There’s something about taking the train. The slow pace, the observation car where you are treated to a panoramic view of trees, hilly fields and rivers while reading and munching on a snack. Taking the train allows you to see the countryside connecting where you left to where you’re going, not just getting from point A to point B as quickly as possible.
It’s a journey, and it saves on carbon emissions, big time. Walking, biking and taking the train are the most environmentally-friendly ways to travel. Going by rail instead of flying can reduce your emissions by approximately 84 percent for domestic trips, according to Our World in Data.
A new Greenpeace Central and Eastern Europe study has found that people looking for travel options in Europe are being encouraged to fly instead of taking the train because of “an unfair competitive advantage” for the airlines, a press release from Greenpeace said.
The Greenpeace report looked at the costs of tickets for trains and airlines on 112 European routes at nine different times. It found that, on average, train tickets were twice as expensive as those for flights, with some routes astronomically higher. For example, the cost of a train ticket from London to Barcelona was 30 times higher than a plane ticket.
“One of the reasons people choose to fly rather than travel by train is price: why would anyone take the train from London to Barcelona and pay up to €384 when air tickets are available for the ridiculously low price of €12.99? Citizens deserve to have access to a clean, efficient and affordable transport system that does not harm the climate, people and our planet,” the report said.
Even though flying is so much worse for the planet than traveling by train, airlines don’t have to pay tax on kerosene, the main component of jet fuel, the press release said. There is no equivalent exemption for railways.
“Airlines benefit from outrageous fiscal advantages. Planes pollute far more than trains, so why are people being encouraged to fly? Low-cost airlines, in particular, have exploited every loophole and trick in the book. €10 airline tickets are only possible because others, like workers and taxpayers, pay the true cost,” said Lorelei Limousin, Greenpeace EU senior climate campaigner, in the press release.
Of the routes looked at for the study, 18 were domestic and 94 crossed country borders. On 71 percent of the routes, flights were cheaper than train tickets. Just 23 routes were “almost always” less expensive to make by train rather than flying.
Of the routes studied, 79 percent were operated by low-cost airlines, which “are in most cases cheaper than rail thanks to their unfair and aggressive pricing strategies,” the press release said.
“In short: if you fly, you are subsidised; if you take the train, you are punished by higher prices – as well as the fact that the journey is often longer,” said Stefan Gössling, a professor at Linnaeus University in Sweden who has studied flight emissions, as The Guardian reported.
In Europe, aviation as a producer of greenhouse gas emissions grew 29 percent from 2009 to 2019, the fastest-growing source in Europe in recent decades, according to the press release.
Greenpeace encourages European governments to introduce affordable, long-term climate tickets to be used for all public transportation means in a country or designated region, adding that they should be compatible with a climate ticket for international use. Revenues for climate tickets could be funded by the phasing out of airline subsidies, a “fair taxation system based on CO2 emissions” and taxes on windfall profits.
“For the planet and people’s sake, politicians must act to turn this situation around and make taking the train the more affordable option, or else we’re only going to see more and more heatwaves like the one currently wreaking total havoc in Spain, Italy, Greece and elsewhere,” Limousin said in the press release.
The Science and Technology Committee of the House of Lords of the UK has published a new report that highlights harmful health impacts from artificial light pollution and noise pollution. It recommends increased research and policies for these “neglected pollutants” that lack regulation and have impacts that are not well understood.
The report, titled “The neglected pollutants: the effects of artificial light and noise on human health,” shows how these pollutants negatively impact human health, which can also lead to poor economic and social outcomes.
“Not only can they cause annoyance, impacting quality of life, but through the disruption of sleep and circadian rhythms, both noise and light pollution can contribute to heart disease and premature death,” Julia King, Baroness Brown of Cambridge and chair of the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee, said in a statement. “Whilst the increased risk to an individual may be low, the exposure of millions of people results in a significant aggregate health burden.”
The World Health Organization has reported that traffic noise impacts about 40% of people in the European Union, and about one in five people in this region are exposed to dangerous levels of noise at night.
Further, the UK Health Security Agency suggests that traffic noise alone led to a loss of about 130,000 healthy life years in the UK. in 2018. Light pollution has been harder to track, but research suggests the rise of LEDs has also led to growing light pollution, according to the report.
In a separate review published in 2021, researchers analyzing studies on noise and light pollution found that these pollutants may have an impact on microbiomes, which could further impact human health. However, many studies on this topic are small or dated, so additional research is needed.
The Science and Technology Committee has come to a similar conclusion, noting that the UK’s 25 Year Environment Plan barely touches on these pollutants and doesn’t set any regulations on reducing noise or light pollution.
The committee advises that the UK should set up a specific advisory group on noise pollution and that the UK Health Security Agency should create a group dedicated to studying light pollution, similar to the established advisory group for air pollution, to assess health impacts. It suggests that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) do more lab and field studies on the health impacts of these pollutants and create a method of tracking, monitoring and reporting light pollution. The committee also recommends policies that target the pollutants.
“The Government should focus on quantifying the health effects of noise and light pollution, set targets and a framework for regulation to reduce the overall burden of disease,” King said. “It should do this by the time of the next five-year Environmental Improvement Plan cycle. It must also strengthen coordination between departments and between central and local government, to ensure meaningful improvements in public health and quality of life in the UK for the benefit of all.”
