When the sharing economy took off in the 2010s and upended entire industries, the firmest proponents of the model heralded it as an economic revolution that would help slash emissions. Of all the ideas that emerged and dissolved over the years, shareable electric scooters seemed to possess the most promise for climate. Almost anyone with a smartphone and a credit card could grab one and ride it down the block or across town, eschewing automobiles.

Yet, as the industry matures and Lime — which, with operations in 280 cities worldwide, is the biggest player — moves further into its eighth year, researchers have shown that the eco-friendly dreams of shared micromobility have not materialized without problems. The true climate benefits of these fleets depends upon how companies deploy and manage them, and safety remains a concern as injuries climb. But industry leaders appear intent on ensuring their scooters are as sustainable and safe as possible.

“It’s really important as a company that has set a net-zero target by 2030,” said Andrew Savage, Lime’s head of sustainability, “that we walk the walk, and that we do everything we can to inspire the industries around us to decarbonize as well.”

The sustainability of shared micromobility is an active area of research in a fast-changing industry. Ultimately, researchers see two factors that determine the overall climate impact of e-scooters: how users ride them, and how operators manage them from manufacturing to disposal.

A recent survey of the latest research questioned whether the sharing economy is inherently sustainable, including a particular look at e-scooters. The survey found many researchers were repeatedly concerned with the question: “If riders hadn’t rented a scooter, how would they have gotten to their destination?” If someone would have walked instead of ridden, that person increased the emissions associated with that trip. But several studies, including one by the Portland Bureau of Transportation and another, funded by Lime, by a German research institute, have found that though anywhere from a third to well over half of scooter users would have walked instead, enough other trips that would have been taken by car were not. Shared scooters, on the whole, help reduce overall transportation emissions — often preventing 20 grams of CO2 emissions per mile ridden on a scooter.

The picture in urban landscapes, however, can get slightly more complicated when researchers consider how those providing the scooters retrieve them to charge, repair, or redistribute them to where people are likely to use them. Colin Murphy, director of research and consulting at the Shared Use Mobility Center, said that when operators use big cargo vans to manage their fleets, they can negate some of the emissions savings from users.

To address this, Savage said the company is improving its fleet logistics to reduce overall emissions. Lime’s scooters and bikes are now equipped with larger, swappable battery packs, which means they need to be charged less often, and when they do, fleet workers can drive around with a trunk full of battery packs rather than taking the scooter back to a warehouse, effectively cutting logistics emissions in half while ensuring scooters are available more often. Savage said the company has also bought over 140 electric vans to support those operations. Though that’s 10 times the number Lime had a few years ago, it’s still only one van for every two cities it operates in.

Savage said Lime is also working to reduce its impacts in other ways. For instance, in North America, “once vehicles arrive at port,” Savage said, “we are now using emissions-free trucking to get those to our distribution centers.” Beyond that, the company has designed a modular bike that makes it easier to swap out damaged parts, and parts that are beyond repair are often sent for recycling. And it has worked with one company, Gomi, to salvage cells from partially damaged batteries for use in what it says are zero-waste Bluetooth speakers.

But perhaps the most concerning hurdle the industry faces is also the one over which it has, in reality, the least direct control: rider safety. One study, released earlier this year by researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that from 2017 to 2020 serious injuries for scooter riders rose threefold, just as revenues for the scooter-sharing industry shot from $10 million to nearly $450 million. This trend only continued into 2021 and 2022, with micromobility injuries increasing an average of 23 percent every year. And these weren’t just scrapes and bruises. The UCLA-led study found that scooter users were, compared to cyclists, more likely to end up with a broken arm or leg, require surgery, or even end up paralyzed. The researchers suspect that may be due, among other things, to riders often lacking safety gear.

Lime insists that it places safety first. But with most American cities designed to promote cars over all other forms of transit, the health of scooter users is, like those of pedestrians and cyclists, at risk once wheels hit pavement. Perhaps it should be no surprise that of the 30 people killed in 2018 while riding an e-scooter, 80 percent were struck by a car. This is why, if society wants to move away from cars as the default, Kailai Wang, who studies urban mobility at the University of Houston, believes urban areas need to invest in upgraded infrastructure like protected bike lanes that can make roads safer for non-automotive transport.

Of course, cars aren’t the only dangers e-scooter users, like cyclists, face. Poor road and sidewalk conditions can lead to serious injuries. And sometimes riders are their own enemy. According to some studies, first-time riders and late-night riders face elevated risks. Murphy, said that these are two areas where scooter-sharing platforms and local policymakers can step in. 

For instance, he said that operators could artificially limit the max speed of a scooter during a user’s first few rides as they grow accustomed to the vehicle. In other cases, many cities prohibit e-scooter rides in the wee hours to prevent misuse. But “to the degree that these vehicles provide a real kind of transportation lifeline for some people,” Murphy said, “that’s almost when they’re at their most important.” For someone who ends a late shift after bus services end, an e-scooter might actually be their best, or only, means of getting home. This reality led the Chicago City Council, for example, to consider revising its own late-night prohibition.

As long as people have access to one of these vehicles when they need one, and a safe lane in which to ride it, shared micromobility can help cities move away from car-dependent transportation, slashing emissions in the process, by shifting transit from something material and energy-intensive to something low-impact and electric.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline 8 years into America’s e-scooter experiment, what have we learned? on Apr 15, 2024.

In the wake of bans on U.S. exports of contaminated recyclables, many U.S. recycling programs…

The post Earth911 Quiz #72: Are There Really Unrecyclable Materials? appeared first on Earth911.

