About half of all packaged goods found in grocery stores contain palm oil, because this product is versatile, grows efficiently for better yields and has low production costs. However, palm oil comes at a high cost to the environment, and its production is a leading cause of deforestation around the world.
As a potential alternative, researchers at Queen Margaret University (QMU) in Edinburgh, UK have developed PALM-ALT, which they found to not only be better for the environment but also a healthier substitute.
PALM-ALT is made from a byproduct of linseed (or flaxseed) production along with natural fiber and rapeseed oil. According to the researchers, it can be made locally at a global scale, including in the UK and within the EU. In response to a question from EcoWatch regarding PALM-ALT’s cost-competitiveness with palm oil, a PALM-ALT spokesperson said they are “unable to confirm costs until manufacturing partners have been arranged.”
PALM-ALT was made to substitute palm oil in baked goods, like cookies and cakes, without impacting characteristics like texture or flavor. It has a consistency similar to mayonnaise. The resulting substitute has 88% less saturated fat and 25% less fat overall compared to palm oil, according to the researchers.
The palm oil substitute is also about 70% better for the environment (based on carbon emissions) compared to palm oil, as the BBC reported.
Oil palm trees grow only in tropical areas, which has led producers to destroy native, tropical forests to build oil palm plantations. This has a number of negative impacts. It removes native plants, displaces wildlife and removes an effective carbon sink, the World Wildlife Fund explained. Tropical forests are typically burned to make way for the oil palm plantations, contributing to air pollution. Palm oil mills also produce liquid waste that pollutes soil, surface water and groundwater.
“Palm can only be harvested in rainforest areas of the globe, thousands of miles away from many of the countries that use the product,” Catriona Liddle, head of the Scottish Centre for Food Development and Innovation at Queen Margaret University, said in a statement. “Current production methods leading to deforestation of tropical rainforests in Malaysia and Indonesia have led to the destruction of animals’ natural habitat, and high greenhouse gas emissions linked to its global transport. It is therefore essential to develop an alternative product, which works well for the food industry and helps reduce the world’s overreliance on palm.”
The researchers have patented PALM-ALT and its production process. As for next steps, in additional to finding manufacturing partners they are looking for food companies and other partners that want to replace palm oil with PALM-ALT in their products.
From California to Florida, homeowners have been facing a new climate reality: Insurance companies don’t want to cover their properties. According to a report released today, the problem will only get worse.
The nonprofit climate research firm First Street Foundation found that, while about 6.8 million properties nationwide already rely on expensive public insurance programs, that’s only a fraction of 39 million across the country that face similar conditions.
“There’s this climate insurance bubble out there,” said Jeremy Porter, the head of climate implications at First Street and a contributor to the report. “And you can quantify it.”
Each state regulates its insurance market, and some limit how much companies can raise rates in a given year. In California, for example, anything more than a 7 percent hike requires a public hearing. According to First Street, such policies have meant premiums don’t always accurately reflect risk, especially as climate change exacerbates natural disasters.
This has led companies such as Allstate, State Farm, Nationwide, and others to pull out of areas with a high threat of wildfire, floods, and storms. In the Southern California city of San Bernardino, for example, non-renewals jumped 774 percent between 2015 and 2021. When that happens, homeowners often must enroll in a government-run insurance-of-last-resort program where premiums can cost thousands of dollars more per year.
“The report shows that actuarially sound pricing is going to make it unaffordable to live in certain places as climate impacts emerge,” said David Russell, a professor of insurance and finance at California State University Northridge. He did not contribute to the report. “It’s startling and it’s very well documented.”
Russell says that what’s most likely to shock people is the economic toll on affected properties. When insurance costs soar, First Street shows, it severely undermines home values — and in some cases erodes them entirely.
The report found that insurance for the average California home could nearly quadruple if future risk is factored in, with those extra costs causing a roughly 39 percent drop in value. The situation is even worse in Florida and Louisiana, where flood insurance in Plaquemines Parish near New Orleans could go from $824 annually to $11,296 and a property could effectively become worthless.
“There’s no education to the public of what’s going on and where the risk is,” said Porter, explaining that most insurance models are proprietary. Even the Federal Emergency Management Agency doesn’t make its flood insurance pricing available to the public — homeowners must go through insurance brokers for a quote.
