For nearly 200 years, two transformative global forces have grown in tandem: economic activity and carbon emissions. The two have long been paired together, or, in economist-speak, “coupled.” When the economy has gotten bigger, so has our climate footprint.

This pairing has been disastrous for the planet. Economic growth has helped bring atmospheric CO2 concentrations all the way up to 420 parts per million. The last time they were this high was during the Pliocene epoch 3 million years ago, when global temperatures were 5 degrees Fahrenheit hotter and sea levels were 65 feet higher.

Most mainstream economists would say there’s an obvious antidote: decoupling. This refers to a situation where the economy keeps growing, but without the concomitant rise in greenhouse gas emissions. Many economists and international organizations like the World Bank, the United Nations, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development celebrate evidence that decoupling is already occurring in many countries. 

“Let me be clear, economic growth coupled with decarbonization is not only realistic, it has already been happening,” said Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency, or IEA, in a commentary published in 2020.

It’s an alluring prospect — that we can reach our climate goals without fundamentally changing the structure of the global economy, just by swapping clean energy in for fossil fuels. But a band of rogue economists has begun poking holes in the prevailing narrative around decoupling. They’re publishing papers showing that the decoupling that’s been observed so far in most cases has been short term, or it’s happened at a pace that’s nowhere near quick enough to reach international climate targets. These heterodox economists call decoupling a “neoliberal fantasy.” 

The stakes of this academic debate are high: If decoupling is a mirage, then addressing the climate crisis may require letting go of the pursuit of economic growth altogether and instead embracing a radically different vision of a thriving society. That would involve figuring out “how to design future livelihoods that provide people with a good quality of life,” said Helmut Haberl, a social ecologist at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna, Austria. Rather than fixating on growth, he argued, “We should engage more in the question of, ‘What future do we want to build?’” 

The basic idea behind decoupling has been ingrained in mainstream environmental thought for decades. The 1987 Brundtland Report — a landmark publication of the United Nations designed to simultaneously address social and environmental problems — helped establish it through the framework of sustainable development. It argued for “producing more with less,” using technological advances to continue economic growth while decreasing the release of pollutants and the use of raw materials.

Decoupling continues to underlie most global climate policies today. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, for example, has spent nearly two decades promoting it under its “green growth” agenda, urging world leaders to “achieve economic growth and development while at the same time combating climate change and preventing costly environmental degradation.” Decoupling is also baked into the IEA’s influential Net Zero Emissions by 2050 policy roadmap, which assumes that full decarbonization can take place alongside a doubling of the global economy by 2050. 

That economic growth should continue is simply assumed by virtually every international institution and government. Policymakers connect growth with more jobs and better living standards, and use it as the primary measure of societal well-being. They also point to growth as a way to keep pace with the rising energy demands and economic needs of a growing global population. 

“The prospects for reversing inequality in all countries will be far greater when the overall economy is growing,” writes Robert Pollin, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

The good news is that at least some decoupling has been happening on a global scale for decades. Greenhouse gas emissions have continued to rise, but not quite as fast as gross domestic product, or GDP — the value of all goods and services produced in a given area. This type of decoupling is described as “relative” or “weak.” As the IEA has noted, the tight link between climate pollution and economic activity “has loosened” in every region of the world except for parts of Southeast Asia and the Middle East. 

But the kind of decoupling needed to achieve international climate targets is called “absolute” decoupling, when economic growth and greenhouse gas emissions veer in opposite directions: GDP up, emissions down. More recent research has documented this in a number of high-income countries. The U.S., for example, saw a 32 percent increase in GDP between 2005 and 2021, while its overall CO2 emissions fell by about 17 percent.

Something similar appears to have happened in other developed economies like France, Sweden, and Germany — even when you account for so-called “consumption-based” emissions, which include emissions from the production of goods that are imported or exported. In other words, these countries seem to really be reducing climate pollution and not just offshoring it to the developing world. Since 2016, reports from the World Resources Institute, the Breakthrough Institute, and independent researchers have shown more and more countries achieving periods of absolute decoupling, including their consumption-based emissions. Perhaps the splashiest analysis came in 2022, when a Financial Times data columnist reported that 70 countries — one in three worldwide — had experienced at least five consecutive years of absolute decoupling between 1990 and 2020.

“Green growth is already here,” the columnist wrote.

Some experts have raised questions about the data used to make these claims — GDP, for instance, can be measured in different ways that affect decoupling calculations, and country-level emissions data typically excludes major pollution sources like aviation and methane leaks from uncapped oil wells. Research led by Haberl — the largest literature review to date on the empirical evidence for absolute decoupling — suggests that only countries experiencing an economic crisis have successfully reduced their emissions, and that evidence for an inverse relationship between GDP and CO2 emissions is “seldom found.” But there’s a general consensus among economists that at least some amount of absolute decoupling has occurred in a handful of countries. In a study published last year in The Lancet Planetary Health, even green growth skeptics found evidence of absolute decoupling in 11 of the world’s highest-income countries.

“Everyone should be cheering about this,” Kate Raworth, a heterodox economist and professor at Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, told Grist. 

This leads to more nuanced questions, not about whether decoupling is possible — at least for individual countries — but whether currently observed trends can be extrapolated out to create a climate-safe future for the entire planet. In other words, can decoupling happen fast enough to limit global warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), the target laid out in the 2015 Paris Agreement?

