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Climate Connections is a collaboration between Grist and the Associated Press that explores how a changing climate is accelerating the spread of infectious diseases around the world, and how mitigation efforts demand a collective, global response.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How climate change is making us sick on Jul 18, 2023.
Workers in Erie, Pennsylvania, are on strike, asking for familiar items like better pay, voting rights, and health care benefits. They’re also asking for one unique condition: to shift their production plant to greener technology.
The plant workers in Erie, two hours north of Pittsburgh, manufacture locomotives for Wabtec Corporation. Locomotives are the engine of the train and generally run on diesel fuel.
Manufacturing workers have been on strike since June 22 and are represented by the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America union, or UE. Initial conversations to renegotiate working contracts began in April. Scott Slawson is the president of the local 506 UE chapter in Erie and said there are currently 1,400 workers on strike.
“The members are dug in for the long haul,” Slawson said. “This is a passionate fight for them and they’re willing to go the distance if required.”
He said his union and train operator unions are working together to push for better environmental standards and greener technology in the industry.
Trains aren’t massive polluters, but the industry is trying to reduce emissions. The transportation industry is responsible for the highest amount of greenhouse gas emission of all industries in the country, with rail being responsible for two percent of the sector’s emissions, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation. Compared to other options, both freight and passenger rail lines emit fewer pollutants than automobiles or planes.
Still, trains are known to release air pollutants in the communities they operate in. For example, diesel emissions from locomotives are responsible for 70 percent of cancer risk in California and the rail industry releases 640 tons of air pollutants every year in that state alone. This reality recently pushed California regulators to create the nation’s first emissions regulations for trains.
To prevent pollution, train companies would purchase and use emissions-reducing locomotives, commonly referred to as Tier 4 locomotives, from manufacturers like Wabtec.
These machines decrease emissions by an estimated 70 percent more than their counterparts, according to industry projections. Top rail companies Norfolk Southern and Union Pacific have made pledges to reduce their emissions (30 percent by 2030 and net zero by 2050, respectively) and adopt some of these greener locomotives.
The industry is moving slowly to make this change, according to a report from the investigative labor outlet Workday Magazine and the progressive public policy organization American Prospect. The Environmental Protection Agency told Workday that, as of 2020, 74 percent of all of the locomotives operated by major rail companies are Tier 2 or lower, with almost all smaller rail companies operating outdated, polluting technology.
Slawson wants to speed up this industry shift and said workers are using their voices to get it done. A report from the University of Massachusetts Amherst found that manufacturing green, Tier 4 locomotives at the Erie plant would create between 2,600 and 4,300 estimated new jobs, and additional several thousand in the region.
“It’s not just about building the locomotive; it’s about requiring the rail industry as a whole to make this switch,” Slawson said. “Even though rail is one of the least polluting things out there, there still has to be a push to adopt the newest technologies.”
Organized workplaces and strikes are on the rise across the country. Industries across the nation are now dealing with the realities of what the transition away from fossil fuel dependency logistically looks like. The UE has said its industry is deeply tied to fossil fuel usage to power the cars they create and they want to break ties with the polluting past.
“The company is not willing to make commitments towards assisting us in this venture and they’re not willing to make commitments to the workforce to allow us to do this,” Slawson said, “and that’s a problematic piece of this.”
In a statement to Grist, a Wabtec spokesperson said the company is disappointed the union has engaged in a strike and that “no one benefits from a walkout.”
“The company is a leader with a proven track record in developing environmentally zero or low-emission locomotives for the rail industry,” Tim Bader, Wabtec spokesperson said.
In addition to the Tier 4 locomotives, Wabtec also manufactures a green technology locomotive that is 100 percent battery-powered, known as a FLXdrive. Bader said Erie engineers, who are not striking, do significant design work for these locomotives, but the manufacturing is done on a “case-by-case basis factoring in plant capacity, location, cost competitiveness, and schedule.”
Bader said most of the Tier 4 manufacturing is being done in Fort Worth, Texas.
