As wildfires and hurricanes wreak havoc on American communities year after year, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD, has quietly become a central part of the federal government’s response to climate change. The agency has spent billions of dollars over the past decade on long-term recovery projects that supplement emergency aid provided by FEMA, which tends to pull back from disaster areas after a few months. States have used HUD money to rebuild fire stations and hospitals, construct new flood defenses, and buy out vulnerable homes. 

When Hurricane Florence spiraled over eastern North Carolina in September 2018, it damaged or destroyed more than 11,000 homes in the space of a few hours. In the aftermath of the storm, the state channeled millions of HUD dollars toward an ambitious effort to build affordable apartments in the areas that had lost big chunks of their housing stock. Restoring this low-income housing is one of the most difficult and expensive parts of disaster recovery, and the HUD money was meant to help ensure displaced renters didn’t have to scatter far and wide to find homes they could afford.

One of the first test sites for the effort was the shoreline city of New Bern, the birthplace of Pepsi. Florence damaged or destroyed almost 2,500 homes and apartments in the city and surrounding Craven County, which were too remote to attract much new investment from private builders. After the storm, the state used HUD money to build a 60-unit apartment complex called Palatine Meadows that is reserved for locals making below the area median income.

But the development may well be arriving too late to make a difference: It will open this month, more than five years after Florence struck, thanks to a mountain of federal paperwork. Documents obtained by Grist through a public records request show that it took two years to set up a program to spend the money, another year to select a site, almost two years to complete a mountain of environmental review paperwork, and another year to build the complex. This timeline was so long that it undermined the initial purpose of the project, which was to provide a timely and affordable option for residents who suddenly find themselves with nowhere to live.

Jeffrey Odham, the mayor of New Bern, says he doubts the new apartment complex will help any of the city’s storm victims.

“There’s people that will take advantage of those units, but someone who was displaced from Hurricane Florence now moving into one of these houses — I don’t think you can make that correlation, because it’s been too long,” he said in an interview with Grist. Odham didn’t know the project was part of North Carolina’s Florence recovery program until Grist informed him. It is the only subsidized apartment project in New Bern that has been built with FEMA or HUD money.

The state department that administers federal recovery funding, Rebuild NC, has faced numerous accusations of delay and financial mismanagement dating back to Hurricane Matthew in 2016. The nonprofit investigative outlet NC Newsline has reported that state officials awarded millions of dollars in building contracts to a construction firm that racked up hundreds of homeowner complaints, relocated storm victims to leaky and moldy homes or hotels that then evicted them, and delayed aid applications for years. (Rebuild NC has defended its spending decisions and blamed delays on the pandemic and supply chain shortages.) 

But just as concerning is what happened for the state when everything went according to plan. Even a well-financed housing project built by a trusted developer took more than half a decade to complete.

The sluggish timeline on the New Bern development is symbolic of a much larger problem with HUD’s disaster recovery program, according to Carlos Martín, a researcher at Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies who has followed the agency’s relief efforts. By the time states can develop new housing with HUD money, he said, it’s often too late. 

“I’ve heard this story before,” Martín told Grist. “They were doing everything right, and it still took forever.”

The problem starts with Congress: FEMA doesn’t need to get a green light from Congress before it starts sending money for disaster relief, but HUD does. That’s because lawmakers have never passed legislation that authorizes the agency’s disaster program on a permanent basis. Instead they pass standalone funding bills that give the agency authorization to spend on specific disasters, and a community’s recovery depends on whether it can elbow its way onto the agenda of the the House of Representatives and the Senate.

North Carolina was luckier than many places, because Congress passed such a bill mere weeks after Hurricane Florence, giving the state more than $336 million for storm recovery. Lawmakers added another $206 million the following year. By congressional standards, this was a fast turnaround: Other hard-hit areas such as Lake Charles, Louisiana, have had to wait more than a year after disasters for lawmakers to allocate funding.

The half-billion-dollar grant from HUD was far more than North Carolina could have hoped to raise on its own, but it took ages for the money to reach the state. Because Congress passes each HUD disaster allocation as a separate bill, HUD has to create new rules for how it spends each new infusion of money, then solicit public feedback on those rules in order to comply with the Administrative Procedure Act. The feds must then review and edit “action plans” from each state that receives money, making detailed decisions about what projects to fund.