One simple way to look at it is to take the rate of emissions reductions achieved in countries that have successfully decoupled, and see how long it would take for them to fully decarbonize. That’s essentially what Jefim Vogel and Jason Hickel — researchers at the University of Leeds and the Autonomous University of Barcelona, respectively — did in the Lancet Planetary Health study. They found that, if 11 high-income countries continued their achieved rates of emissions reduction, it would take them more than 220 years to cut emissions by 95 percent — far longer than the net-zero-by-2050 timeline called for by climate experts.

“The decoupling rates achieved in high-income countries are inadequate for meeting the climate and equity commitments of the Paris Agreement and cannot legitimately be considered green,” the authors wrote. In an interview with Grist, Vogel likened optimism around gradual decoupling to saying, “Don’t worry, we’re slowing down,” while the Titanic races toward an iceberg.

Some economists argue that just because decoupling at the scale and speed necessary hasn’t happened yet doesn’t mean it can’t. With enough investment in renewable energy and efficient clean technologies, they argue, economic growth can continue without the rise in emissions that has historically accompanied it. As noted by researchers at the University of Oxford and the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change, carbon-intensive sectors like electricity generation actually contribute relatively little to the world economy, compared to high-value but lower-emitting sectors like IT, real estate, and social work. 

According to Pollin, the University of Massachusetts economics professor, faster decoupling is simply a matter of money and political will. If policymakers invest 2.5 percent of global GDP each year, he said — about $4.5 trillion — then the world economy can completely decarbonize within 40 to 50 years, all while boosting GDP through the creation of tens of millions of new jobs in the clean energy industry. 

This plan would likely involve new policies to address renewable energy permitting challenges, boost energy efficiency for appliances and housing, and rein in global methane emissions — not to mention the urgent need to curtail the lobbying power of the fossil fuel industry. Economic growth will be a natural byproduct of huge new investments in clean energy infrastructure, according to Pollin, and it will also be essential for creating new jobs for displaced fossil fuel workers and improving living conditions in developing countries. “There is simply no alternative,” he said.

Economists like Vogel and Hickel, however, draw a different conclusion. As long as countries pursue economic growth, they don’t believe world leaders will be able to zero out emissions fast enough to comply with international climate goals and principles of climate justice. According to their research, doing so would require, on average, a 10-fold increase in currently observed decoupling rates, which they consider to be “empirically out of reach.” They note that their conclusions are conservative because their data does not take into account emissions from agriculture, forestry, other land use, aviation, and shipping, and their projections assume that countries began adequate climate mitigation in 2023, which does not appear to have happened.

Other researchers have found that, even under aggressive climate mitigation policies, emissions relative to constant GDP growth can only decrease at a maximum rate of 3 percent per year. That’s only about a third of the decoupling rates that some experts say would be needed to limit global warming to 1.5 or 2 degrees C (2.7 or 3.6 degrees F). 

“Absolute decoupling is not sufficient to avoid consuming the remaining CO2 emission budget under the global warming limit of 1.5 degrees C or 2 degrees C and to avoid climate breakdown,” concluded the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its most recent assessment.

Instead of making growth greener, some economists call for a whole new economic paradigm to address converging social and ecological crises. They call it “post-growth,” referring to a reorientation away from GDP growth and toward other metrics, like human well-being and ecological sustainability. Essentially, they want to prioritize people and the planet and not care so much what the stock market is doing. This would more or less free countries from the decoupling dilemma, since it eliminates the growth imperative altogether.

Raworth, the professor at Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, calls her version of the post-growth agenda “doughnut economics.” In this visual model, the inner ring of the doughnut represents the minimum amount of economic activity needed to satisfy  basic needs like access to food, water, and shelter. The outer ring signifies the upper limits of natural resource use that the Earth can sustain. The goal, she argues, is for economies to exist between the inner and outer rings of the doughnut, maintaining adequate living standards without surpassing planetary limits. 

“Our economies need to bring us into the doughnut,” Raworth told Grist. “Whether GDP grows needs to be a secondary concern.” 

Vogel and Hickel go a little further. They call for a planned, deliberate reduction of carbon- or energy-intensive production and consumption in high-income countries, a concept known as “degrowth.” The rationale is that much of the energy and resources used in high-income countries goes toward carbon-intensive products that don’t contribute to human welfare, like industrial meat and dairy, fast fashion, weapons, and private jets. Tamping down this “less necessary” consumption could slash greenhouse gas emissions, while lower energy demand could make it more feasible to build and maintain enough energy infrastructure. Some research suggests that reducing energy demand could limit global warming to 1.5 degrees C without relying on unproven technologies to draw carbon out of the atmosphere.

Degrowth advocates say that deprioritizing growth could allow countries to redirect their attention to policies that actually boost people’s quality of life: shorter working hours, for example, as well as minimum income requirements, guaranteed affordable housing and health care, free internet and electricity, and more widespread public transit. 

“Degrowth is as much oriented toward human well-being and social justice as it is toward preventing ecological crises,” Vogel said.

Crucially, degrowth advocates mainly promote the concept in high-income countries, which are historically responsible for the vast majority of greenhouse gas emissions. They acknowledge that many developing countries still need to grow their economies in order to raise populations out of poverty. Those existing inequities, they argue, put even more onus on developed countries to shrink polluting industries and cut their consumption, in order to balance out other countries’ necessary growth.

