Seven years after thousands of people converged in North Dakota to block the construction of the Dakota Access pipeline, the public now has an opportunity to weigh in on the environmental risks associated with the section of the pipeline crossing half a mile north of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe reservation.
The 2016-2017 protests brought prolonged, international attention to the Standing Rock reservation, and the Nation’s fight to protect its sacred sites and drinking water. Yet despite months of protests, the project eventually went through with the support of then-President Donald Trump. By June 2017, oil was flowing, and today, up to 750,000 barrels of petroleum pass through the pipeline, which stretches from western North Dakota to southern Illinois.
But the story continued. In 2020, a federal court ruled that the Army Corps of Engineers had not done a thorough enough analysis of the project’s impacts, noting that the pipeline’s “effects on the quality of the human environment are likely to be highly controversial.” The court ordered the Army Corps to produce a full environmental impact statement on the section of the pipeline that crosses underneath Lake Oahe and stop the flow of oil. A higher court later determined that the pipeline could continue operating, but agreed that a more extensive environmental analysis needed to be completed.
That analysis is happening now, and Steven Wolf, chief of the public affairs office in the Omaha branch of the Army Corps, said the current public comment period is an opportunity for the public to weigh in on whether the draft environmental impact statement is adequate — essentially serving as a quality control check on the agency’s revised analysis.
“This is a way for the public to say, ‘Yes, you studied this thoroughly, or no, we think you need to look at some more information,’” he said. “Public input will actually help us to do better analysis and also to ultimately reach a better decision.”
The Army Corps’ new draft environmental impact statement says there haven’t been any leaks from the pipeline since it began operating, although there have been some spills at aboveground facilities where the oil has been recovered. The draft analysis describes the possibility of an oil spill underneath Lake Oahe as “remote to very unlikely,” and concluded that oil would be more likely to spill if it were transported via car or train.
While the draft environmental impact statement acknowledges that the water in the Missouri River corridor is considered sacred to Indigenous peoples, Janet Alkire, chair of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, is worried about the possibility of a petroleum spill that could contaminate her community’s water source. “Am I going to be the tribal chair that has to deal with a disaster? A pipeline that breaks? Am I going to be in that position?” she asked Army Corps officials at a meeting earlier this month.
The company behind the pipeline, Energy Transfer Partners, did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
Wolf says it’s important to remember that the public comment period deals strictly with the half-mile stretch of the pipeline under Lake Oahe. He added that the Army Corps only regulates land used by the company and has no authority to regulate the pipeline itself. “We don’t build pipelines,” said Wolf. “We don’t operate pipelines. We don’t regulate pipelines.” Wolf added that regulatory responsibility sits with the U.S. Department of Transportation.
Still, that authority is consequential. If Army Corps denies the easement, that could force Energy Transfer Partners to reroute the pipeline further away from the Standing Rock reservation.
One option is to move the pipeline 50 miles north of where it is currently, crossing nearly 9 miles north of Bismarck, North Dakota. Energy Transfer Partners analyzed a similar route prior to building the pipeline. In its 2016 environmental assessment, the Army Corps supported avoiding that route, noting its proximity to municipal water supplies. Jade Begay, director of policy and advocacy at NDN Collective, said that the Army Corps’ decision to approve the pipeline’s placement near the reservation rather than the majority-white city of Bismarck was problematic.
“That crossing was really why so many people showed up, because this was a symbol of blatant environmental injustice and environmental racism,” she said.
Steven Wolf says so far the Army Corps has already received tens of thousands of comments. However, many of them are form letters, which the Corps considers a single comment even if it is sent in by thousands of people. Wolf said the agency will respond to every unique issue raised. He estimated a final environmental impact statement on the section in question will take at least a year to complete.
Begay said the public comment period open now is an important opportunity for people to hold the federal government accountable.
“These laws that protect our landscapes, our water, our biodiversity, are really the things keeping us from seeing total destruction and disregard for our clean water and for environmental justice,” she said. “We have to keep the pressure on.”
“Nonstick,” “waterproof” and “stain-resistant” are all commonplace terms that are self-explanatory.
But the “forever chemicals” behind the coatings that give products the ability to resist grease, water and oil are not so well-known, it turns out.
A new study conducted by AgriLife scientists at Texas A&M University is the first generalized survey in the United States to test public awareness and knowledge of perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) forever chemicals. The researchers found that most Americans have no knowledge of the substances and are not aware of their potential associated risks, a press release from the Texas Water Resources Institute (TWRI) said.
“This is the first survey of its kind, and what we found is that the vast majority of people do not have a clear understanding of PFAS,” said Allen Berthold, interim director of TWRI and the study’s lead author, in the press release.
There are thousands of manufactured chemicals that fall under the category of PFAS. They are an ever-growing threat to the environment and human health, as they are not easily broken down or gotten rid of. This is because they have one of the strongest possible chemical bonds, that of the molecules carbon and fluorine.
The study, “Let’s talk about PFAS: Inconsistent public awareness about PFAS and its sources in the United States,” was published in the journal PLOS One.
