Drinking water is at risk of becoming scarce in the face of climate change. More…
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About three times a day, Rich Benoit gets a call to his auto shop, The Electrified Garage, from the owner of an older Tesla Model S whose car battery has begun to fail. The battery, which used to provide several hundred miles of range, might suddenly only last 50 miles on a single charge. These cars are often out of warranty, and the cost of replacing the battery can exceed $15,000.
For most products, repair is a more affordable option than replacement. And in theory, lots of these Tesla batteries can be fixed, said Benoit, who runs one of the few Tesla-focused independent repair shops in the United States. But due to the time and training involved, the safety considerations, and the complexity of the repair, Benoit said that the bill to fix one car battery at his shop might run upwards of $10,000 — more than most consumers are willing to pay. Instead, he said, many choose to sell or donate their old vehicle for scrap and buy a brand new Tesla.
“It’s getting to the point where [the car] is almost like a consumable, like a TV,” Benoit said.
Benoit’s experience heralds a problem that early adopters of EVs, as well as electric micromobility devices like e-bikes and e-scooters, are beginning to face: These vehicles contain big, expensive batteries that will inevitably degrade or stop working over time. Repairing these batteries can have sustainability benefits, saving energy and resources that would otherwise be used to manufacture a new one. That’s particularly important for EVs, which contain very large batteries that must be used for years to offset the carbon emissions associated with making them. But many EV and e-mobility batteries are difficult to repair by design, and some manufacturers actively discourage the practice, citing safety concerns. The small number of independent mechanics who repair EV or e-bike batteries struggle to do so affordably due to design challenges, safety requirements, and a lack of access to spare parts.
“There’s a lot of batteries in the recycle bin that could be repaired,” said Timoté Rouffignac, who runs a small e-bike battery repair business called Daurema in Brussels, Belgium. But “because they are not made to be repaired, it’s quite hard to propose a good price.”
A lithium-ion battery in a smartphone contains a single “cell” consisting of a graphite anode, a metallic cathode, and a liquid electrolyte that allows lithium ions to move from one side to the other to generate an electrical potential. An e-bike battery often contains dozens of cells. EV batteries, meanwhile, can contain hundreds to thousands of individual cells, which are often packaged into “modules,” and from there, bundled into a battery pack. In addition to cells and modules, electric car and e-bike batteries typically include a battery management system that monitors the battery’s state of health and controls the rate of charging and discharging.
All lithium-ion batteries degrade with use and eventually need to be replaced. But when a battery contains many individual cells and other components, its lifespan can sometimes be extended through repair, a process that involves identifying and replacing the bad cells or modules and fixing other faulty parts, like a glitchy battery management system. In some cases, a single module is all that needs to be replaced. Swapping that module out, instead of replacing the entire battery, reduces demand for battery metals like lithium, as well as the carbon emissions tied to manufacturing replacement batteries (or new vehicles). That makes battery repair “highly desirable for a circular economy” — a system in which resources are conserved and reused — said Gavin Harper, a research fellow who studies battery sustainability at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom.
And while not necessarily cheap, repairing batteries can save money. Tyler Helps of Cox Automotive, which repairs in-warranty EV batteries on behalf of automakers and their dealers across the United States, said that in general, a refurbished EV battery is about half the cost of a new one. Since it began offering EV battery repair services in 2014, Cox Automotive estimates that it has saved over a gigawatt hour’s worth of batteries — enough to power about 17,000 new EVs — from being prematurely discarded.
“There’s a myriad of different reasons repair is vastly [more] beneficial than replacement,” Helps told Grist.
But battery repair is dangerous and shouldn’t be attempted at home or by novices, experts say. If battery cells are damaged during a repair attempt, it can cause a short circuit that leads to a fire or explosion. If the person attempting the repair isn’t wearing the proper high-voltage gloves, they could be electrocuted. “You’d be playing with fire” if you didn’t know what you were doing, said John Mathna, who runs the e-bike repair shop Chattanooga Electric Bike Co., noting that some e-bike batteries contain “enough current to kill someone.”
At a bare minimum, battery repair requires high-voltage training, electrical experience, personal protective equipment, and “a baseline understanding of the architectures and how the battery works,” Helps said. Those wishing to fix EV batteries also need equipment to lift the car off the ground and physically remove the battery, which can weigh thousands of pounds.