Several experts told Grist it was a “distraction” to ask whether decoupling greenhouse gas emissions from economic growth is possible, as this question elides many areas of agreement between green growth and degrowth advocates. Both sides agree that moving off fossil fuels will require a massive buildout of renewable energy infrastructure, and that countries need to urgently improve living standards and reduce inequality. 

“The goal is to get to zero emissions and climate stabilization” while improving people’s well-being, said Pollin, the University of Massachusetts Amherst professor. “Those are the metrics I care about.”

They also broadly agree that it’s time to move past GDP as a primary indicator of societal progress. But that’s easier said than done. We are “structurally dependent” on GDP growth, as Raworth put it. Publicly traded companies, for example, prioritize growth because they’re legally obligated to act in the best interest of shareholders. Commercial banks fuel growth by issuing interest-bearing loans, and national governments face pressure to grow the economy in order to reduce the burden of public and private debt. 

Making any meaningful shift away from focusing on GDP would require dismantling these structural dependencies. “It’s massively challenging, there’s no doubt about that,” Vogel told Grist. “But I think they’re necessary changes … if we want to avert a real risk of catastrophic environmental changes and tackle long-standing social issues.”

This article has been updated to better reflect Vogel and Hickel’s definition of degrowth, and to clarify their position that countries can’t pursue economic growth and decarbonize fast enough to comply with international climate targets and principles of climate justice.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How to ‘decouple’ emissions from economic growth? These economists say you can’t. on Mar 4, 2024.

When you fill up your tank and drive away from a gas station, is the resulting carbon pollution your fault? Or the fault of the oil giant that supplied the fuel?

Darren Woods, the CEO of Exxon Mobil, the largest publicly traded oil company in the world, has a clear answer. In a rare interview with the media last week, Woods explained that the “dirty secret” behind why the world wasn’t on track to zero out carbon emissions was that it was simply too expensive. In doing so, he subtly pinned the blame for the emissions created by burning oil and gas on his company’s customers. 

“The people who are generating the emissions need to be aware of and pay the price for generating those emissions,” he told Fortune’s Leadership Next podcast. “That’s ultimately how you solve the problem.”

The emissions in question, created when oil and gas are actually burned, represent 80 to 95 percent of the worldwide emissions associated with oil companies. In energy wonk-land, these emissions are known as “Scope 3.” Three years ago, under pressure from activist investor groups, Exxon reluctantly revealed the vast scale of its own “Scope 3” emissions for the first time. The company estimated that the products it sold in 2019 resulted in 730 million metric tons of carbon dioxide. For reference, that’s 11 percent of what the entire United States emitted that year.

Big emissions have big consequences. Research from the Union of Concerned Scientists has traced the direct and indirect emissions from fossil fuel producers to ocean acidification, the rise in global temperatures, and wildfires in the Western United States.

Activist investor groups have been calling on oil companies to reduce Scope 3 emissions, but Exxon would rather focus on the direct emissions that come from oil rigs and power plants (Scope 1) and the fuel or electricity purchased for things like operating machinery or powering its offices (Scope 2). Exxon sued two of those investor groups in January over the resolutions they’ve submitted demanding faster emissions cuts, arguing that the repeated submissions amount to abuse of the shareholder proposal system. It’s an aggressive move that some experts see as a sign that Exxon is committed to shutting down conversations about responsibility for the full scope of its emissions. 

This issue is a hot topic in oil company boardrooms, according to Laura Peterson, a corporate analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “It’s clear that they find it a threat,” Peterson said. “I think that they know, because their emissions are very high, that they’re not going to be able to just evade them through carbon capture as their climate transition plans claim, and that it’s going to open them up to litigation. And so they are just trying to squelch it.” 

Oil companies have been trying to shunt responsibility for carbon emissions for a long time. A study in 2021 scrutinizing Exxon’s memos, studies, and advertisements over the past half-century found that the oil giant used rhetoric to shift the blame for climate change onto average people, their customers. In public communications, the company focused on “consumers” and “demand,” implicitly pointing the finger elsewhere. BP employed a similar strategy, popularizing the idea of calculating your personal “carbon footprint” in marketing campaigns in the early 2000s.

Exxon is one of the few major oil companies that has so far neglected to set any targets for cutting its Scope 3 emissions. The company’s board has argued that applying these targets to companies would cause “significant, unintended consequences for society.” Woods has written that the current way Scope 3 emissions are calculated would encourage bad behavior from companies and force consumers to turn to dirty energy sources like coal. “That’s like saying that requiring calorie information on restaurant menus would force people to binge on junk food,” Peterson quipped in a blog post.

As countries move to regulate Scope 3 emissions, companies are lobbying to stop them. In late February, Reuters reported that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission was planning to drop a requirement forcing companies to disclose these emissions from its proposed climate risk rules for corporations. That would place the responsibility for those emissions on customers. But California is heading in a different direction, adopting a law last year that will eventually require large companies that do business in the state to disclose their Scope 3 emissions — including corporate giants like Exxon.

Of course, it’s hard to untangle exactly who bears how much of the blame for the emissions that led to the climate crisis: Big Oil? Governments? Rich countries? Billionaires? Normal people? It’s some combination of all of the above. Oil companies make the case that it’s a “demand” problem — as long as people are driving cars, and thus demanding fossil fuels, then they have to keep producing the gas.