Since the 1940s, PFAS compounds have been used in products from nonstick cookware to food wrappers and many other consumer products, as well as in firefighting foam, according to the press release. PFAS levels have been found in food, soil and air, and toxic amounts have been detected in U.S. drinking water.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed a national drinking water standard for PFAS in March. However, most consumers have no idea there is a problem.
“When I ask an audience at a public presentation if they’ve ever heard of PFAS, usually only a few people from a room of 100 will say yes, and that’s fairly consistent with these survey results,” Berthold said in the press release. “PFAS in drinking water has received media and regulatory attention this year, but the general public’s awareness of the contaminant had not been measured until this research.”
The research team analyzed and measured Americans’ knowledge of and experience with PFAS, as well as their perceptions of potential health and environmental risks associated with the compounds.
They found that 45.1 percent had never heard of forever chemicals, while 31.6 had heard of PFAS, but had no knowledge of what they were. Most respondents, 97.4 percent, did not believe PFAS impacted their drinking water, and just 11.4 percent knew that their community had experienced PFAS exposure.
The U.S. Geological Survey came out with research in July that showed at least 45 percent of the country’s drinking water was estimated to be contaminated with one or more kinds of PFAS chemicals.
“Research has come out in the last year showing that many Americans are exposed to PFAS, including through drinking water supplies, whether they know it or not,” said co-author of the study Audrey McCrary, program specialist with TWRI, in the press release. “So, a significant knowledge gap here needs to be addressed.”
Michael Schramm, TWRI research specialist and co-author of the study, said community exposure was the strongest indicator of PFAS awareness in the study.
“However, of the people aware they were exposed to PFAS, approximately half stated they did not know what PFAS were,” Schramm said in the press release. “This indicates a large gap in the information being provided to the public.”
According to the study, respondents who were aware of community exposure to PFAS had a higher likelihood of knowing the sources of PFAS, altering their use of items that could potentially be contaminated with the toxic compounds and answering that their sources of drinking water were also contaminated.
Across the U.S., 1,100 respondents from all 50 states participated in the online survey.
The survey found no significant differences in experience, knowledge and perceptions of risk regarding PFAS across various demographics.
“It was very notable that there was no statistical difference depending on race, gender or age — perception was largely the same across the board,” said deVilleneuve in the press release. “This research was a fact-finding effort and gives us baseline data moving forward as interest in PFAS remediation continues to grow.”
In March 2022, the world pledged to negotiate a treaty addressing the “full life cycle” of plastics. Twenty months later, countries still can’t agree on what that means.
A third round of talks over the global plastics treaty ended in frustration this weekend, as so-called “low-ambition” countries hindered progress by litigating the definition of basic terms like “plastics” and “life cycle.” Observers noted some signs of progress — like growing support for measures to address harmful chemicals that are commonly added to plastics. However, negotiators now have no formal work plan for the five months leading up to the next round of discussions and are significantly behind schedule, according to several advocacy groups that Grist spoke with.
“These negotiations have so far failed to deliver on their promise … to advance a strong, binding plastics treaty that the world desperately needs,” said Ana Rocha, global plastics policy director for the nonprofit Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, or GAIA, in a statement. Another nonprofit, the Center for International Environmental Law, said in a press release that without a “rapid course correction,” the treaty would “succumb to inertia and eventual disaster.”
Last week’s talks were part of a process that’s been ongoing since March 2022, when countries agreed to craft a treaty to “end plastic pollution” by addressing its entire life cycle. The first tworounds of discussions — conducted by an Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee, or INC, composed of representatives from each country — were dominated by broad and often procedural conversations, with lots of stalling from oil-producing countries.
This latest session, held at the United Nations Environment Programme headquarters in Nairobi, Kenya, was the first time delegates had a so-called “zero draft” to spar over: basically, a laundry list of potential definitions, objectives, and other considerations for the final agreement, which countries agreed to have ready by the end of next year. Hopes were high that delegates would read through the draft together, make some recommendations, and give the secretariat a mandate to prepare an official first draft by the beginning of the fourth — and penultimate — negotiating committee session in April.
That’s not what happened.
From the outset, a small group of oil-exporting countries including Russia and Saudi Arabia argued that the zero draft did not reflect all countries’ perspectives and therefore could not serve as the basis for negotiations. To assuage these concerns, the secretariat allowed countries to submit some 500 additional proposals, causing the draft to more than triple in length from its original 31 pages. This process was meant to build trust among negotiators — now, there would be no absolutely no way for countries to say their voice hadn’t been heard.
Delegates meet in plenary on the final day of the third INC session in Nairobi, Kenya. Tony Karumba / AFP via Getty Images
Bjorn Beeler, general manager and international coordinator for the nonprofit International Pollutants Elimination Network, or IPEN, said this was a positive outcome: “More countries own more of the text,” he said, and discussions around different submissions helped further negotiators’ understanding of complex issues. Representatives from the International Alliance of Waste Pickers — a group representing the more than 20 million informal workers who collect and sell recyclable trash, mostly in the developing world — were also able to use this process to suggest more language about a “just transition” for these workers.
