For 40 years, plastic and petrochemical companies have tried to convince the public that plastics can be recycled. But they’ve known for just as long that plastics recycling would never work.

A report released last week by the nonprofit Center for Climate Integrity, or CCI, chronicles a “decades-long campaign of fraud and deception” from Big Oil and the plastics industry to promote recycling as a solution to the plastic pollution crisis. New documents show that industry executives pushed plastics recycling despite knowing since the 1980s that it “cannot be considered a permanent solid waste solution,” and that recycled plastics would never be able to compete economically with virgin material. 

Today, the U.S. recycling rate for plastics sits at about 5 or 6 percent. It has never risen above 10 percent. 

The report’s authors liken the plastics industry’s recycling campaign to Big Oil’s tactics to convince the public that its products don’t cause climate change. Many companies have been involved in both efforts, since plastics are made from fossil fuels. “The oil industry’s lies are at the heart of the two most catastrophic pollution crises in human history,” Richard Wiles, CCI’s president, said in a statement.

CCI traces industry support for plastics recycling back to the 1980s, when it was proposed as a response to widespread public concern over the material’s proliferation — especially as litter. With the threat of regulation looming large, industry representatives felt they had little choice but “to recycle or be banned.” 

Even then, the industry acknowledged major and potentially insurmountable hurdles to plastics recycling. Most significantly, there was no market for recycled plastic — it was too expensive and low-quality to compete with virgin material. One document uncovered by CCI — a 1986 report from the plastics industry trade group the Vinyl Institute — noted that “purity and quality demands set for many applications preclude the use of recycled material.” In the end, the report concluded that recycling “merely prolongs the time until an item is disposed of.”

Plastics and petrochemical company representatives repeatedly shared similar concerns at industry conferences, in meeting notes, and elsewhere: that plastics recycling consumed too much energy, that it would only work for a small fraction of plastic waste, and that a quickly growing supply of virgin materials would “kick the s–t out of” recycled plastic prices, as one official of the now-defunct American Plastics Council wrote in meeting notes obtained by CCI. 

Davis Allen, an investigative researcher for CCI and the lead author of the report, said many of the new documents came from a former American Plastics Council staffer. Others came from industry document databases maintained by Columbia University, New York University, and the University of California, San Francisco. 

The documents, Allen said, strongly suggest that the plastics and petrochemical industries saw recycling as little more than a way to tame public outrage and ward off anti-plastic legislation. One 1994 document quotes a representative of Eastman Chemical saying that, while plastics recycling might one day become a reality, “it is more likely that we will wake up and realize that we are not going to recycle our way out of the solid waste issue.” Another document — handwritten notes from a meeting between Exxon Chemical and the American Plastics Council — quotes Exxon Chemical’s then-vice president saying that, when it came to recycling plastics, “we are committed to the activities, but not committed to the results.”

Still, trade groups and large petrochemical companies invested heavily in public relations to improve plastics recycling’s image. They touted ambitious goals to increase the recycling rate, and then remained quiet when they failed to meet them, or changed the way they measured their progress. Advertisements “simply repeated the same lies about the viability of plastic recycling,” according to CCI. For example, one 1991 ad in Ladies’ Home Journal claimed that “a bottle can come back as a bottle, over and over again.” Meanwhile, educational materials created for use in schools implied that recycling could assuage students’ guilt over using disposable plastic foodware.

By the mid-1990s, the results seemed to have paid off. Industry polling showed that public opinion on plastics had greatly improved and state-level efforts to ban or restrict plastic production had waned considerably — even though the dismal state of plastics recycling had not significantly improved.

Today, most plastic waste gets incinerated or sent to landfills, where it creates hazardous air and water pollution that disproportionately affects low-income communities and communities of color. Meanwhile, environmental advocates say the “myth” of plastics recycling has facilitated the industry’s unmitigated expansion — plastic production has grown by nearly 230 times since 1950. Plastics are expected to drive nearly half of the growth in global oil demand between 2017 and 2050.

CCI isn’t the first group to document the plastics industry’s deceptive communication practices around recycling. A 2020 investigation from NPR and Frontline found ample evidence that the plastics industry and its trade groups promoted plastics recycling despite knowing it was “costly” and “infeasible.” Two former industry executives told the outlets that recycling was used to “advertise our way out of” negative PR.

Since the mid-2010s, a second wave of anti-plastic outrage has spurred the plastics industry and its lobbying groups to again promote the promise of plastics recycling — only this time, they’re pushing so-called “chemical recycling,” which can supposedly melt plastic into its constituent polymers so it can be turned back into new products. Although chemical recycling technologies have existed for decades, most existing facilities — and there are only a few — are still unable to create new plastic products; they mostly turn plastic into chemicals or fossil fuels to be burned. 

Lew Freeman, the Society of the Plastics Industry’s former vice president of government affairs, told Grist in an interview last year that there are “serious questions” about the degree to which chemical recycling can ever work. “The industry seems to be doing the same thing it did 30-some-odd years ago,” Freeman said. 

