This coverage is made possible through a partnership with Grist and WABE, Atlanta’s NPR station.
On a stretch of West Georgia highway, in the triangle of land where an exit ramp meets the road, 2,600 solar panels soak up the bright southern sun. The 5-acre site used to be barren and eroding, but now it provides enough power for more than 100 homes. That’s exactly what the team at the Ray C. Anderson Foundation’s sustainable highway project, known as The Ray, was hoping for.
“What it is today is a field of clean, green energy,” said Allie Kelly, the Ray’s executive director. The solar panels stand higher than most, so wildflowers also grow on what was once “wasted public land.”
Someday, she hopes to see solar fields like this lining highways across the country.
The Ray and mapping company ESRI, which specializes in using location data to solve local problems, have developed a free digital tool to help transportation departments realize solar projects. It finds the parcels of land where solar would work best, and planners can make a virtual mock-up to make sure the installation doesn’t block a view or sit too close to the road.
All told, the Ray estimates there are more than 52,000 acres of empty roadside land in the continental United States that could be generating solar power: in the medians, beside the shoulders, in the centers of on- and off-ramps. Placing solar panels at all these sites could generate up to 36 tera-watt hours of energy, or enough to power 12 million passenger electric vehicles, according to the organization.
Solar panels are installed in the previously-unused land at an exit on Interstate 85 in Georgia. The installation generates one megawatt of electricity, enough to power more than 100 homes.
Courtesy of the Ray C. Anderson Foundation
As transportation departments work to reduce their emissions, many are considering solar on their unused land. Kelly said the Ray is working with more than two dozen states to help them find solar sites.
“It’s a great way for a state DOT to use underutilized land,” said Zechariah Heck, the sustainability program manager for the Oregon Department of Transportation.
Oregon installed the country’s first highway solar project in 2008, a public-private partnership that Heck said has reduced the agency’s electric bill and emissions.
But taking highway solar from an idea to reality can be daunting. Transportation departments own vast amounts of land, and not all of it can host solar panels. The land might be rocky, or filled with trees, or just facing the wrong direction. That’s where the Ray and ESRI’s digital tool comes in.
Eddie Lukemire of the Maryland Department of Transportation’s office of environment said his state has some 3,000 parcels of land along its highways.
“So when you look at 3,000 rows in an Excel spreadsheet, and then you uncross your eyes, those are just numbers,” he said. “I don’t have a column that says, are there trees on that parcel, because we don’t want to cut any trees down to put solar there.”
MDOT hasn’t formally adopted the tool, but Lukemire said it would be useful to explain and demonstrate solar projects.
“It’s really cool to be able to put that jumble of numbers into a program and have an output that is understandable by me, you, anyone,” he said.
The tool can also translate a proposed solar project into whatever terms make most sense to appeal to decision-makers, whether that’s homes powered, economic value, or carbon offsets. And it does all this work quickly.
“Delay is death for projects,” Kelly said. “We are talking about tools that carry project concepts over the valley of death, to procurement and to planning.”
Emissions reduction goals are driving some transportation departments, including those in Maryland and Oregon, to pursue solar energy.
Maryland has set a target of net-zero emissions by 2045. Highway solar stalled in Oregon after its 2008 and 2012 projects, but an executive order from the state’s governor calling for 80 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 reignited the program. Now, the Oregon DOT is developing new solar projects, using the Ray’s tool.
Georgia, where the Ray is based, doesn’t have climate requirements like those. And there aren’t currently plans for more roadside solar beyond the installation on the Ray.
John Hibbard of GDOT explained that most of the agency’s unused land parcels are around five to seven acres, the same size as the existing one-megawatt solar installation.
“One megawatt, which sounds like a lot, really isn’t that much,” he said. “It’s good, it’s better than zero. But it doesn’t compare with hundreds or thousands of megawatts.”
Georgia Power, the state’s largest utility, has prioritized bigger solar projects – huge fields of solar panels that can generate upwards of 100 megawatts.
But Ray founder Harriet Anderson Langford said the small solar array is part of her organization’s broader project: to showcase ways to make a road full of cars more sustainable.
“We hope what we do is inspiring to some other places,” Langford said. “That’s our goal.”
Puerto Rico could get $3 billion dollars for rooftop solar energy and battery storage if Congress approves a Biden administration request made earlier this week. The help is sorely needed.
The archipelago has been repeatedly hit by blackouts after a series of devastating hurricanes that crippled the electricity grid. In 2017, Hurricane Irma, which narrowly missed the main island but caused widespread blackouts, was followed by another — Maria — which killed over 4,000 people. Maria’s damage to Puerto Rico’s grid was so great that it took 11 months for power to be fully restored to the main island.
Both Puerto Rican activists and United States officials believe that investing in solar energy systems will help residents keep power on in their homes during what are certain to be more frequent and destructive storms in the Caribbean. Puerto Rico’s energy grid has been criticized for years for its unreliability under normal circumstances, even without the storm damage to power lines and generators.
While a growing number of Puerto Rican households are taking the initiative to install solar panels on their rooftops, the majority of households continue to rely on electricity through the mainstream power grid, or run diesel-powered generators. Generators, however, are expensive and pollute the air.
But high costs and environmental considerations are only part of the picture. Electricity blackouts on Puerto Rico in the wake of tropical storms have exacerbated the already devastating public health and safety crises that followed. Researchers have estimated that in the three months after Hurricane Maria there was a 62 percent increase in mortality,
Many deaths following the hurricane occurred in isolated and mountainous regions where residents were unable to access outside water or medical facilities. But the lack of electricity at home may have been the biggest factor in the high mortality, as residents were unable to boil water, refrigerate food and certain medicines, or run air-conditioning in their houses.
While a growing number of Puerto Ricans are installing solar panels on their rooftops, it remains too expensive for many.
Dennis M. Rivera Pichardo via AP Images
In San Juan, Puerto Rico’s capital, the average cost to install solar panels for a household is nearly $12,000. While that’s less than what the average household on the U.S. mainland would have to pay for home solar, the cost is too much for most Puerto Ricans; the territory’s median household income is around $21,000.
Before Hurricane Maria in 2017, household adoption of solar energy on Puerto Rico appeared to be more motivated by reducing electricity bills. Now, simply being able to turn the lights on has become just as strong a motivation. The archipelago is also considered a favorable location for widespread solar power adoption.
A preliminary study in 2021 from the National Lab of Renewable Energy concluded that transitioning to rooftop solar energy could produce up to four times the current energy needs of Puerto Rico. This potential is largely due to its high amount of exposure to sunlight throughout the year.
While some Puerto Ricans may acknowledge the value of allocating financial resources to rooftop solar energy, others are not convinced that relying on federal funds will lead to any fundamental changes on the ground.
“Since Maria, the U.S. government has made many allocations of funds that never arrive or their impacts are not seen in Puerto Rico,” said Arturo Massol Deyá, the executive director of Casa Pueblo, a Puerto Rican organization that supports community self-management projects.
Instead, Massol Deyá said, Casa Pueblo and other organizations are working to develop an independent electricity grid centered on solar energy projects that are run for and by local communities in Puerto Rico.
“We’re working to break the dependency model,” he said.
Fodor’s, the popular travel company that built its business on telling you where to go and where to stay, eat and drink once you’re there, has just released a list of places around the world you should skip in 2023.
The company’s 2023 “No List” isn’t advising you to avoid these destinations because of bad food, lousy attractions, or risk of danger, but because the presence of large numbers of tourists in these places is causing unsustainable ecological, cultural, and social harm.
The “No List” focuses on global tourism’s impact on three key areas: unique and sensitive natural environments increasingly degraded by tourists, “cultural hotspots” facing overcrowding and strained housing and infrastructure, and destinations in the midst of water crises that already heavily burden local communities.
Lake Tahoe, California, and Antarctica made the list of natural wonders that deserve a respite from tourists due to their ecologically sensitive environments. As for cultural destinations on the list, Venice and the Amalfi Coast in Italy; Cornwall, England; Amsterdam, Netherlands; as well as Thailand, were noted as experiencing strained infrastructure and higher costs of living that are increasingly pushing out locals.
Global tourism, through a combination of food consumption, accommodation, transportation, and the purchasing of souvenirs, contributes eight percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. After a brief respite in the first months of the pandemic, tourism numbers have exploded, exceeding even pre-pandemic numbers.
But the pandemic-induced downtown in tourism gave locals, environmental activists, and government officials in places like Thailand the chance to witness something seemingly unimaginable: the revival of their local ecologies and communities that had been devastated by the social and environmental costs attributed to the industry. In April, the Southeast Asian country’s government banned styrofoam packaging and single-use plastics from national parks. The minister of natural resources and environment also ordered that all national parks in Thailand be closed for one month a year.
Amidst global droughts and depleting reserves, water is central to understanding some of the pushback from local communities against mass tourism. On the Hawaiian Island of Maui, which also made the “No List,” many Native Hawaiians have become increasingly vocal about how mass tourism is negatively impacting their access to increasingly scarce water resources. This past June, mandatory water restrictions were put in place in parts of Maui most visited by mainland and international tourists. The order prohibited non-essential use of water, including irrigation, lawn watering and washing vehicles. But as local households were forced to adjust or face hefty fines, hotels and other tourism facilities were exempt from these cutbacks.
“When they stay in a destination, tourists essentially become temporary residents,” said Justin Francis, the co-founder and CEO of travel company Responsible Travel, in an email. “That can place an additional strain on local services and facilities.” Francis advocates for more tourism taxes, which he says can boost funding for infrastructure development – roads, access to clean water, energy provision – that benefits local communities as well as tourists.
Pushback against mass tourism has also extended to policies on housing availability and affordability. On Oahu, Hawaii’s most populous island, the mayor of Honolulu signed a bill in April restrictions on short-term rental properties and Airbnbs in an attempt to help alleviate the local housing crisis. The proliferation of these properties, particularly in densely populated cities like Amsterdam and Barcelona, has become one of the most controversial issues not only among housing advocates and travel experts, but also official marketing and tourism officials. “They’re literally decimating communities – pricing local people out of their homes and areas they’ve lived their whole lives in,” said Francis. Amsterdam’s left-wing city council attempted to ban Airbnb rentals in three central districts of the city, but it was overturned by local courts last year.
The city of Honolulu’s policy includes limiting the number of Airbnbs and short-term rental properties as well as increasing the minimum length of stay required for visitors who use these services. The majority of homeless on the streets of the city are Native Hawaiians, who experience disproportionate levels of poverty throughout the state.
Of course, many communities most vulnerable to the negative social and environmental impacts of mass tourism are also dependent on it for their livelihoods. Simply boycotting travel can also hurt groups that are most vulnerable, including women, migrants, and people of color.
Some destinations are seeking to make the most of the economic benefits of tourism while minimizing its cultural and environmental impacts simply by restricting travel to “high value” tourists – i.e, those with more disposable income. The Himalayan nation of Bhutan is a prime example. Visitors are charged a daily $200 fee, which doesn’t cover the cost of hotels or other services. Bhutan’s government says that the fee supports sustainable tourism development and training, as well as carbon offsetting.
As for Antarctica, some experts argue that its inclusion on Fodor’s list is complicated, due to the fact that the landmass has no local population that would benefit from visitors. On the other hand, thoughtful and sustainable tourism could arguably protect more of the environment there, which could serve as a buffer against more destructive economic industries like mining. “Tourism here cannot be allowed to grow without limits and mandatory environmental measures,” said Francis from Responsible Travel. However, The Antarctic Treaty, which prohibits economic and military exploitation of the region, will likely continue to protect the area’s environment and resources.
The big takeaway from Fodor’s list is that travel can be a force for good – both for nature and for local communities. The key is not necessarily to stay away, said Francis, but to always make informed choices that minimize harm and maximize benefits to local communities first.
“As an industry we need to do better than ‘leaving nothing but footprints’, and actively work towards creating positive impacts,” he said.
The world’s biggest petroleum exporter, a country built with oil money, and a founding member of the most powerful oil cartel on Earth, is now styling itself as a pioneer of climate change solutions.
At the United Nations climate conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt last week, Saudi Arabia held a separate meeting for Middle East and North African countries to go over the details of two separate initiatives aimed at cutting emissions and fighting desertification. The plans include planting 50 billion trees around the region, expanding wind and solar power, and enhancing carbon capture and storage technologies.
What’s not included is any mention of cutting oil production. In fact, the state-run oil company Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest corporate greenhouse gas emitter as well as the world’s most valuable company, said that it’s aiming to raise its production capacity by 2025, even as it plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions to as close to zero as possible by 2050.
Saudi Arabia, in other words, wants to remain an oil power and somehow go green at the same time.
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, de facto leader of the absolute monarchy, sees no contradiction in this, sources told Grist. Taking measures to combat climate change will ensure that Saudi Arabia both diversifies its economy and remains one of the world’s political power brokers, a position it gained as a direct result of its rich petroleum reserves. Selling more oil, Saudi officials have reasoned, can help facilitate this balancing act. And as fuel prices remain high following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, experts said that the Saudi government is doing what any oil-producing country would do: meeting demand.
“Saudi Arabia knows that its oil will be the last oil purchased and produced in the world,” said Ellen Wald, a historian and scholar of the energy industry, in an email. This, she explained, is because Aramco has by far the lowest cost of production on the planet, at around $2.80 per barrel, thanks to its vast reserves conveniently pooling near the desert’s surface. “So even if every car on the road is an EV [electric vehicle] and all the planes run on batteries, anyone still buying and using oil will be buying Saudi oil.”
The discovery of oil radically transformed Saudi Arabia over the course of the 20th century, turning a largely nomadic desert society into a country with sprawling cities and a highly educated workforce. After an American oil company struck liquid gold in Dhahran in 1938, tapping into what would become the largest source of petroleum in the world, the kingdom was rapidly outfitted with pipelines, refineries, and export terminals. Aramco, as the oil venture came to be called, was owned by Texaco and other American oil companies until the Saudi government bought them out in 1980. With its vast oil wealth fully under the control of the ruling family, the House of Saud, the country deepened its ties with the West and secured a powerful spot at the geopolitical table. It’s one they intend to hold onto.
Two men view the site of the Arabian American Oil Company’s first successful oil well in Saudi Arabia. | Location: Dharan, Saudi Arabia. Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS / Corbis via Getty Images
When scientists began sounding the alarm about climate change in the early 2000s, Saudi Arabia took up a reactionary position at the United Nations, highlighting skeptical views on the science of global warming and attempting to block climate policy. The kingdom’s tone began to change, however, after the 2015 Paris Agreement, a legally binding international treaty with the goal of limiting global temperature increases to well below 2 degrees celsius compared to pre-industrial levels.
“After Paris, there was no turning back – the world will decarbonize,” said Karim Elgendy, an urban sustainability and climate consultant at Chatham House, a London-based policy institute. Saudi Arabia “realized that being at the table is better than not being at the table. Shaping the outcome is better than being affected by the outcome.”
The following year, the kingdom launched “Vision 2030,” a policy framework meant to diversify the economy and reduce reliance on oil revenues, which have historically accounted for more than 60 percent of the country’s economy. One of its major goals was buffing up tourism. The government also loosened its restrictions on women, allowing them to drive without a male guardian and enter public spaces without headscarves. In 2020, the government announced that Saudi Arabia will go “net zero” within 40 years, a term that refers to balancing the amount of emissions released and the amount of carbon removed from the atmosphere. It will be no easy feat.
Saudi Arabia’s rapid modernization saw the rise of towering skyscrapers, luxury malls, and a proliferation of private cars, along with a new way of life for its 35 million residents. As it developed, the country’s carbon footprint mushroomed until by 2017, Saudi Arabia was the fifth largest oil consumer in the world after the United States, China, India, and Japan. A sizable share of its emissions comes from energy consumption during the country’s punishingly hot summers, when temperatures frequently top 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Another significant portion comes from the operations of the state-run oil company Saudi Aramco, which experts estimate has generated more than 4 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions since 1965.
Despite this, the Saudi government has repeatedly dodged responsibility for contributing to climate change, claiming that it’s a developing nation like Jordan or Ghana. Officials have refused to join other global superpowers at the UN climate summit that are pledging funds for “loss and damage” financing to poorer countries hit hard by climate change.
Earlier this year, Aramco announced that it would be net-zero by 2050. This target is “a big deal because of the impact [it] could potentially have,” said O’Connor, the analyst at Carbon Tracker. “They emit as much as some medium sized countries.”
A flame from a Saudi Aramco oil installation known as “Pump 3” burns brightly during sunset in the desert near the oil-rich area Al-Khurais.
Marwan Naamani/AFP via Getty Images
But O’Connor characterized Aramco’s net-zero plans as “heavy on rhetoric and light on substance.” Rather than cutting emissions in absolute terms, for instance, the company plans to measure its progress using carbon intensity, a ratio of the amount of carbon dioxide released for every unit of energy produced. That would allow Aramco to claim success if it increases oil production while keeping its emissions the same.
The company believes that it can do this by capturing and reusing the carbon dioxide emitted during oil production, rather than allowing it to enter the atmosphere. Successfully doing so relies on the nascent carbon capture and storage industry. Last week at the UN climate summit, Aramco announced plans for a new carbon capture and storage hub, which it said will be able to store 9 million tons of carbon a year by 2027.
That captured carbon would then be injected back into wells to extract even more petroleum. While Aramco has promoted this as a sustainable method of keeping carbon beneath the earth, O’Connor said that the additional oil reaped from the practice will eventually end up combusting in someone’s vehicle or power plant in another part of the world – causing a net increase in emissions. (Saudi Aramco declined a request for comment.)
The Saudi government has argued that other countries’ emissions, even if a result of Aramco’s oil, are not its problem. Officials have said that the government wants to take a “comprehensive” approach to tackling climate change, which includes using oil revenues to fund its green initiatives.
These programs include some conventional climate-friendly efforts such as new solar and wind-power farms and an update of existing building standards to promote energy efficiency. But they also include ostentatious developments such as NEOM, a “smart city” with blueprints resembling mockups of a science fiction video game, complete with classrooms taught by holograms, flying elevators, and an urban spaceport.
A map shows the projected site of NEOM, a Saudi smart city being built in the Tabuk Province of northwestern Saudi Arabia. PeterHermesFurian via Getty Images
The brainchild of Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman, NEOM has been under construction in the country’s northwestern desert since 2019 and is scheduled to be completed by 2025. The city is expected to run on a combination of wind and solar power and be a hub for green hydrogen, a fuel created when electrolyzers powered by renewable energy extract hydrogen from water molecules. (The Saudi government has said it aims to become the world’s top exporter of green hydrogen in the next half century.) The project has been plagued by setbacks, including violent confrontations with members of the indigenous Howeitat tribe who are being forcibly displaced by the project’s construction.
NEOM is the latest in a string of “smart cities” that have proliferated across the Middle East in the past two decades, from Abu Dhabi’s failed Masdar City to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi’s new administrative capital in the middle of the desert. Gokce Gunel, an anthropology professor at Rice University who has written extensively about clean energy in the Arab Gulf states, said that projects like NEOM are primarily ways for ruling families in the region to maintain their standing.
“There’s a political function to these projects even if they don’t fulfill their promise,” Gunel said. She calls them “status quo utopias”. Enterprises like NEOM “claim to create utopias but they really want to preserve the present the way it is, to maintain the way oil has made the world.”
Saudi Aramco engineers and journalists look at a new carbon capture facility in Hawiyah, Saudi Arabia.
AP Photo/Amr Nabil
Elgendy, who is on contract with the Saudi government to work on the city and cannot discuss its details due to a nondisclosure agreement, sees it differently. To him, NEOM is another example of the Saudi government’s determination to stay relevant in a post-oil world, an indication of its desire to “stay at the table” that petroleum helped create.
“Instead of dragging their feet and slowing down the process, they have tried to buy a little bit of time,” Elgendy said. The kingdom’s climate action proposals let them “steer the process in a way that allows them to use oil and gas revenues to diversify their economy and become something else, become a different Saudi Arabia.”
But in the long term, it could be hard to keep up a balancing act that depends on the rest of the world’s response to climate change. When the fallout from the war in Ukraine inevitably dies down, governments will have to make tough choices about how and when to shift their economies away from fossil fuels. If major emitters like the United States make progress quickly, Saudi Arabia’s endeavors could become more difficult to pull off, even as other countries continue to buy oil.
And someone will be buying oil. Petroleum-derived products are ubiquitous in modern society, from synthetic clothing fibers to shampoos and detergents to plastic airplane parts. But the petrochemical industry that produces these products accounts for only about 17 percent of global demand for oil. O’Connor said that no matter how much the world wants petrochemicals, as grids shift to renewable power and electric cars become more popular, Saudi Arabia will see its oil revenues shrink. She pointed to the most recent report from the International Energy Agency, which found that starting in the mid-2020s, fossil fuel demand will decrease each year by an average amount roughly equivalent to the lifetime output of a large oil field.
“It’s a very fair point that once the demand is there someone is going to fill it, but what we would say is that that demand is beginning to wane and it will wane severely,” O’Connor said. “There’s a seismic shift about to take place in energy demand towards more sustainable sources. Aramco and Saudi Arabia need to reckon with that.”
This story was originally published by The Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
All large car parks in France will be covered by solar panels under new legislation approved as part of president Emmanuel Macron’s renewable energy drive.
