Have you ever considered how our perspective of climate change might shift if we focused…
The post Land and Sea Change for Earth Day, Expanding the Climate Change Narrative appeared first on Earth911.
To build all of the solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicle batteries, and other technologies necessary to fight climate change, we’re going to need a lot more metals. Mining those metals from the Earth creates damage and pollution that threaten ecosystems and communities. But there’s another potential source of the copper, nickel, aluminum, and rare-earth minerals needed to stabilize the climate: the mountain of electronic waste humanity discards each year.
Exactly how much of each clean energy metal is there in the laptops, printers, and smart fridges the world discards? Until recently, no one really knew. Data on more obscure metals like neodymium and palladium, which play small but critical roles in established and emerging green energy technologies, has been especially hard to come by.
Now, the United Nations has taken a first step toward filling in these data gaps with the latest installment of its periodic report on e-waste around the world. Released last month, the new Global E-Waste Monitor shows the staggering scale of the e-waste crisis, which reached a new record in 2022 when the world threw out 62 million metric tons of electronics. And for the first time, the report includes a detailed breakdown of the metals present in our electronic garbage, and how often they are being recycled.
“There is very little reporting on the recovery of metals [from e-waste] globally,” lead report author Kees Baldé told Grist. “We felt it was our duty to get more facts on the table.”
One of those facts is that some staggering quantities of energy transition metals are winding up in the garbage bin.
Two of the most recyclable metals found abundantly in e-waste are aluminum and copper. Both are slated to play essential roles in the energy transition: Copper wiring is prevalent in a range of low- and zero-carbon technologies, from wind turbines to the power transmission lines that carry renewable energy. Aluminum is also used in some power lines, and as a lightweight structural support metal in electric vehicles, solar panels, and more. Yet only 60 percent of the estimated 4 million metric tons of aluminum and 2 million metric tons of copper present in e-waste in 2022 got recycled. Millions of tons more wound up in waste dumps around the world.
The world could have used those discarded metals. In 2022, the climate tech sector’s copper demand stood at nearly 6 million metric tons, according to the International Energy Agency, or IEA. In a scenario where the world aggressively reduces emissions in order to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, copper demand for low-carbon technologies could nearly triple by 2030.
Aluminum demand, meanwhile, is expected to grow up to 80 percent by 2050 due the pressures of the energy transition. With virgin aluminum production creating over 10 times more carbon emissions than aluminum recycling on average, increased recycling is a key strategy for reining in aluminum’s carbon footprint as demand for the metal rises.
For other energy transition metals, recycling rates are far lower. Take the rare-earth element neodymium, which is used in the permanent magnets found in everything from iPhone speakers to electric vehicle motors to offshore wind turbine generators. Worldwide, Baldé and his colleagues estimated there were 7,248 metric tons of neodymium locked away in e-waste in 2022 — roughly three-quarters of the 9,768 metric tons of neodymium the wind and EV sectors required that year, per the IEA. Yet less than 1 percent of all rare earths in e-waste are recycled due to the immaturity of the underlying recycling technologies, as well as the cost and logistical challenges of collecting rare earth-rich components from technology.
“It’s a lot of hassle to collect and separate out” rare-earth magnets for recycling, Baldé said. Despite the EV and wind energy sectors’ fast-growing rare-earth needs, “there is no push from the market or legislators to recover them.”
The metals present in e-waste aren’t necessarily useful for every climate tech application even when they are recycled. Take nickel. The lithium-ion batteries inside electric vehicles gobble up huge amounts of the stuff — over 300,000 metric tons in 2022. The amount of nickel required for EVs could rise tenfold by 2050, according to the IEA. But while the world’s e-waste contained more than half a million metric tons of nickel in 2022, most of it was inside alloys like stainless steel. Rather than getting separated out, that nickel gets “recycled into other steel products,” said Kwasi Ampofo, the lead metals and mining analyst at energy consultancy BloombergNEF. Some of that recycled steel could wind up in wind turbines and other zero-emissions technologies. But it won’t directly help to fill the much larger nickel demands of the EV battery market.
In other cases, e-waste might represent a significant supply of a specialized energy transition metal. Despite being present in tiny amounts, certain platinum group metals — found on printed circuit boards and inside medical equipment — are already recycled at high rates due to their value. Some of these metals, such as palladium, are used in the production of catalysts for hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, said Jeremy Mehta, technology manager at the Department of Energy’s Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Technologies Office. “Recycling palladium from e-waste could help meet the growing demand for these metals in fuel cell technologies and clean hydrogen production, supporting the transition to clean energy,” Mehta said.
For the energy transition to take full advantage of the metals present in e-waste, better recycling policies are needed. That could include policies requiring that manufacturers design their products with disassembly and recycling in mind. Josh Blaisdell, who manages the Minnesota-based metals recycling company Enviro-Chem Inc., says that when a metal like copper isn’t getting recycled, that’s usually because it’s in a smartphone or other small consumer device that isn’t easy to take apart.
In addition to design-for-recycling standards, Baldé believes metal recovery requirements are needed to push recyclers to recover some of the non-precious metals present in small quantities in e-waste, like neodymium. To that end, in March, the European Council approved a new regulation that sets a goal that by 2030, 25 percent of “critical raw materials,” including rare-earth minerals, consumed in the European Union will come from recycled sources. While this is not a legally binding target, Baldé says it could “create the legislative push” toward metal recovery requirements.
Harvesting more of the metals inside e-waste will be challenging, but there are many reasons to do so, Mehta told Grist. That’s why, last month, the Department of Energy, or DOE, launched an e-waste recycling prize that will award up to $4 million to competitors with ideas that could “substantially increase the production and use of critical materials recovered from electronic scrap.”