This story was originally published by WIRED and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

With its expanse of buildings and concrete, Mexico City may not look squishy — but it is. Ever since the Spanish conquistadors drained Lake Texcoco to make way for more urbanization, the land has been gradually compacting under the weight. It’s a phenomenon known as subsidence, and the result is grim: Mexico City is sinking up to 20 inches a year, unleashing havoc on its infrastructure.

That includes the city’s metro system, the second-largest in North America after New York City’s. Now, satellites have allowed scientists to meticulously measure the rate of sinking across Mexico City, mapping where subsidence has the potential to damage railways. “When you’re here in the city, you get used to buildings being tilted a little,” says Darío Solano‐Rojas, a remote-sensing scientist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. “You can feel how the rails are wobbly. Riding the metro in Mexico City feels weird. You don’t know if it’s dangerous or not — you feel like it’s dangerous, but you don’t have that certainty.”

In a recent study in the journal Scientific Reports, Solano‐Rojas went in search of certainty. Using radar satellite data, he and his team measured how the elevation changed across the city between 2011 and 2020. Subsidence isn’t uniform; the rate depends on several factors. The most dramatic instances globally are due to the overextraction of groundwater: Pump enough liquid out and the ground collapses like an empty water bottle. That’s why Jakarta, Indonesia, is sinking up to 10 inches a year. Over in California’s San Joaquin Valley, the land has sunk as much as 28 feet in the past century, due to farmers pumping out too much groundwater.

A similar draining of aquifers is happening in Mexico City, which is gripped by a worsening water crisis. “The subsurface is like a sponge: We get the water out, and then it deforms, because it’s losing volume,” says Solano‐Rojas. How much volume depends on the underlying sediment in a given part of the city — the ancient lake didn’t neatly layer equal proportions of clay and sand in every area. “That produces a lot of different behaviors on the surface,” Solano‐Rojas adds.

Subsidence rates across Mexico City vary substantially, from 20 inches annually to not at all, where the city is built atop solid volcanic rock. This creates “differential subsidence,” where the land sinks differently not just square mile to square mile, or block to block, but square foot to square foot. If a road, railway, or building is sinking differently at one end than the other, it’ll destabilize.

Read Next

One solution to fight climate change? Fewer parking spaces.

Siri Chilukuri

That’s how you get the tilted road traffic barriers at Acatitla Station, shown above. And below, the deformation of tracks at Oceanía Station. If in either of these places the land was subsiding at a uniform rate, the tracks and road would also sink uniformly, and you might not have a problem. “We found that some of the segments of the metro system are moving faster” than it was designed for, says Solano‐Rojas. The study found that nearly half of elevated segments of the metro are experiencing differential subsidence. This would imply that they would need to be serviced before the system’s typical threshold of 50 years, at which point a segment would need rehabilitation or repair to continue optimal operation.

Sistema de Transporte Colectivo, which operates the Mexico City Metro, did not provide comment for this story after repeated inquiries.

A metro system by its nature is a sprawling web of lines: Mexico City’s includes 140 miles of tracks running underground in subways, aboveground as you can see above, and on elevated platforms. “It goes from areas that are really stable, to areas that are subsiding at 30 centimeters per year, or even almost 40 centimeters every year,” Solano‐Rojas. “So the goal here was to see where the most damage could be.”

That damage comes in a few forms. As the land sinks, it can create divots for rainwater to accumulate, causing flooding along railways. That can mess with the electrical system that powers the trains, Solano‐Rojas says.

And elevation changes can increase the grade of the rails. The metro’s trains are designed to operate on a maximum slope of 3.5 percent, Solano‐Rojas says, but some stretches of track are now double that due to subsidence. “Trains can get derailed very easily if there is a slight change in the leveling of the railways,” says Manoochehr Shirzaei, an environmental security expert at Virginia Tech who studies subsidence but wasn’t involved in the new paper. “Most of the infrastructure has certain thresholds; it tolerates a certain level of differential land subsidence. But often they don’t account for the rate that we see, for example, in Mexico City.”

Read Next

How NYC’s upcoming congestion pricing program will reduce traffic — and cut carbon

Emily Pontecorvo

Solano‐Rojas and his colleagues found subsidence in the area of an overpass near the Olivos station, which collapsed in 2021 while a Metro train was traveling over it. “We did part of this analysis before 2021, and we detected that that area was having differential displacements,” says Solano‐Rojas. “We were like, ‘Oh, yeah, it looks like something could be happening here in the future.’ We think that it’s not a coincidence that we found this.” Solano‐Rojas was careful to say that the potential contribution of subsidence to the disaster would require further evaluation, and official investigations have cited construction errors and do not mention subsidence.

For this study, the researchers looked at the metro infrastructure above ground, not the subway segments — basically, the parts of the system they could verify visually. (The photo below shows the differential subsidence of columns supporting an overpass.) But by providing the system’s operators with information on how quickly its infrastructure might be subsiding, their work can hopefully inform interventions. Engineers can add material underneath railways, for instance, to restore lost elevation. Bolstering subways, though, could be much more challenging. “We don’t have a concrete solution for that,” says Shirzaei. “In most cases, when that happens, it just results in shutting down the project and trying to open a new lane.”

This isn’t just Mexico City’s problem. Earlier this year, Shirzaei and his colleagues found that the East Coast’s infrastructure is in serious trouble due to slower — yet steady — subsidence. They calculated that 29,000 square miles of the Atlantic Coast are exposed to sinking of up to 0.08 inches a year, affecting up to 14 million people and 6 million properties. Some 1,400 square miles are sinking up to 0.20 inches a year.

Differential subsidence is not only threatening railways, the researchers found, but all kinds of other critical infrastructure, like levees and airports. A metropolis like New York City has the added problem of sheer weight pushing down on the ground, which alone leads to subsidence. The Bay Area, too, is sinking. On either coast, subsidence is greatly exacerbating the problem of sea level rise: The land is going down just as the water is coming up.