Ross Eisenberg, president of America’s Plastic Makers — a subgroup of the petrochemical industry trade organization the American Chemistry Council, which absorbed the American Plastics Council in 2002 — criticized the CCI report as “flawed.” In a statement, he said it “works against our goals to be more sustainable by mischaracterizing the industry and the state of today’s recycling technologies.” Eisenberg did not specifically refute any of the claims made by CCI.

In response to Grist’s request for comment, the Vinyl Institute did not address any of the report’s claims but said it was “committed to increasing” the amount of polyvinyl chloride — a kind of plastic — that gets recycled each year. Eastman Chemical and Exxon Mobil did not respond to Grist’s requests for comment in time for publication.

CCI hopes that its report “lays the foundation” for more ambitious legal challenges against the plastics and petrochemical industries. According to Alyssa Johl, CCI’s vice president of legal and general counsel, most lawsuits so far have targeted the makers of specific products — for instance, Keurig, which misleadingly placed the “chasing arrows” recycling symbol on coffee pods that couldn’t actually be recycled.

These lawsuits “don’t go far enough,” Johl said. In her view, future cases should target the whole industry — including the fossil fuel producers themselves and their trade organizations, highlighting the integral role they played in promoting recycling as a solution to the plastic pollution crisis. Such lawsuits are mostly likely to be brought by cities or state attorneys general, Johl said, and they may invoke public nuisance, consumer fraud, racketeering, or conspiracy laws — similar to successful legal challenges that have been brought against the tobacco and opioid industries. 

The most promising push so far has come from California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who in 2022 began investigating fossil fuel and chemical companies for their role in what he called an “aggressive campaign to deceive the public” about the viability of plastics recycling. That investigation is ongoing. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Petrochemical companies have known for 40 years that plastics recycling wouldn’t work on Feb 20, 2024.

In 2024, the voluntary carbon market will undergo significant shifts– from CORSIA deadlines going into effect, new carbon border taxes and continued momentum in Article 6.2. Changes to how carbon credits can be counted toward net zero progress, including the Scope 3 claim from the VCMI and the ISO’s expansion of the role of carbon credits presents a huge opportunity for buyers. 

The United Nations Environment Programme’s Global Resources Outlook — the flagship report of the UN’s International Resource Panel, due to be published later this month — highlights how the consumption of natural resources globally is set to rise by 60 percent by 2060.

Raw materials consumption worldwide is already four times higher than it was in 1970, and its continued expansion could spell disastrous consequences for the environment and climate, the analysis said.

The increase — caused by urbanization, industrialization and an exploding population — is responsible for upwards of 90 percent of terrestrial biodiversity loss and water stress across the globe, 60 percent of impacts from global heating and 40 percent of those caused by air pollution, reported The Guardian.

“Already, the technosphere — the totality of human-made products, from airports to Zimmer frames — is heavier than the biosphere. From the 2020s onward, the weight of humanity’s extended body — the concrete shells that keep us sheltered, the metal wings that fly us around — have exceeded that of all life on Earth. Producing this volume of stuff is a major contributor to global heating and ocean acidification, and the rapidly accelerating extinction of plants and animals,” Gareth Dale, associate head of the social and political sciences department at Brunel University London, wrote in The Conversation.

The extraction of natural resources used to make materials like concrete and metal is throwing Earth’s ecosystems off-balance. Large tracts of land are annexed for transportation and extraction related to the mining industry, whose energy consumption has increased three-fold since the 1970s.

As the demand for materials continues to rise, more energy is needed for extraction in increasingly deep and remote mining sites.

“More seams will be dug and more mountains moved to bring glittering fortunes to some while many regions, above all in developing countries, become sacrifice zones,” Dale wrote. “‘Critical’ and ‘strategic’ raw materials are those that face supply risk either in their scarcity or their geographical concentration, and which the major powers require for their military sectors and for competitive advantage in tech industries. Right now, the race for critical minerals is geopolitical: each major power wants to secure supplies in allied countries.”

Critical raw materials are needed for the transition to renewable energy as well. Nine times as many minerals can be necessary for a wind turbine than an average gas-fired power plant, and a typical electric vehicle contains from six to 10 times as many as fossil fuel-powered vehicles, the UN report said.

However, that doesn’t equate to a renewables-based economy using more materials than one that is fossil-fuel based, Dale said.

“Energy consumption due to mineral demand for energy transition technologies is dwarfed by that which arises from mineral demand for the rest of the economy,” Dale wrote in The Conversation. “Nonetheless, the mineral demand of the energy transition stokes the mining boom in such sectors as copper and lithium. Mining must change in order to reduce its environmental impact.”

Dale said recovering waste minerals can be increased, and household electronic waste recycled.

“In practice, however, the use of secondary materials relative to newly-extracted ones is declining,” Dale wrote. “The recovery rates of minerals from recycling remain low. Another UN study of 60 metals found the recycling rate for most of them was below one percent.”

Dale added that extracting minerals is easier and less expensive than urban mining under the current economic system because it involves purchasing cheap land, frequently in developing countries.