“[W]e need to increase our domestic supply of critical materials to combat climate change, respond to emerging challenges and opportunities, and strengthen our energy independence,” said Mehta of the DOE. “Recycling e-scrap domestically is a significant opportunity to reduce our reliance on hard-to-source virgin materials in a way that is less energy intensive, more cost effective, and more secure.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Staggering quantities of energy transition metals are winding up in the garbage bin on Apr 18, 2024.
This story is published as part of the Global Indigenous Affairs Desk, an Indigenous-led collaboration between Grist, High Country News, ICT, Mongabay, Native News Online, and APTN.
Sometimes when a storm hits and the waves are high in the Straits of Mackinac, which connects Great Lakes Michigan and Huron, Whitney Gravelle wonders if she’ll get a call: Maybe there will be a breach, and oil from the Line 5 pipeline under the strait will spill into her homelands. Gravelle, president of the Bay Mills Indian Community, has been working to decommission Line 5, run by Enbridge, for years. The pipeline was built in the strait in 1953, without consultation with Bay Mills or other tribes. In 2010, a nearby pipeline also overseen by Enbridge spilled 1 million gallons of oil into Michigan waters.
“I have routine nightmares about Line 5,” Gravelle said. “I think it’s because we are so involved in the issue — we work on it every single day.”
In 2023, Gravelle brought the issue of Line 5 in front of the U.N. Permanent Forum of Indigenous Issues, or UNPFII, the largest annual gathering of Indigenous peoples in the world. In response, the U.N. recommended that the U.S. and Canada decommission the pipeline because of its “real and credible threat” to Indigenous rights. That has not yet happened. This week Gravelle was at UNPFII again to bring attention to Line 5.
Gravelle was also there to speak on a panel about how the United States has — or hasn’t — applied the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Also known as UNDRIP, the declaration is the international standard for Indigenous rights. While legally non-binding, UNDRIP encompasses the rights of Indigenous peoples to maintain lifeways, language, sovereignty, and political autonomy, free from assimilation and colonizing forces.
The discussion — put on by the Implementation Project, a partnership between the Native American Rights Fund and University of Colorado Law School — included U.S. officials like Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Bryan Newland, also a citizen of the Bay Mills Indian Community, and others from the Department of Commerce and Agency for International Development. There, Newland highlighted the Biden administration’s recent policies to increase inclusion of tribal nations’ priorities and perspectives.
U.S. history with the declaration is rocky. When Indigenous leaders from across the globe first introduced it in 2007 the U.S. voted against it, saying that it “should have been written in terms that are transparent and capable of implementation.” Three years later, under the Obama administration, the U.S. became the last country to adopt UNDRIP, acknowledging it as a “moral and political force.” But today, there is still a “vast implementation gap,” said former U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples James Anaya at the forum Tuesday.
The declaration is an articulation of basic human rights to things like life, religion and self determination in an Indigenous context, said Kristen Carpenter, a law professor at the University of Colorado Boulder and past appointee to the Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which helps governments implement UNDRIP. “United States law and policy often still fall short of those basic human rights. It’s easy to get lost sometimes in the nuts and bolts and the very difficult work of policy,” Carpenter said at the discussion Monday. “But this work could not be more important, in my perspective, because of the issues that are on the table.”
In the U.S., concerns range from land protection to cultural continuity to reckoning with America’s past policies of genocide. A critical part of the declaration is that governments should get Indigenous nations’ informed consent on projects and policies that could impact them. And while UNDRIP considers such consent to be the bare minimum, many countries, including the U.S., interpret it as the highest standard, and have failed to enact it.
Free, prior, and informed consent could give tribes and Indigenous communities more control over decisions that currently rest solely with the federal government, like Line 5 or the massive copper mine proposed at Oak Flat that is opposed by the San Carlos Apache Tribe.
Consultation with tribes has been federal policy — in name, if not in practice — since 2000, but has been widely interpreted by agencies and officials. Even though the U.S. hasn’t adopted consent as the basis for its relationships with Indigenous nations, it has begun to incorporate it into specific policies, Newland said at the forum discussion on Monday.
Last December, for example, the department revised the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, first passed in 1990, which determines how burial sites, sacred objects, and human remains are handled and returned to tribal nations. The revision uses consent language directly from the declaration, and includes the requirement that federally funded museums, agencies, and universities receive the free, prior, and informed consent of descendants or tribes before exhibition, research, or access to human remains or sacred objects. The change has already been impactful, if narrow, and some museums have taken action to avoid violating the law.
Newland also said the department has instituted a new model to find consensus with tribes when an activity impacts tribal health, jurisdiction, sacred sites and rights. The policy applies to everything from mining to green energy development.
In addition to improvements in consultation policies, Newland cited the Department of Interior’s report on the history of boarding schools in the U.S. as one way the department is upholding article 8 of the declaration, which deals with forced assimilation. The department is also in the process of consulting with tribal nations on a 10-year national plan for Indigenous language revitalization.
While acknowledging the Interior Department is the “shining star” of tribal consultation in the U.S., Gravelle said that’s just not the case with other agencies the tribe has to engage with, such as the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The result is an uneven dynamic across the government. “We touch so many different federal agencies,” Gravelle said. “They all have to honor those obligations that were made with our tribal nations, and yet we continue to see that failure over and over again.”
There is also the shifting ground of policy changes from one administration to the next. The changes at the Department of Interior are positive, but can be undone — or go unused — by a new administration. “It does continuously feel like that you are trying to prove that you are worthy of life, and that you are worthy of having a home, and that you are worthy of being able to raise your children with your cultural values on the lands that your ancestors lived,” Gravelle said of the struggle to be heard by federal governments.
That domestic discord, Gravelle said, “has prevented the United States from emerging as a leader, especially in the international field, when it comes to international Indigenous rights.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline At UN, Indigenous leaders fight for application of rights on Apr 18, 2024.