Legislation approved by the French Senate this week requires existing and new car parks with space for at least 80 vehicles to be covered by solar panels.
The owners of car parks with between 80 and 400 spaces have five years to comply with the measures, while operators of those with more than 400 will have just three years. At least half of the area of the larger sites must be covered by solar panels.
The French government believes the measure could generate up to 11 gigawatts of power.
Politicians had originally applied the bill to car parks larger than 27,000 square feet before deciding to opt for car parking spaces.
French politicians are also examining proposals to build large solar farms on empty land by motorways and railways as well as on farmland.
The sight of parked cars under the shade of solar panels is not unfamiliar in France. Renewables Infrastructure Group, one of the UK’s largest specialist green energy investors, has invested in a large solar car park in Borgo on Corsica.
Macron has thrown his weight behind nuclear energy over the past year and in September announced plans to boost France’s renewable energy industry. He visited the country’s first offshore windfarm off the port of Saint-Nazaire off the west coast and hopes to speed up the build times of windfarms and solar parks.
The move comes as European nations examine their domestic energy supplies in the fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Technical problems and maintenance on the powerhouse French nuclear fleet has exacerbated the problem while the national operator EDF was forced to cut its output in the summer when French rivers became too warm.
The government has also launched a communication campaign, “Every gesture counts,” encouraging individuals and industry to cut their energy usage, and the Eiffel Tower lights are being turned off more than an hour earlier.
The French government plans to spend €45 billion ($53.3 billion) shielding households and businesses from energy price shocks.
Separately on Wednesday, ScottishPower announced it would increase its five-year investment target by £400 million ($473.6 million) to £10.4bn ($12.3 billion) by 2025. The UK solar and wind farm developer hopes to generate 1,000 jobs in the next 12 months.
Despite massive spending and recent neck-and-neck polls, three incumbent Midwest governors who campaigned on clean energy transitions won over their Republican challengers on Tuesday.
Democratic governors Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Tim Walz of Minnesota, and Tony Evers of Wisconsin won reelection, beating three Trump-backed Republican candidates who campaigned on varying platforms and ideologies that would have derailed plans to decarbonize in all three states. Minnesota challenger Scott Jensen, for example, had proposed rolling back the state’s “clean cars” regulation, and Wisconsin challenger Tim Michels had deep ties to the oil and pipeline industries.
Addressing a crowd in downtown Madison, Wisconsin, Evers, a former public school superintendent with a penchant for vanilla ice cream, said “some people call it boring, but you know what, Wisconsin? As it turns out, boring wins.”
These races saw landmark funding from the candidates’ coffers, with over $33 million spent in Minnesota, $32 million in Michigan, and $115 million in Wisconsin, the most in state campaign history. In addition to their focus on climate, all three governors also campaigned on increasing access to abortions and reproductive health care, especially in Wisconsin, where abortion bans are being challenged by the current administration.
Without clean energy opposition in the statehouse, these governors will now have the opportunity to keep their states on course to achieve various deadlines.
Wisconsin plans for all electricity consumed in the state to be 100 percent carbon-free by 2050 in accordance with an executive order Evers signed in 2019. Whitmer signed an executive order in 2020 to make the state’s entire economy carbon-neutral by 2050 and has been a staunch opponent of the Line 5 petroleum pipeline, which cuts across Upper Michigan, Wisconsin, and Great Lakes waters. Walz is behind various clean energy initiatives in Minnesota, such as a push for more electric vehicle sales in the state starting in 2024, and plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 30 percent by 2025 and 80 percent by 2050.
And with the incumbents’ reelections, these states will be closer to clean energy deadlines with seemingly climate-friendly governors at the helm.
Walz has supported expanding solar panel manufacturing in partnership with the state legislature, which released $5.5 million in a bipartisan effort to expand a Northern Minnesota production facility, slated to be one of the biggest in the country. In Michigan, Whitmer has pushed for more electric vehicle and charging station production in an effort to maintain the state’s deep ties to the automotive industry. She recently announced $10.2 million in tax incentives and grants for EV manufacturing in Detroit.
Whitmer, Walz, and Evers will now also be able to determine what to do with the money coming to their states from the Inflation Reduction Act, the country’s “most significant” climate bill in United States history. The bill contains funding for low-carbon energy sources, as well as investments in a clean economy and manufacturing.
Holly Burke, a spokesperson for climate change advocacy group Evergreen Action, said that the results in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Michigan are a clear indicator that governors that lead on climate policies are popular candidates and they should take tonight’s results as a mandate from voters to pursue stronger environmental and clean energy standards.
“In one of the most competitive swing states in America, Governor Evers didn’t run from climate action—he leaned into it,” Burke said in a statement. “This election shows that climate leadership is a political winner in Wisconsin.”
After years of complaints from Puerto Rican officials about air and water pollution, the Environmental Protection Agency announced last week it would test for contamination in the southern part of the island.
The tests would be the first conducted by the EPA on Puerto Rico’s southern coast.
Community leaders in the city of Guayama, located on the Caribbean shoreline, had requested federal assistance to investigate the groundwater near a coal ash burial site run by a local power plant, according to the Associated Press. In response, the EPA said it would invest $100,000 in two pilot projects that would sample air and drinking water wells near the site and also test for contaminants.
Environmental advocates have also expressed concern that historic flooding caused by Hurricane Fiona in September has exacerbated groundwater contamination on the United States territory.
In Puerto Rico, as in other parts of the U.S. and its territories, communities that have traditionally been underserved have suffered the most from environmental hazards and damage from increasingly powerful and destructive storms.
Coal combustion residue, or coal ash, is primarily produced by the burning of coal and is one of the largest types of industrial waste produced in the U.S. and Puerto Rico. More than 100 million tons of it is generated each year and is disposed of by utilities in open-air storage pits and landfills. These coal ash disposal sites are often unlined, meaning there is no mesh or other protective material to prevent the leaking of their toxic chemicals into local drinking water wells, streams, lakes, and rivers.
A report released last week from Earthjustice, an environmental law organization, found that 91 percent of U.S. coal plants contaminate groundwater with high levels of arsenic and other chemicals. These contaminants have been proven to cause multiple types of cancer and impede brain development in children.
EPA officials said that although the site in Guayama where the coal ash was buried by the local power plant was lined, they have yet to determine the quality of the liner. The Associated Press also reported that the EPA had in the past issued air and coal combustion residue law violation notices to the company that runs the plant.
The EPA will also investigate whether Hurricane Fiona damaged landfills in Puerto Rico when it made landfall in September. Many of the island’s landfills are overcapacity, due to a combination of poor investment in maintenance and the proliferation of debris from previous natural disasters. Fiona caused the entirety of Puerto Rico to lose power for days, left over one-third of its population without drinking water, and caused major damage to Guayama and the neighboring city of Salinas. The storm struck almost exactly five years after the devastation of Hurricane Maria in 2017, from which the local infrastructure and economy is still reeling.
On Tuesday, Pennsylvania voters will decide the future of abortion in this state.
In the aftermath of Dobbs v. Jackson’s Women Health Organization, the Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade’s constitutional right to abortionand made abortion rights the purview of state government, 13 states have banned the procedure altogether, most with very limited exceptions. In Pennsylvania, the Republican-controlled legislature has been preparing to enact an abortion ban for years. Democratic Governor Tom Wolf has promised to veto such a ban as long as he remains in office.
But Wolf’s second term is drawing to a close, and the availability of safe, legal abortion in Pennsylvania is essentially dependent on which candidate succeeds him: sitting state Attorney General Josh Shapiro or ultra-conservative Christian nationalist Doug Mastriano. Shapiro has promised to protect access to abortion, whereas Mastriano intends to severely restrict it. If Mastriano prevails and Republicans retain their majorities in the state House and Senate, Pennsylvanians’ right to terminate pregnancies would likely come to an end.
A trailer decorated with messages supporting Donald Trump and Doug Mastriano, the Republican nominee for governor of Pennsylvania, along I-76 in western Pennsylvania. Tom Williams / CQ Roll Call
In southwestern Pennsylvania, this battle for reproductive rights takes place against a disturbing backdrop. Over the past 15 years, shale gas development has proliferated across the region, with thousands of unconventional wells — also known as fracked wells — drilled since 2007. And due to widespread fracking being a relatively new practice and the oil and gas industry’s efforts to conceal and downplay the toxicity of chemicals used in it, Pennsylvanians are just beginning to understand the potential health impacts of living, becoming pregnant, and raising a family in the second-highest natural gas-producing state in the nation. For these Pennsylvanians, a ban on abortion would just be one more way in which their health has been wrested out of their control.
“I feel like if you’re going to say, ‘life is so precious,’ and then take away the rights of women, I think you should think about what’s happening around the people that are trying to have children,” says Gillian Graber, a mother in Westmoreland County and executive director of the fracking awareness organization Protect Penn-Trafford.
Graber and her family participated in a landmark investigation conducted by Environmental Health News in 2019 that found high levels of chemicals used in the fracking process in the bodies of people living near well pads. “We’re going to have several generations of people that may see really dramatic consequences to something that they had no part in planning, no part in allowing, no say in whether it happened in their community.”
There is a fast-growing body of literature on the dangers that oil and gas development can pose to maternal and prenatal health. Higher rates of gestational hypertension and preeclampsia, conditions in which a person develops sometimes life-threatening high blood pressure during pregnancy, have been found in pregnant people who live in close proximity to oil and gas wells. Babies born to families that live near wells are also more likely to be born preterm and with lower birth weights, conditions that put them more at risk for other health issues throughout childhood. They are also more at risk of congenital heart defects.
Makenzie White, a trained nurse and public health manager with the public health nonprofit Environmental Health Partners, says the public health principle of “biological plausibility” helps explain why it should not be “shocking” that living close to fracking operations would be associated with negative health impacts for pregnant people, infants, and children. For example, benzene is a known carcinogen and endocrine disruptor, and it’s also a hydrocarbon that has been observed to be released in the fracking process. Many forms of air pollution have documented negative effects on maternal and prenatal health — including increased risk of miscarriage — and fracking sites have measurably worse air quality than the areas around them.
“Part of the concern with pregnant individuals and children is that we already know from research on other topics that it’s a vulnerable time to be impacted from any type of pollution,” she says. “There’s also been a lot of research about these different chemicals and toxins impacting fertility in general, which is very concerning, and would indicate that we would need more supportive healthcare in order to take care of our residents and better protect them.”
Activists and homeowners protest against hydraulic gas drilling, or “fracking,” outside the Philadelphia convention center on Wednesday, September 7, 2011.
AP Photo / Mark Stehle
The medical consensus is that people who live near fracking sites suffer higher rates of complications during pregnancy. And if abortion is made illegal, those complications will become much more dangerous. Abortion can be medically required in the case of severe preeclampsia, to manage a miscarriage, or in response to other serious problems to save the pregnant person’s life.
“Imagine you’re someone who already has a high risk, and you live near a polluting site that could increase your risk, and it’s out of your control,” says Laura Dagley, a nurse who works in public health education for Physicians for Social Responsibility. “You’re afraid for your life, the life of your baby, and if you’re in a situation where it’s no longer medically recommended for you to continue with the pregnancy — and then there’s no access to abortion. It’s scary for me to consider that Pennsylvania as a state would considering putting communities’ health at risk, either in unchecked pollution by the oil and gas industry, and taking away access to safe abortions.”
Dagley has made it part of her life’s work to inform Pennsylvanians about the risks of living near fracking sites. She recently spoke to residents of Washington County in southwestern Pennsylvania at a community event about an ongoing study conducted by the University of Pittsburgh into a suspected connection between fracking waste and an unusually high incidence of a rare bone cancer called Ewing’s sarcoma among children and adolescents in this region. She says it was attended by a number of parents of young children who had heard vague connections made between fracking and health problems in the community and were curious to learn more.
Protective boundaries divide a residential area and a construction site for the Mariner East 2 natural gas liquids pipeline in West Chester, Pennsylvania, in 2019. Bastiaan Slabbers / NurPhoto via Getty Images
At a park pavilion in Canonsburg, about a hundred residents took in presentations on the observed higher rates of childhood cancers, asthma, low birth weights, and preterm births in regions where oil and gas extraction is prevalent. Erica Jackson, a community outreach manager for the FracTracker Alliance, told the crowd that “some of the strongest evidence of fracking health impacts is on infants.”
Dagley noticed some grave expressions in the crowd as the presenters spoke. “There are people who are considering whether or not they want to have children, if they’re putting them at risk, but I think there are many people who already are pregnant or already have kids who feel a lot of guilt,” says Dagley. “Even though it’s not their fault, it’s very much the fault of the industry and people who are refusing to regulate and stop this industry from doing harm.”
“It’s a hard part of being the person who’s there to talk about the research and health impacts, I can just see it on people’s faces, they’re like, ‘Oh great, I didn’t know this is happening, and now my child is sick, or now I am pregnant. What do I do?’ It’s not so easy to pick up and move. It’s very hard to see people try and process that.”
There’s also an incentive not to process it — to not have to face change or challenge the status quo of the community. Janice Blanock, a Washington County resident whose son Luke died from Ewing’s sarcoma in 2016 at the age of 19, says that many members of her community aren’t interested in understanding the potential health impacts of oil and gas development.
“I think people are kind of afraid — like, if I get too involved I’ll know too much, and I won’t be able to support jobs,” she says. “And once you know, you can’t take it back, you can’t unknow what you learned.”
But what happens when you begin to understand the risks lingering in your air and water? Every woman I spoke with for this story, all of whom are mothers or grandmothers themselves, said the same thing: that knowing about the risks that fracking pollution poses to a fetus or to a child is unlikely to sway a person who wants to have a baby from having one. Instead, what they do is adapt to the circumstances they’ve been handed.
A farmhouse in Claysville, Pennsylvania, stands near pipes connected to hydraulic fracturing equipment.
AP Photo / Keith Srakocic
Lois Bower-Bjornson, a dancer and activist in Washington County, was raised in Western Pennsylvania and returned in 2004 to raise children in a more rural setting, full of woods to roam and creeks to play in. “Prior to moving back here, the pollution aspect didn’t enter into my head,” she said, as the coal and steel industries that dominated the region throughout the 20th century had largely died off. But when oil and gas companies began drilling unconventional wells around her home “like the Wild West,” suddenly her children were sick all the time.
“And then there it is, it happens and you’re there, and you do the best that you can with what you have,” she says. “We have air monitors, I asked for a water filtration system two Christmases ago, and my kids are educated to know, ‘you can’t go outside right now, the air is terrible.’ You become kind of an expert on what to do and when to do it with your children, and what to do when you do live in a polluted community.”
Fossil fuel interests have been deeply entrenched in Pennsylvania politics since the first well was drilled in Titusville in 1859. And unlike abortion, positions on fracking are not cleanly divided down party lines. Many Democrats in the state government today — including Governor Wolf and Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman, currently a candidate for U.S. Senate — have consistently supported fracking in Pennsylvania as an economic boon, and oil and gas companies have enjoyed significant tax breaks in the state. An exception can be found in the U.S. House of Representatives candidate Summer Lee, who seeks to represent the district containing parts of Allegheny and Westmoreland counties in the southwestern part of the state, and has been vocally opposed to fracking and outspoken about its health consequences throughout her career.
There is something to be said for loving one’s home so much you want to heal its many wounds. Southwestern Pennsylvania is riddled with centuries-old scars of many, many different forms of industrial exploitation. But it is also filled with families who have made its hills and valleys their home for generations, and want to see their grandchildren and great-grandchildren make it theirs as well. And there you can find a contingent that campaigns and organizes and votes, in hopes that the slow pace of political change will catch up to the more reckless stride of fossil fuel development.
Joining that contingent this year are voters who have been freshly mobilized by Mastriano’s threats to abortion rights in the state. Bower-Bjornson, for example, says that she has conservative, Trump-supporting family members who will be voting for Democrats on November 8 because they fear for the health of their daughters should abortion become illegal in Pennsylvania.
In the meantime, what do you do if you want to start a family in western Pennsylvania — or any oil and gas producing region — or if you already have one? The good news is that most negative maternal and prenatal health impacts associated with fracking are observed only in people who live quite close to a well, within about a half-mile radius; the bad news is that there are hundreds of new active wells every year, and residents often get little warning about their installation. Just a few years ago, a new well pad was installed very close to the home of Janice Blanock, the woman whose teenage son died from Ewing’s sarcoma. There was a town meeting to inform the community about the new well, but many local residents were in favor of it because of the jobs they believed it would provide.
But Blanock has no plans to move, and no desire to. “I still love it, it’s home, but I worry now where I didn’t before, and I’m aware of more,” she says. “I would say if you’re going to have children, you definitely want to look into where you raise them. And I don’t know if this is the safest place for you to do that, sadly.”
Massachusetts has to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, the deadline the United Nations says is consistent with a livable planet, under a sweeping climate law signed by the state’s Republican governor last year. In order to do that, the Bay State plans to pipe in hydroelectric power from Canada. But the project has run into a roadblock: stiff opposition from the nearby state of Maine.
Last year, Maine voters rejected the buildout of a proposed transmission line, which would run through its western flank and carry power from dams in Quebec to customers in Massachusetts. As a result, the clean energy project is stalled, maybe indefinitely — the most recent legal setback occurred last week — and Massachusetts’ effort to wean itself off of fossil fuels has suffered a serious blow.
New England Clean Energy Connect, as the troubled Massachusetts project is called, is representative of a larger issue: Building new infrastructure in this country is a torturously slow process that often gets slowed down further by community opposition and legal challenges. Renewable and clean energy projects are particularly vulnerable to delay. Unlike natural gas pipelines, which are under the authority of an independent federal agency called the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, transmission lines are at the mercy of the states they run through.
As more states commit to new climate plans, more interstate transmission lines like the one Massachusetts is fighting to build will have to crisscross the United States. There are precious few other ways to get clean power from renewable sources like wind and solar farms, geothermal plants, and hydroelectric dams, often sited in rural areas, to the dense urban centers that want to plug into it. Congress could speed up transmission construction by becoming the ultimate referee on interstate power lines, but so far lawmakers have declined to step into that role. The issue has taken on new urgency ahead of the midterm elections, which could wrest congressional control away from Democrats and shake up the power dynamics in Washington. If Democrats can’t figure out a way to reform the permitting process before the end of the year, they may not get a chance to revisit it for a long time.
Meanwhile, experts predict that interstate squabbling over where transmission lines can go and who should shoulder their costs will continue to jeopardize new renewable energy projects as the nation scrambles to pump its patchwork of power grids full of renewable energy and make the tardy transition away from fossil fuels. “If you have an interstate transmission line, any state that that line is going through can veto the project,” John Larsen, who leads U.S. energy system and climate policy research for the independent research firm the Rhodium Group, told Grist. “It happens all the time.”
The ease with which a state can nix another state’s transmission line could derail the nation’s green aspirations and even undermine the historic climate change bill Congress passed in August, the Inflation Reduction Act. The Rhodium Group estimates that nearly a quarter of the emissions reductions that are expected to take place by 2030 won’t come to fruition if no new transmission is built in the U.S. Other groups say the climate bill would take an even bigger hit without reforms that shorten the review processes for renewable energy projects and spur the construction of new transmission lines.
Senator Joe Manchin, the conservative Democrat from West Virginia, proposed a plan in late September that would have made the green transition promised by the Inflation Reduction Act happen faster. He aimed to pass a permitting reform bill, legislation that would have prevented states from squabbling over some long-distance, interstate transmission projects and sped up the permitting process for all types of energy projects. But the bill fell apart in the Senate less than a week later after facing opposition from both Republican and progressive lawmakers.
Some GOP legislators didn’t support it because it was proposed by a Democrat and also because they were loath to hand transmission permitting, something that has long been in states’ remit, over to the federal government. Among progressives, one issue was that Manchin’s bill included a carveout for a natural gas pipeline in West Virginia called the Mountain Valley Pipeline that threatens water resources and communities in Appalachia and would add some 90 million metric tons of emissions to the U.S.’s carbon ledger every year. Another problem was that the bill revised and shortened the process by which federal agencies review the environmental impacts of major and minor infrastructure projects, which environmental justice advocates worried would increase the amount of pollution faced by low-income Black and brown communities.
But experts say that, despite its drawbacks, lawmakers blew a rare opportunity to address the country’s transmission problem by failing to pass Manchin’s bill. “The United States cannot reach its emissions goals, be a climate leader, or ensure that our energy is clean, affordable, reliable, and secure without permitting reform,” Josh Freed, the senior vice president for climate and energy at the Washington, D.C.-based think tank Third Way, told Grist.
Some Democratic members of Congress think so, too. “The good outweighed the bad, and there was definitely bad,” Sean Casten, a Democratic U.S. representative from Illinois, told Grist, referring to Manchin’s bill. (Prior to running for office, Casten occasionally wrote blog posts for Grist between 2007 and 2014.) Most Democratic senators — including another Democratic climate hawk, Brian Schatz of Hawaii —appeared prepared to pass the legislation, too.