“That land gets dug up, pulverised and processed in a simple flow that is amenable to capital-intensive operations. Urban mining by contrast is often labour-intensive and requires a complex and state-enforced regulation of waste streams,” Dale wrote. “So, throwing more materials onto the market lowers prices, which tends to expedite economic growth, raise energy consumption, and proliferate environmental harms. In short, there is nothing intrinsically ‘green’ about urban mining or the circular economy.”

Dale explained that interest in “degrowth” strategies has been increasing.

“As the scale of the environmental crisis grows more daunting, even moderate voices — not degrowthers — have recognised that certain sectors, such as shipping and aviation, will have to be cut to virtually zero over the next 20 or 30 years,” Dale said.

According to Jason Hickel — a degrowth advocate and author of Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World — consumer and manufacturing applications that contribute to waste need to shift to those that advance the green transition.

“Factories that produce SUVs could produce solar panels instead,” Hickel said, as The Conversation reported. “Engineers who are presently developing private jets could work on innovating more efficient trains and wind turbines instead.”

The post Humans Could Consume 60% More Natural Resources by 2060: UN Report appeared first on EcoWatch.

A new study led by researchers from University of Southern California (USC)’s Keck School of Medicine has found that certain foods — like processed meats, hot dogs, teas and foods not prepared at home — are likely to contain higher levels of PFAS “forever chemicals.”

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are a group of thousands of synthetic chemicals used in consumer products and household items like food packaging, nonstick cookware, clothing and furniture. Deemed “forever chemicals” because they do not break down quickly or easily, their widespread use has led to them becoming ubiquitous in water, air and soil, as well as in the bodies of humans and other animals.

The study found that diet and PFAS exposure are closely linked, and that consumption of foods with higher levels can result in accumulation in the human body over time, a press release from the Keck School of Medicine said.

“The main takeaway is not to demonize certain foods or say, ‘Oh my gosh, this food is so unhealthy.’ The point is to highlight that we need more testing of these foods, and this gives us an avenue to say, ‘OK, these foods may have higher levels of PFAS so we should do more targeted monitoring of them,’” said Hailey Hampson, lead author of the study and a doctoral student in the division of environmental health at Keck, as The Guardian reported.

The researchers studied two groups of young adults — 123, primarily Hispanic, with the Southern California Children’s Health Study (CHS), and a “nationally representative sample” of 604 young adults with the National Health and Nutrition Examination Study (NHANES), the press release said. The research team found that consuming certain foods, including those that are prepared at restaurants, was associated with higher PFAS levels in the human body.

“To our knowledge, this is the first study to examine how dietary factors are associated with changes in PFAS over time,” Jesse A. Goodrich, senior author of the study and a Keck School of Medicine assistant professor of population and public health sciences, said in the press release. “Looking at multiple time points gives us an idea of how changing people’s diets might actually impact PFAS levels.”

The study was published in the journal Environment International.

The results highlight the importance of monitoring and testing a variety of foods and beverages for PFAS contamination.

“We’re starting to see that even foods that are metabolically quite healthy can be contaminated with PFAS,” Hampson said. “These findings highlight the need to look at what constitutes ‘healthy’ food in a different way.”

Participants in the study answered questions regarding their diets, including the frequency with which they ate certain foods and beverages — such as dark green vegetables, bread, milk, sports drinks and tea. They were also asked how often they consumed foods from fast-food and non-fast-food restaurants and how often they ate home-cooked foods. The researchers used this information to hypothesize how often the participants came into contact with food packaging — a common source of PFAS.

Blood samples from the participants were tested for PFAS levels. The group from CHS was tested once at roughly the age of 20, as well as at around age 24, while the NHANES group was only tested around the age of 19.

The CHS group members who reported a higher consumption of tea in the first go-round were found to have higher PFAS levels during the second visit. A 24.8 percent higher level of perfluoro- hexanesulphonic acid (PFHxS) was found with one additional serving, along with a 16.17 percent higher level of perfluoroheptanesulfonic acid (PFHpS) and a 12.6 percent higher incidence of perfluorononanoic acid (PFNA).

Participants who reported higher pork intake were also found to have higher PFAS levels at the second visit, with one added serving associated with a 13.4 percent higher level of perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA).

Foods prepared at home were found to have the opposite effect. Every increase of approximately 7.06 ounces of home-cooked foods equated to 0.9 percent lower baseline levels of perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS) and 1.6 percent lower at the time of the second visit.

“It’s really interesting to find that these foods that are maybe not so healthy, when they’re cooked at home were a lower source of PFAS, and that definitely points to food packaging,” Hampson said, according to The Guardian.

The researchers said the pervasiveness of food packaging might call for a tougher strategy. Last year, an advisory letter was issued by the attorney general of California asking paper straw and food packaging manufacturers to disclose levels of PFAS in their products.

“That’s a really good step in the right direction, and our findings highlight the need for more of those types of regulations across the country,” Goodrich commented.

The post Processed and Packaged Foods Increase PFAS Levels in Human Blood, Study Finds appeared first on EcoWatch.