A 2022 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, however, concluded that people demand “services,” not fossil fuels specifically. In fact, the panel found that people could live comfortably with a lot less fossil fuels. “Demand-side” solutions, including shifts in how buildings are constructed, how people get around, and what they eat, have the potential to reduce emissions 40 to 70 percent across all sectors by 2050.

Climate advocates argue that oil companies, with their history of spreading climate disinformation and trying to block policies to move away from fossil fuels, bear a large portion of the blame for climate change. Across the country, around 30 lawsuits filed by cities, states, and Indigenous tribes seek to hold Exxon and other fossil fuel companies accountable for deceiving the public about the harms of using their products.

“They’re responsible for a lot of climate damage, and they’re responsible for misleading the public in the past, which led to more damage,” Peterson said. “And now they’re basically saying that they should not be responsible for disclosing these emissions, because they’re just not relevant to their business.”

Unsurprisingly, Exxon’s CEO wants to move past the whole history aspect. “That was 30 years ago,” Woods told Fortune last week. “I mean, today, the world has moved on. The understanding of this challenge has moved on. I think where we are today is, how can we contribute to a solution set, not debate the past?”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline There’s a reason Exxon’s CEO says its emissions are your fault on Mar 4, 2024.

This story was originally published by Canary Media.

California and Texas have a new clean-energy superlative to compete over: who’s got the most grid batteries.

Last year, Texas overtook California in large-scale solar power capacity. When huge amounts of solar power rush onto the grid, batteries tend to follow. Now, Texas is building more grid batteries than California, the longtime undisputed leader in clean energy storage.

Developers are expected to complete 6.4 gigawatts of new grid battery capacity in Texas this year, according to the federal Energy Information Administration. That’s more than double the 5.6 gigawatts of battery capacity it ended 2023 with. It’s also as much battery capacity as the entire United States built last year, which was a record year for the energy storage industry. The projection outpaces the 5.2 gigawatts set to come online in California.

The surge of batteries in these states underscores the fact that energy storage is an increasingly major part of the country’s transitioning electricity system. The U.S. is slated to add 14.3 gigawatts of battery storage overall this year; that represents 23 percent of all new power plant capacity. Climate analysts have long called for massive storage expansion to facilitate a shift to low-carbon energy — now it’s finally starting to happen.

California is still forecast to end the year with more battery capacity than Texas, but if the current pace continues, Texas could surpass the Golden State as soon as next year. That would be a remarkable upset for California’s leadership in deploying clean energy. It’s yet more evidence that Texas has become a leader in building clean power plants, not due to enthusiastic climate policy, but because the technologies compete so well in the state’s energy marketplace.

California built up its nation-leading battery fleet through years of diligent policies and subsidies designed to jump-start the adoption of this pivotal clean energy technology. The state finalized a mandate in 2013 for its utilities to start acquiring energy storage and allocated funding for households and businesses that wanted to buy small-scale batteries. Utilities began awarding capacity contracts (known as ​“resource adequacy” in the state’s regulatory jargon) to battery developers, providing the financial certainty needed to build gigawatts of storage.

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These policy measures paid dividends when batteries helped Southern California’s grid survive gas shortages after the 2015 Aliso Canyon gas storage leak. Over the years, the technology has helped solar development continue after the sunny hours became saturated with renewable energy; the batteries shift solar generation into more valuable nighttime hours. They also deliver vital capacity when heat waves push the state’s grid to the brink of collapse.

Texas got into the game much more recently, but for different reasons. When battery costs fell, private developers started seeing opportunities to make money in the competitive ERCOT wholesale markets. Unlike California, Texas does not award specific contracts to ensure sufficient grid capacity; instead, the price spikes from moments of scarce supply are meant to incentivize private developers to build power plants and make money.

Developers have found that acquiring land, obtaining permits, and connecting to the grid is easier in Texas than in California’s regulatory regime. The payoffs can be huge, both for developers and residents. For developers, rapidly responding batteries are well suited to making money off the sudden swings in ERCOT’s increasingly renewables-inflected markets. But more batteries help the broader community, too, as they keep the grid functional in dicey situations, like during a string of heat waves last summer.

Battery construction picked up in Texas around 2020, when firms like Plus Power, Broad Reach Power, and Key Capture Energy moved forward with 100-megawatt projects, which were unheard of in that market at the time. Now Plus Power, for instance, lists multiple Texas energy storage projects in construction with capacity in the hundreds of megawatts. Key Capture lists 580 megawatts in operation or construction in Texas. Broad Reach has more than 300 megawatts operating, with another 800 MW in the design-and-build phase.

And as these early movers on Texas grid batteries keep doubling down, new entrants are rushing in to compete. The entrepreneurial influx has made Texas in 2024 the liveliest grid storage market the U.S. has ever seen.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Texas will add more grid batteries than any other state in 2024 on Mar 3, 2024.

This story was originally published by LA Public Press, an independent, non-profit newsroom advocating for a better Los Angeles. Support their work here.

In 1999, Pomona resident Joe Hinojos knocked on doors in southeastern Pomona, organizing neighbors against a wood products facility that dirtied the air and left sawdust in backyards. 

For years, residents of the Southern California city’s industrial zone pushed back against the growing number of waste facilities near residences in a mostly Latino neighborhood. These efforts came to a head with the city council’s 2012 approval of a controversial waste transfer station.