It’s been nearly a year since Democratic lawmakers pushed the first new climate spending legislation in more than a decade over the congressional finish line. The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, or IRA, includes $369 billion in clean-energy tax credits and funding for climate and energy programs, money that is already trickling into the economy as federal agencies begin to distribute it.
The Biden administration said the bill will help deliver on the president’s pledge to cut the United States’ emissions in half by 2030, and independent analyses estimated that it would help slash domestic emissions by 43 to 48 percent below 2005 levels by 2035. Now, researchers have made an updated prediction. The Rhodium Group, an independent analytics firm that tracks greenhouse gas emissions produced by the U.S. economy, published a report on Thursday that shows just how much climate progress the IRA will usher in — and where the legislation will fall flat.
“Nearly one year after it passed, the IRA’s effects are coming into clearer focus,” a spokesperson for Rhodium Group said.
The report, the ninth edition of Rhodium’s annual emissions assessment, found that the IRA and state-level climate bills that have been signed into law by governors across the country in recent years will drive emissions down between 29 and 42 percent in 2030, compared to 2005 levels. By 2035, greenhouse gas emissions will decrease between 32 and 51 percent. Prior to the IRA’s passage, the nation was on track to cut emissions by 26 to 41 percent by 2035, according to Rhodium’s estimate from 2022. Rhodium called the overall reductions “a meaningful departure from previous years’ expectations for the U.S. emissions trajectory.”
Thanks to the IRA’s subsidies, solar and wind energy are already becoming a lot cheaper: solar by nearly 40 percent and wind by 55 percent. The legislation will also influence the speed with which electric vehicles replace gas-powered cars. In 2035, electric vehicles will comprise between one-third and two-thirds of all passenger car sales, the report said. That’s meaningful progress, but the emissions reductions aren’t steep enough to get the U.S. fully on track to meet its pledge to reduce emissions 50 to 52 percent by 2030 under the Paris Agreement, the 2015 international treaty on climate change that aims to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).
That’s because federal policy levers are only one piece of the decarbonization puzzle. A number of other factors could influence the speed and extent to which renewable energy technologies replace oil, coal, and gas, including how the industrial sector behaves and whether states continue to pass ambitious climate policies.
And because the IRA revolves around incentives for clean energy, rather than penalties for fossil fuel use, some of the factors impacting the speed with which the economy decarbonizes won’t be influenced by the federal legislation.
For example, Rhodium projects that natural gas, which made up roughly 36 percent of the nation’s power mix in 2022, will comprise 6 to 29 percent of the power supply by 2035, depending on whether utilities take advantage of the incentives in the bill and what types of renewable energies are feasible in their markets. Natural gas, a cheap source of energy, surpassed coal as the nation’s leading source of electricity in 2016. Despite the incentives in the IRA, gas is still abundant, affordable, and here to stay for the foreseeable future.
In New York City, a city that has positioned itself as a leader in the green transition and has vowed to reduce fossil fuel use 80 percent by 2050, environmental activists successfully lobbied for the closure of the nearby Indian Point Nuclear plant, which prompted the city to temporarily rely on natural gas-powered plants as it works to build infrastructure that can funnel hydropower from Canada to Queens.
Over the course of the next decade, policymakers, regulators, and utility executives will weigh similar trade-offs between cost, climate impact, and public opinion across the country, and they won’t all choose the same path. That will result in a patchy network of green and dirty electricity. The ranges presented in the new Rhodium report account for that patchiness.
But they also show that the IRA is making a difference. “Though there’s uncertainty on just how fast the U.S. scales up renewable energy on the grid or EVs on the road, those levels of deployment would be meaningfully lower than what we’re estimating in our modeling under otherwise the same conditions absent the IRA,” Ben King, lead author of the report, told Grist.
In order to continue making progress on climate change, Congress will likely need to pass additional climate laws, including legislation directed at hastening the permitting process for new large-scale renewable energy projects, beefing up the green energy workforce, and resolving kinks in the supply chain that are hamstringing green technology deployment. That has become harder to do since Republicans retook control of the House of Representatives in January.
The goals of the Paris Agreement are still within reach, the report reads, “but getting there won’t be easy.”
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. Read more here.
As the planet warms, mosquitoes are slowly migrating to higher places — and bringing malaria to populations not used to dealing with the potentially deadly disease.
Researchers have documented the insects making their homes in higher places that are typically too cool for them, from the tropical highlands of South America to the mountainous but populous regions of eastern Africa. A recent Georgetown University study found them moving upward in sub-Saharan Africa at the rate of 21 feet per year.
“The link between climate change and expansion or change in mosquito distributions is real,” said Doug Norris, a specialist in mosquitoes at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
It’s difficult to pinpoint how these shifting mosquito populations will affect specific populations, Norris said, in part because people have gotten better at fighting malaria.
Global deaths from the disease declined by 27 percent between 2002 and 2021, as countries have adopted insecticide-treated nets, antimalarial drugs, and tests. Eighteen million doses of a new malaria vaccine are set to be distributed across Africa in the next two years.
But the world faces new threats: U.S. health officials say the first malaria cases in the United States since 2003 were found in Florida and Texas in May and June, and an invasive mosquito species is likely behind spikes in malaria in Djibouti and Ethiopia. Climate change presents another emerging threat, World Health Organization officials wrote in their latest global malaria report.