Some observers, however, said many of the new submissions to the zero draft were unproductive.
“‘Repetitive’ is a light way to say it,” Rocha told Grist. “Ninety percent of them were watering down the content” of the text.
Rocha said the flood of submissions forestalled more important discussions on the treaty’s substance. Rather than moving onto a new draft, the secretariat is now planning to present an updated version of the zero draft ahead of the INC’s fourth meeting.
Adding to the disorder, member states on Sunday ran out of time to reach an agreement on “intersessional work” — the important discussions that happen between negotiating sessions. Because there are only two week-long INC meetings remaining before a final draft is due at the end of next year, this intersessional work is considered critical for progress on issues like what to do about hazardous chemicals and microplastics, and how to finance the treaty.
Jacob Kean-Hammerson, an ocean campaigner for the nonprofit Environmental Investigation Agency, said discussions among negotiators will still happen, but they will now be on a strictly informal, voluntary basis. “It’s not a good outcome,” he said, but it wasn’t an accident: “What we saw is just a few countries holding the process to ransom, and not wanting anything out of this treaty.”
Perhaps the biggest sticking point was over the scope of the agreement — whether it should limit plastic production or focus mostly on cleaning up the oceans and preventing litter. Even though countries already agreed at the beginning of the treaty process to address plastics’ “full life cycle” — a term that traditionally refers to everything from production to disposal — oil-producing countries have repeatedly argued for a narrower interpretation of that mandate. This time, members of a loosely defined “group of like-minded countries” — which includes Bahrain, China, Cuba, Iran, and Saudi Arabia — said the plastics life cycle should only begin when a product is disposed of.
Activists call for plastic reduction outside the third INC session in Nairobi, Kenya. Luis Tato / AFP via Getty Images
“It makes no logical sense,” Beeler said. To him, it looks like a desperate scramble from oil-producing countries to undo the mandate they already agreed to in March 2022, in response to proposals that are more ambitious than they may have expected. “I don’t think Saudi Arabia or Russia would have ever imagined 18 months ago that we’d actually be looking at controls on polymers.”
Some environmental advocates have also resisted the phrase “life cycle,” but for different reasons: They say it implies a circular life cycle for plastics, in which products can be turned back into new items in an infinite loop. In reality, only 9 percent of plastic waste is recycled globally, and most products can only be recycled a few times before they have to be discarded.
Still, “life cycle” is in the original treaty resolution — and experts told Grist it would be very difficult to remove it.
A majority of countries have expressed support for some sort of mechanism to address plastic production. But the structure of the INC meetings has given outsize power to countries who refuse to negotiate in good faith. At present, all decision-making has to happen by consensus rather than a majority vote, making obstructionism relatively straightforward. Some observers described oil-producing countries’ delegates as “intransigent.”
With just two more meetings and a little over a year left before a final draft of the treaty is due, some observers wondered whether more time will be needed. It’s unclear what kind of progress the so-called “high-ambition coalition” of countries will be able to make at future INC meetings without more cooperation from the oil-producing nations — especially on the critical issue of plastic production, which is expected to nearly triple by 2060, outpacing the capacity for waste collection services and recycling to keep up.
“Major plastic producers just don’t see a connection between plastic production and plastic pollution,” Beeler told Grist.
Beeler resisted some of the most pessimistic assessments of the INC meeting. Progress is going slower than many activists had hoped for, he said, but the plastics conversation in general has ramped up very fast and most countries still need time to develop their national positions.
To get resistant countries to engage at the next INC, he suggested that it might be helpful to steer the conversation toward reduced growth of the plastics sector. “It’s very hard to say you have to cap production,” Beeler said, especially to countries like Russia that are geopolitically isolated and dependent on fossil fuels. “We have to have a serious discussion about how we deescalate the rapid growth of plastic production.”
Trees and other plants are known for their air purifying capabilities, providing oxygen to the millions of species on our planet. Planting more trees and preserving the ones we have has been one of the strategies being used to help mitigate the effects of the climate crisis.
A new study using more realistic modeling suggests that plants may be capable of absorbing even more carbon dioxide produced by human activities than previously estimated.
However, the researchers emphasized that their findings do not mean governments can slow down the reduction of carbon emissions in the fight against climate change, a press release from Trinity College Dublin said.
Plants absorb carbon from the atmosphere and convert it into sugars used for metabolism and growth through the process of photosynthesis.
“Plants take up a substantial amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) every year, thereby slowing down the detrimental effects of climate change, but the extent to which they will continue this CO2 uptake into the future has been uncertain,” said lead author of the study Dr. Jürgen Knauer of the Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment at Western Sydney University, according to the press release. “What we found is that a well-established climate model that is used to feed into global climate predictions made by the likes of the IPCC predicts stronger and sustained carbon uptake until the end of the 21st century when it accounts for the impact of some critical physiological processes that govern how plants conduct photosynthesis.”
Scientists have historically been unclear on how the carbon uptake benefits provided by vegetation will respond to changes in temperatures, rainfall and carbon dioxide levels as the climate crisis progresses. For instance, more extreme heat and droughts might significantly weaken the capacity of terrestrial ecosystems to act as carbon sinks.
