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Christian Diaz hates a boxy, six-story brick building with blue and gray paneling in Logan Square, a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood on the northwest side of Chicago. 

“It looks boring and uninspired,” said Diaz, the housing director at Palenque LSNA, formerly known as the Logan Square Neighborhood Association. “When people think gentrification, this is the building that comes to mind.”

The building is an example of what urban planners call Transit-Oriented Development, or TOD. The idea is that developing near transit stations leads to interconnected communities and fewer cars emitting carbon dioxide. Developers get incentives and neighbors get a walkable community. But Diaz said buildings like this — dense, tall developments catering to wealthy tenants — are accelerating gentrification in the once working-class, largely Latino neighborhood. Only 3 of the 60 units qualify as affordable housing.

“This building, thumbs down — 100 percent thumbs down,” Diaz said.

Instead, housing advocates like Diaz want TOD to evolve and become a tool to make Logan Square accessible for everyone — and to help reclaim it for people pushed out by gentrification. 

“The irony is that in the pursuit of more walkable cities, we’re actually making it so that people of color in general have to be more reliant on cars,” Diaz said. As longtime residents are pushed farther and farther from the city, he points out, access to public transportation becomes limited and cars become inevitable. 

Developing residential buildings near transit stops was seen by planners as a shortcut to greener, more efficient cities. But across the country the idea has been slow to take off. A recent analysis from the Urban Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank, found that while growth near transit has expanded over the past 20 years compared to previous decades, it’s still not enough.  

The analysis found that almost nine times as many housing units were added far from transit stations as opposed to near them over the past two decades.

“There are two big reasons for that: One is we haven’t built enough public transportation for the people who need it,” said Yonah Freemark, a principal research associate at the Urban Institute. “And the second is, we continue to allow development far out into the suburbs, suburban areas.” 

Suburban and exurban sprawl will mean more driving, more congestion and more carbon emissions in Chicago and other major cities, according to Freemark.

Diaz’s fight in Chicago isn’t easy, but his group is starting to score some wins with new affordable housing and public spaces. In the end, success will mean marrying a drive for affordable housing to the increasingly clear need for sustainable and climate-resistant cities. 

TOD as a solution picked up in earnest in Chicago around 2013 after the City Council passed an ordinance encouraging developers to build near transit. It was a race-neutral policy that resulted in little activity on the South and West sides. But off the train stations in Logan Square, for example, that meant luxury housing that left out moderate- and low-income families. In 2019, the city updated the ordinance to ensure a racial analysis is baked into any project. 

“We don’t want walkable neighborhoods only for affluent individuals,” said Jannice Newson, coordinator for Elevated Chicago, a coalition of nonprofits and city agencies trying to advance equity in Transit-Oriented Development by making sure affordable housing is part of the equation. 

TOD has thrived in hot markets, according to Kate Lowe, a professor of urban planning at the University of Illinois Chicago. 

“That’s the thing,” Lowe said. “When we rely on the private sector, we’re going to see profit-driven actions.” 

The market in Logan Square is hot. The price of a single-family home can cost $1 million. Upscale retail dots the Milwaukee Avenue corridor, a diagonal roadway that bisects the neighborhood. Since 2001, nearly half of Logan Square’s Latino population has been displaced and replaced by mostly white and upwardly mobile residents. To count as affordable housing, resident incomes must be at or below 60 percent of the area median income. In Chicago, for a family of four that comes to $66,180. 

Logan Square is still gentrified, but parts of the neighborhood are now closer to transit and beginning to feel like home again. Soon the streetscape is going to be redesigned around the Logan Square Blue Line train station. 

“We’re going to have more green space, we’re going to have La Placita,” Diaz said.   

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La placita — Spanish for plaza — emerged out of conversations with residents who wanted a Latin American-inspired public square. The development is part of a major traffic redesign of the neighborhood that was years in the making. Construction is set to begin in the coming months. 

“I can’t wait, in two years, to call my mom on a Sunday morning and say, ‘Hey mom, vamos a la placita,’ and we can just walk down the street in Logan Square,” Diaz said. 

It’s not just green space. Palenque LSNA is also working on developing 10 murals across neighborhood schools that commemorate the history and culture of the neighborhood. 

“As we’re developing this new open, walkable space for the community, our hope is that the children will eventually come to La Placita and say, ‘Oh, wow, that’s the mural from my school. This plaza is for me.’” 

