The mission met with civil society representatives and political and institutional leaders and heard the testimony of journalists who cited a growing climate of fear amid a deeply polarized environment, increasingly authoritarian governance, and escalating attacks against the press. Journalists expressed grave concern over their ability to continue operating in the country following the enactment of a Russian-style “foreign agents” law earlier this year.
The mission concluded with a press briefing and will be followed by a detailed report with recommendations.
Thousand-foot-long ships chug through the Panama Canal’s waters each day, over the submerged stumps of a forgotten forest and by the banks of a new one, its canopies full of screeching parrots and howler monkeys. Some 14,000 pass through its locks every year, their decks stacked high with 6 percent of the world’s commercial goods, crisscrossing the paths of tugboats on the voyage between oceans.
In early 2023, the weather pattern known as El Niño ushered in a drought that choked traffic through the canal, dropping water levels in Lake Gatun, the canal’s main reservoir, to record lows and revealing the tops of trees drowned when the canal was created at the start of the last century. It takes 52 million gallons of water to get a cargo ship through the canal’s locks, and by December, only 22 of the usual 36 ships were allowed to make the passage each day. Some vessels opted for lengthy routes around Africa instead, while others bid as much as $4 million to skip the queue that had grown to more than a hundred ships.
Over a year later, the water is rising and the logjam has cleared, thanks to increased rainfall as well the Panama Canal Authority’s water management and a recently installed third-set of water-recycling locks. But the problems are sure to reappear: El Niño returns every 2 to 7 years, and when it does, climate change will continue kicking it into higher gear. Panama’s growing urban population also needs drinking water – much of it sourced from the same Lake Gatun that feeds the canal’s locks.
“This means that if we do not increase water capacity in about a decade, we will not be able to provide water to the citizens,” said Óscar Ramírez, the president of the canal authority’s water resources committee, during a press conference this summer, according to the newspaper La Estrella de Panamá.
A view of exposed tree stumps in Gatun Lake in Colon, Panama in August 2023.Daniel Gonzalez / Anadolu Agency via Getty
With a future crisis seeming inevitable, the canal authority is turning to a long-contemplated solution: Dam the neighboring Río Indio to create a new reservoir, which could be tapped to replenish the canal when the water levels drop, and dig a 5-mile-long tunnel to connect it to the canal. The idea effectively got the greenlight this summer when the Supreme Court struck down an old law, and in doing so, expanded the canal authority’s jurisdiction to include the Río Indio basin. In total, the project would likely take six more years and $1.6 billion. Once the reservoir is built, Ramírez told reporters, both locals and the canal will have all the water they need for another 50 years.
Filling the reservoir would submerge about 17.7 square miles of land, currently home to more than 2,000 Panamanians, according to La Estrella de Panamá. Building the dam will require relocating schools, health centers, and churches that serve them. An additional 12,000 people, many of them farmers, live in the surrounding area.
Humans have been building dams for thousands of years, but such mega dam projects are a hallmark of economic development in modern times. According to the International Displacement Monitoring Centre, dams displaced an estimated 80 million people worldwide during the 20th century, and information about their fate is scarce. The canal authority acknowledges the hardship that moving would impose on people, and has said that they won’t begin construction until they’ve consulted with these residents and heard their concerns.
“I think there’s often a better alternative than building a new dam, but obviously dams are still going to be built,” said Heather Randell, an assistant professor of global policy at the University of Minnesota who has studied the impact of dam projects on communities. In her research, she found that people forced to move often lose their social networks and livelihoods, and wind up in poverty. In Vietnam, construction of the Son La Hydropower dam in the mid 2000s displaced 90,000 people and moved them to smaller plots of farmland. On average, incomes fell by 65 percent.
Those living nearby are often disrupted, too. As the diverted water upsets the ecosystem, neighboring areas might have trouble finding food, or see diseases spread more quickly. In Africa, for instance, decades of research shows multiple instances of schistosomiasis, a chronic disease caused by parasitic worms, spiking near dam projects and man-made reservoirs. In many regions, climate change is amplifying these problems.
Residents of El Limón, a town in the Río Indio river basin, walk past a multi-grade school building.Tova Katzman for Concolón Magazine
Although there is no harm-free way to displace people, Randell says, compensating them fairly for their lost livelihoods and land can help. In the 1970s, the government of Panama promised to make such payments to thousands of Indigenous people from the Kuna and Emberá communities who had to relocate for a large hydroelectric dam in Panama’s Darién Province. In 2014, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights found that the government never made these payments and failed to provide titles to protect their new lands, leaving them vulnerable to invasion by illegal settlers. Nowadays, Randell says, there’s “definitely been improvements in recognizing that if you’re going to displace a bunch of people you should be fairly compensating them.”
The canal authority says it plans to compensate residents, with the aim of improving or maintaining their quality of life. “If a person has livestock, we must preserve that livestock even if they are displaced, because it is their livelihood,” said Ricaurte Vásquez Morales, the Panama Canal Authority’s administrator, according to Estrella de Panama’s reporting. According to El Siglo, another national newspaper, the authority has held meetings with more than 1,600 people living in the area that would be flooded.
Randell says that community activism can also help mitigate the risks to people and the environment. In Brazil, decades of protests against the Belo Monte dam project, which began in 1979, drew international attention and put pressure on developers – resulting in the cancellation of the original project in 2002. When it was relaunched shortly after, the plans were scaled back significantly. Before the dam could be opened in 2016, at least 20,000 people had to move to make way for its construction. “Although it might not stop the project outright, it can still make some positive impact on how bad the project is going to be for people or for the environment,” Randell said.
Panama has recently seen a surge of such environmental activism. Last year, hundreds of protesters marched through cities and blocked roads after Panama’s legislature extended Minera Panamá’s operating contract for Cobre Panama, the largest open-pit copper mine in Central America. Panama’s Supreme Court declared the contract unconstitutional in November 2023 and the mine has since ceased operations. According to La Prensa, the canal authorities are actively trying to avoid a repeat of these protests as they negotiate with the towns affected by the proposed Río Indio reservoir. (The Panama Canal Authority did not respond to Grist’s repeated requests for comment.)
People from dozens of these towns in the provinces of West Panama, Colón, and Coclé have been protesting against damming the Rio Indo since the environmental impact study for the project was conducted between 2017 and 2020. Last year, a coalition of farmers representing districts from these provinces — some of whom were already uprooted by the copper mine — signed a community agreement to reject the reservoir, while also calling for the closure of Minera Panamá. Since the Supreme Court’s decision to expand the canal authority’s jurisdiction in July, leaders of the same groups have continued organizing meetings and voicing their concerns to media outlets. Last month, a poll of families living on the banks of the Río Indio, conducted by a University of Panama sociology professor, found 90 percent are opposed to the dam. Meanwhile, the canal authority began a census to count the number of families in the river’s basin, and set up a hotline for their questions.
Panama’s Canal Administrator Ricaurte Vásquez Morales speaks during a press conference at the authority’s headquarters in Panama City in September 2023.Luis Acosta/AFP via Getty
The last time work on the Panama Canal required upending entire towns was when it was first constructed, more than a century ago. A treaty ratified in 1904 gave the United States eminent domain over the Canal Zone — the power to seize any property within a parcel of land that encompassed the entire 50-mile length of the canal’s future waterways and 5 miles on either side of it. Some 40,000 people were displaced from the Zone to create the canal and the lakes attached to it.
“The flooding became the only story, and it’s not the complete story,” said Marixa Lasso, a historian at the Panama Center for Historical, Anthropological and Cultural Research in Panama City. “It was used as an excuse to expel people that did not need to be expelled.” Instead, she says, many towns were displaced to create exclusively American towns, where families of expatriates who worked on the canal, known as Zonians, lived for generations.
U.S. control of the region continued until a 1977 treaty, signed by President Jimmy Carter and the Panamanian military dictator Omar Torrijos, relinquished the canal to Panama at the end of 1999. Lasso said what separates the present-day from the past is that the decision over how to handle the canal now rests with the Panamanian government, giving citizens a greater say over their own fate. She says it’s important to consider alternatives, and if the only solution requires displacing people, history shows the importance of keeping communities intact and close to their original lands.
“Last time, we were not able to have a say in what happened,” Lasso said.
Vice presidential hopefuls Tim Walz, the Democratic governor of Minnesota, and J.D. Vance, the junior Republican senator from Ohio, faced off Tuesday night in New York. It was the first time the two men have debated, and likely the last debate of this year’s race to the White House. The evening began with a decidedly less awkward handshake than the one that kicked off the presidential debate a month ago, and quickly moved into a foreign policy question. One unknown at the outset, however, was to what extent the moderators or the candidates would bring up climate change.
At the presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump last month, the climate question didn’t come until the tail end of the candidates’ sparring session. This time it was the second question that moderators asked, and both candidates tacked notably to the political center, with Walz endorsing “an all above energy policy” and Vance seeking to sidestep the question of whether human-caused climate change is happening.
CBS News moderators Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan pegged their question to Helene and pointed to research showing that climate change makes hurricanes “larger, stronger, and more deadly,” as well as polling showing that 7 in 10 Americans favor taking steps to address climate change.
Both candidates responded by expressing their condolences to the victims of the hurricane, with Vance calling it an “unbelievable, unspeakable human tragedy.” They differed, however, on both the causes and the solutions to the broader climate question.
Vance, who answered first, endorsed a robust federal response to help disasters victims before turning to the bigger picture. He avoided acknowledging the reality of human-caused climate change, instead referring to “crazy weather patterns” and global warming as “weird science.” For the sake of argument, Vance started from the premise that carbon emissions drive climate change — “Let’s just say that’s true,” he said. Vance argued that bringing manufacturing back to the United States would reduce emissions, falsely claiming that America has “the cleanest economy in the entire world.”
In regard to solutions, Vance derided the Biden administration’s incentivization of solar panels because, he said, their components often come from abroad. He alluded to the potential for building new nuclear energy facilities and explicitly called for more energy production domestically, without specifically mentioning oil or natural gas.
J.D. Vance, the Republican Senator from Ohio, at the vice presidential debate.
Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images
If Vance hedged over the reality of climate change, Walz stated the problem emphatically. “Climate change is real. Reducing our impact is absolutely critical,” he said, touting the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, the biggest clean energy spending bill in history, which he said “has created jobs across the country.” In an awkward turn of phrase, Walz said, “We are seeing us becoming an energy superpower for the future, not just the current.”
Ultimately, the climate consequences of this election could be enormous. It could, for instance, determine how close the U.S., which has emitted more greenhouse gases throughout history than any other country, comes to achieving the dramatic emissions cuts scientists say are needed to avoid the worst impacts of global warming. And even a casual debate viewer couldn’t miss the two candidates’ divergent views on America’s energy future.
The Democratic ticket has framed combating the climate crisis as a matter of protecting freedom, and has urged the continued investment in clean energy. The official GOP platform, on the other hand, includes a rollback of rules encouraging the adoption of electric vehicles and calls for the United States to become the world leader in oil, gas, and coal production. Some researchers have estimated that a second Trump term could add an extra 4 billion metric tons of carbon to the atmosphere by 2030, compared to a Democratic presidency.
Vance returned to the theme of domestic energy production throughout the debate, at one point saying that one of the quickest ways to address the housing crisis is to “drill, baby, drill.” His closing statement included an anecdote about how when he was growing up, his grandmother didn’t always have enough money to turn on the heat — and he argued that Biden and Harris’ energy policies are making it harder for everyday Americans to afford energy. (The Inflation Reduction Act is expected to save Americans $38 billion in electricity bills by 2030.) Climate and energy did not come up in Walz’s closing statement.
Hurricane Helene tears through the southeastern United States as scientists say climate change rapidly intensifies hurricanes. The storm devastated large swaths of the southeastern United States after making landfall in Florida as a Category 4 storm. Officials say the death toll is likely to rise, as many are still missing. Helene is expected to be one of the costliest hurricanes in U.S. history and was fueled by abnormally warm water in the Gulf of Mexico, but most of the media coverage has failed to connect the devastation to the climate crisis. “The planet’s overheating. It’s irreversible. It’s caused by the fossil fuel industry,” says climate activist and climate scientist Peter Kalmus in Raleigh, North Carolina. “This will get worse as the planet continues to get hotter.”