Members of both political parties have bemoaned the barriers to expeditious permitting, but Congress rarely takes up legislation to reform the process. Larsen, who has been tracking these types of bills for decades now, said that, prior to Manchin’s bill, Congress had only seriously considered permitting reform twice in the past 20 years — first, in the Energy Policy Act of 2005 and then again in last year’s bipartisan infrastructure bill. Both laws tweaked the nation’s permitting rules, but neither resulted in the federal government taking control of the permitting process for transmission lines, which is, in Larsen’s view, the biggest permitting obstacle to the renewable energy transition.
Manchin’s bill, if it had passed, would have allowed FERC to permit some long-distance lines that are “consistent with the public interest,” in addition to simplifying the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, and giving FERC jurisdiction over hydrogen pipelines. “The windows of opportunity for this stuff are very infrequent,” Larsen said.
But Manchin’s bill would have also made it easier for all types of energy projects to move forward, something that made progressives queasy. Casten said that that was a tradeoff he was willing to take. “My calculus, for better or for worse, is that if you streamline transmission permitting you will bring on clean energy assets at a rate that will economically neuter the fossil energy assets,” he said. In other words, he was comfortable making the gamble that easing the permitting process for transmission would result in large-scale renewable energy deployment. Eventually, renewables would become so cheap that new fossil fuel infrastructure wouldn’t be necessary.
Manchin pulled his bill from the government spending package it was attached to before senators could vote on it, knowing he didn’t have the Republican votes he needed to make it happen. In the coming weeks, experts anticipate that he could try to hitch a new version of the bill to an existing legislative package and pass it that way before the end of this congressional session. The only two viable candidates are the omnibus spending bill, a big package of appropriations bills, and the National Defense Authorization Act, the NDAA, which funds the military through the 2023 fiscal year. Congress will turn to those sometime between the midterm elections and the end of this year, the period known as a “lame-duck session.”
But there are risks to attaching permitting reform to one of these other bills, especially the NDAA, Casten said. Manchin will likely work with Republicans to come up with a new permitting reform bill that has their support, and that version of the bill could gut the National Environmental Policy Act, leading to the approval of infrastructure projects without adequate environmental reviews, or include provisions that allow states to drill for oil and gas on federal land within their state borders with less oversight than is currently in place. Such a bill already exists — it was proposed by Republican Senator Shelley Moore Capito, Manchin’s fellow senator from West Virginia — but it failed to pass after Democrats blocked it. It’ll be much harder for Democrats to nix a new permitting bill if it is attached to the NDAA because voting against military spending is politically unpopular.
“If there is a package that the Senate can accept in the NDAA, it will in all likelihood be worse,” Casten said. “How many Democrats are going to peel off over permitting and shut down military spending? That’s a really politically hard question.”
There’s also a scenario in which Republicans take back one or both houses of Congress next week and permitting reform is revisited under their terms. On Tuesday, Politico reported that House Republicans are planning an energy agenda that centers around much more aggressive permitting reforms that would significantly shorten environmental reviews for all types of energy projects. But they’re unlikely to be successful in the next two years.
“In the scenario where we lose one chamber, I’m not sure you do any of this,” Casten said. “For all the lip service Republicans pay to oil and gas permitting reform and NEPA repeal, they won’t have a White House that will sign off on it.”
Meanwhile, the clock is ticking. “We’re 28 years away from 2050,” Larsen, from Rhodium, said. “The longer we wait the less it’ll help.”
When Maria Payan’s son was screened for cancer, she knew he had to leave home.
The Payan family lived in Delta, Pennsylvania, a rural community of fewer than 1,000 people near the southern edge of the state, bordering Maryland. Payan, a Pennsylvania native, said she wanted her son Michael to grow up in a small, idyllic community like she did when she was young, making Delta an attractive place to raise a family.
Then the farm across the road changed hands and became a concentrated animal feeding operation, or CAFO, home to thousands of poultry and cattle, churning out a steady supply of manure and animal waste.
“It just changes your entire life,“ Payan told Grist. “Kids can’t play outside. You have to call them inside with the level of stench because you understand it’s not just odors.”
The proliferation of CAFOs across the country has harmed the quality of life for neighboring small communities for decades, with environmental groups now suing the Environmental Protection Agency over the agency’s failure to regulate groundwater pollution stemming from factory farms.
When a farm produces massive amounts of animal waste, the waste must go somewhere. Generally, farms have pits of manure that hold the waste, uncovered and outdoors, which increase methane emissions and contribute to more ammonia in the air, as well as pollution from nitrates and phosphorus. The waste also contains hydrogen sulfide, a chemical that causes a strong odor and inflammation in the eyes, skin, and lungs.
Some of these massive farms cash in on fuel from this waste, known as biogas.
When food and animal waste are deprived of oxygen, which occurs in landfills and manure lagoons, a natural process known as anaerobic digestion occurs. Bacteria consume the waste products and eventually release methane, a widely used natural gas. The process occurs on farms inside air-tight containers known as digesters.
These digesters capture methane that would otherwise be emitted into the atmosphere, making biogas one avenue to reduce methane emissions. The burning of methane does release carbon into the atmosphere, but the use of biogas for energy now allows the nation to cut the equivalent of carbon dioxide emissions equivalent to taking 1.3 million cars off the road in a year.
The energy production process causes farmers to enclose or cover manure pits, but just because the manure isn’t visible doesn’t mean it isn’t causing problems.
In rural areas, well water is a primary source of drinking water for residents, and nitrate contamination from animal waste has been linked to a variety of cancers as well as infant death and miscarriages.
Payan said she remembers seeing her son’s body covered in red, irritated wounds after taking a shower, which exposed him to the chemicals found in the region’s groundwater.
The Payan family moved to Sussex County, Delaware soon after to get away from CAFO pollution, but the industry has exploded throughout the region. Payan, who now works with the Socially Responsible Agriculture Project, said a “gold rush” of more massive farms is popping up in Delaware, with facilities affecting the quality of life for families in this rural county, which has a large Black and Latino population.
“It’s got to stop. We can’t just do business as usual,” Payan said.
But based on this year’s historic climate legislation package, biogas is set to boom.
Maria Payan, formerly of Delta, Pennsylvania, stands next to the Delta farm her family moved away from after its operations began polluting the community. Payan, who participated in the documentary “Right to Harm,” now advocates against factory farms and biogas in the northeast region. “Right to Harm” / Hourglass Films
The Inflation Reduction Act, signed into law this past August, includes a sweeping $369 billion investment in various clean energy technologies and credits for consumers to purchase greener technologies. One of those industries is biogas, an energy source that captures methane emissions from large-scale farms. Biogas facilities, which are billed as a “renewable energy source” in the industry, will receive various tax credits and investments from this legislation, prompting industry leaders to look into expanding and constructing facilities across the country.
“It’s almost giddy,” said Timothy Baye, professor of Business Development and State Energy specialist at the University of Wisconsin. “It’s like waking up not expecting Christmas and finding a Christmas tree.”
Animal waste, like cow manure, and agriculture have been identified as significant contributors to the planet’s warming temperatures, with agriculture accounting for 24 percent of global emissions of carbon, methane, and other gasses. Over 100 countries have signed a pledge to cut global methane emissions by 30 percent by 2030. Methane emissions also come from the fossil fuel industry and have seen historic rises in recent years.
The biogas industry has grown exponentially over the past two decades, primarily thanks to California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard, which was adopted in 2006. The standard created a market for “low-carbon and renewable alternatives” to gasoline and diesel, driving new biogas operations around the country. According to the EPA, electricity generated from biogas more than doubled between 2010 and 2020.
The IRA will give tax credits of up to 30 percent — the same investments given to large clean industries like solar and wind — to biogas facilities built by the beginning of 2025. In addition, this legislative package will also invest roughly $2 billion in the United States Department of Agriculture’s Rural Energy for America Program, or REAP, which provides loans and grants to farmers and businesses in the energy efficiency and renewable energy sector, which includes biogas facilities.
In October, a bipartisan group of Senators from across the Midwest and Great Plains sent a letter to the EPA, urging more pathways for “electricity generated from biogas” to be brought to the energy market.
Apart from the IRA, the Biden administration has made biogas a focal point of its clean energy goals, with the planned creation of new public-private partnerships to encourage more biogas facilities as a part of its Methane Emissions Reduction Action Plan.
When food and animal waste are deprived of oxygen, a natural process known as anaerobic digestion occurs and eventually creates methane. The gas is captured on farms inside these air-tight containers known as digesters. Faba-Photography / Getty Images
“The biggest impact that the IRA has had on the industry is it has started to levelized the playing field among different renewable energy technologies,” Patrick Serfass, executive director of the American Biogas Council, told Grist.
Serfass said the industry is at a similar moment that both wind and solar were years ago. When a windfall of federal funding helped those sectors in years past, the industries exploded. Since then, he said those involved in the renewable energy sector have looked to Congress to create a “more fair marketplace” for biogas plants to compete in selling and making renewable energy.
“(The IRA) has helped to get more biogas systems developed, and if you care about reducing carbon emissions and producing renewable energy, then that’s a really good thing,” Serfass said.
States with large agricultural sectors are likely to see an increase in biogas facilities, but biogas is not just dependent on animal manure. Landfills and wastewater treatment plants also make up a large portion of the industry. California, Texas, and North Carolina have the biggest potential to make biogas, as estimated by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
This month, a $25 million loan project in Stanislaus County, California, which includes the city of Modesto, was approved. The funding, part of REAP, will provide loans for dairy farms in the region to construct six biogas facilities to connect to a local ethanol plant. Additionally, the loans will also fund natural gas pipeline projects, commonly used in the biogas industry as a way to move the created gas from farms to a refinery without the need for large tanker trucks and costly shipping.
Communities that already live with large animal farms and biogas facilities could be a cautionary tale for regions that are expanding or building more digesters. In counties across southeastern North Carolina, predominantly Black and low-income communities have been fighting against the state’s massive hog industry-turned biogas producers for years.
Dr. Sacoby Wilson, a leading expert on environmental justice for rural and agricultural communities, said biogas investments may help decrease methane emissions, but neighboring residents are still exposed to a variety of compounding health hazards.
“They’re not getting the co-benefits that supposedly come from capturing methane, burning methane, or digesting waste,” Wilson told Grist.
Wilson said that biogas is not a clean energy source. While he appreciates the Biden administration’s recent advancements and commitments to environmental justice, the massive funding push for biogas inside the IRA is “one step forward and two steps back.”
He said there should be more significant investments in solutions to the source problems of methane emissions, such as massive agricultural operations that have grown across the country, rather than propping up an industry that relies on destructive practices.
“Why not invest in sustainable, regenerative agriculture?,” Wilson said, “which will actually be more beneficial to local communities, to the local economy.”
Agriculturally focused states are seeing increased pushes for more manure digester facilities. Greenleaf, Wisconsin, an unincorporated community less than 20 miles south of Green Bay, is now home to a massive digester facility. The new facility claims to be among the largest in the nation, converting nearly a million gallons of manure into methane daily. The gas produced here will be pumped into a national pipeline system and used to fuel natural gas vehicle requirements in states on the other side of the country, like California and Oregon.
Early this year, the prospect of a new digester in Rock Valley, Iowa, was heralded as a sustainable solution for nearby farming communities in the northwest corner of the state. But soon after it opened, the facility leaked 376,000 gallons of manure into nearby waters.
“What we’re seeing is essentially factory farm, biogas, and anaerobic digesters being used in tandem with large factory farm operations, which obviously is raising a lot of concern and opposition from communities,” John Aspray, a Food & Water Watch senior organizer in the state, told Grist.
The Bloody Run Creek, also in the northern part of the state, has experienced increased farm run-off from a digester-turned-large animal operation in recent years. Iowa is now seeing an increase in digesters, with nine new facilities granted permitting last year and seven existing ones approved for expansion. State legislators have tried to curb nitrate pollution from agriculture by proposing a ban on new CAFOs, but just last year, state officials incentivized the creation of more digesters at large-scale farms with state funding.
“It’s not going to revolutionize agriculture in a way that makes it more sustainable,” Aspray said. “These are a false solution to climate change.”
On the evening of July 14, NASA launched the Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation, or EMIT, 250 miles up to perch on the International Space Station. With the satellite’s speed in equilibrium with the Earth’s gravitational pull, the instrument took off into orbit and has been circling our planet once every 90 minutes ever since.
EMIT belongs to a category of equipment known as spaceborne imaging spectrometers and was designed to examine how flurries of airborne, mineral dust on the Earth’s surface affect temperature changes across the globe.
In the three and a half months following EMIT’s launch, the tool has not only successfully mapped out massive dust plumes and their effect on the changing climate, but has also identified another key piece to the global warming puzzle: more than 50 methane “super-emitters,” some of which had previously gone unseen.
Methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, is a byproduct of decomposing organic material and the leading component of natural gas — the fuel used in power plants as well as in heating and cooking appliances in buildings. In the 20 years after release, methane is estimated to be 80 to 90 times more effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. In 2021, the amount of methane in the atmosphere soared to the highest level on record. And super-emitters — oil fields, pipelines, landfills, animal feedlots, and other facilities that emit methane at unusually high rates — are a major part of the problem. Researchers have estimated that super-emitters account for between 8 and 12 percent of all methane emissions from the oil and gas sector.
The super-emitters that EMIT identified included oil and gas infrastructure east of the port city of Hazar, Turkmenistan, emitting methane at a rate of 111,000 pounds per hour. Off of Carlsbad, New Mexico, the apparatus detected a previously unidentified 2-mile-long plume rising from the Permian Basin, one of the largest oilfields in the world. A waste-processing complex in Iran, also previously unknown to scientists, was found to emit an estimated 18,700 pounds of methane per hour.
Scientists at NASA aren’t the only ones using satellites to track methane leaks. A French geoanalytics company called Kayrros SAS uses a combination of satellite data and algorithms to identify super-emitter sites. In February, researchers from Kayrros and various climate institutions announced that they had used satellite instruments to identify more than 1,800 major releases of methane globally in 2019 and 2020.
While carbon dioxide lingers in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, methane breaks down after about a decade. Due to this timeframe of atmospheric response, a deceleration in the rate of global warming could come to fruition relatively swiftly if the world confronts its methane emissions.
Last fall, during the annual United Nations climate conference in Scotland, the United States and European Union announced the Global Methane Pledge, an international initiative aiming to slash the world’s methane emissions by 30 percent by the end of this decade. More than 100 countries have signed onto the pledge. Researchers say that slowing methane emissions can be achieved at relatively low cost — for instance, by requiring oil and gas companies to repair leaky equipment and forbidding them from intentionally venting methane into the air. Improving livestock manure management and plugging abandoned oil and gas wells are other strategies that could yield major benefits.
NASA hopes that EMIT can be part of those solutions. “Reining in methane emissions is key to limiting global warming,” NASA administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement. “This exciting new development will not only help researchers better pinpoint where methane leaks are coming from, but also provide insight on how they can be addressed — quickly.”
For years, with climate bills stalled in Congress, advocates, community groups, nonprofits, and even businesses have relied on ballot initiatives — where citizens vote on new laws alongside new candidates — to push forward environmental action at the state and local levels. In 2020, Michigan voters approved a proposal to use money from oil leases on public lands to fund parks. Two years earlier, Nevada passed the first step of a constitutional amendment requiring utilities to source 50 percent of energy from renewables by 2030, and Florida voted to ban offshore oil and gas drilling in state waters.
“It’s unusual for there not to be more [state-level] environmental ballot initiatives,” said Nick Abraham, state communications director at the League of Conservation Voters, “but hopefully it’s a sign of progress.”
If passed, the initiatives in New York and California would marshal billions of dollars for new climate action in two of the U.S.’s most populous states. They would also serve as models for other parts of the country looking to develop their own strategies.
As voters prepare to head to the polls November 8, we’re breaking down these major ballot measures — and others — that have the potential to significantly advance climate progress in the U.S.:
Construction workers build a system of walls and flood gates to protect New York City from rising sea levels.
Ed Jones/AFP via Getty Images
New York: The Clean Water, Clean Air, and Green Jobs Bond Act of 2022
New York passed its first environmental bond act in 1910, borrowing money to establish a network of state parks. Since then, voters in the state have approved 10 ballot measures to fund environmental projects, from improving wastewater infrastructure to addressing the impacts of pollution on public health. The 2022 Bond Act would be the first one in over 25 years — and the largest in state history.
The measure got its start in 2020, when former Governor Andrew Cuomo proposed the “Restore Mother Nature Bond Act,” which would have allowed the state comptroller to sell up to $3 billion in state bonds to revitalize fish and wildlife habitat, expand renewable energy, and protect the state from floods. Cuomo withdrew the act over economic concerns during the COVID-19 pandemic, but it’s back for the 2022 midterms, this time with a new, more sober name and an amendment by Governor Kathy Hochul to increase the amount to $4.2 billion.
The stakes:
The Clean Water, Clean Air, and Green Jobs Bond Act would fund environmental projects in four major areas: At least $1.1 billion would go to ecosystem restoration and reducing flood risk, including coastal rehabilitation and voluntary buyout programs, in a state where hurricane frequency and severity is only expected to increase. Up to $650 million would fund land conservation and recreation, including farmland preservation. Up to $1.5 billion would go to climate change mitigation, including funding for zero-emission school buses and strategies to reduce urban heat. And at least another $650 million would go to water quality improvements and climate resilient infrastructure.
The measure would also require that 35 percent of the funds be spent in “disadvantaged communities,” currently defined by a state Climate Justice Working Group using variables like high exposure to flooding, extreme heat, and pollution, and socio-economic factors like race, ethnicity, and income. An economic impact analysis of the act found that it could create or support 84,000 jobs statewide.
Its chances of passing:
With such a wide span of initiatives supported by the proposition, and investments right in people’s backyards, campaigners say it’s likely that this bill will pass. A broad coalition of environmental groups, labor unions, farmers, land trusts, and government organizations have come together in favor of the ballot measure, raising over seven figures. The biggest donors are The Nature Conservancy and Scenic Hudson.
“New Yorkers will vote yes on this one,” said Julie Tighe, president of the New York League of Conservation Voters. “We just need to make sure they know it’s there.”
While the New York State Conservative Party has opposed the measure, there’s no organized opposition, which bodes well for the future of climate funding in New York State.
An electric vehicle charging station in Los Angeles, California.
Citizen of the Planet/Education Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
California: Proposition 30
California originally had two climate ballot initiatives this year, but a measure to reduce single-use plastics was withdrawn at the last minute after stakeholders negotiated a bill achieving many of the same goals. Now all that’s left is Proposition 30, which would raise taxes for California’s wealthiest residents to fund EV adoption and wildfire fighting. The measure has found unlikely bedfellows: some of the same labor unions that clashed with rideshare companies in 2020 over a proposition to classify drivers as contractors with limited benefits have now teamed up with Lyft in support of Prop 30.
The stakes:
The proposition would increase the income tax for people making over $2 million a year by 1.75 percent for a 20-year period (or until three years after statewide emissions drop to 80 percent of 1990 levels.) The money generated — an estimated $3.5 to $5 billion a year — would go to three areas:
A zero-emissions vehicle infrastructure fund would receive 35 percent to build charging stations, and another 45 percent would go to rebates and other incentives for electric vehicle purchases, with at least half of all EV-related money being spent in low-income communities. The last 20 percent would go to a fund for wildfire prevention and suppression, with a priority on hiring and training new state wildland firefighters.
Its chances of passing:
Proposition 30 is the standout contested measure on the California ballot, and while so far the majority of voters support it, it’s uncertain how the finally tally will shake out.
A string of environmental, labor, and public health organizations including the American Lung Association, the Union of Concerned Scientists, firefighter groups, electrician unions, and even actress and environmentalist Jane Fonda have supported the proposition. They argue that it would help reduce air pollution from wildfires and gas-powered cars, and that the wealthiest individuals in the state should pay. The California Democratic Party endorsed the initiative, as did the controversial rideshare company Lyft.
In September, Governor Gavin Newsom paced around in a television ad telling Californians, “I gotta warn ya” about Proposition 30. He called it “[Lyft’s]’s sinister scheme to grab a huge taxpayer funded subsidy.” Rideshare companies, by law, will have to log 90 percent of their miles in electric vehicles by 2030 to meet California’s Clean Miles Standard. Lyft has spent over $45 million to support the proposition so far, although Prop 30 supporters point out that revenue from the tax would go to the same electric vehicle programs that Newsom funds with his own budget. Plus the EV incentives would go to Lyft drivers to buy cars, not directly to the company itself.
Newsom’s break with his own party to come out against the measure gave a boost to opponents, including the state Republican Party, the Chamber of Commerce, three large timber companies that make money on wildfire salvage, and the California Teachers Association, which would like to see more money go to schools. Besides calling it a Lyft tax grab, opponents argue that with the state’s recent $10 billion investment in EV goals and a budget surplus of over $90 billion, California doesn’t need to raise taxes. Newsom has expressed concerns that the proposition would destabilize California’s tax revenue, which relies heavily on high-income earners. But a report released in early October shows the measure could help the state make major strides towards meeting its climate goals while supporting middle- and low-income residents.
In Rhode Island, voters will be deciding on Question 3, a $50 million environment and recreation bond measure that would fund small business energy loans, watershed and forest restoration, and land acquisition. The bulk of the money, $16 million, however, would go to municipal climate resilience, helping communities improve coastal habitats and floodplains and strengthen infrastructure.