North Carolina aimed high with its post-Florence action plan. Housing was the biggest need after the storm, and officials wanted to go beyond traditional FEMA programs that reimburse storm victims who relocate to hotels and existing apartments.

“These [reimbursement] programs are beneficial to renters, but may not be best suited to meet the renter recovery need of such a vast geography,” state officials wrote in a 2021 report, adding that a better approach would be “to create new housing stock in a way that is more responsive to the needs of the recovering community.” 

The private market was never going to build back low-income housing on its own in eastern North Carolina. Almost all new affordable housing — whether in disaster-struck areas or anywhere else — relies on government subsidies, most notably the federal Low Income Housing Tax Credit, which allows developers to claim tax breaks for the expenses of building new units at below-market rates. But even that credit wasn’t generous enough to bring developers to the impoverished towns that had been destroyed by Florence; it would take the extra inducement of HUD money to get developers to build new low-income apartments in places like New Bern.

In 2021, after the state completed months of paperwork to set up its action plan, it sought out builders who were interested in taking advantage of the HUD money. One of the bids was from an established affordable housing developer called Woda Cooper, which owns dozens of apartment complexes across the country. Woda had found an empty lot off a major thoroughfare in western New Bern, just down the road from a high school and well inland from the coast. The lot had been vacant for decades, and it wasn’t exactly a moneymaker, but by stacking HUD money on top of other federal tax credits, Woda could make the project pencil out.

Finding the developer was only the start of the process, because the HUD funding was subject to dozens of laws and regulations that restrict how the federal government spends money. These regulations have piled up over the decades to protect wetlands, endangered species, drainage systems, historic assets, and people who live near construction sites. Together they created a set of additional hurdles that Woda and Rebuild NC had to clear before the development could break ground.

“We stress repeatedly to everyone that we’re partnering with, ‘don’t disturb any ground, don’t spend any money, don’t do anything until we clear the environmental review process and have permission from HUD,’” said Tracy Colores, the community development director at Rebuild NC, who managed the housing program.

That review process took most of 2022. In order to comply with endangered species laws, the state engaged in a monthslong back-and-forth with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to figure out whether cutting down trees on the site might threaten migration stops for the northern long-eared bat. (It didn’t.) In order to ensure the complex didn’t violate any historic preservation laws, officials sought comment from two Native American tribes, who didn’t express any concerns. There was a Superfund site at a defunct power plant almost a mile away from the lot, so the state had to check in with another state agency about the potential risk of groundwater contamination, which was nonexistent. Rebuild NC had to contact a separate department to check whether there were any underground fuel storage tanks in the area, which there weren’t, or aboveground fuel tanks that could explode, which there also weren’t.

Furthermore, a small corner of the parcel sat within a FEMA-designated flood zone. Even though the developers weren’t going to build in that corner, they did plan to cut down a few trees, which triggered another review under an executive order issued in the 1970s, which regulates flood zone construction. The state liaised with the local floodplain administrator, completed an exhaustive report on flood risks, redid site plans to add a retention pond, and ran a public notice about the proposed tree-cutting in a local newspaper — all to mitigate “temporary impacts to .01 acres” of floodplain, an area roughly the size of a two-car garage. 

The state had to undertake yet another review process when they realized that a ditch on the property counted as a federally designated wetland because it contained stagnant water. The developer needed to replace two concrete culverts that drained into the ditch, expanding the 15-inch pipes to 18 inches, but under federal law this action counted as new wetland development under the Clean Water Act, which meant the developer had to seek a permit from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Meanwhile, the developer and the state spent months waiting for HUD approval to sell a portion of the lot that contained a cell phone tower, which conflicted with land use regulations governing the federal Low Income Housing Tax Credit.

HUD handed down final permission to use federal money for the project in November, more than four years after Florence made landfall, at which point Woda Cooper closed the deal to buy the land and started preparing the site for construction. They cleared the lot during the first half of 2023, and by the time the fifth anniversary of Florence came around, they were about halfway done building the apartments themselves. The construction timeline stretched on for a few extra months due to a supply-chain snag with the building’s electrical system, but otherwise things went according to plan. The first tenants are expected to arrive later this month.