“There’s very few people that could or even should attempt something like this,” Benoit said.
But even those who have the proper training often struggle to repair EV or e-bike batteries because of how they are designed. Many e-bike batteries are housed in heavy-duty plastic cases that can be difficult, if not impossible, to open up without damaging internal components. Inside an e-bike battery, or inside individual modules of an EV battery, cells are often glued or welded together, making them difficult or impossible to replace individually. What’s more, as a 2021 report by the European Environmental Bureau highlighted, some e-mobility batteries contain software that causes the battery to shut down if it detects evidence of unauthorized tinkering.
Manufacturers argue that their batteries are designed to promote safety, durability, and high performance, which can come at the expense of repairability, and many offer free or discounted replacement batteries within the warranty period (typically around two years for major e-bike brands and eight to 10 years or 100,000 miles for EVs). Repair advocates, on the other hand, contend that modular designs with reversible fasteners, such as clips or adhesives that can be unstuck, don’t necessarily compromise safety and that the benefits of designing for repair far exceed the costs.
European policymakers are beginning to listen to advocates. In August, the European Union adopted a new regulation aimed at fostering battery sustainability. Among other things, it includes a provision requiring that the batteries used in e-bikes and other “light means of transport” vehicles, like e-scooters, be repairable down to the individual cell level by independent professionals. The European e-bike industry, which strongly opposed this provision due to concerns over safety, battery certification, and legal liability issues, is now grappling with how to comply.
“We are still examining how the requirements of the new EU battery regulation can be made possible while complying with the applicable safety regulations and our high quality standards,” e-bike battery manufacturer Bosch told Grist. One challenge for manufacturers, Bosch noted, is the “contrary development in the USA,” which is “on its way to stronger regulations and higher standards for e-bike batteries and systems.”
Indeed, the federal Consumer Product Safety Commission recently announced that it is considering regulations for e-bikes and their batteries. This comes after a recent rash of e-bike battery fires that have also spurred a policy response on a local level. The New York City Council recently amended its fire code to prohibit “the assembly or reconditioning of a lithium-ion battery” using secondhand cells from another battery, which repairers sometimes do.
The city also recently enacted a law requiring that e-mobility manufacturers ensure their products’ batteries are certified to the UL 2271 design standard, which is intended to promote safety. Ibrahim Jilani, the global director of consumer technology at UL Solutions — a multinational company that tests safety certification standards for a wide range of industrial and consumer products and materials — said that repaired batteries can meet this standard. But the company doing the repair would be required to “keep the design exactly how it was prior to needing repair,” Jilani said, including using the same make and model of cells and electronic components. Battery repair shops would also need to submit to UL field inspections four times a year, which would cost them a little over $5,000 a year, Jilani said.*
Compared with e-bikes, lawmakers have been relatively quiet on EV battery repair. In the U.S., there are no specific laws or regulations that address the issue. The EU’s new battery regulation doesn’t touch on EV battery repair either, other than to suggest lawmakers update a separate vehicle regulation “to ensure that those batteries can be removed, replaced, and disassembled.”
That’s an idea that GDV, the German Insurance Association, “strongly supports,” a spokesperson told Grist. In October, the group published the results of a study that found EVs are a third more expensive to repair than similar gas-powered vehicles, a finding it attributed in part to the high costs of fixing or replacing batteries.
“There are a lot of automakers who do not allow battery repair, even in case of minor damages to the battery case,” a GDV spokesperson told Grist. Automakers sometimes choose to replace the battery if the car was involved in an accident that caused the airbags to activate. Both practices “will lead to an increase of repair costs,” and ultimately, higher insurance premiums, the spokesperson said.
New rules around EV battery repairability would come at a critical time. Helps, of Cox Automotive, said that two trends in EV battery design are occurring in parallel: “Batteries are either becoming very serviceable, or not serviceable at all.”
Some, like the batteries inside Volkswagon’s ID.4, feature LEGO-like modules that are easy to remove and replace. Others, like Tesla’s new 4680 structural battery pack, don’t include modules at all. Instead, all of the cells are bonded together and bonded to the pack itself, a design Helps described as “impossible to service.” If a bad cell group is found, the entire battery must be replaced.
“It’s still a fully recyclable battery,” Helps said. “You’re just not able to repair it.”