Past labor battles over a green transition have been rooted in anxiety that as industries try and pivot away from fossil fuel use or polluting machinery, workers would be left in the lurch. This has played out before when offshore wind came to Texas and oil workers worried the transition would leave them behind.
But, this doesn’t mean that workers in these industries don’t support the change. In 2021, 4,500 California oil workers signed on in support of renewable energy projects like wind and solar. That same year, the nation’s largest coal mining union announced its support for clean energy projects, albeit with a few caveats.
Liz Ratzloff said the ongoing strike in Pennsylvania is an example of how industries not directly operating in fossil fuels are moving towards greeners solutions and their workers are demanding they be active participants in any sort of transition.
[Read next: The shared history of unions and the environmental justice movement]
Ratzloff is the co-executive director of the Labor Network for Sustainability, a nonprofit advocacy group focused on the intersection of labor organizing and climate action. She said as the nation pushes for more renewable technologies in transportation, it makes sense the frontline workers creating those products are organizing.
“These companies are using this point of transition as a way to undo a lot of labor standards that have been won,” Ratzloff said.
Right now, the auto industry is preparing for a round of labor negotiations. The United Auto Workers, or UAW, are advocating for a guaranteed transition for workers who currently manufacture gas-powered vehicles to the manufacturing of EVs. The union, which represents roughly 400,000 active workers across the country, has criticized the lower pay associated with EV production. UAW has also called out the Biden administration for not requiring union laborers and fair pay standards when giving federal subsidies to EV manufacturers.
She said the strike in Pennsylvania echoes similar pushes in auto manufacturing to decarbonize and manufacture electric vehicles, all with fair pay. Auto industry workers who manufacture electric vehicles are often paid less than their legacy coworkers who create gas-powered vehicles, she said. For example, a battery cell manufacturing plant in Lordstown, Ohio currently has a starting wage of $16.50 an hour, with the chance to make up to $20 per hour after seven years. The plant, a General Motors project, replaced an assembly plant that closed in 2019 where GM union workers made double the current starting pay.
Ratzloff said the fight in Pennsylvania goes behind a push for a green transition and is ensuring that workers continue to have rights and a say in their jobs as the industry changes.
“[The Wabtec strike] shows the potential power of workers, communities, and the labor movement in addressing the climate crisis where companies are uninterested and unwilling, and the government is seemingly unable,” she said.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Pennsylvania locomotive manufacturing workers are striking for greener jobs on Jul 18, 2023.
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Some of the most breathtaking and specialized wine regions in the world are also the most challenging to maintain.
Vineyards in these areas are part of what is known as “heroic viticulture,” meaning the grapes are grown in extreme environments, such as altitudes of 1,640 feet or more above sea level, on slopes of 30 percent or higher grade, on small islands or on terraces, reported Cell Press.
They are referred to as “heroic” because the grapes there are difficult to cultivate and harvest.
“Viticulture becomes ‘heroic’ when practiced under extreme climatic, geomorphologic, and geographical conditions. Farmers are considered heroes because they deal with this ‘adverse’ environment every day, typically by purely manual operations without the use of mechanized tools,” researchers from the University of Padova wrote in a Backstory published in the journal iScience.
In addition to the inherent challenges of cultivating wine grapes in these regions, scientists are now concerned that extreme weather brought on by climate change, as well as shifting socioeconomic conditions, may present risks to crops and their cultural legacy, according to Cell Press.
“The risk is not only losing an agricultural product or seeing a landscape change, negatively impacting the local economy,” the authors of the Backstory wrote. “The risk is losing entire communities’ history and their cultural roots.”
Some of the world’s most celebrated wines come from the heroic viticulture regions of Portugal, Spain and Italy, including the Prosecco Hills, Cell Press reported.
“Viticulture is one of the most relevant agricultural systems of steep-slope landscapes. In Europe, we can find some of the most famous sites and popular wines (e.g., Port wine, Prosecco, Passito),” the authors wrote. “Landscapes characterized by heroic viticulture have been recognized and protected by the United Nations, being inserted in the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Sites and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS). Here, a virtuous combination of agronomic practice, famous wine, networks of restaurants, green tourism, and even religion and art (if churches are on the site) created an optimal condition for a circular economy and socioeconomic sustainability. Nevertheless, these landscapes are under threat [from the] changing climate.”