April 17 is International Bat Appreciation Day! In celebration of these sometimes unsung nocturnal pollinators, a new study has demonstrated how bats can be allies of agriculture, as they feed on important crop “pests.”
The researchers found that encouraging bats can be beneficial for conservation efforts, as well as local farmers, a press release from University of Oxford said.
“Bats often get a bad rap. Our study highlights their significance, revealing that while their nocturnal habits and secretive lifestyle make them elusive to many, insectivorous bats play a crucial role in the ecosystems they inhabit and, through the ecosystem services they provide, they can help humans in multiple ways,” said co-author of the study Dr. Ricardo Rocha, an associate professor in the biology department at University of Oxford, in the press release.
Because of bats’ ability to fly, they have colonized a variety of oceanic islands, including Portugal’s sub-tropical Madeira, and their presence has been beneficial for the island’s farmers.
About one-fifth of mammal species are bats. They play an especially vital role in island ecosystems, since these environments usually have much fewer mammals than mainland habitats. However, the diets of island-dwelling bats have traditionally been understudied.
The research team looked at three bat species living on the island of Madeira — the Madeira Lesser Noctule (Nyctalus leisleri verrucosus), the Madeira Pipistrelle (Pipistrellus maderensis) and the Grey Long-eared Bat (Plecotus austriacus).
The team collected droppings from more than 100 individual bats, then extracted DNA from their feces to determine what they were eating. The researchers found that the diets of all three bat species were highly diverse. They ate more than 50 distinct species between them, including flies, beetles, butterflies, moths and spiders. Of the identified species, 40 percent were either likely or confirmed forestry or agricultural pests.
“We anticipated that all three species would primarily feed on nocturnal butterflies; however, we did not expect that over 40% of the species detected in the bats’ diet are likely or confirmed agricultural or forestry pests,” said the study’s lead author Angelina Gonçalves of the University of Porto in Portugal in the press release.
The research team discovered that the bats consumed a well-known agricultural pest, the banana moth (Opogona sacchari), which impacts banana trees, an economically important local crop.
The bats also feasted upon insects such as golden twin-spot moths (Chrysodeixis chalcites) and turnip moths, who frequently damage cereals and vegetables. Bats also ate a human parasite called Psychoda albipennis, which causes urogenital myiasis, leading to burning sensations, abdominal pain and diarrhea.
The study, “A metabarcoding assessment of the diet of the insectivorous bats of Madeira Island, Macaronesia,” was published in the Journal of Mammalogy.
Collecting the bats was challenging for the researchers at first, as it involved the use of mist nets to capture and hold them until the collection of their fecal samples. Through their use of echolocation, the bats were initially able to easily avoid the nets.
“Fortunately, we discovered that the bats lowered their guard when they came to drink so we changed tactics slightly and waited at strategic water points,” Gonçalves explained. “In this way, we were then able to capture enough individuals to conduct our research.”
The expansion of agriculture is one of the biggest causes of biodiversity loss globally, but some species like bats are able to exploit its resources. The study shows that encouraging bats can benefit conservation while supporting island farming communities.
“An increasing number of farmers are using bat boxes to attract insectivorous bats to their fields,” Rocha said. “During our study, we experimented by placing some in the protected area where we were working, and to our excitement, some of these are now inhabited by the vulnerable Madeiran Pipistrelles. This suggests that deploying simple artificial bat roosts might lead to win-win outcomes for both conservation and local farmers.”
The post Despite Their ‘Bad Rap,’ Bats Can Help Farmers appeared first on EcoWatch.
The planet is currently experiencing its fourth global coral bleaching event on record, affecting most of the Great Barrier Reef (GBR). It is the second mass bleaching in the past decade, NOAA scientists said in a press release.
Across the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Ocean basins, heat stress at levels high enough to cause bleaching has been extensive, as monitored remotely by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)’s Coral Reef Watch (CRW).
“From February 2023 to April 2024, significant coral bleaching has been documented in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres of each major ocean basin,” said Derek Manzello, coordinator of NOAA CRW, in the press release.
CRW bases its sea surface temperature data on information gathered from NOAA and partner satellites from 1985 to the present.
For a bleaching event to be “global,” there must be significant bleaching in the three ocean basins over a one-year period, reported Reuters.
Since February 2023, mass bleaching has been detected among reefs in at least 54 nations and territories, CRW said.
Bleaching occurs when extreme water temperatures trigger corals to expel the vibrant algae that live in a symbiotic relationship with them, providing the corals with nutrients.
“More than 54% of the reef areas in the global ocean are experiencing bleaching-level heat stress,” Manzello said, as Reuters reported.
As with the current global bleaching event, the other three — 1998, 2010 and 2014 to 2017 — happened at the same time as the El Niño climate pattern, known to cause warmer sea surface temperatures. The combination of El Niño and climate change have resulted in ocean temperatures breaking long-standing records over the past year.
“As the world’s oceans continue to warm, coral bleaching is becoming more frequent and severe,” Manzello said in the press release. “When these events are sufficiently severe or prolonged, they can cause coral mortality, which hurts the people who depend on the coral reefs for their livelihoods.”
Mass coral reef bleaching has been recorded throughout the tropics since early last year, including in Florida, the Caribbean, the eastern Tropical Pacific, the GBR, Brazil, the Red Sea, Persian Gulf, the Gulf of Aden and the South Pacific.
Widespread bleaching has also been reported to NOAA in other areas of the Indian Ocean, including the Seychelles, Kenya, Tanzania, Mayotte, Tromelin and off Indonesia’s western coast.
Bleaching does not always mean affected corals will die. They can recover if the heat stress causing the bleaching diminishes in time.
“The bottom line is that as coral reefs experience more frequent and severe bleaching events, the time they have to recover is becoming shorter and shorter. Current climate models suggest that every reef on planet Earth will experience severe, annual bleaching sometime between 2040 and 2050,” Manzello said, as reported by The Guardian.