A bill proposed in California takes aim at single-use cups used for dining in at chain restaurants in the state.

The proposed Senate Bill 1167 (SB1167) would require that chain restaurants provide reusable, non-toxic cups for customers that dine in the restaurant, rather than offering paper, plastic or other single-use cups.

“California has a massive plastic waste problem, and if we are serious about protecting our environment and living sustainably, we must reduce it across the board,” Senator Catherine Blakespear, who proposed the bill, said in a press release. “SB 1167 is a simple, sensible step to reduce waste coming from restaurants.”

According to a 2021 study by CalRecycle (California’s Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery), rigid plastic food service ware waste totals over 503,000 tons per year, and paper or fiber food service ware waste reaches an annual total of over 849,000 tons.

The bill aims to cut down that waste and states that chain restaurants will need to provide a reusable drinking vessel, such as a mug or durable glass cup, for customers consuming the beverage on the premises. 

If the proposed legislation becomes law, qualifying restaurants that are found in violation would receive a notice for the first two instances of violations. From there, additional violations could incur a $25 per day fee, but fees would not exceed $300 for the year.

Several environmental organizations have shared support for the proposed bill, including co-sponsors Heal the Bay, Surfrider Foundation, Californians Against Waste and The 5 Gyres Institute.

“There is a reason why ‘reduce’ and ‘reuse’ come before recycling in the ‘3 Rs,’ and there are few examples of more egregious and wasteful consumption than being given a disposable cup when you are drinking coffee at a café,” Nick Lapis, advocacy director for Californians Against Waste, said in a statement. “Things we use for minutes shouldn’t pollute the earth for centuries.”

In addition to reducing waste, Heal the Bay shared on social media that the switch would also save water.

“The production of 500 paper cups utilizes 370 gallons of water, while a ceramic cup that is washed 500 times uses 53 gallons of water on average,” the organization shared on its Instagram page.

If the bill passes, it is expected to take effect beginning January 2025.

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The post California Bill Would Ban Single-Use Cups for Some Dine-In Restaurants appeared first on EcoWatch.

This story was originally published by Canary Media.

Heat pumps outsold gas furnaces. Again.

According to data from the Air-Conditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration Institute released last week, Americans bought 21 percent more heat pumps in 2023 than the next-most popular heating appliance, fossil gas furnaces. That’s the biggest lead heat pumps have opened up over conventional furnaces in the two decades of data available from the trade group.

As electric appliances, heat pumps help slash planet-warming emissions from a major source — space heating — while also letting consumers ditch the health-harming fumes from gas and heating oil in their homes. They’re almost magically efficient; they can routinely produce the same amount of heat as a fossil-fired system using just a third or a quarter of the energy.

Heat pumps’ growing popularity compared to furnaces is ​“really good news,” said Alex Amend, director of communications at pro-electrification advocacy group Rewiring America. The U.S. is ​“absolutely moving in the right direction.”

Last June, Rewiring put together a year-by-year sales growth trajectory for heat pumps that would be fast enough to take adoption from the 16 percent of U.S. homes they’re installed in as of 2023 to all projected 140 million homes by midcentury. Rewiring America’s figures and the data from the Air-Conditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration Institute aren’t directly comparable; AHRI tracks units sold while Rewiring tracks households. But even so, it’s clear that ​“we still have a ways to go” for gas furnace sales to fall to zero, said Wael Kanj, research associate at Rewiring America.

Sales for both heat pumps and fossil gas furnaces were down relative to 2023 due to supply-chain bottlenecks and a double punch of inflation and high interest rates that tempered consumer spending across the board. But heat pumps continued to widen a lead that first emerged in 2022, when they surged ahead of gas furnaces by 12 percent and topped 4 million units sold for the first time.

It’s important to note that the data does not unequivocally mean that more U.S. homes are now installing heat-pump systems than gas furnaces. Because heat pumps are modular, home systems often have more than one unit. Larger homes may also install more than one gas furnace.

But the data does suggest that the growing popularity of heat pumps could be opening up new markets across the U.S. The tech is popular in the Southeast where mild climates have long made them a viable option. In recent years, though, heat-pump technology has improved, and the appliance has taken hold in states with frigid winter weather, such as Maine and Colorado. Heat pumps proved so popular in Maine that in July, the state beat its original deployment goal and had to set a new, more ambitious one.

The Biden administration is galvanizing the move to heat pumps. The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act incentivizes heat pumps with a 30 percent federal tax credit up to $2,000, and federal rebates are expected to start rolling out this year.

Leaders at the state level are also setting ambitious clean-heat targets. In September, governors of 25 states pledged to cumulatively install 20 million heat pumps by 2030. And last week, nine states upped the ante with a target (albeit a nonbinding one) for heat pumps to make up 90 percent of home heating sales by 2040. Many states and utilities also have incentive programs to encourage residents to install heat pumps.

At the same time, consumers are getting more curious about the tech. As recently reported by Distilled, Google searches for the term ​“heat pump” have doubled in the last five years.