The decision launched a wave of activism in Pomona. Two environmental justice groups, Clean and Green Pomona and United Voices of Pomona for Environmental Justice (co-founded by Hinojos’s daughter Linda), launched in 2012. Two years later, the groups successfully advocated for a ban on new waste and recycling facilities. 

But the underlying zoning that allows industrial uses near homes remained, and online shopping upped the demand for warehouses and air-polluting diesel trucks. The same groups that fought waste facilities a decade ago are now fighting another pollution source in the same neighborhood. 

But after 75 years, the city of Pomona is finally on track to make major changes to its zoning code this year for the first time since its initial creation back in 1949. The new zoning code is expected to be finalized around April.

“A lot of facilities that our communities haven’t wanted have ended up in our city, and there wasn’t the zoning or accountability to stop that. While we’ve done various initiatives to try to reduce pollution, the zoning of how things are baked into the foundations of the city is quite important,” said Lisa Engdahl, president of the board at Clean and Green Pomona.

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How does zoning work? 

Across Southern California, each community’s zoning code — a labyrinthine, technical, and detailed set of rules determining factors like how far a home can be set back from the street, or which areas are appropriate for warehouses and which are better suited for residences — underlies the way neighborhoods look and feel. Zoning and land-use decisions are also at the foundation of many environmental justice issues, as they determine how close polluting facilities can be to homes and schools and often disproportionately place pollution in low-income communities of color. 

In Pomona, pollution disproportionately impacts the mostly Latino neighborhood in the city’s industrial zone. The southeastern corner of Pomona, where warehouses have proliferated in recent years, is one of California’s most polluted neighborhoods. As of 2018, the neighborhood fell within the 92nd percentile of areas in California with the highest pollution burdens, meaning only 8 percent of areas in the state experienced a higher pollution burden. Every day, around 8,000 trucks travel to and from Pomona’s 125 warehouses, emitting pounds and pounds of greenhouse gasses and particulate matter, which are linked to respiratory issues and other health problems. 

Like many other cities, Pomona’s development was shaped by discriminatory redlining practices of the 1930s. Redlined zones, mostly communities of color, were considered “risky,” while white communities were deemed suitable for investment. 

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Pomona’s first – and current – zoning map is from 1949

Pomona adopted its first zoning map in 1949 when these practices were more common, and that map has persisted for almost 75 years, still shaping today’s health disparities. Reservoir Street, which now borders the industrial zone, was described in 1939 redlining maps as in “decline” and “largely owned by the low-income labor class.”

“The fact that it took so long to update the zoning code definitely reflects professional malpractice in the past, that critical updates that affect community health have not happened,” Engdahl said.

When the code was adopted, multifamily housing was intentionally placed next to industrial zones to protect single-family neighborhoods. But since single-family homes then contained deed restrictions that kept nonwhite families from purchasing them, this meant communities of color were intentionally placed near industrial sites, a division that continues today. Over 90 percent of Pomona’s Hispanic population lives within industrial zones or high-density zones in close proximity to major highways, while the majority of the city’s white population lives away from the industrial zones.

“Systemic discrimination is still rampant in the city of Pomona based on the condition of our streets, our houses, and our environment,” said Nora Garcia, a city councilmember representing southeast Pomona. “There’s no doubt in my mind that having such an outdated zoning code has helped things persist. But I’m also cynical enough to believe that it’s also been old prejudices towards communities like mine.”

Today, 67-year-old Hinojos still lives on Phillips Boulevard, where his home of 40 years is technically a “non-conforming” use that doesn’t match the area’s industrial zoning. It’s one of many such homes in this zone, which is home to over 17,500 residents. After decades of living in this polluted neighborhood, Hinojos needed a double lung transplant two years ago. 

“What is our health worth? What’s the dollar value of a life that is worth the effort to make them clean up this pollution? My insurance was billed $1.7 million for my operation, so my life so far is worth $1.7 million,” he said.

“Historically, this has been Pomona’s reputation,” said Linda Hinojos while driving past warehouses and scrap yards in the industrial zone. “But we’re changing that now…. We have a different vision now for what we want the city to be.”

The zoning code update, one of several measures currently underway to address structural racism in Pomona’s land use policies, is one way that the city is trying to reach that vision. 

There are currently no specific regulations or standards for large warehouses and other logistics facilities in Pomona’s zoning code, which hasn’t been comprehensively updated since 1949. The city’s current zoning code has just one manufacturing zoning definition, which allows for a wide variety of manufacturing and industrial uses. Without more specific definitions of what’s allowed, city staff interpret whether each business application fits in with the zoning. And while the old zoning code only provided an allowed “use,” such as warehouses as a use in the industrial zone, the new zoning code would further define what’s allowed in certain areas by other categories like building size and function. “Warehouses” will no longer be a use, but instead will be a “type” of building, which recognizes that a warehouse can serve a variety of uses, such as a brewery or a fulfillment center, according to Ata Khan, planning manager with the city. 

According to Engdahl, the current zoning has also made it difficult to hold companies accountable because many facilities are under their own conditional use permit with their own rules. “When you don’t have consistent zoning, you don’t know which rules have been agreed upon with that particular facility, […] how well thought through those rules were, and how consistent may depend on who is in leadership at that time and planning conditions in the city,” said Engdahl. 