In most states, bonds that create public debt have to be brought before voters. Rhode Islanders haven’t rejected a bond measure since 2006, and have approved 29 since then. With no formal opposition, and a supporting coalition that includes political leaders, the Rhode Island Infrastructure Bank, and various conservation groups, this one is likely to pass.
While there aren’t many state climate ballot initiatives to watch this year, local ballots are a different story. No organization tracks all environmental initiatives at the county and city level, but the Trust for Public Land’s LandVote Database lists 58 land conservation and park measures on local ballots across the U.S. That number does not include initiatives to reduce emissions or adapt to climate change without a land-based component.
In Cochise and Graham counties in Arizona, Wilcox Basin residents will vote on new restrictions on large groundwater wells; a yes vote would mark a new precedent of a rural community restricting its own water use and successfully regulating large-scale farms. In Denver, voters will revisit a landmark 2020 initiative to increase sales taxes by .25 percent to fund climate action; they’ll also weigh in on a requirement for all buildings and food waste producers to provide recycling and composting. A local tax measure in Los Angeles would generate $227 million annually to prioritize the creation of parks and recreation spaces in areas lacking access to greenspace. In Illinois, a proposed county tax increase on the ballot would be used to establish forest preserves in Chicago’s southeastern suburbs.
Those are just the tip of the iceberg. “This year we’re seeing a lot more equity initiatives,” said Andy Orellana, associate communications director at the Trust for Public Land. While there will still be a need to ensure funds are spent equitably and correctly, Orellana sees it as a hopeful sign of progress.
Over the past several months, Britain has seen the death of a monarch, the proclamation of a new one, the resignation of Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and the election of his replacement, Liz Truss, who almost immediately sent the British economy into freefall.
Now, Britain is getting its third prime minister in just as many months. Truss resigned on Thursday after a six-week run; Rishi Sunak, the country’s chief financial minister, was selected as the new leader of the Conservative Party and will take her place in 10 Downing Street.
Truss set a low bar on environmental issues during her short tenure, carrying out what was dubbed by her opponents as a “war on nature.” While Sunak’s record on climate policy has been arguably poor, environmental advocates are hopeful that he will at least deliver on some of his party’s 2019 environmental manifesto, which contains a moratorium on fracking and a strong commitment to decarbonizing the economy by 2050.
“He’s obviously better news than Truss, that goes without saying,” said Chris Venables, head of politics at the Green Alliance, an independent cross-party environmental think tank based in the United Kingdom.
Sunak, a former investment banker and one of the wealthiest people in England, was elected to British parliament in 2015 and selected by Johnson as Chancellor of the Exchequer in 2020, overseeing the state’s economic and financial matters. After Johnson resigned in July, Sunak campaigned for prime minister, but lost to Truss. Her platform of tax cuts and free market economics, however, quickly led to massive inflation, the pound depreciating in value, and runaway government borrowing.
“Her environmental policies were also very much a factor in her demise,” said Venables, adding that Truss was very close to people aligned with the fossil fuels agenda. In the last month under Truss, the U.K. saw a concerted attack on the basics of environmental protection: Truss and right-wing members of Parliament sought to wipe over 570 rules on environmental protection inherited from the European Union off the slate. Her new “investment zones” policy stoked fears among conservation groups that development would harm wildlife. She scrapped a popular new payment scheme in the works for farmers to implement conservation practices. And she also planned to restart fracking.
Sunak, on the other hand, has declared his support for conservation, for reforming farm payments, and for meeting Britain’s net-zero goals, though much of his climate agenda remains to be seen.
Sunak has historically aligned with his Conservative Party colleagues to vote against efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. While chancellor, he implemented cuts that ended a nationwide home insulation subsidy program, though he has since talked about prioritizing home insulation across Britain by launching a new, improved program. Under pressure from the Labor Party, he instituted a windfall tax – levied when unexpected circumstances, like war or natural disaster, result in larger-than-usual profits for an industry – on oil and gas companies, but it included a tax break for corporations that re-invested in new fossil fuel production. Campaigning over the summer, he reaffirmed his opposition to both onshore wind and farmland solar development, two of the cheapest ways to generate electricity in the U.K. He wants to increase offshore wind capacity and also supports increased drilling for gas in the North Sea.
“He has been elected on no ticket, so he didn’t have to say what he was going to do,” said Venables. “Britain needs state intervention and investment in areas that are hard to decarbonize and there haven’t been many signs that he is willing to do that.” As chancellor, he shepherded England through the pandemic by increasing spending for social support, which he has since tried to reign in. Over the summer, Sunak ran on a fiscally conservative agenda. Still, said Venables, there are some things he’s done for the climate.
At the last United Nations’ climate meeting, COP26 in Glasgow, Sunak articulated a center-right approach to tackling the climate crisis and committed to making Britain the “world’s first net zero aligned financial center,” pledging $120 million to the Taskforce on Access to Climate Finance. He oversaw the creation of the U.K. infrastructure bank to unleash climate capital and, even if enforcement and timescales leave much to be desired, he mandated that every company in the U.K. have a climate plan. At the same time, he was criticized for cutting overseas aid to developing countries, failing to pay the U.K’.s fair share toward the $100 billion global climate target, and cutting taxes on domestic flights in the runup to COP26.
While Truss asked King Charles III not to go COP27 in Egypt, environmentalists expect Sunak to go, and hope that he will support Charles’ attendance as well. The new monarch has been hailed as “the climate king” for his history of speaking out on biodiversity loss and global warming, although many have been quick to point out the role of the monarchy in creating the climate crisis through colonial rule.
Some hope Britain’s current economic and energy crises may spur Sunak, often characterized as sensible and pragmatic, to rethink his past policies. Fuel bills are 2.5 times what they were a year ago, and would be five times more were it not for government support. “We’re going into a winter where we’re expecting millions of households to fall into fuel poverty,” said Venables. “Literally the only way through is to insulate homes and build out renewables.”
This story is produced by Floodlight, a nonprofit news site that investigates climate issues. Sign up for Floodlight’s newsletter here.
Schuyler Wight is a fourth generation rancher who has raised longhorn cattle outside Midland, Texas, for decades. Wight is no geologist, but over the years, he’s had to familiarize himself with what lies underground. Scattered across his sprawling 20,000-acre ranch are more than 100 abandoned oil and gas wells left behind by wildcatters who drilled in random locations for decades looking for oil. Many were unsuccessful, but thedrilling opened up layers of porous rock, revealing water, and minerals.
Rather than cap the holes, the wildcatters and their oil companies–now long gone–transferred ownership of unproductive wells to the previous owners of Wight’s ranch to be used as water wells, known as P-13 wells.
Decades later, some of the wells on Wight’s land are leaking contaminated water, hydrogen sulfide and radioactive materials. Occasionally, Wight’s cattle drink water that has bubbled up to the surface and die, representing thousands of dollars in losses for his ranch.
Typically, the Texas Railroad Commission would take responsibility for cleaning up oil and gas wells abandoned by now–defunct drilling companies. But the commission won’t spend a dime on wells like Wight’s. That’s because the commission argues his wells aren’t oil or gas wells because they never successfully produced fossil fuel.
Without state or federal funds to clean up the mess, farmers, ranchers, and small local governments are struggling to fix the major environmental damage left from decades of drilling. Wight has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars–and counting–to clean up just a few of the wells on his property.
“That’s a lot of money when you’ve got to pay it back with cattle,” Wight said.
Across the state, according to the commission’s records, there are nearly 2,000 documented P-13 wells. Not all of them have started to leak as on Wight’s ranch, but it’s impossible to know the full scale of the problem. “The RRC does not maintain a cost estimate to plug abandoned water wells as it is the responsibility of the landowner to complete those pluggings,” the agency’s spokesperson Andrew Keese said in an email.
In Pecos County, the Middle Pecos Groundwater Conservation District has repeatedly asked the Railroad Commission to add 40 wells to the agency’s statewide list of 8,000 abandoned wells marked for cleanup. The small local agency doesn’t have the funds, staff or resources it needs to plug the abandoned wells that are now polluting groundwater in the region, said Ty Edwards, the district’s manager. Many of the wells are on remote properties, owned by absentee landowners, environmental advocates say. The most infamous of these wells, Sloan Blair #1, has been spewing so much briny water that it’s formed a body of water nicknamed Lake Boehmer in the middle of the West Texas desert.
According to an analysis commissioned by the groundwater district, the well was originally drilled into the San Andres formation as an oil test well and then was abandoned. Now, underground pressure is causing the salty water to spew to the surface, bringing with it contaminants such as benzene and xylene, both carcinogens. The analysis found both compounds were at unsafe levels. The well is also leaking hydrogen sulfide gas at potentially lethal levels for humans, and heat-trapping gasses including methane and carbon dioxide. To survey the site, researchers have to wear hazmat suits.
“The problem is that when they drilled into this formation, there are several [layers] with no well integrity–you’re picking up different constituents that are causing the water quality to go very, very bad,” Edwards said. “The water quality in the area is drastically degrading over time,” becoming undrinkable and unusable. “It’s known that you can’t get any good water in the area–most people get on the county water line that comes from 20 or 30 miles away. It’s making some areas uninhabitable.”
Texas regulators refuse to take responsibility for Lake Boehmer, an abandoned oil and gas well, converted into a water well that later blew out and created a lake in Pecos County.
Mitch Borden, Marfa Public Radio
The million dollar– perhaps even billion dollar– question is why the Railroad Commission has doubled down on shedding responsibility for the converted water wells, said Cole Ruiz, a lawyer for the groundwater district. “The factual circumstances around these P-13 wells is that they were originally drilled by oil and gas operators–which requires a permit granted by the Railroad Commission,” he said. “There’s nothing in the statute that allows them to shed jurisdiction once they’ve reclassified it as a water well.”
In essence, the Railroad Commission’s narrow definition of what counts as an oil and gas well allows it to choose which wells it will plug with state and federal funds. Since wells are still being converted on paper to water wells–anywhere from a handful to a few dozen in recent years–that means the problem is still growing, and operators may be escaping future liability.
Ruiz suspects if the wells were added to the state’s roster of orphan wells, they’d cost millions of more dollars than the state has already committed towards cleanup, and would slow the progress the agency has been reporting in recent years. In one particularly severe case, for example, an abandoned and improperly plugged oil and gas well on Wight’s land caused a sinkhole so deep the state transportation agency is now spending more than $25 million to reroute a road.
Railroad Commission staff members who testified at a recent Texas House Natural Resources Committee hearing repeated their argument that some of Pecos County’s most troublesome wells, like the one that created Lake Boehmer, simply aren’t in the agency’s jurisdiction. “It never produced any oil, or any gas. But it did produce a lot of water,” said Clay Woodul, the commission’s assistant director of field operations. “And that’s the difference. It never has been an oil or gas well. It will never be an oil or gas well.”
In the 1980s, the Texas Legislature allocated money from regulatory and permit fees toward cleaning up wells and oil fields that were abandoned by companies that went bankrupt. Each abandoned well can cost at least $20,000 to plug, according to some estimates. An influx of federal dollars through the Biden administration’s infrastructure bill has granted the state $25 million to chip away at the $480 million problem. The commission has said it won’t use federal money for the P-13 wells.
Nationwide, the Environmental Protection Agency estimates there are more than 2 million abandoned oil and gas wells that need to be plugged in order to reduce methane emissions still leaking from the wells, in addition to other pollutants.
When Wight first noticed the leaking wells on his property in 2015, he couldn’t find records for them in the Railroad Commission’s databases. Wight hired a surveyor from Dallas, Jackie Portsmouth, who searched through the basement of the Midland Energy Library to find a paper trail for the problem wells. “Part of the problem is that the Railroad Commission’s older well data from 1964 hasn’t been put in their system properly,” Portsmouth said.
Portsmouth used GIS tools to determine the geolocation of the wells. Eventually, he found the permits, the mineral rights leases, and other documentation for the wells. The company that drilled one of the problem wells in 1969, Union Texas Petroleum, doesn’t exist on paper anymore–it was acquired by ARCO, another oil and gas company, for $2.5 billion in the 1990s.
“One of the arguments the [Railroad Commission] is making now is, ‘We never got any oil out of this,’” Wight said. “But sometimes you drill dry holes, that’s the way that thing goes. You have to get a permit to drill it. I’m not very smart, but it sure looks like it’s their baby.”
Advocates and experts say the Railroad Commission’s distinction between water wells and oil and gas wells is arbitrary. The decision seems to be based solely on current commissioners’ and staffers’ interpretations of the state’s natural resource code; there are no strings attached to federal orphan well funds that would make some wells ineligible.
“The definition of orphan wells is broad enough that it could encompass P-13 wells,” said Tannya Benavides, the advocacy director for the nonprofit watchdog group Commission Shift. “The Railroad Commission is passing the buck–these wells weren’t originally drilled as water wells.”
Commission Shift has advocated for the state legislature to amend the Natural Resources Code to specifically include the converted wells in its definition of orphan wells. That would force the commission to include the wells in its cleanup and could also provide additional funding, studies and resources to address the problem of converted wells on private property.
“I’m not trying to put words in their mouth, but it seems like this is a problem the Railroad Commission wants to go away,” Ruiz, Middle Pecos’ lawyer, said. “But I can tell you, it’s not going to go away.”
New York is the latest state to push for a ban on the sale of new gas-powered vehicles by 2035.
New York joins Massachusetts and Washington state in following the plans of California, which on August 25 passed the nation’s first measure banning the sale of new gas-powered cars by 2035.
New York’s mandate is part of a nationwide push for widespread electric vehicle ownership, supported by the Biden Administration as part of its climate policies. In addition, New York has set a 2050 goal to reduce vehicle emissions by 85 percent from 1990 levels. The state also plans to completely electrify its school bus fleet by 2035. A 2021 state emissions report found that transportation was responsible for 28 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions.
Both Washington and Massachusetts immediately set their own plans in motion to ban sales of new gas-powered vehicles after California’s decision. The two states have so-called trigger laws, which direct them to follow whatever emissions reduction policies are put in place in California. While Washington’s mandate has an identical 2035 deadline, the state hopes to completely phase out new gas-powered vehicle sales by 2030.
New York’s regulation will go into effect in stages in order to reach the state’s 2035 target. Thirty five percent of new cars purchased will need to be zero-emission by 2026, and 68 percent by 2030.
Across the country, lack of access to charging infrastructure remains a significant barrier for many of the nation’s low-income households and communities of color. Last week, EVolve NY, a program of the New York Power Authority, the largest state public power utility in the U.S., celebrated the completion of its 100th high-speed charging station, part of a statewide network. But electric vehicle advocates argue that prioritizing the placement of the nation’s charging stations along major highways might encourage long-distance travel but bypass many low-income urban neighborhoods. While a handful of cities are partnering with the private sector to provide streetside charging infrastructure, concerns remain about access to charging stations for those living in apartments or without parking garages.
The health risks associated with vehicular air pollution have a disproportionate impact on the state’s most disadvantaged communities — often low-income Black, Indigenous, and Latino — who are more likely to live adjacent to transit routes with heavy vehicle traffic. A report this year from the American Lung Association found that a transition to 100 percent sales of zero-emission vehicles would prevent 110,000 premature deaths, three million asthma attacks, and over 13 million workdays lost due to air pollution.
Tania Pacheco-Werner put on her walking shoes. She was halfway through her first pregnancy and had just been diagnosed with gestational diabetes. Her doctor’s advice? Stay active.
But Pacheco-Werner lives just outside Fresno. It was summer, and well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. The air outside was also thick with wildfire smoke from nearby forest fires — an increasingly common occurrence due to climate change.
The expectant mother wanted to do everything right, but was getting conflicting advice. On the one hand, she needed to walk and stay active to prevent complications from gestational diabetes; on the other, public health messaging about wildfires told her to stay inside and reduce her exposure to the smoke. So, what did she do?
Pacheco-Werner went to Walmart. Every day, her husband drove her to the nearby superstore so she could walk around and exercise indoors where the air felt cool and clean thanks to air-conditioning and filtration.
Her doctors hadn’t instructed her to come up with this solution. In fact, her doctors never advised her about the potential effects of wildfire smoke on her pregnancy. But Pacheco-Werner holds a PhD in medical sociology, is the co-director of the Central Valley Health Policy Institute, and also serves on the Board of the California Air Resources Board for the San Joaquin Valley. She had been closely following a growing body of scientific literature about the impacts of wildfire smoke on preterm birth and adverse birth outcomes.
Thanks to her own research, Pacheco-Werner knew to buy an air filter to make her home safer for herself and her baby. She knew that finding a safe space to exercise was important for a healthy pregnancy. But looking at the cloud of smoke hanging over Fresno, Pacheco-Werner suspected many other pregnant people were also in danger.
Those most at risk were likely the people living in substandard housing, a problem tied to historically exclusionary policies in the region. As research increasingly shows how wildfire smoke and poor air quality hurt pregnant people and the children they carry, cities across California are working to curb these effects through ventilation centers and weatherization programs. In Fresno, where the air quality is routinely some of the worst in the country, the city and its residents are grappling with how to keep up with the increased risk of severe wildfire smoke.
Since the beginning of the 20th century, the bulk of Fresno’s affordable housing —and, in turn, its low-income populations and many people of color — have been located on the city’s west side. Government policies codified housing discrimination in the 1930s with “residential safety maps” that aimed to help investors decide which areas were “safe investments.” They marked the “least desirable” neighborhoods in red, which became the basis for the term “redlining.” In many instances, Black people living in these redlined neighborhoods were denied home loans altogether. West Fresno was one of these redlined districts, and the homeowners there have been feeling the repercussions ever since.
The idea that present-day health problems can be traced back to redlining is not new, nor is it exclusive to wildfire smoke. In a 2020 study by the UC Berkeley–UC San Francisco Joint Medical Program, researchers found that historically redlined areas of eight cities in California — including Fresno — have “significantly higher rates of emergency department visits due to asthma.” The study analyzed several factors that might contribute to health problems in redlined areas, including emissions from highways, which are found more frequently near low-income neighborhoods. The study also briefly noted that, under racially exclusionary housing practices, Black families lacked access to well-constructed housing.
“Areas that were redlined have been shown to have houses that are of poor quality,” says Rachel Sklar, a post-doctoral researcher at the UC San Francisco’s Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment. Sklar is trying to understand the links between redlining and birth complications for pregnant people in California. She explains that, because older houses tend to have older windows, poor-quality insulation and no air conditioning (requiring inhabitants to open windows), these homes likely also harbor more air pollution, including wildfire smoke. That means residents of these homes might face higher rates of pollution exposure.
A 2005 study from the University of California Berkeley analyzed housing characteristics that may lead to “leakage” of air pollution into the home. The study found that older and smaller houses tended to have more leakage than newer and larger ones, which are more likely to have weather-stripped windows and incorporate modern building techniques. Another study, from 2001, found that there could be a tenfold difference in leakage between the homes with the best air tightness and those with the worst.
Air pollution of all types is a problem for these “leaky” homes. But as wildfire smoke increases in both severity and intensity in places like Fresno, public health messages are failing to address inequalities in housing standards. According to a report titled “Wildfire Smoke: A Guide for Public Health Professionals” compiled by the Environmental Protection Agency, “the most common advisory during a smoke episode is to stay indoors, where people can better control their environment.” However, the authors explained that the effectiveness of staying indoors as a strategy “depends on how well the building limits smoke from coming indoors.” The authors acknowledged that access to air conditioning is helpful to reduce indoor smoke, but many low-income households don’t have access to it.
A firefighter attacks on brush fire on third day of Fairview Fire in 2022. Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
“In very leaky homes,” the report found, “outdoor particles can easily infiltrate the indoor air, so guidance to stay inside may offer little protection.”
In the summer of 2018, when Pacheco-Werner was pregnant, the county of Fresno issued a health advisory about the wildfire smoke and extreme heat. In this advisory, the county advised “people with existing respiratory conditions, young children, and the elderly” to “remove themselves” from smoke. The California Department of Public Health, or CDPH, has issued similar warnings in summer months, urging people living near wildfires to “stay indoors if possible.” While the CDPH notices do state that pregnant people like Pacheco-Werner are especially vulnerable, no alternatives are given to account for variations in indoor air quality or access to filtered air.
Exposure to dangerous levels of wildfire smoke has increased significantly over the last decade. This is true for most of California and much of the western United States, but Fresno has been hit particularly hard. According to the air quality tracking website IQAir: “Smoke that travels from wildfires throughout the state often reaches the Fresno area and worsens the city’s already poor air quality, often increasing air pollution levels significantly.”
Researchers are studying the impact of Fresno’s poor air quality on children, including those exposed prenatally. The Children’s Health & Air Pollution Study is a collaboration between Stanford University and UC Berkeley that has published numerous studies assessing the effects of various sources of air pollution on children’s health, including a 2020 review of the effects of wildfire smoke. The authors cited a single day in 2018 when over 1 million school children in California had classes canceled due to wildfires. Children are particularly susceptible to smoke, they wrote, because they tend to spend more time outside, breathe more air relative to their body weight, and are still growing and developing. The researchers advised that ventilation and filtration be improved in all buildings in which children spend time. They also noted that children’s risk of health problems due to wildfire smoke doesn’t just start when they head off to school: Problems can arise while they’re still in the womb.