“We accounted for aspects like how efficiently carbon dioxide can move through the interior of the leaf, how plants adjust to changes in temperatures, and how plants most economically distribute nutrients in their canopy. These are three really important mechanisms that affect a plant’s ability to ‘fix’ carbon, yet they are commonly ignored in most global models,” Knauer said.
The study, “Higher global gross primary productivity under future climate with more advanced representations of photosynthesis,” was published in the journal Science Advances.
The new modeling looked at a climate scenario with high emissions in order to test how the carbon uptake of plants would respond to worldwide climate change until 2100, the press release said.
The research team examined versions of the model with varying complexities and realistic depictions of plants’ physiological processes. The most simplistic version did not take into account the three essential physiological mechanisms of photosynthesis, but the most complicated version took all three into account.
The researchers found that the more complex models consistently predicted greater increases in the carbon uptake of vegetation across the planet. They found that the processes reinforced each other, as they would in the real world, strengthening their effects when combined.
“Because the majority of terrestrial biosphere models used to assess the global carbon sink are located at the lower end of this complexity range, accounting only partially for these mechanisms or ignoring them altogether, it is likely that we are currently underestimating climate change effects on vegetation as well as its resilience to changes in climate. We often think about climate models as being all about physics, but biology plays a huge role and it is something that we really need to account for,” said Silvia Caldararu, an assistant professor in Trinity’s School of Natural Sciences who was part of the research team, in the press release.
Caldararu went on to say that the findings of the study could help scientists better assess potential solutions to the climate crisis found in the natural world.
“These kinds of predictions have implications for nature-based solutions to climate change such as reforestation and afforestation and how much carbon such initiatives can take up. Our findings suggest these approaches could have a larger impact in mitigating climate change and over a longer time period than we thought,” Caldararu said. “However, simply planting trees will not solve all our problems. We absolutely need to cut down emissions from all sectors. Trees alone cannot offer humanity a get out of jail free card.”
Members of the United Auto Workers have overwhelmingly approved a contract that will deliver higher wages, assure them of a role in the EV transition, and possibly lead toward greater unionization of the auto sector. With all of the benefits the pact provides, tens of thousands of people will immediately see their pay rise more than 40 percent, the union said.
The union’s ratification of the pact, by a margin of 64 percent, with Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis followed a two-month strike. Though the electric vehicle transition was never an explicit part of bargaining, it ran as a simultaneously tense and hopeful undercurrent through the walkouts, pickets, and negotiations. This contract, analysts say, will allow the union’s 150,000 members to maintain their quality of life as the nation decarbonizes the transportation sector.
“Those are all huge wins,” said Albert Wheaton, director of the Cornell Institute for Labor Studies. “The biggest wins by far have been for the lower paid workers.”
Under the contract, the base wage paid to workers will increase 25 percent, while the top wage will climb 33 percent. It also provides cost-of-living adjustments and eliminates the two-tiered wage system that saw new hires permanently earn lower wages than veterans. Temporary workers will see their pay jump 150 percent, and the pact cuts from eight to three the number of years required to reach the top pay level.
The agreement with Stellantis also provides for the reopening of a plant that the automaker had planned to close in Belvidere, Illinois, and will add 1,000 jobs at an EV battery plant in the same town.
Workers at Ford and Stellantis overwhelmingly supported the contract; the margin was tighter at GM at just 55 percent, according to Reuters and the Washington Post. The union had already secured an agreement with GM to include new EV and battery factories in the contract; similar victories were seen with Stellantis, Labor Notes reported, though the union’s win was less pronounced at Ford, where two current EV plants are included in the deal, but all future ventures will have to be organized by UAW separately.
Union president Shawn Fein promised on Monday to bring the fight to other automakers.
“The Stand Up Strike was just the beginning,” he said in a statement. “The UAW is back to setting the standard. Now, we take our strike muscle and our fighting spirit to the rest of the industries we represent, and to millions of nonunion workers ready to stand up and fight for a better way of life.”
The strike has already improved conditions at other automakers. Even as the UAW announced its win, Toyota factories in Kentucky and Alabama — a major player in the EV space — had already raised their base wage to $28 per hour. A nascent, not-yet-public union drive has started at Tesla, a notorious union-buster. Hyundai, which operates electric vehicle battery plants in the South, has said it will raise factory pay beginning next year.
Almost as soon as the contracts were announced on October 31, automakers expressed concern about their impact on EV production and sales. The workers’ gains, analysts warned, could hobble the nascent transition by increasing costs or impacting the speed with which manufacturers could produce the cars. Ford, for example, has estimated the new contract will add $850 to $900 in labor costs per vehicle, according to Reuters. In the weeks since the UAW and Detroit automakers announced the contracts, there have been increasing signs that the relatively high cost of EVs, coupled with softening demand, could slow the transition.
“The auto industry has always been cyclical,” Wheaton said. With new technologies and safety laws, the industry ebbs and flows.
