In the 20 months since Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which offered billions in subsidies for clean energy projects and electric vehicles, President Joe Biden has sought to supplement those climate carrots with a few key sticks. The Environmental Protection Agency has in recent months raced to roll them out, in the form of key regulations that penalize carbon emissions from power plants, oil wells, and passenger cars, under an effort to finalize new rules before the election.

The administration on Friday finalized the last of those rules, a set of strict standards for carbon emissions from big rigs and other heavy-duty vehicles. This regulation has been among the most controversial Biden climate rules, in large part because it pushes up against the limits of available technology: Freight companies and trucking industry advocates have argued that the rule could force them to abandon diesel engines before electric drivetrains are ready to replace them in long-haul tractor-trailers. The EPA weakened the rule from an earlier version in response to those concerns, delaying the mandate for the largest trucks by a few years.

But the rule goes beyond long-haul trucking. It also applies to a wide range of other heavy-duty vehicles, including garbage trucks, box trucks, cement mixers, and school buses. These vehicles spew toxic air pollution just like 18-wheelers, but they travel far fewer miles and carry lighter loads, making them easier to replace with electric models.

“When you look at the share of vehicles, even in the tractor-trailer space, a huge chunk of those don’t travel more than 250 miles per day,” said Dave Cooke, a vehicles analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a climate advocacy organization. “There is a significant chunk of the sector that could be electrified now, because a large portion of it has these really distinct routes.” The rule will apply to about 11 million heavy-duty vehicles in the United States.

The trucking industry’s opposition to the rule has centered on what EV drivers often call range anxiety: Tractor-trailers have to haul heavy loads down interstate highways for hours at a time, and many existing batteries aren’t quite up to the task of replacing diesel engines over such long ranges. Furthermore, the few electric tractor-trailers on the market right now are several times more expensive than conventional models, and there are few places to charge them. The Biden administration has sought to remedy this infrastructure gap with a “zero-emission freight corridors strategy” that will channel chargers and grid investments toward interstates that carry an outsize share of long-haul freight.

But a large percentage of trucks and heavy-duty vehicles don’t make long trips and so don’t need to worry so much about range. Garbage trucks, city buses, and delivery vehicles, for example, travel just a few hundred miles each day at most, within the range of current battery technology, and they return to a depot or warehouse where they can charge overnight. 

Even the Clean Freight Coalition, which represents freight companies and truck dealers, has found that most of these vehicles could go electric using available technology. A recent report from the group found that electric models on the market right now could handle 93 percent of medium-duty trucking routes, with only the longest 7 percent requiring more juice than current batteries can offer. That’s compared to just half of all tractor-trailer routes, according to the report.

The electric transition among short-haul vehicles is already happening in many parts of the country. The Biden administration has doled out billions of dollars to cities like Baltimore to roll out electric school buses, and companies like Amazon have deployed a growing number of electric Rivian delivery trucks on package routes. 

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The nation’s most ambitious effort is afoot in California, which has been seeking federal permission to impose even stricter truck emissions standards than the EPA. It has been making an aggressive push to decarbonize short-haul trucking, otherwise known as drayage. Trucks unloading freight from the nation’s two biggest ports, in Los Angeles and Long Beach, California, make thousands of trips through residential neighborhoods, and the state is pushing companies to go electric and improve air quality in those areas.

The Biden administration’s new rule sets a faster timeline for things like delivery vans and utility trucks than it does for tractor-trailers. The standards for those smaller vehicles start in the 2027 model year, but standards for “sleeper cab” long-haul rigs don’t take effect until 2030, a change that represents a big concession to concerns from the trucking industry. 

“We thank [EPA] for addressing industry concern about the challenges of the early years of the rule, and we remain committed to upholding the spirit of this regulation,” Sean Waters, an executive at the major trucking company Daimler, said in a statement following the rule’s announcement.

Like the EPA’s previous rule on passenger cars, the truck rule is “technology neutral,” meaning it doesn’t mandate an electric transition. Instead it sets goals for the carbon emissions of a truck manufacturer’s entire fleet, giving them the option to increase the fuel efficiency of their diesel engines or offer hybrid or electric models. The agency laid out a hypothetical scenario showing how a company could reach compliance in model year 2032 by rolling out a line of hybrid delivery vans and school buses. Two-thirds of its tractor-trailers would still run on diesel, with a smaller number of hydrogen fuel cell trucks thrown into the mix as well.

Cooke says the agency could have pushed companies harder to switch to zero-emission vehicles given that the technology for electrified short-haul trucks already exists. 

“This rule doesn’t put that guarantee in place, that we’re going to see zero-emission trucks in communities on the ground that are dealing with the trucking sector,” he said, adding that he had hoped for a “stronger signal” to companies and utilities to invest in electric trucks and transmission infrastructure to charge them.

Even so, the rule will still lead to significant air quality improvements, says Laura Kate Bender, who leads healthy air advocacy at the American Lung Association. That will be true even for cities without major trucking routes or large ports, she said: Large local vehicles like buses and garbage trucks are some of the most polluting on the average city street, and a strong push to replace them with electric models will ease the burden on frontline communities.