The other developments in the state’s housing program aren’t much further along. Out of the 16 apartment projects that the state chose to fund with HUD money, 13 were in various stages of construction as of late January, including the completed Palatine Meadows. Two projects had received their authorization from HUD but haven’t yet broken ground, and one project had fallen through after the state couldn’t find a suitable developer. Meanwhile, a separate effort to rebuild one of New Bern’s largest public housing projects with money from FEMA has yet to get off the ground.

On one hand, these new low-income units would likely never have been built at all were it not for the infusion of money from HUD. Other federal programs helped Florence victims find new housing throughout the state, but the HUD money built new housing in the same places that lost it. Denis Blackburne, the senior vice president of Woda Cooper, told Grist that “without this [HUD] funding source, this development [Palatine Meadows] would not have been feasible” and that the federal money didn’t delay the building process.

On the other hand, Palatine Meadows may be arriving too late to change the trajectory of New Bern’s rebuild. Odham, the city’s mayor, says that most New Bern homeowners who suffered damage during the storm have returned and rebuilt their houses with money from insurance and federal grants. Renters, on the other hand, have almost all moved away: The city didn’t have any available apartments in the years after the storm, so renters who lost their homes had no choice but to look elsewhere for replacement housing.

“The question of whether people came back would come down to whether it was owner-occupied, or whether it’s rental property,” he said. “For rental property, I would say that most of those folks have probably turned over. They left to go find somewhere else to live.”

Martín, the Harvard researcher, says that other states like Louisiana and New York have also seen long delays when they try to develop new housing with HUD money.

“Affordable housing projects tend to take the longest for all grantees,” he said. “It certainly helps to have more housing, but if we’re looking at the people who lost their housing back in the disaster, I’m pretty sure it does very little for them.” HUD’s own inspector general found in a December report that the agency has taken longer and longer to deliver disaster funds: The average time between the passage of a disaster bill and the disbursement of funds to states tripled from around 200 days to around 600 days between 2000 and 2022.

In response to questions from Grist, a spokesperson for HUD said that the agency is working on a plan to streamline the funding process for its disaster program — and that it has asked Congress to authorize the program on a permanent basis. 

Martín says Congress should also add exemptions to the environmental review process that would allow states to move through reviews faster if they’re working on affordable housing projects that are below a certain size, or projects in urban areas that are already developed. The state of California has added such exemptions to its own environmental laws as part of an effort to build more low-income housing, and a recent executive order Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass has streamlined permitting reviews for new infill housing, leading to thousands of new units. For a project like Palatine Meadows, which brought just 60 units to an existing neighborhood, such exemptions might have sped up the timeline by a year or more.

Colores, of Rebuild NC, told Grist that the housing development project was worth doing even on a prolonged timeline. She added that new apartment complexes like Palatine Meadows will ease local housing shortages and provide new housing stock that will be strong enough to withstand future storm events.

“To the extent that we can leverage these HUD dollars, we can make a significant difference in the quality and quantity of affordable housing in a lot of communities that are frequently hit by storms,” she said. However, she acknowledged that for many victims of Hurricane Florence, the ribbon-cutting on Palatine Meadows will be too late to make much of a difference. 

“I wish that we could move more quickly,” she said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline North Carolina tried to rebuild affordable housing after a hurricane. It took half a decade. on Apr 3, 2024.

A record number of wildfires are burning in the Venezuelan Amazon, as a drought driven by climate change impacts the region.

More than 30,200 fires have been detected by satellites in the country from January to March, reported Reuters. Brazil’s Inpe research agency said it is the most for the period since records began in 1999.

The number includes fires in Venezuela’s grasslands, forests and the Amazon.

“Venezuela’s dry season typically extends from December to March with heavy rains returning in April and May. The country’s fire season generally follows the same pattern, with the number of fires observed by satellites tending to rise in January, peak in March, and drop in May,” NASA Earth Observatory said. “And so it went for the 2024 burning season, with one key difference. In the preceding months, unusually warm and dry weather, potentially a consequence of global warming and shifting circulation and rainfall patterns associated with the ongoing El Niño, parched the country’s landscapes and primed them to burn.”