Tesla didn’t respond to Grist’s request for comment.
*Correction: This story originally misstated the nature of UL Solutions’ work and the costs associated with obtaining UL certification.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline EV battery repair is dangerous. Here’s why mechanics want to do it anyway. on Dec 8, 2023.
There’s a scene in Craig Santos Perez’s book of poems from an unincorporated territory [åmot] that feels eerily familiar. The author, an English professor at the University of Hawaiʻi, is walking through the San Diego Zoo when he sees a caged Guam sihek, an endangered native kingfisher bird of Guam.
Perez was born and raised on Guam, but this is the first time that he’s seeing the bird in real life, with its blue tail, green wings, and orange and white feathers. The creatures no longer live in Guam’s jungles, decimated by invasive brown tree snakes brought by U.S. military ships. Like many other CHamorus from Guam, Perez grew up accustomed to the silence of native birdsong.
Like Perez, I’m indigenous to the Marianas, and even though I grew up on a neighboring island, I spent a lot of time on Guam as a kid. Back then, snake-induced power outages felt normal, and so did the birds’ absence. It wasn’t until I was in college, walking through the Bronx Zoo, when I too saw the sihek, imprisoned for its own survival thousands of miles away from home. It felt jarring.
Even stranger is the feeling of seeing my language and experiences reflected in a book, especially one that’s highly acclaimed. Last month, Perez became the first Pacific Islander to win a National Book Award, standing in a suit at the New York City awards ceremony in front of a crowd that included Oprah. The next day, 8,000 miles away on Guam, WhatsApp threads lit up with the YouTube clip of his acceptance speech in which he thanked the crowd in CHamoru.
That distance is part of what made that award feel so momentous. In his poetry, Perez grapples with the invisibility of Guam (“Are you a citizen?”), the ongoing legacy of colonialism, the consequences of continuing militarization, and the ever-ascending threat of rising seas. “The rape of Oceania began with Guam,” he quotes at one point.
There’s a heavy grief in his exploration of what CHamorus have lost, and stand to lose with climate change, and a more personal grief embedded in his poetry about his grandparents, who passed away during the writing of the book. But there’s also a lightness to his work, especially in his lists of modern-day åmot, or medicine, for stateside CHamorus feeling mahålang for home.
I spoke with Perez last week to hear his reflections on the book and how his poetry relates to climate change, environmental justice, and the broader experiences of Indigenous peoples. This interview has been condensed and edited.
Q. You’ve mentioned that you’re writing for yourself and your family and our people, but you’re also writing for the broader global community in the U.S. and beyond. One of the challenges that Indigenous people face is the way our stories are often erased from history, or in the case of Indigenous Pacific peoples, we are literally relegated to the margins of maps or footnotes in textbooks. What do you see as your book’s role within that broader context?
A. So much of my work is about making the struggles of our people visible, and the history and politics of Guam, in particular, visible, on a national and international stage. That’s a way for me to write against the erasure of Pacific Islander histories specifically and Indigenous histories in general. I’ve been so inspired by Native American writers for decades writing against their own erasure and raising their voices to highlight issues facing their own communities, and so I wanted to do the same thing with my own work. And as you know, the connection to the environment, to lands and waters is a core component of Indigenous identity and culture, and so I wanted to always have that at the forefront.
When our homelands and our peoples are invisibilized it makes it easier for colonial nations or corporations to exploit us and to turn our homelands into sacrifice zones. But when we expose these issues, that creates a way for us to not only cultivate empathy for our struggles, but also to establish alliances and solidarity with other communities who have experienced similar kinds of environmental justice issues. And then I think it also empowers our own people to continue to keep fighting and struggling for justice. And so for me, poetry and storytelling play a pivotal role in the environmental justice movement.
Q. Your poem about the Guam sihek resonated with me because I had the same experience at the Bronx Zoo: encountering the bird in a cage thousands of miles away from home, that I had never seen or heard in the wild, and feeling struck by the irony and sadness of it. Can you share more about that experience and what you were hoping to convey with your writing?