“There’s a lot of different types of trucks, beyond the big long-haul trucks that we think of on the highway, that are actually in folks’ neighborhoods,” said Bender. “We’re excited to see the cleanup that this leads to.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The EPA’s push to clean up trucking goes way beyond 18-wheelers on Apr 1, 2024.

The loss of a beloved family member is one of the most challenging times humans…

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Join Earth911’s Mitch Ratcliffe for a special World Water Day conversation with model and activist…

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AnnDionne Selestin normally finished work as a housekeeper at The Westin in West Maui after 5 p.m., but August 8 was different. With a hurricane passing south of the island and the power out, most guests were riding things out in their rooms and didn’t want to be bothered. So Selestin, her husband, and three aunts who also worked at the hotel headed home early, driving through Lāhainā in the mid-afternoon as an inferno approached.

They spent two hours stuck in gridlocked traffic, watching branches fly through the sky and the orange glow of flames on the hillside inch closer and closer. As a black cloud descended on their line of cars and more people hurried out of their driveways into the caravan, fear evident in their faces, Selestin and her aunties prayed silently, in English and Pohnpeian, the native language of their home island in Micronesia, Pohnpei. 

Their prayers were answered that day: They survived the Lāhainā wildfire that killed more than 100 people in the coastal historic town, the deadliest blaze in modern U.S. history. 

Tourism skidded to a halt. Six months later, Selestin started working with wildfire survivors who were Indigenous Pacific migrants like herself: Families who migrated from the Federated States of Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, and Palau. That’s when she learned that despite treaties between their countries and the United States that allow her community to live and work here legally and indefinitely, a mistake in the drafting of a law 28 years ago prevented them — some of them homeless — from getting access to help from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. 

Now, Congress has passed a law restoring access to FEMA and other key federal programs to citizens of these countries living in the U.S. It ends nearly three decades during which people such as Selestin, an estimated tens of thousands, had been cut off from governmental safety-net programs. 

The community of legal migrants from Pacific island nations is known as the Compact of Free Association, or COFA, citizens. That COFA citizens weren’t eligible for any aid is attributed to an inadvertent mistake in drafting the 1996 Welfare Reform Act. The new law that corrects this error was included in the federal spending bill approved last month. 

Members of this community who were denied crucial support in the wake of Lāhainā’s destruction are expected to be the first to benefit. 

“Just knowing that there’s people that actually care about the COFA citizens, it’s amazing,” said Selestin, the surprise evident in her voice. “We’re very grateful.”  

That fact people care surprises Selestin because for most of her life, she’s heard that people like her are not welcome in Hawaiʻi. Her parents moved to Maui from Pohnpei when she was 6, seeking a better life for her and her siblings. At first, that meant splitting up the family by leaving her older brothers with relatives on their home island more than 3,000 miles away. Her father got a job on a pineapple plantation, an experience that reflects the immigrant story so often celebrated in Hawaiʻi. 

But there was one key difference. Selestin is a citizen of Pohnpei, in the Federated States of Micronesia, one of three Pacific island nations that gained independence and a seat at the United Nations in the 1980s and 1990s following a century of colonial rule. 

The United States gained control over the islands from Japan during World War II and supported their independence with the understanding that the U.S. military would still retain strategic power over their lands, airspace, and surrounding waters, a portion of the western Pacific region that rivals the size of the continental U.S. The international agreements securing these military rights — the Compacts of Free Association — have been increasingly recognized as critical to U.S. national security amid growing concerns about China.  

As part of the compacts, the U.S. to a large extent maintains an open border policy with the three nations: Their citizens can live and work in the U.S. and vice versa with no need for a visa. When the treaty with the Federated States of Micronesia was signed in 1986, people who moved to the U.S. were eligible for the same federal programs, such as federal disaster aid, that long-term permanent residents can access.

But just 10 years later, COFA citizens’ eligibility was stripped in the 1996 Welfare Reform Act. It wasn’t just FEMA: The community lost access to Medicaid and food stamps. They could work in the U.S. legally for decades, but if they suddenly became disabled they could no longer collect Social Security disability insurance.

Many COFA migrants who moved to the U.S. for work and education never needed to rely on these safety nets. But others who were too sick to work, or struggling to raise families on low salaries and high rents, quickly realized that they had been paying taxes into a system that excluded them when they needed help most. 

The Lāhainā wildfire gave momentum to longstanding community advocacy to reverse this systematic exclusion and to ongoing efforts by Hawaiʻi congressional leaders, Senator Mazie Hirono and Representative Ed Case, to restore their eligibility. 

The bill was included in a broader measure to renew the treaties with the Federated States of Micronesia and Republic of the Marshall Islands. The law provides funding to the countries and also extends veterans’ health benefits to COFA citizens, who serve in the U.S. military at high rates and previously were denied care.

After the bill became law this month, FEMA announced it will reopen its cash assistance application window for COFA citizens affected by the Maui wildfires. Agency spokesman Todd Hoose said he’s not sure yet how many people it’ll help — he’s heard estimates as low as a few dozen people or as high as 200. The COFA community in Lāhainā was small, but growing; much bigger was the Filipino community, which included immigrants of mixed legal status. Undocumented people remain excluded from federal disaster cash assistance.