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
If we get it right, the pace of life is more humane. Time that had been spent dealing with health- and flood-insurance paperwork, advocating for renewable energy, being stuck in traffic, and otherwise butting up against outdated and broken systems, is now used to grow food, prepare for extreme weather events, and care for each other. All streets, not just those in wealthier areas, are lined with trees (including fruit and nut trees), providing shade and beauty and photosynthesis (and snacks). Rain gardens and bioswales line streets, ready to absorb and divert storm waters. We linger outside, in parks and on sidewalks, with friends and neighbors. We have time to make meals at home or consume them at a cafe. “To-go” is uncommon; instead, we meet eyes as we chew. We know plastic recycling is mostly bullshit and have abandoned disposables — instead we (gasp!) wash the dishes. No longer frenzied with meaningless to-dos, we find ease amid the generational work of making our planet livable. As we spend more time outside, our appreciation for nature grows with immersion, inspiring ever more creative adaptations to our changed climate. Biophilia and biomimicry flourish in a virtuous cycle with the thriving of biodiversity. We are unrushed — chill, even.
— a DOUBLE drabble, thieved from the final chapter of What If We Get It Right? By Ayana Elizabeth Johnson
The spotlight
Occasionally, when I’m reading an evocative book or article or other piece of literature, I’ll catch myself staring out the window, having looked up from the page involuntarily to daydream. Sure, it could be a sign of a short attention span (thanks, TikTok), but as a writer myself, I actually consider this to be one of the greatest effects a piece of writing can have. Because it’s not that my mind has wandered to unrelated topics — it’s that whatever I’m reading has inspired me in some way that sent my brain off to pause, process, and dream.
This happened to me repeatedly with What If We Get It Right?, a new book by marine biologist and climate policy expert Ayana Elizabeth Johnson (in conversation with a couple dozen other leading voices across the climate spectrum, including Bill McKibben, Rhiana Gunn-Wright, Adam McKay, and Leah Penniman). The book focuses on solutions, as well as visions of the world we could have if we implement them — and the importance of holding up those visions as something to work toward.
“These pages conjure a thriving (and quite different) world, and show us that it’s worth the effort — the overhaul — to get there, together,” Johnson writes in the book’s introduction.
On Monday, I got to hear Johnson share some of her insights on the book, climate solutions, our political moment, and hope, at a Climate Week event put on by Grist, Mother Jones, Rewiring America, and the Tishman Environment & Design Center at the New School.
The event was all about envisioning a better future. First, multidisciplinary artist Aisha Shillingford led us through a visioning exercise in which we traveled to the year 2075, witnessed an era dubbed “the Flourissance,” and returned with an artifact. (If you want to try a little visioning yourself, you might remember that Shillingford walked us through a similar exercise last year. You can do this at home!)
Then Johnson sat down in conversation with voting rights activist and former Georgia state Representative Stacey Abrams, who is now senior counsel at the electrification nonprofit Rewiring America, among many other things.
You may not be able to tell in this photo, but at this moment, Johnson and Abrams had, in fact, burst into a spontaneous singalong — to Prince’s “7,” the first track on the “Anti-Apocalypse Mixtape” that Johnson includes at the end of the book. Claire Elise Thompson
During the conversation, the two leaders discussed some of their practical visions for what we must do next to fix the climate crisis. They talked about the proliferation of climate tech, like heat pumps, and the wonderful synergies of when solutions that are good for the planet also make people’s lives better. And they confessed that they share a dislike for hope as a concept (something that Johnson makes clear in the book). “We don’t get to give up on life on Earth. I don’t need hope — I need an action item,” Johnson said.
Rather than hope or optimism, they spoke about holding up tenacity and determination as the mindsets we need to address the climate crisis. “My shorthand is, I think the glass is half full. It’s probably poisoned, though,” Abrams said, and described herself as “an ameliorist” — one who’s dedicated to making things better.
Before the event, Johnson and I spoke briefly about her approach to writing What If We Get It Right?, the power of manifesting, and some of the action items that are next on her horizon, including an exciting, and extremely unconventional, book tour. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
(Also. Just as we were parting ways after our interview, as she was getting ready to head onstage for the event, Johnson called after me, “Claire! I love your drabbles!” One of the best moments of my professional life, period.)
Q. I really strongly resonated with something you wrote in the book’s introduction: “I created this book because it’s what I’ve needed to read.” Could you talk a bit about that need that you felt, and the gap that this book fills?
A. There’s a lot of apocalyptic stuff out there in pop culture — whether that’s out of Hollywood or the way the news just covers climate disasters, if at all. And I just kept thinking, we have the solutions we need. We just need to implement them. Why is no one showing us that it’s worth the effort? And so that’s what this book is: me making the case that it’s worth the effort to get this as right as possible, even knowing it won’t be a perfect world. It’ll be a better world.
Q. Why do you think it’s important to imagine the future? Not just forecast, but actually dream of the future?
A. I’ve been asked this question a lot of times — something different is coming to mind right now, which is, that’s just the way I do things. No one was like, “You should do a climate variety show in four different cities with all the famous acquaintances you can wrangle and a dance-off and puppets and magic tricks and game shows.” No one was like, “This is what a book tour should be.” But like, why not?
Creating this book and envisioning the tour has just been another exercise in, there’s really not as many rules as we think there are. You just do the thing. You dream the thing up, and then you do the thing. And we could do the same with climate that we could do with creating a book or piece of art — we could just create the future that we want to live in, create the world that we want to live in.
People use the term a lot, “manifesting,” right? Or “words become things,” or all of that. It starts somewhere. You dream it up and then, as much as you can, make it real in the world. There’s a sense in which my whole life is a case study in that. Because there’s no reason why some Black girl from Brooklyn should actually become a marine biologist because she said it out loud when she was 5 — a lot of people say that out loud when they’re 5. But there’s something about the tenacity of it. I’ve always been enamored with this sense of possibility. But in a sort of boring, realistic way. I wasn’t good with my imagination, per se — I wanted an imaginary friend and I couldn’t quite muster it. You know, I’ve always been very, very grounded in the real world. And I think maybe that’s helpful. My dreams are just big enough to be achievable. So I think it’s only natural that I apply that to climate. Like, why would we not try to do the biggest best thing we possibly can?
The sort of more standard answer, the one that I give in the book, is if the future is just a blank slate or a void, we aren’t moving as quickly toward it as we should. We’re sort of sauntering away from the apocalypse instead of running toward something. And we have these very vague notions of what the future could be, with solar panels and electric cars. But it’s not concrete enough for people. And I don’t know that this book meets the promise of the title, but it’s enough breadcrumbs that you can piece together a path. That’s the hope anyway, that it makes these visions of climate futures feel a little more concrete and feasible.
Q. That reminds me of a question you pose in many of your interviews with other leaders throughout the book — which is basically, “What’s the least sexy, most esoteric thing we need to do to make this happen?” But then at the end, you describe “implementation” as the sexiest word in the English language. Am I picking up that maybe all the wonkiest implementation things are actually the most exciting to you?
A. I mean, transmission lines, right? Or heat pumps! Like, I get Rewiring America‘s determination to make heat pumps sexy and I’m on board with this. I had supermodel Cameron Russell walking the stage at my book launch wearing that [heat pump] costume, just saying climate solutions, in high heels, full makeup. So I’m in for trying to make these things sexy, but it’s got to sort of be a bit tongue-in-cheek.
Q. Do you want to tell me more about the tour, and how that all came together?
A. The tour got sort of out of hand. It is 20 cities, six weeks, something like 40 events. I mean, if the goal is to welcome people in, you gotta go to a bunch of places where people are. But also, the tour was designed to visit the people featured in the book. There are 20 interviews in this book, there are a few co-authored chapters, there’s poetry, there’s art. I wanted to do the book tour to the places where these people live, so I could be in conversation with them as opposed to having it be the Ayana show. It’s like the Ayana and friends extravaganza. Every single tour stop is different.
I am an introvert, and this is sort of my nightmare. So I was like, the only way I’m going to do a book tour at all is if it’s fun. It doesn’t have to be miserable. It doesn’t have to be boring. It’s a great excuse to get to travel to all the people that I love. It’s also a chance to introduce all my favorite people to each other.
Q. I did also want to talk a bit about all the voices who contributed to the book itself. Did you always envision it with that format, with all the different interviews and contributors?
A. No. I was envisioning: I read a hundred books and then I pull elements from all these other experts and distill and paraphrase and present it back. But I was like, God, I don’t want to do that project, let alone read that book. And so I guess, in my own Climate Venn Diagram way, I was like, “Well, that doesn’t bring me joy. We’re going to have to find another way to do this.”
A worksheet version of the Climate Venn Diagram, an exercise Johnson invented for finding the sweet spot of what you love to do, what you’re good at doing, and what the climate movement needs. You can download this and do it yourself! Ayana Elizabeth Johnson
But my editor actually, Chris Jackson, has come for years to this event series I do at Pioneer Works called Science & Society. I always interview two people with complimentary areas of expertise — an ocean fisherman and an ocean farmer talking about the future of seafood, or a nonprofit leader and a scientist talking about the plastic problem, or the head of Wikipedia and of the Brooklyn Public Library talking about the future of public knowledge. And it has been shocking to me that, like, you can get 300 people out in Red Hook Brooklyn on a Tuesday night to listen to this stuff. There is an appetite for it. And my editor came up to me after one of them — he was like, “This is the book.” [Editor’s note: Shoutout to editors!] I was like, “What are you talking about?” And he said, “The thing that you do that is special is tell us who to listen to and then help us understand what the heck they’re saying.”
And so I thought the interview format would maybe be more lighthearted and literally conversational, and have that ease. Especially because these are people I’ve known for years, if not a decade, and I have a certain rapport with them and we can make fun of each other, and I can make them explain things, and I know enough about their work to make sure they’re not underselling or skipping part of it. My job was really to be a guide for the reader. And then the bonus is the audiobook is all their voices.
Q. What are some of your next chapters, now that this book is out in the world?
A. Well, the tour is a very big chapter. How do we avoid the tree-that-falls-in-the-forest — you don’t spend two years making a book and then just hope, in this crazy media landscape, that it finds all the right hearts and minds and hands. It has to be very deliberate.
For the Venn diagram, we have made these note cards of it that we’re giving out and making people fill out at every stop, to actually have people think together in a room about what that could be — and then hopefully talk about it after and see who else is interested in similar things. I’m bringing the Environmental Voter Project and Lead Locally on tour with me to make this very much into a get-out-the-vote initiative for environmentalists. Because 8 million registered voters with “environment” as their number one issue did not vote in the 2020 election — so it would be absolutely irresponsible of me to do a book tour in September and October of 2024 and not be focused on that.
My dream is to be a behind-the-scenes person in 2025 and beyond. We’ll see if I can pull that off, because people want a face to associate with the ideas — but I don’t have any interest in being that face. I don’t want to host a TV show or anything like that. I love the wonky policy memo stuff and I’m excited to devote more time to building up the work there.
I just launched a Substack newsletter, and embedded within that will be a What If We Get It Right podcast. A bunch of the conversations I’m having on this tour need a home. So I hired an audio producer to work with me on that — that launch is next week.
I’ve had this dream children’s book series in my head for like five, 10 years. So that may happen. But I just want to disappear into the woods of Maine, basically. This book is sort of my offering — I hope this is enough breadcrumbs that people can sort of follow one of the paths or chart their own, and then I won’t be needed.
Read:All We Can Save, a 2020 anthology that Johnson co-edited, along with Katharine K. Wilkinson (and the very first book we read for the Looking Forward book club)
Read:Our Time Is Now, a 2020 bestseller by Stacey Abrams focused on voter suppression and how to counter it
Johnson’s book also includes a few visuals of what a compelling climate future might look like, created by artist Olalekan Jeyifous. The photomontages conjure up a “protopian, sustainable community in ’90s Brooklyn — a future that is, as Olalekan puts it, ‘decolonized, decarbonized, draped up, and dripped out.’” As you can see in the image below, the green and joy-filled societies that Jeyifous imagined would call themselves the Proto-Farm Communities of Upstate New York, or PFCs.
IMAGE CREDITS
Vision: Grist
Spotlight: Claire Elise Thompson; Ayana Elisabeth Johnson
It was a warning shot picked up by seismometers around the world. Last September, a melting glacier collapsed, sending the mountaintop it propped up careening into the Dickson Fjord in East Greenland. The impact created a 650-foot tall tsunami — twice as tall as the Statue of Liberty — which crashed back and forth between the steep, narrow walls of the channel, booming so loud that the vibrations wrapped the globe in a 90-second interval pulse for 9-straight days.
“It’s like a climate change alarm,” said Stephen Hicks, a seismologist at University College London. Hicks is part of an international team of researchers who finally sleuthed out the source of the vibrations that had been a source of bafflement ever since earthquake monitoring stations recorded the signal. Unraveling the mystery and mapping out the tsunami took the team of 68 scientists, from a wide range of disciplines, a full year.
A side-by-side comparison of the fjord 30 minutes before and 7 minutes after the landslide.