A. Growing up on Guam when I did was the time when the birds were all disappearing, and zookeepers came in and “saved” the last remaining wild birds. I don’t have any memory of the native birds in Guam at all besides just studying them in school and looking at pictures in the classroom. And so when I did see that bird for the first time at the San Diego Zoo, it was similarly kind of an uncanny experience. I’m still kind of processing the depths of what I felt in that moment. Part of it was just feeling the deep loss of extinction, endangerment, extirpation, and so on, but at the same time feeling this deep sense of survival and resilience.
I wanted to also honor the birds in the same way I would honor my grandparents in the poems. I was thinking about extinction, not just a species loss, but also as a whole matrix of loss: the cascade that happens in the jungles, the rainforest, what happens when birds are disappeared from the landscape? What happens to the people who are close to these birds when they’re gone? The birds have deep meaning in our culture and still have meaning today. But obviously, these are different things when they’re no longer wild.
Q. One of your poems describes how “mapmakers named our part of the ocean ‘Micronesia’ because they viewed our islands and cultures as small and insignificant.” Then you list the empires that have taken over our islands, and their effects, a sort of progression of colonization, and at the very end you describe our islands slipping under rising seas. What were you thinking about when you started this poem about colonization and ended it with climate change?
A. Colonialism has led to the environmental destruction of our home islands: Our islands are often used for very extractive industries, whether it’s plantation agriculture in Hawaiʻi or on Guam, the military using our lands and waters for bases and military testing, and so on. All of these industries are fossil fuel-based, and they’ve all led directly to the rising sea levels and all the other climate change impacts that we see in the Pacific and globally. Things that we need to do to change this, they’re almost impossible to implement because, whether our islands are still colonized or in terms of the independent Pacific, they all exist within these neocolonial capitalist frameworks. And so in order to address climate change, we need to also reckon with the legacy and ongoing impacts of colonialism. And so for me, it’s always been important to be part of the decolonization movement alongside environmental justice and climate justice, because it’s all connected.
Q. Another poem you wrote that resonated with me was about how diasporic CHamorus become foreign in their own homelands after leaving, as their islands change and grow strange to them. I was wondering if you could talk about what an acceleration of outmigration due to worsening storms and other climate change impacts could mean for our people and our culture.
A. In the beginning of the highlighting of the Pacific in climate change discourse, there was a lot of rhetoric about, “If Pacific Islanders are forced to move from our homelands, we’re nothing, we’re nothing without our islands,” which was a rhetorically powerful rallying cry. But my critique of that is, that’s true, but at the same time, we have to look at our diasporic Pacific communities. Even when we leave our homelands, we’re not nothing. We don’t just become dead souls, but we still carry our culture with us, even if we’ve been forced to migrate. Obviously it’s tragic, when and if we have to migrate because of climate change and we have to do everything to, of course, prevent that, so that we can stay in our homelands. But at the same time, if that future does come, I think we know it’s important for us to highlight the strength of our diaspora communities and to have faith in our people that we will be able to maintain our cultures and languages even if we’re forced to leave home.
Q. Speaking of language, I noticed that throughout your book you deliberately included many CHamoru words and phrases. For Native peoples, the speaking of our languages is often in and of itself a political act because of how they’ve been suppressed. What went into your decision and what did you hope to accomplish?
A. Through poetry, I found the space where I could kind of reclaim the language even if it’s just single words or simple phrases or even quotes from the rosary in CHamoru, for example. For me, poetry, like a lot of Native poetry, became a space of language reclamation in the face of the long history of language colonialism and erasure.
I actually read a study that found that there’s a relationship between biodiversity loss and language loss. And part of the thesis was that because, letʻs say, a rainforest in the Amazon is being cut for timber or something and a lot of those tribes are being displaced, forced to move to the city, and in the city they have to speak Spanish or some other colonial language.
There are a lot of narratives of doom and extinction like that. But I think there are a lot of Indigenous people, despite displacement and colonialism, they’re still able to be resilient and maintain culture and language within diasporic spaces. Not ideal, but I think it speaks to the power of Indigenous peoples.
Q. Throughout your book, you write a lot about your grandmother: playing bingo with her, watching her rub achiote seeds to make red rice, listening to her speak CHamoru. Can you tell me more about her? When you think about the brutal Japanese occupation that her generation experienced during World War II and subsequent loss of land to the U.S. military, how do you see it relating to the challenges that our children’s generation will face?