These rare wines come under a multitude of climate-related threats, as the authors highlight in the Backstory.
“The increased frequency of weather extremes driven by climate change accelerates soil degradation. Intense and localized rainfall events, if soil and water conservation solutions are not optimally adopted, can quickly trigger slope failures and widespread soil erosion processes on cultivated hillslopes. In addition, prolonged droughts, as we observed in Europe in 2022, could pose another criticality: sustainable water resources management on steep slopes,” the authors wrote.
The authors went on to say that socioeconomic factors pose additional issues for the survival of heroic vineyards.
“The last half past century has been characterized by rural exodus and a gradual abandonment of mountain landscapes. The new generation is unwilling to continue working under extreme conditions if economic benefits are insignificant.”
Solutions such as small water storage systems that prevent runoff, as well as discussions and collaboration between farmers, scientists and consumers were suggested by the authors, reported Cell Press.
“The key to success lies in combining the traditional knowledge of winemakers with innovation and scientific rigor,” the authors of the Backstory wrote. “In this way, farms can work closely with scientists to optimize investments for a more functional, sustainable, and safe agricultural landscape — a winning alliance to face these diverse natural and anthropogenic challenges.”
The post Some of Europe’s Most Popular Wines at Risk From Climate Crisis appeared first on EcoWatch.
This week and last, Europe has been buffeted from one heat wave to another, and when “heat storms” start being named, you know they must be intense.
Last week, a heat wave named after Cerebus — a three-headed dog from Greek mythology that guards the entrance to Hades — brought scorching temperatures and wildfires to southern and eastern Europe, from Spain to Turkey.
This week, the Charon anticyclone and accompanying heat wave, which also takes its name from Greek mythology — in this case the ferry operator who brought souls across the river to the underworld — will move from north Africa into Europe, bringing temperatures that may break records.
The hottest locations are predicted to be Italy, Greece, Spain and portions of the Balkans, reported The Guardian. Tuesday and Wednesday could bring temperatures as high as 118.4 degrees Fahrenheit on the islands of Sardinia and Sicily. In 2021, the mercury reached 119.8 degrees Fahrenheit in Sicily, a record high for Europe.
Rome is also predicted to see record heat this week.
“We need to prepare for a severe heat storm that, day after day, will blanket the whole country,” warned Italian weather news service Meteo.it on Sunday, as Reuters reported. “In some places ancient heat records will be broken.”
Orazio Schillaci, Italy’s Minister of Health, warned tourists who plan to visit popular Roman ruins to take precautions.
“Going to the Colosseum when it is 43C (109.4F) is not advisable,” Schillaci told Il Messaggero newspaper yesterday, adding that people should remain indoors from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., reported Reuters.
According to authorities, at least 4,000 people were evacuated on the Spanish island of La Palma in the Canary Islands due to a forest fire.
“The #ClimateCrisis is not a warning. It’s happening. I urge world leaders to ACT now,” said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organization, in a tweet.
Some tourists have collapsed and suffered from heat stroke, and Greece’s Acropolis has been closed by authorities during the hottest hours of the day, according to the Daily Mail.
“This is not normal. I don’t remember such intense heat, especially at this time of year,” said Federico Bratti, a Lake Garda sunbather, as the Daily Mail reported.
Scientists have warned of the combination of El Niño, which brings higher sea surface and air temperatures, and climate change.
“We’re from Texas and it’s really hot there, we thought we would escape the heat but it’s even hotter here,” said Colman Peavy, on vacation in Rome with his wife Ana, as reported by CBS News.
The post Intense Heat Wave Grips Europe as Wildfires Rage, Monuments Close appeared first on EcoWatch.
This story is part of Record High, a Grist series examining extreme heat and its impact on how — and where — we live.
As a second “heat storm” bears down on Southern Europe, millions of people across the continent are bracing another week of record-setting temperatures.