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A moratorium on warehouses in Pomona

Environmental justice groups pushed for and won a moratorium on new large warehouses and trucking facilities in July 2022, which the Pomona City Council voted to extend several times. The warehouse moratorium was also linked to the zoning code update, with the moratorium intended to keep new large warehouses from getting approved under the 1949 zoning code while staff worked on new and more relevant regulations for the logistics industry of 2023. 

But in early December 2023, the city council voted to allow the moratorium to lapse, ending the long-running but ultimately temporary measure. The city council failed to get the necessary six out of seven votes in support of an extension during a December 4 meeting. Vice Mayor Elizabeth Ontiveros-Cole and Councilmember Robert Torres both voted against the extension following some pushback from industry representatives, despite a majority of public comments in support of the extension. 

That means that starting January 1, 2024, Pomona’s zoning surrounding warehouses again went back in time to 1949, and will remain there until the city finalizes the zoning code this spring. The typical timeline for approving permits to build new warehouses means it is unlikely that developers could submit an application in January and get approved before the zoning code is updated, Khan said at the December meeting. But the city frequently receives applications for licenses on existing properties, which could be repurposed into logistics facilities. 

“For the last two years, about once a week, our division regrets clearing a license for something where somebody thought they were going to do something and they ended up doing something else,” Khan told the city council on December 4. “Folks put e-commerce on one line on a business license, there’s no description, and we have nothing to hold them to. I might come back to that property in two months, and it’s filled with a hundred trailers, and we don’t have any code to stop that.”

This story was supported with grant funding from the Los Angeles Press Club. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Why one Southern California city is updating its zoning code after decades of environmental issues on Mar 2, 2024.

Indigenous communities in California are exposed to disproportionate levels of particulate matter in amounts much greater than previously thought, a new study has found.

Using a new technique of measuring prolonged exposure to wildfire smoke, the researchers discovered that the Indigenous communities were exposed to an average of roughly 1.7 times the smoke that would be expected, considering Indigenous populations statewide each year between 2006 and 2020, reported Berkeley News.

The scientists said their new exposure measurement matrix will assist with understanding the effects of long-term smoke exposure for epidemiological and environmental justice studies — essential for vulnerable communities.

“Analyses spanning 2006 to 2020 revealed that Native American and Alaska Native, multiracial, and non-Hispanic white populations had consistently disproportionate outdoor wildfire PM2.5 [fine particulate matter] exposure. Housing, occupational, behavioral, or economic constraints may result in larger actual disparities,” the researchers wrote in the study paper. “Improved long-term wildfire PM2.5 exposure measurement can support health-equity-focused interventions and climate resilience.”

Co-author of the paper Rachel Morello-Frosch, a UC Berkeley professor of public health and environmental science, policy and management, said the knowledge is becoming more and more important as millions across the United States are being exposed to toxic smoke from ever-increasing climate change-fueled wildfires.

“Now that wildfires are coming at us sequentially, and clearly are going to be increasing in frequency and intensity, we can’t look at them one at a time,” Morello-Frosch said, according to Berkeley News. “We have to look at them using a more cumulative exposure framework.”

The study, “Measuring long-term exposure to wildfire PM2.5 in California: Time-varying inequities in environmental burden,” was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The study of pollution coming from chimneys, tailpipes and power plants — particulate matter — has long been evaluated by monitors set up by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), but those measurements are usually averaged, Berkeley News reported. This leads to the effects of extreme events like wildfire smoke from one mega-fire that lasts just a few days being spread out over the entire year. This obscures severity, which could be the crucial factor in terms of health, particularly considering extremes are happening more often due to climate change. It also makes it harder to trace long-term health impacts caused by wildfire smoke.

To find out how extreme events fit into the wider health narrative, the researchers came up with five novel metrics to be used in tandem for an improved assessment of the intensity, duration and frequency of exposure to smoke.

Factors such as the most intense week of wildfire smoke exposure in a year or the amount of smoke waves in a particular area that last for two days in a row can assist scientists in pinpointing exposures that might have slipped under the radar.

“That may really matter for certain types of disease processes much more than the average smoothed out over the year,” said Joan Casey, lead author of the paper and a University of Washington assistant professor of environmental and occupational health sciences, as reported by Berkeley News.

A big problem with the EPA sensors is that they don’t specify where the particulate matter is coming from. To get around that in the study, co-author Tarik Benmarhnia — a UC San Diego Scripps Institution of Oceanography associate professor — looked at satellite images of smoke to find out when and where fires caused spikes of particulate matter.

“Developing such metrics to capture populations’ exposures to such repeated events can help provide a more nuanced and realistic picture of how novel environmental hazards can lead to inequities across various communities,” Benmarhnia said. “Focusing on wildfire smoke is particularly timely, as this has become the major source of air pollution in the past few years.”

The researchers said the study raised important environmental justice concerns and expressed hope that it would inspire new methods of quantifying people’s exposure to other threats like flooding.

“The beauty of this paper is that it provides a proof of concept about how we need to be looking at the effects of a wildfire on communities at a granular level,” said Morello-Frosch in Berkeley News. “It’s a really great foundation for how to assess exposures in this long-term framework in order to more accurately assess health effects of perennial fire events that are no longer restricted to the western part of the United States.”

The post California Wildfire Smoke Impacts Indigenous Communities Nearly 2x More Than Expected appeared first on EcoWatch.

The current El Niño event — which has been impacting global temperatures and weather since July of last year — is predicted to continue to drive record heat in 2024, according to a new modeling analysis by an international team of researchers.