A. She was 19, I think, at the beginning of the occupation. And during the march to Mañenggon, she was actually pregnant with what would have been her first child. But unfortunately, during the march, she had a miscarriage. I will always be struck by her resilience to wrap her fetus in banana leaves and carry her daughter the rest of the way on that march and go on and keep living life. She was a very soft-spoken woman and very devout, of course.
I canʻt even fathom what that generation went through during that time. Not only did they experience the war and the occupation and all of that sudden violence, but then also just the slow violence after that of the military taking over so much land, displacing so many families from their ranches and from their sources of sustenance, forcing them to speak English in school and just the whole violence of colonial education and acculturation. Just imagining the changes she saw in our island from the 1920s all the way up to just a few years ago across her 96 years of life. Even though we’re facing another slow violence with climate change, I do think at least my generation can learn from that generation how to endure, how to survive, but also how to be resilient and to keep fighting for what we believe in. My grandma wasnʻt some kind of radical activist or decolonial activist or anything like that. But she definitely loved our culture and instilled a love for everything CHamoru in us. We have different struggles to fight, but the similarity is to continually fight for what we love, and to do everything we can to protect our families and to give our kids the best life possible while still trying to maintain our cultures.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The first Pacific Islander to win a National Book Award talks colonialism, culture, and climate on Dec 8, 2023.
Brazil and Colombia have blown up 19 illegal gold mining operations in the Amazon rainforest. Colombia’s armed forces said the mines were producing about $1.5 million worth of the rare metal every month and polluting the rainforest’s rivers with mercury, reported the BBC and Reuters.
The unlawful activity was producing 50.71 pounds of gold a month, authorities said, as Reuters reported.
The mining operation “became a source of financing for weapons and explosives and the acquisition of chemical inputs by the criminal structure known as the Familia del Norte,” Colombia’s armed forces stated in a press release, as reported by Reuters.
The mission was backed by the United States and targeted the infrastructure of the operation. Authorities said the illegal mining polluted 18 million gallons of water each month with 114,000 grams of mercury.
“Gold mining causes deforestation, which converts forests to polluted ponds and mobilizes large amounts of sediment from river bottoms. The burning of the gold-mercury amalgam also emits enormous quantities of mercury into the atmosphere. Artisanal gold mining currently contributes more than 35 percent of all global mercury emissions created by people, more so than any industrial activity,” said Jacqueline Gerson, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, in an opinion piece published by Scientific American last year.
More than half of Brazil and Colombia are rainforests, making them two of the most biodiverse countries in the world. Rainforests are essential to the environmental health of the planet in many ways — their astounding array of plant diversity removes carbon dioxide from the air through photosynthesis, while they lower air and surface temperatures through evapotranspiration and provide ample shade.
“Once mercury is emitted into the atmosphere, it can enter a forest via three different pathways. First, mercury can dissolve in rainwater and then fall to the forest floor during rain events. Second, mercury can stick to the surface of small particles in the atmosphere. These particles can be intercepted by leaves, creating a coating of mercury on the leaves that can be washed to the forest floor during rain events in a process known as throughfall. And third, mercury can be taken up by leaves when their stomata are open for photosynthetic exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide. This mercury can then enter the forest floor when the leaves drop,” Gerson wrote.
Mercury pollution can wreak havoc on the delicately balanced rainforest ecosystem, poisoning its inhabitants.
“Once mercury enters the environment, it can cause neurological damage in both people and wildlife. In fact, numerous studies have found that people — especially indigenous communities — consuming fish caught near gold mining have elevated levels of mercury,” Gerson added.
Twelve vessels on the Purete and Pure rivers in Colombia were destroyed by authorities, Reuters reported. The vessels contained engine rooms, accommodations and sediment storage. Seven of the vessels were blown up in Brazil.
Colombian President Gustavo Petro and Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva have both worked to protect and reduce deforestation in the Amazon rainforest, which the two nations share.
“We are witnessing a historic bi-national operation against the illegal extraction of mineral deposits, aimed at protecting the lungs of the world,” said William Rene Salamanca, director of the national police in Colombia, in a statement, as reported by Reuters.
The post Brazil and Colombia Destroy Illegal Gold Mines in Amazon Rainforest appeared first on EcoWatch.
Scorching heat waves, drought and ocean surface temperatures as warm as a hot tub were all symptoms of global heating in 2023, which the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said would be the warmest year on record.