Climate advocates are increasingly pushing policymakers to incentivize — or even mandate — homeowners to replace their broken-down ACs with heat pumps. Data from AHRI reveals a big missed opportunity on this front: Americans are buying more central ACs when they could be purchasing dual-purpose heat pumps.

Despite the strong showing for 2023 overall, heat-pump sales fell behind gas furnaces in the last quarter of the year. That could be in part because many consumers aren’t prepared to switch to a heat pump when their gas furnace breaks, Kanj said; as temperatures drop, they just need a replacement fast.

According to Kanj, that’s why it’s crucial to make it easier for consumers to choose heat pumps by alleviating supply-chain constraints, educating contractors and the public, and helping people plan for the upgrade rather than wait until they have an emergency. That way, ​“when someone’s furnace goes out and it’s cold outside … there’s a heat pump ready and waiting.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Heat pumps outsold gas furnaces again last year — and the gap is growing on Feb 19, 2024.

Kathy Hannun, president and cofounder of Dandelion Energy, introduces an untapped heating and cooling capacity…

The post Earth911 Podcast: Dandelion Energy CEO Kathy Hannon on the Promise of Residential Geothermal Heat Pumps appeared first on Earth911.

This story was produced through a collaboration between the Daily Yonder, which covers rural America, and Nexus Media News, an editorially independent, nonprofit news service covering climate change.

One of the most iconic landmarks in downtown Grants Pass, Oregon, is a 100-year-old sign that arcs over the main street with the phrase “It’s the Climate” scrawled across it. 

To an outsider, it’s an odd slogan in this rural region, where comments about the climate – or rather, climate change – can be met with apprehension. But for locals, it’s a nod to an era when the “climate” only referred to Grants Pass’ warm, dry summers and mild winters when snow coats the surrounding mountains but rarely touches down in the city streets. 

Now, the slogan takes on a different meaning.

In May 2023, the Grants Pass City Council passed a one-of-a-kind sustainability plan that, if implemented, would transition publicly owned buildings and vehicles to renewable energy, diversifying their power sources in case of natural disaster.

While passing the sustainability plan in this largely Republican county was an enormous feat on its own, actually paying for the energy projects proves to be Grants Pass’ biggest challenge yet. 

“There are grants out there, but I don’t think we’re the only community out there looking for grants to help pay for some of these things,” said J.C. Rowley, finance director for the city of Grants Pass. Some project examples outlined in their sustainability plan include installing electric vehicle charging stations downtown and solar panels at two city-owned landfills, and converting park streetlights to LED. 

Rural communities face bigger hurdles when accessing grant funding because they don’t have the staff or budget that cities often do to produce competitive grant applications. This can slow down the implementation of projects like the ones laid out in the Grants Pass sustainability plan.

And time is not something Grants Pass — or any other community — has to spare.

Global climate models show the planet’s average annual temperature increasing by about 6.3° Fahrenheit by 2100 if “business-as-usual” practices continue. These practices mean no substantive climate change mitigation policy, continued population growth, and unabated greenhouse gas emissions throughout the 21st century — practices driven by the most resource-consumptive countries, namely, the United States. 

In southwest Oregon, this temperature increase means hotter summers and less snow in the winters, affecting the region’s water resources, according to a U.S. Forest Service analysis. This could mean longer and more severe wildfire seasons. 

In Roseburg, Oregon, about 70 miles north of Grants Pass, a 6.3°F increase would mean the city’s yearly average of 36 days of below-freezing temperatures would decrease to few or none, according to the analysis. Grants Pass would suffer a similar fate, drastically changing the climate it’s so famous for. 

Grants Pass has a population of 39,000 and is the hub of one of the smallest metropolitan statistical areas in the U.S. The metro contains just one county, Josephine, which has a population of under 90,000, nearly half of whom live outside urbanized areas. Over half of the county’s land is owned by the Bureau of Land Management or National Forest, and it contains a section of the federal Rogue River Scenic Waterway.

“In the event of a natural disaster, we are far more likely to get isolated,” said Allegra Starr, an Americorps employee who was the driving force behind the Grants Pass sustainability plan. “I’ve heard stories of communities that were less isolated than us running out of fuel [during power outages].”

Building resilience in the face of disaster is a main priority of the plan, which recommends 14 projects related to green energy, waste disposal, transportation, and tree plantings in city limits. All of the projects focus on improvements to city-owned buildings, vehicles, and operations. 

In partnership with Starr and the Grants Pass public works department, a volunteer task force of community members spent one year researching and writing the sustainability plan. In spring 2023, it was approved by the Grants Pass City Council. 

Now, the public works department is in the grants-seeking stage, and they stand to benefit from the influx of climate cash currently coming from the federal government. 

Money for sustainability, if you can get it

In 2022, the Biden administration passed the single largest bill on clean energy and climate action in U.S. history: the Inflation Reduction Act, which funnels $145 billion to renewable energy and climate action programs. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, passed in 2021, allocates $57.9 billion to clean energy and power projects. 