Diaz is proud of the work his organization and other local partners have accomplished. He said it’s proof that it’s possible to fight — and possible to win. 

“We’re here to stay part of the neighborhood,” Diaz said. “A significant part of the neighborhood, especially in the center, along the Logan Square Blue Line station, will always be working-class people and people of color.”

Right near where La Placita will sit, Diaz fixed his glasses and pointed toward a modern, seven-story building. On a former parking lot, close to a train stop, a development called the Lucy Gonzalez Parsons apartment building has 100 units — all affordable housing.  

“This one gets two thumbs up,” Diaz said. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline In Chicago, one neighborhood is fighting gentrification and climate change at the same time on Apr 5, 2024.

The idea of a national “green bank,” which would lend public money to help cash-strapped businesses and individuals invest in things like solar panels and energy-efficiency upgrades, has been kicked around since at least the first Obama administration. But it wasn’t until President Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act into law in 2022 that the federal government set aside money, through the bill’s $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, for this express purpose.

On Thursday, Vice President Kamala Harris and EPA Administrator Michael Regan announced that the administration is ready to start signing checks. But rather than centralizing the funding in a single bank, the administration is routing the money — $20 billion of the total so far — to eight selected applicants, representing more than a dozen local nonprofits. The idea is that these trusted intermediaries, which have track records investing in local projects already, can better inject the loans directly into communities, with the vast majority of funding going to low-income and disadvantaged recipients. The hope is to provide communities with access to the capital they need to invest in a clean local economy — according to a vision recipients define for themselves.

“We have the capacity with this approach to empower communities to decide which projects they want that will have the greatest impact from their perspective in the place they call home,” Vice President Harris said at the announcement event in Charlotte, North Carolina. “We can invest in those projects in a way that will actually have value for the people that live there — instead of us from Washington, DC, telling us what you need.”

In Charlotte, Vice President Harris visited Grier Heights, a historically Black neighborhood where a community bank called Self-Help has facilitated investments to insulate, weatherize, and electrify nearly 50 homes. The vice president highlighted that these efforts not only created jobs for the contractors who did the work and reduced the carbon footprint of each of the homes, but they also improved the lives of families inhabiting them. When she visited the Grier Heights home of one father and small business owner, the resident told Harris that his combined gas and electric bill had been cut from $600 a month down to around $100 a month after he moved into one of Self-Help’s energy-efficient homes. Those savings allow him and his spouse to spend more on childcare and set aside savings for their children.

Self-Help and another community-based lender have partnered with the nonprofit Climate United Fund to invest the nearly $7 billion they were awarded through the green bank program in projects that hope to support families, schools, small businesses, community organizations, and other local institutions. They intend to invest at least 60 percent of those funds in low-income and disadvantaged communities, 20 percent in rural communities, and 5 percent in tribal communities.

The other community-based financial institutions that will receive the remaining $14 billion announced on Thursday — which will be facilitated by the National Clean Investment Fund and the Clean Communities Investment Accelerator — have similar goals for the kinds of projects and communities they support. One awardee, the Native CDFI Network, intends to focus its efforts in reservations and native communities.

These grants, along with a $7 billion “Solar for All” grant expected to be announced later this Spring, represent “the single largest climate investment in the Inflation Reduction Act,” according to a press release quoting Massachusetts Senator Edward Markey, a Democrat who supported the law.

The funds are designed to do far more than simply inject public funds into communities that need them — they are also intended to catalyze further investment. The EPA expects every dollar of federal investment to spur seven dollars in private spending. If this projection is correct, then this multiplier would exceed the similar effect observed in separate Inflation Reduction Act provisions. (A recent analysis found that the law’s tax credits drummed up $5.50 of private investments for every $1 in credits.) This means that the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund could lead to nearly $200 billion in green investment.

Though the idea is that these sorts of effects will make the program a win-win-win for the climate, local communities, and the government, the green bank project is not without its critics. One member of Congress, a Republican representing Alabama, called the effort a “Green ‘slush fund’” when he tried to repeal the green bank program earlier this year, saying that the program has insufficient accountability and oversight to ensure money is not wasted. In a vote cast almost entirely along party lines, the bill passed the House of Representatives and was sent to the Senate. While it has yet to receive a vote in the Democrat-controlled Senate, President Joe Biden issued a statement making clear that he would veto the attempted repeal.

