas escapes from pipelines and storage tanks, underscoring the potential for damage like the kind McAnespy fears.
In early 2018, liquefied gas escaped through a crack in one of the storage tanks at a facility in Cameron Parish owned by Cheniere Energy, a Houston-based corporation that was the first American firm to export LNG. Workers discovered and patched the leak before any explosion occurred, but an investigation by the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, part of the federal Department of Transportation, revealed other cracks in the tank. The regulator fined Cheniere $2.2 million and ordered the company to stop using two faulty tanks, deeming them “hazardous to life, property, or the environment.”
A year later, during a separate, previously unreported incident at the same facility, a leak of an unidentified substance caused three construction workers to lose consciousness, according to a lawsuit filed by the workers against Cheniere in Texas state court. The three workers were on the job near one of the plant’s giant liquefaction machines when they became “overwhelmed with the odor of gas.”
In an incident report provided to the court, one of the workers recalled that he “started to feel weak and [dizzy]” after smelling a “strong odor of unknown chemicals,” and after that he “didn’t remember anything until [he] arrived at the Port Arthur hospital.” Cheniere said it couldn’t figure out the source of the leak, according to court documents, calling its investigation “inconclusive.” (A judge ruled in Cheniere’s favor on procedural grounds last year, but the workers have since filed for a new trial.)
Leaks and malfunctions like these can also trigger explosions. In June 2022, a thunderous blast shook Freeport LNG’s facility in Freeport, Texas, the second-largest export terminal on the Gulf Coast, rattling the town of 10,000. A malfunction in one of the plant’s pressure valves caused gas to back up in a pipeline and leak out into the air, where it formed a dense “vapor cloud” and then ignited. It took eight months for Freeport LNG to repair the damage from the blast and secure permission from the federal government to export gas again.
It hasn’t happened on the Gulf Coast yet, but experts worry that the liquefaction process could lead to much bigger blasts. The Freeport explosion involved a leak of methane, but export terminals also employ a cocktail of chemicals known as refrigerants to condense gas into a liquid, including ethylene, propane, and hexane. They are all even more explosive than gas itself, which means they would cause larger vapor cloud explosions, perhaps large enough to level entire city blocks.
“We have searched high and low to find this answer of how far people would be affected and no one has been able to tell us,” said Naomi Yoder, a staff scientist at the Gulf Coast-based environmental organization Healthy Gulf who studies LNG terminals. “If they don’t have those answers, then what in the world are we doing building these things?”
Venture Global and other gas exporters have promised jobs in cash-strapped parishes that sometimes fail to provide residents with basic services. Officials in Cameron, for instance, are still working to resume medical treatment at the parish’s only hospital, which was damaged by Hurricane Laura in 2020. And in July, Louisiana’s Governor John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, declared a state of emergency in Plaquemines after saltwater from the Mississippi River began seeping into the drinking water supply. In response, the parish and a state agency handed out 200,000 bottles of water.
Some locals are worried that the new terminals won’t improve these conditions even if they deliver on the promise of more jobs. Supporters of the Plaquemines project say the parish badly needs the 250 jobs and 728 indirect jobs that Venture Global promised to create, since almost the same number of positions were eliminated when the Phillips 66 Alliance Refinery up the road shuttered in 2021. In an effort to lure the company to the parish in 2016, the Louisiana Board of Commerce and Industry awarded Venture Global a 10-year property tax break to build the LNG terminal. That break was worth $83.5 million in the first year of the contract, a sum larger than the parish’s 2022 budget of $75 million. The board recently approved another $29.8 million in payroll tax rebates to the company over 10 years.
McAnespy appreciates the economic benefit of the terminals, but says companies like Venture Global often ignore the residents who live closest to the facilities.
“The plant is a wonderful economic boost, not just to Plaquemines or the state of Louisiana, but worldwide,” McAnespy said. “My concern is that it’s such a big project that they’re imposing their will on us. Have a little respect for us.”
Given the chance, McAnespy said, he’d move 10 miles up the road and away from the plant where he would be more confident that his family could easily evacuate if there was an explosion. McAnespy’s house is likely within the blast radius of the plant’s high-powered liquefaction machines, as well as its massive gas storage tanks.
McAnespy said that Venture Global offered to buy the houses of some people living on the east side of Lake Hermitage Road in Plaquemines Parish, which the company considers to be the outer boundary of its blast radius. But people like him just across the street haven’t heard anything from the company.
“I feel like they should come back here and give me an option to buy me out,” he said. “Do your project, just give me fair market value for my property. I’ll pick up my pieces and go live somewhere else.”
On a bright day in April, Travis Dardar stood with his boot heels in the shallows of Calcasieu Lake, a few miles away from John Allaire’s house, surveying the area where he took his boat out to catch shrimp each spring. The 38-year-old Dardar has been fishing all his life, beginning in his hometown of Isle de Jean Charles, an island community in southeast Louisiana.
“Back then, fishing wasn’t really a choice for me, you know?” Dardar said, eyes shaded under his camo Louisiana State University baseball cap. “It was the kind of lifestyle we grew up in. We had to eat.”
Travis Dardar stands near the spot where he usually took out his boat to go shrimping. Grist / Lylla Younes
Like other residents of Isle de Jean Charles, Dardar is a member of the United Houma Nation, a state-recognized tribe, and his family had a strong connection to the island. He rebuilt his family home there twice after successive hurricanes ripped through. But after many of his neighbors moved away and his grandfather died, the place didn’t feel like home anymore. Other residents of Isle de Jean Charles were taking part in one of one of the first climate resettlement programs in U.S. history, and Dardar decided it was time for him to leave, too. In 2015, he and his wife and kids moved west to Cameron, where he could still make a living by shrimping, the only way he’d ever known.
Dardar quickly got used to life in Cameron, a fishing community just like Isle de Jean Charles. But then came the LNG terminals, one after the other, tearing out patches of wetlands larger than football stadiums and changing the chemistry of the air and water. The export facilities now ring Calcasieu Lake, a gourd-shaped body of water separated from the Gulf of Mexico by a narrow channel that cuts through a stretch of wetlands. Until recently, most of Louisiana’s fossil fuel infrastructure sat well inland from the Gulf. Sitting back from the water gave oil refineries and chemical plants protection from storm surges and easy access to highways and pipelines. LNG export terminals are different: Because they load gas right onto massive tanker ships, these facilities must sit right at the water’s edge, on land that is both undeveloped and especially vulnerable to flooding.
That soon became a problem for people, like Dardar, who caught shrimp on Calcasieu Lake for a living. The massive waves created by gas tankers damaged his boat and forced Dardar and his fellow shrimpers to cluster in a corner of the lake where they all vied for a small share of the catch. Another gas company, Tellurian, had announced plans to open a 1,200-acre terminal on the Calcasieu River, which empties into the lake, and they began to worry that the shipping traffic to that terminal would one day push them out for good.
An abandoned crane stands near old fishing equipment along the shores of Cameron, Louisiana.
Grist / Lylla Younes
To Dardar, it seemed like a sort of cosmic joke. He’d survived decades of deadly hurricanes only to leave Isle de Jean Charles, and when he finally achieved some measure of stability, a new industry rose up around him, an outside force challenging his livelihood once again. In fact, the plants came to Cameron for the same reason Dardar did: Calcasieu Lake is an ideal access point for LNG tankers coming in from the Gulf of Mexico.
This summer, Dardar made a choice he’d fought hard to avoid. He took a buyout from Venture Global and used the money to move his family 20 minutes north to the town of Kaplan, where he could continue shrimping in nearby Intracoastal City. Dardar said that in the month since they moved, he sleeps better at night. The air, too, is easier to breathe.
“Kind of feel like we’re at home,” Dardar said of the new property in Kaplan. He described the final months in Cameron as eerily similar to the end of his time on Isle de Jean Charles.
The rapid expansion of the LNG industry in Cameron Parish might have pushed Dardar away from the coastline, but Venture Global and its fellow LNG exporters are incurring their own risks by setting up along the Gulf Coast. The five active LNG terminals bordering the Gulf of Mexico sit at the end of “Hurricane Alley,” a band of warm water that begins off the northwest coast of Africa and stretches across the Atlantic, providing fuel in the form of heat for dangerous hurricanes to form.
In August 2020, Hurricane Laura made landfall in Cameron Parish, driving a 17-foot wall of water onto southwest Louisiana’s coast and exacting damage on a third of the state’s industrial facilities, including multiple LNG terminals. A pressure system failure at Cheniere’s facility led to the release of more than 100 tons of pollutants, and a nearby plant owned by San Diego-based Sempra Energy reportedly flared for days after the storm. Two months later, Hurricane Delta swept through, causing more damage to petrochemical plants across the state.
“These locations can barely handle storms now,” said Jessi Parfait, a native of south Louisiana who works on the Sierra Club’s Beyond Fossil Fuels campaign. “Just imagine 30 years into the future, which is supposed to be the lifetime of these facilities, potentially more. They’re not going to be as protected.”
Sunlight glints off equipment at Cameron LNG. Grist / Lylla Younes
LNG developers have tried to assure investors and regulators that they’re getting ahead of future hurricanes by weather-proofing their facilities. A representative from Commonwealth LNG, the firm planning to break ground next door to Allaire’s property in Cameron, told Grist that it will build a “storm-surge wall intended to minimize flood damage or disruption of operations.” A representative from Sempra Energy pointed out that its facility is located 18 miles inland and eight feet above sea level, which puts it out of reach of storm surge events. The representative noted that the terminal suffered minimal damage when Hurricane Laura hit in 2020.
But the risks are only increasing. The sea levels off the coast of Louisiana are likely to rise by as much as two feet over the next 30 years, and the waters of the Gulf of Mexico are only getting warmer, which will provide more fuel to hurricanes as they make landfall. By the end of the century, the Gulf Coast region might be as much as 12 degrees F hotter, which will allow rainstorms to hold more moisture.
Last year, the Sierra Club asked Ivor van Heerden, a noted marine scientist and former Louisiana State University professor, to assess the hurricane risk of Venture Global’s Plaquemines LNG terminal. Van Heerden is perhaps best known for predicting the potential devastation of Hurricane Katrina more than a decade before the storm submerged New Orleans in 2005.
When completed, Plaquemines LNG will be surrounded by a 26-foot storm wall and flanked by two separate levee systems. In his report, however, van Heerden determined that a Category 4 or 5 hurricane like Laura or Ida could still flood the facility and cause widespread damage that would spill into surrounding wetlands and nearby communities.
“It is my opinion after years of studying hurricanes and flooding that this LNG site will be flooded, in the not-too-distant future and perhaps even the next hurricane season,” van Heerden wrote in the report. If a flood ever breached the plant’s levee system, he wrote, there would be a high probability of chemicals “being carried off the site and into homes, businesses, farmland, and fragile coastal wetlands.”
The risks are similar at the five other LNG facilities that now line the Gulf Coast, and future export terminals in Louisiana and Texas will be just as prone to devastation during storms. As van Heerden sees it, the gas industry is on a collision course with rising sea levels and ocean temperatures, building explosive infrastructure in an area that is only getting more vulnerable to climate change.
A time lapse over several years shows construction of two LNG terminals on the Texas-Louisiana border. Planet Labs PBC / Grist / Lylla Younes
Grist sent questions about air pollution and hurricane risk to all five companies that operate LNG export terminals in Texas and Louisiana, and only two responded. A representative from Sempra Energy, said that the company “put[s] the health, safety and security of our workforce, customers and communities at the center of everything we do.” A representative from Commonwealth LNG said that “the safety of our employees, the public, and the environment … have the highest priority in everything that we do.”
Officials in Louisiana ignored van Heerden’s warnings before Katrina, and the result was the most expensive natural disaster in the history of the United States, costing more than $170 billion. If he’s right about the risks of exporting LNG, coastal Louisiana could see a devastating LNG disaster in the coming years, as soon as the right hurricane strikes, and it will be people like Henry McAnespy who bear the immediate damage from chemical explosions and contamination. The effects would also be felt well beyond coastal Louisiana.
“The average American should recognize that when it all goes to hell in a bucket, they’re the ones who are going to be coughing up the money for the remediation,” van Heerden told Grist. “Katrina cost billions of dollars. The cost [of an LNG disaster] is going to be borne by the American public, and it’s going to be a substantial cost.”
Editor’s note: Earthjustice and the Sierra Club are advertisers with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.
Over the past century, the fossil fuel industry has made a habit of letting others clean up their messes. Today, the country is dotted with millions of “orphaned wells,” crevices in the Earth that companies once used to extract oil, and subsequently abandoned once they were no longer considered profitable. But additional help appears to be on the way: This week, the Biden Administration announced it would make nearly $660 million in funds from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law available to states to plug more of these polluting fissures.
“These investments are good for our climate, for the health of our communities, and for American workers,” said Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland in a press release on Monday. “With this additional funding, states will put more people to work to clean up these toxic sites, reduce methane emissions and safeguard our environment.”
Unless they are plugged — filled with concrete and stripped of unused equipment — abandoned oil wells can seep hazardous compounds into their surroundings. A growing body of research has shown that orphaned oil wells are a major source of planet-warming emissions since the steel and concrete walls that reinforce them are prone to cracking over time and releasing methane, a potent greenhouse gas. A 2020 Reuters investigation found that in 2018, orphaned wells emitted an estimated 280,000 tons of methane into the atmosphere, roughly the equivalent of the emissions from the total amount of oil that the U.S. uses on a typical day.
Legally, companies are required to plug their wells after they finish extracting fuel, but regulators have long struggled with enforcement. Part of the challenge is financial: It costs an average of $20,000 to seal a single well, and many companies file for bankruptcy before following through. As a result, experts estimate that there are two to three million abandoned oil wells across the country, with the majority concentrated in oil-and-gas producing states such as Texas and Pennsylvania.
The Department of the Interior said that the new funding is part of its goal to advance environmental justice, a term that refers to the disproportionate pollution borne by low-income people and communities of color across the country. Numerousstudies have demonstrated that practices like redlining — in which financial services such as loans and insurance are systematically denied to people in certain neighborhoods of color — have concentrated oil and gas wells in majority Black and Hispanic neighborhoods in places like Los Angeles.
The hazards of living near abandoned wells go beyond their contribution to climate change. Orphaned wells are a public health threat since they can emit dangerous chemicals like benzene and toluene, which have been linked to conditions such as blood cancer and liver disease. In rare cases, they can leak methane into nearby buildings, allowing the gas to build up to dangerous levels.
This week’s announcement marks the second major round of funds from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to plug orphaned wells. States used the first set of funds, which was announced last August, to plug approximately 3,000 wells. Officials have until the end of the year to apply for this new round of grants, which range from $1 million to $80 million, depending on the number of wells in the state.
“At the end of the day, it’s a lot of money, but it’s nowhere near enough,” Josh Axelrod, a senior policy advocate at the National Resources Defense Council, told Grist. “The big question is whether the federal government should really be in the business of cleaning this up since technically, the industry was supposed to be on the hook for these wells over the years.”
After decades of intensive lobbying, petitioning, heartfelt testimony and the deaths of countless miners, federal regulators have finally taken a major step toward tighter restrictions on exposure to silica dust, a change that could save thousands of lives.
The Mine Safety and Health Administration has proposed halving the permissible level of silica exposure to 50 micrograms per cubic meter. That’s in line with what the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has held other industries to since 2016. Silica dust is toxic, and long-term exposure can cause a slow but fatal hardening of lung tissue called progressive massive fibrosis, or, as it’s known within coal-mining areas, black lung disease. The toxin increasingly abounds in mines as companies plumb thinner coal seams with greater impurities. Advocates of the tighter guideline, which will apply to all miners, regardless of what they dig from the earth, say it could go a long way toward protecting workers. But even as they celebrate, they’re strategizing on how to make the rule even stronger.
“There’s a lot more work to be done,” said Vonda Robinson, vice president of the Black Lung Association.
Robinson knows the incalculable costs of lax mine safety regulations. Her husband, who worked 30 years underground in southwestern Virginia, was diagnosed with black lung at the age of 47 and has spent years entangled in byzantine federal benefits systems. She’s been fighting for a stricter standard as long as almost anyone, but she worries that there are still loopholes that the industry will readily exploit.
“They just use the miner to get their pockets full of money,” Robinson said. “The company’s all about production, production, production, let’s get the coal out, let’s get the coal out. They will not do correct sampling.”
Federal mining regulators, along with the Kentucky and West Virginia coal associations, did not respond to requests for comment.
Much has been made of the companies’ responsibility for dust sampling to determine how much silica and other contaminants miners are exposed to; that task is left to the industry because the Mining Safety and Health Administration does not have the funding or personnel to do it. Robinson says regulators must deploy more inspectors if the higher standard, which awaits public comments and clearance from multiple agencies, is to be enforced. The Black Lung Association and other advocacy groups are preparing to lobby for more funding to the agency and stricter sampling oversight.
Robinson feels buoyed by the movement’s victories, though. Last year, campaigns succeeded in securing a permanently higher rate for the black lung excise tax, which the Internal Revenue Service levies on coal companies to support the fund from which afflicted miners draw federal benefits. (Robinson’s next goal is raising that benefit, which stands at just $737 per month or about $1,100 for miners with a dependent.)
Alongside other labor groups, miners and their advocates have long sought tighter silica standards. Although OSHA made silica a priority in 1995, when the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health found a need for stricter exposure standards, it didn’t update its standard until 2016. The Mine Safety and Health Administration hasn’t updated its guideline since 1985. Black lung patients and their advocates petitioned the agency for a revision in 2011, but it didn’t send to send one to the Office of Management and Budget for review until last year. Public pressure increased in the months preceding Friday’s announcement on June 30. Last week, U.S. senators Joe Manchin, Bob Casey, Sherrod Brown, John Fettermain, and Tim Kane, all of whom represent coal-producing states, signed an open letter urging prompt action. They voiced support for the rule after its announcement.
“We applaud the Mine Safety and Health Administration’s new proposed silica rule to enhance health protections for miners across the country,” they said in a statement. “We urge swift implementation of this rule because protecting our hard-working miners from dangerous levels of silica cannot wait.”
If adopted, the rule will require routine medical testing of all mineworkers, and require companies to find ways of limiting silica exposure through measures like respirators. Once the rule is posted in the Federal Register, MSHA will initiate a 45-day comment period, which will be punctuated by public hearings in Denver and Arlington, Virginia. Both will be streamed online.
Last week, the federal Bureau of Land Management, or BLM, proposed a new rule that would reduce fees for wind and solar development on public lands by 80 percent. Regulators at the BLM say the move could accelerate renewable power production on federal lands and help achieve President Joe Biden’s goal of a carbon-free power sector by 2035.
Solar and wind developers and advocates lauded the proposed rule as an important step toward a clean energy transition on U.S. public lands. For more than a century, energy production on federal lands was limited almost exclusively to coal, oil, and gas extraction. Experts say the rules in place were designed to optimize fossil fuel production, not renewables — resulting in disproportionately high costs for clean energy developers that the proposed rule aims to address.
“This rule recognizes that if we want to see renewable energy developed at a sustainable and meaningful pace on public land, there need to be rules that are conducive to that,” Bobby McEnaney, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s dirty energy project, told Grist.