Three new alert levels were added to CRW’s worldwide coral bleaching warning system earlier this year to represent the increasing extremes impacting the planet’s ocean environments.
According to CRW data, in 2024 a record 80 percent of the GBR has been subjected to heat stress sufficient to cause bleaching. The iconic reef is currently suffering another mass bleaching — its fifth in eight years.
“[T]he prognosis is not good for coral reefs as we know them, and the GBR is not immune. We are certainly not giving up on reefs, but they’re under serious pressure,” said Dr. Roger Beeden, chief scientist at the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, as The Guardian reported.
The post NOAA Confirms 4th Global Coral Bleaching Event as Climate Crisis Puts Reefs ‘Under Serious Pressure’ appeared first on EcoWatch.
A report from the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC) has found that capacity of new global wind energy installation reached 117 gigawatts (GW) in 2023, a global record.
Compared to 2022, capacity from global wind energy installations increased 50% year-over-year, the report found. Globally, 54 countries, with representation of all continents, installed new wind energy infrastructure.
As Reuters reported, most of the new wind installations were onshore, which made up 106 GW of total new capacity added in 2023. Offshore wind installations made up 10.8 GW.
Wind energy capacity reached 1 terawatt for the first time last year, according to the report. With the record-high wind energy capacity added in 2023, GWEC has increased its wind capacity growth forecast for 2024 to 2030 by 10%.
The council has estimated that new wind installation capacity will grow by 158 GW per year until 2028, Reuters reported.
According to the report, China, U.S., Brazil, Germany and India led the world in new wind energy installations last year. China reached a record of 75 GW, nearly 65% of all new wind energy capacity in 2023.
Despite the promising new record, the report authors are still concerned that wind energy capacity is not growing quickly enough to meet renewable energy targets outlined at COP28 in late 2023.
“It’s great to see wind industry growth picking up, and we are proud of reaching a new annual record. However much more needs to be done to unlock growth by policymakers, industry and other stakeholders to get on to the 3X pathway needed to reach Net Zero,” Ben Backwell, CEO of GWEC, said in a press release. “Growth is highly concentrated in a few big countries like China, the U.S., Brazil and Germany, and we need many more countries to remove barriers and improve market frameworks to scale up wind installations.”
As The Associated Press reported, wind energy capacity will need to increase 320 GW or more per year to meet the COP28 targets of tripling renewable energy capacity to at least 11,000 GW by 2030. Wind energy capacity will also need to increase at a higher amount each year to meet the Paris Agreement to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
To reach these goals, GWEC outlined several global actions that could help in its latest report, including new and enhanced governmental policies, public and private partnerships and investments, a secure supply chain, improved trade policies that don’t increase costs for end-users, updated production models, closing power grid gaps, efficient permitting processes, community engagement and more.
“Geopolitical instability may continue for some time. But as a key energy transition technology, the wind industry needs policymakers to be laser-focused on addressing growth challenges such as planning bottlenecks, grid queues and poorly designed auctions,” Backwell said. “These are the measures that will significantly ramp up project pipelines and delivery, rather than reverting to restrictive trade measures and hostile forms of competition. Enhanced global collaboration is essential to fostering the conducive business environments and efficient supply chains required to accelerate wind and renewable energy growth in line with a 1.5C pathway.”
The post New Wind Installations Reached Record High in 2023 appeared first on EcoWatch.
Silica dust, thrown into the air while mining, has contributed to a staggering rise in cases of progressive, incurable, and deadly black lung disease in America’s coal miners. The insidious particulate is particularly common in the seams of low quality coal found in central Appalachia, yet the Mine Safety Health Administration, or MSHA, has for decades pegged safe exposure levels at about twice what the government allows for every other occupation. On Tuesday, the agency finally announced an updated standard, outlining not only a new threshold for exposure, but increased on-the-job safety measures and medical surveillance to protect workers.
“Miners deserve to go home safe and healthy each day and should never have to choose between sacrificing their lungs and providing for their families,” Chris Williamson, MSHA’s director, said in an address on Tuesday in Uniontown, Pennsylvania. “Miners also deserve to retire in dignity and enjoy the fruits of their labor with their loved ones. That’s why we’re all here today to take a long overdue step forward to protect miners from exposure to toxic silica dust.”
Williamson joined representatives of United Mineworkers of America and United Steelworkers in making the announcement, which miners and their advocates have spent years fighting for.
The need was urgent. Silica dust is toxic, and long-term exposure can cause a slow but fatal hardening of lung tissue called progressive massive fibrosis, or, as it’s known among miners and their families, coal-mining areas, black lung disease. The toxin increasingly abounds in mines as companies plumb thinner coal seams with greater impurities.
The rule, which spans hundreds of pages, covers all miners, regardless of what they dig from the earth, as well as anyone working construction on mine sites. It tightens medical surveillance for black lung by making more frequent clinical visits available to workers at no cost, outlines measures for silica dust monitoring, and, most importantly, lowers the exposure standard to the same 50 micrograms long enforced by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration — 50 micrograms of silica per cubic meter of dust during an eight-hour work day. It also outlined a renewed push for site compliance with stricter consequences, including, Williamson said, “citations, proposed penalties, immediate corrective actions, and if abatement does not occur in a reasonable period of time, withdrawal orders” leading to closure of mines violating the rule.
“Ultimately, this rule’s success will depend on its implementation and enforcement,” he said.
And that, some worry, is exactly where the effort may fail. The new regulations still allow mine operators to conduct their own sampling, a longtime source of grievance for miners and their advocates who simply do not trust coal companies to accurately report silica levels.