“It’s almost like drinking through a fire hose with the grant opportunities, which is a curse and a blessing,” said Vanessa Ogier, Grants Pass city council member. Ogier joined the council in 2021 with environmental and social issues as her top priority and was one of the sustainability plan’s biggest proponents. 

But competing against larger communities for the grants funded through these federal laws is a struggle for smaller communities like Grants Pass. 

“I really don’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth, but when a small community only has one grant writer and they have to focus on water systems, fire, dispatch, fleet services, and they’re torn in all these different ways, it can be difficult to wrangle and organize all these opportunities and filter if they’re applicable, if we would even qualify,” Ogier said. 

Having a designated grant-writing team, which is common in larger cities, would be a huge help in Grants Pass, Ogier said. 

A 2023 study by Headwaters Economics found that lower-capacity communities – ones with fewer staff and limited funding – were unable to compete against higher-capacity, typically urban communities with resources devoted to writing competitive grant applications. 

“[There are] rural communities that don’t have community development, that don’t have economic development, that don’t have grant writers, that may only have one or two paid staff,” said Karen Chase, senior manager for community strategy at Energy Trust, an Oregon-based nonprofit that helps people transition their homes and businesses to renewable energy. Chase was a member of the volunteer task force that put together the Grants Pass sustainability plan.

When the Inflation Reduction Act money started rolling in, many of the rural communities Chase works with did not have plans that laid out “shovel-ready” energy and climate resiliency projects, which is a requirement of much of the funding. Grants Pass’ sustainability plan should give them a leg-up when applying for grants that require shovel-ready projects, according to Chase.

“Most of my rural communities pretty much lost out,” she said. 

This is despite the approximately $87 billion of Inflation Reduction Act money classified as rural-relevant, rural-stipulated, or rural-exclusive funding, according to an analysis from the Brookings Institute. Rural outreach is part of the Biden administration’s larger goal to put money into rural communities that historically have been left out by state and federal investments.

But this outreach isn’t perfect. Most of the federal grants available to rural communities still have match requirements, which are a set amount of money awardees must contribute to a grant-funded project. 

The Brookings Institute analysis, which also looked at rural funding from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the CHIPS and Science Act, found that “over half [of the rural-significant grants programs] require or show a preference for matching funds, and less than one-third offer flexibility or a waiver.” 

Of the rural-exclusive and rural-stipulated programs, less than one-third of the total grants offer match waivers or flexibility to reduce the match requirement. This makes getting those grants a lot harder for rural communities with smaller budgets. 

Help from the outside

To address limited staffing, in 2021 the Grants Pass public works department applied to be a host site for an Americorps program run out of the University of Oregon. 

The program, coined the Resource Assistance for Rural Environments (RARE) program, assigns graduate students to rural Oregon communities for 11 months to work on economic development, sustainability planning, and food systems initiatives. An Americorps member was assigned to Grants Pass to work as a sustainability planner from September 2022 to August 2023. 

Without the Americorps member, Grants Pass officials say there’s no way the plan would have been written.

“She came in and learned about the city and the operations and the technical aspects of it and was able to really understand it and talk about that,” said Kyrrha Sevco, business operations supervisor for the public works department. “That’s hard to do.”

Bringing outsiders in can be a tricky undertaking in a rural community, but RARE program director Titus Tomlinson said they collaborate with the host sites to make the transition for their members as smooth as possible. 

“When we place a member, we place them with a trusted entity in a rural community,” Tomlinson said. “[The site supervisor] helps them meet and engage with other leaders in the community so that they’ve got some ground to stand on right out of the gate.” 

Each participating community must provide a $25,000 cash match that goes toward the approximately $50,000 needed to pay, train, and mentor the Americorps member, according to the RARE website. Communities struggling to meet this cash match are eligible for financial assistance. 

Grants Pass paid $18,500 for their portion of the RARE Americorps grant.

Allegra Starr, the Americorps employee, no longer works in Grants Pass since completing her 11-month term. In her stead, a committee of seven has been created to monitor and report to the city council on the progress of the plan’s implementation. 

Much of this implementation work will fall on the director of the public works department, Jason Canady, and the business operations supervisor, Kyrrha Sevco. 

“There has to be that departmental person who’s really carrying that lift and that load,” said Rowley, the Grants Pass finance director. “It’s the Kyrrhas and Jasons of the world who are leading the charge for their own department like public works.”

Now, Canady and Sevco are laying the groundwork for multiple solar projects. Eventually, they hope to bring to life what local high school student, and member of the original volunteer sustainability task force, Kayle Palmore, dreamed of in an essay titled “A Day in 2045,” which envisions bike lanes, wide sidewalks, solar panels, and electric vehicle charging stations on every street corner. 

“A smile spreads across your face as you think of how much you love this beautiful city,” Palmore writes. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline With limited resources, an Oregon town plans for climate change on Feb 18, 2024.

This story was originally published by KUNC.

Colorado’s Glenwood Canyon is as busy as it is majestic. At the base of its snowy, near-vertical walls, the narrow chasm hums with life. On one side, the Colorado River tumbles through whitewater rapids. On the other, cars and trucks whoosh by on a busy interstate.