Researchers have recently sought to better understand the effects of wildfire smoke on pregnant people. In 2021, Stanford researchers, led by Sam Heft-Neal, published a study that linked wildfire smoke to preterm births across California. Heft-Neal and his team were able to demonstrate that every additional day of smoke exposure was linked to an increased risk of preterm birth, concluding that nearly 7,000 “excess preterm births” in California could be attributed to wildfire smoke exposure in the study’s five-year period.
Preterm birth is typically defined as birth before 37 weeks of pregnancy. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, babies born prematurely are at risk of a variety of health complications, including breathing problems, feeding difficulties, vision and hearing problems, and developmental delays. Additionally, one-third of infant deaths across the state are related to prematurity.
In the United States, the average rate of preterm births is one in 12. But there is a stark divide along racial lines, especially for pregnant people in Fresno County, home to the highest rate of preterm births in California. At least in part due to societal inequities and institutional racism, Black people in Fresno County are nearly 75 percent more likely to have a preterm birth than white people. This statistic led researchers, health experts, physicians and community members to launch the California Preterm Birth Initiative to conduct and fund research on racial disparities in birth outcomes while centering BIPOC lived experiences. According to the Fresno County Department of Public Health, in 2020, the preterm birth rate for white pregnant people in Fresno County was just under 9 percent, but the rate for Black pregnant people was approximately 13.5 percent. For Hispanic pregnant people, like Tania Pacheco-Werner, it was 10 percent, though Hispanic preterm births make up the highest total number in Fresno County, at 821 reflecting the area’s large Hispanic population. Of the total 1,378 preterm births in Fresno County in 2020, 59.5 percent of them were Hispanic.
Linking preterm birth rates to wildfire smoke exposure is complicated, Kendalyn Mack-Franklin of the California Preterm Birth Initiative explains. People of color in Fresno have reported a number of variables that contribute to their high rates of preterm birth, from lack of access to prenatal care, to racism within medical facilities. Environmental exposure likely played a role before the significant increase in wildfire smoke too, since redlined neighborhoods in Fresno are closer to freeways and pollution-emitting industrial zones.
“Preterm birth has a lot of confounding variables,” Mack-Franklin says. “It’s very difficult to say that it’s for one particular reason, unless that reason is
In 2019, the California Legislature approved the Wildfire Smoke Clean Air Centers for Vulnerable Populations Incentive Pilot Program. The program, administered by the California Air Resources Board, will build a system of clean air centers by funding ventilation system upgrades in schools, community centers, senior centers, sports centers and libraries. Funding will be divided between California’s three air quality districts (Bay Area Air Quality Management District, San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District and South Coast Air Quality Management District) and the California Air Pollution Control Officers Association which oversees all 35 local air quality agencies across the state. In the San Joaquin Valley District, applications for funding opened on Aug. 17.
Clean air centers are one way to tackle the problem of indoor air quality, but to Rachel Sklar, housing is still at the center of smoke’s disproportionate effects on low-income people of color. “The problem is that people have no choice but to live in poorly maintained homes,” she sats.
Sklar adds that while coastal cities like those in the Bay Area might routinely have better air quality than inland regions, low-income residents of those cities are being pushed inward to places like Fresno as their housing costs become untenable. In her most recent paper, published Aug. 28 in the International Journal of Gynecology & Obstetrics, Sklar calls for housing policy reform, writing, “The rapid population growth in inland areas with high fire risks, as well as the disproportionate share of low-income black and Hispanic people that are migrating to these areas and experiencing the downstream health effects of living in those areas must be addressed.”
While redlining and residential safety maps may technically be relics of the past, Sklar notes that today’s housing crisis is pushing low-income people to “sub-optimal living situations where their health is going to be affected.”
“Who would think that urban housing policy would have anything to do with preterm birth rates?” says Sklar. “Well, you wouldn’t, unless you connect the dots.”
The remains of a home that burned are left abandoned on July 04, 2022 in Fresno, California.
Spencer Platt / Getty Images
Air quality districts around the state are starting to realize the importance of healthy air in homes and have piloted a variety of incentives to find solutions, though improvements in air quality are often one of many benefits of energy-focused programs. The Fresno Economic Opportunities Commission has a weatherization program aimed at helping homeowners and renters cut down on energy costs and prepare their homes for extreme weather by weather-stripping doors, caulking windows and gaps, insulating exterior walls, and repairing and replacement ducts. “Of the residents served within the past year, 56 percent lived in homes 50 years or older,” says Fresno EOC Energy Manager Matt Contrestano. “In addition, almost 23 percent of the homes assessed were deferred services due to the condition of the home including structural, electrical, plumbing, sewage and water leaks or clutter and pest infestation issues.”
In 2021, Fresno EOC’s Transform Fresno project, which focuses on downtown, Chinatown, and southwest corners of Fresno, provided energy-efficient upgrades to 12 homes; in 2020, they reached 34 homes. According to Contrestano, these programs help residents by reducing utility bills, maximizing energy efficiency, and allowing each resident to live in a healthier and more comfortable environment.
In 2021, Santa Barbara County Air Pollution Control District launched a program to give hundreds of free air purifiers to residents in the towns of Guadalupe and Casmalia. This year, the San Joaquin Valley District followed suit, approving a similar program to give 1,500 families free in-home air purifiers to mitigate the in-home risks of wildfire smoke exposure.
Despite the grueling summer months, Pacheco-Werner had a healthy pregnancy and carried her baby to full term. But her son, now 4 years old, has developed asthma, which has been difficult for Pachecho-Werner’s family to manage. There’s no way to know if his asthma is related to the wildfire smoke his mother breathed in when he was growing in her womb.
This past spring, Pacheco-Werner became pregnant again, and she worried that she’d have to endure another summer of hot, smoky weather. So far, the pollution has been moderate, but Pacheco-Werner ended up facing another challenge: Her second baby was born preterm, at 36 weeks. Although she and the newborn are recovering well, Pacheco-Werner is concerned he too will develop asthma like his brother.
Even so, Pacheco-Werner is well aware of the privilege that her fluent English and health insurance afford her. But as a Mexican immigrant who spent much of her life in Fresno’s “most impacted neighborhoods,” she continues to use her personal experiences to inform her research on the relationships between neighborhoods and health, fighting for every Californian to have equal access to clean air.
“When we don’t pay attention to inequality,” she says, “it affects us all.”
This year’s midterm elections will decide the direction of a massive legislative package meant to tackle the nation’s agricultural problems. Republican Senate and House members are already vowing they won’t pack it with climate “buzzwords.”
Roughly every five years, lawmakers pass The Farm Bill, a spending bill that addresses the agriculture industry, food systems, nutrition programs, and more. This legislation is up for reauthorization next year. The political fighting comes on the heels of both the recently passed Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law including billions of dollars for climate provisions.
John Boozman, a Republican Senator from Arkansas who is a high-ranking member of the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry, is among a growing number of Republicans who have said they will not allow additional climate provisions into the upcoming Farm Bill. If Republicans win back the House this November, which is still a possible outcome despite tightening Democratic races across the country, GOP members will be in control of drafting next year’s Farm Bill.
“In their zeal to pass their reckless tax-and-spend agenda, they (Democrats) have undermined one of the last successful bipartisan processes in the Senate,” said Boozman in a Senate floor hearing this past August. Boozman said the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act without bipartisan support threatens the future of the Farm Bill, a generally bipartisan omnibus bill. The next bill needs to be authorized before September 2023.
Over a dozen members of the House Agriculture Committee, which steers the Farm Bill draft process, are up for reelection this November. For example, Abigail Spanberger, a Virginia Congresswoman whose district is near the nation’s capital, and a committee member and subcommittee chair, currently faces a contested election in her state, with inflation’s impact on farming communities a key point in the race. Glenn Thompson, a Congressman who represents a western Pennsylvania district, is slated to be the Chair of the House Agriculture Committee if Republicans win the House. After the passage of the historic climate bill this August, the Pennsylvania Republican said the Inflation Reduction Act “only complicates the pathway to a Farm Bill and creates even greater uncertainty for farmers, ranchers, and rural communities.”
Thompson has expressed interest in conservation efforts in the past, but in a September hearing, he said he won’t allow unnecessary climate items into next year’s bill.
“I will not sit idly by as we let decades of real bipartisan progress be turned on its head to satisfy people that at their core think agriculture is a blight on the landscape,” Thompson said in the hearing. “I have been leaning into the climate discussion, but I will not have us suddenly incorporate buzzwords like regenerative agriculture into the Farm Bill or overemphasize climate.”
Ahead of the November elections, House Republicans have already released insight into their priorities for this upcoming legislation. The Republican Study Committee, whose members make up 80 percent of all Republican members of Congress, released its draft budget in July. This draft document outlines a plan that completely defunds federal programs that support conservation efforts, as well as slashes federal food stamp and crop insurance programs. The draft document heralds the preliminary budget as “ undeniably pro-farmer.”
As Farm Bill debates continue, a group of over 150 progressive, agriculture, and environmental groups, from the nation’s largest federation of labor unions to the Sierra Club environmental group, have urged President Joe Biden to add climate reforms in the upcoming legislative package. In a letter to Biden, organizations urged the President to pass a Farm Bill that would help mend economic and racial divides in the industry, increase access to nutrition, support fair labor conditions in farming communities labor conditions, as well as tackle the climate crisis with a focus on agriculture.
Sarah Carden, policy advocate for Farm Action, a progressive agriculture advocacy nonprofit that signed the letter, said that no farmer will deny the industry has been plagued by increased extreme weather events and the Farm Bill needs to address climate change as much as it does other problems in the industry. She said the organization has urged federal agencies to push more funding into programs that help conservation efforts, promote soil health, and mandate the use of climate-smart solutions, instead of contributing to a band-aid funding cycle.
“Farmers who are receiving federal support in the wake of increased extreme weather events and disasters should be practicing practices that contribute to resiliency,” Carden told Grist.
Carden said that the United States Department of Agriculture, or USDA, has created more climate-focused solutions in recent years, such as the recently announced Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities which directs $3 billion to small growers into the supply chain, but it’s important that sustainable solutions are written into the Farm Bill this upcoming cycle as administration changes could upend individual agency efforts.
Since its creation in the 1930s, the Farm Bill has provided direct, federal funding to farmers to address the evolving agricultural industry, from land management to economic development. What was created as a way to infuse cash into an industry decimated by the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, by 1973 the farm bill turned into a massive set of legislation that addresses everything from soil erosion to federal food stamp programs.
Farmers and growers need to address the changing climate, said Margaret Krome, the policy program director for Wisconsin and Midwest agriculture nonprofit research group Michael Fields Agricultural Institute. Krome said the industry is running out of time to address ongoing problems. “We have got climate change at our doorstep,” she said.
Krome, who works with state and federal officials on legislation about agriculture, said the Farm Bill has always been a way to have farmers focus on their current needs. As discussions and draft legislation begin, she said three issues are likely to be at the top of the debates; climate change, the future of farming and addressing historic racial injustices in the industry, and the intersection of nutrition and agriculture.
With increasing polarization in politics and the upcoming midterm elections, she said it is important for those working on the bill to remember that farming touches everyone in the country and should, hopefully, remain bipartisan. Despite political differences at the state level across the country, a nonpartisan coalition of state agriculture department officials recently issued a letter declaring their desire for the Farm Bill to include increased disaster relief, nutrition programs, and subsidies for regional food production.
As farming adapts to warming crops and increased droughts, federal agencies are increasing funding and focusing on addressing the industry’s role in spurring a warming world. According to the USDA, the nation’s agriculture sector accounted for 11 percent of the country’s carbon emissions in 2020.
Congressman David Scott of Georgia, center, speaks at a press conference in 2009. Scott is currently seeking re-election and is the Chair of the House Committee on Agriculture.
Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images
The Farm Bill already includes language outlining two top USDA environmentally focused programs, the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, or EQIP, and the Conservation Stewardship Program. Both of these programs are normally funded through the Farm Bill, but the Inflation Reduction Act added billions of funding to them, with $8.45 billion for EQIP and $3.25 billion for the conservation program. The infusion was praised by environmental groups and Democrats who hope the increased funding will help farmers implement climate-smart solutions like cover crops to help to increase crop resiliency or create wildlife habitats on farmland.
Key agricultural leaders on Capitol Hill also predict that, alongside the addition of climate provisions, fights over Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, will stall next year’s Farm Bill. In both 2014 and 2018, efforts from House GOP members to cut SNAP funding slowed the bill’s passage. Earlier this year, Georgia Democratic Congressman David Scott, who is currently seeking re-election and is the Chair of the House Committee on Agriculture and represents a district just outside of Atlanta, warned that fights over SNAP could derail Farm Bill conservations. Given the Biden administration’s recent announcement of plans to end hunger by 2030, debates over nutrition funding are likely to flare up.
The fight will boil down to the program’s funding as from 2024 to 2028, SNAP is estimated to cost roughly $531 billion, an increase caused by droves of new users coming to the program due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In comparison, all nutritional programs, not just SNAP, were estimated to cost $326 billion in the 2018 Farm Bill.
Recently passed landmark climate legislation may also interfere with what makes it into the Farm Bill, as Conservative House and Senate members have said funding from the Inflation Reduction Act could decrease the budget for climate proposals inside the Farm Bill.
When dealing with the life cycle of plastic, hundreds of solutions await, from alternative bioplastics that might be able to degrade themselves through the magic of fungus, to complex chemical recycling that can break plastics down to become other petroleum products or to be rebuilt good as new
But as promising as chemical recycling and next-generation plastics may sound, experts also say some of the most realistic solutions to plastic pollution involve eliminating it from packaging as much as possible.
Decision-makers are asking: How can manufacturers design their plastic packaging to be recycled more easily after consumers are done with it? Should packaging all be the same color of plastic to avoid dye-based contamination in recycling processes? Could markers on different types of plastic help imaging robots at sorting facilities do their jobs better when diverting containers by type? Which products could avoid using plastic altogether?
Currently, the vast majority of plastic recycling is done by mechanical methods. First, post-consumer plastics are divided by number; for example, the PET plastic or polyethylene terephthalate commonly used for beverage bottles needs to be separated from the HDPE plastic (high-density polyethylene) that’s often used for laundry detergent containers. Each group is then often shredded and melted into pellets that can get remelted and formed into new packaging. Or different plastics can be repurposed into boards for outdoor decks or processed into fibers for carpets and clothing.
But because heat can degrade the polymer chains (strings of repeating molecules) in plastic, there are limits to the number of times plastic can be “recycled” in the truest sense of being made into a new product.
With those limitations in mind, many people, from those working for the largest oil and chemical manufacturers (think BP and Dow) down to individual entrepreneurs, are experimenting with chemical recycling as a potential way to recycle even more plastic. Less than 10 percent of the stuff actually gets recycled, but chemical recycling offers the promise of rebuilding the molecule chains that are broken down with heat, as well as the possibility of converting plastics into fuels and other compounds.
Whether some of the newer chemical recycling proposals will actually succeed is a question. Common constraints include the high costs of building and powering processing facilities, the purchase of expensive chemicals, and the challenge of reliably sourcing materials uncontaminated with food scraps, dyes, or other types of plastic or garbage. Other concerns center on the greenhouse gas emissions of the chemical recycling process and, in the case of turning plastics into fuels, burning the end products, and whether those climate costs are less than those caused by creating virgin plastic.
Meanwhile, innovators of all ages are developing plastic alternatives made from things like fish skin, vegetable starches and other biodegradable substances that offer the promise of rapid decomposition when disposed of properly, a sharp contrast with the thousands of years that traditional plastics may linger in the environment.
As people figure out whether chemical recycling or plastic alternatives can prevent plastic pollution — which has already tainted air, water, and land around the globe — local governments around the country are still getting a grasp on the recycling options that already exist.
Washington state’s wakeup call came about five years ago when China stopped accepting highly contaminated bales of recycled materials from around the world. Washington lawmakers, responding to the loss of a market that took upwards of 60 percent of the state’s recycled materials, created the Recycling Development Center in 2019. Lawmakers instructed the state Department of Ecology, via the new center, to help create domestic markets for the state’s recyclable materials.
Washington was on course to lead the way in tackling big recycling problems surrounding plastics and other materials, but the Recycling Development Center got off to a slow start as the COVID-19 pandemic caused agencies to shift to remote work and Governor Jay Inslee froze unnecessary hiring. The center’s 14-member advisory board, made up of scientists, manufacturers, environmentalists and more, started meeting virtually in 2020, later offering grants to pilot recycling projects and funding studies that identified recycling options and issues.
Presort Lead Jameel Henricksen, right, and Sorter Jerome Thomas remove plastic bags at Waste Management’s SMaRT Center in Spokane, Wash., on Wednesday, April 10, 2013. Young Kwak / Inlander
“We had resources from the Legislature that we couldn’t use to hire a consultant, so we set up a little grant program for local governments and universities,” says Kara Steward, director of the Recycling Development Center.
Recently, the center has been able to support business accelerator competitions, such as NextCycle Washington, which aims to identify innovative ideas that can create a circular economy for materials like plastic. People with promising ideas will get help pitching to investors and connecting with groups that have far deeper pockets than a state program, Steward says.
“We’re really excited because this is not the kind of thing the Department of Ecology does,” Steward says. “We’re about keeping human health and the environment clean, and I’m over here going, ‘But wait, I want to give money to businesses!’ Everybody around me is like, ‘You can’t do that.’ ‘Yeah, actually, I think I can.’”
New ideas that focus on solutions outside of the recycling system are also welcomed, as packaging innovations may better reduce the waste we create.
“We can’t recycle our way out of the plastic problem,” Steward says. “We’ve recycled 8 percent of the plastic manufactured since the beginning of plastic. We’ve got to think outside the box, do new things, and NextCycle Washington is a great way to try and give a boost to those innovations that just need a little bit of help.”
In a 2021 report funded by the Recycling Development Center, research professor Karl Englund and a civil and environmental engineering team at Washington State University outlined existing chemical and thermal recycling options for plastic — such as heat-intensive solutions like pyrolysis and gasification, or catalyst-based solutions like glycolysis — and assessed their viability to operate in the Pacific Northwest.
Chemical recycling can create new plastics, syngas (made from hydrogen and carbon monoxide from wood, plastics or other sources), bio oils, and other products.
The report found there could be enough post-consumer plastics in either eastern Washington or the Puget Sound region to support a chemical recycler on either side of the state if consumer recycling rates were to increase significantly — from a current rate of about 8 percent to 50 percent. But the report also notes that the costs to open a new facility can be prohibitive, especially as the market prices for end products can vary.
“There is a definite need to secure investment dollars to make any recycling process a success,” the report states. “Having investors that are educated and informed about the recycling supply chain is a must for them to be comfortable to invest in what can be a somewhat risky venture. Without sufficient investment management, smaller companies and start-ups will have a difficult time securing investments and mitigating risks.”
The research team also compiled a database of hundreds of existing recyclers. Though it was updated in spring 2022, the list could already be updated with 100 new companies trying to work on plastic recycling, Englund says. Maintaining a reliable list is a challenge, as companies often make a big splash when they announce their promising new recycling process, but some fade away if their process doesn’t pencil out or get funding, Englund says.
Massive multinational companies such as Dow or BASF, which make additives that help in the more popular mechanical recycling processes, are more likely to stick around, as their products are readily available and backed with more finances, Englund explains.
Even when new facilities do open, they don’t always work as intended. One company in recent years offered Boise, Idaho, the ability to recycle its plastic films like bags and peel-back container tops into diesel fuel, but much of what was collected ultimately ended up getting burned for energy rather than converted to fuel, Reuters reported last year. The company said the switch was due to high levels of contamination in Boise’s recycling stream, but Reuters noted that multiple other “advanced recycling” projects around the world had also failed or been significantly delayed in recent years, largely due to high costs.
However, Englund says that while many news outlets may focus on the recycling failures, scientists and businesses are making significant progress to advance chemical recycling.
“The guys in the plastics world are busting their butt to make this happen,” Englund says. “Do we all need to do more? Yeah. But at least we’re taking steps in the right direction, and I am cautiously optimistic.”
New alternatives need to be assessed to ensure they’re a better option than continuing to churn out new plastic.
For example, say that a store switches to glass bottles that can be returned for a deposit, washed, refilled and put back on the shelf. Does the weight of transporting those glass containers in vehicles contribute to worse gas mileage and a larger carbon footprint than lightweight, recyclable plastic containers? How much water is needed to clean the containers versus produce new ones?
For advanced recycling, companies have to calculate whether the energy needed to chemically break down and rebuild plastics is higher than the greenhouse gas emissions of creating new plastics.
Upstream, packaging design decisions can also help make products more recyclable.
Take a plastic container that holds bleach wipes. If the body of the container is white, the top of the container is another color, and the label is printed directly onto the plastic, those dyes can “contaminate” the process when recyclers are trying to achieve one homogenous color, Englund says.
“When we develop that plastic at the very beginning, we’ve got to look and say, ‘How can I get this back to this form at the end of its life?’” Englund says.
A better design for that container of wipes might be as simple as using one color for the entire container and printing the label on paper, which is far easier to remove before the chemical recycling process and also could be separately recycled, he says.
Englund also wonders whether other design features such as symbols imprinted with infrared ink could help materials recovery facilities more easily sort the different materials.