First Street is posting its report online, and it also runs riskfactor.com, where anyone can type in an address and receive user-friendly risk information for any property in the U.S. One metric the site provides is annualized damage for flood and wind risk. Porter said that if that number is higher than a homeowner’s current premiums, then a climate risk of some kind probably hasn’t yet been priced into the coverage.
“This would indicate that at some point this risk will get priced into their insurance costs,” he said, “and their cost of home ownership would increase along with that.”
Wildfires are the fastest growing natural disaster risk, First Street reported. Over the next 30 years, it estimates the number of acres burned will balloon from about 4 million acres per year to 9 million, and the number of structures destroyed is on track to double to 34,000 annually. Wildfires are also the predominant threat for 4.4 million of the 39 million properties that First Street identified as at risk of insurance upheaval.
“You don’t want someone to live in a place that always burns. They don’t belong there,” he said. “We’re subsidizing people to live in harm’s way.”
First Street hopes that highlighting the climate insurance bubble allows people to make better informed decisions. For homeowners, that may mean taking precautions against, say, wildfires, by replacing their roof or clearing flammable material from around their house. Policymakers, he said, could use the information to help at-risk communities adapt to or mitigate their risk. In either case, Porter said, reducing threats could help keep insurance rates from spiking.
Ultimately, though, Russell says moving people out of disaster-prone areas will likely be necessary.
“Large numbers of people will need to be relocated away from areas that will be uninsurable.” he said. “There is a reckoning on the horizon and it’s not pretty.”
Fall in the U.S. is when three major sports leagues – football, basketball and hockey – start their seasons. Baseball also continues, and in the UK and Europe, some of the major soccer leagues like the Premier League have started their seasons as well. Additionally, college sports with larger budgets, like American football and basketball, have teams that travel by air.
With major sports comes major travel. And air travel is still a heavy contributor to carbon dioxide emissions, with some data saying it constitutes up to 12% of total global travel emissions. According to the International Energy Agency, air travel is heading in the wrong direction related to the Net Zero Emissions by 2050 goal.
Most professional sports rely on air travel to get to games. Between private planes, chartered flights and commercial flights, and because of the intensity of scheduling, there is no way around traveling by plane to meet league and TV scheduling requirements. On top of team travel, dedicated fans typically book flights to games that aren’t local enough to travel by car or bus.
So where do pro sports stand in terms of their carbon impact? Last year, the United Nations published a policy brief outlining the ways that sport can address climate change, by “raising awareness, influencing behaviors, and shrinking its carbon footprint.” The brief quoted a study that found the 2016 Rio Olympics was responsible for 3.6 million tons of carbon dioxide. The UN report recommended several actions: reducing the carbon footprint of buildings; compiling more data on the carbon footprint of sports; and using sports as a “tool for climate action.”
There are tangible examples of teams around the world taking action against climate catastrophe. In the English Premier League for soccer, a recent study by Sports Positive Leagues concluded that “we have probably seen one of the biggest leaps in progress from clubs across the board” in relation to sustainability and lessening impact on climate. This group, part of the Sports Positive network, measured such things as clean energy, energy efficiency, sustainable transport and single-use plastic reduction. Manchester United, a team in the Premier League that ranked third in the Sports Positive rankings, also announced they would buy carbon offsets against their recent travel to the U.S. The offsets that the team will use for its estimated 450 tons of CO2 emissions from its 2023 summer tour will be used at the Crow Lake Wind project in South Dakota.
In the U.S., just a few years ago the National Basketball Association (NBA) was the most polluting league of the four American sports leagues. But in 2022, the league reduced team travel mileage by about 2,000 miles per team. But it’s not just team travel – the overall carbon output is impacted by fans, the energy of the arena and the kind of materials, like single-serve plastic, used inside arenas. In April of 2022, Atlanta’s State Farm Arena — home to the Atlanta Hawks NBA team — received a TRUE Platinum certification from Green Business Certification Inc. for its efforts in reaching zero waste.