To build an energy project on public lands, the BLM charges developers rental fees for the land itself and additional fees based on the amount of energy produced. The Energy Act of 2020, a bipartisan law to advance clean energy innovation, authorized the agency to reduce those fees for wind and solar projects. In 2022, the agency issued internal guidance that lowered fees by about 50 percent. Last week’s proposed rule would cut costs another 30 percent. It would also codify those reductions, making it more difficult for future presidential administrations to change course.
The rule would also streamline approval processes by allowing the agency to accept leasing applications from renewables developers without holding a competitive auction in areas prioritized for clean energy development.
Fossil fuel developers typically pay far lower fees for using public lands than their wind and solar counterparts. For example, before production fees kicked in, as of 2021 oil and gas paid $1.50 to $2 per acre in rental fees each year — although the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act increased some of those rates. But for wind and solar, the BLM currently calculates rental fees according to market-rate land values, which can run up to tens of thousands of dollars per acre.
“Industries that use our public lands should be paying equitable fees,” said McEnaney. “Oil and gas does not pay its fair share.” He said one reason for the imbalance is that fossil fuel industries have had decades to lobby policymakers for industry-friendly fees and approval processes.
Meanwhile, the first solar project on public lands was approved in 2010, during the Obama administration. But renewable projects on federal lands have since continued to grow. In the last two and a half years, the BLM has approved 35 solar, wind, geothermal, and transmission projects. The projects are expected to generate more than 8 gigawatts of electricity — capable of powering 2.6 million homes.
The agency is currently processing 74 project proposals for utility-scale renewable energy on public lands, all located in the West.
Also last week, the agency issued updates on an expanded Western Solar Plan, a federal framework launched by the Obama administration that identifies priority areas for solar power production on public lands in the West, and incentivizes and streamlines project development. The plan currently spans six states — Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah. The BLM is seeking comment on expanding solar planning to five additional states — Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming.
The proposed rule and updates arrive as part of the BLM’s broader strategy to permit 25 gigawatts of clean energy on public lands by 2025 — a mandate set by Congress in the Energy Act of 2020. The agency will accept public comments on the proposed rule until mid-August.
Betty Johnson calls the day 15 years ago when her husband, Tommy, a heavy machinery operator, rushed to Tennessee’s Kingston Fossil Plant “a tragedy we’ll never forget.” More than 1 billion gallons of coal ash slurry — the toxic waste left over from burning coal to generate electricity — had punched through the wall of an unlined, six-story pit about the size of Nashville’s Centennial Park.
Tommy Johnson was among scores of first responders to what remains the nation’s largest industrial disaster. The slurry crashed across the Emory River like a mudslide, shattering trees, pushing homes off of their foundations, and eventually swallowing more than 300 acres as it polluted two major waterways. The 2008 spill, with a volume five times greater than the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe, alerted people to the dangers of coal ash and forced the Tennessee Valley Authority, or TVA, which owned and operated the site, and other utilities to confront the environmental and health impacts of half a century of waste buildup. The calamity destroyed scores of homes in the tiny East Tennessee community of Swan Pond, roughly 30 minutes west of Knoxville. But for families like the Johnsons, the real tragedy came when the workers who cleaned up the mess got sick.
“When my husband went to work there, he was a 300-pound, very healthy, very active man,” Johnson recalled one day in April from a podium outside Westminster Presbyterian Church in Knoxville. Behind her, a black vinyl sign marked “Workers Memorial Day,” an international recognition of those killed or injured on the job. After the spill, Tommy developed chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, low kidney function requiring dialysis, and skin lesions. He also suffered weekly fainting spells.
Tommy Johnson at the Kingston coal ash spill site. Courtesy of Janie Clark
“His body is weak, he gets tired. He can’t even drive a car by himself because he’ll pass out,” said Johnson, who quit her job to become full-time caretaker to a man she’s known for 38 years. “We wanted to go around the country, visit, see things, but that’s not going to happen anymore. He can’t visit his grandkids because of his illness, and it’s because of the toxic coal ash.”
Since the mid-20th century, when coal became the dominant fuel to generate electricity, utilities have stored almost 5 billion tons of coal ash at more than 1,000 sites nationwide. These dumps are divided into two categories: ponds that store it in a wet slurry and landfills that store it as dry powder. Most are unlined and many are uncovered, allowing contaminants to leach into waterways or linger in the air. Today, at least 9 out of 10 coal-fired power plants are contaminating groundwater.
Coal ash contains at least 17 dangerous heavy and radioactive metals, including at least six neurotoxins and five known or suspected carcinogens, such as arsenic, chromium, mercury, lead, radium, and selenium. Prolonged exposure to coal ash can impact every major organ system, causing birth defects; heart, lung, and neurological diseases; and a variety of cancers.
Avner Vengosh, a geochemist and professor of environmental quality at Duke University, began studying coal ash when he arrived at Kingston a few days after the spill. The following May, he released a study warning that workers and residents faced grave health risks from contaminants in the ash. But people like Tommy Johnson would spend the next six years toiling without personal protective equipment like dust masks, Tyvek suits, or respirators. More than 50 have since died, and over 150 are sick, according to the Tennessee Lookout. (TVA spokesperson Scott Brooks rejected Vengosh’s findings, and even now continues to cast doubt on his methods. Vengosh, whose peer-reviewed report appeared in a top environmental science journal, called TVA’s criticisms of his work “baseless.”)
In 2015, after decades of waffling over what to do with the waste, the EPA finally issued a law regulating coal ash, largely in response to the Kingston disaster and almost 160 documented cases of water contamination from the pollutant. The rules forced utilities to monitor contamination and create cleanup plans.
“It’s unfortunate that it had to take this many years for industry to be called out to admit that numerous dump sites were contaminating groundwater, but it’s how this system works,” said Lisa Evans, senior counsel for Earthjustice. “Unless you have a specific rule requiring investigation and cleanup, industry is just not going to do it.”
But the rule covered only half of U.S. coal ash. The rest, stored in inactive legacy sites, continues polluting the environment, largely without remedy. According to a tally of industry data by Earthjustice, as many as 808 ponds and landfills, including at least one at Kingston, were exempt. (A preliminary EPA finding shows 261 sites: 134 landfills and 127 ponds.) In May, after several rounds of lawsuits, the EPA proposed an amendment to the rule that will cover most of these legacy sites.
A 2009 aerial photo of the coal ash spill taken a few miles away from the Kingston Fossil Plant.
Tennessee Valley Authority
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, told Grist in an email that the 2015 order was in line with past decisions under the federal Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, which governs the coal ash rule. But the agency said the proposed change was driven by a record showing that regulating legacy sites “will have significant public health and environmental benefits.”
The agency is expected to finalize the rule by May 6, 2024. Six months later, the new law will go into effect. While environmental advocates are hopeful, noting that closing the loophole is long overdue, they warn that the change may not entirely solve the problem. Simply including more sites in the rule doesn’t guarantee greater federal oversight, accelerate the cleanup by industry, or ensure an increase in community and environmental protection.
Betty Johnson plans to be in Chicago on June 24 for a public hearing on the amendment, where she will speak up for her husband and others who have suffered after doing their part to clean up the messes others left behind.
“I want to warn people about coal ash,” she told Grist by phone. “People don’t realize how dangerous it is.”
The stacks of the Cane Run and Mill Creek power plants loom over the banks on Kentucky’s side of the Ohio River. They go largely unnoticed by those who gather on the river, the largest tributary of the Mississippi, to paddle, or fish, or spend the day boating. Each summer, the shoreline brims with blue stands of chicory and the pink pods of swamp milkweed. The wide, flowering leaves of catalpas hang over the water, framed by tall oaks. Even in winter, when the foliage fades and falls, the area retains its beauty.
Yet those two power plants, which sit roughly 20 miles apart and are owned by Louisville Gas & Electric and Kentucky Utilities, are home to at least four of the state’s 25 unregulated coal ash sites. In 2021, a pair of studies by the University of Louisville showed that children experienced increasing health risks the closer they lived to the plants. Kids age 6-14 faced an escalating threat of neurobehavioral issues like anxiety, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and social problems. Their nail samples also contained elevated concentrations of heavy metals like chromium, manganese, and zinc, all of which are coal ash constituents.
A school bus passes a coal ash pit in Louisville, Kentucky.
Getty Images
“Once you’re exposed to coal ash, it really is a major risk to human health,” Vengosh told Grist. Over the last 15 years, his studies of water near and beneath coal ash sites, and from lakes located near regulated and unregulated sites in North Carolina, show that not only does the material leach contaminants into groundwater, but the pollutant has entered the broader environment, in some cases occurring in 50 percent of lake bed sediment. Climate events, like hurricanes, further the spread of pollution. “Closing [all the sites] is a must that should have been done eight years ago,” Vengosh said.
The fight to regulate these remaining sites began in 2016, when Earthjustice sued over a loophole that excluded ponds created by utilities that stopped generating electricity before the rule took effect in October 2015. Two years later, a federal appeals court determined these sites — also called surface impoundments — required regulation because they pose a significant threat to “human health and the environment through catastrophic failure.” The court order cited two legacy pond disasters: a 2009 pipe break at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Widows Creek site that dumped over 6 million gallons of coal ash into local waterways and the 2014 Duke Energy spill of 27 million gallons of the slurry into North Carolina’s Dan River.
Widows Creek Fossil Plant, as seen on March 5, 2010. Tennessee Valley Authority
But under the Trump administration, the EPA didn’t act and instead rolled back coal ash regulations. In 2022, Earthjustice sued again to close another loophole that exempted landfill sites — also called CCR management units — that stopped receiving ash after October 17, 2015. In a settlement, the Biden administration agreed to review and revise the 2015 rule. In May, it formally proposed including most unregulated ponds and landfills in the federal coal ash rule.
The expanded regulation is necessary because “some of the most dangerous sites in our region” are those excluded from the 2015 rule, said Frank Holleman, an attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center who has fought for tighter regulation of coal ash dumps. These unlined, largely abandoned and unmonitored locations are “ticking time bombs,” he said, and most if not all of them are below the water table, threatening drinking water. “There is no distinction between regulated and unregulated sites in terms of environmental threat, or the risk of catastrophic failure,” he said. In an email to Grist, the EPA agreed that “the risks of these unregulated units are like currently regulated units.”
Almost half of Kentucky’s 43 regulated coal ash areas have a hazard risk high enough to cause environmental damage, economic losses, or loss of life, according to an analysis by the Ohio River Valley Institute, an Appalachian think tank. (Kentucky isn’t alone; for decades before the Kingston spill, the Tennessee Valley Authority ignored “red flag” warnings over the safety and stability of its coal ash ponds, according to the agency’s inspector general.) When a coal plant shutters, the towns around them — more often than not low-income and communities of color — are left to police the waste left behind.
“Unlined ponds and landfills, and the legacy of the undermanagement of waste, are part of the burden that this generation carries, and it’s important that we not pass that burden on to the next generation,” said Tom Fitzgerald, retired director of the Kentucky Resources Council, a nonprofit that provides legal representation in environmental cases. “Utilities have the ability to absorb those costs, and in some cases, it’ll be ratepayers that pay those costs. But those costs are currently being borne, off the books, by people who live in contaminated areas.”
The amendment is important because under current federal law, if a utility reports a high level or significant increase in a coal ash constituent like arsenic, lithium, or radium, it is only required to remedy the pollution if the source is a regulated site. Should the company link the contamination to an unregulated facility, it can essentially ignore the problem.
The EPA said it found power plants actively disposing of coal ash in areas outside regulated units, and 42 instances where companies managing the coal ash blamed groundwater contamination on unregulated units.
In the 2023 proposal, the EPA investigated 10 facilities across nine states that had reported high levels of contaminants but blamed the potential pollution on the unregulated coal ash sites. Examples abound: Nevada’s Reid Gardner Generating Station, neighboring the Moapa Band of Paiutes reservation, continues leaking at least 10 contaminants at levels above groundwater protection standards, including 682 times the lithium, 252 times the arsenic, and almost double the radium allowed by law. But owner-operator NV Energy blames the pollution on an unregulated pond complex dating to the 1970s and has so far avoided cleanup.
At Pennsylvania’s New Castle Generating Station, where owner GenOn Power Midwest LP self-reported arsenic at levels 372 times higher, on average, than EPA health standards, the company blamed the contamination on an unregulated landfill directly underneath its regulated landfill, again avoiding cleanup.
On a crook in the Cumberland River in southeastern Kentucky, East Kentucky Power Cooperative’s Cooper Station also manages a regulated, lined landfill directly over an unregulated, unlined coal ash pond that has collected waste since 1965. Utility reports note the site has “extremely high karst potential” — meaning the highly permeable bedrock below dissolves easily and readily transports water. Such groundwater movement may have facilitated the release of boron, calcium, and sulfate, but the owner said the regulated landfill wasn’t responsible for the pollution.
The Cumberland Fossil Plant as seen on March 3, 2010. Tennessee Valley Authority
According to the EPA, these sites, and hundreds more, will be included under its revision to the 2015 rule. John Mura, executive director of communication at the Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet, confirmed that Cooper’s “very old former ash pond” will be brought “into the fold with this new rule.”
Abel Russ, an attorney with the Environmental Integrity Project, said the proposed rule makes sense from a cleanup perspective because it allows utilities to deal with all of the ash rather than picking and choosing which sites to clean and close and which to blame for continued contamination. Another benefit: The 2021 study by the Ohio River Valley Institute argues that a “clean closure” plan could create hundreds of jobs at coal plants and bring money to local economies.
“It will make cleanup more efficient, more effective, and more logical, which should be to everyone’s benefit, even owners,” said Russ.
While most environmental advocates say they’re happy with the proposal, they note several very specific exemptions that apply to perhaps 50 sites. For example, active power plants that claim not to have regulated units, or long-closed power plants that claim not to have legacy ponds, are exempt. The EPA said it is soliciting comments, “but currently, the Agency lacks sufficient data to support regulating these units.”
“That’s a gap we want EPA to close, because old landfills at retired plants are likely to be leaking hazardous contaminants just like all other landfills. There’s no difference and no less risk,” said Evans. “We don’t think it’s a huge number of sites, but there’s no reason to exclude them.”
John Ward, communications coordinator of the American Coal Ash Association, which advocates for recycling coal ash waste, said the EPA also could promote the beneficial reuse of the material instead of “just moving the ash from one disposal site to another.” Encapsulated ash used in cement and concrete could help decarbonize those industries, but Ward said it would require more flexible timelines and compliance.
“In all of these EPA regulations the compliance guidelines are generally very tight,” said Ward. “The [EPA] would probably have to allow a different timeline for cases where an owner-operator will go to the expense of setting up a harvesting operation and the time it takes for markets to absorb those materials.”
The EPA says the rule doesn’t change beneficial use requirements and it “did not propose to change the closure completion timeframes for the newly regulated units.”
But perhaps the biggest critique is EPA’s continued lack of enforcement, even after it proposed making the coal ash rule an enforcement priority for 2024. EPA said its enforcement program ensures landfills and ponds “do not present dangerous structural stability issues (such as those that led to the catastrophic 2008 Kingston Tennessee coal ash disaster) that could put surrounding communities in harm’s way,” while monitoring groundwater data, cleanup, and closure “to determine whether facilities are complying with the regulatory requirements and adequately addressing coal ash disposal risks.”
But according to a 2022 study, seven years after the initial ruling, only 4 percent of utilities have selected a cleanup plan for contaminated groundwater. Only two citizen enforcement lawsuits, both in litigation, have been brought. No state has brought an enforcement action under the rule. EPA said it cannot comment on specific ongoing matters.
Evans said it’s unlikely the proposal will spur any new EPA enforcement. What it could provide are “more opportunities for enforcement by the EPA, citizens, and states,” she said. “Certain things make it more easily enforceable like clear language and compliance documentation that’s publicly available and transparent.” But, she added, “There’s no substitute for a strong presence by the EPA to ensure that the utilities are complying with the law.”
When workers like Tommy Johnson began cleaning up the Kingston spill, they piled some of the coal ash on top of a pond that Amanda Garcia, attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center, calls the ballfield. While TVA has so far called the site an inactive, and therefore unregulated, landfill, Garcia said the 2023 proposal will require it to clean up that site.
“Even after the Kingston spill, TVA has been dragging their feet,” said Garcia. “Putting more power in the hands of directly affected communities is a really important outcome of this rulemaking.”
The TVA’s Scott Brooks did not respond to specific questions about its coal ash sites, but he said the agency is “reviewing the proposed federal rule and how it will apply to our program” and that it wouldn’t impact “our steadfast commitment and efforts to safe, innovative, responsible coal ash management.”
In 2013, Tommy Johnson joined more than 200 others in suing TVA’s cleanup contractor, Jacobs, alleging the health conditions they suffered stemmed from their coal ash exposure. In 2018, a Knoxville jury ruled that their illnesses were linked to coal ash, but a second phase of the trial that could have brought individual relief and medical compensation never happened after the case went into court-ordered mediation.
This spring, after two rounds of mediation and efforts by Jacobs to slow the case, the parties reached a settlement. Workers cannot discuss it, but Janie Clark, wife of Tommy Johnson’s best friend Ansol Clark, a fellow Kingston first responder who died in May 2021 of a rare blood cancer, said, “As a widow, I’m glad for the survivors that are living, but for the families that have lost their loved ones, it’s got a hollow ring to it. It’s too little too late.”
Tommy Johnson, who was 71, never saw the end to the decadelong litigation. The day after the memorial service in which his wife so eloquently shared his struggles, he collapsed during a Sunday service at the church where he served as deacon. Three weeks later, he died.
Editor’s note: Earthjustice is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.
In 2014, Anthony Giancatarino visited Louisiana to attend a meeting about “energy democracy,” or the idea that people, rather than corporations, should have control over energy production where they live. The Philadelphia native had spent the past several years working on climate policy in Pennsylvania, and was interested in hearing about how Louisianians were approaching the same issues. As he listened to people at the meeting describe the challenges of advancing clean energy in their state, the similarities and connections between their respective regions began to dawn on him.
Like the oil- and gas-producing heartlands of the Deep South, parts of Appalachia — Kentucky, West Virginia, and Western Pennsylvania — have long histories of companies excavating the earth for resources like coal and gas and leaving communities to grapple with the pollution left behind. In all these places, the fossil fuel industry has maintained its influence by dint of being a primary source of employment. There are deeper regional connections, too. The foothills of Appalachia start just north of Birmingham, Alabama, a city built on the labor of a majority-Black working-class who worked in sweltering foundries, converting coal and iron ore into steel.
“These regions are connected by a political history,” Giancatarino said. “They’re also connected by a history of extraction, and they’re also connected by a geologic history, by the way the rivers flow.”
Giancatarino remembers the Louisiana meeting as the event that planted the seeds for #WeChooseNow, a project that has unfolded over the past year at Taproot Earth, a Louisiana-based organization with a mission of advancing equitable local solutions to the climate crisis, and the Climate and Community Project, a progressive climate policy think tank formed out of the University of Pennsylvania. Last spring, Giancatarino and his colleagues at Taproot began convening more than 150 different community leaders and advocates from across Louisiana, Texas, Pennsylvania, and Kentucky to develop climate action strategies that respond to their local needs. The resulting four reports — one for each state — lay out their visions, such as canceling the debts people owe to utility companies, reforming the criminal justice system, and funding job training so that former coal workers can get jobs cleaning up mines.