There may also need to be changes on the consumer side, he says, as a lot of design is based around consumer preferences for package appearance.
“How do we as a society learn to accept things not in a million different colors [with] all these cool things added to it?” Englund asks. “You know, hey, it’s just milk.”
Some states are helping tip the scale in favor of circular systems by requiring higher percentages of post-consumer recycled materials in packaging in coming years. Some are also passing “extended producer responsibility” rules that require manufacturers to pay for the recycling of their products at the end of their life cycle. Those policies could make some plastic recycling methods pencil out, as manufacturers will be more inclined to buy the recycled products to meet state mandates.
Western Washington University freshman Anna Armstrong, 18, on campus Tuesday morning Sept. 20, 2022, in Bellingham, Wash. Armstrong is planning to major in environmental science and minor in environmental justice. Paul Conrad / InvestigateWest
Amazingly, you don’t need to work in a multimillion-dollar lab backed by a massive corporation to design a plastic alternative.
For 18-year-old Anna Armstrong, the desire to help solve the world’s plastic problem started particularly young. Early in her freshman and sophomore science classes at Ferris High School in Spokane, Armstrong studied the potential of fungus to enhance composting. As she saw how difficult it was to compost bioplastics that are already available in the grocery store, she wondered if she could invent an alternative.
She researched some of the options being explored, such as using the skin of invasive fish species to make bioplastics, which tackles two environmental problems at once. But working with smelly fish skins wasn’t exactly appealing.
Her compost work led her to a specific fungus, Aspergillus oryzae, and she wondered if it could be used to break down the types of plant starch-based plastics, such as compostable trash can liners, that are becoming more popular in the plastic-alternatives field.
“Aspergillus oryzae is found in Asia a lot of the time in food management because it is used for fermenting rice,” Armstrong says. “I was looking into what it does, and it kind of links to the starch and starts to eat away at it, which helps the fermentation process. So I cross applied that to plastic degradation to see how I could fix a separate problem.”
During the last two years of her high school biomedical innovation classes — much of the time working remotely due to the pandemic — she researched sustainable sources for arrowroot powder, vinegar and vegetable glycerin that could create thin sheets of plastic similar to those found wrapped around products on store shelves, and set to work creating her own prototypes.
“I tried probably 30 or 40 recipes before I actually landed on one that I could use,” Armstrong says. “The ratios can be pretty tricky.”
She also tried to adjust her methods to make the prototypes more transparent and with as few visible imperfections as possible, because consumers can be picky.
Armstrong took her bioplastic to the Eastern Washington Regional Science and Engineering Fair, where she took first place for her invention and went on to compete virtually in the International Science and Engineering Fair in Atlanta, Georgia, where she placed fourth in the world in the environmental engineering category this year. Judges there helped her talk through how to reduce water usage when creating the bioplastic film and coached her on how to describe her work.
This fall, she’s starting college at Western Washington University, where she plans to major in environmental science and minor in environmental justice. Ultimately, she wants to get her PhD in mycology (the study of fungi, such as mushrooms) as she continues developing her product, which she hopes to see on store shelves one day.
“I want to prove that it isn’t impossible to make a plastic that actually works and is environmentally friendly,” Armstrong says. “If I can do it at 17, then scientists who have been working forever in the environmental engineering field should be capable of making it with years of experience.”
Part of her passion also stems from growing up with fears of how climate change will impact the planet in her lifetime. She says scientists are trying everything they can to get the world to heed their warnings, but it doesn’t seem like anyone is taking action.
“I really want to live in a world [where] I don’t have to worry about what the future generations can look like, and not even future generations of humans, I’m talking about all the flora and fauna that lives in the world and depends on the environment around us,” Armstrong says. “Fear isn’t an excuse to be complacent. Because other people haven’t done it doesn’t mean you can’t.”
InvestigateWest (invw.org) is an independent news nonprofit dedicated to investigative journalism in the Pacific Northwest. Visit invw.org/newsletters to sign up for weekly updates. This story was made possible with support from the Sustainable Path Foundation.
This storywas originally published by The Guardian and is reproduced here as part of theClimate Deskcollaboration.
More than 14,000 miles of new oil pipelines are under development around the world, a distance equivalent to almost twice the Earth’s diameter, a report has revealed. The projects, led by the U.S., Russia, China, and India, are “dramatically at odds with plans to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius or 2 degrees Celsius,” the researchers said.
The oil pumped through the pipelines would produce at least 5 billion tons of CO2 a year if completed, equivalent to the emissions of the U.S., the world’s second largest polluter. About 40 percent of the pipelines are already under construction, with the rest in planning. Global carbon emissions must drop by 50 percent by 2030 to keep on track with internationally agreed targets for limiting global heating.
The developers of 6000 miles of pipelines under construction stand to lose up to $75 billion if action on the climate crisis prevents the new pipelines being fully used, according to the analysts at Global Energy Monitor who produced the report.
Russia, which is facing oil and gas boycotts from the west over the war in Ukraine and wants to increase exports to India and China, is developing around 1200 miles of new pipelines.
Regionally, sub-Saharan Africa is leading the world in pipeline development, with around 1200 of oil pipelines already under construction and around an additional 2700 miles proposed. The projects include the controversial East African crude oil pipeline, which will transport oil drilled from a national park in Uganda to an export terminal on the coast of Tanzania.
“For governments endorsing these new pipelines, the report shows an almost deliberate failure to meet climate goals,” said Baird Langenbrunner at Global Energy Monitor. “Despite climate targets threatening to render fossil fuel infrastructure as stranded assets, the world’s biggest consumers of fossil fuels, led by the U.S. and China, are doubling down on oil pipeline expansion.”
The oil industry enjoyed record profits in the last year, the report said, and “is using this moment of chaos and crisis to push ahead with massive expansions of oil pipeline networks”.
The UN secretary-general, António Guterres, told world leaders gathered in New York on Wednesday: “The fossil fuel industry is killing us, and leaders are out of step with their people, who are crying out for urgent climate action.”
The Guardian revealed in May that the world’s biggest fossil fuel firms are planning scores of “carbon bomb” oil and gas projects that would drive the climate past the temperature targets with catastrophic global impacts. In May 2021, the International Energy Agency said new oil and gas fields were incompatible with the world remaining within relatively safe limits of global heating.
The new report found that the length of pipeline in construction has more than doubled compared with Global Energy Monitor’s assessment in 2019, while the length of proposed pipeline has roughly halved.
The U.S. is the world leader for pipelines in development. “A major push to increase crude oil export capacity out of the Permian basin [in Texas and New Mexico] along the Gulf coast is arguably a make-or-break moment for the industry, which is gradually losing its social license to build new projects as the impacts of the climate crisis become more severe,” the report said.
India is the leader for pipelines under construction, including the around 1000 mile long Paradip Numaligarh crude pipeline in the north-east of the country, which is expected to come online in late 2024.
Russia is aiming to expand its oil exports along the Northern Sea Route, which is becoming more accessible as global heating melts Arctic sea ice. The proposed Vostok oil pipeline is also around 1000 miles long.
Data on the capacity of the new pipelines was only available for two-thirds of the pipelines in the report, but these would carry 30 billion barrels a day for decades if they continued operating to the end of their typical lifetimes. When burned, this oil would produce 4.6 billion tons of CO2 annually. The Global Energy Monitor analysis did not include projects that had failed to advance its development in the last two years, classifying these separately as shelved.
California regulators voted unanimously last week to develop new rules that would effectively ban the sale of natural gas-powered heating and hot water systems, a first-in-the-nation commitment. The California Air Resources Board, or CARB, an agency that oversees the state’s climate targets and regulates pollution, passed the measure on Thursday as part of a larger plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions and comply with federal air quality targets.
Beginning in 2030, homeowners in California looking to replace their furnace or hot-water heater will only be able to purchase zero-emission appliances. Regulators expect this to primarily mean a switch to heat pumps — very efficient electric devices that can both heat and cool homes — as well as heat pump water heaters.
It will be the first legal mandate in the country designed to purge natural gas from existing buildings — in contrast with past policies aimed at stopping new developments from using the fuel.
“We are celebrating this historic win as California becomes the first state to end the sale of polluting fossil fuel appliances,” said Leah Louise-Prescott, a senior associate at the clean energy think tank RMI. “California’s leadership sets a clear example for other states to follow in their transition to a healthy, all-electric future.”
The use of fossil fuels in homes for space and water heating, drying clothes, and cooking food is responsible for about 10 percent of U.S. carbon emissions. California municipalities have been at the vanguard of tackling these emissions for several years now, beginning in 2019 when the city of Berkeley passed an ordinance preventing new developments from hooking up to the gas system. Cities around the state and across the country have since followed with similar policies, including Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, and, most recently, Chicago.
California has also led the way at the state level. Last year it adopted a landmark building code change that strongly encourages all new buildings in the state to forgo gas hookups. And earlier this month, the Golden State’s utility board took another pioneering step to end subsidies for gas line extensions to new buildings. In many states, utilities do not charge new customers the full cost of extending a gas line to their building — instead incorporating those costs into rates and spreading them across their customer base.
“By eliminating these subsidies, we eliminate a financial incentive that is now a perverse incentive,” Clifford Rechtschaffen, one of California’s utility commissioners, said at the time. “An incentive for expanding the gas system to serve new homes and commercial facilities as opposed to building those facilities completely electric.”
But restricting gas in new buildings only stops the problem from getting worse — it doesn’t do anything to move California closer to its goal of cutting emissions to net-zero by 2045. Encouraging existing homes to replace gas heating appliances with heat pumps will not only cut emissions in the winter. It could also cut peak energy demand during heat waves, reducing the risk of electricity shutoffs, since these systems are typically more efficient than stand-alone air conditioners.
Amy Turner, a senior fellow at Columbia Law School’s Cities Climate Law Initiative, said that there are a range of local policies that address emissions and energy use from existing buildings around the country, but they don’t target gas specifically. For example, New York City’s local law 97 requires buildings to ratchet down their emissions over time. “Some building owners may choose to switch out gas for electricity in order to comply, but they could also comply by reducing emissions or energy use in other ways,” said Turner. A much-celebrated plan in Ithaca, New York to electrify all of the city’s buildings by 2030 relies on incentives and ultimately will require voluntary participation from building owners.
Policies to ban gas in buildings have been fiercely opposed by the natural gas industry, which has successfully lobbied for many Republican-led states to prohibit municipalities from restricting gas use. The American Gas Association, an industry group, has its own plan to cut emissions that relies heavily on switching to lower-carbon fuels like biogas derived from waste.
Thursday’s vote was not solely motivated by California’s climate goals. Gas-powered appliances are also a significant source of air pollution. One study published last year found that pollution from residential buildings in the U.S. now harms more people than that of power plants; it caused nearly 6,000 premature deaths in 2017 alone. According to CARB, gas appliances in California emit four times the amount of nitrogen oxide, or NOx, pollution as the state’s electric utilities, and nearly two-thirds the NOx emissions from cars. NOx pollution is a precursor to smog, and exposure to NOx can lead to the development of asthma or aggravate existing respiratory conditions.
In August, the Sierra Club and 25 other environmental groups petitioned the Environmental Protection Agency to adopt NOx performance standards for furnaces and water heaters — a very similar proposal to the one CARB just approved, but at the national level. At the time, the American Gas Association issued a statement saying such a measure would “impose undue burdens on consumers at every step of the process, including our most vulnerable communities.”
But at least in California, funding is in place to relieve that burden. The state’s most recent budget, passed in June, includes $1.4 billion to decarbonize buildings, with most of the funding earmarked for low-income families.
Brandon Dawson, the director of Sierra Club California, said the new rules combined with this funding “can ensure not only emissions reductions but also access to electric appliances for all Californians.”
To get the United States running on clean energy will require a lot of metal: A single electric vehicle battery pack could contain around 8 kilograms of lithium, 14 kilograms of cobalt, and 35 kilograms of nickel. A wind turbine can contain more than 4 tons of copper.
Over the next several decades, global demand for these “critical minerals,” a group that includes lithium, cobalt, nickel, and copper, is projected to increase by 400-600 percent driven by a surge in manufacturing of renewable technologies. For some metals like lithium and graphite, it could skyrocket by as much as 4,000 percent.
China dominates this global market, processing 50-70 percent of the world’s lithium and cobalt. But the Biden administration has taken a hard line against providing tax breaks to manufacturers who source metals from countries without free trade agreements with the U.S. That means that developers of technologies like electric vehicles and wind turbines need to find new supply streams – and fast.
But the process of extracting metal and mineral deposits from the earth, known as hardrock mining, has a reputation for contaminating local watersheds and causing irreparable environmental damage. That’s why domestic mining projects often encounter legal challenges and protests when they are initially proposed.
“It’s very hard to open up a mine in the United States. No one wants a mine in their backyard,” said Jordy Lee, a program manager at the Payne Institute for Public Policy at the Colorado School of Mines. “It’s not clear how the U.S. is supposed to mine and produce all these minerals when there’s so much pushback against the industry.”
Domestic mining is governed by a 150-year old law that critics characterize as a relic of the Wild West Era. Unlike laws regulating other extractive industries like oil and gas, the General Mining Law of 1872 doesn’t require companies to pay federal royalties on the resources they extract from public lands. A patchwork of more recent legislation regulates the environmental impacts of mining, but since it is distributed across multiple federal agencies, it can take years before a project gets approved. The Biden administration has recently passed a batch of bills to incentivize the buildout of a domestic supply chain to mine and process the minerals necessary for weaning the country off fossil fuels.
Now, Senator Joe Manchin, Democrat of West Virginia, is proposing legislation that would speed up permitting for major energy and infrastructure projects, including mining. The National Mining Association has said that the bill would help hardrock mining companies meet rising demand by providing some certainty that their projects will get greenlighted.
Environmental advocates and community groups whose land risks destruction from proposed projects see it differently. Mining activity has left deep scars across the American West, where the Environmental Protection Agency estimates that 40 percent of watersheds have been contaminated by hardrock mines. This environmental degradation has had particularly severe consequences for indigenous communities because many live close to the country’s largest deposits of nickel, lithium, cobalt, and copper.
The history of mining in the United States is inextricably linked to the history of westward expansion. The General Mining Law of 1872, inked 150 years ago by President Ulysses S. Grant, proclaimed mineral extraction to be the highest and best use of U.S. public lands, and encouraged waves of settlers to move West, displacing indigenous people from their native lands.
A century later, the Cold War spawned another mining boom, as uranium was needed for nuclear weapons. Government incentives helped develop mining from an industry of pickaxes and shovels to one that employed massive machinery to blast through mountaintops and scrape the surface of the earth. At the time, the only law governing mining was the one Grant had signed in 1872, and companies were allowed to abandon sites without cleaning up the toxic by-products they left behind. The consequences of this unregulated activity were disastrous: More than 22,000 abandoned hardrock mines around the country still pose an environmental hazard to the surrounding area.
A train carts copper ore out of mines in Ducktown, Tennessee in 1939.
Wolcott, Marion Post
After a national environmental movement swept through the nation in the 1960s, President Richard Nixon signed a series of laws that changed how the mining industry is regulated, including the Clean Water Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, and the Endangered Species Act. Regulations passed in the 1970s mandated that companies clean up project sites after they finished. But by the time these measures were implemented, demand for critical minerals had waned as the Cold War came to a close. When the tech boom started in the late 1990s, companies needing lithium and other metals for cell phone batteries and high-speed cables sourced them from other parts of the world. As countries like China and Chile built out their hardrock mining industries, the U.S. focused on developing other industries, like oil and gas.
“We used to be the largest lithium producer in the world and now we’re one percent of it,” said Ben Steinberg, a former Department of Energy official who represents the mining industry at the public relations firm Venn Strategies in Washington, D.C.. “So the knowledge about how mining operates, and what its value is to the country, is largely lost.” This is all the more challenging, Steinberg said, because many of the people who live near new extraction projects are against mining at the very moment when the country suddenly needs a lot more of it.
“It’s a big threat,” said Joe Kennedy, a Western Shoshone activist who spoke to Grist after a day of lobbying against the mining industry in Washington, D.C. His tribe’s lands, which stretch across parts of Nevada, California, Idaho, and Utah, have been contaminated by uranium extraction and open pit gold mining. Today, numerous companies are looking to open new gold and lithium mines in the region. “We’re playing with fire, and we’re probably going to get burned.”
The question of how much the U.S. should develop its hardrock mining sector is hotly contested. The impact of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on the European economy has highlighted the risk of relying too heavily on foreign nations for critical resources. Numerous environmental organizations have pointed out that the development of a circular economy in which critical minerals are recycled rather than continually extracted could decrease the country’s need for mining. The environmental watchdog Earthworks estimates that recycling has the potential to reduce demand by approximately 25 percent for lithium, 35 percent for cobalt and nickel, and 55 percent for copper by 2040. But more recycling isn’t likely to meet the demands for critical minerals anytime soon.
“This isn’t the choice of yes or no for the need for minerals that come from the ground,” said Steinberg. “This should be a conversation about how.”
Both Lee and Steinberg think it’s possible to mine for critical metals sustainably with the consent of locals, and also avoid repeating the mistakes of the twentieth century. But doing so will require Congress to pass stronger laws and standards.
That’s why the Biden administration recently convened an interagency working group on mining reform, which has been directed to come up with recommendations for creating new environmental standards and defining procedures for incorporating local recommendations.
But some people living near proposed project sites have argued that certain parts of the country are simply too culturally precious to mine. Take Chi’chil Biłdagoteel (known in English as Oak Flat), a forested region of southeast Arizona where mining giants Rio Tinto and BHP want to build a copper mine on land sacred to members of Western Apache and Yavapai tribes. The companies hope to extract the metal material by blasting through underground ore deposits, a method that could create a crater up to two miles wide and 1,000 feet deep. Tribal members and their allies have been fighting the project for nearly two years in federal court.
In Washington, members of the the San Carlos Apache Nation protest a proposed copper mine on their native land.
Win McNamee / Getty
“There are different types of sustainable mining, and one of those is the actual process of choosing where,” said Blaine Miller-McFeeley, a senior legislative representative at Earthjustice. “That is just as important as choosing how.” He called the bill Manchin is pushing in Congress “a sellout to industry” because it would enable mining companies to force through a project without taking concerns of the community into account, undermining the administration’s purported goal of giving locals a say in the permitting process.
Kennedy of the Western Shoshone tribe said that after witnessing decades of biodiversity loss and water contamination on his tribe’s land at the hands of mining companies, he is skeptical that domestic hardrock mining will become a truly sustainable industry.
“There would have to be a lot of built trust,” Kennedy said. “I mean, the Western Shoshone should be the ones to say yes or no to this type of project because it is Western Shoshone territory. It is Shoshone land, and that really is the bottom line.”
To Steinberg, Manchin’s bill is a “step in the right direction,” because it would streamline an outdated permitting process, but he agreed that there are certain places that should be off limits.
“We have the Grand Canyon. Probably shouldn’t mine in the Grand Canyon,” Steinberg said. “But we can’t plan millions of years of geology, and earth’s deposits are where they are, so we need a process and place for the industry and governments and the public to come together to make this vision about where to mine.”
Industrial mining is linked to the loss of more than 1200 square miles of tropical forest across the globe between 2000 and 2019, according to a new study published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The minerals needed for a transition to clean energy are extracted through mining operations. As the mining industry expands, the scientists behind the paper say that both governments and mining companies need to take deforestation into account when making decisions about how and when to mine for minerals.
While agriculture and livestock farming pose greater threats to forests across the globe than industrial mining, the study highlights the industry as a new and growing concern.
“The energy transition that is coming is going to be mineral intensive — it has to be mineral intensive,” said Anthony Bebbington, one of the study’s authors and a professor of geography at Clark University in Massachusetts. Iron for turbines, lithium for car batteries, copper, nickel and more, are all essential, he said.
Bebbington expects demand for minerals to increase exponentially. Already, mines worldwide extract double the raw materials today as they did in 2000, according to the study.
Given that forests play a key role in absorbing the carbon emissions driving climate change, Bebbington said governments and mining companies must consider the industry’s impact on nearby forests in order for a clean and just energy transition to take place.
In the East Kalimantan province in Indonesia, for example, “there is plenty of evidence of communities having to move, or losing land, because of the expansion of coal mining,” Bebbington said. East Kalimantan is the center of the coal mining industry in the country.
The study is the first to measure the impact of industrial mining on tropical forest loss on a global scale. Researchers looked at deforestation in 26 countries between 2000 and 2019, using data from Global Forest Watch
Of these, Indonesia alone accounted for over 58 percent of all tropical deforestation directly attributed to the mining industry.
Construction vehicles sit in an open-pit coal mine in Indonesia.
Afriadi Hikmal / Getty Images
Brazil, Ghana and Suriname have also sustained major tropical forest loss as a direct result of industrial mining, according to the study.
“The risks for environmental damage and the…infringement on human rights risks are real, and this data is pointing to that,” said Bebbington.
Beyond the actual perimeter of industrial mining sites, tropical forests nearby these mining operations also face threats.
These sites require their own infrastructure, the study says. New roads, population increases, and nearby small-scale mining operations can all contribute to deforestation near industrial mining, Bebbington said.