Wherever in the world it’s happening, people have to stop overextracting groundwater to slow subsidence. Newfangled systems are already relieving pressure on aquifers. It’s getting cheaper and cheaper to recycle toilet water into drinking water, for instance. And more cities are deploying “sponge” infrastructure — lots of green spaces that allow rainwater to soak into the underlying aquifer, essentially reinflating the land to fend off subsidence. Such efforts are increasingly urgent as climate change exacerbates droughts in many parts of the world, including Mexico City, putting ever more pressure on groundwater supplies.

With increasing satellite data, cities can get a better handle on the subsidence they can’t immediately avoid. “I really feel like governments have a chance to use these kinds of studies to have a more structured plan of action,” says Solano‐Rojas.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Mexico City’s metro system is sinking fast. Yours could be next. on Apr 14, 2024.

This story was originally published by Capital & Main.

When it comes to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and watershed protection, several downballot elections this year in a handful of states could have a major effect in the transition away from fossil fuel. 

The media tend to ignore such contests, which attract far fewer voters than big federal and state elections. But board members of public utilities in Arizona and Nebraska are up for election in coming months, and the results of those contests could potentially transform energy policy for millions of Americans. 

The elections come amid growing concern about the role of money in such races and in the wake of headline-grabbing corruption scandals at utilities across the country. Utility fraud and corruption — in Florida, Illinois, Mississippi, Ohio, and South Carolina — has cost electricity customers at least $6.6 billion, according to an analysis by news nonprofit Floodlight, which noted that “some power companies embrace — or seek to block — the transition away from fossil fuels toward wind, solar, hydrogen, and nuclear, which produce fewer greenhouse gasses.”

On April 2, six clean-energy candidates won seats on two boards of the Salt River Project, a not-for-profit utility that provides water and power to more than 2 million people living in central Arizona. It’s one of the largest public power companies in the country. Critics say that it’s also one of the biggest contributors in the Western U.S. to greenhouse gas emissions since it relies on coal, oil, and natural gas to generate more than two-thirds of its energy. Arizona is the sunniest state in the country, yet the Salt River Project gets only 3.4 percent of its energy from solar, lagging behind the state overall, which gets 10 percent from solar.

Though they didn’t win a majority of the board, the new clean energy members could have a greater role shaping the energy future of Phoenix, the fifth-largest city in the U.S. with a population of more than 1.6 million. The election attracted controversy due to rules limiting voter eligibility to property owners and not all rate payers in the district — it also got the attention of famed environmental activists like Bill McKibben, leader of the climate campaign group 350.org.

Some of the incumbent board members have served for decades because of an election system set up in the early 1900s — when the Valley of the Sun was settled by farmers and ranchers — that allows only property owners to vote and apportions votes by acreage. The more land you own, the more votes you get. 

As a result, most of the utility’s customers don’t have a say in choosing the leadership of a body that sets their energy rates and decides what energy sources they use to generate electricity.

The clean energy advocates promise to accelerate solar deployments, adjust rates to incentivize the use of rooftop solar, and strengthen watershed protection in a region that is increasingly suffering from drought and extreme heat. In 2023, Phoenix saw a record 54 days when the temperature hit 110 degrees.

“We call ourselves the Valley of the Sun for a reason,” said Randy Miller, a winning Salt River Project board member who supports the slate of clean energy candidates and was motivated to run several years ago when he was told that his energy rates would nearly triple since he installed rooftop solar on his home. “I couldn’t believe it, the nearby ASP [Arizona Public Service] district has more than triple the amount of rooftop solar. Higher rates are a complete disincentive to getting solar power. We need new leadership on the board.”

The candidates were especially motivated in light of a state commission’s recent decision to scrap its renewable energy standard, the only state to take such action, according to solar industry advocates. That body, the Arizona Corporation Commission, also has an election coming up in August.

Longtime board member Stephen H. Williams, who defeated one of the clean-energy candidates, did not return calls from Capital & Main for comment.

The current board members running for reelection had pushed back against the new candidates, sending out flyers touting “40 combined years of providing affordable and reliable power and water” and citing sustainability as one of their concerns. They criticized what they called an attempted “takeover” by “ideological extremists,” claiming that Salt River Project “has managed to reduce carbon intensity by 35 percent since 2005, despite the dramatic growth happening in our service area.”

The insurgents in the Salt River Project race had hoped to emulate Nebraska, where clean-energy advocates won three seats in 2016 on the heavily rural Nebraska Public Power District. That helped tip the balance of power and led the board to vote 9-2 in 2021 to aim for net-zero emissions in the utility’s generation by 2050. As a result, with the state’s other two major power utilities already making similar pledges in recent years, Nebraska became the first GOP-dominated state to commit to net-zero electricity emissions.

The end result was a long-sought goal of climate activists and environmental groups, such as the Nebraska Conservation Voters and the Sierra Club, which poured money into the 2018 and 2020 races. Before that, such races were sleepy affairs with incumbents running unopposed. The unprecedented level of campaign contributions sparked debate in this year’s election cycle, with some state lawmakers recently pushing to make the elections partisan so that voters have a better idea of each candidate’s agenda.

“Nebraskans support clean energy” but the utilities didn’t reflect those values — and so it became a matter of organizing and educating voters, said Chelsea Johnson, deputy director of Nebraska Conservation Voters, describing recent election results. “You can have a really big impact running for these local offices.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The downballot races that could transform energy policy in Arizona and Nebraska on Apr 13, 2024.

The Australian Marine Conservation Society (AMCS) has released video footage showing that the southern portion of the Great Barrier Reef is suffering from deep-sea coral bleaching, reported The Guardian.