“When we expand access to capital and give every person in our nation — no matter who they are or where they live — the opportunity to pursue their dreams,” the vice president said on Thursday, “we build a cleaner, healthier, and more equitable and more prosperous future for everyone.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline These ‘green banks’ are getting billions to decarbonize disadvantaged communities on Apr 4, 2024.

The rate of carbon emissions cuts in the United States has doubled since the passage of President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), according to a new report by Clean Investment Monitor.

Since the IRA was passed in 2022, more than 80 wind, solar and energy storage projects have made use of the law’s tax credits and direct payments, reported Reuters.

“Clean energy and transportation investment in the US set another record in Q4 of 2023, reaching $67 billion — a 40% increase from the same period in 2022. Clean investment now accounts for 5% of all private investment in structures, equipment, and durable consumer goods in the United States, up from 3.7% at the end of 2022,” a press release from Clean Investment Monitor said.

Together, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the IRA supplied $239 billion for electric vehicles (EVs), green energy, carbon management and electricity for buildings in the U.S. last year — a 38 percent increase from 2022, the report said, as Reuters reported.

“Retail investment accounted for nearly half of this total, driven by robust growth in electric vehicle sales (a 52% increase year-on-year). Investment in the deployment of utility-scale solar and storage systems also grew robustly over 2023, up more than 50% year-on-year to $53 billion,” the report said. “But the fastest investment growth last year occurred in the deployment of emerging climate technologies — up ten-fold from $0.9 billion in 2022 to $9.1 billion in 2023 — and in the manufacturing of clean technology, up 153% from $19 billion in 2022 to $49 billion in 2023.”

According to experts, much more will need to be done to reach net-zero by 2050.

“The IRA doubles the pace of reductions but should have tripled it to hit our 2030 climate goals and get on the path to net-zero by 2050,” said Jesse Jenkins, who participated in the study and is an energy systems engineer with Princeton University’s Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, as reported by Reuters.

The report was a collaboration between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and independent researcher Rhodium Group.

Asian and European companies were motivated by the IRA to increase their investments in the U.S., which led Europe to develop its Green Deal Industrial Plan.

Challenges to implementation of the IRA in some sectors have included state and local regulations hampering the development of transmission lines to connect renewable energy projects to the grid and the pace of expansion of EV charging stations.

Jigar Shah, director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s loan programs office, said the IRA has been slow to encourage some projects like carbon sequestration, hydrogen, geothermal and nuclear energy.

Last month in Houston, Shah commented that the sectors “continue to struggle around figuring out how exactly to put all the pieces together,” as Reuters reported.

Oil companies have complained that projects like oil well carbon capture and hydrogen plants have faced regulatory hurdles, said Roman Kramarchuk, who is in charge of climate markets and policy analytics at S&P Global Commodity Insights.

Kramarchuk added that another wave of development would happen when there was “more certainty” concerning financing and “what it takes to get a deal done.”

The IRA has contributed to a reduction in U.S. carbon emissions of four percent annually — twice the pace of the year before passage of the law — according to an article published last year by researchers from across the country.

“We estimate a total of $34 billion in federal investment — including tax credits, grants, and the fiscal cost of government loans — went to clean energy and transportation projects nationwide in fiscal year 2023,” the report said. “There was $220 billion in total investment in clean energy and transportation projects during the same period.”

The post Carbon Emissions Reduction Rate in U.S. Has Doubled Since Passage of Inflation Reduction Act, Report Finds appeared first on EcoWatch.

State lawmakers in Florida have passed a bill, HB321, to ban intentional balloon releases and charge intentional balloon releases as littering infractions.

The bill passed with overwhelming support in the state’s House of Representatives and Senate in March. Now it awaits signing into law by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

“What goes up must come down, and when it comes to balloons, that can have deadly consequences for marine life,” Jon Paul Brooker, director of Florida Conservation at Ocean Conservancy, said in a statement. “The ingestion of a single piece of balloon has the potential to kill a seabird, which shows why even one intentionally released balloon is one too many.”

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A study by Ocean Conservancy scientists found that about one in three seabirds that consumed just a single piece of a balloon would die from eating that debris. 

Ingested balloons can block the digestive tracts of animals or simply keep them from feeling hungry, leading to starvation. Balloons also pose an entanglement risk to wildlife. Balloons are the top cause of marine debris-related death for seabirds, Ocean Conservation Society found.