Each report is dedicated to a core theme. In Louisiana, the researchers focused on democracy; in Texas, on energy; in Kentucky, on labor; and in Pennsylvania, on public finance. Each lays out the problems associated with its respective theme along with a list of policy recommendations that the community leaders helped develop.
The Louisiana report dives into the problem of mass incarceration and its connection to “climate justice,” a term that acknowledges how global temperature increase can have disproportionate social, economic, and health impacts on underprivileged populations. Despite efforts to reform the state’s criminal justice system, Louisiana continues to have one of the highest incarceration rates in the world, with 1,094 Louisianans locked up for every 100,000 residents. As a result, money that could be spent on fortifying levees, restoring coastlines, and building green infrastructure winds up keeping people in prison.
Incarcerated people are especially vulnerable to climate change, since prisons and jails with poor ventilation systems can overheat, and many facilities sit in low-lying areas prone to flooding. In Louisiana, prison inmates are often tasked with disaster recovery work or paid pennies on the hour to work at local fossil fuel companies, both pursuits that involve exposure to hazardous materials.
Inmates from the St. Martin Parish Correctional Center help residents of fill sandbags in Butte LaRose, Louisiana, in May 2011. Scott Olson/Getty Images
Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, an assistant professor of philosophy at Georgetown University and member of the Climate and Community Project, said the goal of the project is to offer examples of why climate justice involves reckoning with structural inequality. “There’s a distributive question at the bottom of climate politics,” he said. “It’s a foregone conclusion that there will be suffering, destruction. Mass incarceration is among the systems that makes sure which populations have to do the suffering.”
In Louisiana, the state pays parishes to house inmates in local jails and prisons. This gives a de-facto incentive to cash-strapped parish governments to expand facilities so that they can house more inmates. Táíwò said that this incentives-based model fuels not only mass incarceration, but also other aspects of the criminal justice system that disproportionately affect underserved communities, such as bail bonds. And once this system is up and running, it’s “difficult to reverse,” he said. “Once you’re able to put more people in prison, the incentives that encourage over-policing and tough-on-crime laws go on autopilot.”
Justin Sole, an activist and south Louisiana native who was involved in the development of the report, said that decades of divestment in south Louisiana’s low-income towns and neighborhoods have left many of the state’s young people with few options after high school, a condition that researchers have correlated with higher incarceration rates. It doesn’t help that powerful hurricanes come through every few years, leaving trails of devastation that parish governments don’t have the funds to address.
“Government involvement in the community just isn’t there,” Sole said. “The population is starting to dwindle, and there’s nothing for the kids to do.”
A former oil field worker and a member of the United Houma Nation, a tribe in southeast Louisiana, Sole said high incarceration rates destabilize communities by directing funds away from public services. Local governments often spend precious resources on prisons and jails rather than investing in infrastructure that will protect communities like his from climate impacts. In Terrebonne Parish, for example, elected officials are pooling federal disaster relief grants and COVID-19 funds to build a new jail rather than rebuilding infrastructure that was damaged by Hurricane Ida in 2021.
“I know people who are still living in FEMA trailers,” Sole said. Instead of using federal funds to build a new jail, parish politicians could “implement some type of grant program for affordable housing to help people become homeowners.”
Storm-damaged houses after Hurricane Ida in Grand Isle, Louisiana, in September 2021. Sean Rayford/Getty Images
The report lays out a series of solutions, which includes banning oil and gas exports, funding coastal reclamation projects, building green infrastructure, and ending the system that incentivizes parishes to build new beds in jails and prisons. Asked how support for such policies could gain traction in a state dominated by the fossil fuel industry, Táíwò acknowledged that it wouldn’t be easy. In Louisiana, “the entire political terrain is shaped by fossil capital,” he said “That’s the most intense version of the political problem imaginable.”
Táíwò thinks the path forward is still the same as it would be anywhere else: spreading awareness, identifying alternatives, and then causing problems for people in power if they refuse to pursue them.
Bruce Reilly, the deputy director of Voice of the Experienced, an advocacy organization run by formerly incarcerated people, said that groups like Taproot help build political momentum for policies that reduce incarceration rates. However, he added, he is worried that some policymakers seeking to address climate change could embrace interventions that wouldn’t improve the lives of people behind bars.
“We can build environmentally friendly prisons. We can actually use prison labor to build solar fields or wind turbines,” he said, adding that those solutions — neither of which the report authors endorse — wouldn’t solve the inherent injustices of a system that forces a disproportionately Black inmate population to work for little to no pay. “What am I uplifting by reinforcing that problem and what impacts does that have across our society as a whole?”
Taproot and the Climate and Community Project’s other reports include equally ambitious agendas in their respective states. In Kentucky, the organizers focused on transitioning former coal workers into stable union jobs in the clean energy sector. In Pennsylvania, they advocated for capping rate increases on electric bills and fully electrifying both new and existing households. The Texas report was developed in the wake of Winter Storm Uri in 2021, which dumped record amounts of snow on the state and caused power outages that led dozens of people to freeze to death. It includes policies such as increasing offshore wind farming, canceling all existing utility debt, and creating community utility boards that establish public control over energy generation.
Sole said that participating in the assembly meetings that went into creating these reports helped him realize the importance of building relationships with other communities dealing with the same issues as his.
“If we take an industry out of my community, it isn’t just going to disappear,” Sole said. He gave the example of a plastics plant that, if sued by one locality, would simply try to build someplace else. “If we can ban together as a whole, well that company can’t even come on the coast anymore.”
Giancatarino hopes the reports will help change the portrayal of the Gulf Coast and Appalachia as places in decline. Even though these are the regions most impacted by the oil and gas industry, he said, they’re often left out of the national conversation about shifting the economy away from fossil fuels.
“We’re not going to solve the climate crisis if we just focus on the solutions out of California and New York,” Giancatarino said. “It would be great if the climate movement realized that if we had climate justice in Appalachia and the South, we’d have climate justice in the nation.”
This coverage is made possible through a partnership with Grist and WABE, Atlanta’s NPR station.
The first new nuclear reactor built in the United States in more than 40 years is now up and running in Waynesboro, Georgia. After more than a decade of construction and spiraling costs, Plant Vogtle Unit Three, the first of two new reactors at the site, started producing power at its full capacity in May. It’s expected to come online this month after a final round of tests.
The completion of the new reactors is a major milestone not just for the long-delayed project but for nuclear energy in the United States. The new units at Plant Vogtle were the first nuclear construction approved in decades and are the country’s only new reactors in progress.
Once seen as the future of U.S. nuclear, the story of Vogtle has gotten more complicated as construction has stretched over a decade and costs have continued to climb. Its narrative is still about the promise of carbon-free energy, but it’s also a cautionary tale.
“In a rational world, this would be the last nuclear power project that would be built in the United States,” said University of British Columbia physicist and nuclear skeptic M.V. Ramana.
When the Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved the Vogtle construction in 2012, the project was hailed as the dawn of a new nuclear age.
“The resurgence of America’s nuclear industry starts here in Georgia, where you’ve just got approval for the first time in three decades to build new nuclear reactors,” then-Energy Secretary Stephen Chu told workers at the plant as construction got underway.
In the intervening decade, the climate crisis has accelerated and the need to decarbonize has become ever more urgent, making nuclear power more appealing. Since renewable energy sources are often intermittent — relying on the sun shining or the wind blowing — many see nuclear plants as an important complementary source of power. Each Vogtle reactor can generate enough electricity to power half a million homes without burning fossil fuels.
“As we’re closing coal plants, we have to replace them with something,” said Georgia Public Service Commissioner Tim Echols.
That switch can make a big dent in climate-warming emissions. Once both units come online, Georgia’s overall carbon emissions from electricity generation are expected to drop by 5 to 10 percent, according to Georgia Tech professor Marilyn Brown, who tracks the state’s emissions.
“That’s a big number,” she said.
But throughout its decade of construction, the project has also been plagued by cascading delays and climbing costs. The first reactor was scheduled to come online in 2016; it’s hitting that milestone seven years later. The total price tag has more than doubled — to more than $30 billion.
Now, utilities are looking for nuclear projects that would have a more reliable cost and schedule, said John Kotek of the Nuclear Energy Institute in Washington, DC. They’re focusing on smaller reactors that would generate hundreds of megawatts, instead of thousands like the Vogtle reactors.
The Tennessee Valley Authority, the corporation created by New Deal legislation that manages the Tennessee River and provides electricity to Tennessee and surrounding states, has announced plans to build several of these small modular reactors, he said, while Duke Energy, Dominion Energy, Rocky Mountain Power, and PacifiCorp, have included new nuclear energy in their future plans.
“Part of the motivation for the small modular reactors here in the US is that they come with a lower price tag,” Kotek said. “They’re just physically smaller machines that cost less to build. They’ll take less time to get into operation.”
But critics say that was the promise of Vogtle too: that it would be a new kind of reactor that’s cheaper and faster to build. Ramana said there’s no reason to think small modular reactors will be different.
“The lesson I think we should learn from this is: what works on the computer doesn’t work in the real world,” he said.
The Plant Vogtle reactors are a design called AP1000, which developer Westinghouse said could be built cheaper and faster thanks in part to modular construction, relying on factory-made components instead of building from scratch on site. But the cost estimate jumped immediately when it came time to actually build, Ramana said, and only climbed from there. All of this was predictable, he said, because similar issues have plagued most other nuclear projects.
In fact, it was predicted at the time. The Public Interest Advocacy staff of the Georgia Public Service Commission warned that the costs could skyrocket back in 2008. They advocated for a risk-sharing mechanism to incentivize Georgia Power to keep the construction costs down and opposed plans to bill customers for the Vogtle construction while it was underway.
Both proposals failed. Thanks to a 2009 state law, Georgia Power ratepayers are billed a monthly Nuclear Construction Cost Recovery fee. They will begin paying an additional monthly charge when each of the new Plant Vogtle units come online.
“It’s absolutely nonsensical, that they are going to have to bear the burden of this gamble with this kind of technology,” said Jennifer Whitfield, a senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center.
Instead of the risk-sharing idea, the Public Service Commission has the ability to review Plant Vogtle costs and exclude any it deems imprudent. Advocates are gearing up for a fight over whether Plant Vogtle’s ever-rising price tag is prudent, once both new reactors are online.
Going forward, Whitfield said there are more cost-effective ways to decarbonize, such as energy efficiency improvements and solar, which is now cheaper than gas, coal, and nuclear.
Proponents see nuclear as a necessary complement to those other renewables, providing what’s known as baseload power all the time — instead of only when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing. But that’s old-fashioned thinking, Ramana said.
“They just want to have coal plants without coal,” he said. “We’ll never solve the climate problem that way.”
Instead, Ramana said, it will require rethinking how we manage the energy grid.
“There’s not going to be a silver bullet solution,” he said.
A new government program aims to tackle climate change upgrades in federal public rental housing units that most desperately need the help.
Advocates, while praising the goal of the program, say it doesn’t go nearly far enough.
The program is a first for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD, and would give funding to retrofit housing for people on the agency’s rental assistance program. A HUD official told the Washington Post that he estimates the program would reach only hundreds of properties, instead of the nearly 24,000 that are eligible.
The initiative has $837.5 million to fund these climate retrofits, which will target some of the country’s oldest and least energy-efficient rental buildings, while also preparing them for climate-related disasters. Climate events are poised to impact one in 10 homes, according to a report released last year by CoreLogic, an international data property company.
Carlos Martín, project director at the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University, told Grist that the program will do a lot for the families that qualify but that the climate crisis requires greater investment than the initiative provides.
“The challenge in this case is because it’s a finite amount of money,” said Martín, “so it’s going to go deep for a lot of buildings and certain households that live in the building, but it’s not going to go very wide.”
The upgrades will create homes that are more resilient to climate events by funding retrofits like the installation of solar panels, heat pumps, and wind-resistant roofing. It will also fund the structural and insulation-related changes needed to sustain the energy and weight requirements of new clean technologies.
The Biden administration originally proposed a $170 billion plan for housing, which would have allocated $15 billion for affordable housing alone. Most political pundits attribute the original bill’s death to its opposition from Senator Joe Manchin, a Democrat from West Virginia.
Eventually, the administration did pass the Inflation Reduction Act, which was a reduced version of the original Build Back Better bill and provided funding for this program through HUD.
This program is also a part of the Biden administration’s Justice40 plan, which aims to provide 40 percent of federal funds to address underserved, pollution-burdened neighborhoods. The plan has previously been criticized for ignoring race, which complicates efforts to help communities of color that live with industrial contamination.
“I really appreciate an opportunity to have a federally funded program that really contributes to advancing racial equity in various sectors in light of climate change,” said Sabrina Johnson, a lead housing advocate for the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Federally funded housing programs have historically been rife with racist housing policies such as redlining, which was created when the Federal Housing Authority refused to back mortgages in Black neighborhoods. Those policies still reverberate through the housing market today.
This initiative aims to change that dynamic and instead center communities of color to protect them from the harms of climate change. Johnson said, though, to truly be equitable, this and other initiatives like it need to incorporate feedback from the people directly affected when designing these programs.
“It’s really critical that we ensure that we’re not advising on what we think the community needs, but we’re hearing it directly from the source,” said Johnson.
Martín is worried about who will actually get the money. He’s concerned that the Southern U.S. will suffer more from climate change than the North and could get left behind.
“So it’d be important for HUD … to make sure that maybe if you’re living in the South in a rural area, and are living in one of the buildings that get benefits from one of these programs, that you also get access,” he said. “It’s not just the Chicagos, the San Franciscos, the L.A.s, the Bostons of the world.”
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Every few years, the world’s top scientists come up with hundreds of different scenarios, all aimed at limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. The successful plans all require serious emissions cuts — not surprising, as humans have put more than 1.7 trillion metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere over the past three centuries. But many of those plans also require something else: sucking carbon out of the atmosphere. The challenge is that no one can agree on the best way to do it.
Carbon removal is a catch-all term for anything that people do that pulls CO2 out of the air and stores it somewhere else. To meet the world’s climate goals, we would need to do this on a massive scale — anywhere from 440 billion to 1.1 trillion metric tons before the end of the century. That’s more carbon than the U.S. has emitted in its entire history.
So how do we remove all that carbon? There are two carbon removal ideas that have really captured the conversation. One is direct air capture, which involves big factories that suck in tons of CO2 from the atmosphere, chemically concentrate it, and store it deep in the ground. The other idea is to simply plant trees! After all, trees have naturally sequestered carbon for millions of years. These two approaches are often viewed as technology versus nature.
The world’s direct air capture factories currently remove around 10,000 metric tons of CO2 each year. That’s the equivalent of more than a million gallons of gasoline. But that’s small compared to the 2 billion metric tons of CO2 removed by the world’s trees and plants each year.
Trees are also a tried-and-true method for removing carbon. They’re ready to go compared to direct air capture, which is only a few decades old. The direct air capture industry does exist, with a few facilities up and running today, but experts say it still has a ways to go.
To better understand why pulling carbon out of the atmosphere is so difficult, imagine being given a martini and being asked to somehow extract all the gin. (Keep in mind, CO2 makes up a much smaller proportion of the atmosphere than gin does in a martini.) That’s part of the reason why carbon-removing machines have to rely on energy-intensive chemical reactions and processes, which come with a pretty hefty price tag. Critics of direct air capture think there are way better uses for all that energy and money. Trees, on the other hand, are pretty cheap, and they’re self-powered by the sun.
Given those arguments, trees seem like the obviously better approach for carbon removal. But the choice is not nearly as clear-cut as it might seem.
Scientists think direct air capture, once it is better developed, could potentially store a lot of carbon — more even than the potential of the vast majority of the “natural” forms of carbon removal happening today.
Jesse Nichols / Grist
You also need to consider what happens to the carbon after it’s removed. Trees suck up carbon, turning it into wood as they grow bigger, storing this living carbon for decades or sometimes even centuries. But they can’t store it forever. Eventually, trees die and decompose, which means that carbon in plants doesn’t actually stay out of the atmosphere all that long. For this reason, scientists call this the “fast carbon cycle.”
If you want to remove carbon for a really long time, your best bet is the slow carbon cycle. This is all the carbon that’s stored deep in the Earth. Normally, it takes up to 200 million years for carbon in this cycle to move between rocks, soil, ocean, and atmosphere, but humans short-circuited this cycle when we started digging up fossil fuels. As we burned coal and oil from the ground, we were inadvertently pulling massive amounts of ancient carbon out of the slow carbon cycle and into our atmosphere, leading to the climate crisis we’re in today.
Technologies like direct air capture allow us to do the exact opposite: to put that carbon back into the slow carbon cycle where it came from. When direct air capture facilities put carbon back underground, that carbon could stay there for 10,000 years or more.
So while the goals of direct air capture and tree-based carbon removal are the same, they are really different approaches — and they’re not even the only ones. There are dozens of other ideas for removing carbon from the atmosphere, and they’re all a little different when it comes to cost, readiness level, capacity, and storage duration.
Jesse Nichols / Grist
There are ideas for storing organic carbon in wetlands, in soil, and even in algae in the ocean.
Some plans propose converting CO2 into minerals, on land and in the ocean. You can even combine trees and direct air capture — using trees or plants for energy, and capturing and injecting the carbon into the ground.
Scaling up our carbon removal is going to be challenging, and there are legitimate concerns that it could distract from the highest priority goal of cutting emissions in the first place. But even with dramatic cuts to how much CO2 we release into the atmosphere, scientists say carbon removal is probably going to be necessary.
Methodology
We got our data from the 2022 IPCC report, which compiled data from dozens of carbon removal studies that estimated the cost, capacity, and storage duration for each carbon removal idea. It also ranked how well each technology is developed, on a scale of 1-9.
The report presents low and high estimates for each category. For simplicity, we chose an average of the two estimates to show on our charts. We also aimed to show the ranges wherever possible. Although there are plenty of ways to remove carbon with trees, we focused on “afforestation/reforestation” — which is a technical term for planting new forests or restoring cut forests.
At one point in the video, we show a visual depicting the amount of carbon currently being removed by trees and other plants. This figure at 2:03 comes from the State of Carbon Dioxide Removal report, and includes carbon removed through afforestation, reforestation, agroforestry, soil carbon, wetland restoration, and improved forest management. The report also includes carbon stored in durable wood products, though this sub category is subject to scientific debate. Later, at 2:34, we chose to exclude durable wood products in our figure depicting tons of carbon removed due forms of natural processes. This was based on a lack of data in the IPCC report on durable wood goods.
For simplicity and data purposes, we couldn’t include every carbon removal idea in our video. If you’d like to learn about more carbon removal ideas, check out the 2022 IPCC report.
Technically, Holly Hutchinson lives in Ithaca, New York, a university town in the Fingers Lakes region in the north-central part of the state. But she also lives at an important intersection between two national crises: affordable housing and the race to stave off climate disaster.
She can tell you from experience that the housing dilemma is pushing more Americans into mobile homes; she lives in one herself.
“Like many places in the country, purchasing a home here has become just out of reach for so many of us,” she said. “What is the alternative? Well, mobile homes are relatively affordable.”
Mobile homes might be easier on the budget, but their energy use is massive.
That’s where Hutchinson’s day job comes in. She’s a coordinator at Finger Lakes Climate Fund and Sustainable Finger Lakes. She’s directing a program that gets heat pumps into mobile homes — one of the first in the United States.
Hutchinson has one in her own mobile home, installed after her propane furnace died last year.
Mobile homes are an often forgotten segment of the affordable housing market.