“We do not yet have the process, but we are encouraging folks to help us identify those who are potentially eligible,” Hoose said. 

Even though there’s still so much unknown, Selestin is excited. In the months since the wildfire, FEMA has spent tens of millions of dollars to help affected families stay housed. She knows people who have been sleeping in their cars and struggling to feed their kids. As a middle schooler on Maui, she felt ashamed to be Micronesian, but now at age 24, she’s proud of it, and wants to continue to help her people get back on their feet. 

Rising sea levels, worsening storms, and other climate change-related effects are expected to increase outmigration from the island nations, especially the low-lying atolls of the Marshall Islands, to more mountainous islands like Guam and Oʻahu and other parts of the U.S. The Maui wildfire will not be the last time that members of the Micronesian diaspora will be in need of federal disaster assistance. And next time, they’ll have the right to receive it right away. 

“That’s huge for us,” Selestin said. 

Correction: This story originally misspelled AnnDionne Selestin’s name.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Indigenous Pacific wildfire survivors on Maui can finally get FEMA help on Apr 1, 2024.

This story was originally published by the Texas Tribune and is the second of a three-part series on emerging energy sources and Texas’ role in developing them. 

In 2009, on a plot of shrub-covered cattle land about 45 miles northwest of McAllen, Shell buried and abandoned a well it drilled to look for gas. The well turned out to be a dry hole. Vegetation grew back over the site.

In 2021, a Houston-based energy company run by former Shell employees came looking for it.

This company wasn’t drilling for oil or gas, though. Its engineers were looking for a place to experiment with their technology for producing geothermal energy, created by Earth’s underground heat.

A startup called Sage Geosystems leased the site. The company installed a wellhead and brought in a diesel-powered pump. They used fluid to create cracks in the rock deep below the surface, a technique similar to fracking for oil and gas.

One day last March, the crew pumped 20,000 barrels of water into the 2-mile-deep well. Hours later, an operator opened the well from a control room. Pipes above ground shook as the pressurized water gushed back up. The water spun small turbines, generating electricity.

Sage and other companies believe geothermal power is key to replacing polluting coal- and gas-fired power plants. Even though solar and wind are proven clean energy sources, they only produce electricity when the sun shines or the wind blows. Geothermal power could provide continuous, emissions-free energy.

“Geothermal heat doesn’t have those variable conditions,” University of Texas at Austin clean energy expert Michael Webber said. “If you hit a hot spot below ground — might be thousands of feet down — the heat won’t matter based on whether it’s cloudy or whether it’s summer.”

Texas has become an early hot spot for geothermal energy exploration. At least three companies are based in Houston, and scores of former oil industry workers and executives are taking their knowledge of geology, drilling and extraction to a new energy source.

“We’ve punched over a million holes in the ground in Texas since Spindletop,” said former Texas oil and gas regulator Barry Smitherman, who has become a geothermal advocate. “So we have a lot of knowledge, and we have a lot of history and skill set.”

Heat constantly radiates out from the center of Earth as radioactive elements break down. That energy warms water that bubbles up to or escapes as steam at the surface. Humans have taken advantage of that phenomenon — an early form of geothermal power — for heating, bathing and cooking since ancient times.

For more than 100 years, engineers have used that underground hot water or steam to generate electricity. Geothermal power in 2015 fueled 27 percent of the electricity in Iceland, which sits on one of the world’s most active volcanic zones. In 2022, it generated about 5 percent of the electricity in California. The United States is the top geothermal electricity producer in the world.

Still, the total amount of geothermal electricity produced in America is tiny compared with other sources. It accounted for about 4 gigawatts last year, according to a federal analysis, or enough to power about 800,000 Texas homes.

Businesses such as Sage and government researchers say there’s a lot more geothermal power to be had by pumping fluid through hot rock where there is no natural water. With technological advances, a government analysis predicts geothermal power in the U.S. could grow to 90 gigawatts by 2050. That would have been enough to power the entire Texas grid during last summer’s highest-demand day.

Companies are racing to develop their technology and techniques to harness this energy source. They vary in how deep they want to drill (from around 7,000 feet, which oil and gas equipment can handle, to 66,000 feet, which it cannot), how they heat the water (in the well or in the rock) and how they bring the heated water back up (in the same well that sent it down or with a second one).

Like oil wildcatters, the geothermal industry must figure out the best places to drill. They’ll face the same concerns about triggering earthquakes that have dogged oil and gas fracking operations and previous geothermal efforts. In 2006, a pilot geothermal plant in Switzerland caused a magnitude 3.4 earthquake that damaged buildings and led to the plant’s closure. In 2017, a magnitude 5.5 earthquake linked to a pilot geothermal project in South Korea injured dozens.

Companies should follow existing best practices informed by research to monitor seismicity and adjust or pause operations as needed, said William Ellsworth, an emeritus professor at Stanford University. States could also mandate these protocols. “You have to pay attention to what you’re doing,” Ellsworth said.