Wheaton said the contracts may provide workers with greater security, particularly the provision that allows them to strike over plant closures, while also allowing union shops to transition from internal combustion vehicles to electrics in a controlled way.
“It helps stabilize those existing plants by saying, ‘No, we make parts for both gas and electric cars,’” Wheaton said, rather than opening separate factories in an economy that may not fully support them yet. With the elimination of wage tiers, workers at idled plants will also be able to move more easily to other locations without a huge decrease in pay, he said.
Mijin Cha, an assistant professor of social sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz, sees the strike as the vanguard of labor fights that will characterize the transition away from fossil fuels. She says characterizing the UAW’s win, and any that may follow, in a “jobs versus environment” framework would be a mistake. Policies like the Inflation Reduction Act, while groundbreaking, often benefit private sector companies, not workers, and it isn’t labor, but fossil fuel producers and other entrenched industries, that hampers efforts to decarbonize.
“The greed of the fossil fuel industry is what’s stopping the energy transition,” she said, “not the fact that people want to make a decent wage.”
A government commission in Ohio has decided to open some state parks and wildlife areas to fracking.
The decision comes amid an investigation on allegations of possible fraudulent support from an industry group representing energy companies, The Associated Press reported.
The Ohio Department of Natural Resources Oil and Gas Land Management Commission (OGLMC) greenlit multiple fracking proposals on land owned by Ohio Department of Natural Resources and the Ohio Department of Transportation, according to a report by The Associated Press.
The commissioners held a meeting to consider the applications, and many environmentalists showed up to protest.
After one member of the audience threw play money on the ground in front of commissioners in protest, the commissioner chair Ryan Richardson responded, “I’m going to ask again that we can show respect to the commissioners,” Ideastream Public Media reported.
The protestor responded, “Why should we show respect when you are not respecting us, and you’re giving away our land to profit-making oil and gas? Why should we sit here and let you do that?”
Days before the decision, Ohio Senate Democrats sent a letter to OGLMC, asking them to decline the applications to frack in state parks.
“These applications, if approved, would very likely lead to disastrous consequences, not only for the cleanliness and wellbeing of our state parks, but also for the health and safety of our fellow Ohioans who live near and visit these peaceful refuges,” the letter said. “If the Commission is not prepared to outright reject all applications for fracking under Ohio’s state parks, we hope that these concerns, shared both by us and by many Ohioans, at least give you pause. We strongly urge that you consider outright rejecting or at minimum, delaying these applications.”
Ultimately, the commission approved three applications for Salt Fork State Park, three in Valley Run Wildlife Area, one in the Zepernick Wildlife Area, and one for a property in Belmont County that is owned by the Ohio Department of Transportation.
Fracking has technically been legal on Ohio public lands since 2011, The Allegheny Front reported. Previous language included that state agencies “may” lease state lands for fracking, but recent amendments changed that language to “shall.”
There is an ongoing investigation following claims of possible fraud regarding public support for fracking on Ohio’s public lands. Cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer reported that there were allegedly nearly 150 public comment letters in support of opening up land parcels for fracking with names of people who say they didn’t authorize the letters. Cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer reported that they traced these comments back to two groups that advocate and lobby for natural gas industry campaigns. The Consumer Energy Alliance has disputed the claims and questioned the Cleveland.com’s and The Plain Dealer’s investigation and reporting.
Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost responded in September 2023 that he would investigate the situation. A spokesperson for Yost told The Associated Press the investigation is ongoing.
Bidding nominations can begin starting in January 2024, but protestors have said they will continue to show up to the meetings.
“At a time when the science is telling us we have to stop all the oil and gas, instead we’re doing this in our parks,” Cathy Cowan Becker, a member of Save Ohio Parks, told The Associated Press. “We’re rightfully really angry about this.”
European Union (EU) member states and lawmakers have reached an agreement to stop exports of certain types of waste, including plastics, to countries outside the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) group of mostly rich countries starting in mid-2026.
“Exports of certain non-hazardous wastes and mixtures of non-hazardous wastes… will be allowed only to those non-OECD countries that consent and fulfil the criteria to treat such waste in an environmentally sound manner,” the European Parliament said, as reported by Reuters.
Compliance with the rights of international workers will also be taken into account, Parliament added.
In 2021, the European Commission proposed a revision of waste shipment rules in the EU in order to make it more difficult for member countries to ship their trash to poorer nations.
“The EU will finally assume responsibility for its plastic waste by banning its export to non-OECD countries,” said Pernille Weiss, a member of the European parliament from Denmark who was director of the proposal, as The Associated Press reported.
Parliament said EU member states must stop exporting their plastic waste to poorer countries, adding that plastic waste export rules for OECD countries would be made stricter as well, reported Reuters.
In past years, about half of waste exports from the EU have gone to non-OECD countries that have less-strict waste management rules.
“Once again, we follow our vision that waste is a resource when it is properly managed, but should not in any case be causing harm to the environment or human health,” Weiss added, as The Guardian reported.