“I’m pretty upset,” said Vonda Robinson, the vice president of the national Black Lung Association. Her husband John is 57 and succumbing to the disease; he was diagnosed 10 years ago, far younger than coal miners of previous generations. His doctor recommends a lung transplant, and he’s waiting until the last possible moment, because of the stress the operation places on the body. Those with silicosis tend to live about five years after a transplant.
In the 14 years since MSHA proposed updating the silica dust standard, Robinson and the National Black Lung Association lobbied lawmakers and rallied tirelessly for improved enforcement. Although she feels the regulation announced Tuesday is a “good” rule, “if it’s not enforced, we’re gonna be sitting in the same boat that we were in.”
Regulators allow mines to do their own monitoring because MSHA simply can’t afford to inspect every mine. To do that, the agency, which saw its budget peak in 1979, would have to overcome the consequences of years of budget cuts, and resulting staffing shortages, seen during every presidential administration of this century. Even under the more labor-friendly Biden administration, MSHA saw a smaller-than-expected budget increases in last year’s annual appropriations bill. Mining deaths have also jumped — up 31 percent in fiscal 2023, when 42 workers died — due to accidents, a troubling increase that may signal the agency is having trouble keeping up. The agency also tends to move slowly; it identified a cluster of black lung cases in the 1990s but failed to act.
Robinson also worries about other weaknesses in the new regulation. It uses an eight-hour day as an average to estimate silica exposure, but most miners work 10- or 12- hour shifts. It also allows for just four MSHA silica dust inspections per mine per year, a rate that may not capture the true risk of exposure. Recent investigations by National Public Radio also revealed the agency may have undercounted the number of black lung cases recorded in recent years because studies showing explosive growth have not yet been peer-reviewed.
Rebecca Shelton, the policy director at Appalachian Citizens Law Center, has been poring over the rule since its release. She is particularly concerned about coal companies’ continued control over testing, since the industry has had a history of cheating on results. Shelton said monthly mine testing by MSHA would be ideal because the amount of dust in the air can change depending on where in a mine the company is working, ventilation and other factors. The Mine Safety Health Administration dismissed the idea of creating a lower permissible exposure limit because it would be too costly for mine operators, something she said indicates “a prioritization of the economics of the industry over the lives of miners.”
For people like Brandon Crum, a radiologist who X-rays black lung patients and sees the damage first-hand, the disease, and MSHA’s response to it, is personal. He worked the mines, the fourth generation in his family to do so. “It was a dusty job in dusty conditions,” he said.
Crum’s radiology office is in Pike County, Kentucky, on the border with West Virginia. He is among the few radiologists certified to read chest X-rays for signs of black lung. After documenting early signs of the alarming and continual rise in the disease, particularly among younger miners — those in their 30s and 40s who worked as little as 10 years underground before becoming so sick they needed transplants or died. In 2016, he joined three young men in making a video pleading for federal action to address the crisis; one of them has since died and the others have come to need lung transplants.
Crum says the disease cuts a wide swath through the region, affects those who have it, those who know them, and those who wonder if they might be next. He relayed his experiences in comments he made to the MSHA when the rule was in its draft stages last year. “I tried to put more of a personal touch on it,” he said. “It not only affects the men, but women and families and entire communities.”
The United Mine Workers of America is supporting the new rule, participating in its promotion and celebrating it as the fruit of many years of hard work, which continued even as, union communications officer Erin Bates said, coal companies refused to acknowledge the scale of the disease. The union went around them to Congress, knocking on doors and making calls for decades. She concedes the regulation isn’t perfect, but is happy anything was adopted at all. “Obviously, we want it to be better,” she said, “but no matter what, more health and safety is better for our miners.”
This story has been updated.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A new federal rule aims to protect miners from black lung disease on Apr 17, 2024.
In much of the United States, groundwater extraction is unregulated and unlimited. There are few rules governing who can pump water from underground aquifers or how much they can take. This lack of regulation has allowed farmers nationwide to empty aquifers of trillions of gallons of water for irrigation and livestock. Droughts fueled by climate change have exacerbated this trend by depleting rivers and reservoirs, increasing reliance on this dwindling groundwater.
In many places, such as California’s Central Valley, the results have been devastating. As aquifers decline, residential wells start to yield contaminated water or else dry up altogether, forcing families to rely on emergency deliveries of bottled water. Large-scale groundwater pumping has also caused land to sink and form fissures, threatening to collapse key infrastructure like roads, bridges, and canals. These local impacts have been the price of an economic model that provides big farmers with unlimited access to cheap water.
At a tense twelve-hour hearing that lasted well into the night on Tuesday, California officials struck a big blow against that model. The state board that regulates water voted unanimously to take control of groundwater in the Tulare Lake subbasin, one of the state’s largest farming areas, imposing a first-of-its-kind mandatory fee on water pumping by farmers in the area.
The decision to place the basin’s water users on “probation,” a punishment for not managing their water effectively, could force some of the region’s largest land barons to pay millions of dollars in fees or stop cultivating huge sections of their farmland.
The vote sets up a high-stakes enforcement fight with some of the state’s most powerful farmers, who have fought for years to avoid state intervention on their profitable dairy pens and tomato fields. The state will start measuring water usage and collecting fines later this year, but it has never attempted any such enforcement action before, and there is no way to know yet whether farmers will comply with the fees.
The larger question is whether the state’s policing effort will succeed in forcing a long-term reduction to groundwater usage in the state’s agricultural areas. The success or failure of this effort matters not just for California but also for many other pasture-rich states, from Nevada to Nebraska, that are trying to police their groundwater. If the Golden State can cut water usage without causing political or economic upheaval, it will leave a blueprint for other states trying to manage scarce water.
“Groundwater is one of these collective resources where your pumping has an impact on a lot of other people, and you have to have a mechanism to manage that,” said Ellen Hanak, an economist and water expert at the Public Policy Institute of California, a think tank. “I seriously doubt that the state wants to be taking over basins and managing them, but there has to be a backstop.”