And perhaps most importantly, the geothermal businesses will have to show they can compete with the cost of other power sources, with help from the federal government in the form of Inflation Reduction Act tax credits.

The more the technology is deployed, the more the costs might come down, Rice University Associate Professor Daniel Cohan said. Getting the price where the federal government hopes for it to be cost-competitive is “feasible,” Cohan said, “but there’s no guarantee that the industry will get there.”

The federal Department of Energy said this month that $20 billion to $25 billion needed to be invested by 2030 to move toward widespread use.

“We’re all doing something a little bit different,” Sage CEO Cindy Taff said. “One of us is going to have a breakthrough that really commercializes this stuff.”

The daughter of a geophysicist who worked for Mobil, Taff studied mechanical engineering and built a 36-year career at Shell. She worked her way up from production engineer to vice president, managing a team with an annual budget of around $1 billion.

With freckles and curly hair that falls past her shoulders, Taff said she knew the world wanted to pivot to new energy sources. Her daughter, concerned about climate change, urged her mother to get away from the “dark side” of oil and gas.

When former colleagues from Shell told Taff they were co-founding Sage and invited her to join them, she got excited.

Taff saw that Sage was a nimble company with people she considered some of the smartest in the industry. The geothermal business had a lot of growing to do, like the early days of wind or solar. Her work could have a large impact.

“It was exciting to be working with people that I knew had a sense of urgency and made a difference,” Taff said. “And then, it was exciting to be working for yourself in a way that you can push the agenda.”

So, in 2020, Taff took the leap. Her daughter joined the company too.

Building interest in geothermal 

In 1989, the Exxon Valdez oil tanker spilled 11 million gallons of oil off the coast of Alaska, killing some 250,000 seabirds, 2,800 sea otters and 300 harbor seals. In Augusta, Georgia, 10-year-old Jamie Beard was riveted by the news coverage.

“I understood things enough to know that that was not something we wanted,” Beard said.

That experience pushed Beard into environmental activism, starting the next day, when she took a Kleenex box decorated like the ocean to raise money for coral reefs. She painted murals about environmental rights. In college, at Appalachian State University, she organized an Earth Day festival and tied herself to trees on a West Virginia mountaintop to protest workers scraping them away to mine for coal.

Beard went on to study environmental law at Boston University. She represented corporations, telling herself she could make change best from the inside. That proved incorrect. She joined a startup working on technology that could be applied to geothermal drilling.

That’s when her life changed.

Beard read an interview about the huge potential for geothermal power to provide electricity around the world. The interview was with Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Jefferson Tester, who led a team that published a 372-page assessment of the resource for the federal government in 2006.

“The technology needed to advance … but it wasn’t like it had to invent a whole new area because it’s so compatible with what we do with hydrocarbon extraction,” Tester said in an interview with the Texas Tribune. “They drill holes in the ground and they pull fluids out of the ground, whether they’re gas or liquids, and they sell it. Well, that’s what you do for geothermal too.”

Beard read the report over and over.

This is my career, Beard thought.

The history of modern geothermal power went back a century: The world’s first full-scale geothermal power plant started operating in 1913 in Italy. In 1960, Pacific Gas and Electric built the first commercial geothermal power plant in the United States at a spot in Northern California known as “The Geysers.”

In the 1970s, the federal Department of Energy started researching pulling power from what was referred to as hot, dry rock. The country that decade suffered through Arab countries’ embargo on exporting oil to America, causing oil prices to skyrocket. Still, the technology didn’t get far enough for the concept to take off.

Engineers built geothermal power plants where they could find existing water resources relatively easily, maybe marked by hot springs or fumaroles, which are holes where hot gases and vapors escape from underground, said Lauren Boyd, director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s geothermal technologies office. But building new plants got riskier as prime locations got harder to find.

Beard saw opportunity. She knew the oil and gas industry could develop technology quickly. The U.S. ushered in the “shale revolution” as companies drilled horizontally and cracked open rock with hydraulic fracturing, known as fracking, to extract giant amounts of oil and gas. That technology could be used for geothermal.

Beard, 45, is the type of person who speaks with an energy that rubs off on you. Her hair is cut into an angular bob; she wears artsy glasses. She made giving a TED talk look easy.

Armed with a $1 million Department of Energy grant, Beard moved to the University of Texas at Austin around 2019 to convince people that now was the time to start a geothermal company. She argued that oil and gas experts did not have to be only the villains in the climate change story; they could also be the people who help alleviate it.

“Oil and gas people are a gigantic brain trust,” Beard said. “They are a huge asset.”

Beard had a young son. She learned he inherited a rare genetic condition that gave him a life expectancy of 10 or so years. A journalist from Wired who profiled Beard described a woman facing an existential choice: She could let the doom of his fate swallow her, or focus on changing the world.

Beard started by reaching out to industry veterans whom she suspected were retired, golfing and bored. Maybe their grandchildren were after them for being part of the fossil fuel industry that contributes to climate change.

Beard said she spent months talking with people like Lance Cook, who retired from Shell as a vice president. Beard said the reaction she usually got was “it’ll never work,” followed by a phone call a few weeks later that the person was still thinking about it. But Cook decided to jump in, and he became the chief technology officer for a new company named for Beard’s son, Sage.