The European Parliament and Council must formally approve the new rules before they can take effect, as well as completely stop exports to non-OECD nations and set stricter rules on plastic waste exports to rich countries.
After five years, nations can request a lifting of the ban if they would like to import plastic waste from the EU as long as they show they are capable of treating it properly.
Less than a third of the plastic in Europe that gets thrown away is recycled and most gets burned.
“Whilst this is an improvement to current obligations, the evidence of the harms and necessity for a full plastic waste ban are clear. This is a signal that the EU is finally beginning to take responsibility for its role in the global plastic pollution emergency,” said Lauren Weir, an ocean activist from the Environmental Investigation Agency, as The Guardian reported.
Some types of non-plastic waste could still be exported to non-OECD nations if they meet specific environmental and social requirements.
“[I]t is disappointing to not see a total export ban on shipments – and not even a ban on hazardous and mixed plastic waste – to Turkey, which is both the largest importer of plastic waste in the EU and an OECD member,” said Sedat Gündoğdu, a microplastics researcher at Turkey’s Çukurova University, as reported by The Guardian. “We know from past practices that partial bans and ineffective content controls do not prevent the illegal circulation of plastic waste.”
Kitchen Arts & Letters, a legendary cookbook store on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, is tiny — just 750 square feet — but not an inch of space is wasted. With roughly 12,000 different cookbooks and a staff of former chefs and food academics, it’s the land of plenty for those seeking guidance beyond the typical weekday recipe.
One table is piled high with new cookbooks about ramen, eggs, and the many uses of whey, the overflow stacked in leaning towers above the shelves along the walls. One bookcase is packed with nothing but titles about fish. And next to a robust vegetarian section at the back of the store, tucked in a corner, is a minuscule collection of cookbooks about sustainability and climate change.
Natalie Stroud, a sales associate at Kitchen Arts & Letters, pointed me to the five titles featured there. “It’s hard,” she said, “because there aren’t many. But it’s something we’re trying to build out as it becomes more popular.”
The sustainable cookbook section at Kitchen Arts & Letters in New York. Caroline Saunders
One of the cookbooks is Eating for Pleasure, People, and Planetby British chef Tom Hunt. I flip to a recipe titled “a rutabaga pretending to be ham” (with cross-hatching that would make a honey-baked ham blush) and a Dan Barber-inspired “rotation risotto” starring a dealer’s choice of sustainably grown grains. Next to it is Perfectly Good Food: A Totally Achievable Zero Waste Approach to Home Cooking by restaurateur sisters Margaret and Irene Li, full of mad-lib recipes for wilting ingredients like “an endlessly riffable fruit crisp” and a saag paneer that grants ingredients like carrot tops a compost-bin pardon.
Climate cookbooks seem to be picking up speed in parallel to a trend toward sustainable eating. In 2016, the term “climatarian” entered the Cambridge Dictionary — referring to a person who bases their diet on the lowest possible carbon footprint. In 2020, a survey by the global market research company YouGov found that 1 in 5 U.S. millennials had changed their diets to help the climate. If you consider a climate cookbook to be one that was written, at least in part, to address the dietary changes necessitated by the climate crisis, you can see a whisper of a subgenre beginning to emerge. At least a dozen have been published since 2020.
These cookbooks might play an important role in the transition to sustainable diets. It’s one thing — and certainly a useful thing — for scientists and international organizations to tell people how diets need to change to mitigate and adapt to the climate crisis. It’s another to bring the culinary path forward to life in actual dishes and ingredients. And recipe developers and cookbook authors, whose whole shtick is knowing what will feel doable and inspiring in the glow of the refrigerator light, might be the ones to do it.
A photo of me chopping onions and garlic for the “Anything-in-the-Kitchen Pasta” from the cookbook “Perfectly Good Food.” Haley Saunders
I’ve been thinking about this handoff from science communicators to the culinary crowd for a while. I worked at Grist until I went to Le Cordon Bleu Paris to learn how to make sustainable desserts. (Climate cuisine is dead on arrival without good cake.) Now a recipe tester and Substacker with my own dream of a one-day cookbook, I find myself wondering what this early wave of climate cookbooks is serving for dinner.
What does climate cooking mean? And willthese cookbooks have any impact on the way average people cook and eat? The emerging genre of climate cookbooks puts a big idea on the menu: that there won’t be one way to eat sustainably in a warming world, but many — à la carte style.
Mia Torres / Grist
Cookbooks about sustainable ways of eating are nothing new, even if they haven’t used the climate label. M.F.K. Fisher’s World War II-era book How to Cook a Wolf found beauty in cooking what you have and wasting nothing. The comforting recipes in the Moosewood Cookbook helped American vegetarianism unfurl its wings in the 1970s. Eating locally and seasonally is familiar, too. Edna Lewis spread it out on a Virginia table in The Taste of Country Cooking, and Alice Waters turned it into a prix fixe menu and various cookbooks at her Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse.