“We’ve had a lot of housing conversations for a long time in this county, but nobody ever talks about mobile homes,” said Gay Nicholson, president of Sustainable Finger Lakes. “We feel like there’s a population there that’s more and more vulnerable.”
The hope is to install heat pumps in 50 mobile homes in the area by the end of this year. The program is funded by a grant from Tompkins County, the county that encompasses Ithaca, and will help offset the costs of installing these heat pumps. Sustainable Finger Lakes will also help owners find other funding to pay for any remaining costs or in some cases access low-interest loans from the state. The goal is to make heat pumps as affordable as possible, according to Nicholson.
“I’m really grateful that New York State has finally embraced the reality that we are going to have to, as ratepayers or taxpayers, provide a helping hand to low-income people to transition their energy supply,” said Nicholson.
The heat pumps could have massive implications for energy efficiency — Nicholson estimates that mobile home owners use 70 percent more energy than people who live in other types of housing.
“So that means there’s a lot of energy poverty for low-income folks in those homes, and many of them are seniors who have, you know, maybe had to downsize out of their homes that they could no longer afford,” said Nicholson.
Mobile homes encompass a large amount of the affordable housing in the U.S., outpacing all other types of affordable housing according to Linda Shi, a professor of city and regional planning at Cornell University in Ithaca.
Mobile homes roughly fall into two categories: older homes and newer prefabricated homes where the components for those houses are all made in factories and then built onsite. The difference is substantial and has implications for how resilient mobile home owners could be to climate change.
“For the older units, the quality of the housing and of the infrastructure may be significantly substandard,” said Shi. “And that can mean that they are less well insulated, so they are more exposed to heat and cold.”
Newer mobile homes are often better insulated and built, but they too are vulnerable to different climate events, including extreme heat and cold. Heat pumps can make a huge difference for homeowners.
“As the climate warms, we have hotter summers or longer periods of heat spells — having a heat pump that can cool as well as heat is just like the biggest benefit.” said Hutchinson.
Mobile homes are more vulnerable to almost every type of climate event that can occur, from flooding to extreme heat to hurricanes and tornadoes. After tornadoes leveled mobile home parks in Mississippi earlier this year, mobile home owners got another stark reminder of how susceptible they are to extreme weather caused by climate change.
As the country starts to shift off of fossil fuels, Hutchinson hopes that mobile home renters and owners are prioritized.
“The ideal is nobody’s left behind as we transition to this clean energy future that we talked about,” said Hutchinson.
Not long ago, coal was booming in the United States. The country’s power generators used more of that fuel in 2007 than ever before — a little over 1 billion tons. Four years later, the generating capacity of the nation’s coal-fired power plants peaked at 318 gigawatts, enough electricity for 238 million homes.
But over the last decade, the U.S. energy sector has made a dramatic pivot away from the greenhouse gas-spewing fossil fuel. Research shows it continues to do so at an astonishing pace. Nearly half of the generating capacity seen in 2011 is expected to vanish by the end of 2026, according to a report published Monday by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a nonprofit think-tank focused on the global energy transition. The analysis also found that coal use by U.S. electric-power producers could hit just 400 million tons this year. And roughly 40 percent of the country’s current coal-fired capacity is set to close by 2030.
“People were not predicting it was going to happen that quickly,” Seth Feaster, the report’s author and a data analyst at the institute, told Grist. “This is a long term structural decline. This is not an economic cycle that is simply going to go away. It is a real phaseout across the industry of the use of coal.”
The country’s current coal-fired electricity capacity is 184 gigawatts. That’s down 42 percent from the 318 gigawatts produced in 2011. As another 173 coal-fired power plants close or stop using coal in coming years, capacity is projected to hit 116 gigawatts by 2030.
Coal’s precipitous decline has resulted in large part from the natural gas boom and the rise of renewable energy. Their falling costs — owing to technological innovations and government incentives, like those in the Inflation Reduction Act — have made it cheaper to replace 99% of operating U.S. coal plants with solar and wind farms, according to a recent study from climate and energy think-tank Energy Innovation. Last year, more electricity came from renewables than from coal for the first time in U.S. history.
“Coal is unequivocally more expensive than wind and solar resources. It’s just no longer cost competitive with renewables,” Michelle Solomon, a policy analyst at Energy Innovation, told the Guardian.
While coal consumption has been falling for a decade and hit a low during the first months of the pandemic, some industry observers thought it would rebound when natural gas prices jumped following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. That didn’t really happen, Feaster said. Although consumption saw a slight resurgence in 2021, it again fell in 2022. The U.S. Energy Information Administration expects power generators to use less coal this year than in 2020.
“What’s most surprising about this decline is how many factors — including soaring gas prices, spurts of very high power demand from heat waves, and a robust post-pandemic economic recovery — should have aligned in 2022 to provide one of the better opportunities for a coal rebound,” Feaster wrote. “Instead, it appears to have slipped away in the face of railroad-based delivery troubles; labor shortages; a resistance or inability to ramp up production; and the apparent reluctance of utilities to switch back to coal from gas.”
Still, even as renewables usurp some of coal’s market share — which the EIA projects to drop from 20 to 17 percent this year — some analysts say the transition isn’t happening fast enough to meet the climate goals outlined in the Paris Agreement. Not only is natural gas, a fossil fuel, still the dominant source of electricity in the U.S., but globally, coal use has increased in recent years. The International Energy Agency expected it to reach an all-time high last year as countries like India and China continue to rely heavily on it.
In a remote and heavily forested region of northern Maine, a critical resource in the fight against climate change has been hiding beneath the trees. In November, scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey, or USGS, announced the discovery of rocks that are rich in rare earth elements near Pennington Mountain. A category of metals that play an essential role in technologies ranging from smartphones to wind turbines to electric vehicle motors, rare earths are currently mined only at a single site in the United States. Now, researchers say a place that’s been geologically overlooked for decades could be sitting on the next big deposit of them — although a more thorough survey would be needed to confirm that.
While the U.S. government frets over shortages of the metals and minerals needed to transition off fossil fuels, it also lacks the basic geological knowledge needed to say where many of those resources are. Less than 40 percent of the nation has been mapped in enough detail to support the discovery of new mineral deposits, hampering the Biden administration’s plan to boost domestic mining of energy transition metals like rare earths and lithium, an essential ingredient in electric vehicle batteries. But the administration and Congress are now attempting to fill the maps in, by ramping up funding for the USGS’s Earth Mapping Resources Initiative, or Earth MRI.
Geologists Chunzeng Wang and Preston Bass in the field near Pennington Mountain. Bass carries a tool called a portable gamma spectrometer. United States Geological Survey
A partnership between the federal government and state geological surveys, Earth MRI was established in 2019 with the goal of improving America’s knowledge of its “critical mineral” resources, a list of dozens of minerals considered vital for energy, defense, and other sectors. The initiative was quietly humming along to the tune of about $11 million per year in funding until 2022, when Earth MRI received an additional influx of $320 million, spread out over five years, through the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. Since then, Earth MRI has kicked into overdrive, with the USGS launching dozens of new critical mineral-mapping efforts from Alaska to the Great Plains.
The USGS will be hunting for minerals both in the ground and at abandoned mines, where there may be valuable metals sitting in piles of toxic waste. The deposits they identify could eventually be extracted by mining companies, though experts say lawmakers and regulators will need to carefully weigh the benefits of mining against its social and environmental costs.
For now, says Earth MRI science coordinator Warren Day, the goal is to accomplish something that’s never been done before. “Nobody’s ever mapped all the critical minerals for the nation,” Day told Grist. “This is a huge undertaking.”
Indeed, the process of mapping the Earth is both labor intensive and time consuming: Geologists must be sent out into the field to record observations and locations of geological features like faults, take measurements, and make detailed interpretations of a landscape. Those interpretations might be augmented with laboratory analyses of soil and rock samples, as well as data collected by aircraft and other remote sensing instruments. It can take several years for researchers to synthesize all of that information into a map with a resolution of an inch to 2,000 feet, the standard scale that state geological surveys work at. Those geological maps don’t fully characterize ore deposits to determine whether they are economical to mine. But they often form a starting point for private companies to conduct that more detailed exploratory work.
“Our part is the definition of the geological framework where deposits could occur,” Day said. “Private industry takes that and tries to define the resources.”
That industry-led exploration can take an additional several years, after which it might take up to a decade to permit and build a mine, says Allan Restauro, a metals and mining analyst at the energy consultancy BloombergNEF. The mismatch between the time from exploration to mining, and the anticipated near-term ramp-up in demand for energy transition metals, has led many experts to predict we’ll see shortfalls of resources like lithiumwithin the decade.
“Even if something were to be discovered right at this very instant, it may not be an actual producing mine until beyond 2030, when demand has shot up,” Restauro told Grist.
To help close the gap between mineral discovery and future demand, Earth MRI scientists are racing to collect as much baseline geological data as they can. The federal government is contracting private companies to do airborne geophysical surveys — flying specialized instruments over a region to measure specific properties of the rocks underfoot. The primary approach the USGS is using, called aeromagnetic surveying, measures slight variations in the Earth’s magnetic field that relate to the magnetic properties of local rocks. In some cases, the agency is also conducting radiometric surveys, which detect natural radioactive emissions from rocks and soils containing elements like thorium and uranium. These elements can indicate the presence of specific mineral types of interest: Thorium, for example, is often found alongside rare earth elements.
The boom on this Earth MRI helicopter contains sensitive equipment for conducting airborne geophysical surveys.
United States Geological Survey
As the USGS is conducting reconnaissance from the air, state geologists are sent out to the field for detailed surface mapping and sampling.
Earth MRI scientists have identified more than 800 focus areas around the nation — regions with at least some potential to host critical minerals. With the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law boosting the initiative’s total budget to $74 million annually from 2022 to 2026, the effort to survey all of them has ramped up “significantly,” says Jim Faulds, the president of the American Association of State Geologists. About twice as many states are now engaged in mapping projects as before the law, and individual projects are receiving three times the funding they were before. That’s expected to be a major boon for Western states like Nevada and Arizona, which have only had a quarter to a third of the land mapped in detail and are among the most promising places in the country to find energy transition metals.
“Many Western states are mineral rich,” Faulds said. “But we don’t necessarily know where those minerals are.”
Even in places where large mineral deposits have been discovered already, we don’t necessarily have detailed maps of the region. That’s the case for the Thacker Pass area near the Oregon border, host to some of the largest lithium resources in North America, as well as an area of west-central Nevada that has large lithium deposits. New Earth MRI-funded survey work in these areas will help define the full extent of these resources, says Faulds, who directs Nevada’s state Bureau of Mines and Geology.
In the eastern U.S., where some states are relatively well mapped, there’s still a potential for new discoveries. Geologists had no idea, for example, that the Pennington Mountain area of northern Maine was host to rare earth-rich rocks: Earth MRI funded a project in the area because it had previously been mined for elements like copper and manganese, said Anji Shah, a USGS geophysicist who contributed to the study.
“When we chose the area, we were thinking about those particular mineral resources,” Shah said. “It was only when we got the [airborne survey] data and we noticed some anomalies that we said, ‘Hey, this might be high in rare earth elements.’” Follow-up work in the field and lab confirmed not just elevated levels of rare earths, but also niobium and zirconium, minerals used in jet engine components and nuclear control rods.
A fine-grained volcanic rock, found on Pennington Mountain in Maine, that hosts rare earth elements, niobium, and zirconium. United States Geological Survey / Chunzeng Wang, University of Maine-Presque Isle
Discoveries like this could ultimately lead to the establishment of new mines and new domestic supply chains for critical minerals, a key policy goal of the Biden administration. But as companies start clamoring to dig these rocks out of the ground, the administration will have to think carefully about how to balance its climate and national security priorities with the potential harms of mining, which can degrade local ecosystems, cause air and water pollution, and transform rural communities. Projects that aren’t sited carefully are likely to meet local resistance, as illustrated by a proposed lithium mine at Thacker Pass that recently began construction despite fierce opposition from conservationists, a local rancher, and Native American tribes.
“We’re going to discover many more deposits” out of Earth MRI, said Thea Riofrancos, a political scientist at Providence College in Rhode Island who studies the intersection between resource extraction and green energy. But the benefits of extracting those minerals, Riofrancos said, “should not be presumed.”
Riofrancos would like to see the government thinking holistically about better and worse places for mining, perhaps combining maps of mineral deposits with maps showing biodiversity, water resources, historically marginalized communities, and Indigenous lands, where a large fraction of today’s energy transition metal mining occurs, according to a recent study. (Day says the USGS always obtains written consent from tribes before mapping reservation lands.) Taking all of these factors into account when deciding where to permit new mining will help ensure that harm is minimized, Riofrancos says.
One of the more attractive places to hunt for energy transition metals could be abandoned mine land, which has already been degraded. Coal mining waste, for instance, can be enriched in rare earth elements; scientists with the Department of Energy are currently working out the best ways to extract them. Several years ago, Shah and her colleagues discovered that mining waste at abandoned 19th- and 20th-century iron mines in the eastern Adirondack Mountains in New York is also enriched in rare earths — in particular, the so-called heavy rare earths that are more economically valuable.
Riofrancos sees the USGS’s inclusion of mine wastes in its mapping efforts as a positive sign. “The more industrially developed an area is, the less new harm is created by mining,” she said, adding that it might be possible to extract new metals from mine waste in tandem with environmental cleanup efforts.
But ultimately, it’s private companies that will decide, based on the trove of new information the government is collecting, which areas it wants to explore further for possible mining. And at this point, Faulds says, “there’s quite a bit of interest at all levels” in Earth MRI data.
“I would say companies are on the edge of their seats,” he said.
Construction began this week on an open-pit mine at the largest lithium deposit in the United States, even as tribes and environmental groups continue a years-long effort to block the project.
The Bureau of Land Management approved the $2.2 billion mine project in January 2021. Mining operations would cover 5,000 acres and create a pit deeper than a football field. Lithium is a key component in the batteries of electric vehicles.
Thacker Pass, known as Peehee Mu’huh to the Paiute Shoshone people, is 200 miles north of Reno and less than 40 miles north of the tribal land of the Fort McDermitt Paiute-Shoshone tribe. Tribes opposing the mine say the area has historical, cultural and religious importance and that it was the site of an 1865 massacre of at least 31 Paiute people.
“It’s an important place not only because a terrible massacre occurred, but also because it’s a place where people gather, it’s a place for ceremony, for hunting,” said Michon Eben, tribal historic preservation officer for the Reno Sparks Indian Colony, a government that includes members from the the Paiute, Shoshone and Washoe tribes. The colony is advocating for Peehee Mu’huh to be on the National Register of Historic Places. “It’s really hard to be a tribal member and see our homelands destroyed,” said Eben.
Thacker Pass also comprises thousands of acres of sagebrush and is a nesting ground for the sage grouse and a migration corridor for pronghorn antelope. Environmental groups including the Great Basin Resource Watch and Western Watersheds Project say the mine would cause irreversible ecological damage, and that the project’s impact was not adequately studied.
“It got by the environmental impact statement process in just under a year and I would expect a project of this scale and complexity to take 3 to 5 years,” said John Hadder, director of Great Basin Resource Watch. “That’s sloppy permitting on the side of the federal government.”
Tribes, environmental groups and a cattle rancher are all plaintiffs in a combined case against the Bureau of Land Management, or BLM, and Lithium Nevada, a subsidiary of Lithium Americas. On February 6, a federal judge in Reno ruled that the BLM had complied with federal law in approving the mine, with the exception of one matter regarding waste disposal, which the judge ordered the BLM to revisit. The plaintiffs filed an appeal in the 9th Circuit and an emergency motion to block construction before the appeal hearing. The appeals court rejected the injunction and set the hearing date for June.
In January, General Motors announced it would invest $650 million in Lithium Americas to develop the Thacker Pass mine, and expected the deal to yield enough lithium for 1 million electric vehicles per year.
Lithium Americas did not respond to a request for comment.
If the appeal fails and the lithium mine goes into operation, Hadder said it sets a bad precedent for how projects can be rushed in the name of the green transition.
“If it’s mining for lithium and other critical minerals, it will fall under the rubric of ‘Lithium is so important that we need to relax some of our environmental standards,’” said Hadder. “That’s a dangerous path that future generations and the environment will pay a price for. I think they’ll look back and say, ‘Oh, that wasn’t a good idea.’”
Over the past 15 years, coal power has been on a precipitous decline across the United States, dropping in use by over 50 percent. The rise of cheaper natural gas and renewable energy combined with environmental regulations has led to the shuttering of hundreds of plants across the country. Between 2010 and 2021, 36 percent of the country’s coal plants went offline; since then another 25 percent shut down or committed to retiring by 2030.
But even as coal declines, it is still keeping a deadly grasp on communities across the country, according to a new report from the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign. The coal sector is responsible for 3,800 premature deaths a year due to fine particle pollution, or PM2.5, from smokestacks.
“We know that coal plants remain one of the biggest polluters in the United States,” said Holly Bender, senior director for energy campaigns with the Sierra Club. “What the [government] data didn’t show was who was most impacted by each of these plants.”
Coal plants release heavier particles and localized pollution that can have acute impacts within a 30- to 50-mile radius, but they also release fine particulate matter that gets blown hundreds of miles away downwind from tall smokestacks. The report looked at these particles specifically, finding that they had widespread impacts, causing premature death in states that don’t even border another state with a plant.
For example, the highest number of deaths due to coal plant pollution happened in Alleghany County in Pennsylvania and Cook County in Illinois, with 63 and 61 fatalities per year, respectively. Yet Cook Country is hundreds of miles away from the nearest power plant. The Labadie plant, Cook County’s biggest coal pollution contributor, owned by the American energy company Ameren, is over 300 miles away in rural Missouri. For the average coal plant, only 4 percent of premature deaths occurred in the facility’s same county and only 18 percent occurred in the same state, highlighting the cross-regional nature of the problem of coal soot.
Particulate pollution has a well-documented and disproportionate impact on people of color and low-income communities. The report notes how these inequities are increasing over time. While as a whole coal is the only pollution source that affects white Americans more than average, Daniel Prull, the author of the report, noted that the impacts varied from plant to plant; many coal facilities examined in the study had disproportionate impacts on communities of color, depending on where they were located.
Over 50 percent of the mortality caused by coal soot could be traced back to 17 plants, the report found. The parent company with the most deaths was Tennessee Valley Authority, which has four plants, and is owned by the U.S. government. Many of the other super-polluters, such as PPL, Berkshire Hathaway, and Ameren, were investor-owned utilities — which combined were responsible for 40 percent of these coal-driven premature deaths. “This is not just a problem that’s relegated to one part of the industry,” said Bender, adding that the parent companies causing the most harm were also the ones that have failed to make commitments to retire coal plants and transition to clean energy.
In line with the Clean Air Act, the EPA is supposed to regulate particulate pollution; last month it released a draft proposal to do so under the National Ambient Air Quality Standards. While the draft standard would lower the exposure limit, the new Sierra Club report notes that it does nothing to explicitly address controlling emissions from coal power plants, over half of which lack modern pollution control technology.
Coal continues to become increasingly uneconomic, Bender said, but it’s important to make sure the energy sector doesn’t simply move from one fossil fuel to another. “Natural gas could not be further from a climate solution,” she said. “We need to make sure we are truly on track to achieve these emission reductions that are necessary to address the climate crisis and the very real pollution burdens experienced across the country.”