Land is frequently cleared for agriculture through the use of human-made fires, but researchers said South America’s low rainfall and high temperatures — in addition to an absence of prevention planning — have been causing the fires to spread out of control, Reuters reported.

“Everything is indicating we’re going to see other events of catastrophic fires — megafires that are huge in size and height,” said Manoela Machado, a University of Oxford fire researcher, as reported by Reuters.

The most severe fires in the region usually happen during August and September along the Brazilian Amazon’s southeast edge, where agricultural deforestation is the most intense.

“NASA’s MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) sensor detected a record-breaking number of fires in Venezuela in the early part of the year,” NASA Earth Observatory said. “Fire counts in January 2024 and February 2024 were above 9,000 — higher than any other January or February since the beginning of the MODIS record in the early 2000s. In March 2024, the sensor detected more than 11,000 fires; the only other March that the sensor detected more was in 2003.”

According to Venezuela’s national park service, during Easter weekend, approximately 400 firefighters battled a significant fire that currently threatens Henri Pittier National Park — an oceanfront reserve that contains unique cloud forests, Reuters reported.

Further south, NASA data tracked 5,690 active fires in Venezuela’s Amazon as of late March — half the total number burning in all of the Amazon’s nine countries.

Just 10 to 25 percent of normal rainfall levels have fallen in the past 30 to 90 days in Venezuela and Brazil’s Roraima state, according to Michael Coe, tropics program director at Woodwell Climate Research Center, as reported by Reuters.

José Rafael Lozada, a retired professor and forestry engineer at Venezuela’s Universidad de Los Andes, said the region is caught in a “vicious cycle” with climate-change fueled hot and dry conditions worsening fires, which then release greenhouse gases that make climate change worse.

“People burn the same [amount of fires], but the drought is more extreme. The vegetation is drier, the rains are scarce and we see the consequences: a small burn turns into a fire of great magnitude,” Lozada said, as Reuters reported.

The post Venezuela Battles Record Wildfires During Climate-Fueled Drought in Amazon appeared first on EcoWatch.

Utility regulator the Virginia State Corporation Commission has approved more than a dozen new solar projects in the state with 764 megawatts (MW) of total electricity capacity — enough power for nearly 200,000 homes during peak output, a press release from Dominion Energy said.

The projects include four solar facilities with 329 MW of capacity that Dominion Energy will own or acquire, as well as an additional 435 MW provided by independently owned solar projects, reported Reuters.

“These projects deliver on our promise of reliable, affordable and increasingly clean energy for our customers,” said Dominion Energy Virginia President Ed Baine in the press release. “Through our investments in offshore wind, battery storage and solar, Virginia continues to make progress on its clean energy transition.”

Once the solar projects are approved, the utility said Dominion Energy will have solar projects with more than 4,600 MW in the state and capacity to power more than 1.1 million homes during peak times, Reuters reported.

The solar projects were originally proposed in October of last year, as Dominion sought to take advantage of the Inflation Reduction Act’s billions of dollars in direct payments and tax credits for renewable energy, reported Reuters.

Dominion’s solar fleet is the second largest in the United States, the press release said. The new projects will create more than 1,600 jobs while generating economic benefits of more than $570 million for the state.

Roughly six million energy customers in 15 states use natural gas or power from Dominion Energy, which has its headquarters in Richmond, Virginia.

Completion of the new solar projects is expected by 2026, with local and state permits required before construction can begin.

The projects are predicted to add roughly $1.54 to the average monthly bill of a residential customer. Right now, Dominion Energy’s rates are 31 percent lower than the average for the Mid-Atlantic and 12 percent lower than the national average.

According to the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA), as of the fourth quarter of 2023, Virginia had a total of 4,841 MW of solar installed, with 6.56 percent of the state’s total electricity generation coming from solar. The state ranked 11th in the country for total solar capacity with enough to power 585,088 homes.

Virginia had invested $5.7 billion in solar, and the number of solar companies in the state was 208, providing 4,753 solar jobs. In the past decade, solar prices in Virginia have gone down 47 percent.