For the January to November period of this year, the average global temperature was 1.46 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the highest ever recorded.
This year “has now had six record breaking months and two record breaking seasons. The extraordinary global November temperatures, including two days warmer than 2C above preindustrial, mean that 2023 is the warmest year in recorded history,” said Samantha Burgess, C3S deputy director, as C3S reported.
News of the record-breaking temperatures comes as delegates from nearly 200 countries are meeting at the COP28 climate summit in Dubai and discussing the potential phaseout of fossil fuels.
According to C3S, for the first 11 months of 2023, the temperature was 0.13 degrees Celsius above the mean temperature for the same time period in 2016, which currently holds the record for the warmest calendar year.
Last month was the warmest November ever recorded worldwide, with an average temperature 0.85 degrees Celsius above the average for November from 1991 to 2020, and 0.32 degrees Celsius higher than November of 2022.
The planet was feeling the heat all the way to the poles.
“Arctic sea ice extent reached its 8th lowest value for November, at 4% below average, well above the lowest November value recorded in 2016 (13% below average),” C3S said. “Antarctic sea ice extent was the second lowest for November, at 9% below average, after reaching record-low values for the time of year by large margins for six consecutive months.”
This year’s boreal autumn — September to November — was 0.88 degrees Celsius above average, the warmest for that time period ever recorded, the EU scientists said.
“Boreal autumn 2023 saw precipitation above average over a large latitudinal band across Europe, as well as over the UK and Ireland, most of Scandinavia and Türkiye. During the season, several storms triggered widespread rainfall and floods locally,” reported C3S. “In the period September to November 2023, it was drier than average over much of North America, over central and easternmost Asia as well as over most of Australia, South America and southern Africa.”
Of all the major economies in the world, the EU has had the most progressive climate change policies, Reuters reported, but overall actions are still not keeping up with what is necessary to meet the Paris Agreement target of keeping the global average temperature to “well below” two degrees Celsius — ideally lower than 1.5 degrees Celsius — in order to avoid the worst effects of climate change.
“As long as greenhouse gas concentrations keep rising, we can’t expect different outcomes from those seen this year. The temperature will keep rising and so will the impacts of heat waves and droughts,” said C3S Director Carlo Buontempo, as reported by Yale E360. “Reaching net zero as soon as possible is an effective way to manage our climate risks.”
The post 2023 Will Be Hottest Year on Record, EU Climate Service Says appeared first on EcoWatch.
Paris will plant an “urban forest” at Place de Catalogne, a busy roundabout with close proximity to the Gare Montparnasse railway station. The city will add nearly 500 trees to the roundabout.
The new urban forest project will help with cooling to combat the urban heat island effect as well as contribute to an overall plan for improving air quality and reducing emissions that contribute to global warming.
“The temperatures one could feel in this little forest will be 4 degrees lower compared to what we could have outside it and so, it will be very pleasant,” Mayor Anne Hidalgo said, as reported by Reuters. “There’s also some work on recycling rainwater, and here, too, we can recycle rainwater to be able to water, maintain, allow this urban forest to thrive. So it will really be pleasant.”
The roundabout was formerly a busy car traffic site but is now a bike-friendly area, which connects to a bike lane leading to suburbs south of the city. With the addition of 478 newly planted trees, it will further expand its purpose by becoming an urban green space.
The site is expected to be fully planted by June 2024.
In addition to planting trees at Place de Catalogne, the city expects to plant a total of 170,000 trees from 2020 to 2026. So far, about 63,000 trees have been planted toward this goal.
Hidalgo launched an initiative in 2019 to incorporate more urban forest areas throughout Paris, with an ultimate goal to make half of the city covered in vegetation and to become a carbon-neutral city by 2050.
“I am convinced that Paris must adapt to changing temperatures,” Hidalgo said in 2019 about the urban forest plan, as reported by Dezeen. “The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change forecasts heatwaves at 50 degrees Celsius by 2050. We have an obligation to act today.”
Further, city officials announced in 2021 a plan for the city to become completely cyclable by 2026 with the Plan Velo: Act 2, which will add a total of 130 kilometers (over 80 miles) of bikeable pathways throughout the city.
Earlier this year, officials announced another green initiative: to make the Seine swimmable again after a century-long ban. Sewage drainage into the river led to a long ban on swimming in the famous river, but officials have been working to clean up the river and create new outlets for wastewater to travel. About 30 to 35 fish species have returned to the river as a result.