Oil companies and governments have pledged to slash methane emissions in recent years, but so far have little to show for it. Emissions of this potent greenhouse gas by the fossil fuel industry continued to climb in 2022, the International Energy Agency said Tuesday.
The group condemned the oil and gas industry for failing to address this problem even as it saw record profits last year, driven up by a tighter energy market following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The technology needed to eliminate most methane emissions already exists and would require spending only a tiny percentage of those profits to deploy, the agency said.
“Methane cuts are among the cheapest options to limit near-term global warming,” Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency, or IEA, said in a statement outlining the findings. “There is just no excuse.”
About one-third of the global warming to date can be attributed to methane emissions. Many human activities are to blame, including agriculture and all the rotting waste people throw out. But in the U.S., energy production is the biggest culprit, according to the IEA. Methane, the main component in natural gas, leaks into the atmosphere accidentally and is also intentionally released during the production and transport of fossil fuels.
The IEA estimates that the global energy industry released nearly 135 million metric tons of methane in 2022, which is higher than the previous year and only slightly below the record seen in 2019. Major incidents like last fall’s explosions along the Nord Stream pipelines in Europe made up just 2 percent of the total. “Globally, normal oil and gas operations emit the equivalent of a Nord Stream size event every single day on average,” the organization said.
Methane traps nearly 90 times as much heat as carbon dioxide during its first 20 years in the atmosphere. The good news is it breaks down within decades. That means curbing its release could slow global warming in the short term while the world moves beyond fossil fuels.
Fortunately, 75 percent of energy-related methane emissions can be eliminated with readily available technologies, the IEA said Tuesday, at a cost of about $100 billion. That’s less than 3 percent of the profits that oil and gas companies earned last year, the group pointed out. The industry would not even have to dip into its profits to implement some of these solutions. Producers could capture and sell methane instead of venting it. In the U.S., about 17 percent of emissions could be reduced at no net cost, according to IEA data.
The Biden administration has promised to contain methane from the oil and gas industry, but has yet to finalize regulations that the Environmental Protection Agency proposed in November 2021. The public comment period for a revised proposal, unveiled during last year’s United Nations climate conference, closed last week. If finalized, the rules would require routine monitoring of all wells, including low-producing sites that have an outsized contribution to pollution. They would also encourage the use of advanced leak detection technologies and require well operators to sell or use excess methane instead of venting it into the atmosphere or burning it off.
A program created by last year’s Inflation Reduction Act will also act as a backstop if the regulations are diluted or take too long to implement. Beginning next year, large oil and gas facilities will be hit with a fine of $900 for every metric ton of methane they release.
“Fossil fuel producers need to step up and policy makers need to step in — and both must do so quickly,” Birol said Tuesday.
This story was reported by InvestigateWest, an independent news nonprofit dedicated to investigative journalism in the Pacific Northwest. Visit invw.org/newsletters to sign up for weekly updates.
The word “sustainable” features prominently on the website for Merkle Standard’s crypto mining operation in remote eastern Washington, which aims to be carbon neutral by year’s end.
In Idaho, budding company GeoBitmine plans to meet its “environmental, social, and governance mandate” by using heat waste from its computers to grow crops in a greenhouse.
And in Texas, crypto miners trumpet their presence as eager customers of a growing portfolio of wind and solar power projects.
Across the country, cryptocurrency miners are striving to remake the image of their industry in the public’s and policymakers’ minds: from flighty to reliable, from all about profit to altruistic, from energy guzzling and emissions heavy to climate conscious.
“We want to be allies, not adversaries,” said Jay Jorgensen, founder and CEO of GeoBitmine, the Idaho company. “Allies of the earth, of energy, of energy production, of the community we’re in.”
But environmental groups and researchers are skeptical. They point to the industry’s track record of contributing to greenhouse gas emissions and e-waste, as documented by federal agencies and independent researchers, and to the general volatility of crypto’s first decade-plus of existence.
“I think there’s been a big shift in the public relations aspect,” said Nick Thorpe, climate and energy advocate with Earthjustice, an environmental law nonprofit that produced a sweeping report in 2022 on the crypto mining industry’s environmental liabilities.
“(They’re) attempting to say all of the various talking points, like ‘We incentivize renewable energy … We’re near a wind farm so therefore we’re getting 100 percent clean energy,’ which, frankly, is incredibly misleading and very much like greenwashing.”
Voices from both camps are clamoring for the ear of state and federal policymakers who are just beginning to form regulations around the nascent industry. The ongoing question is whether crypto mining will hinder or help progress toward transitioning the country away from fossil fuels and stabilizing the nation’s electrical infrastructure.
Based on the industry’s history, even some crypto miners are striking a cautious tone.
“(With) the pace of movement, plus the frankly irresponsible nature of many of the participants, it would be illogical for policymakers to not be concerned,” said Malachi Salcido, a Wenatchee-based bitcoin miner with a decade of experience in the industry. “The way that will change is not by arguing or entering into conflict. It’s by managing loads responsibly over time, taking strategic long-term positions, and earning trust.”
Ant Boxes (with SR-20 in the background) outside the Merkle Standard cryptocurrency mining facility in Usk, Wash. on Friday, Sept. 9, 2022.
Erick Doxey/InvestigateWest
Volatility and climate toll
Crypto mining faces growing scrutiny about its climate impacts.
Concerns center mostly on the process of bitcoin mining, which uses a system called “proof of work.” It is energy-intensive by design, requiring computers to solve thousands of equations as quickly as possible in the hopes of solving the correct sequence to earn bitcoin.
A 2022 Biden administration report stated the industry consumed about 1 percent of the electricity used in the country, producing between 25 million and 50 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually.
Like data centers, crypto mining operations also use water as coolant and churn through computers every year. That same White House report stated that crypto mining was responsible for e-waste output equivalent to that produced by the entire nation of the Netherlands.
But some crypto miners have been innovating and pushing back, arguing that the industry has the ability to do better for the planet.
Jorgensen is among them. He’s been involved with the bitcoin mining industry for two and a half years, beginning as a contractor. Now, he’s gathering investors to launch GeoBitmine, which he plans to set up in Idaho Falls this spring.
Jorgensen refers to GeoBitmine as an “agrotech company” rather than a bitcoin mining operation. He said his focus with most of the five-acre facility is to build a greenhouse heated by the servers working away at mining bitcoin. That can employ at least 30 people initially, he estimated.
In short, he said, he wants to expand upon the mission of bitcoin mining.
“I’m a practical guy who wants to solve problems and do it the easiest way possible,” he said. “We have problems with water consumption, food production, and our energy grid needs to be stabilized. I found an opportunity where all those things can be put together.”
GeoBitmine aims to be carbon-neutral by the end of 2023, Jorgensen said. His plan to achieve that relies on a combination of 75 percent renewable power supply provided by PacifiCorp, energy savings from repurposing server heat through the greenhouse and carbon sequestration through the crops grown in the greenhouse.
In response to questions about the value of using so much energy to mine bitcoin, Jorgensen points to other uses of electricity such as Netflix streaming, which, according to one 2020 estimate, uses about 94 terawatt hours globally each year.
“You’re just being prejudiced against something that uses less than 1 percent of the grid,” he said. “People fear what they don’t understand.”
Ant Boxes during the preparation process at the Merkle Standard cryptocurrency mining facility in Usk, Wash. on Friday, Sept. 9, 2022.
Erick Doxey/InvestigateWest
Salcido, CEO of Salcido Enterprises, has watched many mining operations rise and fall as the value of bitcoin fluctuated wildly during his 10 years in the business, which justifies the caution from utilities and policymakers.
Given the ongoing volatility of the industry, Salcido said, he doesn’t fault utility companies for setting higher rates for crypto customers in order to protect their assets, or lawmakers for being cautious. He believes it’s too early for crypto miners to try to burnish their environmental credentials in the minds of the public.
“True sustainability requires a lot of strategic, thoughtful planning and execution, not lurching,” Salcido said. “That, coupled with the fact that crypto as a new emerging, evolving industry has a get-rich-quick kind of attribute, means most people don’t see it as sustainable. And in these early market cycles, it’s not acting sustainable.”
With time and experience, though, he still believes that it can become so.
A bet on potential?
An infamous crypto mining project in upstate New York that reopened a mostly defunct coal plant to power its servers was what initially spurred Earthjustice’s work around crypto mining.
Thorpe, the senior associate with the nonprofit, became involved as environmental impacts of crypto mining “became a bigger and bigger issue across the U.S.”
Earthjustice found several other examples of the industry reopening fossil fuels plants or keeping them online as it studied the industry throughout 2022.
Using public filings with utility and financial regulators, investor presentations and media reports, the nonprofits vetted claims that crypto mining is embracing greener practices and mitigating its environmental toll. In partnership with the Sierra Club, Earthjustice compiled that research to present to federal policymakers.
They describe their research as “the first attempt to comprehensively document the explosive growth of cryptocurrency mining in the United States and examine how this industry is impacting utilities, energy systems, emissions, communities, and ratepayers.”
Earthjustice found through its research that even in cases where mining operations claimed to be drawing directly from renewable projects, “most mining facilities draw power from the grid — meaning their electricity is generated by whatever existing energy is in place in the region, or is contracted by their utility.”
“Increased load on any grid means an increased incentive to run that coal plant which supposedly was going to retire,” Thorpe said. Additionally, “I haven’t seen any example of crypto building out additional clean energy projects solely for their operations.”
Crypto miners also say the industry can contribute in other ways due to its flexibility in power usage. Unlike data centers, crypto mining operations can stop running their computers to ease pressure on the grid during times of peak demand. Or they can ramp up usage during times when energy generation exceeds the grid’s current capacity.
Servers at the Merkle Standard cryptocurrency mining facility in Usk, Wash. on Friday, Sept. 9, 2022.
Erick Doxey/InvestigateWest
States have mostly been relying on subsidies or lower rates from utilities to incentivize crypto miners to disconnect during surges, rather than mandates that require them to do so.
Jorgensen said that tactic is effective: It makes financial sense for miners to avoid heightened costs of electricity during peak demand and to receive the tax benefits or rate benefits that come from disconnecting for a while.
Environmental advocates point out that ratepayers subsidize those incentives for crypto miners, however, without getting any benefit from sharing the grid with those operations.
Earthjustice also said it found many more instances of power companies getting stuck holding the bag for investments they made to serve crypto operations, only to have those same operations shutter or leave town. The group noted instances in Kentucky, Arkansas, Nebraska and Washington.
Thorpe acknowledged that the industry is still talking about ways to improve. But for climate groups, the past and present make for more compelling arguments.
“We are focused on what’s happening right now,” he said. “Fossil fuel plants are being run to exclusively mine bitcoin. Proof of work is designed to be energy-intensive. Until that changes, I don’t see a future where it actually could follow the models of other companies like Google and Microsoft that have made commitments to run on carbon-free electricity.”
InvestigateWest is an independent news nonprofit dedicated to investigative journalism in the Pacific Northwest. This story was made possible with support from the Sustainable Path Foundation.
The president of the World Bank is stepping down from his post, a move many link to his controversial statements about climate change last fall. David Malpass announced his resignation this week, saying he would leave at the end of June, nearly a year before the completion of his five-year term.
Last September, at a climate change event hosted by the New York Times, Malpass was repeatedly asked if he accepted the scientific consensus that fossil fuels were a leading cause of climate change. His answer — “I’m not a scientist.” — prompted immediate calls for his resignation from environmental activists, policy makers and world leaders.
While Malpass later apologized and claimed on TV “I’m not a denier,” the incident further cemented doubts about the bank president’s commitment to address the climate crisis.
The World Bank and its sister institution, the International Monetary Fund, were established in the wake of the devastation of World War II to provide funding for reconstruction and to reduce poverty. The bank now provides billions of dollars in funding primarily to developing countries, with a stated purpose to support projects that reduce poverty and promote economic development.
In January of 2020, Malpass shocked other multinational development institutions after he turned down an invitation to attend a Davos gathering of world leaders and policy makers to address both poverty and climate change. Malpass was appointed by the Trump administration in 2019.
The World Bank itself has been no stranger to controversy around climate change in recent years. In 2021, the bank said that it had committed $25 billion dollars annually over the next four years to support projects that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions, poverty and inequality, among other climate financing goals. But climate and environmental activists have claimed that up to 40% of the bank’s climate financing funding could not be independently verified.
At the same time, the World Bank has been criticized for being averse to lending to developing countries that are reeling from devastation from extreme weather as a result of climate change. At the United Nations climate summit in Egypt last fall, Mia Mottley, the prime minister of the Caribbean island nation of Barbados, publicly criticized the financial institution for allowing countries like hers to suffer under mounting debt while being asked to cover the costs of rebuilding critical infrastructure on their own. Mottley proposed reform to the bank’s lending policies, specifically calling forth a plan that would include a loan clause allowing countries hit by natural disasters to suspend repayments.
Developing nations like Barbados have borne a disproportionate amount of the impacts of climate change, which include rising sea levels, as well as more extreme weather, from more powerful hurricanes to longer and more severe droughts. In response to Mottley’s proposal, a number of global leaders and climate activists have called on the World Bank and other development institutions to do more to finance renewable energy projects as well as resilience plans without taking on more debt.
The leadership of the World Bank has traditionally been a U.S. citizen and selected by the United States. Rajiv Shah, a former head of USAID, has already been mentioned as a possible candidate to replace Malpass.
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
In the 1980s, a group of scientists predicted climate change with uncanny accuracy. Those scientists happened to work for Exxon.
Many fossil fuel companies knew about climate change well before the general public did.
But a recent review of dozens of internal Exxon documents from the 1970s and ‘80s, found company scientists knew a lot more than the basics of what greenhouse gasses were doing to the planet.
To understand what Exxon knew and how they knew it, let’s go back to 1977. This was an important moment in history: Scientists and government agencies were just starting to seriously study climate change. Researchers knew the basics — carbon dioxide levels were rising, and the Earth would most likely get warmer — but there were still a lot of unanswered questions. And Exxon, a major fossil fuel company with a skilled research department, decided to spend millions of dollars to answer those questions for themselves.
If you read historical documents or interviews from this time, you get the sense that Exxon scientists were genuinely interested in understanding climate change — even a bit idealistic! A top company scientist at the time envisioned Exxon at the center of a global climate research project “aimed at benefiting mankind.”
Exxon believed that good climate science would only help their business. You see, the company had been watching another industry facing another environmental crisis.
Just a few years prior, the world was starting to get anxious about the vanishing ozone layer. Certain chemicals found in aerosol sprays and refrigerators were damaging the part of the atmosphere that protects earth from the sun’s most harmful rays. And so the government decided to ban spray cans that used those chemicals.
Exxon’s top scientists saw the ban’s impact on the chemical industry. And 1979 they wrote, “When Freon based [sic] aerosol containers were baned [sic], the chemical industry was also caught unprepared. If the industry had anticipated the problem, it could have been working on substitute propellants.”
In much the same way, Exxon thought that if they really understood the science behind climate change, they might uncover solutions, nuances, or new business opportunities that could help the company in the long run. So they assembled a team of atmospheric scientists. They built a high-tech climate lab on one of their oil tankers to help study CO2 in the ocean. And they invested in cutting-edge computer models to predict the future global temperatures.
Exxon scientists’ first climate models were published privately in 1982, years before the general public was aware of climate change. Exxon predicted the climate would warm just under half a degree celsius between 1980 and 2000. And by the early 2000s, they found the earth could be warm enough to objectively detect climate change. (Scientists officially detected climate change in 1995). Over the next few years, Exxon’s climate predictions kept getting better.
By the late 1980s, climate change was starting to enter the public conversation.
Less than two months after James Hansen’s testimony, Exxon laid out its strategy in an internal memo: In order to prevent the “noneconomic development of non-fossil fuel resources,”
they instructed their staff to “emphasize the uncertainty in scientific conclusions regarding the potential enhanced greenhouse effect.”
For the next two decades, Exxon stuck to that strategy of emphasizing climate uncertainty. All the while, Exxon scientists continued to quietly study and predict climate change trends in academic journals. So, Exxon was simultaneously calling climate science “sheer speculation” and publishing peer-reviewed climate models showing an increasingly warmer world.
How good were those decades-old Exxon models? Recently, a group of outside researchers compared each Exxon climate model to real-world climate records, scoring them from 0 to 100. And they found that, on average, Exxon’s predictions were 72 percent accurate! Exxon’s best prediction, published in 1985, was 99 percent accurate — more accurate than predictions from the world’s top independent and government scientists at that time.
How do you judge a climate model’s accuracy?
Climate models are computer programs that use lots of variables to predict how much our planet will warm in the future.
A good climate prediction depends on getting two main things right: First, the computer model needs to accurately simulate Earth’s complex climate system. Second, Climate modelers need to accurately predict how much CO2 we’ll emit in the future. This is determined by economic, technological, and societal factors.
To score a model’s accuracy, scientists compare the climate prediction to real-world historical records. A prediction that closely lines up with reality is considered “skilled,” and given a score of up to 100; a prediction that is way off base is given a score of as low as 0.
Scientists can score climate predictions in two ways. One method simply compares predicted vs. actual warming over time — the method we mention in our story.
Another method focuses only on accuracy of the “climate” part of the climate model. Scientists track how much warming the models predict per unit of CO2, and compare that to similar real-world records. This allows scientists to ignore the role actual fossil fuel use played in the difference between prediction and reality.
Exxon’s in-house climate models were, on average, 72 percent accurate at predicting warming over time, and 75 percent accurate at predicting warming per unit of fossil fuels. A separate study used the same methods to rank top government and independent climate models — those models scored 69 percent with both methods of assessment.
This research adds to a story: For years, one of the best climate models in the world came from an oil company. And then, they spent the next several decades discrediting it.
President Joe Biden took a victory lap on his climate record during last night’s State of the Union, touting his administration’s major investments in clean energy and resilient infrastructure.
He celebrated the passage of the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, as well as the Inflation Reduction Act, “the most significant investment ever to tackle the climate crisis,” Biden told a packed House Chamber. “[It is] lowering utility bills, creating American jobs, and leading the world to a clean energy future.”
“The climate crisis doesn’t care if you are in a red or blue state,” Biden said. “It is an existential threat. We have an obligation, not to ourselves, but to our children and grandchildren to confront it. I’m proud of how America at last is stepping up to the challenge… But there’s so much more to do. We have got to finish the job.”
But Biden’s address failed to lay out exactly how he plans to do this beyond the roll out of these already-passed acts, particularly as he faces a newly elected Republican majority in the House.
Unlike his calls for tax reform and protections for Medicaid and Social Security, the State of the Union lacked a clear vision for how his administration hopes to tackle the many climate deadlines looming for the last two years of his term, from new emissions limits on coal-fired power plants and vehicles to efficiency standards for appliances and industry. There is also the issue of the delays and staffing shortages at the Environmental Protection Agency, and fear of a blockade on climate action within federal courts, spurred by a deep bench of conservative judges appointed during the Trump Administration.
Jamal Reed is the executive director of Evergreen Action, a climate change political advocacy organization based in Washington state. Ahead of Tuesday’s address, Reed told Grist that Biden’s investment has been monumental for the transition to a clean economy, but he agreed that there is a lot left on D.C.’s climate to-do list.