The footage shows that the bleaching extends at least as far down as 59.1 feet — the deepest reported during this mass bleaching event, a press release from AMCS said. Some of the corals have begun to die in the face of record marine heat waves.

“I feel devastated. This bleaching event is the worst I have seen. It’s a severe bleaching event,” said Dr. Selina Ward, University of Queensland’s former academic director of the Heron Island Research Station, in the press release.

Ward reported extensive coral bleaching at all 16 southern Great Barrier Reef sites she had visited, saying it was the worst she had seen in three decades.

“I’ve been working on the Reef since 1992 but this [mass coral bleaching event], I’m really struggling with. The diversity of species involved has been hard to deal with. Look at bleached areas, there are many different species that are bleached – many of which are pretty resistant to bleaching so it’s not a pleasant one,” Ward added.

Last week, aerial survey data showed that 75 percent of the reef had experienced bleaching during the current bleaching event, with much of it classed as “high to extreme bleaching.”

During climate change-driven marine heat waves, extended periods of warmer ocean temperatures cause corals to become stressed, which leads them to expel the algae that live in a symbiotic relationship with them. These algae not only give corals their colorful appearance, but they are also their main source of energy, so long periods without them can lead to starvation.

“This new footage shows extensive coral bleaching in southern reefs, but there are images from the central and northern parts that show bleaching is extensive and severe in some of those areas too. Although in-water surveys will take months, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority has completed the aerial surveys but only released the data. The authority must urgently release the maps to show to the public the extent and severity of this bleaching event,” said Dr. Lissa Schindler, campaign manager with AMCS, in the press release.

Some southern reef areas have seen elevated water temperatures lasting for a record 14.57 weeks, smashing the previous 11.8-week record set in April of 2020, according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data.

“The Great Barrier Reef is experiencing an unprecedented fifth mass coral bleaching in eight years. This is worse than the past two mass bleaching events – in 2020 and 2022 – and we may discover as bad as the worst bleaching on record in 2016,” Schindler said. “The Reef has never experienced such extended marine heatwaves before.”

Last week, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority said surveys of 1,000-plus individual reefs showed that more than 50 percent were experiencing “high or very high” bleaching levels, with less than 10 percent showing “extreme bleaching,” The Guardian reported. About a quarter of the reefs were relatively unaffected.

“Coral species, which were considered resilient in previous marine heatwaves, are this time bleached. We are already seeing coral dying from this level of heat exposure but expect to see more across multiple coral species,” Schindler said in the press release. “The Great Barrier Reef is a global icon, home to thousands of species and worth $6 billion annually to the economy. If this was a bushfire it would be declared a national disaster but because it is underwater and out of sight, it is not getting the attention it should by our leaders.”

Schindler emphasized that, as the reef’s custodian, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority needs to play a bigger role in addressing threats to the reef related to climate change.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority (@gbrmarinepark)

“The Australian Government must lift its emissions reduction targets in line with keeping global warming to 1.5°C – a critical threshold for coral reefs. Australia’s current emissions reduction target of 43% by 2030 is consistent with a 2°C warming pathway, which equates to the loss of 99% of the world’s coral reefs. If the Albanese government is serious about its commitment to UNESCO to protect the Reef, then it must commit to net-zero emissions by 2035 and stop approving new fossil fuel projects,” Schindler said.

The Great Barrier Reef’s plight is directly related to human-caused climate change, and no time must be lost in addressing and mitigating the source of the crisis, Ward explained.

“This bleaching event again brings us to the question, what are we doing to stop the Reef from being lost? I can’t help but wonder what it is going to take for the right decisions to be made. We are really running out of time. We need to reduce our [greenhouse gas] emissions immediately. We cannot expect to save the Great Barrier Reef and be opening new fossil fuel developments. It’s time to act and there are no more excuses,” Ward said in the press release.

The post Great Barrier Reef Suffering Record Coral Bleaching With Damage 59 Feet Below the Surface appeared first on EcoWatch.

The Department of Energy, or DOE, announced Friday that it’s strengthening energy efficiency requirements for light bulbs in U.S. markets, in a move anticipated to save Americans $27 billion on their utility bills over 30 years. The DOE estimates that the new standards will prevent 70 million metric tons of carbon from being emitted over 30 years — equivalent to the annual emissions of 9 million homes.

According to the new rule, light bulbs sold or imported after 2028 must have an efficiency level of at least 120 lumens per watt, almost triple the current minimum standard. Under the new standard, a light bulb as bright as an old-school 60-watt incandescent bulb would require no more than 6.5 watts of electricity.

The federal government has already once strengthened its efficiency standards under the Biden administration. Last year, the classic Edison-style incandescent bulb was almost entirely phased out. (That rule, which set the current efficiency standard of 45 lumens per watt, actually predates Biden’s presidency and was initially scheduled by Congress to go into effect in 2020, but it was delayed by the Trump administration.)

By 2028, when the new standards kick in, the DOE predicts that some 98 percent of new bulbs sold in the U.S. will be LEDs.

The federal standards do not prescribe a particular kind of bulb for common household usage, but merely mandate minimum efficiency levels. And they only apply to new sales and imports; no one is required to replace the bulbs already in their homes.

Exemptions are carved out for certain types of bulbs, like oven lights, where LEDs are unsuitable because they don’t perform well under high heat.

Andrew deLaski, the executive director of the Appliance Standards Awareness Project, a coalition of energy efficiency proponents, said the trend toward greater efficiency has made a difference in the battle against global warming — especially since the widespread adoption of LEDs.