“[A]fter a coordinated lobbying effort by clean energy advocates, environmental organizations and many other stakeholders, Virginia passed the Clean Economy Act, which will create up to 29,000 solar jobs while providing enormous market opportunities for both distributed generation and utility scale solar,” SEIA said. “SEIA remains active in industry discussions about how to implement [Virginia Clean Economy Act] and guidance around Virginia’s new zero-carbon generation and energy storage requirements.”

The post Virginia’s Utility Regulator Approves Enough New Solar Projects to Power Nearly 200,000 Homes appeared first on EcoWatch.

A series of research articles published in the scientific journal The Gerontologist collectively outline several risks that climate change poses for aging well.

The journal’s special issue, titled “Climate Change and Aging,” presents multiple links between climate change and human health, particularly for aging adults.

In one of the forum articles included in the special issue, “A Framework for Assessing the Effects of Climate Change on Dementia Risk and Burden,” researchers noted the risk of worsening Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD) because of climate change. 

The study’s authors showed multiple ways that climate change could directly and indirectly impact people with ADRD, such as how extreme heat and wildfires can impact healthcare infrastructure, housing, community programming and biological processes. They also noted how climate action could improve health outcomes and the aging experience.

“Because the same fossil fuels that are causing climate havoc are also spewing harmful air pollution that harms older people disproportionately, a transition away from these polluting energy sources towards cleaner, healthier options (such as solar power and wind energy) can deliver benefits for our health and the climate,” wrote Dr. Vijay Limaye, co-author of the study and director of Applied Research Initiatives, Science Office & International, for the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). “But because of the scale of climate pollution that we’ve already added to the Earth’s atmosphere, we must also better prepare our communities for the climate hazards that we will continue to face in future years.”

One of the research articles included in the special issue further examined climate impacts on people with dementia, particularly in terms of disaster preparedness for the people living with dementia and their caregivers, highlighting a need for more resources for caregivers to reduce the stress of disaster preparedness for aging populations.

Another forum article, “Age-Friendly and Climate Resilient Communities: A Grey–Green Alliance,” noted that existing frameworks to address livability and wellness for aging populations typically don’t incorporate climate resilience. So the study authors wrote a framework to complement the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Global Network of Age-Friendly Cities and Communities with an emphasis on sustainability.

In one of the research articles, “Population Aging and Heat Exposure in the 21st Century: Which U.S. Regions Are at Greatest Risk and Why?” researchers identified areas of the U.S. where older adults faced the highest risk of extreme heat, including New England, the upper Midwest and rural mountain regions.

Similarly, another research article included in the special issue examined vulnerabilities to extreme heat in Portland, Oregon, and found one area of the city in particular that was the most vulnerable to extreme heat also included a high number of older adults and had the highest concentration of housing with age and income restrictions.

Additional studies in the special issue examined states’ climate adaptation plans and how they address aging populations, emotional well-being for people of different ages who have experienced stress related to hurricanes, and a series of interviews between climate activists ages 16 to 76, which revealed compassion across generations rather than blaming or criticizing.

“Our world is experiencing significant alterations and challenges due to climate change,” the special issue authors concluded. “This Special Issue of The Gerontologist clarifies that the seismic changes wrought by climate change will similarly alter how we age and study the aging process.”

The post Climate Change Threatens the Health of Aging Adults, Researchers Say appeared first on EcoWatch.

Single-use plastic straws are an environmental problem that few people think about. But consider the popularity…

The post 9 Alternatives to Single-Use Plastic Straws appeared first on Earth911.

In early March, a small group of Democratic senators from the Rust Belt sent President Joe Biden an urgent letter. They began by extolling the benefits of two of the Biden administration’s biggest achievements, the bipartisan infrastructure law and the Inflation Reduction Act, calling them “historic investments in our nation’s infrastructure” that will ring in a brighter future for American manufacturing. But there was something, they cautioned, that threatened to hamper this progress: the Environmental Protection Agency’s planned regulations for integrated iron and steel mills, proposed last July and nearing a court-ordered deadline.

“We are concerned that the EPA’s proposed integrated steel rules will do what foreign competitors have thus far been unable to do: deter and diminish continued American investment in improving our steel industry,” wrote the five senators, among them Joe Manchin of West Virginia and John Fetterman of Pennsylvania. They claimed the regulations would cost companies billions, enough to force widespread layoffs, despite the EPA’s estimate of $7.1 million in costs for the two companies, U.S. Steel and Cleveland-Cliffs, that own all 10 of the country’s steel mills.