“The IRA and the current baseline do not get us where we need to honor climate commitments,” Reed said, referring to how the law is projected to reduce emissions by 42 percent by 2030 – 8 percent less than what the U.S. committed to in international agreements. “We need to push states to go further faster than they ever were before with these investments. We need to implement rapidly, equitably, and efficiently the Inflation Reduction Act and make sure we’re getting those dollars out the door.”
Similar to past speeches, Biden aligned his climate agenda with a goal of returning the country to its once former manufacturing glory. He announced a commitment to making all federally funded infrastructure projects use American made products. This Made-in-America campaign, however, has sparked criticism both within the U.S. and abroad, with some experts arguing it could slow down the transition to renewable energy as the country hunts for domestic supplies, such as minerals, and manufacturing facilities to support demand.
Opponents of the Biden Administration’s emphasis on clean energy haven’t been as welcoming to this vision. In response to last night’s address, Cathy Rodgers, a Republican Representative from Washington who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said the president’s “radical rush-to-green agenda” has harmed U.S. energy production and American’s pocketbooks.
In what felt like a first, Biden criticized the record profits Big Oil companies brought in last year, generated amidst a global energy crisis spurred by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. He lambasted companies for increasing investor profits instead of investing in domestic energy production, but made no mention of requiring investments in renewable energy sources or a commitment to reducing oil production. He also steered clear of assigning responsibility to the fossil fuel industry for causing and hiding the crisis.
Ad-libbing from the official speech, Biden made it a point to clarify that “we’re going to need oil for at least another decade.”
While Americans were reckoning with sky-high gas prices at the pump last year, the country’s biggest oil giant was raking in more money than ever. Exxon Mobil, one of the world’s largest oil companies, reported on Tuesday that it made $56 billion in profits in 2022. That’s the most a Western oil company has ever earned and averages out to around $6.3 million an hour over the course of the year.
It’s not just Exxon. Other major oil companies such as Chevron and Shell are expected to report similar results in the coming weeks, pushing their combined profits to around $200 billion, according to the financial markets data firm Refinitiv.
Darren Woods, Exxon’s CEO, praised the company’s results on calls with the press, calling them proof that it was right to resist pressure to pull back from fossil fuel production and invest more in renewables. Other oil giants like BP have shifted more of their resources to solar and wind projects – investments that don’t have immediate payoffs.
“We leaned in when others leaned out, bucking conventional wisdom,” Woods said in an interview with CNBC.
The unprecedented earnings stem from a combination of trends. In the early days of the pandemic, demand for oil plunged and gas prices nosedived, prompting companies like Exxon to cut costs by shuttering refineries and laying off workers. Just as the economy began to recover, Russia invaded Ukraine, causing a major supply squeeze as the demand for oil returned to pre-pandemic levels. The result: soaring gas prices and major profits for Exxon.
Governments have responded with anger to Big Oil’s rising profits. In the fourth quarter of 2022, a new EU windfall tax dealt a $1.3 billion blow to Exxon’s overall earnings. The company is now challenging the policy in court.
“It’s just unlawful and bad policy trying to tax something, when what you actually need is for it to increase,” Exxon’s CFO Kathryn Mikells told Reuters. “It has the opposite effect of what you’re trying to achieve.” The European Commission has maintained that the windfall tax is within its legal authority.
President Joe Biden has also lashed out at American oil companies, accusing executives of limiting production at a time when gas was prohibitively expensive.
“The latest earnings reports make clear that oil companies have everything they need, including record profits and thousands of unused but approved permits, to increase production, but they’re instead choosing to plow those profits into padding the pockets of executives and shareholders while House Republicans manufacture excuse after excuse to shield them from any accountability,” said White House spokesman Abdullah Hasan.
Absent from the discussion is any mention of what boosting oil production could mean for the Biden administration’s climate goals. The International Energy Agency has said that no new oil and gas fields should be developed if the world is to stay on track to limit global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and avoid the most disastrous impacts of climate change.
But the rush to wean European countries off Russian natural gas has driven the president to approve new fossil fuel projects. This week, his administration is reportedly planning to direct the Department of the Interior to grant partial approval to a massive new oil drilling project on federal lands in northern Alaska. Led by oil giant ConocoPhillips, the so-called “Willow project” is expected to unlock more than 600 million barrels of crude, a prospect at odds with Biden’s stated goals of taking action against climate change.
After news of the upcoming report broke, environmental advocacy organizations such as the National Resources Defense Council blasted the Biden administration, accusing it of planting a carbon bomb at a time the world needs just the opposite.
“We can’t keep drilling to the ends of the Earth while a runaway climate crisis ravages our world,” said Manish Bapna, the NRDC’s president, in a statement. “The administration needs to draw a line in the tundra, hold the line on carbon pollution, and speed the shift to cleaner, smarter ways to power our future.”
Regulators have long known that climate change poses a threat to the U.S. financial system. Major disasters like hurricanes and wildfires can wipe out buildings and crops, causing losses for the banks that make loans against these assets. Even efforts to take on climate change could cause problems: A rapid, widespread shift to renewable power could send shock waves through financial markets as stocks and bonds tied to fossil fuel companies fall, hurting the bottom line of banks, insurers, and other institutions tied to them.
Now the Federal Reserve, which is tasked with overseeing the country’s financial system, is trying to figure out just how vulnerable big banks are to this kind of upheaval. The Fed on Tuesday released new details about a climate risk analysis it is asking six major U.S. banks to conduct, offering a peek at the worst-case climate events that financial regulators are worrying about.
Banks often use stress tests like these to assess risks in their portfolio, and since the financial crisis the Fed has required large banks to ensure that they can withstand sudden financial shocks, but this is the first time that the U.S. government has asked major banks to account for their exposure to climate change. The results of the so-called “pilot climate scenario analysis exercise” will offer new insight into whether these banks could survive major climate shocks, and could also help inform new regulations such as the ones that followed the 2008 financial crisis.
The banks that will participate are some of the largest and most diversified in the country: Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley. This batch controls about half of the banking market in the United States as measured by total deposits, and also manages billions of dollars for investors and pensions. The Fed’s exercise asks these banks to consider two major types of climate danger: the “physical risk” of natural disasters and the “transition risk” of a movement away from fossil fuels.
In the first part of the exercise, banks will assess how their portfolios would fare if one or more major hurricanes struck the Northeast, a “region in which all participants have material commercial and residential real estate exposures.” The Fed wants banks to pay particular attention to their real estate portfolios: how many residential and commercial loans would fall through, and how much money would it cost the banks if that happened?
In the second, the Fed will look at how their investments and loans would perform during a rapid energy transition to net zero emissions by 2050. If the world’s nations did come together and decarbonize on that timeline, it’s likely that major oil companies and other carbon-intensive companies would see severe losses. Rating agencies like Standard & Poor’s might downgrade their credit, making it harder for them to borrow their way out of trouble, which in turn would cause losses for the banks that finance and insure them.
Many large financial institutions still provide large loans and underwriting services for fossil fuel producers. A new report from the advocacy group Reclaim Finance found that even banks that have signed a prominent global net-zero pledge have provided a combined $269 billion in financing for fossil-fuel companies over recent years. Five of the Fed’s six participating banks are named in the report as top fossil-fuel financiers — all except Goldman Sachs.
Yevgeny Shrago, policy director for the climate program at Public Citizen, the consumer advocacy group, said the Fed’s exercise is a welcome start, but it doesn’t go far enough.
“It’s not even a fire drill,” Shrago told Grist. “It’s like looking at the map of a building and being like, do we have enough exits?” The exercise focuses on how climate change could affect banks’ balance sheets, Shrago said, but it doesn’t consider how losses at those banks could lead to broader financial turmoil for small banks, insurers, pensions, and ordinary people.
The Federal Reserve is independent from the Biden administration, but the bank’s announcement comes on the heels of other regulatory actions. The Securities and Exchange Commission is in the middle of finalizing a rule that would require publicly-traded companies to disclose their greenhouse gas emissions, and the Treasury is seeking information from major insurers about how climate change could affect their business.
The Federal Reserve has asked banks to submit their responses by the end of July, and plans to make the results of the study public later this year.
The appeal of electric cars is straightforward: Owners get to save money by skipping trips to the gas station and feel good about doing their part to cut carbon emissions. That’s part of the reason why U.S. sales are currently soaring, with electric vehicles expected to make up 10 percent of the cars and light-duty trucks on roads in 2030. This is good news for the climate, since transportation is the single largest source of emissions in the country.
The decision to switch to electric-powered vehicles benefits 9 out of 10 U.S. drivers, but the lowest income Americans get left behind, according to the results of a new study from the University of Michigan.
A group of researchers at the school’s Center for Sustainable Systems analyzed data on income level, gas and electricity costs, and vehicle-specific greenhouse gas emissions for every census tract in the United States. They found that over 90 percent of vehicle-owning households would see reductions in both carbon emissions and the amount they spend on powering their car by switching to an electric vehicle. These benefits are especially pronounced on the West Coast, where some households could cut their annual transportation bills by $600 or more, and slash their annual carbon emissions by more than 4.1 metric tons, the study found.
The pattern does not hold true, however, for those with the lowest incomes, more than half of whom would continue to be burdened by high transportation costs – defined as more than 4 percent of their income – after trading in their gas-guzzler for an electric car. The study found that households that would receive little benefit are concentrated in Midwestern states with coal and natural gas-reliant energy grids, as well as in Alaska and Hawaii, the two states with the highest cost of electricity.
The study’s authors called these disparities a problem of “distributive justice,” a term used to describe the equal distribution of a policy’s benefits and burdens. They say their research is the first to consider how switching to an electric vehicle would impact both emissions and energy costs across different regions of the country.
“Our results confirm the potential for widespread benefits from EV [electric vehicle] adoption,” said study author Joshua Newell, an urban geographer at the University of Michigan, in a press release. “However, EV ownership in the U.S. has thus far been dominated by households with higher incomes and education levels, leaving the most vulnerable populations behind.”
The potential for an electric vehicle to decrease its owner’s overall carbon footprint and energy expenses depends on many factors, including the car battery’s power source, driving and charging patterns, and local electricity rates. Rural and suburban households tend to spend more of their income on energy because of a lack of public transportation and the need to drive longer distances.
Take an electric car-owner living in a suburban area of Indiana, where more than half of electricity comes from coal-fired plants. Even though the owner is not releasing greenhouse gasses while driving to work, they are using more power to charge their vehicle, and it’s dirty. Moreover, the average electric bill in Indiana is high relative to the rest of the country – $162 last October compared with the nationwide monthly average of $139 – so charging at home can get expensive. This driver might save some money they would have spent on gas by purchasing an electric car, but the difference might not be enough to convince them to make the switch.
Compare that to somebody buying an electric car in an urban part of California. Since more than 30 percent of the state’s grid is powered by renewables, this owner will be charging their vehicle with cleaner electricity, resulting in a net-decrease in their carbon emissions after ditching their gas-powered car. Electricity bills are right around the national average, but foregoing the costs of filling up the tank in California – where gas runs $4.40 a gallon – more than makes up the difference.
Factoring in income further complicates the picture. While households that make more than 30 to 80 percent of the average median income for a given area would pay a low or moderate amount to power their electric vehicle, those earning less than 30 percent of the average median income would still be stuck with moderate or high costs.
Newell, the co-author of the study, told Grist that these findings raise all sorts of questions about the best way to get Americans to buy more electric cars. He cited a need to develop programs like California’s Enhanced Fleet Modernization Program, which provides funds for low-income residents to scrap their high-polluting vehicle for a cleaner one.
The study didn’t account for the cost of buying an electric vehicle, because prices are expected to swing in the coming years. Beyond the cost of the actual car, Newell noted that a lack of public charging stations in rural and low-income areas remains a problem. California, for instance, has one charging station for every 2,848 residents, according to Choose Energy, whereas Alabama has one for every 20,000. One way of addressing that, he said, is to expand and subsidize them. But it all depends on what’s best for that town.
Given the many variables at play, Newell said efforts to get more Americans to buy electric vehicles need to be crafted at a “regional level.”
Last year was the fifth-warmest ever recorded in planetary history, scientists announced on Tuesday. The data reflects a wider warming trend driven by emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, with the past eight years being the warmest on record, and 2016 the hottest yet.
The record heat is hitting some parts of the globe harder than others. This past summer was the hottest ever recorded in Europe, where a series of punishing heat waves claimed more than 20,000 lives. Prolonged heat waves also swept through parts of Pakistan, northern India, and central and eastern China.
“2022 was yet another year of climate extremes across Europe and globally,” said Samantha Burgess, deputy director of the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, which announced the findings. “These events highlight that we are already experiencing the devastating consequences of our warming world.”
The consequences range from extreme floods that submerged a third of Pakistan last August to the seemingly unending drought that has paralyzed swaths of east Africa, killing more than 7 million livestock and subjecting more than 8.5 million people to dire water shortages since the drought began in October 2020. A study from the Norwegian Meteorological Institute last year found that parts of the Arctic are warming up to seven times faster than the global average, causing sea ice to melt more rapidly than anticipated. Because this ice acts as an “air conditioning unit” for the planet, its depletion could accelerate current rates of warming.
Meanwhile, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is on the rise, increasing by approximately 2.1 parts per million last year, a rate similar to those of recent years. Atmospheric methane concentrations increased by 12 parts per billion, which is higher than average. Current concentrations of the two gasses are estimated to be the highest on record for the past 2 million years and 800,000 years, respectively, according to the report.
The warmer temperatures highlight the need for efforts to cut carbon emissions. In the United States, the Biden administration passed the country’s first major climate legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, in August. And yet the country’s carbon pollution keeps climbing: A report by the Rhodium Group on Tuesday found that U.S. emissions increased by just over one percent last year.
The observed warming trends persisted in 2022 despite three consecutive years of La Niña, a climate pattern marked by cooler-than-normal sea surface temperatures near the equator in the Pacific Ocean, which tends to suppress warming across the world. La Niña is expected to stick around through the first part of this year, before giving way to El Niño, the weather pattern associated with warmer waters in the Pacific, which cause hotter and drier conditions globally.
While it is difficult to predict the outcome of an El Niño in a given year, the absence of a La Niña cooling effect suggests that this year could be even hotter than the last.
This story was originally published by Capital and Main and is reproduced here with permission.
All good stories start with a question. So here are five to consider as the record-breaking accumulation of greenhouse gases continues into the opening days of 2023.
Climate change, of course, can’t be divided into parts. The answers to these questions, however you devise them, may start small and specific and then, like climate change itself, to borrow the title of a popular 2022 film, illustrate how it is “everything everywhere all at once.”
1) In what ways do the fossil fuel companies resemble a criminal conspiracy?
The territory of Puerto Rico is using a novel argument in a recently filed lawsuit alleging that oil and coal, and their paid allies, conspired to mislead the public over the costs and consequences of their greenhouse gas emissions. In the lawsuit, filed in early December, 16 Puerto Rican municipalities charged the companies under the RICO statute normally used to prosecute organized crime. The municipalities allege “decades of deception” by oil and coal companies, their trade associations and a network of funded think tanks to cast doubt on the connections between their greenhouse gas emitting products and the climate change-induced extremes (floods, droughts, hurricanes) that their residents have experienced over the past two decades.
That same constellation of companies and institutions is pretty much omnipresent in neighborhoods across the United States. The groundbreaking group of plaintiffs in Puerto Rico offer some pretty evocative descriptions of fossil fuel industry actions that most likely have occurred in cities and states elsewhere in the country. They cite evidence going back as far as 1989, when defendants ExxonMobil, Shell, BP and Rio Tinto launched a nonprofit corporation, the Global Climate Coalition, “to influence, advertise, and promote the interests of the fossil fuel industry by giving false information to their consumers and the public at large.” They allege that the companies’ aim, acting individually and collectively, is to convince the public that global warming is not occurring, and if it is, that there is no scientific consensus as to why. The damage caused in Puerto Rico by the extreme weather events of the last five years, they claim, can be traced to these efforts, which convinced governing authorities to resist actions that would help reduce greenhouse gas emissions, or properly prepare for their impact.
A similar constellation of companies and institutions have made the same misleading arguments in communities across the United States — starting in Washington, D.C., but also in state capitals across the country — where they have worked to undermine national, state and local responses to climate change. The Puerto Rican case will be watched closely for its use of the criminal, as opposed to civil, statutes, and builds upon a long trail of legal offensives to hold the industry accountable for the immense financial consequences of climate change for the public treasury — a drain on public funds that is being felt in every jurisdiction across the U.S.
2) What is a greenwash?
Public concerns over climate change have risen to such an extent that companies are now trying to ride the wave by describing their work with new environmentally friendly language. It’s time for journalists, and everyone else, to beware of virtue signaling in the climate realm. How to know if claims are real? The EU is devising rules to hold investment firms — many of them also operating in this country — accountable for their “sustainability” and other claims. The United Nations has already done so, with some tartly worded introductory remarks, “It’s Time to Draw a Red Line Around Greenwashing,” to the report “Integrity Matters: Net Zero Commitments by Businesses, Financial Institutions, Cities and Regions.” As the impacts of atmospheric disequilibrium become ever more clear, and the claims of companies in the spotlight ever more vaguely “green,” there will, no doubt, be abundant opportunities to hold companies accountable to their “net-zero” and other climate claims. Those guides provide some handy clues to watch out for. Maybe there’s a greenwash in motion wherever you are — and it won’t be in a laundromat.
3) Who will get water in the West?
Residents of southern Arizona and California are discovering amid plummeting Colorado River reservoir levels what scientists told us long ago: You can’t grow water. The inconvenient truth about water is that the amount of moisture in the atmosphere doesn’t change; it just moves or stays longer in the atmosphere, but it does not expand in quantity. So we are stuck with what we have — a water supply that spends more time in the ever-hotter atmosphere, and comes down in ways that are less and less predictable. Some areas become wetter, others drier. Though that truth shapes the situation with regard to this most fundamental of resources, there’s another truism for journalists that also still holds: Follow the water, or follow where it used to be. That trail leads to money, and money leads to power. Wherever you live in the West, water is guaranteed to be a story for a long time.
Start with the Colorado River, shift to the Tule and the Tuolumne and the Klamath, to the Sacramento and the San Joaquin — which feed, or not, the mighty pumps in Tracy sending water further south. Whatever river trail you follow, access to water in the West is what former Gov. Jerry Brown once called a “Hobbesian situation,” a fight over resources that is getting more brutal “as things get tighter” due to climate change. The battle over access to water, fought in locations across the West — along riverfronts, lakes, reservoirs, dams, canals, aqueducts, tunnels and every other form of channeling water in a direction other than that it would normally flow — promises to become more intense and more desperate as the sources of that water become more erratic and centers of moisture shift in the atmosphere. At every stage, it’s a question of who gets the water and who does not. Water stories often start small, where levees or tunnels or dams or diversionary channels are dug or proposed, and can lead very quickly to the most powerful interests in a state, a city, a town, all thirsty for a drink.
4) What does an earthquake have to do with solar power?
In the week before Christmas, a powerful earthquake registering 6.7 on the Richter scale rattled Humboldt County in Northern California. Tens of thousands of residents in Eureka and surrounding towns lost power for over two days when PG&E’s electrical grid failed. Other than those with generators, the only residents in and around Eureka who had power when the grid went down were residents who’d installed solar panels — which were largely unaffected by the power outage. There is little, if any, evidence linking earthquakes to climate change. In that same area, however, there have been major storms and fires — both of which have been intensified by climate change. In those natural disasters, similar patterns emerged: While the power grid went down, the solar panels kept generating electricity. For those living and reporting along the picturesque fault lines of California, it is worth considering what this tells us about solar not only as a carbon-clean energy source, but as a hedge against disasters.