One study published in 2016 found the habitat for malaria-carrying mosquitoes had expanded on the higher elevations of Kilimanjaro by hundreds of square kilometers in just 10 years. The densely populated region faces new risks from malaria as a result, the research found, especially considering the population has not faced much exposure before. Meanwhile, the study found fewer mosquitoes at warming lower elevations.
“As it gets warmer at higher altitudes with climate change and all of these other environmental changes, then mosquitoes can survive higher up the mountain,” said Manisha Kulkarni, a professor and researcher studying malaria in sub-Saharan Africa at the University of Ottawa.
The region Kulkarni studied, which is growing in population, is close to the border of Tanzania and Kenya. Together, the two countries accounted for 6 percent of global malaria deaths in 2021.
Jeremy Herren, who studies malaria at the Nairobi-based International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology, said there is evidence that warming temperatures influence where mosquito populations choose to live. But it’s challenging to make sweeping predictions about how that will affect the spread of malaria, he said.
For example, Herren noted the long-dominant mosquito species in Kenya fell off in the mid-2000s, around the same time that insecticide-treated nets were widely distributed. The species is now nearly impossible to find, he said, a shift that is likely not attributable to climate change.
Mosquitoes are also picky about their habitat, Norris said. The different malaria-carrying species have various preferences in temperature, humidity, and amount of rainfall. In general, however, mosquito larvae grow faster in warmer conditions, he said.
Rising temperatures are also not the only way a changing climate gives mosquitoes the upper hand. The bugs tend to thrive in the kind of extremes that are happening more frequently because of human-caused climate change.
Mosquitoes tend to thrive in the kind of extremes that are happening more frequently because of human-caused climate change.
Longer rainy seasons can create better habitats for mosquitoes, which breed in water. But conversely, while droughts can dry up those habitats, they also encourage people to store water in containers, creating perfect breeding sites. An outbreak of chikungunya, another mosquito-borne disease, between 2004 and 2005 was linked to drought in coastal Kenya for these reasons.
Researchers found malaria cases in the highlands of Ethiopia fell in the early 2000s in tandem with a decline in temperatures as global warming temporarily stalled.
Pamela Martinez, a researcher at the University of Illinois, said her team’s findings on malaria trends in Ethiopia, published in 2021 in the journal Nature, lent more confidence to the idea that malaria and temperature — and therefore climate change — are linked.
“We see that when temperature goes down, the overall trend of cases also goes down, even in the absence of intervention,” Martinez said. “That proves the case that temperature has an impact on transmission.”
Ethiopia’s temperatures began to warm again in the mid-2000s, but public health officials also ramped up efforts to control malaria in the highlands around that time, which has contributed to a sustained decline in cases. But even as the Ethiopian Ministry of Health drafted a plan to eliminate malaria by 2030, its authors laid out the threats to that goal: population shifts, a lack of funding, the invasion of a new mosquito species, and climate change.
After years of criticism for its outsize use of plastic, the world’s largest retailer appears to be making progress to reduce its plastic footprint.
Amazon announced in its latest sustainability report on Tuesday that orders shipped from its fulfillment centers used 85,916 metric tons of single-use plastic in 2022 — an 11.6 percent decrease from the amount used in 2021.
The company attributed this decline to its expanded use of paper-based packaging, as well as an increased effort to ship items in their original containers — without adding any Amazon-branded packaging. Amazon has also stopped using nonrecyclable bags made of mixed materials, and on Tuesday it said it was “phasing out” padded plastic mailers — those ubiquitous blue and white envelopes studded with the Amazon logo — in favor of “recyclable alternatives.”
Eliminating padded plastic mailers is a “big, big deal,” said Matt Littlejohn, senior vice president for strategic initiatives for the nonprofit Oceana, although he called on the company to set a concrete timeline for doing so. He called Amazon’s sustainability report “good news for the oceans,” since plastic film like the kind used in Amazon’s packaging is one of the most common forms of marine plastic litter and is the deadliest type of plastic to marine animals.
Plastics have other impacts, too: They’re made of fossil fuels and are a major source of climate pollution, and they cause toxic chemical pollution at every stage of their life cycle. Meanwhile, the U.S. recycling rate for plastics is just 5 percent, meaning the vast majority of plastics are littered, burned, or sent to a landfill.
Amazon’s 2022 sustainability report is the first to include a quantitative estimate of the company’s single-use plastics footprint; previously, the company’s only other estimate came from a blog post last December. Before that, organizations like Oceana had to publish their own estimates and had called for greater transparency — sometimes through investor pressure. Over the past three years, shareholder advocacy groups have repeatedly filed resolutions demanding that Amazon disclose the amount of plastic it uses and reduce it by one-third by 2030. One resolution, co-filed in December 2021 by Green Century Capital Management and As You Sow, was supported by nearly half of Amazon shareholders.
Now, environmental advocates say Amazon appears to be on the right path — in contrast to many other major plastic users. Even companies that have signed onto a prominent pledge to reduce virgin plastic use have moved in the wrong direction: Over the past several years, Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Mars, and many others have reported an increasein the weight of their virgin plastic packaging.
Still, the 86,000 metric tons of plastic used in Amazon fulfillment centers is a lot, and Douglass Guernsey, a shareholder advocate for Green Century Capital Management, said Amazon must move much faster to replace other types of plastic packaging — like non-padded plastic mailers — with reusable alternatives or packaging made from recycled paper. He called for third-party verification of Amazon’s single-use plastic reductions, and for the company to disclose more information about its plastics use: “What type of plastic is Amazon using?” Guernsey asked. “How much is designed to be recyclable?”