According to the study, several areas worldwide are likely to see record-setting average surface air temperatures (SAT) as a result of El Niño until June 2024.

“The likelihood of global mean SAT exceeding historical records, calculated from July 2023 to June 2024, is estimated at 90%,” the researchers wrote in the study. “Regions particularly susceptible to recording record-high SAT include coastal and adjacent areas in Asia such as the Bay of Bengal and the South China Sea, as well as Alaska, the Caribbean Sea, and the Amazon. This impending warmth heightens the risk of year-round marine heatwaves and escalates the threat of wildfires and other negative consequences in Alaska and the Amazon basin, necessitating strategic mitigation measures to minimize potential worst-case impacts.”

The El Niño-Southern Oscillation — a main driver of global climate variability — is concentrated in the tropical Pacific Ocean, Nature Publishing Group said. The warming associated with El Niño and the cooling of its partner phase La Niña both affect weather. During El Niño, heat is released into the atmosphere, bringing a faster rise in global mean surface temperatures (GMST). Even a small uptick in GMST has been associated with marked increases in SAT during periods of extreme heat.

“Changes in global surface air temperature (SAT) are influenced by external forcing (e.g., greenhouse gases) and internal climate variations,” the research team wrote. “[D]uring El Niño events, the ocean releases heat to the atmosphere, primarily due to increased air-sea heat fluxes driven by elevated sea surface temperatures (SST). Accordingly, during El Niño phase, enhanced atmospheric heating in the tropics accelerates a rise in global annual mean surface temperature (GMST), contributing to record-breaking warming (e.g., 2015–2016).”

The researchers modeled the current El Niño event’s effects on the regional fluctuation in average SAT from the 1951 to 1980 average and July of 2023 to June of 2024. The peak of El Niño is usually from November to January.

The research team found that a moderate El Niño would bring record average SAT to the Philippines and the Bay of Bengal, while a strong El Niño event would lead to record mean SAT in the South China Sea, the Caribbean Sea and areas of Alaska and the Amazon.

The study, “Enhanced risk of record-breaking regional temperatures during the 2023–24 El Niño,” was published in the journal Scientific Reports.

The scientists also used modeling to look at El Niño’s effects on GMST during the same period, Nature Publishing Group said. They discovered that a moderate or stronger event would lead to a 90 percent likelihood of record GMST. Under the moderate scenario, they estimated the GMST for 2023 to 2024 to be from 1.03 to 1.10 degrees Celsius above the average for 1951 to 1980. Their GMST estimate for the strong El Niño scenario was a GMST of 1.06 to 1.20 degrees Celsius above the benchmark.

The team warned that record mean temperatures would likely make it difficult for regions to cope with the effects of excess heat.

The scientists called attention to the fact that elevated SAT can result in a major rise in the probability of extreme climate events like tropical cyclones, heat waves and wildfires, especially in coastal and oceanic areas where the ocean’s increased heat capacity leads to persistent and extended climate conditions.

“This study uses observed temperature records, and what we know about El Niño and other effects on the rest of the globe, to infer what might happen in 2024,” said Adam Scaife, head of long range prediction with the UK’s Met Office, as The Guardian reported. “Some regions, Africa and Greenland for example, have poor historical data coverage and are hard to assess with these methods, but they are highlighted as regions with prominent levels of excess heat this year in climate model forecasts.”

The post El Niño Predicted to Supercharge Record Global Heating in 2024 appeared first on EcoWatch.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has announced finalized energy efficiency standards for washing machines and dryers.

According to the DOE, the new standards could save U.S. households a total of $2.2 billion annually on utility costs, with savings of up to $39 billion on energy and water bills over 30 years. Additionally, the measures are expected to cut carbon dioxide emissions by about 71 million metric tons.

“With these rules in place, Americans can be confident that they are saving money, water, and energy with every cycle. The broad support for these rules shows that efficiency standards are a winner all around,” Joe Vukovich, staff attorney at Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), said in a statement. “These standards will make sure our washers and dryers are not needlessly wasting energy, while also cutting carbon pollution by a combined 71 million metric tons over 30 years.”  

The new standards for residential washing machines will save about 0.7 quadrillion British thermal units (BTUs) over 30 years, or 3% of energy use compared to many washing machines currently on the market. Residential dryers will save about 11% of energy use (about 2.7 quadrillion BTUs over 30 years) compared to those currently on the market, according to the DOE. 

NRDC reported that for a household that upgrades to both a washing machine and dryer complying with the new standards, there will be about $67 in utility savings per year. Dryer models could have up to 40% energy savings compared to models that don’t meet the new standards. Because drying machines use up a lot of energy, about 3.2% of total household energy consumption per year, the monetary savings could really add up.

Those who want to upgrade to models that meet the new standards could save money on the upfront costs by taking advantage of the Department of Energy’s tax rebates.

“For decades, DOE’s appliance standards actions for clothes washers and dryers have provided loads of savings for American families while also decreasing harmful carbon emissions,” U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm said in a statement. “With strong support from industry leaders and consumer advocates, DOE will continue to roll out innovative appliance solutions throughout 2024 to lower costs for the American people — continuing the cycle of household savings that are the backbone of President Biden’s Investing in America agenda.” 

The new standards for both washers and dryers are to be met by March 1, 2028. NRDC reported that many appliances currently on the market are already meeting the new standards.