Chris Anderson, the leader of TED, known for its conferences with TED talks by experts on various topics, invested $16 million through his climate investment fund. Drilling firm Nabors invested $9 million more.

Early successes 

Beard wasn’t the only person who saw the potential of leveraging expertise from the oil and gas industry to develop geothermal in Texas.

Tim Latimer grew up in a city of about 1,000 residents in Central Texas, where he remembers being fascinated by the Discovery Channel show “Build It Bigger” about constructing large projects that impact many lives, such as bridges, tunnels and dams.

Latimer studied mechanical engineering at the University of Tulsa. He wanted a job back in Texas to be near family and friends, so when he graduated in 2012 he went to work on drilling sites while the shale revolution was taking off.

Latimer considered whether he should be working in fossil fuels in a world confronting climate change. But working on rapidly developing technology alongside smart people excited him. Moving into wind or solar didn’t feel right after years studying drilling.

Then came the lightbulb moment. He found the same 2006 geothermal report that inspired Beard. He realized that what he was doing, which included drilling into high-temperature rock in South Texas, presented what he called a “huge opportunity for tech transfer” into geothermal.

Latimer thought the idea was so obvious he could join a geothermal company already doing it. He found none. What if this could change how the world gets energy and no one tried it? he wondered. Like other startup founders, he’s articulate and dreams big. At a conference where some wore suits, he wore sneakers, a button-down and jeans.

Latimer went to Stanford University Graduate School of Business and met a classmate getting a PhD in geothermal research. Together they started Fervo Energy. They headquartered the business in Houston. Their first Houston-based hire had 15 years of experience working for oil and gas companies Hess and BP. Fervo now employs 80 people, about 60 percent of whom came from oil and gas work.

Fervo’s approach is basically to drill vertically and horizontally, then use fracking technology to create horizontal cracks in the earth. That way, operators can send water down the well, where it can flow through the small cracks in the rock to heat before coming back up another nearby well.

Two California energy providers have signed contracts to buy power from Fervo. Google also has a financial agreement with them. Oil and gas company Devon Energy Corporation invested $10 million and later invested millions more.

Last summer, Fervo ran a 30-day test in 375-degree rock in Nevada. They deemed it a success, and now the company is building a project nearby in Utah, next to where the Department of Energy has sponsored a geothermal field lab. They expect the project will put power mostly onto the California grid in 2026.

Drilling deeper

Back in Houston, in a beige set of warehouses on the south side of town, another company led by former oil and gas experts is taking a third approach.

Henry Phan left a 19-year career in product development at Schlumberger, where his work included designing drilling equipment that could steer sideways, to join a former colleague who launched Quaise Energy. The company focuses on using millimeter waves — which are higher frequency microwaves like the ones used to heat food — to create wells by vaporizing rock.

Oil and gas equipment begins to fail when temperatures below ground reach around 400 degrees. Drill bits wear down quickly against harder rock and electronics are pushed past their limits. Using millimeter waves would allow operators to “drill” deeper than oil and gas equipment can go — which means reaching hotter rock that could produce more power.

The idea interested Phan, and he thought the physics made sense. Plus, he would work on cutting-edge technology that he thought could be a “big step change for humanity.” Quaise had a lot less bureaucracy than at the giant Schlumberger, where money going into product development seemed to be diminishing. In 2020, he signed on as Quaise’s vice president of engineering. He brought more former colleagues with him.

Quaise aims to be able to drill into 300 to 500 degree rock by 2026, produce steam that can generate electricity by 2028 and go commercial after that. Their investors include Nabors, climate investors Prelude Ventures and billionaire Vinod Khosla.

In early experiments with the technology, they used millimeter waves to “drill” through an eight-foot cylinder of basalt rock, plus samples of 1- to 2-inch-thick basalt. The examples sit on display in their office.

“It’s cool to work on a new product,” Phan said, “but the fact that it can make an impact to … our life and our children’s life and their generation and their kids is monumental. So it’s rewarding from the point of view that we’re working on something that is so impactful if we can make this thing work.”

Disclosure: Google, Rice University and the University of Texas at Austin have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline In Texas, ex-oil and gas workers champion geothermal energy as a replacement for fossil-fueled power plants on Mar 31, 2024.

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation.

The art of maple syrup production flows through generations of Dan Potter’s family history.

His great-grandfather bought the family farm in rural Iowa in the late 1880s and cleared the land for strawberries, clay, and whiskey production. Eventually, he transitioned to making maple syrup to add to his whiskey. That started a 140-year-old tradition that has persisted through the Civil War, the Great Depression, and both World Wars.

Potter opened his own maple syrup company with his wife and three daughters in 2009. Great River Maple, in Garnavillo, Iowa, is now among the state’s most prolific syrup producers.

This year’s record-warm winter caused sap to flow early, bringing challenges for the family-run company. They tapped their first trees on Jan. 22 — more than three weeks earlier than ever before.

“When you take into account that the average season is somewhere around six-and-a-half weeks long,” Potter said, “you’re talking an incredible amount earlier.”