Planet Labs
The resulting paper, recently published in Science, blames man-made global warming for the collapse. A century of greenhouse gasses heating up the atmosphere have eroded swaths of the Greenland ice sheet — frozen freshwater that holds back 23 feet of potential sea level rise. Hicks said this kind of landslide-tsunami has never been seen in East Greenland, an area that tends to experience less melt than the country’s Western perimeter. It could be a one-off, random event, or a sign of spreading instability. “We can maybe expect more of these events in the future,” Hicks said.
Another group of researchers, from the University of Barcelona, recently confirmed the ice sheet’s trajectory. Their study, published in the Journal of Climate by the American Meteorological Society, found that days of extreme melt, linked to periods of hot, stagnant air in the summer, have doubled in frequency and also intensified since 1950. Roughly 40 percent of the ice Greenland loses in a year occurs during these extreme melting events.
“Each episode of melting is becoming more intense and frequent than in the past,” said Josep Bonsoms, a geography researcher at the University of Barcelona and the study’s lead author. For instance, an extreme melting event in 2012 led to the loss of 610 gigatons of ice, enough to fill Lake Eerie, and then some.
According to the University of Barcelona researchers, even days of average melt, often influenced by the same weather conditions as extreme days, contribute to worsening melt in the future. Although their study did not make predictions, Bonsoms says the pattern will likely continue to accelerate as the planet heats up.
Take this summer. Greenland experienced above average melt, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, but not enough to be considered extreme. In July, two heatwaves ate away at the snowfall in the Western area of the ice sheet, depleting its ability to reflect sunlight, known as albedo. When the darker, glacial ice beneath it became exposed, the land absorbed more heat, intensifying the melt.
On a bigger scale, this type of feedback loop is one of the reasons that the region is warming four times faster than the rest of the planet, a phenomenon known as Arctic amplification. Tyler Jones, an arctic researcher at the University of Colorado, Boulder, said that among the many catalysts driving Arctic amplification, “the most important is the loss of sea ice.” Unlike Greenland’s land-bound ice, these floating patches of sea ice don’t directly contribute to sea level rise when they melt, but their albedo acts like a giant mirror reflecting the sun’s heat.
“If you remove that giant mirror, all of a sudden that incoming solar energy gets absorbed by the ocean,” Jones said. Because the ocean can trap and store so much heat, this means the entire region becomes warmer even in the winter. The amount of sea ice remaining in September, the end of the annual melt season, has almost halved since the 1980s — with hardly any older than 4 years surviving. This year, global sea ice levels neared record lows.
“We’re in a new climate regime. We are seeing extremes that just weren’t in our records of climate ever, just now appearing before us,” Jones said. Because the melting is self-perpetuating, he says, the ice sheet will continue to destabilize until the damage is irreversible. And as sea levels continue to rise, coastal communities around the world will have to adapt to a new world of extremes their cities weren’t built for.
As New York City’s Climate Week begins, we speak to environmental justice activist Kumi Naidoo, the former head of Greenpeace International and Amnesty International and now the president of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative, about his work to end the use of fossil fuels, the leading driver of climate change. Naidoo calls for “urgency and the fastest withdrawal” from the world’s dependence on fossil fuel companies, slamming the “arrogance,” “control” and “impunity” of their profit-maximizing CEOs. Naidoo is from South Africa, which brought the genocide case against Israel to the International Criminal Court, and he has joined other climate activists in linking the climate justice and antiwar movements. “We have to recognize many of the struggles we face are very intersecting and very connected.”
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
As the United Nations General Assembly meets in New York City alongside Climate Week, dozens of activists were arrested Monday at a protest outside of Citibank’s global headquarters while demanding the company divest from fossil fuels. Democracy Now! spoke to many activists from the Gulf South about the impact of Citibank-funded projects in their communities. “I’m not even a teenager yet, and I have to fight for my life and many others my age,” says 12-year-old Kamea Ozane from Southwest Louisiana. “I shouldn’t have to do this. This is not right.”
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
New York, September 23, 2024 — The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) today announced the Climate Crisis Journalist Protection Initiative, which will ensure that journalists reporting on climate issues are able to do so freely and safely. The initiative will provide climate journalists with assistance, safety training, and other forms of support.
CPJ has raised nearly one-third of the funds needed for the $1 million dollar initiative, which CPJ CEO Jodie Ginsberg unveiled today at the 2024 Clinton Global Initiative meeting. The annual meeting is a venue for civil society groups to publicly commit to action on global problems.
“Journalists probe political corruption and the organized crime networks exploiting natural resources. They report on environmental devastation and the innovations and policies to stop it,” said Ginsberg at the meeting. “Such reporting is becoming increasingly dangerous. Climate change is the issue of our time and one that requires journalists to be able to report freely and safely. This initiative will help ensure that.”
The Climate Crisis Journalist Protection Initiative will:
Provide financial and non-financial support, including mental health assistance and tailored safety workshops, to journalists via a dedicated emergency fund
Further CPJ’s research to detect global hotspots and safety trends, map journalist needs, and conduct preventative outreach
Help increase awareness of the threats facing climate reporters and transform existing journalist protection mechanisms to account for climate-related threats
Engage with the private sector to ensure that journalists face no barriers to and no reprisal for their reporting on companies that are exacerbating or working to solve the climate crisis
Between 2009 and 2023, at least 749 journalists and news media outlets reporting on environmental issues were targeted with murder, physical violence, arrest, online harassment, or legal attacks, according to UNESCO. More than 300 of these attacks occurred between 2019 and 2023 – a 42% increase on the preceding five years (2014-2018).
CPJ has long documented climate-related attacks on journalists and has published safety advice on covering extreme weather events, flash floods, and wildfires. In 2001, CPJ established its journalist assistance program to dispense emergency grants to journalists in distress worldwide. In 2023 CPJ provided assistance to 719 journalists from 59 countries.
CPJ’s Climate Crisis Journalist Protection Initiative was unveiled during the 2024 annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative in New York on September 23, during a session on solutions for journalists covering crises, featuring former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, among others.
About the Committee to Protect Journalists
The Committee to Protect Journalists is an independent, nonprofit organization that promotes press freedom worldwide. We defend the right of journalists to report the news safely and without fear of reprisal.
Founded by President Bill Clinton in 2005, the Clinton Global Initiative is a community of doers representing a broad cross-section of society and dedicated to the idea that we can accomplish more together than we can apart.
Through CGI’s unique model, more than 9,000 organizations have launched more than 3,900 Commitments to Action — new, specific, and measurable projects and programs. Learn more about the Clinton Global Initiative and how you can get involved at www.ClintonGlobal.org
New York, September 23, 2024 — The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) today announced the Climate Crisis Journalist Protection Initiative, which will ensure that journalists reporting on climate issues are able to do so freely and safely. The initiative will provide climate journalists with assistance, safety training, and other forms of support.
CPJ has raised nearly one-third of the funds needed for the $1 million dollar initiative, which CPJ CEO Jodie Ginsberg unveiled today at the 2024 Clinton Global Initiative meeting. The annual meeting is a venue for civil society groups to publicly commit to action on global problems.
“Journalists probe political corruption and the organized crime networks exploiting natural resources. They report on environmental devastation and the innovations and policies to stop it,” said Ginsberg at the meeting. “Such reporting is becoming increasingly dangerous. Climate change is the issue of our time and one that requires journalists to be able to report freely and safely. This initiative will help ensure that.”
The Climate Crisis Journalist Protection Initiative will:
Provide financial and non-financial support, including mental health assistance and tailored safety workshops, to journalists via a dedicated emergency fund
Further CPJ’s research to detect global hotspots and safety trends, map journalist needs, and conduct preventative outreach
Help increase awareness of the threats facing climate reporters and transform existing journalist protection mechanisms to account for climate-related threats
Engage with the private sector to ensure that journalists face no barriers to and no reprisal for their reporting on companies that are exacerbating or working to solve the climate crisis
Between 2009 and 2023, at least 749 journalists and news media outlets reporting on environmental issues were targeted with murder, physical violence, arrest, online harassment, or legal attacks, according to UNESCO. More than 300 of these attacks occurred between 2019 and 2023 – a 42% increase on the preceding five years (2014-2018).
CPJ has long documented climate-related attacks on journalists and has published safety advice on covering extreme weather events, flash floods, and wildfires. In 2001, CPJ established its journalist assistance program to dispense emergency grants to journalists in distress worldwide. In 2023 CPJ provided assistance to 719 journalists from 59 countries.
CPJ’s Climate Crisis Journalist Protection Initiative was unveiled during the 2024 annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative in New York on September 23, during a session on solutions for journalists covering crises, featuring former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, among others.
About the Committee to Protect Journalists
The Committee to Protect Journalists is an independent, nonprofit organization that promotes press freedom worldwide. We defend the right of journalists to report the news safely and without fear of reprisal.
Founded by President Bill Clinton in 2005, the Clinton Global Initiative is a community of doers representing a broad cross-section of society and dedicated to the idea that we can accomplish more together than we can apart.
Through CGI’s unique model, more than 9,000 organizations have launched more than 3,900 Commitments to Action — new, specific, and measurable projects and programs. Learn more about the Clinton Global Initiative and how you can get involved at www.ClintonGlobal.org
You’ve probably heard that the Biden administration’s signature climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act, gives people big rebates and tax credits to switch to a heat pump or electric vehicle. But the law also contains a much-less-talked-about provision that could save lives: $1.5 billion for planting and maintaining trees that would turn down the temperature in many American cities.
That money goes to the U.S. Forest Service, which has been doling out the money to hundreds of applicants, including nonprofits and cities themselves. The $1.5 billion is nearly 40 times bigger than what the Forest Service typically budgets for planting and taking care of trees in cities each year, and it’s earmarked for underserved neighborhoods. So far, the agency has awarded $1.25 billion of the funding, and is working to distribute the remaining over the next year.
“Going from a $36 [million]-to-$40 million program with urban forestry, to a little over $1.5 billion, was a substantial infusion in dollars to address things like tree equity, tree canopy, and more importantly, providing this type of funding to underserved communities,” said Homer Wilkes, undersecretary for natural resources and environment at the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
While cities across the U.S. already run their own tree-planting programs with their own funds, this amount of federal money is like winning the arborist lottery. “It’s unprecedented,” said Edith de Guzman, a researcher at UCLA and director of the Los Angeles Urban Cooling Collaborative, whose research has found that tree cover significantly reduces heat-related hospitalizations. “This is a pinch yourself, once-in-a-lifetime kind of opportunity.”
Planting trees in cities, though, turns out to be a surprisingly complex challenge. Some species like live oak grow bigger canopies, which provide more shade. Others, like fruit trees, can provide food. Along a noisy street, residents might want bushier trees that better block sound. And all tree species capture carbon and clean the air by hoovering up pollutants. Any green space also reduces urban flooding by soaking up rainwater.
With the IRA money, arborists will try to plant native tree species adapted to the local environment. “The native species here are going to do best with our climate, but also provide so many more benefits for pollinators,” said Jordan Herring, arborist and ground maintenance manager for the city of Winchester, Virginia, which received some IRA funding. “Birds, small mammals, they’ve adapted with these species for so long.”
But just because a species is native doesn’t mean it’s perfect for a given spot. Some species have deeper root systems while others stay closer to the surface, potentially cracking sidewalks and creating problems for residents in wheelchairs. So some of the IRA funding will also go toward planting trees in private property, like around homes, apartment buildings, and businesses. In San Francisco, for example, native species like the coast live oak and California buckeye, both of which would tear up sidewalks if planted on a street, would work nicely in a private lot. “It allows us to respond to a very common desire in the community of somebody saying: I really don’t want a tree in front of my house on the sidewalk, but I would love one in my backyard,” said Brian Wiedenmeier, executive director of Friends of the Urban Forest, another organization that received money from the legislation.
Any urban arborist will tell you they can’t do their job properly without taking into account what a neighborhood wants. “We can’t just parachute into any of these neighborhoods and say: Lucky you — we’re here to plant trees,” said Dan Lambe, chief executive of the Arbor Day Foundation, which received $50 million of IRA funding from the Forest Service to divvy out to nonprofits, cities, and tribal communities. “It takes relationship-building.”
Port St. Lucie, Florida, which also received a share of the IRA funds, holds citizen summits where residents hash out what kinds of tree species they want, and where they want them planted. They also get updates on projects completed since the previous year’s summit. “So residents get to actually see the improvements and the input that they’ve made, and the changes they’ve been able to make in the community,” said Shereese Snagg, project coordinator of urban beautification in the city’s public works department.
Perhaps the greatest challenge for an urban tree is the same for any urbanite: City life can be tough. When choosing species, arborists consider that some need more light than others, and will wither if a building is blocking the sun. If a canopy grows too big, it might get tangled up in overhead wires and electrocute itself, so pruning is paramount. All the while, trees may get stressed by ever-hotter temperatures and less rainfall made worse by climate change, meaning arborists need to look into the future to find the right species to plant.