Guernsey also criticized Amazon for failing to make a forward-looking, time-bound commitment to reduce its plastics use. “I would like them to make a statement saying, ‘We’re phasing out single-use plastic. We’re Amazon, we can do that,’” he said.
Littlejohn said Amazon should ensure that its plastic reductions manifest throughout the company’s supply chains. Although the numbers cited in Amazon’s 2022 sustainability report likely apply to the majority of Amazon orders — those shipped from the company’s fulfillment centers — they don’t cover those that are shipped from third-party sellers’ doorsteps. Amazon doesn’t disclose what fraction of its sales are shipped from third-party sellers.
Amazon declined to respond to a series of questions about its plastic use, but a spokesperson for the company said they “continue to prioritize materials that are recyclable and to find alternatives to plastic.” The spokesperson noted some of Amazon’s previously published progress, including the elimination of single-use plastic air pillows in Europe and Australia.
Both Guernsey and Littlejohn vowed to keep campaigning for stronger action from Amazon. “Investors care about this,” Guernsey said. “The shareholder process has been incredibly important … and we’re going to continue to use it to pressure the company to reduce its environmental footprint.”
Imagine 2200, Grist’s climate fiction initiative, publishes stories that envision the next 180 years of equitable climate progress, imagining intersectional worlds of abundance, adaptation, reform, and hope.
Wake from a passing barge nearly throws me over the edge of Nelson’s flat bottom boat. He is winching in his gill nets and I am wondering if it is a bad idea for me to try and help him with the day’s catch. It can get dicey, gill netting silver, bighead, and common carp. The silvers and bigheads like to bask in the calmer pockets of water where your nets can get snagged and the common carp prefer to skirt the bank where it’s two or three feet deep, foraging for worms, insects, and whatever else they can find. Losing a net is a big deal too because you can get fined for “ghost fishing,” or catching and killing fish in an accidentally lost net. The electric engine is whining with the weight of the catch though and Nelson keeps saying, “It’s a good day, Benjamin! It’s a good day!”
Nelson let me borrow his Grundens, which are two sizes too big, but he doesn’t want me to wear his dad’s old gear. He’s the only person who gets that privilege.
“Fishing coming up,” Nelson shouts. I see it, a bighead, probably twenty pounds. I grab the tail, free its head with the fish pick, and toss it in the front of the boat. It smacks its tail on the deck. “That’s the sound of money,” Nelson yells. He’s one of a dozen or so commercial fishermen who gill net carp on the Missouri River. When the water was dirty, the carp were a constant source of hand-wringing and injury. The silvers have a bad habit of jumping out of the water when scared and colliding with the faces of unfortunate boaters. The Big Muddy is clean now, and Nelson can market his carp in the new KC port. Ramen spots in Westport serve Missouri local fish cakes, a local cajun place uses the meat to make smoked fish dip, and what doesn’t get sold to the food market gets used for fertilizer.
Another bighead surfaces as Nelson pulls in more net. This one is bigger, thirty pounds maybe. I stick its body under my arm like a football, slip the net off with the pick, and heave it into the hold. It goes that way until there are at least fifty fish piled in the bottom of the boat. We’ve nearly pulled in all the net, the marker buoy bobbing towards us, when I see a huge white shape roll at the surface. The tail is a foot tall at least and I recognize the gray and cream coloration.
“Sturgeon!” I shout. Nelson positions himself to keep the winch going and help me, but then the marker buoy bobs underneath the water and the boat lurches sideways. I hold on to the gunwale, trying to steady myself, and Nelson hits the emergency stop on the winch.
“Fuck,” he mutters, tugging on the net. “It’s snagged. How is that even possible? We need to get that fish out of the net.” The marker buoy bobs back up then disappears as Nelson gives the net a tug. Neither one of us want to see the sturgeon die, but if we can’t get the net unstuck, it’s a real possibility. I pull with him, but the only thing we manage is to inch the boat backwards.
“Ben, grab an oar. We’re just going to have to swing around and grab it. I can’t risk getting the prop tangled in that net.” He cuts the engine right when I grab an oar. I rush to the helm, slip through the piles of fish, and paddle furiously on port side. I look over my shoulder and Nelson is leaning over the gunwale, a knife in one hand, straining to reach the entangled sturgeon as we turn and drift towards it. Then, he plunges headfirst into the river, the soles of his boots skyward. I scramble back to the stern just in time to see his head pop up above the surface. He takes a deep breath and then starts cutting through the net. His life jacket is barely keeping him afloat and I know that as soon as he severs the connection between the boat and the gill net, he and the sturgeon are going to start drifting down current.
“A fish this size can be a hundred years old, older than the last great flood.”
“Take it in!” he shouts as he cuts the last part of the net. I flip the winch on to take up the last of the net and hit the red button to start the outboard. It sputters, but doesn’t turn over. Nelson is holding on to the sturgeon like a floaty and the two are already going downriver.