Two-thirds of the countries included in the study experienced higher rates of deforestation within 50 kilometers, or roughly 30 miles, of mining sites.
The lead author of the study is Stefan Giljum, an associate professor at Vienna University’s Institute for Ecological Economics. Beyond forest loss, he said, the environmental impacts of industrial mining include loss of biodiversity, disruption of water sources, pollution, and an increase in hazardous waste.
“Government permitting should take all of this into account; an industrial mine can easily disrupt both landscapes and ecosystems,” Giljum said in a press release. “Industrial mining remains a hidden weakness in their strategies to minimize environmental impacts,” he said.
While the study excluded artisan, small-scale, and illegal mining activities due to lack of consistent data, Bebbington said accounting for these mining activities would have only increased mining’s impact on tropical forests.
The study does not say mining is the main driver of deforestation worldwide, but it is a significant driver, Bebbington said. “If we accept the energy transition is going to involve an exponential increase in mining, the risk of an exponential increase of [forest loss] and the rights of communities that live in those forests is real and significant.”
The degree of these consequences depends on the “determination and decisions of both governments and companies” to anticipate and “do something about it,” he said.
This coverage is made possible through a partnership with Grist and WABE, Atlanta’s NPR station.
On a sweltering Friday this summer, a who’s who of Georgia political and business figures gathered under a large tent on a dusty expanse of vacant land outside of Savannah, sipping champagne. They were waiting for the governor to confirm the week’s exciting rumor: Hyundai was going to build electric vehicles here.
“It is my great honor to officially announce that Hyundai Motor Group will build their first dedicated electric vehicle manufacturing plant right here in this good soil in Bryan County,” Governor Brian Kemp, a Republican, announced to whoops and cheers.
He went on to boast that 20 EV-related projects had come to Georgia since 2020, promising thousands of jobs and billions in investment. The state has actively pursued these companies, offering billions in tax breaks and other incentives to lure Hyundai, electric truck and SUV maker Rivian, EV battery maker SK Innovation, and others to Georgia. Kemp called the state “the unrivaled leader in the nation’s emerging electric mobility industry.”
And it’s not just EVs. Solar panels have been made in Georgia since Suniva was founded out of Georgia Tech in 2008, and the industry has expanded in the last few years. The solar manufacturer Qcells opened a plant in 2019 and announced an expansion this year, and last year NanoPV announced another plant in the state.
Georgia Governor Brian Kemp speaks at a campaign event in May. Joe Raedle/Getty Images
This green manufacturing boom comes even as Georgia lags on climate policies that could spur the adoption of EVs, solar panels, and other green technologies. The state has no emissions reduction goals and charges EV owners an annual fee of more than $200. The state Public Service Commission, which regulates Georgia’s largest utility and therefore most of the state’s electricity generation, has mandated more large-scale solar in the last decade but sets no overarching emissions goal for power generation. The commission recently approved more gas-fired power and put off decisions on closing coal units and expanding rooftop solar.
Georgia isn’t alone in this disconnect. A December 2021 report by the Centers for Strategic and International Studies, or CSIS, found that many states without what it called “climate ambition,” like Texas, Louisiana, Wyoming, and South Dakota, are still pursuing the economic opportunities of clean energy. In Georgia, officials see a chance to attract new businesses that promise jobs and investment, while companies feel the lure of massive tax breaks and convenient ports to move their goods. It’s a deal that makes economic sense, regardless of climate policy.
“Just because a state does not have targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions itself does not mean it has no aspirations to sell its products to others that do,” the report found.
‘Jobs of the future’
For economic development officials in Georgia, pursuing clean energy and tech facilities is a simple matter of reading the writing on the wall. It’s where manufacturers are investing their money.
“We’re trying to make sure that every small town in Georgia has an opportunity to thrive and really reach the jobs of the future,” said Pat Wilson, commissioner of the state’s Department of Economic Development. “It’s imperative on us … that we go after the jobs that are going to be here for the next 50 years.”
In the automotive industry, those jobs will be in electric vehicles, not gas-powered ones. Georgia is already home to a Kia manufacturing plant and numerous facilities that make car parts for other manufacturers, meaning a lot of Georgians work in the industry.
“There are 55,000 Georgians whose life is really tied to an internal combustion engine,” Wilson estimated. In enticing EV companies, battery makers, and other links in the EV supply chain to the state, he said, officials are aiming to line up jobs those workers can transition to as their industry increasingly goes electric.
The same is true in other states. “We can think about the desire to preserve some of their legacy industries,” said Morgan Higman, the author of the CSIS report on climate ambition and clean tech jobs. “There’s this sort of external market pressure.”
Higman’s report also identified a similar motive in states with big oil industries, like Texas, Louisiana, and Wyoming. In Louisiana, for instance, the state’s Climate Initiatives Task Force adopted a Climate Action Plan earlier this year that calls for investment in “Louisiana-based low-carbon industry through tax incentives” as well as programs to train oil and gas industry workers for clean energy jobs. In Texas, Exxon has proposed a $100 billion carbon capture and storage project that it says will need public funding, including tax breaks; local officials in Harris County have supported the idea.
Why build here?
Renewable energy and electric vehicle companies list a lot of reasons for choosing states like Georgia, even though they’re not those companies’ biggest U.S. markets and they lack policies that help promote the companies’ products.
But the state has other advantages, including a well-established manufacturing sector. For instance, in 2019, solar cell maker Qcells opened a factory in Dalton, Georgia. That region has long made and exported flooring.
“So it’s already got a really strong manufacturing-focused workforce,” said Scott Moskowitz, head of public affairs for Qcells, which announced this year that it will expand the Dalton facility. “But it’s also just a really good place, both logistically and economically.”
A worker moves stacks of completed solar panels ready for shipping on the assembly floor at the Qcells solar panel manufacturing facility in Dalton, Georgia.
Dustin Chambers for The Washington Post via Getty Images
He cited Georgia Tech as a hub for training students and developing new technologies, as well as nearby ports for importing raw materials and shipping products to consumers. The Port of Savannah is the fourth-busiest container port in the country, and the Port of Brunswick is the second-busiest for roll-on/roll-off trade — in other words, shipping vehicles.
Those factors are specific to Georgia, but lots of red states share one advantage over their climate-ambitious counterparts: land.
“They have a lot of dirt that’s relatively cheap. And these are big facilities,” Higman said, citing a manufacturing incentive program in Alabama that applies to facilities on a minimum of 250 acres. The new Hyundai plant in Georgia will be built on a nearly 3,000-acre “megasite.”
“It’s a lot cheaper to do that in a place like Georgia than it is in a place like New York or California,” she said.
‘We’re going to need suppliers’
While states like Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas lack their own climate goals, their fast-growing clean technology industries make them a key part of the national story. States that do have carbon emissions reduction targets need to buy their solar panels, wind turbines, and electric vehicles from somewhere. And billions of dollars of clean energy incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act, which President Joe Biden signed into law last month, are expected to further increase demand.
“This is a great example of the capacity of states like Georgia … to play an important role in supporting the decarbonization goals of other states and even the president’s goals for our country,” Higman said. “We’re going to need suppliers of these technologies.”
Right now, many of those suppliers are overseas. That’s creating problems in light of the ongoing, global disruption of supply chains. The COVID-19 pandemic has led to city-wide shutdowns in export hubs in Asia; shortages of dock workers, truck drivers, ships, and shipping containers; changes in the price and availability of key materials like steel and polysilicon; and an overall increase in shipping costs. Concerns about labor practices in China and alleged efforts by Chinese manufacturers to undercut U.S. solar manufacturers have added further uncertainties and delays to the solar supply chain.
The ramping up of U.S. manufacturing won’t ease the current difficulties, Higman said, but it could help prevent similar problems in the future.
A case for red state climate plans
But should Georgia, and other red states, do more to nudge the market in a cleaner direction? Wilson, the Georgia economic development commissioner, doesn’t think so. He’s counting on businesses and consumers to lead the state’s transition to electric vehicles and renewable energy, not the government.
“We have become the fifth-largest state for installed solar in the country. And the reason being is that companies are pushing for a renewable portfolio from our utilities. And companies are doing that because they’re being driven by the consumer,” Wilson said. “And so we don’t have a mandate, but we’ve created a business case.”
Arrays of solar cells on conveyor belt at Qcells, a solar panel manufacturer in Dalton, Georgia.
Dustin Chambers for The Washington Post via Getty Images
Similarly, he expects Georgia drivers to switch to electric vehicles without the government or regulators intervening. In that case, he said, car manufacturers are going electric and so drivers will follow suit, in what he called a “business-led transition into electrification.”
But some advocates said the state government should be doing more to speed those transitions, in addition to wooing manufacturing.
“What we’re seeing nationwide is that the states that set the conditions to really support the adoption of electric transportation, and that are aggressively working as a state but also with their investor-owned utilities to deploy charging infrastructure at scale, is where the market is strongest,” said Stan Cross of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, a nonprofit advocacy group.
Georgia leads the Southeast in charging stations and is number two in the Southeast for EV sales per capita, he said, but the region lags behind the rest of the country.
Cross said that a climate plan that promotes electric vehicle adoption could ultimately boost Georgia’s economy. “Georgia has no skin in the oil game,” Cross said, so a hypothetical state policy to promote the transition to EVs would be as much about the state’s economy as about emissions.
“It’s about stopping the hemorrhage of dollars leaving the state every time you pump gas and diesel,” he said. “Keep those dollars in the state by driving electric.”
In other words, for states that haven’t previously pushed EVs or renewable energy, a new case for climate policies is emerging that boils down to an old slogan: Buy local.
At a press conference during the Paris climate summit in 2015, when leaders from 196 countries had gathered to reach an agreement on how to slow climate change, President Barack Obama proposed a solution for their planetary problems: charge polluters for their greenhouse gas emissions.
“I have long believed that the most elegant way to drive innovation and to reduce carbon emissions is to put a price on it,” he said, speaking from a podium flanked with American flags.
Obama’s pitch was based on a cornerstone of American climate policy, the carbon tax. Championed by the likes of Bill Clinton, Senator Bernie Sanders, and some old-guard Republicans, and heralded by thousands of economists as essential in the fight against climate change, it would have imposed a fee on every ton of carbon released into the atmosphere, a cost that could spell the end of high-emitting industries like coal.
President Barack Obama speaks during a press conference at the Paris Climate Summit in December 2015.
Pascal Le Segretain / Getty Images
Although many environmentalists in Washington have spent the better part of two decades trying to pass a carbon tax in Congress, it was absent from the historic climate package signed by President Joe Biden last month. Instead of taxing polluters on their emissions, the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, aims to fight climate change with green tax credits for clean electricity and manufacturing, as well as for alternative-fuel and electric vehicles. These tax incentives are a major boon for developers of solar panels, wind farms, and other renewable energy technologies, companies expected to receive a combined $60 billion in tax benefits over the next decade. The law also incentives Americans to purchase more electric vehicles by offering a $7,500 tax credit to buyers of new EVs and $4,000 to buyers of used ones.
So how did the conversation shift so dramatically, from one focused on taxing polluters to one based on using the tax system to reward developers and buyers of renewable technologies? Is the dream of a nationwide carbon tax dead?
“It looks good as a model,” said David Hart, a senior fellow at the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation in Washington, D.C. “If you didn’t have politics, and you didn’t have emotions, and you didn’t have cultural biases in the activities impacted by these taxes, then it looks good on paper.”
The idea of putting a tax on carbon emerged at a time when scientists were beginning to reach consensus that the unabated burning of fossil fuels was changing the world’s climate. At an economics conference in 1981, Yale economist William Nordhaus presented a landmark paper that asked how economic policy could slow the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. He considered a range of available solutions, from energy conservation to investments in green technologies, but concluded that a tax on carbon was the most powerful mechanism for stopping climate change.
The reason, Nordhaus argued, had to do with the basic economic principle of supply and demand: If you want someone to do less of something, charge them for it. And because the dirtiest polluters would pay the most in taxes, they would likely be the first to shut down, decarbonizing the economy at the fastest rate.
Proponents believed this strategy could gain bipartisan support since it relied on the market and not on government spending to get the job done. Back then, protecting the environment wasn’t such a polarizing issue. President Richard Nixon’s administration had established the Environmental Protection Agency and passed the Endangered Species Act. During the presidential election of 1988, Republican candidate George H. W. Bush proclaimed that issues related to the nation’s land, water, and soil “know no ideology, no political boundaries,” and pledged to fight climate change using the power of markets. He declared that he’d be “the environmental president.” Once in office, Bush overhauled the Clean Air Act with sweeping amendments to address ozone emissions, acid rain, and industrial pollution.
US Pres. George Bush standing at podium with presidential seal promoting his clean air proposals, w. the Grand Teton Mts. in the bkgrd. (Photo by Cynthia Johnson/Getty Images)
Cynthia Johnson / Getty Images
But in 1993, when President Clinton proposed a “BTU” tax, referring to a unit of heat, on coal, oil, and natural gas, he encountered major resistance from both sides of the aisle, and the bill tanked before it was ever put to a vote in the Senate. For the following decade and a half, Republicans had the majority in the House of Representatives, and conservative foundations pumped millions of dollars into moving the party toward climate denial. Then in 2009, two Democrats, Representatives Henry Waxman and Edward Markey, made a second attempt at passing a carbon-pricing bill, this time using a cap-and-trade approach. The strategy puts a limit on polluters’ carbon emissions, while enabling them to buy additional capacity from other companies that have not yet hit their cap. That bill also failed.
Support for a carbon tax became a political death knell, due in part to the power of the fossil fuel lobby: A 2019 study found that political lobbying reduced the chances of Waxman-Markey’s passing by 13 percent. In subsequent years, powerful lobbying groups helped to take down incumbent Republicans who advocated for climate legislation like Representative Bob Inglis, who was unseated from his South Carolina district in a 2010 primary after unabashedly supporting a carbon tax.
But industry influence and Republican objection alone cannot explain the policy’s undesirability. Even Democrats began to shy away from taxing carbon emissions in recent years. Senator Sanders called for a carbon tax as part of his platform in 2016, but gradually withdrew his support, and the tax was excluded from progressive Democrats’ flagship climate proposal, the Green New Deal.
Critics have pointed out that such a tax could be regressive, meaning that it would hit low-income families the hardest. Numerous studies have shown that recycling the tax revenue through the economy and giving it back as checks to low-income households balances out the burden, but the mechanics of this money-maneuvering are difficult to articulate, and the solution has not garnered much public support.
A plume of smoke rises above residential buildings from a refinery in New Castle, Delaware in April 2022.
Robert Nickelsberg / Getty Images
“A well designed carbon price, of course, can spur significant investments, good jobs, and redress structural injustices. But at the front end, it says, ‘We’re gonna raise prices, and then we’ll compensate you,’” said Ben Beachy, the vice president of manufacturing and industrial policy at the BlueGreen Alliance, an organization that conducts research about solutions to environmental challenges. “It’s little wonder that this [the IRA’s incentive package] is the approach that President Biden just signed into law.”
James Stock, a professor of political economy at the Harvard Kennedy School, agreed that a tax incentive program is more politically palatable than a carbon tax, but added that it has only recently become a viable climate policy.
“The world [today] is a very different one from the mid-2000s when the calls for a carbon tax were big,” said Stock. “Back then we didn’t have any good alternatives to reducing emissions other than using less.”
The Carter administration implemented the first solar power subsidies in the 1970s when the nation was reeling from an energy crisis that arose, in part, after the Arab states in OPEC instituted an oil embargo to protest U.S. support for Israel. But in the decades following their initial deployment, solar and wind power were still viewed as nascent technologies that could not compete with coal-fired power plants.
Gas station attendants peer over their “Out of gas” sign in Portland during a national oil shorage in 1973.
Smith Collection / Gado / Getty Images
Today, solar power is less than one-fifth of the price that it was in 2009, and the cost of wind turbines has dropped by more than half over the same period. And while constructing solar farms used to be three times more expensive than building new coal plants, it’s now cheaper to build and operate a new solar farm than to run an existing coal-fired power plant.
As a renewables-heavy grid became more viable, so too did an investment-led climate policy, one based on incentives rather than penalties.
Over the past decade, organizations like the BlueGreen Alliance and the Environmental Defense Action Fund began building coalitions to create a unified vision for a climate policy that could succeed on Capitol Hill. These groups did not agree on everything (some, for example, supported emergent technologies like carbon capture while others preferred natural solutions like reforestation), but they shared the belief that shifting the economy away from fossil fuels required more government intervention, not less.
The birth of the Sunrise Movement, a national youth-led organization launched in 2017 to fight climate change, marked a turning point in the popularity of the strategy. The group emphasized the importance of what’s called a “justenergy transition” from a fossil-fuel economy to a green one, a shift that would create thousands of jobs in the renewables sector and battle climate change alongside income inequality and environmental injustice. Many of the movement’s supporters, including Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Deb Haaland, won their seats in the 2018 midterm elections. The group heavily influenced the Green New Deal proposal, whose omission of a carbon tax helped to sour the policy among Democratic incumbents on the Hill.
Youth activists from the Sunrise Movement participate in a rally in Washington D.C. in June 2021.
Caroline Brehman / CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
“There is no doubt that the Sunrise Movement and their focus on the Green New Deal created energy for a massive expansion of this [incentives-first] strategy,” said Molly Prescott, a spokesperson for Senator Jeff Merkley, the Democrat from Oregon who helped push for the green tax incentives in the IRA’s failed predecessor, the Build Back Better Act. She added that the senator has supported a carbon tax in the past, but that “changing economies” as well as environmental justice advocacy groups had convinced him to focus on other climate policies in recent years.
“Twelve years ago, I watched my landmark climate legislation pass in the House and die in the Senate,” said Democratic Senator Ed Markey, one of the authors of the failed 2009 cap-and-trade bill. “I am grateful for the countless young people and all those in the climate movement who breathed new life into our fight for climate action.”
Still, the IRA’s incentives-first approach isn’t without its critics. Some experts believe that a climate policy that depends largely on subsidies with little penalty for polluters is insufficient. What is lost without a carbon tax, they argue, is economic efficiency. Since the IRA does not penalize polluters (with the exception of a fee on companies that exceed their allowable methane emissions), the dirtiest sources won’t necessarily be phased out the fastest.
To test this theory, researchers at University of California, Berkeley and the University of Chicago simulated a decarbonization of the electricity sector using a carbon tax in one case and green subsidies in another. The results were surprising: The two policies did not achieve substantially different fossil fuel reductions by the end of the decade.
But that doesn’t mean that the policies are equally effective. Severin Borenstein, a professor at Berkeley and one of the authors of the study, cautioned that what tax credits do for the electricity sector in terms of providing both innovation and efficient decarbonization may not hold true for other industries. In particular, he believes that green credits will not work as well to clean up transportation, which is responsible for the largest share of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions. That’s because the people likely to buy new electric cars have not been driving, on average, the dirtiest vehicles.
“They drive new cars, and they tend to be politically liberal, which tends to mean they don’t drive the biggest emitters,” he said. “And so in some ways, it’s just the opposite of the electricity sector where we said, ‘Look, the coal is gonna get pushed out first anyway.’ That is not true with EVs.”
Stock, the Harvard economist, acknowledged this dynamic, but added it should be balanced against the fact that when wealthy Americans buy new green technologies, they help drive down the prices for everyone else. This trend is playing out now in electric vehicles, with car manufacturers rolling out high-end electric versions first in order to finance the development of cheaper models.
“So Ford and Tesla learn to make the EVs, and then that creates the capacity to create cheaper versions for the mass market,” Stock said.
These trends not only help reduce America’s carbon footprint, but also the world’s, said David Hart, the senior fellow at the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation. Germany made a huge investment in solar power in the early 2000s, and “bought down the price” for the global market, he said, meaning that the country’s investment in solar eventually made it cheaper for everyone else. “As rich countries, that’s what we should be doing.”
Hart, along with many other policy experts, argues that the passage of the IRA does not necessarily mean a carbon tax is dead. Rather, the new legislation is just a first step in slashing the country’s carbon emissions and preventing the most disastrous consequences of climate change.
“I do think there are going to be places and times when it [the carbon tax] is going to be a crucial tool to get to the last mile, but I don’t think it should be a focus of policy,” Hart said. “The goal should be to develop these technologies with a direct funding approach. Let’s make the clean stuff cleaner and cheaper before you make the dirty stuff more expensive. That is the sort of guiding spirit [of the IRA] if you can discern one here.”
Over 20 million households in the US have unpaid electricity bills. But it’s not just inflation that is putting them behind; it’s also our increasingly extreme weather.
Blistering temperatures over the summer led many to keep their air conditioning on longer than they might normally. And now that winter is on the horizon, the cost of heating adds to the stress.
“There’s no relief in sight,” said Mark Wolfe, executive director of the National Energy Assistance Directors Association, or NEADA, which monitors the effectiveness of federal utility assistance programs. “All signs point to another expensive winter.”
And for many of the nation’s struggling families, this means dealing with service shut-offs, deciding whether to “heat or eat,” or continuing to incur debts to utilities that will eventually have to be paid.