If one species is hardy and easy to care for in a particular city, the temptation for an arborist is to just plant them all over the place. But that lack of diversity would mean they’d all reach the end of their lives at once and need to be ripped out en masse. “If you throw in a pest or disease in with that, you have a serious situation on your hands, trying to remove a lot of trees before they die completely,” said Herring. “So one of my biggest pushes is also getting a lot of diverse species out there into the mix.”
Just being a native species, though, is no guarantee that a tree will survive. For the first year or so of its life, a tree needs regular watering until its roots get established. Sick-looking youngsters will need caring for, and as they grow they’ll need pruning to make sure they turn into a manageable form. Accordingly, the Forest Service stipulates that the IRA cash goes toward both planting and maintaining. “We didn’t just give these grants and turn them loose,” Wilkes said. “This will be a process that will actually be worked on and monitored over the next five years to make sure that the American people are getting what they’re paying for.”
Even longer-term, the federal funding could help solidify a sort of an information-sharing network of arborists. The idea is to develop a nationwide workforce of folks who can select, plant, and maintain the urban forest for years to come. Especially in underserved neighborhoods, that could provide jobs while preparing a city for a hotter future. “I think trees can sometimes be seen as a nice-to-have in a must-have world,” Lambe said. “But what we’re learning through science and otherwise is that trees are no longer a nice-to-have. They are a critical part of city survival.”
Among those concerned about the climate, it’s become something of a self-evident truth that as people suffer more severe and more frequent extreme weather and grapple with global warming’s impact on their daily lives, they’ll come to understand the problem at a visceral level. As a result, they’ll be eager for action. In other words, many climate activists believe that even if advocates and academics can’t sway the hardened opinions of the dismissive, extreme weather can wake anyone up.
The data disagrees.
Over the last seven years, as the effects of climate change have begun to envelop the world in smoke and storm, natural disasters have in fact leapt front of mind for voters when they contemplate the most important reasons to take climate action. Those concerns, however, aren’t shared evenly across the political spectrum.
Preventing extreme weather ranked among the top three reasons to address the crisis among 37 percent of voters surveyed this year, according to an analysis by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. That’s up from 28 percent seven years ago. For Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale program, this shift reflects the fact that, while many Americans regard climate change with a certain psychological distance, the increasingly shared experience of smoke-filled skies, life-threatening heat, and earth-cracking droughts means “climate change is no longer distant in time and space,” Leiserowitz said. “It’s right here, right now.”
Mainstream media outlets are making that increasingly clear for their audiences, thanks in large part to the nascent field of attribution science that allows researchers to describe in real time the links between global warming and a given weather system.
Grist
The shift Leiserowitz and his colleagues detected was driven in large part by moderate and right-leaning Democrats. In 2017, less than one-third of those voters included preventing extreme weather among their top three reasons for desiring action, but by this year, half of moderate and conservative Democrats ranked it that highly. The opinions of moderate and left-leaning Republicans, however, stayed mostly unchanged, with just under 30 percent of those voters citing extreme weather as a top three reason to reduce global warming. Perhaps surprisingly, extreme weather even increased in relevance among conservative Republicans, with 21 percent listing it as a leading reason compared to just 16 percent in 2017.
But even as extreme weather became increasingly salient among the most conservative voters, far more of them selected the survey option “global warming isn’t happening.” In 2024, a full 37 percent of conservative Republicans denied the reality of climate change, compared to 27 percent just seven years earlier.
“People’s beliefs about climate change are driven predominantly by political factors,” said Peter Howe, an environmental social scientist at Utah State University who has worked with Leiserowitz in the past but was uninvolved in this analysis. The political and social circles a person occupies and the beliefs they hold not only mediate one’s overall opinions about climate change, Howe pointed out, but they influence how that person experiences extreme weather.
When Howe collected and reviewed studies analyzing the connections between extreme weather and personal opinions about climate change, he found that although those already concerned about the crisis often had their anxieties heightened by a natural disaster, those who were dismissive before the event often remained so, ignoring any potential connection to global warming.
When Constant Tra, an environmental economist at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, and his colleagues published a similar study in May, he found that disasters don’t shove people toward concern and alarm in the way he expected. At best, “it kind of nudges people,” he said, but rarely moves someone from an entrenched position of categorical denial, especially when those around them aren’t concerned.
This dynamic reflects a groundbreaking experiment conducted in 1968 in which a college student was placed in a room with two actors. As smoke trickled into the room, if the actors pretended that all was fine, the test subjects rarely reacted with alarm or reported the smoke. In fact, they often assumed it wasn’t dangerous. In the climatic reprise of this “smoky room experiment” currently playing out in America, climate deniers are filling the role of the actors, trying to convince everyone around them that everything’s fine. Over time, those views spread and positions harden.
But the smoky room experiment and Leiserowitz’s own research make something clear: Concern can be contagious, too.
Screaming from the clock towers, however, is not enough on its own, Leiserowitz added. “It’s really important that people have an accurate understanding of the risks,” he said, without exaggeration or ignoring the fact that every little bit matters. That clear-eyed accounting of the risks must also be paired with an exploration of the solutions that exist, that we can implement with ease and efficiency, and that can make a meaningful impact today.
On a blisteringly hot, sunny day this summer, Emory University researcher Arabella Lewis made her way through the underbrush in a patch of woods in Putnam County, Georgia, about an hour southeast of Atlanta. She was after something most people try desperately to avoid while in the woods: ticks.
“Sometimes you gotta get back in the weeds to get the best ticks,” she explained, sweeping a large square of white flannel along the forest floor.
The idea was that the ticks could sense the movement of the fabric and smell the carbon dioxide Lewis breathed out and would grab onto the flannel flag.
“My favorite thing about them is their little grabby front arms, the way that they like wave them around, like they’re trying to grab onto things,” said Lewis, who’s been fascinated by ticks since she was a young kid growing up on a farm — and persistently dealing with ticks. “They have these little organs on their hands that smell, so they smell with their hands.”
Once a tick jumped aboard her flannel, Lewis picked it up with the tweezers she wore around her neck and deposited it into a labeled vial. Back at the Emory lab, she would test ticks for the Heartland virus.
The tick collection and testing is part of an ongoing effort to get a better handle on Georgia’s tick population and the diseases the ticks carry. Earlier this year, Emory scientists published detailed, localized maps of where the state’s most common ticks are likely to show up. Now, they’re tracking emerging diseases like Heartland, a still-rare virus that causes symptoms like fever, fatigue, nausea and diarrhea.
Nationwide, vector-borne diseases — that is, illnesses spread by carriers like ticks and mosquitoes — are on the rise, according to the CDC, and climate change is a major factor.
Emory University researcher Arabella Lewis uses tweezers to collect a tick off a square of flannel in the woods of Putnam County, Georgia.
Matthew Pearson / WABE / Grist
“Changes in climate lead to changes in the environment, which result in changes in ecology, incidence and distribution of these diseases,” said Ben Beard, the deputy director of CDC’s vector-borne disease division.
There’s a lot at play with vector-borne disease, not all of it climate change-related. These diseases live in animal hosts, so scientists have to consider how climate change is affecting those animals as well as the vector species like ticks. Humans keep encroaching on forested land full of both host animals and ticks, increasing their interactions and potential exposure.
As for the ticks themselves, longer summers and milder winters mean they’re coming out earlier and sticking around for longer. The lone star tick, which carries the Heartland virus and has long been widespread across the South and Mid-Atlantic, is expanding north and west as the climate warms. The black legged tick, which transmits Lyme disease, is also expanding its range – especially into areas that have seen significant warming, Beard said.
Clayton Aldern / Grist
“So all of those things are kind of coming together,” he said. “And so the net effect is you have potentially more people over a broader geographic distribution, and over a longer period of time during the season potentially exposed to the bites of infected ticks.”
That’s exactly why the Georgia researchers are trying to get a better handle on ticks and their diseases: so they can help people avoid getting sick.
“My hope is that people in these regions that are predicted to have high probability will take more preventative measures when they’re out on hikes, or just out kind of in the yard, just generally interacting with our environment to hopefully prevent them from getting any tick borne diseases,” said Steph Bellman, who led Emory’s lone star tick mapping project.
As for the Heartland virus, it’s still largely a mystery, Lewis said.
“There’s no treatment at this point other than just kind of taking care of the symptoms,” she said. “It is considered an emerging pathogen, so pretty rare.”
“We are taking the steps to understand it now so if an increasing human incidence were to happen, we know what can be done,” said Emory environmental sciences professor Gonzalo Vazquez-Prokopec, who leads this research team.
They’re establishing a baseline of knowledge and research, he said, so they can stay on top of these diseases as they move and the climate changes.
“Narrative agency is most important when reminding people of their own ability to actually do what they’re capable of.”
— Ahmed Badr, co-founder of Narratio
The spotlight
When Rayan Mohamed was 4 years old, her family left their home in Mogadishu amidst the Somali Civil War. For nine days, they traveled by bus throughout the country. “We moved to different cities that were a little bit safer, and it didn’t work out,” Mohamed recounted. “And my mom decided that it was time to move out of the country.” Eventually, they arrived at the Awbare Refugee Camp in neighboring Ethiopia, intending to spend just one night there. But, with the possibility of returning to their home country narrowing, Mohamed’s family decided to apply for asylum in the U.S. They would spend seven years in the camp before finally being granted the opportunity to move to Syracuse, New York, in 2014.
In recent years, Mohamed has created short films and poems about her time at the camp. “Anytime that I want to draw from an experience, it’s always going to be in Ethiopia, because that was the most pivotal experience [of] my life,” she said. She described her time there as extremely difficult, with her day-to-day governed by stifling mundanity. “Waiting for answers that may or may not come,” she recounts in one of her poems, “yearning for something that exhausts our wishes.” But, she was also bolstered by support from her tight-knit family of women — her mom, grandma, and sisters. Their steady closeness cultivated an emotional resilience that Mohamed carries with her to this day. “In a cozy tent where memories were made,” reads the poem, “We found comfort in each other’s presence.”
Mohamed recited these lines at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in July. Her performance was part of an arts showcase for Narratio, a fellowship that empowers resettled refugee youth to tell their own stories. Through the program, arts and culture workers skilled in various mediums — including poetry, photography, filmmaking, and visual arts — guide participants through an intensive storytelling project.
Rayan Mohamed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art this July, participating in a special showcase as part of Narratio’s fifth anniversary. Edward Grattan
“The goal of the program is to provide opportunities for the fellows to tell stories on their own terms,” explained Brice Nordquist. He co-founded the Narratio fellowship in 2019 with Ahmed Badr to combat media representations that flatten and homogenize the refugee experience. By giving displaced young people the opportunity to process their experiences through storytelling — and giving a platform to those stories of individual journeys — they hope to communicate the human side of migration, and its many complexities.
Though every migration story is personal, these experiences are becoming more and more common on our rapidly warming planet. According to recent projections, the number of people displaced by environmental factors could increase to over a billion by 2050. And climate change’s impacts on global migration are already visible: Since 2008, an estimated 21.5 million people have been displaced annually by environmental hazards.
Conceptions of “climate refugees” are often limited to those displaced by acute disasters such as earthquakes, wildfires, and floods. But climate change can be one of many complicating factors, or a driving force behind the scenes. “Displacement stories are more complex, when you think about the roots of them,” Nordquist said. Many Narratio fellows are from the Arab Peninsula, the Horn of Africa, and Central Asia — regions in which escalating climate threats and environmental degradation increasingly drive migration.
By working with displaced young people, Badr and Nordquist have acquired a more expansive view of climate displacement, they said. In some cases, fellows’ migration pathways illustrate how conflicts over land, food, and other natural resources are inextricable from environmental changes. In others, they demonstrate climate change’s role as a threat multiplier.
Mohamed’s family, for instance, initially left Somalia due to the ongoing civil war. But environmental factors drove her family’s eventual move to the United States. During their time in Ethiopia, volatile weather made life in the refugee camp increasingly untenable. Severe droughts compromised their food and water sources. These dry periods were interrupted by tornadoes and flooding, which destroyed improvised shelters and even drowned young children. It’s an example of how climate volatility can drive further involuntary movement — making refugees’ lives even more tenuous, and dissuading displaced people from settling in neighboring countries that are vulnerable to climate impacts.
And, more and more, environmental hazards are becoming the primary cause of displacement. In 2021, for example, most displacements from Mohamed’s home country, Somalia, were “primarily related to climate,” according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Although these conditions can send people across borders, people usually move within their own countries, including in wealthy nations like the U.S. that may be more commonly thought of as resettlement countries.