Shortly after the senators sent off the letter, the EPA unveiled its final rule, the first time the agency has ever attempted to cut emissions from leaks and equipment malfunctions at steel mills. The EPA expects the new regulations will cut particle pollution by 473 tons every year. But the final rule is weaker than the one it proposed in 2023. Whereas the agency had originally planned to slash steel mills’ toxic emissions by 79 tons per year, a 15 percent decrease overall, the final version is expected to cut emissions by 64 tons each year. The EPA also dropped a proposed limit on the thickness of the smoke emanating from mills’ doors and roof vents. 

Jim Pew, a senior attorney at Earthjustice who has litigated multiple lawsuits against the agency for its failure to curb steel mill pollution, told Grist that the regulations will have “real benefits” for the people living in the shadows of the country’s most polluting steel mills, but lamented the safeguards that were removed. 

“It’s a small step in the right direction,” he said, noting that the EPA had furnished the final rule with a standard to regulate a type of incinerator used by some highly polluting mills. “The steel companies mounted a real disinformation campaign about the cost of the rule that I think put pressure on EPA to take out some provisions that would have been beneficial.”

The new rule gives the country’s steel companies two years to update their facilities with the requisite emission reduction equipment and workplace standards. In an email, an EPA spokesperson said the agency had “carefully considered the stakeholder feedback and made data-driven modifications in the final rule that provide needed flexibility, while also providing health protections for surrounding communities.”

The senators’ letter represents a rare occasion of congressional involvement in the EPA’s rulemaking process, a yearslong endeavor that requires extensive data collection and engineering expertise. The agency’s air pollution regulations, while undergirded by science and riddled with industrial jargon, have major consequences for communities that host the country’s industrial infrastructure, determining the quantities of toxic chemicals that companies can emit — and that residents can inhale.  

Steel production is a highly polluting enterprise involving heating coal above 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit to produce a product known as coke, which is then combined with iron ore in a blast furnace and melted down into liquid steel. The broiling heat releases a slew of toxic heavy metals such as lead and arsenic, as well as fine particulate matter that can accumulate in the lungs after prolonged exposure. Numerous studies have linked pollution from steel mills to impaired heart and lung function.

Ninety percent of the steel industry’s emissions originate from four mills that dot the rim of Lake Michigan near the border between Illinois and Indiana. Once bustling hubs for manufacturing, towns like Gary, Indiana, sank into decline over the latter half of the 20th century when manufacturing jobs were shipped overseas. Today, the steel mills that emit black smoke into the air of the area’s overwhelmingly low-income and Black communities are holdouts from this era, symbols of a prosperous past that politicians on both sides of the aisle seem eager to protect. 

The first effort by members of Congress to convince the EPA to change its course came last December. A group of eight senators, including Democrat Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota as well as Republicans Mike Braun and Todd Young of Indiana, sent a letter to the EPA’s administrator, Michael Regan, arguing that the agency’s proposed regulations would harm national security by making the domestic steel industry — the “world’s cleanest major producer of steel” — uncompetitive.

“We support reducing harmful air pollution,” they wrote. “We also support rules that are durable, realistic,” and based on the view that the federal government should “improve public health while protecting good-paying jobs and supporting industries essential to our national and economic security. These rules fail to meet those standards.” The senators did not specify which provisions in the proposed rule would have these effects. The letter in March from Manchin and the other Democrats brought even stronger warnings. “If these rules are promulgated as proposed, Cleveland-Cliffs and U.S. Steel may be left with no choice but to prematurely shutter mills, resulting in job losses and irreparable harm to their local communities,” the senators argued.

In its final rule, the EPA estimated that the total costs to the steel industry would total $7.1 million, an amount that would cover the installation of air monitors to measure chromium pollution around the perimeter of facilities and the implementation of new workplace practices to reduce leaks from previously unregulated emission sources. But in a press release supporting the senators’ claim of costs running into the billions, Cleveland-Cliffs CEO Lourenco Goncalves argued that the rule would “put at risk good-paying, middle-class union jobs in the steel industry.” In 2023, U.S. Steel and Cleveland-Cliffs reported sales of $18 billion and $21 billion, respectively.