But until recently, if you wanted to read about food and climate change, you had to turn to the nonfiction shelves. Books like The Fate of Food by Amanda Little (for which I was a research intern) and The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan swirl the two topics together as smoothly as chocolate and vanilla soft serve, albeit through a journalistic rather than culinary lens. The way we eat is both a driver of climate change — the food system accounts for a third of global greenhouse gas emissions — and an accessible solution. Unlike energy or transportation or the gruel that is national politics, our diets are a problem with solutions as close as the ends of our forks.
It seems only natural that consideration for the climate would eventually waft into recipe writing and cookbooks. In 2019, NYT Cooking created a collection of climate-friendly recipes, albeit a sparse one by their standards, focused on meat alternatives, sustainable seafood, and vegan dishes. In 2021, Epicurious announced it would stop publishing new recipes containing beef, which is about 40 times more carbon-intensive than beans. In parallel, climate cookbooks have begun to proliferate, and so far, they’re offering varied entry points to sustainable eating.
A few recent food waste cookbooks want home cooks to know one thing: that simply using all our food is an undersung climate solution — one often overshadowed by red meat’s gaudier climate villainy. The research organization Project Drawdown lists reducing food waste as the climate solution that could cut the most emissions (closely followed by adopting plant-rich diets), a fact that caught Margaret Li’s attention when she and her sister Irene were writing Perfectly Good Food.
“That kind of blew my mind,” she said. “For people worried about the environment, you think, ‘I should get an electric car, I should eat vegetarian.’ But then you waste all this food and throw it in the landfill. It seems like a pretty important connection to make for people.”
One: Pot, Pan, Planetby the “queen of greens” Anna Jones offers another way in, tinkering with a weeknight style of vegetarianism to make it even better for the environment. Her brightly flavored recipes, which have earned her comparisons to Nigella Lawson and Yotam Ottolenghi, streamline kitchen appliance use (hence: one pot, one pan), saving a lot of time and a little energy and money, too.
Jones has also honed her vegetarian shopping list over time. “The ingredients I’m drawn to have definitely changed,” she said. She now offers substitutions for dairy and eggs as a matter of course (you can use vegan ricotta in her sweet corn and green chili pasta, if you wish!), and she deemphasizes certain plant-based ingredients that come with environmental or social baggage. Water-guzzling almonds and often exploitatively produced chocolate appear on a “tread lightly” list, along with the recommendation to think of them as special treats rather than everyday staples.
Other cookbooks take a different approach, offering home cooks a fully developed set of what we might call climate cooking principles.
When chef Tom Hunt wrote his 2020 cookbook Eating for Pleasure, People, and Planet, his goal was “to cover food sustainability in its entirety.” It opens with his “root-to-fruit manifesto,” which he translated from an academic book for a home cook audience and boiled down to a few ideas: plant-based, low-waste, and climate cuisine. By “climate cuisine” he means using local and seasonal ingredients, sourcing from labor- and land-conscious vendors (consider the cover crop, would you, in your next risotto?), and eating a rainbow of biodiverse foods.
Eating seasonally and locally are sometimes dismissed from the climate conversation because they don’t save much carbon, according to experts. But some argue that seasonal food tastes better and can help eaters steer away from climate red flags. Skipping out-of-season produce avoids food grown in energy-sucking greenhouses and stuff that’s flown in by plane, like delicate berries. (Air travel is the only mode of transport that makes food miles a big deal.) And local food comes with an oft-forgotten green flag: Buying from nearby farms strengthens regional food economies, which makes the food system more resilient to climate events and other shocks.
Hunt also makes the case for putting biodiversity on the plate. “Biodiversity has always felt like one of the key elements of this whole situation that we’re in,” he said. Today, nearly half of all the calories people eat around the world come from just three plants: wheat, rice, and maize. “That kind of monoculture is very fragile,” he explained. “People often don’t realize that our food is linked to biodiversity, and the diversity of the food that we eat can support biodiversity in general.”
A use-what-you-have citrus cake I recently made, from the cookbook “Perfectly Good Food.” Caroline Saunders
Biodiversity is also a through line in For People and Planet — a collaboration between the United Nations and the nonprofit Kitchen Connection Alliance with recipes contributed by star chefs, Indigenous home cooks, and farmers. (We’ll call it the U.N. cookbook, since these titles otherwise threaten to blend into an alliterative purée). Its recipes are a global tour of plant-forward culinary biodiversity, like a West African moringa pesto pasta and banana-millet croquettes rolled in puffed amaranth that looks like teensy popcorn.
Published last year, the cookbook is divided into five big ideas: biodiversity, food and climate change, reducing food waste, sustainable consumption, and the food system. The topics came from a U.N. food systems summit, said Earlene Cruz, who is the founder and director of Kitchen Connection Alliance and who compiled the cookbook. They were the ones that “consumers needed more information on, but could also be contributors to in a positive way.”
The chapters on sustainable consumption and the food system argue that a sustainable eating philosophy isn’t complete without consideration of — among other things — resilience and nutrition. What does that mean in dinner form? In Nunavut, Canada, it might mean choosing grilled Arctic char, because it’s part of a nutritionally and culturally important Inuit fishing economy. (Folks in other parts should source it carefully, since seafood is environmentally complicated.) Among the Maasai Indigenous community in Kenya, it might mean serving enkum, a starchy side dish that uses low-cost veggies, since frequent droughts and social unrest make food prices high. The chapters stress communities’ ability to feed themselves healthily, on their own terms, regardless of what climate disruptions may come or what industrial food supply chains may peddle.