“What was a 60 watt light bulb now uses, say, 9 or 10 watts,” deLaski said. “That’s a big reduction in energy use, which means less fossil fuels being burned in power plants which leads to climate change. But even an efficient technology can get better.”

Those improvements are already on their way, as lighting manufacturers have been steadily increasing efficiency in light bulbs for years, driven by economic incentives as well as federal regulation. Lighting manufacturers weighed in on the new standard during the federal rulemaking process.

“The modern LED light bulb is a much better light bulb than the one you bought five years ago, way way better than the one you bought ten years ago, and in another universe than the CFL [ compact fluorescent lamp] that you can’t even buy anymore,” said deLaski.

The new federal standards effectively guarantee that these innovations are shared across the market, ensuring “that all the choices available in stores and from internet sellers are going to be LEDs that incorporate the latest efficiency technologies,” deLaski said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The lowly light bulb is the Biden administration’s latest climate-fighting tool on Apr 12, 2024.

The Biden administration has announced almost $830 million in grants to support 80 projects across the country to improve aging roadways. The goal of the investments is to make transportation infrastructure more extreme weather-resilient in the face of heat waves, flooding, sea-level rise and other impacts related to climate change.

The first-of-their-kind awards are being funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law’s Promoting Resilient Operations for Transformative, Efficient and Cost-saving Transportation (PROTECT) Discretionary Grant Program, coupled with current PROTECT Formula funding already going to states for similar projects, a press release from the United States Department of Transportation’s Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) said.

“We have seen far too many examples of transportation infrastructure being shut down or damaged by extreme weather, which is more extreme and more frequent in this time of climate change,” Pete Buttigieg, U.S. Secretary of Transportation, said before the announcement, as The Associated Press reported. “America’s infrastructure was not built for the climate that we have today, and the consequences of this are very real and being felt by people in every part of the country.”

Through the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, more than $50 billion has been dedicated to climate adaptation and resilience through the establishment of a National Climate Resilience Framework to advance climate resilience strategies for local communities.

The U.S. transportation system was designed and built mostly before today’s more frequent and severe extreme weather events, which are causing increasing damage to transportation infrastructure, the press release said.

The PROTECT program will be put toward projects to strengthen roads, highways, bridges, public transportation, ports, pedestrian facilities and intercity passenger rail. Increasing their resilience will reduce costs in the short- and long-term by minimizing future reconstruction and maintenance needs.

“From wildfires shutting down freight rail lines in California to mudslides closing down a highway in Colorado, from a drought causing the halt of barge traffic on the Mississippi River to subways being flooded in New York, extreme weather, made worse by climate change, is damaging America’s transportation infrastructure, cutting people off from getting to where they need to go, and threatening to raise the cost of goods by disrupting supply chains,” Buttigieg said in the press release.

Four types of grants are being awarded by FHWA in 37 different states, the Virgin Islands and the District of Columbia.

“Every community in America knows the impacts of climate change and extreme weather, including increasingly frequent heavy rain and flooding events across the country and sea-level rise that is inundating infrastructure in coastal states,” said Shailen Bhatt, FHWA administrator, in the press release. “This investment from the Biden-Harris Administration will ensure our infrastructure is built to withstand more frequent and unpredictable extreme weather, which is vitally important for people and businesses that rely on roads and bridges being open to keep our economy moving.”

Disadvantaged communities are often most at risk from hazards, and the grant program will help further environmental justice by addressing these communities’ needs.

“The program encouraged applicants from all levels of government — from local governments and Tribes to state DOTs — to apply for PROTECT discretionary-grant funding,” the press release said. “Consistent with the objectives of the National Climate Resilience Framework, these awards will help these communities across the country become not only more resilient, but also more safe, healthy, equitable, and economically strong.”

The post Biden Admin Announces $830 Million in Grants to Strengthen U.S. Infrastructure Against Climate Change appeared first on EcoWatch.

Wizz Air, a budget airline based in Hungary, has placed an order for sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) made from human waste.

The SAF is developed by a Bristol, UK-based startup, Firefly, which has come up with a way to turn treated sewage into fuel. Wizz Air recently placed an order for up to 525,000 metric tons of SAF for over the next 15 years from Firefly as a way of investing in the idea, The Guardian reported.

“Alongside fleet renewal and operational efficiency, sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) plays a crucial role in reducing carbon emissions from aviation,” Yvonne Moynihan, corporate and ESG officer at Wizz Air, shared in a press release. “Our investment in Firefly, which has the potential to reduce our lifecycle emissions by 100,000 tonnes CO2-eq per year, underscores our commitment to mainstream the use of SAF in our operations by 2030.”

According to the International Energy Agency, the aviation industry is responsible for about 2% of global carbon emissions, but advancements such as SAF can reduce the impact of air travel. However, as The Guardian reported, developing SAF can be cost- and resource-restrictive. It can be more expensive to develop than conventional aviation fuel, and many SAFs rely on materials with limited stocks, such as spent cooking oil or other food waste.

But Firefly noted that there is a large source of biosolids from treated sewage that otherwise has little value and could be less expensive to turn into SAFs compared to other materials. The sewage sludge can also be blended with up to 50% conventional fuel made from kerosene without needing to redesign or modify aircraft engines, Yahoo! Finance reported.

Firefly’s fuel is still undergoing regulatory testing, but the company has plans to construct a factory for its operations in Harwich in Essex, England, Yahoo! Finance reported. Anglian Water, a utility company, has agreed to supply the biosolids for the facility to turn into SAF. Firefly said it expects to start supplying the SAF by 2028 or 2029.

In addition to helping the airline meet its goal of powering 10% of flights with SAF by 2030, the order for Firefly’s SAF could also help Wizz Air meet the EU’s regulations, which will require 20% SAF for flights starting in the EU by 2030 and 70% SAF by 2050.