In Florida, several communities have already enacted local legislation preventing intentional balloon releases, and there were existing state statutes that limited balloon releases. However, there were exemptions that allowed for releasing fewer than 10 balloons per 24-hour period and for releasing balloons considered biodegradable or photodegradable that do not have any strings, ribbons or other attachments, Surfrider Foundation reported.

HB321 addresses these exemptions, removing the release of a specified number of balloons within a certain timeframe as well as the exemptions for biodegradable or photodegradable balloons.

“Florida made the right call today in banning intentional balloon releases. Balloons are one of the deadliest forms of plastic pollution for ocean wildlife,” Hunter Miller, Oceana Field Campaigns Manager, said in a statement. “It’s great to see state legislators from both sides of the aisle come together to support a commonsense bill and get it passed. We call on Governor DeSantis to quickly sign this into law.”  

While environmental organizations have praised the passing of HB321, they noted that Florida has much more work to be done in terms of addressing plastic pollution by limiting plastic production.

“These victories are particularly significant in Florida, which has been paralyzed from addressing plastic pollution at the source at the state level for years,” Emma Haydocy, Florida policy manager at Surfrider Foundation, wrote on the Surfrider Foundation website. “While the existing preemption has been the status quo for over a decade, this year’s actions to prohibit balloon releases and the full stop of an attempt to expand and entrench plastic preemption is a leap in the right direction.”

Once signed, the bill is slated to take effect this July 1.

The post Florida Lawmakers Pass Ban on Intentional Balloon Releases appeared first on EcoWatch.

The can you set out by the curb every week may not seem so big….

The post A Day for Zero Waste appeared first on Earth911.

In response to growing pressure to address the plastic pollution crisis, Amazon has been cutting down on plastic packaging. Last July, the company said it used 11.6 percent less plastic for all of its shipments globally in 2022, compared to 2021. Much of Amazon’s reductions took place in countries that have enacted — or threatened to enact — restrictions on certain types of plastic packaging. But the company’s progress may not extend to the U.S., which has not regulated plastic production on a federal level. 

Amazon generated 208 million pounds of plastic packaging trash in the United States in 2022, about 10 percent more than the previous year, according to a new report from the nonprofit Oceana. This packaging includes Amazon’s ubiquitous blue-and-white mailers, as well as other pouches, bags, and plastic cushioning. If all of it were converted into plastic air pillows and laid end to end, Oceana estimates it would circle the Earth more than 200 times.

“The crisis is so significant that we need change now,” said Dana Miller, Oceana’s director of strategic initiatives and an author of the report.

Miller and her co-authors are calling on Amazon to stop using plastic packaging in the U.S., citing phaseouts in some of the company’s biggest overseas markets as evidence that such a transition is possible. Amazon has done “some pretty impressive things in Europe and India, but in the U.S. they are not making the same sort of commitments,” Miller added. “The company has made great progress, but it’s just not enough.”

To calculate Amazon’s U.S. plastics footprint, Oceana used market research on the amount of plastic consumed in 2022 by the American e-commerce industry — more than 800 million pounds — and multiplied that by Amazon’s share of the market, 30.5 percent. Oceana then made some downward revisions to account for Amazon’s publicly disclosed efforts to reduce plastic packaging. For instance, in 2022, Amazon said it replaced 99 percent of its mixed-material mailers with paper ones and delivered 12 percent of its U.S. shipments in 2022 without adding any of its own packaging.

The resulting estimate, 208 million pounds, is about 11 times the weight of Seattle’s most iconic landmark, the Space Needle.

This is worrisome because the type of plastic typically used in Amazon packaging — known as “film” — is almost never recycled. Most of it is sent to landfills or incinerators, or is discarded into the environment. According to one 2020 study, plastic film is among the most common forms of marine plastic litter near ocean shores, where it kills more large marine animals than any other type of plastic. Oceana estimates that 22 million pounds of Amazon’s global plastic packaging waste generated in 2022 will end up in aquatic environments.

Plastic production causes additional concerns. The extraction of fossil fuels used to make plastic, plus the conversion of those fossil fuels into plastic products, releases carbon and air, water, and soil pollution that disproportionately affects low-income communities and communities of color.

Miller said she’d like Amazon to reduce plastics “because of a moral responsibility … to reduce their impact on the environment.” But the company has been slow to respond to moral appeals from customers and shareholders, including three shareholder resolutions since 2021 invoking plastics’ damages to marine ecosystems and human health. The resolutions, which each received more than 30 percent of shareholder votes, asked Amazon to cut plastics use globally by one-third by 2030. When announcing that it had cut plastics use globally by 11.6 percent, Amazon did not make a quantitative or time-bound commitment to further reductions.