The post Paris Plans an Urban Forest for a Busy Roundabout appeared first on EcoWatch.
Earth911 is honoring the 52 years of Earth Day with 52 Actions for the Earth….
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Most travelers want their trips to be more sustainable, but with rising airfares and general…
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This coverage is made possible through a partnership with WABE and Grist, a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future.
On a sunny day this fall, two Georgia Southern University grad students stood waist-deep in the North Newport River near St. Catherine’s Island on Georgia’s coast, while their professor and a team from the Georgia Department of Natural Resources used a winch to lower pallets full of oyster shells into the water.
The students guided the pallets into place on the muddy river bank. Those pallets, piled with shells, will provide a hard surface for baby oysters to latch onto.
“We are creating a foundation which wild oysters can populate and grow into a independent reef,” said Cameron Brinton, a marine biologist with DNR.
Oysters used to be abundant here: Georgia led the nation in oyster harvesting in the early 20th century, according to the University of Georgia. But by the 1930s, they’d been overharvested. A similar story has played out in other formerly thriving oyster grounds.
Scientists all along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts are trying to bring oyster populations back, and not just because they’re a popular food. Oysters are also important for healthy coastal ecosystems. And researchers are now studying how creating new oyster reefs could help fight climate change by sequestering carbon.
Oysters, Brinton explained, are a keystone species. That means they create habitat for other critters, from small shrimp and crabs to fish like red drum and spotted sea trout that are popular for fishing.
“The majority of commercially and recreationally important species of fish and shellfish will spend a portion of their life associated with oyster reefs,” Brinton said.
And scientists are studying two ways that oyster reefs suck up and store carbon. First, they keep the sediment in the river from washing away.
“There’s lots of organic matter in this sediment in the rivers here,” said John Carroll, a professor of biology at Georgia Southern. “So some of that organic matter gets buried behind the reefs.”
Organic matter has carbon in it, so the oyster reefs can store that carbon and keep it from warming the planet.
Second, by stabilizing the shoreline, oyster reefs also help marshes expand — and marshes themselves are very good at storing carbon.
“As the marsh grasses grow toward the reefs, they’ll also trap a lot of carbon,” Carroll said.
So Carroll and his students are helping the Georgia DNR build these reefs. Then, they’ll track how the shoreline changes and how much carbon it’s storing.
The project is funded by the environmental arm of Yamaha, the boat engine maker. The company, with manufacturing headquarters for the United States located in the Atlanta area, is looking for ways to offset its carbon impact, and a project on Georgia’s coast made sense, said sustainability program manager Josh Grier.
“It’s something that our customers who are out using our products can see,” he said. “Not only are we investigating how we could potentially sequester CO2, but also providing habitat for fish, you know, kind of giving back into the communities where our customers are using our products.”
Marine combustion — that is, ship and boat engines — produced 23.7 million metric tons, or MMT, of CO2 equivalent emissions in 2020, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. That accounts for a tiny fraction of overall transportation emissions, which were more than 1,500 MMT CO2-equivalent in 2020, mostly from roads.
Yamaha is funding similar research into oyster reefs and carbon sequestration in the Gulf of Mexico through Texas A&M University. The two projects could make for an interesting comparison, Grier said, because the Atlantic coast of Georgia and the Gulf coast of Texas differ a lot in their tides, salinity, and other factors that can influence oyster growth.
“They’re such different environments that we’re very curious to see kind of how the CO2 sequestration manifests itself over time,” Grier said.
Once researchers are able to quantify the carbon storage, Carroll said, he’s hopeful Yamaha and other companies will want to fund more oyster reefs.
“There’s lots of need,” he said. “It just boils down to having enough of the materials.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How much carbon can oysters store? Scientists are trying to find out. on Dec 7, 2023.
Fossil fuels usually suck up everyone’s attention at the annual United Nations’ climate summit. But at this year’s gathering in Dubai, COP28, another topic is generating headlines: food.
More than 130 countries signed a declaration on Friday saying that the world must transform its food systems, the source of one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions, “to respond to the imperatives of climate change.” On Saturday at the conference, the Biden administration announced a national strategy to reduce food waste, a huge emitter of methane. And on December 10, the U.N. is expected to call on countries that consume a lot of meat to eat less of it.