The most high-profile green sports event was the opening of Seattle’s Climate Pledge Arena in 2021. The building is expected to receive a net-zero certification and purports to be the first net-zero carbon arena in the world, a claim that’s difficult to verify.
Other arenas are moving green: Sacramento’s Golden One Center is powered by 100% solar energy and uses 45% less water than required and is a LEED Platinum building. And Toronto’s arena uses deep-lake water cooling instead of air conditioning compressors. Other stadiums in the U.S. with significant climate initiatives include those in Philadelphia, Ohio State and Portland.
A recent news item out of Australia noted that the men’s national soccer teams in Australia purchased carbon offsets against their travel to the World Cup in Qatar. And the NFL’s Houston Texans have purchased offsets for this NFL season and two more from 1PointFive, a subsidiary of oil giant Occidental.
While such actions appear well-intentioned, however, carbon offsets have yet to be proven effective. A study from this year showed that 94% of forest offset credits did not offset any emissions. The Texans are purchasing their credits against the massive direct air carbon capture plant being built in the Permian Basin in Texas. These facilities haven’t even been built yet, and direct air carbon capture is a nascent technology that, some say, is more of a benefit to the fossil fuel companies than to the environment.
The Paris Olympics of 2024 is promising “to halve the emissions arising in relation to the Games, while offsetting even more CO2 emissions than we will generate.” A noble goal, to be sure, but as with all areas of the professional sports ecosystem, drastic improvements need to be made to make a dent in our warming climate.
In a new study, an international group of scientists with the World Weather Attribution initiative has concluded that climate change made the heavy rainfall that led to this month’s deadly Libyan floods up to 50 times more likely.
The first half of September brought extreme rainfall to several Mediterranean countries. On September 10, Libya was hit with disastrous flooding following torrential rainfall associated with Storm Daniel that caused 4,128 confirmed deaths with more than 10,000 still missing, a press release from World Weather Attribution said.
Following the devastating flooding in the Mediterranean, World Weather Attribution’s international team from the Netherlands, Germany, Greece, the United Kingdom and the U.S. came together to assess how much the intensity and likelihood of the extreme rainfall were influenced by human-induced climate change.
“The severe flooding in Spain, Greece, Türkiye, Bulgaria and Libya was caused by very heavy rainfall that fell, in the case of Spain in less than 24 hours, whereas it lasted 24 hours in Libya and up to 4 days over Greece and Türkiye,” the press release said.
The scientists used computer and climate simulations to compare current weather events with those in a world where the climate was not 1.2 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average, reported Reuters.
A warmer atmosphere is able to hold in more water vapor, which allows moisture to build up in clouds, causing increased rainfall. Climate change can also cause erratic weather patterns.
The research team found that climate change not only made the severe rainfall in Libya up to 50 times more likely, but as much as 50 percent more intense.
Most people in the north-eastern cities of Derna, Sousa, Benghazi and Al-Marj were not prepared for the amount of rainfall or levels of flooding Storm Daniel brought.
“In Libya, the volume of water and overnight timing of the dam failures made it so that anyone in the path of the water was at increased risk, not just those who are typically highly vulnerable,” the study said. “In addition to the lack of maintenance, the Al-Bilad and Abu Mansour dams were built in the 1970s, using relatively short rainfall records, and may not have been designed to withstand a 1 in 600 year rainfall event.”
Better forecasting, warning systems and communication of the warnings to the general public, as well as updated infrastructure, are needed to help people in the region be better prepared for extreme and unprecedented weather events.
“In conjunction with improved emergency management capacity, impact-based forecasts may help to provide a clearer understanding of how the rainfall translates into potential impacts and could lead to improved warnings in the future,” the study said. “This disaster also points to the challenge of needing to design and maintain infrastructure for not just the climate of the present or the past, but also the future. In Libya, this means taking into account the long-term decline in average rainfall, and at the same time, the increase in extreme rainfall like this heavy rainfall event; a challenging prospect especially for a country plagued by crises.”
If you’re looking for ways to reduce your carbon emissions you could start by staying home for work. A new study by researchers from Cornell University and Microsoft has found that working remotely can have great benefits for the planet.