“Blue button then the red button!” he shouts. This time the outboard starts and I circle the boat around. The end of the gill net is still snagged beneath the surface so Nelson and the sturgeon are now being buried by the current. I pull up and engage the spot lock so the boat will hold next to him. I lean over the edge, grab the back of Nelson’s collar, and pull him to the boat. The current is pushing his head forward, but he manages to grab the gunwale and I help pull him onto the deck. He lays on his back for a minute, laughing, water pouring off his clothes. He’s missing a shoe.
With shaky arms, I pilot the boat within arm’s reach of the sturgeon. Nelson rolls over and slaps me on the back.
“Thanks Ben,” he says. “Thanks.” Together, we pull the sturgeon up next to the boat and I use the fish pick to free it from the net. It’s a six footer, with a dark gray back.
“Everyone thought these were going to go extinct,” Nelson says breathlessly. I cradle its head in my arms and dip it in the water, facing the current so it can revive. A fish this size can be a hundred years old, older than the last great flood. I feel it start to kick, strength returning to it, and I lift the slate-colored head for one last look. Then, we release it back into the river and it disappears into the murky water. Nelson pulls us to the marker buoy and we break it off the snag. We ride in silence to the port at the flooded west bottoms.
The port flooded back when it was a stockyard in 1951, over a hundred and fifty years ago. They rebuilt it only to have the same flood that swept away KC United Power wipe it out a second time. Now it’s a shallow bayou full of long piers, frog giggers, and houseboats. It floods every year, but people are used to it. We’ve learned to live with the river.
When we unload the last fish to the processor, Nelson turns to me and shakes his head. He’s still soaked and there’s a scrape on his hand from a fish barb.
“I thought I was in trouble there for a second. My foot was wrapped up in the net.” He points to his shoeless foot. “My own river damn near killed me.”
“That’s why you love it though, right?” I say. He pulls his shirt off and wrings the water out of it.
“True words. Maybe you only love rivers that kill you.”
* * *
Nelson is sipping a beer, splayed out on the gravel bar, watching the drip of the bulkhead across the river. I’m sizing up the ten-pound grass carp he’s tasked me with filleting, which I’ve never done before. I tell people I’m an apostate of vegetarianism, but you’re never supposed to take the word of an apostate. We’re there to eat the inaugural carp celebrating that the Blue River is finally clean enough to eat from. We’re also there because Nelson’s dad died the day before and Nelson said he needed the river.
“My granddad never told me what that is,” he says, pointing towards it. The bulkhead is a cracked steel door, like in a submarine, but big enough to drive a truck through. Next to it is the remodeled Prospect bridge, and we’re sitting on part of the riverbank that used to be chain-linked riprap. Metal warehouse roofs, lit by LED spotlights, just peak above the old stone wall of the Bannister Federal Complex, a nuclear manufacturing facility that leaked toxic waste into the river in the early 2000s. That was a hundred years ago though. Now, its spongy, erosion-protective grounds store biodegradable straws. Poetry.
“It’s where they tossed out the dead bodies,” I say. Nelson laughs. He’s wearing his granddad’s muck boots, which have at least six visible holes in them. “You think I’m joking, but what else is an eight-foot-tall cement bulkhead for if not filling up with bodies to be dumped in the river when it floods? Wouldn’t have been the first time they dumped stuff here.”
“You still working on that fish?” he asks. He looks over his shoulder at the uncut carp, nods, and looks back at the river. “Scale it first, then start at the head, right where the scales would start. Slip the knife between one, flat along the spine.” I do as he says. I slide the back of the knife against the scales, knocking them off. They are quarter sized, like plate armor. I slide the knife down the back bone, crunching through the y-bones that run the length of the fillet.
I’m Nelson’s protege. In exchange for help running his carp nets on the Missouri I soak up his knowledge of Kansas City. His family is from east of Troost and they know the metro better than anyone. His great granddad was a Black business tycoon and spent all his money buying up the private land on the Blue River. He willed it to the Department of Conservation after his death. His granddad was the river, breathed it, worked next to it, was poisoned by the Bannister Federal Complex. His father was a wildlife biologist, a guerrilla conservationist who snuck into the park to remove invasive honeysuckle when Jackson County couldn’t get their shit together.
Nelson’s a search engine for the Blue River’s fauna: beavers, deer, mink, you name it. He knows where they live, what they eat, when they fuck for God’s sake. He knows all the other stuff too, wild grapes, how to tell the difference between a blackberry and a dewberry. We pick the chanterelles and other wild mushrooms that hide in the woods, but most often, we’re at the river. I’m his friend now too, which is pretty much unavoidable when you share the river together.
“His granddad was the river, breathed it, worked next to it … “
“You’re getting there,” he says, looking over his shoulder again. He hops up. “This is a special carp, you know?”
I nod. They used to call them ditch salmon, polychlorinated biphenyls spiderwebbed in their fillets. Every nosing carp that rolled in the Blue River flats was a swimming public health catastrophe. Think melanoma, gall bladder disorders, Chernobyl-style shit. People hated them for it too, like the fish were PCBaholics, eagerly sucking the chemical despite intervention, rehab. There was a whole pamphlet about it, a warning. Grass and common carp, ALL SIZES, don’t eat more than one a month. It wasn’t the fishes’ fault though.
“Goddamnit,” Nelson says under his breath. “I wish…”
His face twists. His dad should’ve been here to see it. They’d tried to make it happen, but there was no way he could travel.
“You know, Dad told me today that these boots were all granddad had left when he died. Cancer ate up all the rest of his goddamn life because of this place. I always thought he’d left my dad a little bit of money, but nope. Just these old ass boots.”