“However, achieving our aspiration requires a significant ramp-up of SAF production and deployment,” Moynihan said. “Therefore, we call on policymakers to address barriers to SAF deployment at scale by incentivising production, providing price support, and embracing additional sustainable feedstocks for biofuel production.”

The post Airline Places Order for Sustainable Aviation Fuel Made From Human Waste appeared first on EcoWatch.

By Derrick Z. Jackson

Like almost all things chemical in the United States, the recent announcement by the Biden administration that it is banning a major form of asbestos is both a triumph and a disgrace. 

The triumph is that after decades of Sisyphean advocacy by public health groups and scientists, chrysotile asbestos, a known carcinogen, is finally facing an assorted set of deadlines for import and use in this nation. In a bit of rhetorical ecstasy, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan proclaimed that the federal government “is finally slamming the door on a chemical so dangerous that it has been banned in over 50 countries.”

While this administration does deserve credit for acting on asbestos after years of neglect, it is more accurate to describe the White House as politely showing the door to companies who use what is nicknamed “white asbestos.” Two years ago, when the EPA first started proposing rules to get the last uses of asbestos out of current applications, the agency floated a two-year deadline. After heavy lobbying by the chemical industry, which still uses asbestos diaphragms to produce a third of the nation’s chlorine, it now may be up to 12 years before the last chlorine company converts to non-asbestos technology.

The Biden administration is also generally giving a two to five-year phase out period to companies that use asbestos sheet gaskets to seal pipes. The quickest prohibition is six months against asbestos in automotive brakes and linings, other vehicle friction parts and oilfield gear.  Brenda Mallory, the White House’s chair of its Council on Environmental Quality said, “This action marks a major step to improve chemical safety.”

It should be clear that it is only a step, and therein lies the disgrace. Even with this move, the United States remains many steps behind other developed nations when it comes to asbestos and chemical safety across the board—thanks to decades of industrial and political suppression of science, the enduring might of industrial lobbyists, and our ever-divided government.

Deny, Delay, Disinform

Asbestos makers have known since the 1930s that their products were dangerous and yet they purposely buried that knowledge for decades. They banked on being able to avoid consequences for cancers that took decades to develop in workers who inhaled asbestos fibers. Johns-Manville, the 20^th century’s largest asbestos manufacturer, was infamous for a longstanding policy of not telling employees whether asbestosis showed up in their physical examinations.

The entire industry and insurers led by Metropolitan Life copied the same playbook. According to a paper in the International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health, the final draft of a 1957 industry study deleted the internal finding that asbestos miners with asbestosis were more likely to develop lung cancer than a person without asbestosis. That, in turn successfully , dampened the concern of the American Medical Association.

The leading AMA industrial health editor wrote the authors of the industrial study to say he was “particularly pleased” at the findings of no association of lung cancer to asbestosis. The association’s top consultant for occupational disease went so far as to claim in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association that there was “no epidemiological evidence” of increased lung cancer among workers exposed to asbestos.

The legacy of death and disease from disinformation and “disappeared” information haunts us to this day. By the beginning of 2001, according to a 2004 report by the National Bureau of Economic Research, 600,000 people had filed lawsuits over asbestos-related illnesses that had already cost companies $54 billion in legal costs, with an eventual projected total cost of between $200 billion and $265 billion. The NBER said asbestos cases “involve more plaintiffs, more defendants, and higher costs than any other type of personal injury litigation in U.S. history.”

Just two years ago, a Montana jury awarded $36.5 million to a man who worked in the late 1960s at a vermiculite mine and mill in the town of Libby where the mineral was contaminated with asbestos. The operations were owned by W.R. Grace, but the villain, according to the verdict, was the mill’s workers compensation insurer, Maryland Casualty.

The doctors for the insurer did not tell workers that their annual X-rays showed scarring of the lungs. A New York Times feature quoted a 1967 memo from a lawyer of the insurer who feared “the extent and severity of the problem.” The mine was closed in 1990, but its asbestos dust has so far been tied to 400 deaths and 2,400 cases of disease. In 2009, for the first time ever, the EPA declared a public health emergency, calling the asbestos contamination in Libby “the worst case of industrial poisoning of a whole community in American history.”

Still a Modern Killer

Even today, asbestos exposure is still tied to 40,000 deaths a year in the United States and 255,000 worldwide. It was not until the 1970s that the United States began banning the crumbly forms of asbestos insulation on boilers and hot water tanks, fireproofing sprays, and wall patching. By then, no one knew how much asbestos the average American was living with. ”No one has any kind of numbers,” Sandra Eberle, chemical hazards program manager of the Consumer Product Safety Commission told the New York Times in 1984. ”We don’t have statistics on how many homes asbestos is in, and we don’t know whether or not it poses a hazard in those homes.”

Numbers continue to be hard to come by. As many other nations began enacting bans over the course of the rest of the 20^th century, US efforts stalled. In 1989, under President George H.W. Bush, the EPA attempted to ban most products containing asbestos by 1997. The chemical lobby responded by suing the EPA.

A federal court overturned much of the ban in 1991on technical grounds. It faulted the EPA for not adequately evaluating potentially less burdensome alternatives to asbestos and not comparing the toxicity of potential alternatives. Although the ruling was primarily concerned with the EPA’s process, Robert Pigg, a top asbestos trade-group executive, seized on it to claim: “We have known for many years that asbestos can be safely and securely bound in today’s products.”

The result was three decades of mostly federal silence, with untold exposures to workers at plants still using asbestos. In the 2000s, companies such as Georgia Pacific tried to fend off lawsuits over its use of asbestos in its Ready-Mix joint compound in the 1960s and 70s with highly flawed counterfeit research.