Instead, Amazon seems to have taken its biggest steps to reduce plastic packaging in response to stringent plastic regulations, or the threat of them. “Amazon is a clever company,” Miller said. “They see things in the pipeline and they want to move early.”

In 2019, for example, Amazon India pledged to phase out plastic packaging after Prime Minister Narendra Modi called on constituents to “make India free of single-use plastic,” hinting that he would announce major restrictions on the material later that year. Within months, Amazon India said it had eliminated plastic packaging from the country’s fulfillment centers, replacing it largely with paper.

In the European Union, a directive on single-use plastics has made it unlawful since 2021 to sell several types of single-use plastic, including bags, and after a long drafting process, the bloc last month agreed to “historic” targets to reduce packaging waste by 15 percent by 2040. Amazon said in 2022 that it had eliminated single-use plastic delivery bags at its fulfillment centers across the continent.

Despite efforts from progressive lawmakers, the U.S. still lacks a federal plan to phase down plastic packaging, which could help explain why Amazon hasn’t acted more aggressively on the issue stateside. A spokesperson for the company told Grist last month that Amazon has started a “multiyear effort” to transition U.S. fulfillment centers from plastic to paper packaging, but the company has not announced a timeline for that transition.

Then again, Amazon’s American presence is also much larger than its operations overseas; the fact that U.S. orders make up nearly 70 percent of Amazon’s total sales may make it more complicated to change packaging materials here. 

“It would be a bigger deal for them to eliminate plastics in the United States,” said Jenn Engstrom, director of the California chapter of the nonprofit U.S. Public Interest Research Group, who was not involved in the Oceana report. “But they’re also one of the most innovative and biggest companies in the world; just because it’s hard to do doesn’t mean they shouldn’t do it.” 

Amazon, the largest e-commerce company in the world, sold more than half a trillion dollars’ worth of goods last year. Its main American competitor, Walmart, said last month that it had eliminated single-use plastic from its mailing envelopes globally. In China, the retailer JD.com is replacing disposable packaging altogether with reusable alternatives. 

Engstrom pointed to some some state-level policies that could affect Amazon’s plastics use — most notably in California, where a law enacted in 2022 requires that companies reduce their overall packaging distributed in the state by 25 percent by 2032. Washington state tried to pass a similar law last year, but the proposal died in committee. Five other states have passed less specific bills on “extended producer responsibility,” or EPR, that attempt to make plastic producers financially responsible for the waste they generate — often by having them fund improvements in recycling infrastructure.

Although Amazon is funding several efforts to improve plastics recycling, Oceana says that this is “not the solution the company should be relying on.” Plastic film cannot reliably be recycled due to technical and economic constraints; virtually no curbside recycling program accepts it. In a best-case scenario, plastic film can be downcycled into plastic decking material or benches, but recent investigations suggest that store drop-off programs meant to facilitate this process often end up dumping Amazon packaging in landfills or burning it in incinerators.

When American consumers mistakenly put Amazon’s plastic packages in their curbside recycling bins — as many do — a 2022 Bloomberg investigation found that they may end up at illegal dump sites and industrial furnaces in Muzaffarnagar, India, with potentially dire consequences for nearby residents’ health.

Pat Lindner, Amazon’s vice president of mechatronics and sustainable packaging, called Oceana’s study a “misleading report with exaggerated and inaccurate information,” and told Grist that Amazon is committed to reducing its plastic footprint at U.S. fulfillment centers. A spokesperson said  the company is proud of reducing its plastic footprint in Europe and India and that it would continue to share updates on its progress in the U.S. The spokesperson also said Amazon is committed to good-faith engagement with shareholders on plastic-related resolutions. 

Oceana said the company declined the nonprofit’s requests for country-level data on its plastics use. The company also declined to share data on plastic packaging used in third-party shipments; Amazon’s disclosures for plastic packaging used in 2021 and 2022 only account for packages shipped from Amazon fulfillment centers. 

“We are hoping that Amazon will provide more detailed data … and illuminate some of these questions,” Miller said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline As Amazon eliminates plastic packaging abroad, it’s using even more in the US on Apr 4, 2024.