“The bubble of hot air that has inflated over Southern Europe has turned Italy and surrounding countries into a giant pizza oven,” said Hannah Cloke, a climate scientist at the University of Reading in England. “We haven’t even seen the highest temperatures yet.”
Wide swaths of Europe are expected to see the mercury climb above 100 degrees Fahrenheit, with the Italian weather news service Meteo.it forecasting temperatures as high as 46 degrees Celsius (115 Fahrenheit). The swelter comes as places across the globe are also being hit by extreme heat, flooding, and other climate-driven disasters.
“This is not normal,” a sunbather in Italy told Reuters. “I don’t remember such intense heat, especially at this time of year.”
The searing conditions are the result of back-to-back high-pressure systems, known as anticyclones, which have moved across the Mediterranean from Northern Africa. The first was popularly, though unofficially, called Cerberus, after the three-headed dog from Greek mythology that guards the underworld. The latest is named for the ferryman to the Greek underworld: Charon.
“These heat waves are exactly in line with expectations under human-caused climate change,” said Ilan Kelman, a professor of disaster and death at University College London. Europe also experienced a stretch of record-setting heat earlier this year. ”As the rising temperatures drive worsening heat waves, including terrible humidity, we expect to see substantial increases in related deaths.”
A recent study published in Nature Medicine found that last year’s European heat waves led to 61,000 deaths. While the toll from this year’s blistering conditions remains unknown, at least one heat-related death has been reported: a 44-year old road worker who collapsed and died outside Milan.
As of Monday, the Italian health ministry had put more than a dozen cities under a red-alert heat advisory — the country’s highest level. Greek authorities have been keeping the Acropolis during peak heat hours and have similarly banned risky work during the afternoon.
There is also a fear that the increasingly dry conditions could exacerbate wildfires, which are already burning “out of control” in Spain. Greece, which experienced devastating fires in 2021, lists multiple areas as at very high risk for wildfires.
The brutal temperatures come just days after the hottest week in Earth’s recorded history, which saw unprecedented temperatures and heat indices in the American Southwest, India, and elsewhere. Other spots on the globe, such as the Northeast United States and South Korea, endured extreme rainfall and flooding. Cloke says this confluence of devastating events is becoming a new normal.
“Sea-level rise, melting ice, extreme heat waves, intense rainfall, wildfires, drought, and floods are cropping up in many parts of the world at the same time,” she said. “Today’s extremes of weather are increasingly throwing everything everywhere all at once.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Heat storms turn Southern Europe into ‘giant pizza oven’ on Jul 17, 2023.
Sophie’s BioNutrients, a food tech company, has developed a vegan ice cream made from chlorella protein concentrate, a product made from microalgae. The algae-based ice cream is nutritious, providing B12 and iron as well as other nutrients in each serving.
The company collaborated with Danish Technological Institute (DTI) to develop the ice cream, which is made from concentrated chlorella protein powder along with sugar, coconut oil and other ingredients. The ice cream has “a complete nutrition profile, and in combination with other functional ingredients mimics natural ice cream texture,” Food Business News reported. It can be made into various different flavors of vegan ice cream.
Sophie’s BioNutrients explained that it grows the microalgae using bioreactors and limited amounts of water and local food waste (such as spent grains or okara, a soy byproduct), which takes about three days. The result is a fermented microalgae made from the microalgae species Chlorella vulgaris.
The process uses about 0.02 hectares of space, much smaller than conventional farming, and the company boasted on its website that this system requires no fertilizers, herbicides, antibiotics or other products to make the protein. Microalgae has the added benefit of being good for capturing carbon from the atmosphere.
“Microalgae is one of the most nutrient-rich and versatile resources on the planet,” said Eugene Wang, co-founder and CEO of Sophie’s BioNutrients. “Today we have shown another facet of the unlimited possibilities this superfood can offer — a dairy and lactose-free alternative to ice cream that, thanks to microalgae, offers a higher nutrition content than most available dairy-free alternatives.”