“Did your dad go peacefully?”
Nelson shakes his head. He has a rod stuck in the bank, a live blue-gill on the other end, hoping to catch a flathead. “Dad wasn’t ever gonna go easy.”
I want to say I’m sorry, but I just nod. His eyes are fixed on the bulkhead. My grandpa had told me about the river too, but not like Nelson. He had grown up in Kansas City, west of Troost, and to them it was a distant catastrophe. He existed outside the redlined Black neighborhoods, floating above the city’s history like it was a documentary and not part of his hometown. When the Troost divide started to melt, the runoff of local memory made its way west, into the white neighborhoods that’d tried to forget. West KC was forced to remember.
At one time, the Bannister Federal Complex had been the Kansas City Speedway, then a manufacturing facility in the Second World War, an office for the IRS. Before it was shut down, its final iteration was a nuclear manufacturing plant. Airborne toxins started to poison the workers in the active part of the facility, then the office staff, until the administration couldn’t hide behind fudged reports anymore. My granddad heard it on the news, wrote a letter to the city. By that time though, Nelson’s granddad was coughing blood.
I throw the fish head in the river. Sometimes we keep it for soup, but it’s early summer. Too hot for that. The crayfish will find it, scuttle out from beneath the rocks and recycle it back into the riverbed.
Nelson walks over and crouches above the electric camp stove we brought down to help us fry the fish. He pulls a bag of cornmeal from his backpack, a pot, a glass bottle of oil, a metal camping bowl, and a plate. I score the fillets so he can rub cornmeal in between the gaps to fry the y bones soft.
The little beep of the burner reminds me of the old propane camp stove my dad still used when I was growing up. The whooshing of natural gas being ignited is nostalgic, but my dad was an ironic hold-out when the natural gas industry shut down. Gasoline and propane disappeared when I was in elementary school. Now, it’s all batteries.
He puts the pot on the burner and pours an inch of oil in. I stare at the pot as he gently places the fillets in to fry. The sizzling and bubbling of fish mixes with the trickle of the river and the droning of bullfrogs.
“You really think it’s safe to eat?” I ask. Nelson flips a carp fillet with his fork.
“You know, when dad found out he was dying, he started coming down here all the time and eating fish. Every day he had the energy he was frying up carp. He said he could feel the river had recovered, heard turkeys again, saw beaver sign. They hadn’t announced the end of the pollution advisory. I just thought he didn’t care anymore since he was going to die anyways.”
“He wasn’t too far off though,” I say. “Fourth of July, two years ago, he talked me and my dad’s ears off about it. I thought it was just talk.”
Nelson grins. “One day, son, it’ll be so clean you can drink it!” he says, shaking his finger at me. “Don’t you stop believing that.”
“My dad tried that after talking to him.”
“No shit,” Nelson says. I laugh and nod. My dad, with his ridiculous panama jack hat, sipping the Blue River on his hands and knees, saying he wanted to reconnect to nature.
“He got giardia. Puked his guts out. I told him to boil his water next time and he told me to mind my own damn business.”
“Rightly so. It’s a man’s inalienable right to give himself waterborne parasites,” Nelson says. He lifts the fillets from the oil and sets them on the plate. I fish around in my backpack for the spice shaker. A semi silently glides across the Prospect bridge above us, autopilot lights pulsing blue, and I stop to watch it pass. It backlights the box elders and sycamores that separate the road from the riparian forest below. I think back to being a ten year old, clambering through cathedrals of invasive honeysuckle before they figured out how to eradicate it. That world feels thousands of years away.
I pull my canteen from my pack, dip it in the river, and screw the cap on. Everyone has portable filters now. The water is cold even though it’s June. I offer it to Nelson.
“To life,” I say. He takes it from me, steps into the river, and stares again at the bulkhead door. He raises the canteen then puts it to his lips. To life.
* * *
The ANGELINA’shull is only visible in winter, when the mouth of the Blue River runs low at its entrance point into the Missouri. Last year’s floods unearthed the bridge, which Nelson and I had seen just peak above the water’s surface in the fall. We are floating down the Blue River, intending to be the first to search the long abandoned vessel.
Nelson and I dig our paddles into the flow so that we’ll beach on the sandbar where we think we can climb into the control deck. KC United Power used to own the mouth of the Blue, until a hundred year flood destroyed the station, buried Bayer’s Crop Science institute in a foot of silt and deadfall, and created an oxbow lake between Blue River and Rock Creek. Most of the old floodplain is now public land or Department of Conservation-leased crop fields.
Duck hunters call in the distance and I hear the whistle of gliding waterfowl above me. Nelson puts a hand to his ear, nods, and we hear one, two, three shotgun blasts in quick succession. It’s probably Stuart Mills and his friends. They are the most faithful congregants around the backwaters near downtown. Stuart is in his seventies, grew up east of Troost, before the flood, and used to drive three hours to try to find waterfowl. We met him at the boat ramp upstream two years ago. It’s a yearly event to ride with Stuart in his busted up jon boat and watch him hobble to the duck blind with his equally ancient black lab. They always come home with ducks. Everyone does now.