According to the study, compared to those who travel to an office for work, people who work remotely all the time could reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 54 percent. Hybrid workers can reduce their carbon footprint by 11 percent when they work remotely two days a week and 29 percent when they spend four days working from home.
“The remote work has to be significant in order to realize these kind of benefits,” said Longqi Yang, an applied research manager at Microsoft and co-author of the study, as The Washington Post reported. “This study provides a very important data point for a dimension that people care a lot about when deciding remote work policy.”
The study, “Climate mitigation potentials of teleworking are sensitive to changes in lifestyle and workplace rather than ICT usage,” was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
As a model for the projected greenhouse gas emissions of U.S. remote, hybrid and office workers, the researchers used data on teleworking and commuting from Microsoft employees. They looked at five types of emissions, including energy use at home and in the office.
“Office energy use is the main contributor to the carbon footprint of onsite and hybrid workers, while non-commute-related travel becomes more significant as the number of remote work days increases,” the study said. “In contrast, the effects of remote and hybrid work on ICT usage have negligible impacts on the overall carbon footprint. This highlights that people should shift their focus from ICT usage to commute decarbonization, facility downsizing, and renewables penetration for office buildings to mitigate GHG emissions of remote and onsite work.”
The researchers found that travel not related to work increased for remote workers.
“People say: ‘I work from home, I’m net zero.’ That’s not true,” said Fengqi You, one of the authors of the study and a Cornell professor whose research is focused on systems engineering and data science, as reported by The Guardian. “The net benefit for working remotely is positive but a key question is how positive. When people work remotely, they tend to spend more emissions on social activities.”
Professor You pointed out that people’s homes are not always the most energy efficient, and office printers tend to be more energy efficient than printers used at home.
“While remote work shows potential in reducing carbon footprint, careful consideration of commuting patterns, building energy consumption, vehicle ownership, and non-commute-related travel is essential to fully realise its environmental benefits,” the study said.
Improved fuel economy due to less congestion at rush hour was an additional benefit of more remote work.
“To have a comprehensive plan for something like this, you’re looking at more than just the workplace, and obviously the other choices that people make in their life will also impact the emissions that they create and that organizations might create as well,” said John Trougakos, a professor of organizational behavior and human resources management at University of Toronto-Scarborough, as The Washington Post reported.
The study found that communications and information technology made up only a small portion of overall carbon emissions, so the focus of emissions reductions should be on using renewables for office temperature control and decarbonizing transportation.
“We’re not trying to predict the future, but I think the future is all up to us,” Yang said, as reported by The Washington Post. “This study tells people, if we want to be more carbon neutral in the future, what can we do now?”
More than a year ahead of a state deadline, California has installed 10,000 fast chargers for electric vehicles, the latest in a series of recent milestones in the state’s race to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions from passenger vehicles.
Direct-current fast chargers, or DCFC, play an important role in the transition to electric vehicles, because they are a driver’s best option to quickly recharge a battery while on the road. Fast chargers typically offer power outputs between 50 kW to 350 kW, and some can charge an EV battery to 80 percent in as quickly as 20 minutes. In contrast, the next-fastest type of charger, a Level 2, takes between four to 10 hours to reach the same level of charge.
In 2018, former Governor Jerry Brown issued an executive order that mandated the state install 250,000 EV chargers, including 10,000 fast chargers, by 2025. Since then, the state has nearly quadrupled the number of public and “shared private” (chargers installed at places of business or apartment buildings) fast chargers to hit its target, from around 2,600 to more than 10,000.
“This is the future of transportation — and it’s happening right now all across California,” Governor Gavin Newsom said on Monday at Climate Week NYC in New York, where he made the announcement.
But the state is further behind in its goal to reach 250,000 total chargers by 2025. It currently has less than half that: There are about 93,800 public and shared private chargers in total, but only 41,000 of those are fully public. Additionally, its goal of 250,000 chargers, set more than five years ago, no longer reflects the breakneck pace at which Californians are transitioning to electric vehicles.
There are more than 1.6 million EVs in the state, and 25 percent of new cars sold in the first quarter of 2023 were electric vehicles. An August report from the California Energy Commission found that the state will need more than 1 million public and shared private chargers — including 39,000 fast chargers — to support 7 million electric vehicles by 2030, a steep increase from current targets.