Pinched in the middle of it all is the Shoshone Generating Station.

“It is a nondescript brown building off of I-70 that most people don’t notice when they’re driving,” said Amy Moyer, director of strategic partnerships at the Colorado River District. “But if you are in the water world, it holds the key for one of the most interesting and important water rights on the Colorado River.”

Beneath a noisy highway overpass, Moyer looked at the hydropower plant through a chain-link fence. Her group, a taxpayer-funded agency founded to keep water flowing to the cities and farms of Western Colorado, is poised to spend nearly $100 million on rights to the water that flows through the Shoshone facility.

The purchase represents the culmination of a decades-long effort to keep Shoshone’s water on the west side of Colorado’s mountains, settling the region’s long-held anxieties over competition with the water needs of the Front Range, where fast-growing cities and suburbs around Denver need more water to keep pace with development.

Even though the Shoshone water rights carry an eight-figure price tag, the new owners will leave the river virtually unchanged. The river district will buy access to Shoshone’s water from the plant operator, Xcel Energy, and lease it back as long as Xcel wants to keep producing hydropower.

The water right is considered “non-consumptive,” meaning every drop that enters the power plant is returned to the river. The river district wants to keep it that way as long as they can and ensure the water that flows into the hydroelectric plant also flows downstream to farmers, fish, and homes.

The river district is rallying the $98.5 million sum from local, state, and federal agencies. The district has secured $40 million already, with deals in the works for the remainder. It’s rare for a big-money water deal to find this kind of broad approval from a diverse group of water users. But the acquisition is seen as pivotal for a wide swath of Colorado, and has been co-signed by farmers, environmental groups, and local governments.

“It’s so much more than, ‘We’re going to spend $100 million to do nothing,’” Moyer said. “We’re keeping native flows in the river for so many benefits on the West Slope.”

Why Shoshone?

To understand why this unassuming power plant wields so much clout, you have to take a look at its history.

About 40 million people across seven Western states rely on the Colorado River. It supplies big cities like Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Denver. It supports a multi-billion dollar agriculture industry. But it’s governed by a century-old legal document and a management system that has proven frustratingly difficult to adapt for today’s policymakers.

Core to that management system is the concept of “prior appropriation,” which means that those who were first to use water will be the last to have their water curtailed in times of shortage. It often ignores Indigenous people who were using the river’s water before white settlers ever arrived. But under the rules white settlers drew up and modern governments still use today, it means older water rights are more powerful.

Shoshone’s water right is one of the oldest and biggest in the state, giving it preemptive power over many other rights in Colorado.

Even in dry times, when cities and farms in other parts of the state feel the sting of water shortages, the Shoshone Hydroelectric Plant can send water through its turbines. And when that water exits the turbines and re-enters the Colorado River, it keeps flowing for myriad users downstream.

The hydro plant itself produces relatively little energy. Its 15 megawatt capacity is only a small fraction of Xcel Energy’s total Colorado output of 13,100 megawatts. Shoshone’s capacity is enough to serve about 15,000 customers, which is less than a quarter of the population of Garfield County, where the plant is located.

But the power plant has held legal access to water from the Colorado River since 1902, and can claim seniority over the vast majority of other water owners in the state.

That kind of seniority means power and certainty for whoever owns it. And that has raised the hackles of Western Colorado water users, who worry that water users in other parts of Colorado might be interested in buying Shoshone’s water right.

Colorado’s Front Range — functionally the metro area from Fort Collins to Pueblo — only exists in its current capacity because of a complex network of canals, pipes, and tunnels cut through the mountains, carrying water against gravity to the places where it’s needed. About 80 percent of the state’s water falls on the west side of the mountains, but 80 percent of its people live on the east side.

Cities on the Front Range have been able to grow significantly over the past century, despite often having access to a finite supply of water. Their Western Colorado counterparts worry that future growth could lead those cities to spend big on more water from the West Slope and say securing Shoshone’s water blocks Eastern Colorado water users from the chance to snatch it up themselves.

Fish and farms

The Colorado River District’s plans to buy Shoshone’s water have rallied widespread support, largely because of the transfer’s widespread benefits.

Perhaps no constituency will benefit from the move as much as the one that lives in the river itself.

“Anything that results in more water in the river is good for fish,” said Dale Ryden, a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Standing on the banks of the Colorado River in Grand Junction, Ryden looked out over a murky, meandering stretch of water. It’s part of the “15 mile reach,” a critical section of the river about 80 miles west of the Shoshone plant. The reach is filled partly by water exiting Shoshone’s turbines.

Ryden explained that this section of river is home to a variety of species, some of which are endangered, and some which are found nowhere else on earth besides the upper portions of the Colorado River.

Those species — with funky names like the flannelmouth sucker and the humpback chub — rely on this stretch of river for virtually every aspect of life.

“Back in the day, before there were people here and there was a lot of water and snowpack, the ’15 mile reach’ was kind of the place to be if you were an endangered Colorado pikeminnow or a razorback sucker,” Ryden said. “The adults live here, they spawn here, they feed here. It’s just a really highly-used and good section of river for the adult endangered fish.”