The probation vote for Tulare Lake comes almost a decade after the California lawmakers passed the landmark Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, which requires water users in threatened areas across the state to draft plans for healing their depleted aquifers by 2040. The Central Valley pumps around 7 million acre-feet of groundwater per year, enough to supply more than 15 million average American households, and almost all of it is used for agriculture.
The vast majority of the state’s 89 troubled groundwater basins have already created viable plans for dealing with the crisis, agreeing to fallow some farmland or replenish aquifers by capturing rainwater.
But six laggard basins in the Central Valley have never presented the state with adequate plans for fixing their groundwater deficits. Tulare Lake in particular has slow-walked its planning, even as aquifer levels in the area have plummeted and huge sections of land have sunk by several feet. Water officials from the area have submitted several different water management plans with the state over the past few years, and during Tuesday’s hearing even said they would soon unveil another plan that includes a commitment to use less water for farming. But none of this documentation convinced the state that it could trust local officials to stop the rapid decline of the area’s aquifers.
The probation will force all significant water users in the basin to measure their well water usage starting in July, something that has never been done or even attempted in the Central Valley. It will charge these users a fee of $20 for every acre-foot of water they use, with exceptions for individual households, impoverished communities, and public institutions like schools. That fee is lower than the fees that water officials in other basins have voluntarily imposed on large users.
The basin could exit probation within months if local water leaders present the state with a plan that endorses major usage reductions. One state official said he hoped the probation period would be “short.”
“The reality is that probation is a step in the process,” said E. Joaquin Esquivel, the chair of the state water board. “It’s the forcing of something that the locals aren’t willing to do.”
The major forces in the Tulare Lake area are J.G. Boswell, a massive farming company that has dominated Central Valley politics for almost a century, and Sandridge Partners, another large farming enterprise owned by the Bay Area real estate magnate John Vidovich. These two companies together own tens of thousands of acres of tomatoes, nuts, and dairy farms. They both have representatives on the agencies charged with managing groundwater in the Tulare Lake basin. (A representative for the group of groundwater agencies in the basin didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.)
The farmland owned by these two companies sits atop the former site of Tulare Lake, once the largest body of freshwater west of the Mississippi River. Farmers drained the lake in the late 19th century so they could cultivate the fertile soil beneath it, but the lake reappears during wet years as flooded rivers roar down from the Sierra Nevada mountains and fill the Central Valley. When the lake reappeared last year, Boswell and other landowners erected makeshift levees to protect their valuable crops.
Enforcement of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act will transform this landscape and the rest of the fertile Central Valley. Despite recent investments in more efficient drip irrigation systems and recharge projects that can refill aquifers, most areas in the state will have no choice but to farm less land in order to comply with the law by 2040. According to one study from the Public Policy Institute of California, the law will eliminate between 500,000 and 1 million acres of irrigated crops in the valley, or between 10 and 20 percent of the valley’s agricultural land.
Tulare Lake farmers who spoke at the hearing said the fees could devastate their industry.
“My concern is with the fiscal strain you’re placing on the small farmers,” said Aaron Freitas, a fourth-generation nut farmer who helps run a smaller operation in the basin, at the hearing. “It’s just not encouraging for us to continue our work or protect the future for our children.”
The state believes this reduction is necessary in order to protect low-income communities and critical infrastructure from the devastating effects of subsidence. But enforcing the transition won’t be easy, especially because the major farmers have drawn water with impunity for so long. Some observers worry that the decision to send Tulare Lake into probation could lead to a dangerous confrontation between state regulators and local agricultural interests.
“There may have to be some kind of law enforcement agency out there when the state goes to meter wells for the fees,” said a person who has been closely involved with implementing the groundwater law, who spoke anonymously because they weren’t authorized to speculate about the consequences of the probation decision. “That’s the worst case-scenario.”
*Correction: Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this article mistakenly suggested that many states, including Idaho and Nebraska, have not regulated groundwater.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline In a first, California cracks down on farms guzzling groundwater on Apr 17, 2024.
It’s no secret that climate change poses a threat to our agricultural systems. Hotter temperatures and shifting rainfall patterns, as well as extreme weather events, are already placing stress on farms and imperiling our ability to grow certain crops in certain places. Some of the first casualties will likely be sensitive, specialty crops, like the tropical berries that make one of the world’s most beloved beverages: coffee.
But as long as coffee has been around, alternatives have cropped up around it. And today, a new wave of startups is entering the coffee-imitation game, motivated by the threat climate change poses to the world’s coffee supply.
“I was surprised by just how many types of coffee alternatives are out there,” said L.V. Anderson, a senior editor at Grist who explored these alternatives, grouped under the banner of “beanless coffee,” in a feature story last week. “There’s a really strong tradition, in nearly all regions around the world, of making these brewed beverages that have a resemblance to coffee.”
That tradition has often been driven by cost — offering cheaper options, like toasted barley and rye, for the masses who couldn’t afford a specialty item like coffee. And that’s part of the calculus for today’s climate-focused startups as well, which are making coffee substitutes from readily available ingredients, including various pits, roots, seeds, grains, and legumes. As climate change threatens coffee production, it is likely to drive up the price of the real deal, which could fuel demand for affordable alternatives.
But of course, for those alternatives to begin to gain a foothold today, they have to be good.
When Anderson first began reporting the story, “as someone who drinks coffee and is attached to coffee,” she was highly skeptical of what these startups were offering. “I’m not a morning person, and coffee is really important to me to actually, like, wake up and be ready to face the day,” she said. But her editor encouraged her to approach the story with an open mind, which she did — even sampling a couple of the brews.
While she enjoyed them, for the most part, she was keenly aware that they were not coffee. The rich, seductive smell was missing, and the taste was “just slightly off in a way that’s hard to put your finger on,” Anderson said. But, she added, she could see herself getting used to them if she had to.