The post U.S. Department of Energy Finalizes Washer and Dryer Efficiency Standards appeared first on EcoWatch.

Earth911 inspirations. Post them, share your desire to help people think of the planet first,…

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America’s farms don’t just run on corn and cattle. They also run on cash from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Every year, the USDA spends billions of dollars to keep farmers in business. It hands out money to balance fluctuations in crop prices; it provides loans for farmers who want to buy livestock or seeds; and it pays growers who lose crops to drought, floods, and other extreme weather.

The agency is also now giving money — including $20 billion that Congress earmarked two years ago in the Inflation Reduction Act — to farmers trying to curb their greenhouse gas emissions and store carbon in soil, a key part of the Biden administration’s goal to cut the 10 percent of the country’s emissions generated by agriculture. That windfall of climate-smart farm funding has been widely lauded by climate activists and researchers.

But exactly how the USDA spends that money is more complicated — and contentious — than it might appear, and not simply because Republicans in Congress have threatened to siphon the funds away. A new report from the Environmental Working Group says that more than a dozen of the farming practices that the USDA recently designated as “climate smart”— including several of the highest-funded ones — don’t actually have proven climate benefits. That finding is especially important, according to the group, because the USDA is likely to spend more money on the same practices in the years to come: Much of the $20 billion authorized by the Inflation Reduction Act has yet to reach farmers’ pockets.

Supporting farming techniques with uncertain benefits “undermines potentially real reductions in emissions,” said Anne Schechinger, author of the report and midwest director at the Environmental Working Group, an environmental research and advocacy organization. “If these unproven practices stay on the list, then a lot of money will go to these practices that likely aren’t going to reduce emissions.” 

A USDA spokesperson said the agency uses a rigorous, scientific process to determine what it considers climate smart. Still, the agency acknowledges that not everything on its list necessarily has quantifiable benefits. New additions to the list are provisional — that is, they’re added “under the premise that they may provide benefits” and will be removed later on if those benefits can’t be quantified.

Schechinger analyzed spending by the USDA’s Environmental Quality Incentives Program, called EQIP for short, the agency’s biggest conservation program. She found that between 2017 and 2022 the program directed around $2 billion to techniques that were added provisionally to its climate-smart list for this fiscal year. 

“It looks like a lot of money is going to climate-smart practices between 2017 and 2022 when, really, very little of the total EQIP money has actually gone to practices with proven climate benefits,” said Schechinger.

In particular, the group called into question eight of 15 methods that the Biden administration added provisionally, such as installing a waste facility cover or an irrigation pipeline. One of them — “waste storage facility,” a structure that holds manure and other agricultural waste — may even increase emissions, according to the report. The USDA spent about $250 million on them between 2017 and 2022. 

The department specifies on its list that only a specific kind of waste storage facility, one that composts manure, counts as climate-smart. These composting structures can reduce methane emissions and improve water quality, the agency says. 

“Unfortunately, EWG did not take into account the rigorous, science-based methodology used by USDA to determine eligible practices, nor the level of specificity required during the implementation process to ensure the practices’ climate-smart benefits are being maximized,” said Allan Rodriguez, a spokesperson for the USDA, in an emailed statement. “As a result, the findings of this report are fundamentally flawed, speculative, and rest on incorrect assumptions around USDA’s selection of climate-smart practices.”

Schechinger acknowledged that the USDA doesn’t define all waste storage facilities as climate-smart, but she said that the funding data she was able to obtain through a records request didn’t distinguish between specific facility types and that it “remains to be seen” whether the Inflation Reduction Act money will go only to the kind that composts manure.

Some researchers have argued that more studies need to be done on most “climate smart” practices — even ones, such as planting cover crops, that the Environmental Working Group doesn’t question in its report — before anyone can say how much climate pollution they’re curbing or carbon they’re sequestering. “For most climate-smart management practices we do not yet have the data and information we need to understand when and where they are most likely to succeed,” said Kim Novick, an environmental scientist at Indiana University. 

Most scientists agree that more data needs to be collected and analyzed to understand, say, the nuances of storing carbon in the soil. But some argue that climate change is just too urgent to delay action.

That’s one reason Rachel Schattman, a professor of sustainable agriculture at the University of Maine, supports the USDA’s use of climate funding. She also has confidence in the agency’s commitment to science. A practice doesn’t get put on the agency’s conservation list “without having demonstrated environmental benefits or reduced environmental harm,” she said. “Whether those benefits or reduced harms are related to climate change is something [the USDA] is grappling with in a really meaningful way right now.” 

Schattman also said it’s important not to paint climate-smart practices with a broad brush. “Everybody’s farm is different. Everybody’s soil is different. Everybody’s microclimate is different,” she said.  An irrigation pipeline in the Arizona desert might have a different effect on water and energy use than one on a farm in Vermont. Even if a practice here or there doesn’t reduce emissions or store carbon in the soil exactly how the USDA intends, Schattman said the influx of funding still could move agriculture in the right direction.  

The Inflation Reduction Act created “a once in a lifetime opportunity for a lot of farmers,” she said. “I think it is going to make a lot of things possible that people couldn’t do before.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Is the USDA’s spending on ‘climate smart’ farming actually helping the climate? on Mar 1, 2024.

Recycling isn’t the same as it used to be. A few years ago, China accepted…

The post Can You Recycle Number 5 Plastics? appeared first on Earth911.