“With new EV sales increasing every month, the charging market needs to step up the pace,” John Gartner, senior director of transportation programs at the Center for Sustainable Energy, told Grist in an email.
Still, Gartner said that installing 10,000 fast chargers was significant, considering the high equipment costs and long wait times for permitting and connection confronting the industry. Gartner said federal and state incentive programs would be crucial in reducing financial risk and attracting private investment in EV infrastructure.
California has invested billions in incentives. Last week, it opened applications for $38 million in equity-focused incentives to fund public charging stations in low-income and disadvantaged communities in 28 counties. And a newly passed bill awaiting Newsom’s signature would provide close to $2 billion for zero-emission vehicle incentives and for supporting infrastructure through 2035.
The rest of the country has even farther to go on EV infrastructure. The three most populous states after California have only a fraction of the number of fast chargers. Florida has 2,038, Texas has 2,017 and New York has 1,283. Alaska has the fewest number of fast chargers, with 32.
Germany is likely to generate enough energy from renewables to meet more than 50% of its energy demand by the end of this year, as the country’s Economy Minister Robert Habeck announced at a conference held by the Heinrich Böll Foundation on Monday.
As of 2022, Germany’s solar photovoltaic capacity was at about 67 megawatts, followed by about 58 megawatts of capacity from onshore wind energy and about 8 megawatts from offshore wind, according to a February 2023 report from the Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Action.
As Reuters reported, Habeck noted at the conference that Germany expected to reach its goal of 9 gigawatts of solar capacity for the year, and that the country had already met its goal for the year for onshore wind energy by the end of July.
However, offshore wind development has been more challenging, primarily because of supply chain issues, as Yale Environment 360 reported. In the first six months of 2023, offshore wind capacity grew to 8,385 megawatts. However, the country has a target to reach 30,000 megawatts of offshore wind capacity by 2030.
Wind energy development in Germany has also been stalled by delayed permit applications, as projects require permitting to transport the turbines. With over 15,000 backlogged applications as of early September, projects have been delayed. Transporting turbine components may require about 60 permits, while transporting a wind turbine requires around 150 permits, Reuters reported.
“I can’t apply for a transport permit and tomorrow say: ‘I’ll drive the green truck instead of the red’, because a new permit is needed,” Kai Westphal, a regional head of transport at Vestas, told Reuters.
Still, GlobalData, a data analytics company, predicted offshore wind energy capacity to quadruple and onshore wind capacity to double by 2035.
A report from the Federal Network Agency released earlier this year noted that Germany could meet its energy demand with clean energy, even by quitting coal earlier than anticipated.
“The report by the Federal Network Agency approved by the cabinet today shows that electricity demand can be reliably met at any time between 2025 and 2031,” Habeck said at the time. “This also applies if electricity consumption increases significantly due to new consumers such as electric vehicles and heat pumps and the phase-out of coal takes place by 2030.”
Although 2023 is expected to be the first year that Germany meets more than half of its energy demand with renewable energy sources, Habeck said the country is still not on track to meet its goal of meeting 80% of energy demand with renewables by 2030.
“We won’t get there at the current pace,” Habeck said.
Hello, welcome to Record High. I’m Kate Yoder, a staff writer at Grist, and today, we’re looking at how sweating can help us cope with climate change.
It is embarrassing to be a sweaty person. I remember making my way to the podium to give a speech at my sixth-grade graduation, my feet squelching audibly in flip-flops with every step; taking a test and noticing the warped paper beneath my moist hand; standing up from a plastic chair and hoping no one noticed the sweaty butt print I left behind. So it came as a relief to learn that sweating was actually good for something.
Once I learned that the science journalist Sarah Everts wrote a book called The Joy of Sweat, I knew that I had to talk to her. Everts makes the case that perspiration is a human superpower, a gift for enduring sweltering temperatures. “I think it’s funny that humans have this enormous taboo about a biological function that’s ultimately going to help us survive climate change,” she told me.