According to the company, the microalgae-based ice cream could possibly provide more than double the recommended daily value of B12 in a 1-ounce serving. The microalgae protein made by Sophie’s BioNutrients has been categorized as GRAS (Generally Recognized as Safe) in the U.S. and has the European Food Safety Authority approval for use as food ingredients or supplements, VegNews reported.
Sophie’s BioNutrients has also recently partnered with NewFish, another food tech company developing microalgae proteins, and other collaborators to develop other dairy alternatives made from algae.
Microalgae proteins could be an important food source in the future, and farming microalgae could help boost global food production 50% by 2050 to feed the rapidly growing human population.
“Microalgae is definitely part of the future,” said Anne Louise Dannesboe Nielsen, director of food technology at DTI. “It is a sustainable ingredient with a lot of potential in multiple food applications.”
The post Would You Eat Vegan Ice Cream Made From Algae? appeared first on EcoWatch.
More than half of the deep blue sea is turning green, but scientists aren’t sure why.
In the past two decades, 56 percent of Earth’s oceans have become greener — an area larger than the planet’s total land mass, according to a new study by a team of scientists from the United States and the United Kingdom.
“The reason we care about this is not because we care about the colour, but because the colour is a reflection of the changes in the state of the ecosystem,” said lead author of the study B. B. Cael, an ocean and climate scientist at the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, UK, as The Guardian reported.
There are a host of things that can lead to changes in the ocean’s color, reported the journal Nature. One example is when deep-sea nutrients rise up to feed on phytoplankton blooms containing green-tinted chlorophyll.
Scientists are able to approximate the levels of chlorophyll, as well as how many organisms like algae and phytoplankton there are, by observing sunlight wavelengths reflected off the surface of the ocean.
In surface waters, the amount of chlorophyll can vary greatly each year, so it can be difficult to pick up differences between natural changes and those brought on by climate change.
Theoretically, warmer ocean waters due to climate change should lead to differences in biological productivity, but scientists believe it could take as long as four decades to be able to pinpoint any clear shifts.
“These are not ultra, massive ecosystem-destroying changes, they may be subtle,” Cael said, as The Guardian reported. “But this gives us an additional piece of evidence that human activity is likely affecting large parts of the global biosphere in a way that we haven’t been able to understand.”
The study, “Global climate-change trends detected in indicators of ocean ecology,” was published in Nature.
The research team looked at data from NASA’s Aqua satellite sensor Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) to try and spot trends in seven distinct ocean light wavelengths, reported Nature.
“I’ve thought for a long time that we could do better by looking at the full colour spectrum,” Cael said.
By analyzing 20 years of MODIS data, the researchers noticed long-term differences in the color of the ocean. Most of the changes were in waters between the tropical and subtropical latitudes 40 degrees South and 40 degrees North. The waters in these regions don’t usually have significant color changes during the year due to their lack of extreme seasons, so Cael said the team was able to pick up on smaller long-term shifts.
“On the whole, low-latitude oceans have become greener in the past 20 years,” the study said.
In order to find out if the changes could be caused by climate change, the scientists used the results of a simulation model that played out the possible responses of marine ecosystems to increasing levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases. They found that the changes in the model matched those of their observations.
Cael said the cause of the increased greenish hue of the ocean is likely not the warming ocean because the parts of the ocean that had changed color didn’t match those where temperatures have increased. Cael went on to say that the distribution of nutrients could have affected the shift, as stratification of upper ocean layers occurs as surface waters warm, making it more difficult for nutrients to rise. Fewer nutrients mean smaller phytoplankton can survive better, which alters the ecosystem and could affect the overall color of the water.
However, the scientists aren’t exactly sure why the ocean is changing color.
NASA’s next big mission to observe the color of the ocean will be the Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem (PACE) satellite — set to launch in early 2024 — which will be able to measure the ocean’s color in more wavelengths than any satellite has before.
“All of this definitely confirms the need for global hyperspectral missions such as PACE,” said Ivona Cetinić, an oceanographer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who works on PACE, according to Nature. The satellite “should allow us to understand the ecological implications of the observed trends in ocean ecosystem structure in years to come.”
The post Most of World’s Oceans Changing Color, Study Finds appeared first on EcoWatch.
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