And another angle into this highly topical storyline: In a cruel twist of timing for Humboldt County, in the days after the earthquake those residents with solar panels were able to read on their solar-recharged devices that the state Public Utilities Commission had sharply cut their payments for selling excess power back to the grid, known as net metering. That move, long advocated by PG&E and the energy lobby, suggests an abundant string of local stories as solar installations drop — which they’re expected to by as much as 40% because of the rate cut — just as rooftop solar’s use in emergency situations becomes more clear.
5) What do Indonesia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Brazil have to do with the weather in your neighborhood?
These three countries have the largest tropical forest areas in the world. They are home to an abundant diversity of species, and they are the world’s largest carbon sinks (reminder: Trees inhale carbon dioxide and exhale oxygen). At the recent Convention on Biological Diversity conference in Montreal, these three countries established an informal alliance, known as the OPEC of rainforests, to demand greater funding to ensure conservation of standing forests — often by indigenous communities who have lived in and protected the forest for millennia. Evaporation from those forests is also a critical ingredient in the huge flowing currents of moisture above our heads known as atmospheric rivers — which traverse the atmosphere and thus have a major influence on the weather (including on the recent rain and snowstorms that wreaked havoc in the U.S. over the holidays).
All three countries in the new alliance also produce oil, and are thus both contributors to the emissions that are degrading their forests and hosts to the carbon sinks that can mitigate the damage from them. Either way, it’s clear how deeply our fate is tied to those distant rainforests. Their vitality helps determine the severity of the droughts, floods, rising temperatures and other symptoms here that are being triggered by global warming. For journalists, such connections offer clear stakes to Americans, who are being asked, like the people in other developed countries, to contribute hundreds of millions of dollars in public funds to ensure those trees remain standing. The weather, that great standby of all news coverage, may be the greatest climate story of them all — and may just start with whether or not a far-off tree in a place where we may never have the good fortune to visit is cut or burned, or left standing.
Kentucky officials threatened to divest the state from 11 financial institutions on Tuesday over what it deemed to be climate-conscious investing practices. Targeted firms include BlackRock, JPMorgan Chase, and Citigroup, all of which have publicly pledged to incorporate pro-environment principals into their financial strategies.
Such policies, Kentucky State Treasurer Allison Ball said in a press release, “boycott fossil fuels” and “intentionally choke off the lifeblood of capital to Kentucky’s signature industries.” The announcement follows a state bill passed last year directing her office to publish an annual list of financial institutions involved in a so-called “energy company boycott.”
Kentucky’s efforts are the latest in the Republican Party’s larger campaign against what are known as environmental, social, and governance, or ESG, investing principles. After years of activist efforts to get financial firms to disclose and account for their climate risks, ESG practices — which, in theory, prioritize investments in renewable energy, for example, over oil and gas — have moved from the sidelines to the mainstream, becoming a buzz-acronym on Wall Street. In March, the Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC, the federal agency meant to protect U.S. investors, proposed new rules that would require companies to disclose their carbon emissions as well as the risks posed to their business by climate change. According to the mutual fund research firm Morningstar, 90 percent of all companies now have, or are in the process of creating, ESG strategies.
But over the past year, Republicans have staked their ground against what Florida Governor Ron DeSantis called “woke capitalism.” As of last August, 17 states have proposed or adopted legislation to limit business with institutions that consider environmental and social criteria in their investment practices. West Virginia and Texas created similar lists to Kentucky’s last year, and Florida, Louisiana, and Missouri pulled a collective $3 billion dollars out of BlackRock, whose CEO has been one of the most outspoken financial leaders about the value of ESG investing.
Now, Republicans are using their control of the U.S. House of Representatives as a new tool in their fight against ESG, which they say could harm the fossil fuel industry as well as stakeholder profits. Patrick McHenry, a North Carolina Republican representative and new chair of the House Committee on Financial Services, called the SEC’s climate risk disclosure rules a “far-left social agenda” and has pledged close oversight of regulators. Other House Republicans will call asset managers to testify in hearings on their investments. At the state level, Republican state attorneys general have motioned that they are prepared to take the SEC policies to court if the rules are finalized, according to Inside Climate News.
Yet when you look at the current state of climate-aligned investing on Wall Street, it seems Republicans’ concerns are much ado about nothing. While asset managers have started to invest growing subsets of funds in adherence with ESG principles, which consider things like the effects of climate change and the social impacts of supply chains, most of their money remains in funds that don’t account for carbon emissions. JPMorgan and Citigroup, both members of the United Nations’ Net-Zero Banking Alliance, were among the top financiers of the fossil fuel industry in 2021, according to a recent report. (Vanguard, the largest asset manager after BlackRock, dropped out of the alliance last month following backlash from Republican attorneys general.) What counts as an ESG investment also remains vague and undefined, which can lead to greenwashing; some financial companies’ energy transition funds, for example, can still invest in fossil fuel companies. While last year was the first in history where more money was raised in debt markets for green projects than for fossil fuel companies, Big Oil is still getting more money from high gas prices and private equity, and banks and asset managers appear to remain committed to funding the industry.
In the wake of Kentucky’s announcement, the 11 financial firms added to the state’s restricted list have 30 days to notify the treasury of their holdings in energy companies, and 90 days to “stop engaging” in boycotts. If they fail to comply, the Kentucky government will pull its money from the institutions. So far, some of the listed companies have asserted their fossil fuel bonafides in response. In a statement to The Hill, a JPMorgan Chase spokesperson said, “We are among the largest financiers of the U.S. traditional and renewable energy industries, including in Kentucky where we serve some of its largest energy companies and utilities.” For Reuters, BlackRock pointed to its investments in energy companies like ExxonMobil and Occidental Petroleum.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has proposed new standards for how much of the nation’s fuel supply should come from renewable sources.
The proposal, released last month, calls for an increase in the mandatory requirements set forth by the federal Renewable Fuel Standard, or RFS. The program, created in 2005, dictates how much renewable fuels — products like corn-based ethanol, manure-based biogas, and wood pellets — are used to reduce the use of petroleum-based transportation fuel, heating oil, or jet fuel and cut greenhouse gas emissions.
The new requirements have sparked a heated debate between industry leaders, who say the recent proposal will help stabilize the market in the coming years, and green groups, which argue that the favored fuels come at steep environmental costs.
Below is a Grist guide to this growing debate, breaking down exactly what these fuels are, how they’re created, and how they would change under the EPA’s new proposal:
The fuels
Renewable fuel is an umbrella term for the bio-based fuels mandated by the EPA to be mixed into the nation’s fuel supply. The category includes fuel produced from planted crops, planted trees, animal waste and byproducts, and wood debris from non-ecological sensitive areas and not from federal forestland. Under the RFS, renewable fuels are supposed to replace fossil fuels and are used for transportation and heating across the country, and are supposed to emit 20 percent fewer greenhouse gasses than the energy they replace.
Under the new EPA proposal, renewable fuels would increase by roughly 9 percent by the end of 2025 — an increase of nearly 2 billion gallons. The new EPA proposal will set a target of almost 21 billion gallons of renewable fuels in 2023, which includes over 15 billion gallons of corn ethanol. By 2025, the EPA hopes to have over 22 billion gallons of different renewable fuel sources powering the nation.
The United States is the largest producer of corn, which can be seen being harvested and stored in grain silos. With 40 percent of the corn produced used for ethanol, environmental groups argue that increased corn production leads to more fertilizer use and pollution.
YinYang/Getty Images
Advanced biofuel, a type of renewable fuel, includes fuel created from crop waste, animal waste, food waste, and yard waste. This also includes biogas, a natural gas produced from the methane created by animal and human waste. Advanced biofuel can also include fuels created from sugars and starches, apart from ethanol.
In its newest proposal, the EPA suggests a roughly 14 percent increase in the use of these fuels from 2023 to 2024 and a 12 percent increase the year after that. The EPA wants roughly 6 billion gallons of advanced biofuel in the marketplace by this year.
Nestled inside of the advanced biofuel category is biomass-based diesel, a fuel source created from vegetable oils and animal fats. This fuel can also be created from oils, waste, and sludge created in municipal wastewater treatment plants. Under the new EPA proposal, the agency is suggesting a 2 percent year-over-year increase in these fuels by the end of 2025, which equals a final amount of nearly three billion gallons.
Cellulosic biofuel, another type of renewable fuel, is a liquid fuel created by “crops, trees, forest residues, and agricultural residues not specifically grown for food, including from barley grain, grapeseed, rice bran, rice hulls, rice straw, soybean matter,” as well as sugarcane byproducts, according to the 2005 law.
“In the interim period, there’s going to be a need for lower carbon, renewable liquid fuels”
The EPA’s recent proposal aims for nearly double the amount of the use of these fuels by 2024. Then a 50 percent increase the year after, equivalent to 2 billion gallons.
“We are pretty pleased with what the EPA proposed for 2023 through 2025,” Geoff Cooper, president and CEO of the Renewable Fuel Association, an industry group whose members primarily include ethanol producers, but also represent biogas and biomass producers, told Grist.
Cooper said that the EPA and the Biden administration recognize that alternative fuels are a growing and needed sector while the country tries to move away from fossil fuels. Setting standards for the next three years will help the biofuels industry grow, said Cooper, who predicted more ethanol, biomass, or biogas producers will emerge in the coming years.
“I think the administration recognizes that you’re not going to electrify everything overnight,” Cooper said, “and in the interim period, there’s going to be a need for lower-carbon, renewable liquid fuels.”
The controversy
While renewable fuel standards have gained a stamp of approval from industry producers and the federal government, environmental groups see increased investment in ethanol, biomass, and biogas as doubling down on dirty fuel.
“It’s not encouraging because it continues on the false premise that biofuels, in general, are a helpful pathway to meeting our climate goals,” Brett Hartl, government affairs director for the nonprofit environmental group Center for Biological Diversity.
Biomass wood pellets are a fuel source made from wood debris and lumber, and are a booming industry in the American South. The new Renewable Fuel Standard proposal calls for an increase in this fuel source, despite opposition from environmental groups.
Anadolu Agency / Getty Images
Hartl argues that investing in increased corn production to fuel ethanol will continue harmful agricultural practices that erode soil and dump massive amounts of pesticides on corn crops, which causes increased water pollution and toxic dead zones across the country and the Gulf of Mexico. The United States is the world’s largest producer of corn, with 40 percent of the corn produced used for ethanol.
A study released earlier this year from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that when demand for corn goes up, caused by an increase in blending requirements from the RFS, prices increase as well, which causes farmers to add more fertilizer products, created by fossil fuels, to crops. The EPA’s own internal research has also shown greenhouse gas emissions over the next three years will grow with the increase in blending requirements from the federal mandate.
22.68 billion
the number of renewable fuel gallons the EPA hopes to have by 2025
The Center for Biological Diversity has been critical of the EPA’s past support of renewable fuel without a calculation of the total environmental impacts of how the fuel is produced and is currently in legal battles with the federal agency. They’re not alone in their critiques.
Tarah Heinzen, legal director for Food & Water Watch, a nonprofit environmental watchdog group, said in a statement that an increase in both industrial corn production and biogas, a fuel created from animal and food waste, are not part of a clean energy future.
“Relying on dirty fuels like factory farm gas and ethanol to clean up our transportation sector will only dig a deeper hole,” Heinzen said. “The EPA should recognize this by reducing, not increasing, the volume requirements for these dirty sources of energy in the Renewable Fuel Standard.”
Alternative fuels, like biogas and biomass (a fuel created from trees and wood pulp), have gained steam thanks to the ethanol boom of the renewable fuel category. The biogas industry is set to boom thanks to tax incentives created by the Inflation Reduction Act.
Biomass is a growing industry in the South, with wood pellet mills popping up in recent years. Scientists from across the globe have decried the industry’s suggestion that burning trees for electricity is carbon neutral, with 650 scientists signing a recent letter to denounce the industry’s claims.
The world’s largest producer of wood pellet biomass energy has come under fire from a whistleblower who said the company uses whole trees to create electricity, despite the company’s claims of sustainably harvesting only tree limbs to produce energy. Wood pellet facilities have faced opposition from local governments and federal legislators, with community members in Springfield, Massachusetts successfully blocking a permit for a new biomass facility in November.
Despite concerns from environmental groups, the forecasted demands of the EPA show that the nation is pushing for more of these fuels in the coming years. This past spring, a bipartisan group of Midwestern governors asked the EPA for a permanent waiver to sell higher blends of ethanol year-round, despite summer-time smog created by the higher blend of renewable fuel. More recently, Missouri officials sought the same waiver
What are those fuels again?
Renewable fuel is an umbrella term for the bio-based fuels mandated by the EPA to be mixed into the nation’s fuel supply. The category includes fuel produced from planted crops, planted trees, animal waste and byproducts, and wood debris from non-ecological sensitive areas and not from federal forestland. Under the RFS, renewable fuels are supposed to replace fossil fuels and are used for transportation and heating across the country, and are supposed to emit 20 percent fewer greenhouse gasses than the energy they replace.
Advanced biofuel, a type of renewable fuel, includes fuel created from crop waste, animal waste, food waste, and yard waste. This also includes biogas, a natural gas produced from the methane created by animal and human waste. Advanced biofuel can also include fuels created from sugars and starches, apart from ethanol.
Nestled inside of the advanced biofuel category is biomass-based diesel, a fuel source created from vegetable oils and animal fats. This fuel can also be created from oils, waste, and sludge created in municipal wastewater treatment plants.
Cellulosic biofuel, another type of renewable fuel, is a liquid fuel created by “crops, trees, forest residues, and agricultural residues not specifically grown for food, including from barley grain, grapeseed, rice bran, rice hulls, rice straw, soybean matter,” as well as sugarcane byproducts, according to the 2005 law.
When Hurricane Ian hit Central Florida last fall, Milly Santiago already knew what it was like to lose everything to a hurricane, to leave your home, to start over.
For her, that was the outcome of Hurricane Maria, which struck her native Puerto Rico in September 2017, killing thousands of residents and leaving the main island without power for nearly a year.
So in September 2022, nearly five years to the day when Maria tossed her life apart, Santiago was in suburban Orlando, visiting a friend. As torrents of heavy rain battered the roof of her friend’s home, and muddy waters flooded the streets, she realized they were trapped.
And that her life was going to change, again.
“It created such a brutal anxiety in me that I don’t even know how to explain,” she said in Spanish.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, Santiago was one of more than 100,000 Puerto Ricans who left Puerto Rico and relocated to places like Florida, seeking safety, economic opportunities, and a place to rebuild their lives. Only now, with displacement caused by Hurricane Ian, as well as one of the worst housing crises in the country, the stability for Puerto Ricans in hurricane-battered Florida has never felt more at risk. With those like Santiago twice displaced, many are finding their resilience and sense of home tested like never before.
Homes damaged by Hurricane Maria stand in an area without electricity on October 15, 2017 in San Isidro, Puerto Rico.
Mario Tama via Getty Images
Santiago’s life right before Maria was based in Canóvanas, a town on the outskirts of Puerto Rico’s capital of San Juan. There, she lived with her teenage daughter and son. Hurricane Irma visited first, grazing the United States territory in early September and causing widespread blackouts. When Hurricane Maria hit on September 20, it ultimately took the lives of more than 4,000 Puerto Ricans, making it the most devastating tropical storm to ever hit the region. It would take 11 months for power to be fully restored to Puerto Rico’s main island, home to the majority of the territory’s population of just over 3 million.
Santiago lost her business as a childcare provider in the wake of the devastation to Puerto Rico’s economy and infrastructure. She decided she had no other option but to leave. By mid-October of that year, Santiago, with her children — and their father —relocated to metro Orlando.
It took her years to adjust to her new life. And then Ian happened.
“It was already a nightmare for me,” said Santiago, “because it was like reliving that moment when Maria was in Puerto Rico.” In the aftermath of Ian, Santiago was displaced from a rental home where she had lived for only a week.
Santiago’s déjà vu is not unique among Puerto Rican survivors of Maria living in Central Florida. Many are still reeling from the trauma of economic hardship, poor relief efforts, and displacement that was only now starting to be addressed in Puerto Rico itself.
“There are people who feel like, ‘Man, I just came here from Puerto Rico and here I am in this situation again,’” said Jose Nieves, a pastor at the First United Methodist Church in Kissimmee, a suburb of Orlando. Nieves’ work in recent years has extended to supporting immigrant families affected by natural disaster displacement in Central Florida.
Central Florida is home to large Latin American and Caribbean communities. Many members work in low-wage and low-skilled jobs in the area’s robust tourism industry, which is nonetheless vulnerable to the economic fallout from natural disasters like Ian. Puerto Ricans and other Latin Americans are also among the millions of Florida residents who live in homes without flood insurance.
Earlier waves of Puerto Ricans had relocated to the mainland primarily for economic reasons. Along with those who came to Florida directly from the main island, thousands more had moved in recent years from other long-established Puerto Rican communities in New York and other parts of the Northeast.
By the time Santiago and her family arrived in Orlando in 2017, the metro area was already one of the fastest growing regions in the country. Over one million people of Puerto Rican origin now live in Florida, surpassing the number in New York. In Central Florida, Puerto Ricans make up the largest community of Latinos. Among them are sizable Colombian, Venezuelan, and other Latin American nationalities.
The Super 9 motel in Kissimmee, Florida, which became home to a number of Puerto Rican families displaced by Hurricane Maria in 2017.
Ricardo Ramirez Buxeda via Getty Images
Like many other Puerto Ricans who had come before her, Santiago thought that a new life in Florida would provide what Puerto Rico couldn’t: wages that they could live well on, stable housing and infrastructure, and a local government that was responsive to their needs and that would uphold their rights as U.S. citizens. There was also the benefit of a large network of Spanish speakers who could provide support and share resources on how to navigate social and civic life on the mainland. And perhaps above all, there was also a sense that in Florida their vulnerability to the devastation of tropical storms like Maria would be lessened.
At first, Santiago and her family settled at her sister’s house in Kissimmee. World famous theme parks like Walt Disney World and Universal Studios were minutes away, as was Orlando’s international airport. In December 2017, after finding out that the local government was providing hotel accommodation for those displaced by Maria, Santiago and her family moved into a local Super 8, one of several motels along Highway 192, Kissimmee’s main drag. Its concentration of hotels and motels has earned Kissimmee the moniker of “the hotel capital of Central Florida.”
In August of 2018, after more than eight months living at the Super 8, Santiago and her family started looking for more permanent places to stay. “By then the rents had skyrocketed and they were asking for $50 to $75 [a night] per head of family,” Santiago said of the motels. Landlords were also asking for two to three months rent for a deposit, a standard practice in Florida but one that took Santiago by surprise. “We said if we plan to stay we are going to [need] that money,” she said, “because we left Puerto Rico only with what little we had.” The family eventually settled in an apartment in Orlando.
Ian hit at a time when the cost of living in Central Florida had soared, housing had become more unaffordable, and wages had stagnated. “We’ve just seen this massive spike in the cost of rent and in the cost of everything else,” said Sam Delgado, the programs manager at Central Florida Jobs with Justice, or CFJWJ, an Orlando-based workers’ rights organization.