Nordquist and Badr anticipate a greater focus on environmental issues as the Narratio program expands — as well as a shift in society’s understanding of who a refugee is, and who is vulnerable to displacement. “The shape of the program over time could look a lot different based on the forms of displacement that people are increasingly facing around the world,” Nordquist said. “We anticipate that the types of people who are displaced from [climate] issues will increase.”
Badr, who has a background in environmental organizing, and is himself a former refugee from Iraq, emphasized how important it is for establishment venues to center refugee-led perspectives. Throughout Narratio’s five years, the program has reached a cumulative audience of over 3 million people. Fellows have showcased their final works at the United Nations, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and The New York Times.
He also recognizes the potential for powerful narratives to shape action — both at the societal level, and for the storytellers themselves. By crafting stories through the fellowship, participants are reminded of the value of their own experiences, he said. This, in turn, can empower them to use their voices to drive change. “Narrative agency is most important when reminding people of their own ability to actually do what they’re capable of,” Badr said. “It’s just remarkable to see what that process of claiming a story on your own terms can unlock.”
Mohamed had no experience with filmmaking or videography prior to participating in the fellowship in 2020. The program granted her access to camera equipment and mentorship from a documentary filmmaker; she also workshopped her project with journalists, digital content producers, and film editors. “My whole life, I never really felt comfortable sharing my refugee background, because I felt like it wasn’t important or that it was something that I should be ashamed of or hide,” Mohamed said.
The fellowship changed that perspective for her. “People were interested in hearing what I have to say,” she said. “[This was] never an experience I had before.” After the Narratio fellowship, she went on to work on various video projects, including a documentary about mental health in refugee communities. Now, four years later, Mohamed is enrolled in Syracuse University’s film and media arts program, studying to be a filmmaker. “This is the thing that I love doing the most,” she said. “I want to not only tell my story, but also [the stories of] people like me and people who are underrepresented.”
Musician and composer Ameen Mokdad performs at “Sounds of Ink,” an event in the Met’s André Mertens Galleries for Musical Instruments prior to the Narratio fellows’ storytelling showcase this July. Originally from Iraq, Mokdad is a self-taught musician who had to carry out his art in secret — risking his life to do so — between 2014 and 2017, when the city of Mosul was occupied by ISIS.
When John Holbrook first started working as a pipefitter in the early 1990s, jobs were easy to come by in his corner of northeastern Kentucky.
A giant iron and steel mill routinely needed maintenance and repair work, as did the coal “coking” ovens next to it. There was also a hulking coal-fired power plant and a bustling petroleum refinery nearby. Fossil fuels extracted from beneath the region’s rugged Appalachian terrain supplied these industrial sites, which sprung up during the 19th and 20th centuries along the yawning Ohio River and its tributary, Big Sandy.
“Work was so plentiful,” Holbrook recalled on a scorching August morning in Ashland, a quiet riverfront city of some 21,000 people.
Ashland retains its motto as the place “Where Coal Meets Iron,” and railcars still rumble by. But after years of downsizing production, the steel mill’s owner demolished the complex in 2022. A decade ago, the coal plant switched to burning natural gas to generate electricity, which requires less hands-on maintenance. Meanwhile, thousands of jobs vanished from surrounding coalfields as mining became more mechanized, market forces shifted, and clean air policies took hold.
Many families have since moved away. The tradespeople who’ve stayed often drive for hours to work on the new construction projects sprouting up in other places, like the massive factories for making and recycling electric-car batteries in western Kentucky and the electricity-powered steel furnace in neighboring West Virginia. If America is undergoing a manufacturing boom, it hasn’t yet reached this hard-hit stretch of the Bluegrass State.
But that could soon change.
In March, Century Aluminum, the nation’s biggest producer of primary, or virgin, aluminum, announced that it plans to build an enormous plant in the United States — the nation’s first new smelter in 45 years. Jesse Gary, the company’s president and CEO, has pointed to northeastern Kentucky as the project’s preferred location, though he said there were still a “myriad of steps” before the company reaches a final decision.
The Chicago-based manufacturer is slated to receive up to $500 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Energy to build the facility, which could emit 75 percent less carbon dioxide than traditional smelters, thanks to its use of carbon-free energy and energy-efficient designs. The award is part of a $6.3 billion federal program — funded by the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law — that aims to sharply reduce greenhouse gas emissions from heavy-industry sectors.
The Ohio River seen from Ashland, Kentucky, right. John Holbrook at his office in Ashland.
Aluminum demand is set to soar globally by up to 80 percent by 2050 as the world produces more solar panels and other clean energy technologies. The makers of the essential material are now under mounting pressure from policymakers and consumers to clean up their operations. In North America alone, aluminum producers will need to cut carbon emissions by 92 percent from 2021 levels to meet net-zero climate goals.
Century already owns two aging smelters in western Kentucky. The new “green smelter” is expected to create over 5,500 construction jobs and more than 1,000 full-time union jobs. If built in eastern Kentucky, the $5 billion project would mark the region’s largest investment on record.
“We just need a crumb or two, just a little giant smelter,” Holbrook said with a laugh when we met at his office near Ashland’s historic main street. A short walk away, stones used in the city’s original iron-making furnaces stand as monuments overlooking the Ohio River.
Today, Holbrook heads the Tri-State Building and Construction Trades Council, which represents unions in a cluster of adjoining counties in Kentucky, Ohio, and West Virginia. He’s part of a broad coalition of labor organizers, local officials, environmentalists, and clean energy advocates who are urging Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, a Democrat, to work with Century to secure the smelter and hammer out a long-term deal to provide clean energy for it.
“It’d be a godsend for that area,” said Chad Mills, a pipefitter and the director of the Kentucky State Building and Construction Trades Council. The region “needs it more than you can imagine.”
The impact of Century’s new smelter would ripple far beyond this rural stretch of verdant peaks and meandering creeks.
The planned facility is set to nearly double the amount of primary aluminum that the United States produces — helping to revitalize a domestic industry that has been steadily shrinking for decades owing to spiking power prices and increased competition from China. In 2000, U.S. companies operated 23 aluminum smelters. Today, only four plants are operating, while another two have been indefinitely curtailed. That includes Century’s 55-year-old plant in Hawesville, Kentucky, which has been idle since June 2022.
The decline in U.S. production has complicated the country’s efforts to both make and procure lower-carbon aluminum for its supply chains, experts say.
Globally, the aluminum sector contributes around 2 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions every year. Nearly 70 percent of those emissions come from generating high volumes of electricity — often derived from fossil fuels — to power smelters almost around the clock.
As U.S. primary production dwindles, the country is importing more aluminum made in overseas smelters that are powered by dirtier, less efficient electrical grids. Ironically, an increasing share of that aluminum is being used to make solar panels, electric cars, heat pumps, power cables, and many other clean energy components. The metal is lightweight and inexpensive, and it’s a key ingredient in global efforts to electrify and decarbonize the wider economy.
But aluminum is also mind-bogglingly ubiquitous outside the energy sector. The versatile material is found in everything from pots and pans, deodorant, and smartphones to car doors, bridges, and skyscrapers. It’s the second-most-used metal in the world after steel.
Last year, the U.S. produced around 750,000 metric tons of primary aluminum while importing 4.8 million metric tons of it, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
Meanwhile, the country produced 3.3 million metric tons of “secondary” aluminum in 2023. Boosting recycling rates is seen as a necessary step for addressing aluminum’s emissions problem, because the recycling process requires about 95 percent less energy than making aluminum from scratch. But even secondary producers need primary aluminum to “sweeten” their batches and achieve the right strength and durability, said Annie Sartor, the aluminum campaign director for Industrious Labs, an advocacy organization.
“Primary aluminum is essential, and we have a primary industry that’s been in decline, is very polluting, and is very high-emitting,” Sartor said. Century’s proposed new smelter “could be a turning point for this industry,” she added. “We all would like to see it get built and thrive.”
An employee walks by Century Aluminum’s smelter in Hawesville, Kentucky, in a 2017 photo. The smelter has been idle since 2022.
Luke Sharrett for The Washington Post via Getty Images
A new green smelter wouldn’t just boost supplies of primary aluminum for making clean energy technologies. The facility, with its voracious electricity appetite, is also expected to accelerate the region’s buildout of clean energy capacity, which has lagged behind that of many other states.
Century expects its planned smelter to produce about 600,000 metric tons of aluminum a year. That means it could need at least a gigawatt’s worth of power to operate annually at full tilt, equal to the yearly demand of roughly 750,000 U.S. homes. By way of comparison, Louisville, Kentucky’s largest city, is home to some 625,000 people.
But Kentucky has very little carbon-free capacity available today.
About 0.2 percent of the state’s electricity generation came from solar in 2022, while 6 percent was supplied by hydroelectric dams, mainly in the western part of the state. Coal and gas plants produced most of the rest. Still, after decades of clinging tightly to its coal-rich history, Kentucky is seeing a raft of new utility-scale solar installations under development, including atop former coal mines.
And manufacturers in Kentucky can access the renewable energy being generated in neighboring states as well as regional grid networks like PJM. Swaths of eastern Kentucky are covered by a robust array of high-voltage, long-distance transmission lines operated by Kentucky Power, a subsidiary of the utility giant American Electric Power.
Lane Boldman, executive director of the Kentucky Conservation Committee, said that investing in clean energy and upgrading grid infrastructure would offer a chance to employ more of Kentucky’s skilled workers.
“It’s exciting, because it actually modernizes our industry and leverages a local workforce that has a great expertise with energy already,” she said when we met in Lexington, near the rolling green hills and long white fences of the area’s horse farms. “There are ways you can create economic development that are not so extractive, that just leave the community bare.”
Lane Boldman says she became an environmental advocate years ago after seeing how coal strip mining was harming Appalachian communities.
Maria Gallucci/Canary Media
Northeastern Kentucky isn’t the only location that Century is considering for the smelter. The company is also evaluating sites in the Ohio and Mississippi river basins. The final decision will depend on where there’s a steady supply of affordable power, a Century executive told The Wall Street Journal in early July. (A spokesperson didn’t respond to Canary’s repeated requests for comment.)
Century is aiming to secure a power-supply deal to meet a decade’s worth of electricity demand from the new smelter, according to the Journal. The goal is to finalize plans in the next two years and then begin construction, which could take around three years. In the meantime, the U.S. will continue to see a rapid buildout of solar, wind, and other carbon-free power supplies connecting to the grid.
Governor Beshear has participated in discussions about the smelter’s power supply, in the hopes of landing Century’s megaproject and all of its “good-paying jobs.” His administration “continues to work with multiple experts to determine a location in northeastern Kentucky that includes a river port and can support workforce training as well as provide the cleanest, most reliable electric service capacity needed,” Crystal Staley, a spokesperson for the governor’s office, said by email.
Environmental advocates say the aluminum plant represents a chance to reimagine what a major industrial facility can look like: powered by clean energy, equipped with modern pollution controls, and built with local community input from the beginning. Starting sometime this fall, the Sierra Club is planning to host public meetings and distribute flyers in northeastern Kentucky to let residents know about the giant smelter that could potentially be built in their backyards.
“It’s an opportunity for us to engage people who might shy away from other aspects of being an environmental activist and say, ‘Hey, this is something that we can embrace, because it’s going to help us create jobs so that people can stay in their region,’” said Julia Finch, the director of Sierra Club’s Kentucky chapter. “This is a chance for us to lead on what a green transition looks like for industry.”
Aluminum is the most abundant metal in Earth’s crust. But turning it into a sturdy, usable material is a laborious and dirty process — one that begins with scraping topsoil to extract bauxite, a reddish clay rock that is rich in alumina (also called aluminum oxide). The trickiest part comes next: removing oxygen and other molecules to transform that alumina into aluminum. Until the late 19th century, the methods for accomplishing this were so costly that the tinfoil we now buy at the grocery store was considered a precious metal, like gold, silver, and platinum.
Then in 1886, Charles Martin Hall figured out an inexpensive way to smelt aluminum through electrolysis, a technique that uses electrical energy to drive a chemical reaction. Not long after, he helped launch the Pittsburgh Reduction Company, which went on to become the U.S. aluminum behemoth presently known as Alcoa.
Around the same time that Hall was tinkering in his woodshed in Oberlin, Ohio, a French inventor named Paul Louis Touissant Héroult was making a similar discovery in Paris. Modern aluminum smelters now use what’s called the Hall-Héroult process — an effective but also energy-intensive and carbon-intensive way of making primary aluminum metal.
Smelting involves dissolving alumina in a molten salt called cryolite, which is heated to over 1,700 degrees Fahrenheit. Large carbon blocks, or “anodes,” are lowered down into the highly corrosive bath, and electrical currents run through the entire structure. Aluminum then deposits at the bottom as oxygen combines with carbon in the blocks, creating carbon dioxide as a byproduct.