All this news comes after years of prodding from scientists and environmental advocates who say the only path to keep global warming below the Paris Agreement’s goal of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) is to do things like limit how much meat we eat in the U.S. and other beef-loving countries. (Livestock alone are responsible for about 15 percent of global climate pollution.)
The problem is that meat consumption is as politically polarizing as ever. Fox Business recently ran a headline saying world leaders planned to “declare a war on meat” at COP28. “They don’t want solutions, they want a sick, depressed populace,” television chef Andrew Gruel said on the social media platform X.
The political right is also taking aim at climate-friendly alternatives to meat, like cultivated chicken and beef, made from cells grown in labs. State legislators in Florida recently proposed a bill that would make selling cultivated meat a second-degree misdemeanor. In Europe the issue has been just as partisan. Italy’s right-wing government just banned the production and sale of cultivated meat, ostensibly to protect the country’s culinary heritage. And Germany’s far-right Alternative for Deutschland party has been drumming up fears that the left is coming for their fried cutlets. “They will not take away my schnitzel,” a party co-chair said at a campaign event this fall.
Some of the backlash is likely a result of lobbying by the meat and dairy industries and the proliferation of misinformation on social media. But no matter how good it might be for the planet to end factory farming and to stop converting forests into pastures, researchers say meat is inherently political.
“It’s a political relationship between our species and other species,” said Sparsha Saha, a political scientist who studies meat politics at Harvard University. “That’s what makes it a lot different. It’s not a technology.”
Technological solutions tend to be more popular than lifestyle ones, even though some researchers say both may be necessary to avert environmental catastrophe. According to a survey across 23 countries, people in every one but France showed more support for solving the climate crisis through technology and innovation than by changing how they live.
Saha’s research suggests that meat is even more polarizing than gas-guzzling cars. In a recent study published in the journal Frontiers, she found that voters are more likely to oppose candidates who advocate for curbing emissions by eating less meat than those who talk about the need to limit emissions from transportation.
“It’s like asking us to be a different kind of human,” Saha said. “I think that’s why people are so reticent about it. It is kind of a costly thing to bring up. Even as an academic, I have to be really thoughtful about how I’m framing things.”
To Saha, the solution isn’t to keep meat out of political conversation; it’s to talk about it differently and focus on building consensus. Rather than avoid the issue or pretend like it doesn’t have to be political, she thinks the meat-reduction movement would benefit from messaging supported by a broader coalition, including religious leaders, hunters, and even ranchers who oppose factory farming.
“If we had put more thought into how it could be communicated well to people ahead of time we might not be in this position,” Saha said. “It feels like it was sprung on people.”
Saha advises against “quiet meat politics,” an idea articulated in a piece published in 2021 by the Breakthrough Institute, an environmental research center in Berkeley, California. The author of the article, a researcher named Alex Smith, argued for an approach that “avoids political partisanship and culture warring in favor of creating a technological and infrastructural environment that can achieve long-term sustainable change.”
Smith wrote that plant-based burgers, like those made by Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat, have a lot of potential to replace animal products, and he predicted that more people would shift their diets if those alternatives — as well as “more futuristic” lab-grown meat — got cheaper.
Today, Smith is less optimistic. He told Grist he’s “wary of the possibility” that plant-based meat will ever meaningfully displace poultry and beef, and he noted that “we’re still so far from actually knowing the scalability, the actual potential of cultivated meat.” In his view, efforts to lower greenhouse gas emissions from farming can’t only focus on replacing beef. They have to include improving animal agriculture, like developing feed additives that reduce methane. Smith pushed back against the idea that making meat more central in our politics would convince people to eat less of it.
“There’s pleasure involved. There’s culture involved,” Smith said. “I’m relatively skeptical of the idea that we can divert people and push them ideologically, culturally talking-wise towards anything other than that.”
Saha’s paper offers some evidence for a different perspective. To her surprise, she found that voters were more receptive to a theoretical candidate who talked about animal rights than one who talked about the environmental costs of meat eating. That might signal that meat itself isn’t as divisive as some think. Perhaps it’s made more partisan through its connection to another polarizing issue: climate change.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline What would it take to end the meat culture wars? on Dec 7, 2023.