This year’s maple sap season began early for many producers in Upper Midwestern states, who experienced shorter seasons. Some credit those shifts to the year’s record-warm winter. Thanks to the El Niño effect, the season ranked among the top 10 warmest.

But Indigenous and non-Native experts say human-caused climate change also is having varied and unpredictable effects on the maple harvest. Farmers and Indigenous communities whose ancestors have tapped trees since time immemorial are altering their practices and planning for an erratic future.

“It seems like from year to year, the season gets a little bit earlier,” said Theresa Baroun, executive director of the Wisconsin Maple Syrup Producers Association. “But nothing, nothing, nothing like this year. If you talk to many older producers, they’ve never seen anything like this as well. This is just a different, weird year here in Wisconsin.”

Climate effects

Even amid increasingly earlier seasons, this year stood out, said Justin Cain, operations manager of Maple Valley Cooperative, of Cashton, Wisconsin, whose members include more than 40 farmers from Wisconsin, Michigan, New York and Vermont.

“Most of my farmers were kind of scrambling to get all their taps in and get their vacuums set up,” he said. “Typically, you don’t even think about that stuff till the end of February.”

As of mid-March, cooperative president and maple farmer Cecil Wright and his two business partners had collected about 90 percent of a normal crop — about 100,000 gallons of maple sap. Wright boiled his first barrel of syrup in early February, about three weeks sooner than normal.

“The weather patterns that we’re seeing are typical for the maple-producing areas in more southern areas like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana,” Wright said.

In Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Indian Creek Nature Center tapped its first maple the second week of February, when temperatures already surpassed 40 degrees. The sap flowed. By March 1, though, their taps trickled to a stop. The season was already over — a month earlier than 2023.

Last year, the center collected nearly 2,000 gallons of sap and produced 46 gallons of syrup, one of its best years on record. This year, it collected 500 gallons, just enough to produce 12.

Sap production depends on temperature and microclimates, where just a few degrees difference can make or break a harvest. Flow depends upon freeze-thaw cycles, which generate the pressure to push the liquid up and down the trunk of the maple. As daylight increases and if the weather warms too quickly, tree buds open, ending the season.

“We’re all limited to what nature gives us,” Cain said. “The trees kind of do their own thing.”

New England and the Midwest dominate maple syrup production in the United States. Wisconsin — the fourth-largest producer in the country — netted about 400,000 gallons of syrup valued at $13.5 million in 2022.

Because temperature swings drive sap production, the increased variability might actually increase the harvest in the Upper Midwest.

Wright said the growing sophistication of weather forecasting makes it easier to plan ahead. But tapping too soon presents its own risks. Vacuum equipment and tubing, which can be used instead of buckets on maple farms, can freeze during an unexpected cold snap, and early-drilled tap holes will close over time. 

“We have to acknowledge that humans are affecting our environment, and we don’t totally understand everything that’s happening,” Wright said.

In Wisconsin, sugar maples populate the northern and western portions of the state. Experts expect the trees to persist as climate warms, but the sap is likely to contain less sugar. Experts also expect an earlier harvest, but the timing, which has always varied, is becoming increasingly unpredictable.

Additionally, a lack of snowpack, the spread of non-local species and long periods of drought intermixed with heavy rainfall events, could stress or damage maple trees to the detriment of future harvests.

Indigenous communities already are preparing.

Preserving lifeways into the future

The production of maple syrup began thousands of years ago when Indigenous peoples began transforming sap into syrup and sugar.

Ojibwe bands did so in the Upper Midwest, but in the mid-1800s, the federal government forcibly acquired their lands and waters through a succession of treaties. The bands retained hunting, gathering and fishing rights across what’s now called the Ceded Territory: millions of acres stretching across northwestern Michigan and its Upper Peninsula, northern Wisconsin, and northeastern Minnesota.

For Wisconsin tribes, tapping maple trees is a traditional lifeway, or bimaadiziwin in the Ojibwe language. In addition to exercising treaty rights, promoting food sovereignty and strengthening community ties, Ojibwe people harvest from nature as an act of stewardship. If they do not, the Creator will cease to provide those beings.

Climate change threatens those lifeways and in turn, identity.

Some tribes have developed climate adaptation plans to manage natural resources in a way that protects cultural practices and treaty rights, including the harvesting of maple sap.

Some options include tapping sugar maples in several locations rather than a concentrated gathering. Tree-planting efforts could utilize non-local seedlings from sources that are better adapted to future climate conditions or even related species like red maple.

A generous harvest

In Garnavillo, Potter of Great River Maple expected to collect less sap this year, but in some northern Wisconsin sugar bushes, it flowed comparatively freely.

The Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa youth sugar bush, in northern Wisconsin, commenced about two weeks earlier this year, and although the season felt condensed, the trees gave generously. The youth collected 900 gallons of sap during the first two weeks of March, from which they produced almost 20 gallons of maple syrup, or Anishinaabe-zhiiwaagamizigan.

Maria Nevala, of Odana, Wisconsin, and her partner, JD Lemieux, assisted the program.

The two also have their own sugar bush, which they named Ozaawaa Goon, or “yellow snow.”