Today, this electrochemical process contributes about 17 percent of the total CO2 emissions from global aluminum production. It also causes the release of perfluorochemicals (PFCs) — potent and long-lasting greenhouse gases — as well as sulfur dioxide pollution, which can harm people’s respiratory systems and damage trees and crops. In 2021, PFCs accounted for more than half the emissions from Century’s Hawesville smelter and a third of the emissions from its Sebree smelter in Robards, Kentucky, according to the Sierra Club.
Newer smelters can dramatically reduce their PFC emissions by using automated control systems, which Century deploys at its smelter in Grundartangi, Iceland. Researchers are also working to slash CO2 by developing carbon-free blocks. The technology involves using chemically inactive, or “inert,” metallic alloys in the anodes through which the electrical currents flow. Elysis, a joint venture of Alcoa and the mining giant Rio Tinto, says it is making progress toward the large-scale implementation of its inert anodes and has plans for a demonstration plant in Quebec.
The alternative anodes may not be ready in time for a project like Century’s planned green U.S. smelter. Previously, large-scale buyers of aluminum, such as automakers and construction companies, had anticipated that inert anodes would help slash CO2 emissions in the aluminum supply chain in time for companies to meet their 2030 climate goals. But now that’s looking less likely.
“There’s a feeling now that it’s just taking longer to develop that technology,” said Lachlan Wright, a manager of the climate intelligence program at RMI, a clean energy think tank. One challenge might simply be the limited production capacity for the new anodes, which can’t yet meet the demands of a large aluminum user. Beyond that, “It’s not exactly clear what some of the barriers are there,” Wright added.
Still, when it comes to tackling aluminum’s biggest CO2 culprit — all the electricity it takes to run a smelter — the solutions already exist, in the form of renewable energy and other carbon-free sources.
“We don’t need a new or emerging technology,” Sartor said. “We need huge amounts of existing technology, and it needs to be available in places that work for the industry.”
Deep in the heart of Kentucky’s coal country, the scarred and treeless lands of former surface mines are increasingly being repurposed to supply that clean energy.
On another sun-blasted day in early August, I met with Mike Smith in Hazard, a city of some 5,300 people that’s enveloped by the Appalachian Mountains and built along the winding curves of the North Fork Kentucky River.
We hopped in his white pickup truck and headed toward his family’s 800-acre property. For years, they leased the land to Pine Branch Mining, which dynamited the mountaintop to reach coal seams buried beneath the surface. “I can’t say that I was for it,” Smith told me as we drove past modest homes tucked into creekside hollers and up a bumpy gravel road. Today, he said, “the only coal that’s left here is under the river.”
After the mine closed a decade ago, the land was reclaimed: smoothed out, packed down, and covered with vegetation to prevent erosion. Now, the property is about to undergo its latest transformation, as the home of the 80-megawatt Bright Mountain Solar facility.
Landowner Mike Smith and Louise Sizemore of Edelen Renewables surveyed the former mining site that will soon become the Bright Mountain Solar farm during a visit on August 7.
Maria Gallucci/Canary Media
Avangrid, the lead developer, plans to begin installing solar panels here next year, according to Edelen Renewables, the project’s local development partner. Edelen is also helping to advance other “coal-to-solar” projects in the region, including the 200 MW Martin County Solar Project under construction as well as BrightNight’s 800 MW Starfire installation. Rivian, the electric-truck maker, has signed on as the anchor customer for the $1 billion Starfire project, which is in the early stages of development.
Building on old mining sites can be more expensive and logistically trickier than, say, putting panels on flat, solid farmland. For one, hauling equipment to the former mines requires driving big, heavy vehicles up narrow mountain roads. Smith’s site is divided into uneven tiers of unpaved land. On our visit, he expertly accelerated his truck up a steep dirt path. When we reached the top, I audibly exhaled with relief. Smith gently laughed.
Despite the challenges, there’s an obvious poetry to building clean energy in a place that once yielded fossil fuels. Ideally, it can also bring justice to communities that are still hurting economically and spiritually from the coal industry’s inexorable decline. Bright Mountain and other coal-to-solar developments are projected to generate millions of dollars in local tax revenue over their lifetimes, using land that was left unsuitable for anything other than cattle grazing.
“You’ve got to reinvent yourself,” Smith told me as we gazed at the empty expanse of land where the solar project will eventually stand. Dragonflies darted by, and a quail called from somewhere on the property. “That’s the only way we can survive.”
The next day, I met Adam Edelen, the founder and CEO of Edelen Renewables, at his office in downtown Lexington. Sitting in a wicker rocking chair and sipping a pint glass of sweet tea, Edelen lamented the years of “outright hostility” to renewable energy development in the state. However, some Kentucky policymakers are starting to recognize the need to clean up the state’s electricity sector — if not explicitly to tackle climate change, then at least to attract manufacturers like Century Aluminum that want to power their operations with carbon-free energy sources.
The Martin County Solar Project spans 900 acres on the old Martiki mine site in Pilgrim, Kentucky.
Edelen Renewables
“Now, we’re in this headlong rush to make sure we’ve got a diversified energy portfolio to meet the needs of the private sector,” Edelen said. For Century in particular, he added, “The issue is that they need cheap power and they need green energy, neither of which Kentucky has a lot of.”
Electricity accounts for about 40 percent of a smelter’s total operating expenses. To remain cost competitive, aluminum producers need to hit a “magic benchmark” of around $40 per megawatt-hour, said Wright of RMI. Currently, power-purchase agreements for U.S. renewable energy projects are in the range of $50 to $60 per megawatt-hour — a significant difference for facilities that can consume 1 megawatt-hour of electricity just to produce a single metric ton of aluminum.
Provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act could help to narrow that price gap for Century and other primary aluminum makers.
The 45X production tax credit is a keystone of the IRA, which President Joe Biden signed into law two years ago. The incentive allows producers of critical materials, solar panels, batteries, and other types of “advanced manufacturing” products to receive a federal tax credit for up to 10 percent of their production costs, including electricity.
The IRA also set aside another $10 billion for the 48C investment tax credit, an Obama-era program that’s now available to help manufacturers install equipment that reduces emissions by 20 percent. Aluminum producers could use the tax credit to cover the cost of technology that improves their operating efficiency while also slashing CO2 pollution.
Edelen Renewables says the 48C tax credit will apply to all the coal-to-solar projects, which the company hopes can supply some of the electricity needed for Century’s green smelter. Under the expanded program, renewable energy projects built in “energy communities,” including former coal mine sites, can receive tax credits worth up to 40 percent of project costs, significantly lowering the final cost of electricity associated with the installations.
Eastern Kentucky “has played such a vital role in powering the country’s economy for the last 100 years,” Edelen said. Coal communities “deserve a place in the newer economy, and they’re hungry for that.”
Construction on the Martin County Solar Project began in 2023 and is slated to be completed later this year.
Edelen Renewables
Over in Ashland, John Holbrook said he’s anxiously watching to see if northeastern Kentucky will find its place in the nation’s green industrial transition. If Century selects the region to host its new aluminum smelter, the area’s trade councils and union apprenticeship programs will be more than ready to start training and recruiting workers, he said.
But Holbrook and other local labor leaders aren’t holding their breath. Several people I spoke to recalled the elation they felt in 2018 when the company Braidy Industries broke ground near Ashland on a $1.5 billion aluminum rolling mill — and the heartbreak that followed years later when Braidy backtracked on the plant and its promise of hundreds of jobs. Braidy’s former CEO was later accused of misleading the company’s board members, state officials, and journalists about the project’s true financial status.
While the Braidy scandal was a unique affair, the fallout still lingers in discussions about Century’s green smelter. “I think they’d have to start moving trailers in before we’d feel confident to start saying, ‘Yeah, this is really happening,’” Holbrook said from behind his wide wooden desk.
Still, he remains “cautiously optimistic” about the prospect of Century building its aluminum plant here. “It would be region-changing,” he said. “And life-changing.”
Under Pope Francis’ leadership, many church traditions have been renewed. For example, he gives space to women to take some important leadership and managerial roles in Vatican.
Many believe that the movement of the smiling Pope in distributing roles to women and lay groups is a timely move. Besides, during his term as the head of the Vatican state, the Pope has changed the Vatican’s banking and financial system.
Now, it is more transparent and accountable.
Besides, the Holy Father bluntly acknowledges the darkness concealed by the church hierarchy for years and graciously apologises for the wrong committed by the church.
The Pope invites the clergy (shepherds) to live simply, mingling and uniting with the members of the congregation (sheep).
The former archbishop of Buenos Aires also encourages the church to open itself to accepting congregations who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT).
However, Papa Francis’ encouragement was flooded with protests from some members of the church. And it is still an ongoing spiritual battle that has not been fully delivered in Catholic Church.
Two encyclicals Pope Francis, the successor of Apostle Peter, is a humble and modest man. Under his papacy, the highest authority of the Catholic Church has issued four apostolic works, two in the form of encyclicals, namely Lumen Fidei (Light of Faith) and Laudato si’ (Praise Be to You) and two others in the form of apostolic exhortations, namely Evangelii Gaudium (Joy of the Gospel) and Amoris Laetitia (Joy of Love).
Of the four masterpieces of the Pope, the encyclical Laudato si’ seems to gain most attention globally.
The encyclical Laudato si’ is an invitation from the Holy Father to human beings to be responsible for the existence of the universe. He begs us human beings not to exploit and torture Mother Nature.
We should respect nature because it provides plants and cares for us like a mother does for her children. Therefore, caring for the environment or the universe is a calling that needs to be responded to genuinely.
This apostolic call is timely because the world is experiencing various threats of natural devastation that leads to natural disasters.
The irresponsible and greedy behaviour of human beings has destroyed the beauty and diversity of the flora and fauna. Other parts of the world have experienced and are experiencing adverse impacts.
This is also taking place in the Pacific region.
Sinking cities The World Economy Forum (2019) reports that it is estimated there will be eleven cities in the world that will “sink” by 2100. The cities listed include Jakarta (Indonesia), Lagos (Nigeria), Houston (Texas-US), Dhaka (Bangladesh), Virginia Beach (Virginia-US), Bangkok (Thailand), New Orleans (Louisiana-US), Rotterdam (Netherlands), Alexandra (Egypt), and Miami (Florida-US).
During the visit of the 266th Pope, he addressed the importance of securing and protecting our envirinment.
During the historic interfaith dialogue held at the Jakarta’s Istiqlal Mosque on September 5, the 87-year-old Pope said Indonesia was blessed with rainforest and rich in natural resources.
He indirectly referred to the Land of Papua — internationally known as West Papua. The message was not only addressed to the government of Indonesia, but also to Papua New Guinea.
The apostolic visit amazed people in Indonesia which is predominantly a Muslim nation. The humbleness and friendliness of Papa Francis touched the hearts of many, not only Christians, but also people with other religious backgrounds.
Witnessing the presence of the Pope in Jakarta firsthand, we could certainly testify that his presence has brought tremendous joy and will be remembered forever. Those who experienced joy were not only because of the direct encounter.
Some were inspired when watching the broadcast on the mainstream or social media.
The Pope humbly made himself available to be greeted by his people and blessed those who approached him. Those who received the greeting from the Holy Father also came from different age groups — starting from babies in the womb, toddlers and teenagers, young people, adults, the elderly and brothers and sisters with disabilities.
Pope brings inner comfort
An unforgettable experience of faith that the people of the four nations did not expect, but experienced, was that the presence of the Pope Francis brought inner comfort. It was tremendously significant given the social conditions of Indonesia, PNG and Timor-Leste are troubled politically and psychologically.
State policies that do not lift the people out of poverty, practices of injustice that are still rampant, corruption that seems endemic and systemic, the seizure of indigenous people’s customary land by giant companies with government permission, and an economic system that brings profits to a handful of people are some of the factors that have caused disturbed the inner peace of the people.
In Indonesia, soon after the inauguration on October 20 of the elected President and Vice-President, Prabowo Subianto and Gibran Rakabuming Raka, the people of Indonesia will welcome the election of governors and deputy governors, regents and deputy regents, mayors and deputy mayors.
This will include the six provinces in the Land of Papua. The simultaneous regional elections will be held on November 27.
The public will monitor the process of the regional election. Reflecting on the presidential election which allegedly involved the current President’s “interference”, in the collective memory of democracy lovers there is a possibility of interference from the government that will lead the nation.
Could that happen? Only time will tell. The task of all elements of society is to jointly maintain the values of honest, honest and open democracy.