Across the nation, strip malls, schools, factories, and other big, nonresidential buildings bask in the sun — a powerful, and too often wasted, source of electricity that could serve the neighborhoods that surround them.

Installing solar panels on these vast rooftops could provide one-fifth of the power that disadvantaged communities need, bringing renewable energy to people who can least afford it, according to a study by Stanford University. Although such power-sharing arrangements do exist, the research found that marginalized neighborhoods generate almost 40 percent less electricity than wealthy ones. “We were astonished to see there is still such a large difference,” said Moritz Wussow, a data and climate scientist and the study’s lead author.

This imbalance, often called the solar equity gap, is even more prevalent in the number of home installations. Placing solar arrays atop large commercial buildings could bring renewable energy to renters, while also helping homeowners who can’t afford the technology’s high upfront cost. Previous research by Wussow’s collaborators found that affluent households are more likely to benefit from tax credits and rebates designed to make solar more affordable. With Solar for All, a federal program funded by the Inflation Reduction Act, poised to give states $7 billion to create fairer access to clean energy, the study shows that harnessing commercial rooftops could be an effective way to reach two-thirds of the nation’s disadvantaged communities and begin to close that gap.

“The renewable energy transition is one of the big pillars of where the government is seeking to spend money,” said Wussow. “Our research is supposed to contribute to narrowing the equity gap, and to provide an idea of how this can be accomplished.” 

Using DeepSolar, Stanford’s AI-powered database of satellite imagery, the study tallied the number of photovoltaic panels on large rooftops, at least 1,000 square feet in size, across the U.S. To help its research more readily inform policy, it examined the prevalence of these arrays in census tracts defined as disadvantaged by the federal Justice40 environmental justice initiative. These areas, which must be low income and have a second environmental burden, such as pollution, make up roughly a third of census tracts. The researchers then calculated the cost of generating solar on nonresidential buildings in those areas and found that even in states like Alaska, where the sun all but vanishes for two months each year, the costs per kilowatt would still be cheaper than the local utility rate. If businesses generate their own energy and share it, the results show residents of the surrounding neighborhoods can cash in savings and meet at least 20 percent of their annual power needs.

Despite prevailing equity gaps, community solar projects have been around for over a decade. “I like to think of it as a model, a billing mechanism, where people, regardless of whether they own or rent, can participate in the solar energy transition,” said Matthew Popkin, a U.S. programs manager at RMI, a non-profit dedicated to sustainability research. Most community solar systems rely on subscriptions, where homes connected to a local solar array pay for a share of the energy. Such programs are helping neighborhoods in cities from Denver to Washington, D.C., save money and ditch fossil fuels. “There is no one-size-fits-all approach, there is no model that will nail it for every single community, or a whole city,” Popkin said. “More creativity is probably going to help expand this further.” 

Boston, a city short on open space but with plenty of rooftops, can expect to see community solar on commercial buildings expanding soon. The Boston Community Solar Cooperative, which launched this March, will begin its mission to bring clean energy to disadvantaged households with an 81-kilowatt solar array on top of a grocery store in Dorchester, one of the city’s lowest income neighborhoods. Gregory King, president of the cooperative, said the project is only possible because of solar tax credits provided by the Inflation Reduction Act. “The idea behind the model is really to create community empowerment,” he says. “And we have to create more and more, particularly rooftop solar, in an urban environment like Boston.”

Recent changes in how utilities buy back solar energy from homes, a process called net metering, has tipped residential installations into a decline. But with Solar for All funding about to pour into states as soon as July, experts like Popkin say these new resources could shape the next wave of community solar. “The biggest unknown we have right now is what some of those exact funding structures are going to look like,” he said, but inclusive planning will be key. As communities across the U.S. race to seize clean energy benefits, incentivizing businesses to go solar and share the bounty could give everyone a brighter future.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How big-box stores and schools can help marginalized communities go solar on Apr 4, 2024.

The European Union has been investing four times the amount of money into animal agriculture — which makes “artificially cheap” diets that heavily pollute the planet —  than it has into plant-based farming, according to a new study.

The European Union spends almost one-third of its budget on subsidizing its common agricultural policy (CAP), reported The Guardian.

More than 80 percent of CAP funds given to farmers in 2013 went to animal products, the study said.

“The vast majority of that is going towards products which are driving us to the brink,” said Paul Behrens, study co-author and researcher of environmental change at Leiden University, as The Guardian reported.