Pew, the Earthjustice attorney, said concerns that the new rules will wreak havoc across the industry are unfounded. “The cost claims were so shocking to us, because EPA routinely overstates the cost of its rules,” Pew said, citing a study in 2020 from the National Association of Clean Air Agencies. “They’re saying that not only did EPA understate the cost of these rules, but that it understated them by orders of magnitude.”

After taking note of the senators’ efforts to gut the steel mill regulations, Bruce Buckheit, the former director of the EPA’s air enforcement division, decided to send Regan a letter on behalf of Earthjustice in February. He dissected the contents of the new rule, arguing that its impacts would be “straightforward” and meet the minimum pollution reductions required by the federal Clean Air Act. “I’ve seen nothing in the rulemaking record for these proposals that supports the cost claims in the senators’ letter,” he wrote. The total capital expenditures, he concluded, would be minuscule compared with U.S. Steel’s and Cleveland-Cliffs’ revenues.

“I believe it is important to push back against such overblown industry claims, lest that narrative drive public opinion and agency policy,” Buckheit wrote.

Editor’s note: Earthjustice is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The EPA wanted to clean up steel mills. Then a group of Rust Belt senators got involved. on Apr 2, 2024.

Now 30, Big Wind spent most of their 20s fighting extraction projects. They were at Standing Rock, then, immediately after, traveled east to fight the construction of the Tennessee Gas pipeline. A Northern Arapaho tribal member from the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming, Big Wind learned important financial lessons during those actions: Working collectively in resistance camps means resources are pooled and shared. That’s because climate work, at least at the individual level, doesn’t pay much.

“You’re not really using money inside a camp, even though it’s helping get resources to function,” said Big Wind. “There’s so much possibility, because nobody had to worry about their basic necessities,” they said. 

Outside of the camps is where people like Big Wind have to worry. 

A member of the 30×30 White House Advisory Committee, and a long-time climate activist, Big Wind spoke in Dubai at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in December and, from a young age, has crowdfunded conservation initiatives on the Wind River Reservation. 

“I’m not getting paid to go to these things,” said Big Wind, “by these institutions, by the feds, or by the international community.” Big Wind’s day job with the Wyoming Outdoor Council helps pay for some of these trips, and they continue to rely on crowdfunding to support travel. 

The unpaid labor that Big Wind provides to fight climate change is at the heart of a new paper published in Cambridge University Press called “Wages for Earthwork” — “earthwork” being the term to describe labor that takes care of the planet and provides benefits to all. That work should be compensated, argues essay author David Temin, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Michigan.

“If we’re going to think about a just transition to a world without fossil fuels, we need to put a lot of this invisible labor at the center,” Temin said. “A lot of this is obvious to Indigenous communities. Everyone is implicitly benefiting from this.”

The argument may seem quite basic, but the exploitation of unpaid earthwork has far reaching economic dimensions. Take unpaid housework or childcare: labor that maintains society and allows for the economy to continue operating but that is invisible in everything from labor markets to gross domestic products. Because productivity in most economies is a matter of goods and services, unpaid labor — like eldercare or earthwork — lies outside the market.

“The parallel is absolutely apt,” said Erin Hatton, a professor at the University at Buffalo who specializes in gender and labor markets. “Because of our capitalist system, labor outside the home has a measure of respect.” 

Earthwork, Hatton says, broadens that definition of home by taking care of the Earth as one would tend to a household where everyone lives. “It’s a home more broadly constructed,” she said.

Whereas unpaid housework and childcare have historically fallen to women, unpaid earthwork typically falls to Indigenous peoples, who are expected to steward land and share traditional ecological knowledge for free, says Micheal Mikulewicz, a professor at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry. “The argument is they should be grateful that we are actually asking and trying to help, which doesn’t help them put food on the table,” Mikulewicz said. 

The federal government does provide applications to grants pointed at tribal nations and organizations. This year, the Biden administration awarded $120 million dollars to 146 Indigenous-led projects for everything from climate-adaptation planning to community-led relocation and habitat restoration. But that doesn’t account for all the labor that has been done without federal funding. Also, grant-funding tends to privilege organizations with the means to pay grant writers, which can leave smaller organizations at a disadvantage. 