A latte that Anderson tried at Gumption Coffee in Manhattan, made with beanless grounds from a company called Atomo. L.V. Anderson / Grist
Although coffee is not one of the worst offenders when it comes to the climate impacts of agriculture (like beef and dairy, two other products that have grown their own markets of alternatives), its production does come at an ecological cost. And in many cases, these coffee-less coffee companies are appealing to sustainability-conscious consumers by offering what they claim to be a more eco-friendly option. “I think pretty much all these companies, or most of them at least, are making claims about how their product is deforestation-free,” Anderson said. At least a few startups are also focusing on agricultural waste products to make their brews, helping to keep food waste out of landfills.
These companies may be hoping that early adopters will make the switch based on this sustainability argument, but ultimately, Anderson said, they’re also making a bet that these products will be more climate-proof than real coffee — and that coffee lovers, like Anderson herself, may end up being willing to adjust to the dupes.
“I can’t make predictions about what’s going to happen in the future,” she added, “but I do find it plausible, this vision that beanless coffee companies are pitching for the future — which is that coffee is just going to get really expensive, and it’s going to be hard for people to access coffee the way that they’re used to accessing it.”
In the excerpt below, Anderson explains how beanless coffee is actually brewed, and some of the many many coffee alternatives that are hitting the market. Check out the full piece on the Grist site.
— Claire Elise Thompson
Coffea arabica — the plant species most commonly cultivated for drinking — has been likened to Goldilocks. It thrives in shady environments with consistent, moderate rainfall and in temperatures between 64 and 70 degrees Fahrenheit, conditions often found in the highlands of tropical countries like Guatemala, Ethiopia, and Indonesia. Although coffee plantations can be sustainably integrated into tropical forests, growing coffee leads to environmental destruction more often than not. Farmers cut down trees both to make room for coffee plants and to fuel wood-burning dryers used to process the beans, making coffee one of the top six agricultural drivers of deforestation. When all of a coffee tree’s finicky needs are met, it can produce harvestable beans after three to five years of growth, and eventually yields 1 to 2 pounds of green coffee beans per year.
If arabica is Goldilocks, climate change is an angry bear. For some 200 years, humans have been burning fossil fuels, spewing planet-warming carbon dioxide into the air. The resulting floods, droughts, and heat waves, as well as the climate-driven proliferation of coffee borer beetles and fungal infections, are all predicted to make many of today’s coffee-growing areas inhospitable to the crop, destroy coffee farmers’ razor-thin profit margins, and sow chaos in the world’s coffee markets. That shift is already underway: Extreme weather in Brazil sent commodity coffee prices to an 11-year high of $2.58 per pound in 2022. And as coffee growers venture into new regions, they’ll tear down more trees, threatening biodiversity and transforming even more forests from carbon sinks into carbon sources.
At many times in the past, coffee has been out of reach for most people, so they found cheaper, albeit caffeine-free, alternatives. Caro and other quaint instant beverage mixes, like Postum in the U.S. and caffè d’orzo in Italy, were popular during World War II and in the following years, when coffee was rationed or otherwise hard to come by. But the practice of brewing non-caffeinated, ersatz coffee out of other plants is even older than that. In the Middle East, people have used date seeds to brew a hot, dark drink for hundreds or perhaps thousands of years. In pre-Columbian Central America, Mayans drank a similar beverage made from the seeds of ramón trees found in the rainforest. In Europe and Western Asia, drinks have been made out of chicory, chickpeas, dandelion root, figs, grains, lupin beans, and soybeans. These ingredients have historically been more accessible than coffee, and sometimes confer purported health benefits.
An illustrated advertisement from 1902 for Postum by the Postum Cereal Company of Battle Creek, Michigan. Jay Paull / Getty Images
Today’s beanless-coffee startups are attempting to put a modern spin on these time-honored, low-tech coffee substitutes. Northern Wonder, based in the Netherlands, makes its product primarily out of lupin beans — also known as lupini — along with chickpeas and chicory. Atomo, headquartered in Seattle, infuses date seeds with a proprietary marinade that produces “the same 28 compounds” as coffee, the company boasts. Singapore-based Prefer makes its brew out of a byproduct of soymilk, surplus bread, and spent barley from beer breweries, which are then fermented with microbes. Minus also uses fermentation to bring coffee-like flavors out of “upcycled pits, roots, and seeds.” All these brands add caffeine to at least some of their blends, aiming to offer consumers the same energizing effects they get from the real deal.
“We’ve tried all of the coffee alternatives,” said Maricel Saenz, the CEO of Minus. “And what we realize is that they give us some resemblance to coffee, but it ultimately ends up tasting like toasted grains more than it tastes like coffee.”
In trying to explain what makes today’s beanless coffees different from the oldfangled kind, David Klingen, Northern Wonder’s CEO, compared the relationship to the one between modern meat substitutes and more traditional soybean products like tofu and tempeh. Many plant-based meats contain soybeans, but they’re highly processed and combined with other ingredients to create a convincing meat-like texture and flavor. So it is with beanless coffee, relative to Caro-style grain beverages. Klingen emphasized that he and his colleagues mapped out the attributes of various ingredients — bitterness, sweetness, smokiness, the ability to form a foam similar to the crema that crowns a shot of espresso — and tried to combine them in a way that produced a well-rounded coffee facsimile, then added caffeine.
By contrast, traditional coffee alternatives like chicory and barley brews have nothing to offer a caffeine addict; Atomo, Minus, Northern Wonder, and Prefer are promising a reliable daily fix.
“Coffee is a ritual and it’s a result,” said Andy Kleitsch, the CEO of Atomo. “And that’s what we’re replicating.”