“They say we have California’s expenses and Alabama’s wages.”
Sam Delgado, program manager at Central Florida Jobs with Justice
Delgado explained that the timing of Hurricane Ian at the end of the month left many local families struggling with whether to prioritize emergency expenses or rent. In the wake of the storm’s devastation, many households were forced to use rent money to buy non-perishable food items and gasoline, or temporarily relocate their families to hotels. “People just don’t have enough money for an emergency,” he said.
Florida’s affordable housing crisis, as in the rest of the U.S., is the result of several factors: limited housing stock, zoning laws restricting construction of new rental housing, and stagnant wages that have not kept up with the cost of living. “They say we have California’s expenses and Alabama’s wages,” said Delgado.
Central Florida’s low-income Latino communities are among the hardest hit by the state’s housing crisis. They have some of Florida’s fewest financial and social resources to both prepare for disasters before they happen and to respond adequately after they do. Many live in properties such as mobile homes that are more affordable but less resilient to wind or flood damage.
For families that have previously been evicted or have a poor credit history, it’s even more difficult to secure housing in the traditional rental market. Throughout Orange County (of which Orlando is a part), Osceola County immediately south (home to Kissimmee), and even the Tampa Bay area along the Gulf Coast, the last option for these families is to move into hotels or motels. A number of such makeshift apartment complexes also became micro-communities for Puerto Ricans displaced by Hurricane Maria. The award-winning 2017 film, “The Florida Project,” dramatized the life of a family living in a motel in Kissimmee. But few see this trend as sustainable. “It’s expensive to be poor here because it costs way more to rent a hotel [room],” said Delgado.
And it’s only getting more expensive, as more extreme weather and displacement is putting pressure on the rental market. Prices for apartments are rising higher and higher to meet this demand. After recently looking for an apartment for she and her daughter, Santiago returned to her friend’s home, having had no luck at finding anything affordable. One place she looked at was asking $2,500 per month. “I don’t know what they were thinking,” she said.
In many ways, the housing crisis has faced no greater urgency. Coupled with the lack of affordable housing, many in the Puerto Rican and larger Latino communities feel that the local and state government is not doing enough to support those who have been displaced.
“If you were out of your house for 15, 20 days because of the flood, because you didn’t have electricity or services, it shows that [the state] was negligent,” said Martha Perez, who is a resident of Sherwood Forest, a RV resort community in Kissimmee. Perez was forced to leave her home, where she lived alone, after Ian’s floodwaters made her community uninhabitable for weeks. Both Milly Santiago and Perez, a Mexican citizen, have received material support from Hablamos Español Florida, a social services organization geared to Latino immigrant families in the state.
“When our community gets hit by a hurricane, the recovery doesn’t take days or weeks. I mean, the reality is that many of those families are going to be struggling with the effects of the hurricanes for the next two years,” said Nieves of First United Methodist Church in Kissimmee. He says that the damage from Hurricane Ian has taken hundreds of homes off of the housing market, further exacerbating the affordability crisis.
For many locals and advocates, the needs that have arisen around housing, wages, and climate resilience are effectively the result of an unwillingness from those in power to address the needs of the state’s most vulnerable communities. And social support organizations and volunteers can only do so much. “Every time it’s a nonprofit organization responding to these immediate needs in communities, it looks more like a policy failure than it does a community coming together to help people,” said Delgado.
“What do I want from the government?” said Santiago. “I want them to be more fair with us, because there is a lot of injustice.”
When an American oil company discovered a massive natural gas reserve off the coast of Mozambique in early 2010, the country appeared poised for a brighter future. After more than a decade of relying on foreign aid to recover from a bloody civil war, here was an opportunity to gain financial independence. Government officials celebrated Anadarko Petroleum’s discovery, declaring that revenues from the extracted fuel would help transform Mozambique, one of the world’s poorest countries, into a middle-income nation with robust health care and education.
But the years that followed brought a series of crushing disappointments. A corruption scandal sunk the country into economic and political turmoil and an insurgency swept through the oil-rich Cabo Delgado province, destroying schools and hospitals and displacing thousands. It all happened before a single ounce of gas was shipped for export.
Today, Mozambique is still hoping to use its fossil fuel resources to develop its economy, a story that has played out across the continent, often to disastrous effects. From the vast deserts of Algeria to the delicate peatlands of Namibia, hundreds of mostly foreign-owned corporations are exploring new fuel reserves, prompting claims that the continent will become oil’s “final frontier.” But if the world is to limit global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, no new oil and gas infrastructure can be developed, according to the International Energy Agency. Even as oil giants like Shell and TotalEnergies set up shop in Namibia and Angola, a wealth of recent research has demonstrated that Africa also has immense, largely untapped potential for renewable energy. Despite pleas from environmental advocates across the continent to pursue this path instead, governments have held tight to the idea that tapping fossil reserves is essential for expanding their economies, reducing poverty, and providing power to millions of Africans.
“Africa wants to send a message that we are going to develop all of our energy resources for the benefit of our people because our issue is energy poverty,” said Maggy Shino, Namibia’s petroleum commissioner, in an interview with Reuters at the United Nations Climate Conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, last month.
With 89 percent of the liquified natural gas from the new infrastructure slated for export to Europe, some advocates have questioned how far these projects will actually go toward increasing electricity access for ordinary Africans. More troublingly, a growing body of research suggests that rather than serving as a boon for development, major fuel discoveries tend to spawn corruption and economic instability in countries that lack strong financial institutions and legal systems. This, experts told Grist, is what happened in Mozambique, where the promise of economic growth led to rapid increases in borrowing and sparked violence over access to resources before they ever left the ground.
Lars Burr, a professor of political economy at Roskilde University in Denmark, said that Africa’s colonial history and its relatively small contribution to climate change make drilling for fossil fuels on the continent a question of fairness. “There’s an environmental justice case for African governments being able to consume certain amounts of coal, gas, and oil in order to develop their countries. That’s one side of it.” The other side, he said, is how much these countries are really getting from developing their oil and gas industries. “That’s a difficult one, because the track records are poor.”
Men walk in an oil slick covering a creek near Bodo City in the oil-rich Niger Delta region of Nigeria.
AP Photo/Sunday Alamba
For decades, academics have been studying the “resource curse,” a phenomenon in which countries endowed with abundant natural resources wind up with worse social and economic outcomes after they cash in. This “paradox of plenty” has been seen across Africa, particularly in the continent’s two largest oil-producing states. In the early 2000s, billions of dollars in revenue from deepwater exploration off the coast of Angola went missing after government elites siphoned the funds away from a population that lacked basic public services after decades of civil war. In Nigeria, weak regulations have enabled a quantity of oil equivalent to 50 Exxon Valdez disasters to spill into farms, forests, and rivers, devastating the environment and nearby towns.
What can explain the apparent paradox, this riches-to-rags story? Scholars have pointed out that governments hungry to cash in on major fuel discoveries tend to pull resources away from other vital sectors of the economy such as agriculture, thereby constricting their development. Another explanation points to weak financial institutions, regulatory agencies, and legal systems that fail to stave off corruption and protect against environmental abuses. While these patterns have been observed in many oil-rich nations across Africa and the world, experts emphasized that political conditions, not wealth of natural resources, are what determine whether discoveries will cause more harm than good.
“Resources by their nature are not a curse,” said Erik Katovich, a postdoctoral scholar at the Institute of Economics and Econometrics at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. However, “if a country already deals with conflict or corruption or instability, throwing millions of dollars in oil revenues into the mix is only going to exacerbate any sort of institutional weaknesses that you already have.”
More recent research suggests that these effects are not only reserved for the period after governments receive windfalls from fossil fuels. In what’s called the “presource curse,” the anticipation of oil and gas revenues may engender corruption and lead governments to prematurely restructure their economies and pile on debt.
After Anadarko made its first natural gas discovery in the deep waters of Mozambique’s Rovuma Basin in 2010, billions of investment dollars poured into the country’s Cabo Delgado province, a remote, forested region near Mozambique’s northern border with Tanzania. As oil giants such as ExxonMobil and France’s TotalEnergies rushed to find and develop new fuel reserves, government officials in the capital Maputo took out $2 billion in secret loans to start companies that would provide shipyard services and security for these oil and gas companies. After news of the scandal broke in 2016, the International Monetary Fund suspended financial assistance to Mozambique, sparking an economic crisis that saw the national currency lose a third of its value. The following year, an outbreak of violence in the oil-producing province was quickly linked to the government’s lucrative deals with foreign firms.
The turmoil following Anadarko’s discovery was “a matter of governance,” said José Macuane, a professor of political science at the University Eduardo Mondlane in Maputo. “You have institutions that are not able to address aspirations for development.”
A soldier and a policeman guard the Total Mozambique LGN Project in the Cabo Delgado province in September.
CAMILLE LAFFONT/AFP via Getty Images
Despite authoring a paper that explores the “presource curse” in Mozambique, Macuane isn’t quick to discount the potential benefits of fossil fuel extraction in the country’s north, where the government started exporting natural gas from last month. Selling this gas, he reasoned, could help Mozambique eventually shift to renewable energy and catch up with the rest of the world without relying on foreign aid. (Roughly 40 percent of the population has access to electricity. Although officials have promoted solar power in rural areas, it accounts for less than 1 percent of the country’s total energy supply.)
Such a prospect, he admitted, is challenging given the state of the country’s government, which is still reeling from violence in the north and the decade-old corruption scandal that tanked the economy.
Nonetheless, Macuane expressed frustration with climate activists, particularly those from the West, who he characterized as pushing for a moratorium on fossil fuel extraction in Africa without sufficiently reckoning with the economic reality that many developing nations face.
“Just because we had a case of presource curse, I don’t think we should abandon our natural resources,” he said. “For us to catch up to technology, human capital, and to make a transition, we need resources. Which will be the country to fund it?”
Countless experts have warned about the perils of relying on fossil fuel resources given their unpredictability in global markets. Katovich said that petrostates, nations that depend on fossil fuel exports, risk financial trouble when events such as the coronavirus pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine roil oil and gas markets.
“If your economy is too dependent on natural resources, you’re exposed to a lot of volatility which is out of your control, driven by world events beyond your borders,” he said. Such price swings make it hard for governments to carry out long-term social welfare plans like funding schools and building new electrical grids — even if they wanted to.
In a world that is starting to look beyond fossil fuels, this uncertainty around their future value is the biggest challenge facing petrostates. The falling cost of developing renewables has challenged the notion that natural gas could be used as a “transition fuel” in coal-reliant countries like India and Germany. A study published in May found that it is now more economical for countries to switch straight from coal to renewables instead of importing gas from abroad. Last year, the Carbon Tracker Initiative, a London-based think tank, reported that fossil fuel-producing countries could see their oil and gas revenues tank by more than 50 percent over the next two decades.
That’s why African climate activists are calling on their governments to stop investing billions in infrastructure that might not serve them several decades from now. But at the annual United Nations climate conference in Egypt last month, those demands largely fell on deaf ears, said Dean Bhebhe, a South Africa-based climate activist with the Don’t Gas Africa campaign.
“We got to a point where climate activists were labeled as anti-development,” Bhebhe told Grist. “Our argument was essentially that Africa has every right to develop, but because of the history of ‘extractivism’ of coal and oil, surely fossil fuel production does not provide the answer to improved socio-economic [conditions] across Africa. Development needs to center human rights.”
Demonstrators participate in a Don’t Gas Africa protest at COP27 in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt.
AP Photo/Peter Dejong
Campaigners with climate justice organizations like Don’t Gas Africa and Power Shift Africa point out that many African countries could be rich with renewable power. The IEA estimates that Africa holds 60 percent of the world’s solar power potential but only 1 percent of its generation capacity. A separate analysis from the International Finance Group found that much of the continent’s wind is faster than 8.5 meters per second, making it ideal for wind farms. The report also identified significant wind capacity in Mozambique, Nigeria, and other countries. While these forms of alternative energy are cheaper to develop than liquid natural gas pipelines and offshore oil rigs, they still require money that many developing countries don’t have.
The outcome of last month’s U.N. climate summit could help address that. In a historic agreement that has been hailed as a major win for the global climate justice movement, wealthy nations agreed to create a loss and damage fund that will provide financial support to countries that have historically contributed little to climate change but suffer deep economic losses as a result of it. In addition to offering resources for disaster recovery in places like Pakistan, where historic floods recently submerged a third of the country, the fund is meant to help developing nations construct green infrastructure that they would otherwise be unable to afford.
Bhebhe said the fund is a step in the right direction, but added that until certain details are ironed out, including which countries will receive financing and how it will be distributed, it can only be considered a win on paper. Green financing without also abandoning fossil fuel extraction on public lands is “like being in a bathroom with a tub filling up with water and instead of turning off the tap, you’re like ‘We’ll buy more mops!’”
As the country barrelled towards a potential rail workers strike last week, battle lines were drawn over the issue of paid sick leave. On the one side were unions — the signalmen, track workers, boilermakers, and conductors — who had rejected a contract brokered in September that didn’t include paid time off for illnesses or medical visits. On the other were big rail companies, which have spent years cutting staff, extending worker hours, and enacting stricter attendance policies, all while making record-breaking profits.
Behind the scenes, however, another big industry also had stakes in the standoff: Big Oil. Coal companies, chemical companies, and oil and gas backed rail majors in lobbying Congress to block the workers’ strike.
In early November, the American Chemistry Council, which counts BP, ExxonMobil, and Chevron among its members, put out a report warning that a rail strike could “pull $160 billion out of the economy” and lead to 700,000 job losses. Then last week, 400 business groups sent a letter to Congress urging lawmakers to use their authority from a 1926 law to impose the controversial, rejected contract in the absence of a voluntary agreement. In addition to retailers, agriculturists, and car manufacturers, signatories included the American Petroleum Institute, a trade group for drillers, the National Mining Association, and the Renewable Fuels Association, representing ethanol. All of these industries rely on freight rail to make and ship their products.
“A rail strike would threaten to push an alarming situation over the edge,” Rich Nolan, president and CEO of the National Mining Association, said in a press statement, invoking the already-low coal stockpiles moving into the winter. “The nation needs reliable and efficient rail service and it’s imperative that Congress and the Biden administration act to ensure a strike doesn’t jeopardize it.”
In the end, rail companies and fossil fuel interests were joined by President Joe Biden, who urged Congress to avert the strike over fears of economic breakdown. On Thursday, the Senate did just that, forcing workers to accept the contract with paid sick leave still missing.
“The fact that there are not 60 senators willing to stand up to big business and fight for basic rights for U.S. rail workers is horrific,” tweeted Teamster General President Sean O’Brien.
At first glance, rail would seem like a relatively climate-friendly industry. Transportation is the highest emitter of greenhouse gases in the United States, where passenger cars, trucks, and buses make up over 70 percent of the sector’s emissions. Rail contributes just 2 percent, even while it moves a third of all U.S. exports and about 40 percent of long-distance freight.
But what is often missing in these calculations is what these trains are carrying. Freight trains transport nearly 70 percent of the nation’s coal. When you account for that, they were actually responsible for 16.5 percent of all U.S. carbon pollution in 2019, according to Stanford geoscience professor Rob Jackson, as reported by the Atlantic.
Workers repair the tracks at the Metra/BNSF railroad yard in Chicago, Illinois. The track workers union voted against a contract with the rail companies that did not include paid sick leave. Scott Olson/Getty Images
“Coal was our number one revenue source until about the 1990s,” Jim Blaze, a railroad economist who worked for 21 years at Conrail, told Grist. (Conrail, once the primary railroad system in the Northeast, was acquired by CSX and Norfolk Southern in 1997.) Coal shipments have been declining in recent years, as natural gas takes its place in the energy mix and cargo containers and chemical shipments become more important revenue drivers for the rail industry. Still, coal makes up close to 27 percent of freight rail volume in the U.S., and 11 percent of freight’s revenue. As a result, the rail industry continues to be closely allied with coal.
Research from 2019 showed how, over the past 30 years, BNSF Railway, Norfork Southern, Union Pacific, and CSX, the four largest rail companies in the U.S., joined other coal-dependent companies such as electric utilities in pouring tens of millions of dollars into denying climate science and opposing climate policy.
“It shows that the rail companies were actually funding more climate denialism organizations than even the oil industry,” said Justin Mikulka, a research fellow at the energy transition think tank New Consensus who formerly covered the rail industry as a journalist. “Coal has been such a huge part of rail – it was in their interest to deny that coal was part of the problem.”
According to The New Republic, it was only in late 2020 that the four big rail companies began to abandon their membership in the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, also called America’s Power, which lobbies against climate action and has promoted the “social benefits” of carbon.
And coal isn’t alone. While most oil and gas is sent by pipeline, the oil and gas industry does still rely on rail. Marianne Kah, an oil and gas economist, told The Hill that freight rail moves between 300,000 and 700,000 barrels of crude oil, and 200,000 to 300,000 barrels of propane per day, which, though small quantities compared to coal, do impact availability and price. Oil and gas companies also rely heavily on chemicals transported by trains to create their products. Refiners receive isobutane and ethanol by rail to use in gasoline; in fact, over 70 percent of all ethanol produced in the U.S. travels by rail, and ethanol plants for their part rely on rail to bring in a quarter of their grain. Rail also carries away the sulfur byproducts from the refining process.
Beyond writing letters to block the most recent strike, oil and gas companies have a history of collaborating with the rail industry to avoid freight regulation. In 2013, after a series of high-profile oil train explosions, regulatory agencies spent years trying to implement oil-by-train safety policies, including speed limits for trains, improved braking systems, and requirements to condition oil to make it safer to put in tank cars. “At every meeting by one of the regulatory agencies, the person at the head of the table was someone from the American Petroleum Institute [or API],” said Mikulka, who wrote a book about how freight and oil companies blocked regulations in the years after a runaway train filled with crude oil derailed in Quebec, exploding and killing 47 people.“Even though we’re talking about rail regulations, oftentimes it appeared that the API was driving what was happening.”
Protestors stood with rail unions outside the U.S. Capitol last week as Congress voted on legislation to avert a strike. Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
It’s hard to predict what type of long-term impact shutting down coal and ethanol shipments via a strike would have had on the markets and the move to clean energy, said Blaze. But as Kate Aronoff writes in The New Republic, the strike showed how central fossil fuels still are to the U.S. economy, and how corporate polluters continue their fight to keep it that way.
Ironically, many of the same industries that lobbied against the strike on Capitol Hill have railed against the freight companies at agency hearings for delays and service disruptions. “Shippers and railroad customers were upset this summer about the services they were getting,” said Clark Ballew, a former rail worker and current communications director for the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees, which represents track workers. “Their concerns stem from the fact that railroads don’t have enough people to keep trains moving. The way that we can improve this is… better treatment of employees, that’s the root cause of their problems.”
Strikes are uncommon in rail history, in part because of Congress’ power to intervene, which it historically does on behalf of industry. Rail workers hoped that a more favorable agreement could have been worked out at the bargaining table, or enforced through Congress, by passing a health care addendum to the contract.
“At this juncture it’s clear they’re not going to allow the strike to occur,” said Ballew, just two hours before the Senate voted to impose the contract. “We just want the sick leave added. Can Scrooge be nice to us? It’s Christmastime.”
He says the issue of paid leave will come up again in two years when the contracts are up for renewal.