Since large amounts of land are required to grow feed, and CAP is based mostly on land use, the subsidy program “results in perverse outcomes for a food transition,” the study explained.

“Although the CAP does not designate animal-based commodities as desirable, by disproportionally supporting livestock farming, especially when accounting for animal feed subsidies, the CAP presents an economic disincentive for transitions towards more sustainable plant-based foods,” the study said.

In order to produce equal amounts of protein, beef products need 35 times more land than grains and 20 times more than nuts.

“The global food system is responsible for approximately one-third of greenhouse gas emissions, occupies half of global habitable land and accounts for more than four-fifths of all water consumption. Current global food emissions alone will probably preclude the 1.5 °C Paris Agreement target,” the study said. “The food system is also vulnerable to the impacts of environmental and climate change, which include increasing temperatures and shifting precipitation patterns. More frequent and severe extreme weather events are already affecting food security, and additional European Union funds are already supporting farmers experiencing climate damages.”

The study, “Over 80% of the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy supports emissions-intensive animal products,” was published in the journal Nature Food.

To determine just how much the EU invests in animal products, the research team looked at subsidy records and the supply chain’s flow of public money.

“The study illustrates that most subsidies do not support an urgently needed transition towards healthy and sustainable diets,” said Florian Freund, a Braunschweig University agricultural economist who was not part of the research team, as reported by The Guardian.

Animal farming contributes from 12 to 20 percent of greenhouse gas emissions and is one of the biggest causes of decreasing wildlife numbers globally.

In its most recent CAP reform — 2023 to 2027 — the EU designated 25 percent of direct CAP payments to “eco-schemes” that incentivize environmentally friendly farming.

“CAP payments represent the largest expense (∼30%) of the total EU budget. However, the CAP lacks long-term strategic planning for transforming agricultural systems and reducing emissions. This is concerning in the face of global environmental targets required to keep within the 1.5 °C target, which requires net-zero emissions, eliminating reliance on fossil fuels and substantially reducing livestock farming within 20 years,” the study said.

The post More Than 80% of EU’s Agricultural Subsidies Goes to Animal Farming That Is ‘Driving Us to the Brink’ appeared first on EcoWatch.

Zimbabwe’s President Emmerson Mnangagwa has declared the country’s ongoing drought a national disaster, with more than $2 billion needed to feed millions.

Malawi and Zambia made similar announcements earlier this year, as an El Niño-fueled drought thrust southern Africa into a humanitarian emergency.

Mnangagwa told reporters in Harare that this year more than 2.7 million in Zimbabwe would face hunger, reported Reuters.

“No Zimbabwean must succumb or die from hunger,” Mnangagwa said in a press conference, as AFP reported. “To that end, I do hereby declare a nationwide State of Disaster, due to the El Niño-induced drought.”

The declaration frees up more resources to combat the calamity.

Zimbabwe relies heavily on hydroelectric power, and electricity production has also been impacted by the drought.

Mnangagwa said the grain harvest this season was predicted to produce a little more than half the cereals necessary to feed the country.

“[M]ore than 80% of our country received below normal rainfall,” Mnangagwa said, as reported by The Associated Press. The nation’s biggest priority, the president said, is “securing food for all Zimbabweans.”

Mnangagwa asked for humanitarian aid from local faith organizations and businesses, as well as the United Nations.

“Preliminary assessments show that Zimbabwe requires in excess of $2 billion towards various interventions we envisage in our national response,” Mnangagwa said, as Reuters reported.

Mnangagwa added that increasing food reserves by prioritizing winter crops — as well as importing grains — would be a priority for the government.

“We expect 868 273 metric tonnes from this season’s harvest. Hence, our nation faces a food cereal deficit of nearly 680 000 metric tonnes of grain. This deficit will be bridged by imports,” Mnangagwa said, as reported by Africanews.

Since November, most of Zimbabwe’s provinces have been experiencing crop failure.

The World Food Programme and other agencies have called the situation “dire,” requesting that donors give more assistance.

Angola, Madagascar, Mozambique and Botswana were also facing extreme drought conditions.

The disruption of wind patterns and warmer ocean surface temperatures associated with El Niño have led to record heat, drought and wildfires across the globe.

The current El Niño climate pattern began in the middle of last year and typically affects global temperatures for roughly one year, AFP reported.

The World Meteorological Organization has said that the current El Niño — one of the five most powerful ever recorded — will continue to impact the climate through greenhouse gases trapping heat in the atmosphere.

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