Pope Francis in his book, Let Us Dream, the Path to the Future (2020) wrote:
“We need a politics that can integrate and dialogue with the poor, the excluded, and the vulnerable that gives people a say in the decisions that impact their lives.”
Hope for people’s struggles
This message of Pope Francis has a deep meaning in the current context. What is common everywhere, politicians only make sweet promises or give fake hope to voters so that they are elected.
After being elected, the winning or elected candidate tends to be far from the people.
Therefore, a fragment of the Holy Father’s invitation in the book needs to be a shared concern. The written and implied meaning of the fragment above is not far from the democratic values adopted by Indonesia and other Pacific nations.
Pacific Islanders highly value the views of each person. But lately the noble values that were well-cultivated and inherited by the ancestors are increasingly diminishing.
Hopefully, the governments will deliver on the real needs and struggles of the people.
“Our greatest power is not in the respect that others have for us, but the service we can give others,” wrote Pope Francis.
Laurens Ikinia is a lecturer and researcher at the Institute of Pacific Studies, Indonesian Christian University, Jakarta, and is a member of the Asia Pacific Media Network (APMN).
As the climate crisis continues to accelerate, wealthy governments in the West are clamping down on climate protest. According to a new report from Climate Rights International, demonstrators around the world are being arrested, charged, prosecuted and silenced, simply for using their rights to free expression. One of those prosecuted is activist Joanna Smith, who last year applied washable school finger paint on the exterior glass case enclosing Edgar Degas’s renowned wax sculpture, Little Dancer, at the National Gallery of Art to draw attention to the urgency of the climate crisis. She was charged and later sentenced to two months in federal prison for her civil disobedience. We speak to Smith just a week after her release, and to Linda Lakhdir, the legal director of Climate Rights International. “Countries who have held themselves up as beacons of rule of law are essentially repressing peaceful protest,” says Lakhdir. Smith says the nonviolent action she took was intended to highlight the disparity between a sculpture of a child protected from the elements with a strong plexiglass case and the billions of children around the world left unsafe and vulnerable by climate change’s effects. “The crisis is here now, it’s unfolding in front of us, and our governments are failing us,” she explains.
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
The Committee to Project Journalists called on the Azerbaijani government to release over a dozen jailed journalists and reform the country’s deeply restrictive media laws in a letter signed by 25 organizations ahead of the United Nations Climate Conference on November 11-22, 2024.
CPJ and partners also urged member states of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the conference’s organizing body, to ensure all journalists can freely participate and cover conference developments without obstruction.
Hurricane Francine barreled into southern Louisiana on Wednesday as a Category 2 storm, packing 100 mph winds and sending a surge of water into coastal communities. Because so much of southern Louisiana sits at or below sea level, the surge could race inland unimpeded. The last hurricane to hit the state was Ida in 2021, which unleashed a catastrophic storm surge and caused $75 billion in damages and killed 55 people.
“Storm surge is really a nasty, nasty thing,” said Brian McNoldy, a hurricane researcher at the University of Miami. “It’s hurricane winds essentially bulldozing the ocean onto land. It doesn’t have anywhere else to go.”
The Gulf Coast’s storm surge problem will only get worse from here, scientists warn, because of colliding phenomena. Climate change is supercharging hurricanes as well as raising sea levels, and the coastline along Louisiana and Texas is sinking in some places, a process known as subsidence.
With every little bit of elevation lost, sea-level rise and storm surges grow more severe, yet forecasts have long neglected subsidence because researchers lacked the data. That could mean some parts of the Gulf Coast are underestimating the potential damage. Louisiana’s coastal parishes already have lost more than 2,000 square miles of land between 1932 to 2016 to sea-level rise and subsidence. The state’s wetlands act as a natural buffer against storm surges, but the ecosystems could be nearing collapse.
Warmer waters in the Gulf of Mexico have helped turn Francine into a fearsome cyclone. A hurricane is like an atmospheric engine. Its fuel is warm ocean water, which evaporates and sends energy into the sky. If the wind conditions are right, the storm will spin up and march across the sea. And if the water in its path is extra warm, the fuel is extra potent, allowing a hurricane to intensify into a monster. “They can start to grow very rapidly under very warm sea surface temperatures,” said Daniel Gilford, who studies hurricanes at Climate Central, a nonprofit research organization. “Almost like when your foot hits the accelerator and that fuel pours into your engine to ignite.”
The Gulf Coast is naturally warm because it heated up over the summer. But according to an analysis by Climate Central, as Francine formed it was feeding on ocean temperatures made at least 200 times more likely by climate change.
“What we’re seeing in the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico right now,” Gilford said, “is certainly an environment that is much more susceptible to stronger storms that spin faster and also carry a lot more moisture with them, which can lead to increased rainfall.” In general, a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, meaning there’s more water for a given storm to wring out of the sky.
While that water is falling from above, the storm surge is pushing water in from the side. The stronger the winds, the bigger the storm surge. That’s happening on top of the base layer of additional sea-level rise brought by climate change. “So if the sea levels, just on average, are higher than the built environment is prepared to handle, that can increase the amount of flooding that is associated with these storms,” Gilford said.
At the same time, communities are reckoning with subsidence, as parts of the Gulf Coast are steadily losing elevation. Subsidence happens when people extract too much groundwater, oil, or gas, causing the earth to crumple like an empty water bottle. It also happens naturally when sediments settle over time. (Beyond the consideration of sea-level rise, subsidence can destabilize roads, levees, and other critical infrastructure.)
In a paper published last week in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Earth Surface, scientists used radar measurements from satellites to quantify subsidence across the Gulf Coast, from Corpus Christi to New Orleans, finding that parts are sinking by more than half an inch a year. That may not sound like much, but that’s happening year after year — just as sea levels are steadily rising. Accordingly, the researchers concluded that the subsidence will significantly increase the risk of hurricane-induced floods in the future.
The rate of subsidence is far from uniform, though: Some places along the Gulf Coast, like Galveston county in Texas and New Orleans in Louisiana, are rapidly sinking while others are staying put. That makes subsidence a difficult problem to reckon with, since state agencies need precise data to determine the risk that a given stretch of coastline faces. They can’t get a complete picture of how much land they’ll lose to sea-level rise — and how bad storm surges will get — if they aren’t accounting for the subsidence happening at the same time.
“Once that land surface is lost,” said Ann Jingyi Chen, a geophysicist at the University of Texas at Austin and coauthor of the paper, “and the buildings, the trees, the structures will be lost, that actually loses some of the protective barriers, so the storm surge can move further inland.”
Chen’s analysis found that cities that stopped over-extracting groundwater saw their subsidence pretty much stop. And with more radar data, scientists can incorporate subsidence rates into models of storm surges, helping find problem areas and take action to reduce the sinking. Any little bit of avoided subsidence will make storm surges like Francine’s that much less severe. “For planning purposes,” Chen said, “it’s good to know, so we don’t wait until it is too late.”
Aspen in Sagebrush Steppe on Kiesha’s Preserve, Idaho. (No livestock grazing for 27 years) Photo: John Carter.
The Aspen Decline
What will our forests in the west be like in fall without those golden yellow leaves shining in the sun? Aspen forests in the Intermountain West support levels of biodiversity only exceeded by riparian (stream) communities. In this time of Climate Breakdown, aspen have been declining due to drought and temperature stress, with die-offs of large areas in the Western US in recent decades. Water stress during drought creates air bubbles in the water transport system of aspen, blocking flow of water and leading to mortality. Forest dieback during drought was simulated under a high emissions climate scenario showing that drought stress will exceed the mortality threshold for aspen in the Southwestern US by the 2050s.
Climate Breakdown
We hear slogans such as “net zero by 2050”, meaning we store as much carbon as we release. But the facts reveal that this goal will not be met. The world growth in energy demand, meat production, and population almost certainly will cause exceedance of the mortality threshold for aspen. Triage in the form of major changes in western land management is a must if we are to have a chance to save aspen, other western plant communities, and the wildlife that depend upon them.
Technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and crypto currency with their large data centers consume huge amounts of energy. AI consumes 33 times more energy than traditional computing systems. Barclay’s estimated that the global demand for oil would increase by 15% by 2050 despite adoption of electric vehicles and potential efficiency gains, air travel would place greater demand on oil, and petrochemicals will be the biggest contributor to oil consumption as demand continues to grow. In their “Deadlock” scenario, Barclay’s predicted that the world will fall way short of the goals of the Paris Agreement. This is due to the inability to decarbonize and lack of political will. Livestock production emissions are currently estimated at 11.1 – 19.6 percent of global emissions while global consumption of meat is expected to increase by 90% by 2050.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration acknowledges this. “Our projections indicate that resources, demand, and technology costs will drive the shift from fossil to non-fossil energy sources, but current policies are not enough to decrease global energy-sector emissions. This outcome is largely due to population growth, regional economic shifts toward more manufacturing, and increased energy consumption as living standards improve.” The UN Environment Programme also: “The world is in the midst of a triple planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution and waste. The global economy is consuming ever more natural resources, while the world is not on track to meet the Sustainable Development Goals.”
Livestock Exacerbate Aspen Decline in the Western US
This is a dire situation exacerbated by the grazing of livestock on hundreds of millions of acres of our public and private lands in the Western US. Approximately 70 percent of National Forest and 90 percent of Bureau of Land Management managed lands are leased for livestock grazing. Other public lands managed by the Fish and Wildlife Service, National Park Service, States, and localities also permit livestock grazing.
A review of livestock grazing effects shows that livestock trample and compact the soil, leading to accelerated runoff and decreased infiltration of water into the soil. They remove the ground covering vegetation that shades the soil, thus increasing soil temperatures and evaporation. These factors combine to reduce soil water and elevate the water stress in plants already stressed by drought. Agencies and landowners must manage livestock to protect aspen stands so they and the wildlife that depend upon them have a chance to persist. Here, we use National Forests in southern Idaho and Utah as examples of failure in this respect but this failure is west-wide when it comes to addressing this major stressor of our ecosystems.
The Ashley National Forest Plan to Save Aspen
The Ashley National Forest is a diverse area with high peaks, forests, meadows, lakes and streams. It includes part of the High Uintas Wilderness. It contains habitat for a variety of birds and animals including Canada lynx, black bears, northern goshawk, Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep, deer, elk, moose, native cutthroat trout and others.
In an October 2023 Decision the Ashley NF approved the Ashley National Forest Aspen Restoration Project. This project was planned to “treat” up to 177,706 acres that would include any aspen community in the Forest. The treatments included prescribed burning, logging, mastication, chainsaws, girdling conifers, and ripping aspen roots with heavy equipment. These destructive measures were intended to stimulate regeneration of aspen stands. Eighty-three percent of the project would be carried out in roadless areas. The Forest Service uses an Orwellian twist on language to describe destructive activities such as logging and burning as “restoration” as if these forests didn’t do just fine before we came along with our livestock and destructive machines.
The Environmental Assessment produced by the Ashley NF noted, “Many aspen populations across the west are declining due to drought, browsing by large animals such as cattle, elk and deer, and lack of disturbance, particularly fire, requiring active restoration efforts to maintain and improve aspen forest health in the region.” We mapped the fire history and use of prescribed fires in the past in the project area.
Significant areas had already been subjected to fires, so why the decline in aspen? There was no analysis of this fact by the Forest Service as they proposed more burning, and to date, Ashley NF has not addressed the major issue, that of livestock grazing.
Portion of the Ashley NF showing aspen stands (green) superimposed on livestock grazing allotments (pink). Most of the Forest is divided up into 91 of these allotments.
We provided in-depth comments and an objection to this project using best available science asking that the effects of livestock grazing, stocking rates, and suitability of grazing these areas be addressed. Their response to detailed public input such as this was to deflect. In this case, the Decision Notice stated, “Other comments such as range capabilities are not described in detail in this decision due to the fact that many of the concerns were outside of the scope of this project.”
So, a major stressor, livestock grazing, is outside the scope of the project. This is typical of responses we receive from the Forest Service when we ask that well established principles of range science be applied so livestock grazing is managed within the capacity of the land and is balanced with the needs of wildlife, plant communities, and watersheds as the governing laws and regulations require.
The problem for the Forest Service is that if these principles were applied, stocking rates and numbers of livestock would be greatly reduced. This is not politically tolerable, so it is better to deflect and deny or not address the issue at all. Our team filed litigation against the Forest Service to stop this Aspen Restoration Project, resulting in it being withdrawn.
Water Developments – Industrialization of the Forest for Livestock
Map of Duchesne Ranger District in the Ashley NF with aspen stands (pink) and water developments (blue).
Because water developments (troughs, ponds, pipelines) are used by the Forest Service and other land managers to increase the extent of livestock access into previously little used areas, we requested their data for the locations of these water developments in the Ashley NF.