Paula Winkler / Getty Images
The science of sweat goes as follows: At the first hint of getting hot, your heart starts pumping blood toward the outskirts of your body. In tandem, sweat glands pump water — drawn from that blood — onto your skin. When those tiny beads evaporate, they move heat off the body and into the air. It’s an incredibly efficient way to cool down. The geneticist Yana Kamberov, who studies the evolution of sweat, told me that the ability to shed buckets of water is an ability as unique to humans as our oversize brains.
So why do we burn through all that water, one of life’s precious resources? To avoid getting cooked from the inside out. “Dying from a heat wave is like a horror movie with 27 endings that you can choose from,” said Camilo Mora, a climate scientist at the University of Hawaiʻi at Manoa, who has cataloged 27 different ways that heat can lead to organ failure and death.
“Dying from a heat wave is like a horror movie with 27 endings that you can choose from.”
The thing is, sweating has its limits, as I reported for Grist this week. Very hot, humid conditions can render it ineffective. When the air is thick with water molecules, it’s harder for sweat to evaporate, and the body starts overheating. The theoretical point at which no amount of sweating can help you is thought to be six hours of exposure to a “wet-bulb temperature” of 35 degrees Celsius, or 95 degrees Fahrenheit. Wet-bulb temperature — invented by the U.S. military in the 1950s after recruits kept collapsing from heat illness — is a measurement that combines heat and humidity with sunlight and wind.
But heat gets dangerous long before that point. Last year, a study found that the upper limit of safety for healthy people was a wet-bulb temperature of 31 degrees C, or 88 degrees F. And factors like age, illness, and body size change the math. Older people are especially vulnerable — partly because of health conditions, and partly because sweat glands tend to deteriorate with age.
That humidity poses a problem for sweating is well-known, but I was surprised to learn that the opposite extreme — hot, dry air — could present its own set of problems. Sweat evaporates very quickly in arid conditions, but the human body can only produce a limited amount of sweat, said Ollie Jay, a health professor at the University of Sydney in Australia. That limit is about a liter per hour at rest, or about three liters an hour during exercise. If you managed to reach that point of maximum sweatiness in dry heat, then you wouldn’t be able to sweat enough to cool down. But most climate models ignore this, leading almost certainly to overestimates for what humans can handle, Jay said.
Given how crucial perspiration is for survival, you’d think researchers would have the science of sweat all figured out by now, but there are still open questions. Read the full story here. (Teaser: It includes a robot that sweats.)
By the numbers
Earlier this month, researchers analyzed the hot and humid conditions under which the human body starts to overheat unless specific actions to cool down are taken. They found that under our current climate, 8 percent of the land on Earth will meet this threshold at least once a decade. That would increase to a quarter if global temperatures warm 2 degrees C above the preindustrial average.
It’s not only coral in trouble in Florida: Anemones, sponges, and jellyfish — usually resilient creatures — are struggling to survive in the Everglades amid record marine temperatures. “It’s a complete ecosystem problem,” Matt Bellinger, owner and operator of Bamboo Charters in the Keys, told Abigail Geiger and Gabriela Tejeda for their piece in Grist.
Take a siesta: A midday break with a meal and a nap doesn’t just sound pleasant, it also protects outdoor workers from exposure to the hottest time of day. Grist fellow Siri Chilukuri explains the benefits of reviving the Mediterranean tradition and the challenges of bringing it to the overworked United States.
The fight for worker safety heats up: After laboring in temperatures up to 118 degrees F, baggage handlers, runway signalers, and cabin cleaners at the Phoenix airport requested an investigation of working conditions they say leave them prone to heat illness and exhaustion. They are the first airport workers to file a complaint with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Grist fellow Katie Myers reports.
Heat waves and pregnancy are a dangerous combo: Exposure to both short- and long-term heat raises the risk of life-threatening complications during labor and delivery, Jessica Kutz reports for The 19th. A recent study found that extreme heat was associated with a 27 percent increase in “severe maternal morbidity,” a category that includes cardiac arrest, eclampsia, heart failure, and sepsis.
An “extreme heat belt” is emerging in the Midwest: When hazardous heat came to Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska in August, emergency rooms saw a record number of people suffering from heat-related illnesses. Many homes in the region are designed in a way that’s ill-prepared for hotter temperatures, Holly Edgell writes for Kansas City’s KCUR.