After the flood, the Missouri finally chewed up enough wing dikes to slow and widen. It was a renaissance for wildlife and the Corps of Engineers decided that their sonar mapping was good enough to let the river breathe again. Now, the urban core who’d lived generations disconnected from the cottonwood bottoms and marshes that the first humans would’ve found alongside the Big Muddy have rediscovered the river.
* * *
Nelson and I slip out of our kayaks and haul them onto the sandbar. It’s the kind of sand that you only find in rivers, the kind you can sink into, that finds its way between your fingers and behind your ears. Nelson reaches the rusted sides of the barge first.
“It’s bigger than I thought,” he says. The deck is a good fifteen feet in the air and the hull angles slightly away from us. I uncoil a ratchet strap and toss it onto the ship. Careful does it. I pull it back until the hook end of the strap catches one of the portside cleats.
“You wanna test it?” I ask Nelson, handing him the strap. He shrugs and gives it a sharp pull. “If I break my leg, you have to tow me back, you know.”
“Tow you my ass. You paddle with your arms, not your legs,” I say, grinning. Nelson grabs the strap and starts climbing. He’s got those farmer hands from running his commercial gill nets. Most everyone does something with their hands these days though. My specialty is lion’s mane mushrooms.
Once Nelson clambers over the gunwale, he unhooks the strap and wraps it around the cleat so there’s no way it’ll slip off. I give him a thumbs up and grab the rope. River barges are shaped like big tubs and normally there’d be another fifteen foot drop off the other side of the gunwale, but it’s mostly filled up with sand. We follow the steel frame to the bridge.
The ANGELINA was the last of the old barges and a rare model. It was one of only a few manufactured with an inboard tug. When we reach the rusted stairs, Nelson says after you and steps aside. The stairs lead up to the main deck of the tug. The crew quarters and navigation room are more or less a metal shipping container on top of another shipping container that holds the engine.
“I want to break the lock, see what’s inside, but there’s a feeling, like I’m trespassing.”
“Thanks,” I murmur. I test my weight on the first step and it holds. The whole frame groans and creaks under my weight, but I make it to the top. My hands are caked red with rust from the railing. Nelson follows and we peek our heads into the door. There’s otter poop everywhere, and frozen, half-eaten fish carcasses.
“Amazing that the sonar screens aren’t cracked,” Nelson says. He tries to turn the faded silver steering wheel, but it won’t budge. Time and water have eroded the paint off the control buttons. I open a few cabinets next to the crew bunks. There’s a sealed plastic bag with a phone in it, the kind that my grandpa used to have. I turn it over in my hands and then put it back in the cabinet.
“Got something juicy here,” Nelson calls out. There’s a cabinet with a padlock on it. He gives it a tug, but it won’t open. “Damn. Should we try to break it?”
I want to break the lock, see what’s inside, but there’s a feeling, like I’m trespassing. Nelson must feel the same because he gives it up and after we rummage around, he shrugs and says, “I’d say, let’s take some pictures and head out. Nothing much here unless you want to see what’s in the engine room.
“Worth checking out,” I say. We open the door, but it’s mostly filled with sand. I turn to leave, but catch the shape of something sticking out of the silt underneath one of the engine room stairs. I pull it out and bring it to the front of the tug where I can get a good look at it.
“Is that a Hot Wheels?” Nelson asks, looking over my shoulder. I turn it over in my hands. It’s a truck, a Ford I think. I look at the bottom of it and F-150 Electric 2024 is embossed on the cast metal underside.
“Holy shit,” I say. “This is from when my grandpa was a kid. Looks like a first edition too, right when everyone went electric.”
“That might be worth something,” Nelson says. “Why do you get to find the cool stuff? Goddamnit. Maybe I will break that lock.” I walk out onto the deck while Nelson looks around more. The silhouettes of migrating mallards break the horizon and I hear a few more shots from where Stuart and his arthritic dog are undoubtedly huddled behind the cattails. I slip the toy truck in my pocket and sit on the starboard edge of the deck.
“Yes!” Nelson shouts from inside the tug. I turn and see him come out with a broken padlock.
“You couldn’t resist,” I laugh.
“You can’t find all the cool stuff. Come look,” he says. I hop up and we both crouch in front of the cabinet. It’s rusted shut and Nelson has to grab the handle with both hands and press against the wall with his feet. It pops open and the hinges snap, leaving Nelson flat on his back with the door in his hands. Nelson tosses the door to the side. A tattered, canvas backpack is shoved inside. He slowly works it out, but even being careful the fabric rips a bit. When he tries to unzip it, the bag rips more.
“You’re a top notch archeologist,” I say. He grimaces and after some more unintentional ripping, opens the bag. Inside it is another half gallon plastic bag.
“Why did everyone on this boat put their stuff in plastic bags? It’s like they knew it would sink.” He opens the plastic and inside is a buck knife, a yellowed copy of Sand County Almanac, and a duck call. Nelson looks up and smiles at me.
“Don’t even say anything,” I say.
“Oh, I won’t. You just keep that Hot Wheels of yours.” He puts the bag and the busted lock back in the cabinet, shoves the door in, and walks out onto the deck. I follow, wishing I had opened the lock first. He puts the duck call to his mouth, cups the end of it with his hand, and rips out the loudest mallard quack he can muster. We wait and after a minute we hear a distant quack return.