In 2022, as the Biden administration launched its effort to ban chrysotile asbestos, ProPublica/National Public Radio interviewed more than a dozen laborers who worked at a chlorine plant that operated until 2021 in Niagara Falls, New York. The story said “asbestos dust hung in the air, collected on the beams and light fixtures, and built up until it was inches thick. Workers tramped in and out of it all day, often without protective suits or masks, and carried it around on their coveralls and boots.”

One worker said, “We were constantly swimming in this stuff.”

Chemical Industry Wins Compromise

Yet, none other than the US Chamber of Commerce, the nation’s highest-spending lobbying group, opposed the ban. It claimed, like Pigg in 1991, that the mineral “has been utilized safely in the United States for decades.” The American Chemistry Council unleashed a host of scare tactics. It claimed that an asbestos ban was itself a health hazard that could “cause substantial harm” to the nation’s drinking supply and retard “the production of products necessary to achieve our climate and sustainability goals including batteries, windmills, and solar panels.” 

The council began pining for a 15-year phase-out period for asbestos. Two years later, the final rule clearly reflects a compromise, with the Biden administration saying it recognizes that converting chlorine facilities to non-asbestos technology “requires extensive construction, additional permits, specialized expertise and parts for which there are limited suppliers.”

Even if that compromise holds up against lawsuits, the “final” rule is likely far from a final say on asbestos. While the EPA says that chrysotile asbestos is the “only known form” of the mineral still being used and imported to the United States, there are several other forms that the current regulation is silent on, leaving the door open for their use.

There is also the unresolved issue of “legacy” asbestos installed in walls, ceilings and flooring and basements over most of the 20^th century. In older school buildings, a 2018 EPA Inspector General report said, “substantial amounts” of asbestos were sprayed for insulation and as fire retardants in school buildings, particularly from 1946 through 1972. A 2017 study by the Centers for Disease Control found that deaths from mesothelioma remained “substantial” and were increasing, likely due to workers maintaining or remediating older buildings with asbestos.

The EPA said it will release an evaluation of other types of asbestos and legacy uses by December. But the piecemeal approach is why advocates such as Linda Reinstein, co-founder of the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization, have long pushed for more sweeping federal legislation banning all asbestos fibers in products and requiring chlorine companies to convert to non-asbestos technology in two years, as the EPA had originally planned. Such legislation would make asbestos regulation less vulnerable to the highly variable whims of whoever is in the White House. The legislation is named for Reinstein’s late husband Alan, who died from mesothelioma, an aggressive cancer tied to asbestos exposure.

While Reinstein said in an interview that she was “delighted” that the EPA has issued its current rule, she remained highly concerned that there remain loopholes the asbestos-using industry can exploit, especially since she feels that little has changed in its mentality of putting “profits over people.” She emphasized, “This does not ban what you can find on a store shelf.”

A Painfully Long Journey

The protracted journey to any kind of asbestos ban is a sobering reminder of how long the United States takes to regulate chemicals on any shelf, such as menthol in tobacco products, PFAS “forever chemicals” in our water, pesticides in agricultural fields, and even cosmetics in the bathroom cabinet. National Public Radio’s “Living on Earth” recently featured a study from China finding that women undergoing in vitro fertilization who used skin care products were more likely to miscarry than women who did not use skin care products.

Cosmetics have increasingly been tied to endocrine disruption and cancers. The “Living on Earth” feature served as a reminder that here at home, the United States has banned only 11 chemicals in cosmetics, while the European Union has banned more than 1,300. Leonardo Trasande, director of New York University’s center of environmental hazards, told the program, “The more you unravel the onion, the more you realize–whoa, this is a bigger and more complicated story than you might be able to deal with fully in a lifetime.”

The journey has already spanned several generations to get to where we are on asbestos. We should not have to wait so long to deal with the rest of the chemical world. None other than Reinstein said it best: “What we do matters. What we don’t do matters even more.”

Reposted with permission from Union of Concerned Scientists.

Derrick Z. Jackson is a UCS Fellow in climate and energy and the Center for Science and Democracy. Formerly of the Boston Globe and Newsday, Jackson is a Pulitzer Prize and National Headliners finalist, a 2021 Scripps Howard opinion winner, and a respective 11-time, 4-time and 2-time winner from the National Association of Black Journalists, the National Society of Newspaper Columnists, and the Education Writers Association.

The post A Triumph and Disgrace: The Very Slow Road to Banning Asbestos appeared first on EcoWatch.

The world’s most prominent verification program for corporate climate pledges is reportedly in turmoil following its board of trustees’ unilateral decision this week to allow carbon offsets to count toward companies’ supply chain emissions reduction targets.

In a letter to the board seen by Grist, dozens of staffers and program managers at the Science-Based Targets initiative, or SBTi, said the decision had caused “grave reputational damage” and implied that it risked turning their organization into a “greenwashing platform.”

The letter called for the resignation of SBTi CEO Luiz Amaral and board members who supported the change, as well as the withdrawal of the new policy.

“The actions of the CEO and the board have resulted in significant harm to our organization’s reputation and viability,” the letter said.

The SBTi is a nonprofit that sets standards for corporate emissions reduction targets. It evaluates hundreds of companies’ targets each year and certifies those it deems legitimate. Companies, in turn, advertise the SBTi’s certification as evidence that their pledges are meaningful.

Among the staffers’ main concerns is that access to carbon credits will incentivize companies to offset, rather than reduce, greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation and production of materials they buy and products they sell to consumers. Scientists say companies should do everything they can to limit these emissions, known as “scope 3” emissions, before trying to cancel them out with credits. 