“We have a lot of little kids running around and every time they say, “I gotta go to the bathroom!’ and I’m like, ‘Go ahead,’” Nevala said.

At Ozaawaa Goon, which she has tapped for about 13 years, they began collecting sap in March, about 10 days earlier. The weather was so warm, Nevala didn’t have to wear snowshoes.

The two use their syrup in community demonstrations, turning it into sugar and candies, and gift much of the rest.

“It’s a real expensive hobby for us,” Lemieux said, jokingly.

As of mid-March, the maple buds hadn’t opened, and they had collected the same amount of sap as previous years, if not a little more.

“What is next year gonna be like?” Nevala said. “It’s unknown. And that could be a good thing or it could be a bad thing. Hopefully, it’s a good thing.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Midwest maple syrup producers adapt to record warm winter, uncertainty as climate changes on Mar 30, 2024.

The architect of the Grand Canyon — the Colorado River — is the lifeblood of the West. The river and its tributaries supply water to more than 40 million people in several major cities, including Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Diego and Phoenix.

New research has found that more than half of the mighty river’s total annual water flow is being used to irrigate agricultural crops, depleting this essential water source.

“Persistent overuse of water supplies from the Colorado River during recent decades has substantially depleted large storage reservoirs and triggered mandatory cutbacks in water use,” the study said. “Barely a trickle of water is left of the iconic Colorado River of the American Southwest as it approaches its outlet in the Gulf of California in Mexico after watering many cities and farms. Despite the river’s importance to more than 40 million people and more than two million hectares (>5 million acres) of cropland… a full sectoral and crop-specific accounting of where all that water goes en route to its delta has never been attempted, until now.”

The study, “New water accounting reveals why the Colorado River no longer reaches the sea,” was published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.

The Colorado River’s water levels have been at historic lows because of the ongoing megadrought in the West adding to perpetual overuse. But even though the region is ecologically and economically reliant on the river, a water budget had not been calculated, a press release from Nature Publishing Group said.

The researchers calculated the Colorado River basin’s water budget by looking at the river’s average yearly water use and losses from 2000 to 2019. They took into account all direct human uses — industrial, commercial, domestic and irrigation — as well as indirect losses such as evaporation from wetland vegetation and reservoirs.

“Irrigated agriculture is responsible for 74% of direct human uses and 52% of overall water consumption. Water consumed for agriculture amounts to three times all other direct uses combined,” the study said.

Grass hays like alfalfa grown for cattle feed made up 46 percent of the direct human water consumption from the 1,450-mile river.

The research team found that 32 percent of total water consumption was used to irrigate cattle feed crops.

Water used to irrigate agricultural crops accounted for roughly three times the amount used by cities, reported NPR.

“We consume every single drop,” said Brian Richter, lead author of the study and a World Wildlife Fund senior freshwater fellow, as NPR reported.

In the Upper Basin of the river, irrigation made up almost 90 percent of water usage.

“It is a fact that agriculture uses a lot of water,” said Sharon Megdal, director of University of Arizona’s Water Resources Research Center, as reported by NPR. “I think our ability to adapt is being tested and will continue to be. But I have some confidence that we will be able to.”

The team came up with the first complete Colorado River water budget that included never before reported factors such as Mexico’s overall water consumption — at seven percent — and the total water consumption for the Gila River basin in Arizona, one of the river’s main tributaries, at nine percent, the press release said.

The researchers said a significant reduction in use would need to be made to avoid shortages in the future. More water would also need to remain in the Colorado to support ecosystems along the river’s full length.

“We all need to become far more water literate because there are some hard choices ahead,” said Felicia Marcus, former California State Water Resources Control Board chair and a Stanford University Water in the West Program fellow, as NPR reported.

Negotiations regarding how the increasingly scarce water in the Colorado will be shared by the federal government, Native American Tribes and users in seven states are ongoing. Current guidelines are set to expire in 2026.

“Right now there’s very intense negotiations taking place over how the river’s water will be shared in the future,” said Richter, as reported by NPR. “We wanted those negotiators to have these data in front of them so those debates could be well-informed.”

The post Most of Colorado River’s Annual Flow Is Being Used for Agriculture, Study Finds appeared first on EcoWatch.

Methane is a heat-trapping greenhouse gas (GHG) that is 28 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Most methane comes from human activities — roughly 60 percent — such as agriculture, fossil fuels and the decomposition of waste in landfills.

According to a new study led by nonprofit Carbon Mapper, more than half the landfills in the United States are “super-emitters” of methane.

“Addressing these high methane sources and mitigating persistent landfill emissions offers a strong potential for climate benefit,” said Dr. Dan Cusworth, lead author of the study and a program scientist with Carbon Mapper, in a press release from Carbon Mapper. “The ability to precisely identify leaks is an efficient way to make quick progress on methane reduction at landfills, which could be critical for slowing global warming.”

The study, “Quantifying methane emissions from United States landfills,” published in the journal Science, is the largest measurement-based assessment of landfill methane ever conducted. It identifies major sources of emissions that have been absent from traditional accounting so that they can be given precedence for mitigation.