“We don’t really talk about the amount of work and labor that will be necessary to adapt to climate change,” said Mikulewicz. “Actually making changes in our economy, in our society, in the way our economic system works, or even the way we grow food for that matter. The phases of adaptation are really, really diverse.”

Mikulewicz adds that there are no easy answers to solving these imbalances, but that compensating Indigenous climate labor is a step in the right direction and could open the possibility of broader, more fruitful alliances between environmentalists and labor. 

According to Temin, the paper’s author, solutions could range from hourly wages to pressuring non-Indigenous conservation organizations to pick up the tab, but he recognizes that answers are typically dependent on situations with no one-size-fits-all approach to compensation. The funds to help from large conservation organizations are not making it into the hands of local Indigenous communities. 

However, Temin said the best way for Indigenous peoples to start seeing real forms of compensation is for governments to strengthen tribal sovereignty and return traditional lands to Indigenous stewardship.

“The most important component is securing land tenure rights and supporting local communities’ efforts to protect themselves and their territories against environmentally damaging extractive development projects and conservation projects that kick them off their own land,” he said.

Big Wind, on the Wind River Reservation, agrees. “I don’t think money is going to solve it. But I also feel like we do have a responsibility to ensure that we are taking care of the people who are working for all of us.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Indigenous peoples’ climate labor benefits everyone. Should it be paid? on Apr 2, 2024.

When you recycle a six-pack of aluminum cans, you save the amount of energy equal…

The post We Earthlings: Recycle a Six-Pack of Aluminum Cans appeared first on Earth911.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is launching an emergency response in Lower Florida Keys waters after reports emerged of smalltooth sawfish displaying abnormal behaviors such as spinning and whirling.

In addition to the abnormal behavior reported by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC), as of March 24 there were more than 28 deaths of smalltooth sawfish, a press release from NOAA said.

An investigation effort led by the commission — including the collection and analysis of samples — was underway.

“If the opportunity presents itself, this would be the first attempt ever to rescue and rehabilitate smalltooth sawfish from the wild,” said Adam Brame, coordinator of NOAA Fisheries sawfish recovery, as The Guardian reported. “We’re hopeful for positive outcomes from these rescue attempts, and grateful to our partners for their support as we work to protect this endangered species. It’s important to note that active rescue and rehabilitation are not always effective in saving stranded animals. However, it can still give us critical information to learn about the nature of the distress.”

According to FWC, the ongoing compilation of fish necropsy data so far showed no signs of bacterial infection or communicable pathogens. Salinity, dissolved oxygen, pH and temperature were also ruled out as the cause of fish deaths or abnormal behavior.

Smalltooth sawfish live primarily in shallow coastal waters, with one in five species living in tropical estuaries or seas, NOAA Fisheries said.

The critically endangered fish experienced dramatic population decline during the latter part of the 20th century, primarily due to habitat loss caused by coastal development, as well as accidental capture by fisheries.

Once found in waters off the coasts of North Carolina and Texas, smalltooth sawfish are now mostly limited to Florida. In 2003, they became the first ever marine fish to be protected under the federal Endangered Species Act.

“Given the limited population size of smalltooth sawfish, the mortality of at least two dozen sawfish could have an impact on the recovery of this species,” Brame said in the NOAA press release. 

Brame stated that a higher number of total mortalities was suspected, however. As of March 24, more than 100 sawfish — large juveniles and adults from seven to 14 feet long — had been impacted by the event.

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NOAA planned to rescue the endangered sawfish and bring them to quarantine facilities for observation, with the goal of rehabilitating and releasing them. Agencies offering to house and rehabilitate the fish included Mote Marine Laboratory, Dynastic Marine Associates, Inc. and Ripley’s Aquariums.

“Our goal is to release all rescued sawfish back to the wild once rehabilitated,” Brame said in the press release.

NOAA said it would work with animal care teams, including scientists and veterinarians who would develop specified care guidelines.

The post NOAA Launches Emergency Rescue of Critically Endangered Sawfish in Florida Keys appeared first on EcoWatch.