The U.N. cookbook raises an important idea: that there won’t be one sustainable diet around the world, but many. Still, the mix of considerations it tosses into the pan — water scarcity, nutrition, food sovereignty, biodiversity, pollution — might leave home cooks slightly overwhelmed. You might shut the book, stomach rumbling, and wonder: OK, well, what should I make for dinner if I care about people and the planet?
Mia Torres / Grist
Coming up with recipes for the planet’s well-being involves a number of considerations. How do you come up with a climate cooking philosophy that’s scientifically rigorous and approachable? What do you do about regionality — the fact that some things, like tomatoes, can be grown sustainably in one part of the world, but might require a greenhouse to grow elsewhere? And how do you handle the climate-offender-in-chief — meat?
Most of the climate cookbook authors mentioned above allow for diets that include animal products. They generally don’t want to turn off omnivores, but the overtures they make to meat-eating vary. Hunt’s cookbook Eating for Pleasure, People, and Planet is plant-based, but he includes advice on sourcing meat and fish sustainably for those who do indulge. The U.N. cookbook opted to include some meat recipes, like a South African beef dish called bobotie that could counter childhood malnutrition. Cruz, who compiled the cookbook, is vegetarian; she just doesn’t like the taste of meat. But, she explains, “if I’m putting my personal views aside, some cultures do need to eat meat to sustain themselves.”
Bobotie is a homey dish of curried, spiced meat and fruit topped with an egg custard. Getty Images
More complicated is picking an ingredient list that will be sustainable for everyone who might use the cookbook, regardless of geography, culture, or socioeconomic status. Amy Trubek, a professor in the department of nutrition and food sciences at the University of Vermont, thinks this is one of the biggest challenges climate cookbook authors will face.
“The glossy cookbook genre now, it’s a hard situation in a way,” she said, “because they’re supposed to be pitching it to any middle- or upper-middle-class consumer anywhere in the United States, and they could be living in a penthouse apartment in Chicago, or they could be living in a ranch in New Mexico. So how do you teach about [sustainable eating] without thinking about specificity and regionality?”
Cookbook authors have a few options. They could write a regionally specific cookbook, or a mass-market one starring ingredients that grow sustainably in lots of places (as One did). Or they could write a cookbook that samples vast biodiversity at some cost to sourceability — that’s the approach the U.N. cookbook took.
“There are many cookbooks that could … have 90 percent of the recipes be part of your staple at home,” Cruz said. “But that serves a different purpose.” The U.N. cookbook is instead “almost a launching point into everyone’s own culinary exploration and everyone’s own culinary journey.”
That exploratory emphasis — embodied not just in the recipes but in accompanying carbon and nutrition calculations and in principles that offer starting points rather than answers — puts it at one end of the spectrum in the balance these authors strike between nuance and approachability, science and art. As Cruz put it, “What we wanted to create was sort of a textbook in disguise.”
A meringue recipe from “Eating for Pleasure, People, and Planet” that stars whipped aquafaba — chickpea water — an ingredient that usually gets dumped down the drain. Caroline Saunders
The recipe helps prevent food waste, and introduces readers to a plant-based substitute for egg whites. Caroline Saunders
One, on the other hand, was always meant to make people pull out a cutting board. Jones includes no small measure of environmental nuance — she tucks articles on issues like soil health and ethical sourcing between her recipe chapters — but her recipes themselves don’t ask the cook to do anything other than make weeknight meals with supermarket ingredients. “I could have foraged for sea buckthorn and written a chapter on sea asparagus,” she laughs, “and I would love for everyone to be foraging. But that’s not the reality … I wanted to write a sustainable cookbook, but I also wanted to write a cookbook filled with recipes people could make.”
No matter the topic, writing a cookbook is a big undertaking. Authors develop 100 or more recipes, typically handing them off to recipe testers in batches to poke, prod, and polish to infallibility. And while roughly 20 million cookbooks are sold in the U.S. each year, the field is ever more crowded, so it’s harder to stand out.
For now, the climate cookbooks shelf is still tiny, and it’s hard to know which ones readers might be most tempted to pick up — let alone which, if any, might actually create meaningful shifts in what and how we eat.
“People buy cookbooks for myriad reasons,” wrote Matt Sartwell, the managing partner of Kitchen Arts & Letters, in an email to Grist. “But if there is anything that people will pay for — recipes and information being free and abundant on the internet — it’s a clear point of view and the promise that an author has given a subject very serious thought.”
One: Pot, Pan, Planet is Jones’ best-selling cookbook to date, despite the fact that leaning into sustainability “felt like a bit of a risk,” she said.
She has a hunch about why it’s been popular. “People want to try and make a difference,” she said. “I think it felt comforting for people to have a book full of recipes that it felt OK to eat.”