“That’s probably Stuart,” Nelson says. He gives the call one more go, then we climb down the stairs, rappel off the barge, and walk back to our kayaks. Nelson gathers washed up wood and we build a small fire. Close to dark we stomp it out and paddle back upstream in the dark, treasures in tow, the low glow lights of downtown KC sparkling like distant fireflies.
Gilbert Randolph (he/him) lives in Kansas City, Missouri, and works in social and digital media. His writing has appeared in The Preserve Journal, Northland Lifestyle, New Letters, and others. When he’s not writing, he’s exploring wild places and connecting with his ecosystem through hunting, foraging, fishing, and trapping.
Christian Blaza (he/him) is a freelance illustrator based in New Jersey.
But the climate crisis is also happening beneath our feet, in a phenomenon called “underground climate change.”
The concept has been studied for years surrounding issues of railroad tracks buckling in the heat and groundwater contamination, according to CNN.
However, it was not until recently, in a new study by Alessandro F. Rotta Loria, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Northwestern University, that the effects of underground climate change — also known as “subsurface heat islands” — on civil infrastructure were examined, a press release from Northwestern University said.
“Underground climate change is a silent hazard,” said Rotta Loria in the press release. “The ground is deforming as a result of temperature variations, and no existing civil structure or infrastructure is designed to withstand these variations. Although this phenomenon is not dangerous for people’s safety necessarily, it will affect the normal day-to-day operations of foundation systems and civil infrastructure at large.”
The study, “The silent impact of underground climate change on civil infrastructure,” was published in the journal Communications Engineering.
When the ground gets hotter, it can expand, contract and become misshapen, causing the foundations of buildings to move and sometimes crack. This can affect the soundness and performance of the structures.
“Chicago clay can contract when heated, like many other fine-grained soils. As a result of temperature increases underground, many foundations downtown are undergoing unwanted settlement, slowly but continuously. In other words, you don’t need to live in Venice to live in a city that is sinking — even if the causes for such phenomena are completely different,” Rotta Loria said.
Earlier research discovered warming of 0.1 to 2.5 degrees Celsius each decade for cities’ subsurfaces.
“If you think about basements, parking garages, tunnels and trains, all of these facilities continuously emit heat,” Rotta Loria said in the press release. “In general, cities are warmer than rural areas because construction materials periodically trap heat derived from human activity and solar radiation and then release it into the atmosphere. That process has been studied for decades. Now, we are looking at its subsurface counterpart, which is mostly driven by anthropogenic activity.”
Rotta Loria and the research team installed more than 150 above and below ground wireless temperature sensors along the Chicago Loop. The researchers placed them in subway tunnels, basements, subsurface streets and underground parking garages. They also buried some in Grant Park for comparison.
Anjali Naidu Thota, a Ph.D. student in Rotta Loria’s lab, affixes a temperature sensor to a pipe in a basement beneath the Chicago Loop. Northwestern University
The team found that the temperatures under the Chicago Loop were frequently 10 degrees Celsius warmer than those under Grant Park.
Underground air temperatures can be as much as 25 degrees Celsius hotter than the temperature of intact land, potentially leading to problems of warping, cracking and people using the structures getting heat stroke.
“We used Chicago as a living laboratory, but underground climate change is common to nearly all dense urban areas worldwide. And all urban areas suffering from underground climate change are prone to have problems with infrastructure,” Rotta Loria said.
Rotta Loria completed a 3D computer model after three years of collecting temperature data that was able to simulate how subterranean temperatures had evolved since 1951 — the year the city finished its subway tunnels. The values were comparable to the field data, so Rotta Loria used those to predict the evolution of temperatures until 2051.
Rotta Loria also came up with a model for the deformation of ground in response to rising temperatures. Materials like stiff and soft clay contract when they are heated, while materials such as limestone and hard clay expand.
The simulations showed that warmer temperatures can lead to ground expanding and swelling by up to 12 millimeters. Increased temperatures can also lead to ground contraction and sinking beneath a building’s weight by up to eight millimeters. It may not sound like much, but it is more than many foundations and components of buildings can take and still function.
“Based on our computer simulations, we have shown that ground deformations can be so severe that they lead to problems for the performance of civil infrastructure,” Rotta Loria said in the press release. “It’s not like a building will suddenly collapse. Things are sinking very slowly. The consequences for serviceability of structures and infrastructures can be very bad, but it takes a long time to see them. It’s very likely that underground climate change has already caused cracks and excessive foundation settlements that we didn’t associate with this phenomenon because we weren’t aware of it.”
Geological layers beneath the Chicago Loop. Alessandro Rotta Loria / Northwestern University
Rotta Loria emphasized that newer buildings fare better than older ones.
“In the United States, the buildings are all relatively new. European cities with very old buildings will be more susceptible to subsurface climate change. Buildings made of stone and bricks that resort to past design and construction practices are generally in a very delicate equilibrium with the perturbations associated with the current operations of cities. The thermal perturbations linked to subsurface heat islands can have detrimental impacts for such constructions,” said Rotta Loria.
Rotta Loria pointed out that building planners can minimize the amount of heat that goes into the ground by installing thermal insulation.
“The most effective and rational approach is to isolate underground structures in a way that the amount of wasted heat is minimal,” Rotta Loria said in the press release. “If this cannot be done, then geothermal technologies offer the opportunity to efficiently absorb and reuse heat in buildings. What we don’t want is to use technologies to actively cool underground structures because that uses energy. Currently, there are a myriad of solutions that can be implemented.”