— L.V. Anderson
Read the full piece here to learn more about how researchers and entrepreneurs are thinking about the future of coffee.
Last week, as we celebrated Looking Forward’s 100th issue, we launched a special opportunity that we are very excited about: a mini drabble writing contest.
Thank you to the many folks who have already submitted drabbles! We love reading all of your visions for a clean, green, just future. We’ve included the prompt here again, for those of you who are still percolating.
Also, we heard from a couple of y’all that the email address included in last week’s newsletter was bouncing. Thanks for letting us know — it should be fixed now!
***To submit: Send your drabble to lookingforward@grist.org with “Drabble contest” in the subject line, by the end of Friday, April 26.
Here’s the prompt: Choose ONE climate solution that excites you, and show us how you hope it will evolve over the next 100 years to contribute to building a clean, green, just future. We’ve covered a boatload of solutions you could draw from (100, in fact!) — so if you need some inspiration, peruse the Looking Forward archive here.
Drabbles offer a little glimpse of the future we dream about, so paint us a compelling picture of how you hope the world, and our lives on it, will evolve.
Here’s what we’re looking for:
The winning drabbles will be published in Looking Forward in May, and the winners will receive presents! Some Grist-y swag, and a book of your choice lovingly packaged and mailed to you by Claire.
Another climate-proof coffee company that Anderson covered is Stem; instead of cooking up a beanless imitation with more readily available ingredients, this company is working on growing coffee bean cells in a lab. Like cell-based meats, the product will have to clear regulatory hurdles before it can reach markets. But unlike root- and pit-based imitations, the resulting brew would be chemically identical to the real thing. These three photos show Stem’s coffee, from petri dish to pot.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A wave of climate-conscious startups are brewing ‘beanless coffee’ on Apr 17, 2024.
In 2023, Europe removed a record 487 dams and other river barriers, according to a new report by Dam Removal Europe (DRE), a coalition of organizations including The Nature Conservancy, Rewilding Europe, Wetlands International and World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF).
The number of removals from waterways in 15 European countries was 50 percent more than the year before, a press release from WWF said. More than 2,671.9 miles of rivers were reconnected through the initiatives, restoring ecosystems and boosting climate resilience and biodiversity.
“It is amazing to witness another record-breaking year for dam removals in European rivers. Almost 500 barriers were removed, highlighting the growing support for river restoration to enhance water security, reverse nature loss and adapt to the worsening impacts of climate change,” said Herman Wanningen, World Fish Migration Foundation director, in the press release. “From France to Finland, communities, companies and countries are investing in removing obsolete and increasingly risky barriers to improve river health for people and nature.”
France led the way with barrier removals last year, with the winner from the previous two years — Spain — coming in second, followed by Sweden and its neighbor, Denmark.
The European Union Nature Restoration Law includes the EU Biodiversity Strategy’s dam removal target of restoring a minimum of 15,534.3 miles of rivers by 2030. However, the legislation did not pass the Council of the European Union and remains in limbo.
“The handful of EU countries that are blocking the Nature Restoration Law are also jeopardising the recovery and protection of our rivers, which ultimately will adversely affect us,” said Claire Baffert, senior EU policy officer of water and climate change adaptation at WWF, in the press release. “Across Europe, rivers are littered with often obsolete dams that worsen the health of the very freshwater ecosystems that are vital to providing clean drinking water for us, water for farming and for biodiversity.”
The report, Dam Removal Progress 2023, warns of safety risks presented by obsolete river barriers. Rivers in Europe are broken up by 1.2 million-plus barriers, 150,000 of which are obsolete and pose substantial dangers to wildlife and people.
“Obsolete barriers do nothing but harm the river, increase nature loss and pose a growing risk since they were built to cope with very different climatic conditions. It’s time to re-think the way we manage our rivers by removing all obsolete barriers and letting as many rivers as possible flow freely. A river that does not flow freely is slowly dying,” Wanningen said in the press release.
DRE collected information regarding risks posed by dams to recreational river users like kayakers and swimmers. It discovered 82 incidents resulting in 129 deaths in 16 countries. The victims ranged in age from two to 59 years old — most were in their mid-20s and mid-30s.
“Low-head dams (i.e., weirs) that are especially dangerous due to the formation of an inescapably strong subsurface current (submerged hydraulic jump) are usually called ‘drowning machines,’” the report said. “These structures have caused hundreds of fatalities in the U.S. in the last 20 years; more than any other kind of riverine barrier.”
The risk of any dam collapsing — especially aging and obsolete barriers — is increased by the more extreme flooding and intense storms caused by climate change.
“With tens of thousands of obsolete dams scattered across Europe, the potential for catastrophic failures is a growing risk for downstream communities. Indeed, at least three river barriers collapsed last year due to heavy rain in Norway, Northern Ireland, and Slovenia,” the press release said.
With a number of dam removal projects scheduled for this year, as well as a European dam removal movement network of more than 6,000 people, momentum has been growing.
“Several significant barrier removal projects are on the horizon for the near future,” the press release said. “Croatia is set to proceed with the removal of eight barriers, including parts of old mills and remains of older infrastructure, in Plitvice during April and May, with the aim of restoring natural river flow and biodiversity. Romania is also gearing up for its first barrier removal scheduled for May, a move anticipated to enhance river connectivity and ecosystem health.”
DRE said it wants to make dam removal “business as usual” throughout Europe.
“The support offered by DRE empowered practitioners to restore the connectivity of thousands of river kilometers in the past years, thereby enhancing freshwater biodiversity and enabling migratory fish to access their historical spawning sites after centuries. This impactful outcome was achieved not only through the removal of physical river barriers but also through dedicated and persuasive efforts to influence decision-makers and communities,” the report said.
The post Europe Removed Record Number of Dams and Other Barriers to River Flow in 2023 appeared first on EcoWatch.