Black, Latino, and Indigenous households are the most at risk of having their power cut off. According to a survey on electricity utility equity conducted by Indiana University’s Energy Justice Lab in January, nearly 40 percent of Hispanic households and more than 26 percent of Black households said that they were unable to pay their electricity bill. Twenty-nine percent of Hispanic households and 20 percent of Black households received a disconnection notice, and more than 18 percent of Hispanic households and 13 percent of Black households had their energy service disconnected. Hispanic households were 80 percent more likely than White households to have their service disconnected by a utility provider.
A separate study on water equity by the Pacific Institute found that Black households that receive a utility shutoff warning notice are more than twice as likely to be disconnected as White households receiving a notice. Black households, while making up approximately 14 percent of the nation’s housing stock, nonetheless represented 29 percent of the total disconnections. Native American households were disconnected at the highest rate, at 4 percent, though they only make up 1 percent of the national population.
The impacts of redlining and disinvestment mean that Black and Latino neighborhoods are more likely to have aging and low quality infrastructure, and are more likely to forgo heating or cooling their homes in order to save money for food.
Nearly one in three Americans faced extreme heat advisories and a surge of heat-related emergencies over the summer, forcing many to seek respite outside their homes. Sacramento, California’s capital, opened “cooling centers” in community centers and schools for residents as summer temperatures reached over 95 degrees for days on end. And in the Midwest and East Coast, officials and communities struggled to keep public swimming pools open amid a national lifeguard shortage.
Numerous factors, including inflation, higher energy costs due to the war in Ukraine, and harsher winter weather, have contributed to the increase in unpaid electricity bills. And August utility bills are expected to reflect a dramatic increase in cooling costs.
Two federal programs are aimed at protecting energy insecure populations. The Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, known as LIHEAP, helps low-income households pay their utility bills, while the Weatherization Assistance Program helps households become more energy efficient, thereby reducing the monthly costs. But the former is chronically underfunded and only serves 20 percent of eligible households.
Beginning in the first months of the pandemic, 34 states offered their residents protection against utility shut-offs; all had expired by the end of 2021.
While 41 states have protections against utility shut-offs during extreme cold weather events, only 18 states have protections against utility shut-offs during a heat wave. Although hot states like Arizona have developed a permanent policy against summer shut-offs after a well-publicized death of an elderly resident in 2018, other hot states like Florida have no heat protections at all.
With the limited scope of nationwide utility assistance, there is growing concern that the millions of households who are behind on their electricity bills will have their utility services cut even as extreme weather conditions become the norm.
Some experts and advocates argue that the most immediate policy that can protect households vulnerable to mounting utility debt is to stop shut-offs entirely during the summer if they’ve missed one or more payments.
“If we’re taking energy as a human right, then that means no more shut-offs,” said Justin Schott, project manager for the Energy Equity Project at the University of Michigan’s School of Environment & Sustainability. “Because we know that, whether that happens in extreme heat or extreme cold, this can lead to death.”
From 2017 to 2021, there were an average of 188 heat-related deaths in the US, up from an average of 81 in the five years before that.
Schott believes that there is no reason why moratoriums on shut-offs should not continue while the government continues to tinker with the electricity affordability and assistance programs.
“I think we saw that it dramatically worked and that states were able to do it,” he said. “So there’s no reason why we can’t continue to do that other than lack of will from regulators and utilities to continue on that path.”
But Mark Wolfe, head of the professional group for energy assistance directors, disagrees. For him, reinstating moratoriums amounts to, “kicking the can down the road.” The real issue, Wolfe argues, is that utility bills are simply becoming too expensive, and states differ widely on their policies to reduce the burden on their residents. “If you delay payment, all you’re doing is building up an outstanding bill that has to be addressed at some point in the future,” he said.
A looming heat wave this Labor Day weekend might threaten Western states’ power grids and their residents, with utilities already warning of rotating blackouts.
California has already seen historical heat this week, fueling wildfires that have spurred evacuations and closed a section of Interstate 5. Temperatures are expected to hit 115 degrees Fahrenheit across the southern part of the state this weekend, breaking record temperatures. According to the National Weather Service, excessive heat warnings are already in effect in central Great Basin states such as California, Utah, and Idaho. California Independent System Operator, which manages the state’s electric grid, said it will likely see the most demand for power on Labor Day and is asking residents to conserve energy to prevent more drastic measures like rotating blackouts.
“Consumers are urged to reduce energy use from 4-9 p.m. when the system is most stressed because demand for electricity remains high and there is less solar energy available,” the operator said in a statement. It’s also asking residents not to charge electric vehicles, which are growing in popularity as the state phases out gas-powered cars, during peak hours.
The ongoing drought in the West is already hitting electricity generation, causing some hydroelectric plants to pump out less power, and utility companies have had to fill in the gap with power from natural gas and coal plants, which then contribute to carbon emissions. Utilities in San Diego and Phoenix are taking aggressive steps to conserve water in the face of recent drought conditions, after a one-two-punch of extreme temperatures and diminished water supplies places increased pressure on energy producers and consumers.
Heat waves also pose a threat to public health. They disproportionately harm low-income residents, Black and Hispanic neighborhoods, and people without housing. Extreme heat kills 600 people in the United States each year.
Gavin Newsom, California’s Democratic governor, declared a state of emergency on Wednesday with measures that aim to alleviate the strain on the power grid. The declaration allows residents to use backup diesel generators during periods of peak demand and approves increased electricity production. According to the Associated Press, these measures will increase air pollution in the state, but Karen Douglas, the governor’s senior energy adviser, told the AP that the priority was to keep the lights on.
After decades of fighting to end neighborhood oil drilling in California, environmental justice communities and their allies celebrated Wednesday as the state passed a bill phasing out oil and gas wells in close proximity to homes and schools.
The change was part of a sweeping package of climate bills passed by the California state legislature last night. It includes laws to codify climate neutrality goals, set rules for carbon capture, set interim targets for 100 percent clean energy by 2045, and extend the life of Diablo Canyon, a controversial nuclear power plant that has become a centerpoint of debate in the state’s energy transition. The action comes just one week after California finalized its plan to stop gas-engine car sales by 2035.
“The setback bill was our priority,” said Raquel Mason, policy manager with the California Environmental Justice Alliance. “It’s not often in my time doing this work that we get to go back to our community members with a full win.”
California is littered with 240,000 oil and gas wells and, until now, has had no statewide regulation on how close to homes, schools, and hospitals they can operate. The 2.7 million Californians who live within a half mile of the wells are at higher risk of cancer, asthma, heart disease, and adverse reproductive issues. An investigation by Grist and Capital & Main last year showed that Black, Latino, low-income, and medically underserved communities are disproportionately located near these wells in the state.
“With this bill, the government listened to community concerns and applied the setback to new wells and to the rework of wells,” said Ann Alexander, an advocate and lawyer with the Natural Resources Defense Council. Now, when neighborhood wells have to obtain rework permits, which they do every few years, they will be denied, progressively phasing them out.
As of last night, the Golden State also has a new long-term goal to decarbonize its entire economy. California’s previous legally binding emissions goals ended with a target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent by 2030 — a timeline it is not on track to achieve. Now, the state must get to net-zero emissions by 2045.
Net-zero means cutting emissions by some amount, and balancing out any remaining greenhouse gases with actions to suck carbon out of the atmosphere. The bill that California passed requires emission reductions of at least 85 percent.
Lawmakers also passed two bills that dictate how California can achieve this. The first carbon neutrality-related legislation sets down guardrails for developing technologies that capture carbon dioxide from the smokestacks of industrial facilities, as well as “direct air capture” plants that would suck carbon from the atmosphere. The Air Resources Board, a state agency that regulates greenhouse gas emissions, will have to develop monitoring and reporting systems to ensure that these kinds of projects are actually reducing emissions, and create a public database for tracking their deployment. This bill also requires that the captured carbon cannot be injected into oil fields to increase oil production — a practice that is common today.
The second requires the state to establish new targets for enhancing carbon sinks on natural and working lands, like forests and wetlands. Notably, it separates these targets from the state’s carbon offset market, which enables major polluters in California, like refinery operators, to buy carbon credits from forestry projects to offset their emissions. The program has long been controversial, as it allows dirty industries to keep emitting and the integrity of the carbon credits has been called into question. The natural and working lands bill specifies that any projects receiving state funding for helping to achieve the new goals will not be allowed to generate carbon credits.
In the last hours of the legislative session Wednesday, as California entered a state of emergency heat wave, the vote on Diablo Canyon loomed. California’s last nuclear power plant, operated by Pacific Gas & Electric, or PG&E, the state’s largest private utility, supplies 10 percent of the state’s electricity and was slated to shut down both reactors by 2025.
For months, Governor Gavin Newsom has been laying the groundwork to keep the power plant open, based on concerns that cutting a major power supply at a time when the power grid is increasingly strained by heat waves might lead to blackouts.
Opponents of Diablo Canyon raised safety concerns as the aging facility has no permanent place to store nuclear waste and will require expensive updates when funding could instead be spent on renewable energy. The bill that passed last night will grant a $1.4 billion bailout loan to PG&E, extend the life of Diablo Canyon to at least 2030, and allow it to seek a renewed license until 2045.
Governor Newsom had asked legislators to develop and pass his climate agenda and the Diablo Canyon extension just a few weeks before the end of the legislative session. In the past, the state’s oil lobby and the building trade unions shut down initiatives similar to the ones proposed; this year saw some labor divisions, with individual unions representing electrical, utility, pipe trades, and sheet metal workers coming out in support of the package even while the building trades’ collective lobby stood against it. “They were handing out leaflets in the legislature focusing on aspects that they argue would create jobs,” Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi told Grist last week.
Except for one bill, all of the points in the package passed. A proposal that would have cut the state’s greenhouse gas emissions to 55 percent below 1990 levels, instead of 40 percent, by 2030 was voted down in the assembly. One reason could be because, at the moment, as reported in CalMatters, the state is not on track to reach its current target.
School is back in session and teachers have more than lesson plans on their mind: outdated classrooms with little or no air conditioning makes teaching during heat waves near to impossible.
Columbus, Ohio teachers went on strike this past week, citing cooling systems in need of repair. In Clayton County, Georgia, elementary and middle schools are without proper cooling and hundreds of HVAC repairs need to be made to prevent, in some cases, hot air blowing out of vents and making classrooms inhospitable to students. The Baltimore City Public School system dismissed students at two dozen schools without air conditioning early this week as the city braces for a heatwave.
Classrooms are becoming hotter and hotter as global temperatures rise to extreme levels. These rising temperatures have a detrimental effect on how students learn and fixing them will cost millions of dollars, becoming a point of contention for educators. More and more schools are operating without proper cooling systems or need repairs since roughly 30 percent of all the nation’s schools were built between 1950 and 1969.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration recommends a temperature range between 68 degrees Fahrenheit and 76 F for indoor office workplaces, while some cooling companies say 72 degrees is the most comfortable and has even improved test scores in certain situations. Classroom temperatures have risen above 80 F during the beginning and end of a school year in recent years. Columbus schools saw 14 school days break 80 F indoors in September and October last year. This week, classroom temperatures at Baltimore schools are expected to hit 93 F and have been as high as 100 F in the past.
Hot classrooms aren’t just a disruptor to the school day schedule; they are detrimental to students’ learning. A 2020 study found that for every 1-degree Fahrenheit temperature increase, student learning drops by 1 percent. This study also pointed to heat days disproportionately affecting students of color and how 73 percent of these heat-driven learning gaps could be prevented by the simple inclusion of air conditioning in schools.
Columbus teachers went on strike for four days after failed salary negotiations earlier in the summer, which included asking the school district to fix its outdated heating and cooling systems. Before the strike was initiated, salary negotiations inched closer to a conclusion, but the issue of fixing broken heating and cooling systems was still a sticking point.
Columbus City Schools is Ohio’s largest school district and has experienced the phenomenon of “heat days”—schools closing due to unsafe temperatures in outdated buildings—in recent years. At the start of last school year, the Columbus Education Association issued a statement urging the administration to fix the district’s busted air conditioning and ventilation system to ward off COVID-19 and impending heatwaves.
“We’re dealing with buildings that are way too hot in the warm months and way too cold in the cold months,” Regina Fuentes, Columbus teachers union spokesperson and district teacher, told NPR’s All Things Considered during last week’s strike.
The newly agreed upon contract commits to “planning for building improvements to ensure that spaces where children learn and teachers teach are climate controlled” by the beginning of the 2025-26 school year. This includes providing heating, ventilation, and air conditioning in facilities that are currently without and shoring up classrooms and buildings that operate with limited HVAC. Air conditioning isn’t a new request for teachers striking for better conditions. Ten years ago, the Chicago Teachers Union went on strike and at least one striking teacher reported she wanted “working air conditioning” among other demands. The Baltimore Teachers Union also has an ongoing donation drive to collect fans in preparation for future heat days.
Many schools across the country don’t have operating air conditioning and it eats at their budgets. A Government Accountability Office study found that, out of 100,000 K-12 public schools nationwide, nearly half needed to fix HVAC systems. Schools visited by the study commission cited older systems leaking and contributing to mold and poor indoor air quality on top of poor cooling on hot days.
Environmental advocacy organization Center for Climate Integrity, or CCI, conducted a study last year that tracked how much money school districts across the country have spent on upgrading heating and cooling systems in the past few decades. This analysis found that decades ago, school systems didn’t need air conditioning as much as they do now and they now have to shell out upwards of $40 billion to keep children cool.
The state of Ohio ranks eighth in the nation for monies spent on heating and cooling systems, according to this report, and improvements are still needed. New York comes in first for total equipment costs at nearly $7 billion, with Arkansas and Oklahoma both spending less than a million on cooling systems in recent decades.
“We’ve seen school districts across the country having to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in new infrastructure to keep classrooms at safe temperatures,” Mike Meno, CCI communications director, said. “This is becoming more and more of a problem and more and more of a common occurrence.”
Just this year, Detroit public schools invested $125 million in its HVAC system, despite its schools still needing to shorten their days to escape increased heat. In five years, 95% of its facilities will be updated with cooling systems. As teachers return to Columbus schools this week with a new union contract finalized, it will still take years to properly update their facilities.
The following transcript has been edited for clarity.
There’s a temperature threshold beyond which the human body simply can’t survive — one that some parts of the world are increasingly starting to cross. It’s a “wet bulb temperature” of 95 degrees Fahrenheit.
To understand what that means, it helps to start with how the human body regulates its temperature. Our bodies need to stay right around 98.6 degrees F. If that number gets too high or too low, bad things can happen. And since bodies are always producing heat from normal functions, like digesting, thinking, and pumping blood, we need a place for that heat to go. That’s why our bodies have a built-in cooling system: sweat.
Sweat works by using a physics hack called evaporative cooling. It takes quite a bit of heat to turn water from a liquid to a gas. As droplets of sweat leave our skin, they pull a lot of heat away from our bodies. When the air is really dry, a little bit of sweat can cool us down a lot. Humid air, on the other hand, already contains a lot of water vapor, which makes it harder for sweat to evaporate. As a result, we can’t cool down as well.
This is where the term wet bulb temperature comes in: It’s a measure of heat and humidity, essentially the temperature we experience after sweat cools us off. We can measure the wet bulb temperature by sticking a damp little sleeve on the end of a thermometer and spinning it around. Water evaporates from the sleeve, cooling down the thermometer. If it’s humid, it hardly cools down at all, and if the air is dry, it cools down a lot. That final reading after the thermometer has cooled down is the wet bulb temperature.
In Death Valley, California, one of the hottest places on Earth, temperatures often get up to 120 degrees F — but the air is so dry that it actually only registers a wet body temperature of 77 degrees F. A humid state like Florida could reach that same wet bulb temperature on a muggy 86 degree day.
When the wet bulb temperature gets above 95 degrees F, our bodies lose their ability to cool down, and the consequences can be deadly. Until recently, scientists didn’t think we’d cross that threshold outside of doomsday climate change scenarios. But a 2020 study looking at detailed weather records around the world found we’ve already crossed the threshold at least 14 times in the last 40 years. So far, these hot, humid events have all been clustered in two regions: Pakistan and the Arabian Peninsula.
The warm water in the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf makes the air above extremely humid. Inland, on the Arabian Peninsula, the arid continental heat causes temperatures to skyrocket. And when these two systems meet, they can tip the wet bulb temperature above that 95 degree F wet bulb threshold.
In Pakistan, it’s a little less clear what’s driving these hot, humid extremes. But scientists think it’s caused by warm, humid air flowing inland during the monsoon season. As it passes over the Indus River, the air only gets more humid until it hits cities like Jacobabad, often referred to as one of the hottest cities on earth. To date, Jacobabad has crossed that deadly wet bulb threshold a whopping six times — the most of any single city on record.
If we plot all these events over time, it’s clear these hot, humid extremes are increasing as the planet warms. Scientists expect these events to occur even more frequently in these regions going forward. Other places like coastal Mexico and a large portion of South Asia might soon be at risk of crossing these thresholds for the first time.
Extreme heat is deadly at temperatures well below the 95-degree threshold. Healthy young adults can experience serious health effects at a wet bulb temperature of 86 degrees F. And even dry heat can be dangerous when people’s bodies simply can’t pump out sweat fast enough to cool themselves.
Worldwide, extreme heat likely kills at least 300,000 people each year. But it can be notoriously difficult to track the death counts associated with individual heat waves. Heat often kills indirectly — triggering heart attacks, strokes, or organ failures — making it hard to determine whether those deaths were caused by the heat or an unrelated medical condition.
Even relatively mild heat waves can be deadly when they occur in places where people are not prepared for those temperature extremes. For example, a 2010 heat wave in Russia, where summer temperatures rarely rise above 74 degrees F, killed an estimated 55,000 people despite only hitting about 100 degrees F.
Heat-related death counts are even harder to calculate in regions without accurate or timely death records. In Pakistan — home to many of the world’s humid heat records — the government doesn’t officially track deaths, said Nausheen Anwar, director of the Karachi Urban Lab, a research program that studies the impacts of extreme heat in Pakistan. Instead, her lab often relies on interviews with doctors, ambulance drivers, or graveyard owners to calculate the impacts of heat waves.
With every degree of global warming, these dangerous heat events are becoming even more likely. Stopping climate change may be our best chance to keep them as rare as possible.
With his landmark climate bill seemingly dead in the Senate, President Joe Biden had been facing mounting pressure to find ways to take climate action that didn’t rely on Congress. It looked like one holdout Democrat, West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, stood in the way of passing any version of Build Back Better, insisting just two weeks ago that he would refuse to support any spending to take on climate change.
So last week, from a shuttered coal-fired power plant in Somerset, Massachusetts, Biden pledged to use his presidential powers “to combat the climate crisis in the absence of congressional action.” That day, he announced several executive actions, from setting aside funds to help communities withstand heatwaves and floods, to expanding offshore wind power in the Gulf of Mexico. Then, this Tuesday, the Biden administration rolled out heat.gov, a website with resources to help people cope with extreme heat. And, on Wednesday morning, the White House announced an effort to connect low-income households to solar power.
But by Wednesday evening, Senator Manchin had reversed course, reaching a deal with the Democratic majority leader, Senator Chuck Schumer, on a sweeping package of health-care, energy and climate measures, reviving the possibility of a Senate vote on the climate bill as soon as next week. Still, Biden’s latest slate of executive actions, which garnered little public attention, are poised to help cut electricity costs and broaden the accessibility of solar power.
The announcement comes as punishing heat waves have descended upon tens of millions of Americans this summer, causing demand for electricity to boom. At the same time, a worldwide energy crisis has driven up fossil fuel prices, including natural gas, the top source of electricity in the U.S.
Under Biden’s action on Wednesday to lower home electricity costs, a new program through the Department of Housing and Urban Development would connect residents in subsidized housing to community solar power, opening access to solar for renters, who are often unable to make the switch to renewable power, even if they want to. Community solar power typically relies on a shared solar farm. Members subscribe to an array of solar panels in their region and receive credits for the energy generated, which shaves costs off their bills. The White House thinks the initiative could connect as many as 4.5 million homes to solar, saving them an average of 10 percent on electricity bills each year.
Low-income households typically spend much more of their income on electricity costs than their higher-earning counterparts — a burden that comes from living in homes that often lack insulation or have older appliances. According to the Department of Energy, low-income households spend 8.6 percent of their total income on energy bills, while non-low-income households spend around 3 percent.
“The combination of extreme heat and rising utility prices creates a perfect storm, and HUD-assisted families and communities are some of the most vulnerable,” said HUD Secretary Marcia Fudge, in a release. The new program, she said, “will not only help families reduce utility costs, but also provide an opportunity for HUD-assisted residents to participate in the clean energy economy.”
Biden’s announcement on Wednesday also included another HUD program that will help rural housing authorities take on energy efficiency upgrades in rental housing, while a Department of Energy workforce program, using $10 million from the infrastructure package passed by Congress last year, is aimed at creating more jobs and bringing employees from underrepresented communities into the solar industry.
Heat continues to roil the Pacific Northwest and Southeast, with record highs expected through the rest of the week. On heat.gov, the Biden administration’s new website dedicated to heatwave safety, visitors can find information on their local conditions, as well as tips on staying cool and safe during a heatwave. If someone is experiencing heat cramps, the site says, they should cease physical activity and drink water. If cramps continue past an hour, they should seek medical help. Extreme heat is a growing public health threat that causes or contributes to some 700 deaths each year.