The research team — including scientists from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, University of Arizona, Arizona State University, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and airborne atmospheric research company Scientific Aviation — assessed hundreds of the country’s landfills using airborne surveys and direct observations.

The study not only emphasized the enormous impact of landfill emissions, but highlighted potential gaps in traditional methods of model-based accounting that could benefit from direct measurements using air-, surface- and space-based monitoring.

Landfills are the third largest human-caused methane emissions source in the country. The EPA reported that, in 2021, landfills made up 14.3 percent of methane, emitting GHG equal to almost 23.1 gas-powered passenger cars, according to the press release.

Despite their climate impacts, landfill methane emissions have been largely under-addressed in comparison with methane from other big emitters like oil and gas.

“Traditional surface-based surveys with handheld methane sensors provide an incomplete picture of emissions. This is due to factors like limited access to many sections of active landfills as well as logistical and personnel safety reasons,” the press release said.

From 2018 through 2022, the research team used advanced aircraft direct measurements of municipal solid waste landfills. They looked at more than 200 active landfills participating in the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program (GHGRP) — which makes up 20 percent of roughly 1,200 reported open landfills.

The team found methane plumes at more than half the landfills measured with airborne imaging spectrometers, reported CNN. This was much more than the detection rate of airborne studies of the oil and gas sector, the report said.

The researchers said the results indicated that GHGRP and other reporting systems were missing major sources of methane. They found that average landfill methane emission rates were 1.4 times those reported to GHGRP.

They also discovered that methane emissions from landfills were generally more constant than those of oil and gas — 60 percent lasted from months to years.

Another key finding of the study was that persistent emissions from landfills made up 87 percent of the study’s total quantified emissions. In comparison, most oil and gas methane super-emitters are short and irregular events.

The gaps in quantification protocols and leak detection at landfills in the U.S. were significant.

“Current walking surveys with hand-held sensors are ineffective in completely sampling the landfill surface and may miss high point source activity that can dominate the facility’s emissions while remaining undetected for extended periods,” the press release explained. “Advanced monitoring strategies, such as remote sensing from satellites, aircraft and drones, can provide a more accurate picture of landfill methane emissions. When combined with improved ground-based measurements, remote sensing can provide consistent, comprehensive measurements to better inform models, guide mitigation efforts and verify emission reductions.”

Rob Jackson, a Stanford University professor of environmental science who was not part of the study, called landfills “super-emitters,” CNN reported.

“Even in a future where there is not a reliance on fossil fuels, humans will likely still be generating waste. Even if we transition to cleaner fuels, we’re still going to be dealing with waste management,” Cusworth told CNN.

Due to its potent short-term heating effect, one of the best ways to mitigate climate change is to quickly reduce methane emissions, scientists have said.

“If we’re going to hit our climate targets, reductions in methane emissions can’t come from oil and gas alone. Landfills should be garnering a similar type of attention as oil and gas,” Cusworth said, as reported by CNN.

The post More Than Half of U.S. Landfills Are Methane ‘Super-Emitters,’ Study Finds appeared first on EcoWatch.

The Biden administration restored protections to threatened species in the U.S. on March 29 — protections that had previously been rolled back in 2019 by the Trump administration.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Marine Fisheries Service (NOAA Fisheries) finalized three rules to protect threatened species and their habitats, the Department of Interior announced.

The rules fall under the Endangered Species Act, which has been aimed at protecting and restoring populations of threatened and endangered species since 1973. As Reuters reported, the act is often considered why populations of vulnerable species, like bald eagles and California condors, have not gone extinct.

One of the rules ensures that listing and delisting decisions or deciding on critical habitats will be based on science, rather than the costs to industries.

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“As species face new and daunting challenges, including climate change, degraded and fragmented habitat, invasive species, and wildlife disease, the Endangered Species Act is more important than ever to conserve and recover imperiled species now and for generations to come,” U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Martha Williams said in a press release. “These revisions underscore our commitment to using all of the tools available to help halt declines and stabilize populations of the species most at-risk.” 

One of the new rules restores protections for newly classified threatened species, so these species will quickly receive protections, rather than waiting for official plans to be put together, The Associated Press reported.

In total, the three new rules are set to improve interagency consultation on threatened species and habitats, clarify classification standards, align the habitat designation process with the Endangered Species Act, make decisions based on science over economic costs, and restore the “blanket rule” protections for threatened species.

“Working with our partners, NOAA Fisheries is improving the process for managing species under the Endangered Species Act with a focus on mitigation of ongoing threats such as altered ecosystems due to climate change,” said Janet Coil, NOAA Fisheries assistant administrator. “By leveraging the best available science, we ensure the law remains robust as we work to conserve and recover endangered and threatened species and their habitats.” 

The rules, first proposed in June 2023, received about 468,000 submissions during the public comment periods. 

Industry stakeholders and Republican politicians have argued that these rules limit economic growth, The Associated Press reported. Meanwhile, many environmentalists are satisfied to see these new rules established, but they are upset that it took so long. Some argue that the current administration has not gone far enough in reversing the former Trump administration’s rules that harm vulnerable species. 

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