Carbon credits are supposed to represent some amount of carbon emissions that are avoided or removed from the atmosphere — through projects like planting trees or installing wind turbines — but experts say it’s questionable whether they actually work. More than 90 percent of the rainforest-based credits offered by one popular organization were shown last year to be “worthless,” largely because they promised to protect forests that were never under threat. (The issuer of those credits disputed the findings.)

The SBTi staffers also said the board moved “prematurely,” without notifying or adequately consulting with its technical advisers.

“The Technical Council was neither informed, consulted, nor given approval for such a significant decision,” they wrote, calling this a “clear and apparent breach” of the SBTi’s governance structures. At least one of the SBTi’s technical advisory group members — Stephan Singer, a senior adviser at the nonprofit Climate Action Network — said he resigned from the SBTi over the issue. In his resignation letter, obtained by the Financial Times, he called carbon credits “scientifically, socially, and from a climate perspective a hoax.”

Doreen Stabinsky, another SBTi adviser and a professor of global environmental politics at the College of the Atlantic in Maine, told Grist the move was a “corporate takeover of SBTi that will undermine any ‘science-based’ credibility they had.”

The trustees’ abrupt decision may have been influenced by external pressure to boost business prospects for the voluntary carbon market. Over the past few years, investigations and public scrutiny of “fraudulent” offsets have made prospective buyers wary of carbon credits; perhaps fearing backlash, companies bought 17 percent fewer carbon credits in 2022 than they did the previous year.

If the SBTi softened its position on these credits, it could drive up demand for them. Carbon credit programs would benefit from a bigger pool of interested buyers, and companies would be able to meet their emissions reduction targets more easily. Indeed, dozens of companies told the SBTi in a survey published last month that meeting their scope 3 targets is “too much of a challenge,” and the overwhelming majority of positive reactions to the board’s about-face on carbon credits have come from carbon market funders and participants like the American Forest Foundation, Climate Impact Partners, and Indigo Ag.

María Mendiluce, CEO of the We Mean Business Coalition — which advocates for corporate climate action and is one of the SBTi’s five partner organizations — said in a statement that the move would allow companies to “bring more innovation and investment into cutting emissions from their value chains, while also bringing in much needed funding for climate projects in the Global South.” 

Organizations that set standards for the voluntary carbon market in order to help it grow, including the International Emissions Trading Association, the Integrity Council for Voluntary Carbon Markets, and the Voluntary Carbon Markets Integrity Initiative, also supported the new policy. The last of these recently adopted a similar position on carbon credits used to offset supply chain emissions that raised similar concerns among experts.

“The faulty business model of offset credits is in danger, and this wild move is an attempt to keep the business model alive,” Sybrig Smit, a policy analyst for the nonprofit NewClimate Institute, told Grist. “It’s not an attempt to save the climate.”

Some carbon credit proponents may have lobbied the SBTi board directly for a change in policy. Earlier this week, the Financial Times reported that the Bezos Earth Fund, a $10 billion philanthropic organization created by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and a “core funder” of the SBTi, arranged a two-day meeting in March with SBTi board members, at which representatives of the fund urged the SBTi to allow companies to use offsets.

Read Next

Corporate climate plans are improving, but still ‘critically insufficient’

Joseph Winters

The Bezos Earth Fund is a founding sponsor, along with the Rockefeller Foundation and the U.S. State Department, of a large-scale carbon credit system that was first unveiled at the U.N.’s annual climate summit in 2022. At the time, an independent analysis suggested that the system would need to attract significant business participation in order to have more than marginal impact on greenhouse gas emissions and climate finance. 

The initiative “basically aims to develop a system that will look to sell a lot of credits, and they need to find buyers,” said Gilles Dufrasne, lead on global carbon markets for the European nonprofit Carbon Market Watch.

The Bezos fund and its partners relaunched their carbon credit system at last year’s U.N. summit and said they would finalize a framework for the system by Earth Day 2024, less than two weeks after the SBTi board’s announcement. Dufrasne called the timing “curious.”

The Bezos Earth Fund did not respond to Grist’s request for comment, but the philanthropy told the Financial Times it was uninvolved in the SBTi’s new policy on offsets. A spokesperson said the fund is committed to “ensuring that any use of high integrity market mechanisms is subject to stringent guardrails, limits, and rules so that any use of high integrity carbon credits enhances rather than undermines the integrity of corporate climate targets.”

Neither the U.S. Department of State nor the SBTi board of trustees responded to Grist’s requests for comment. Amaral, the SBTi’s CEO, didn’t respond to a message on LinkedIn.

Across academia and the advocacy world, critics have not held back in repudiating the SBTi board’s decision. Teresa Anderson, global lead on climate justice for the nonprofit ActionAid International, said on X that the move “renders the standard for climate action meaningless.” Alison Taylor, a clinical professor at the New York University Stern School of Business, posted that the move was “good news for voluntary carbon markets, bad news for the overwhelming prevalence of BS in this area.”

Other organizations, including Carbon Market Watch, run their own efforts to evaluate private sector decarbonization plans, but none of them do it at the same scale as the SBTi. In 2022, the organization approved more than 1,000 companies’ climate pledges. It removed hundreds of them from a validation process last month over their failure to submit sufficiently ambitious emissions reduction targets.

“It’s just sad,” said Peter Riggs, director of the environmental nonprofit Pivot Point, describing the niche position the SBTi has held as a widely respected arbiter of corporate climate plans, trusted by both business leaders and climate advocacy groups. “We were hoping SBTi was going to be the exemplar of integrity at a time when other initiatives were still messing around with offsets. And now they’re indistinguishable.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A climate pledge verifier said it would allow more carbon offsets. Its staff revolted. on Apr 12, 2024.