It turns out there are 1,755 of these water developments. When we mapped them and their proximity to aspen stands, there were few aspen stands that were more than a quarter mile from at least one water development, thus ensuring that livestock would have easy access to most stands. Despite this massive number, the Ashley NF had previously approved adding more of these developments which can result in adverse effects up to a mile or more away. Adding these developments is a typical response when degradation by livestock is noted, a placebo to keep the status quo in numbers of cattle and sheep. This is common across the West.
Is the Forest Service Engaged in Willful Blindness?
In 2000, we surveyed habitats in the Bear River Range in SE Idaho’s Caribou National Forest. The Bear River Range is part of the Regionally Significant Wildlife Corridor connecting the Greater Yellowstone Area to the Uinta Mountains and southern Rockies. In our Report, we showed how livestock grazing had degraded conditions in all habitats with the majority of 310 habitat locations including 71 aspen sites, not functioning properly (low production, lack of recruitment, barren understory).
Aspen stand in the Bear River Range adjacent to water troughs for sheep. Trees are stripped as high as sheep can reach and there is no regeneration or understory vegetation. Photo: John Carter.
This is no surprise as nearly 30 years ago the Forest Service Regional Assessments pointed out that aspen regeneration had not been successful due to heavy grazing by domesticated ungulates (meaning cows and sheep).
In the years since those assessments and our report, we have seen no action to reduce or better manage livestock grazing so plant and soil communities, stream systems, or aspen forests can recover and sustain themselves.
Early work by Forest Service research scientists and others documented the loss of aspen recruitment due to livestock grazing. A study of over one hundred aspen stands in Nevada found that in all cases where aspen was protected from livestock, it successfully regenerated without fire or disturbance and maintained multi-aged stands. In areas exposed to livestock grazing, aspen continued to decline.
The Pando Clone of aspen in Utah’s Fishlake National Forest is known as one of the oldest living organisms. It is suffering from lack of regeneration and disease like so many aspen stands across the west where livestock graze. In a 2019 Report, our team demonstrated that livestock (cattle) were removing most of the understory vegetation (70 – 90 percent). Yet, according to the Fishlake NF, “it is thought that the lack of regeneration is due to over browsing from deer and other ungulates. Insects, such as bark beetles, and disease such as root rot and cankers, are attacking the overstory trees, weakening and killing them. ” There is no mention of livestock as deer and other “ungulates” are blamed and no acknowledgement that insects and disease may be related to the stress from browsing and trampling by the dominant “ungulate”, cows. They predict the Pando could be lost, yet cattle still graze while they deflect.
Agency Foot Dragging Perpetuates the Problem
Aspen stand in the Bear River Range dying out in cattle allotment. Photo: John Carter.
In an ongoing case, the Ashley, Uinta and Wasatch Cache National Forests in Utah have been foot dragging in addressing the grazing of tens of thousands of domestic sheep on 160,000 acres of the High Uintas Wilderness. Once again, we have engaged in detailed analysis, comments and meetings, only to have any action delayed for 10 years while the degradation continues.
For decades I have been documenting degradation of these alpine and subalpine areas by domestic sheep. As the Forest Service continues delay, a team of volunteers gathered forage production data and we published a paper showing that if the sensitive nature of the landscape (steep slopes, highly erodible soils) and current forage production was incorporated into a new stocking rate analysis, the numbers of domestic sheep would need to be reduced by 90 percent or more. In other words, this wilderness is not ecologically appropriate for livestock grazing and to do so is to intentionally destroy the ecological integrity of this precious place so that a handful of livestock permittees can graze it with their sheep.
Kiesha’s Preserve – An Example of What Can Be
Aspen stand on Kiesha’s Preserve a decade after removal of livestock. Original trees are the standing dead in the background. Regenerated stand in foreground. Photo: John Carter.
At Kiesha’s Preserve in Idaho, deer, elk, moose, and sage grouse are there year around. When we purchased the land, aspen stands were diseased, had insect boreholes and were dying. We closed the Preserve to livestock 30 years ago and since then, the grasses and flowers and aspen have bounced back, the old aspen stands have died and new, healthy stands have grown back with no insect or disease issues. You can find no evidence of adverse effects from deer or elk because there is natural forage to support them.
Aspen stand on Kiesha’s Preserve with healthy and diverse understory years after livestock removed. Photo: John Carter.
Deer and elk winter in large numbers on the Preserve, finding grass and shrubs beneath the snow as the plant communities have recovered from a century of livestock grazing. On adjacent public lands there is little residual forage left after the livestock leave the allotments, so when an elk or deer digs through the snow, they find no forage for the energy expended.
The Message
As climate heating adds stress to the landscape, increasing mortality to aspen and other forest types, livestock effectively increase the effects of drought. It is time for the Forest Service and other land managers to stop deflecting around the destruction of aspen and native plant communities by livestock and begin to address the problem by removing water developments, reducing stocking rates and providing long term rest so plant communities such as aspen have a chance to recover and are better able to withstand drought.
For a library of books and articles on livestock grazing in the West, see Sage Steppe Wild.
“It doesn’t matter how many thermographers we have, boots on the ground, satellites flying in the air, people with drones and airplanes and all the other technology, none of it matters if you don’t stop methane. None of it counts.”
Back when I worked with satellites (my career before journalism), and I’d talk about my job with folks from outside the space industry, they often responded simply, “Oh, cool.” It always struck me that, though satellites in many ways enable modern life, many people still think about space tech in terms of astronauts and other worlds. But satellites are what make GPS, weather forecasting, long-distance communication, and even airplane Wi-Fi possible. And a growing fleet of precision satellites are now enabling climate solutions, too: helping us spot, and stop, pollution.
Two weeks ago, a satellite designed to identify, measure, and monitor greenhouse gas emissions worldwide was launched into orbit by SpaceX. The spacecraft, called Tanager-1, is a collaboration between NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Earth-imaging company Planet Labs, the environmental nonprofit Carbon Mapper, and others. Tanager-1 has now joined 23 other satellites on orbit, operated by a mix of organizations and agencies, all capable of detecting the potent greenhouse gas methane — which, for the first 20 years after it’s emitted, warms the planet 80 times faster than the same amount of CO2.
Naveena Sadasivam and I recently reported on this new wave of methane-monitoring satellites, and as part of that reporting, we had the chance to speak with Riley Duren, the CEO of Carbon Mapper. Duren previously worked as the chief systems engineer for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Earth science division where he pushed to establish a climate research portfolio, which included expanding the lab’s ability to monitor greenhouse gases. He knew this monitoring could help mitigate climate change, not just study it.
“You can’t manage what you don’t measure,” Duren said.
Carbon Mapper itself emerged in 2020 as a “spin-off,” Duren said, of the work he and others at the lab were doing to study the sources of methane emissions from planes, identify the worst offenders, and alert them so that the operators could take action to fix the leaks that the researchers spotted. While they’d had much success with these aerial surveillance campaigns, “to do it in a sustained and operational way,” Duren said, “we needed satellites.”
But government agencies had no plans to build and launch satellites of that kind, so Duren started chatting with climate philanthropists to put together the funds that would allow him and Carbon Mapper to create their own spacecraft.
Tanager-1, and the flock of similar satellites that Carbon Mapper plans to launch, will work alongside another nonprofit mission that launched earlier this year, MethaneSAT, to better understand where the highest-value actions can be taken to quell methane emissions and leaks. Duren used a metaphor of photographing birds to describe how the satellites can support each other’s efforts to monitor methane. MethaneSAT provides the equivalent of a landscape view, and can point out where there’s a flurry of bird activity. Tanager-1 can then zoom in and capture telephoto snapshots of the metaphoric birds and nests. “And because Carbon Mapper’s flying a constellation of satellites,” Duren said, “it’s kind of like an army of birdwatchers that are going out to follow up on what the landscape photographer has drawn everyone’s attention to.”
Below is an excerpt of the feature I co-wrote with Naveena, covering the highly anticipated launch of MethaneSAT in March, and the hopes and worries of those watching. You can find the full feature here, if you want to read more about the history of using satellites to monitor greenhouse gas emissions, what this new fleet offers, and what opportunities researchers hope to open up with this new and improved tech.
— Syris Valentine
Spying from space: How satellites can help identify and rein in a potent climate pollutant (Excerpt)
On a blustery day in early March, the who’s who of methane research gathered at Vandenberg Space Force Base in Santa Barbara, California. Dozens of people crammed into a NASA mission control center. Others watched from cars pulled alongside roads just outside the sprawling facility. Many more followed a livestream. They came from across the country to witness the launch of an oven-sized satellite capable of detecting the potent planet-warming gas from space.
The amount of methane, the primary component in natural gas, in the atmosphere has been rising steadily over the last few decades, reaching nearly three times as much as preindustrial times. About a third of methane emissions in the United States occur during the extraction of fossil fuels as the gas seeps from wellheads, pipelines, and other equipment. The rest come from agricultural operations, landfills, coal mining, and other sources. Some of these leaks are large enough to be seen from orbit. Others are miniscule, yet contribute to a growing problem.
Identifying and repairing them is a relatively straightforward climate solution. Methane has a warming potential about 80 times higher than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period, so reducing its levels in the atmosphere can help curb global temperature rise. And unlike other industries where the technology to decarbonize is still relatively new, oil and gas companies have long had the tools and know-how to fix these leaks.
MethaneSAT, the gas-detecting device launched in March, is the latest in a growing armada of satellites designed to detect methane. Led by the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund, or EDF, and more than six years in the making, the satellite has the ability to circle the globe 15 times a day and monitor regions where 80 percent of the world’s oil and gas is produced. Along with other satellites in orbit, it is expected to dramatically change how regulators and watchdogs police the oil and gas industry.
“Companies do a good job of complying with the law, but the law has been insufficient,” said Danielle Fugere, president and chief counsel at As You Sow, a nonprofit group that has used shareholder advocacy to push fossil fuel producers to tackle climate change. “So this change will increase incentives for reducing methane emissions.”
Those at Vandenberg or watching online were a bit on edge. A lot could go wrong. The SpaceX rocket carrying the satellite into orbit could explode. A week before, engineers worried about the device that holds the $88 million spacecraft in place during launch and pushes it into space. “That made us a little nervous,” recalled Steven Wofsy, an atmospheric scientist at Harvard University and a key architect of the project along with Steven Hamburg, the scientist who leads MethaneSAT at EDF. If that didn’t go wrong, the satellite could still fail to deploy or have difficulty communicating with its minders on Earth.
They needn’t have worried. A couple hours after the rocket blasted off, Wofsy, Hamburg, and his colleagues watched on a television at a hotel about two miles away as their creation was ejected into orbit. It was a jubilant moment for members of the team, many of whom had traveled to Vandenberg with their partners, parents, and children. “Everybody spontaneously broke into a cheer,” Wofsy said. “You [would’ve] thought that your team scored a touchdown during overtime.”
The data the satellite generates in the coming months will be publicly accessible — available for environmental advocates, oil and gas companies, and regulators alike. Each has an interest in the information MethaneSAT will beam home. Climate advocates hope to use it to push for more stringent regulations governing methane emissions and to hold negligent operators accountable. Fossil fuel companies, many of which do their own monitoring, could use the information to pinpoint and repair leaks, avoiding penalties and recouping a resource they can sell. Regulators could use the data to identify hotspots, develop targeted policies, and catch polluters. For the first time, the Environmental Protection Agency is taking steps to be able to use third-party data to enforce its air quality regulations, developing guidelines for using the intelligence satellites like MethaneSAT will provide. The satellite is so important to the agency’s efforts that EPA Administrator Michael Regan was in Santa Barbara for the launch as was a congressional lawmaker. Activists hailed the satellite as a much-needed tool to address climate change.
“This is going to radically change the amount of empirically observed data that we have and vastly increase our understanding of the amount of methane emissions that are currently happening and what needs to be done to reduce them,” said Dakota Raynes, a research and policy manager at the environmental nonprofit Earthworks. “I’m hopeful that gaining that understanding is going to help continue to shift the narrative towards [the] phase down of fossil fuels.”
With the satellite safely orbiting 370 miles above the Earth’s surface, the mission enters a critical second phase. In the coming months, EDF researchers will calibrate equipment and ensure the satellite works as planned. By next year, it is expected to transmit reams of information from around the world. Its success will depend on the quality of the data it can produce and — perhaps more importantly — how that data is put to use.
This image shows methane emissions from a landfill in Georgia, detected by Carbon Mapper’s aerial surveillance by plane (before the launch of Tanager-1, its first satellite). These imaging tools use a spectrometer to reveal the infrared signature the gas leaves behind — making the invisible visible.
Methane leaks from oil and gas infrastructure including the Permian Basin in Texas, and landfills in Georgia and Louisiana.