Because the fish are protected by the federal Endangered Species Act, people who use water from this section of the Colorado River are legally required to leave enough behind for fish. That means dry conditions and water shortages would force farmers and ranchers in the nearby Grand Valley to play a tricky balancing game between their own water needs and the legal protections afforded to endangered fish.

“We can’t have farming without taking care of those fish,” said Tina Bergonzini, manager of the Grand Valley Water Users Association, one of a handful of agricultural irrigation districts near Grand Junction. “They go hand in hand.”

Mesa County, which contains the Grand Valley, has an annual agricultural output of about $94 million. It’s the state’s top producer of fruits and berries, including the regionally-famous peaches from Palisade.

Bergonzini says the farmers and ranchers who contribute to that total will be able to depend on a steady water supply year after year once Shoshone’s water is guaranteed to keep flowing their way.

“I think peace of mind is the number one most important thing that it’s going to be able to bring to the Grand Valley,” she said.

The Grand Valley Water Users Association was among 21 groups that co-signed the river district’s plan to buy the Shoshone water right.

Other potential suitors

The river district describes the deal as ‘protecting’ the Shoshone water right, but hasn’t detailed who exactly they’re protecting it from. History provides more than a few examples of Front Range cities and agriculture looking West for new water supplies, but it’s unclear which diverters, exactly, would have wanted to buy Shoshone.

Denver Water, the state’s largest water utility, would have been a potential candidate to buy access to Shoshone’s water, but forfeited that opportunity in 2013 when the agency inked the “Colorado River Cooperative Agreement” along with the Colorado River District. In fact, Denver Water agreed to support the acquisition of the Shoshone water right by a West Slope entity.

Representatives from Denver Water, Aurora Water, and Northern Water — which serves eight counties north and east of the Denver metro — declined to comment on the transfer of Shoshone’s water rights. A spokeswoman for Colorado Springs Utilities said the agency was “aware of the Colorado River District’s efforts to acquire the Shoshone water rights and would not oppose the transfer of those rights.”

Mark Hermundstad, a retired water lawyer who helped craft the Colorado River Cooperative Agreement, said he was not aware of any particular water agency that was poised to buy the Shoshone right but that threats may have still existed. He even floated the idea that an East Coast hedge fund could theoretically attempt to buy Shoshone’s water.

“There’s always been a possibility that someone with a lot of money could come in and buy it and try to do something with it,” he said.

Following the funds, and what comes next

Almost all of the $98.5 million for the river district’s acquisition of Shoshone’s water will derive from public funds.

The vast majority of that money, about $49 million, is set to come from the federal government. The river district plans to request a chunk of money from a $4 billion pool given to the Department of the Interior in 2022 for Colorado River projects. The extraordinary infusion of federal money has so far been used to fund a number of incentive programs designed to pay water users — mostly farmers and ranchers — in exchange for reduced water use.

Twenty million dollars will come from the river district’s own coffers. The agency is funded by taxes from 15 counties in Western Colorado. In 2020, voters in those counties overwhelmingly approved a rate hike for payments to the river district, designed to bring in an extra $5 million each year.

Another $20 million will come from the state of Colorado. The state’s water management arm, the Colorado Water Conservation Board, recently voted to approve that spending from its annual “water projects bill,” bringing the river district one step closer to its fundraising goals.

Besides wrangling the formidable sum, the main hurdles left for the river district concern permitting, regulation, and a court hearing. Both the river district and state officials say they are optimistic that all the necessary paperwork will get stamped without issue.

“I don’t expect that there’s going to be entities or individuals that come out of the woodwork vocalizing any strong opposition to us moving forward in this way,” Lauren Ris, director of the Colorado Water Conservation Board, said.

Only one aspect of the transfer appears to present a potential wrinkle: the river district’s ability to own an “instream flow.” That designation refers to water that is owned but not used, in the traditional sense. Instead, it’s left in rivers and streams to “preserve the natural environment.” The state is usually the only entity allowed to own that type of water right.

In a recent Colorado Water Conservation Board (CWCB) meeting, Phil Weiser, the state’s attorney general, pointed out that it would be unusual for the river district — rather than the state board itself — to own Shoshone’s water and keep it as an instream flow.

In an interview with KUNC, Ris pointed to a short list of other times the board made exceptions to its usual policy about instream flow ownership. Ris said the Colorado River District’s takeover of Shoshone is big and important enough that it makes sense to “think creatively” and consider adding Shoshone’s water to that list.

“The easiest way to have an instream flow water, right, is for the CWCB to outright own it and operate it,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean that it’s the only way, and this is such an outlier unique situation.”

‘Long-term, permanent solutions’

The past few decades have seen the Colorado River governed by a patchwork of short-term agreements. The region’s top water policymakers have appeared reluctant to agree on more permanent measures to significantly correct a growing imbalance between supply and demand. Instead, they’ve put together temporary deals designed to stave off catastrophe at the nation’s largest reservoirs.

While the Shoshone water right transfer likely won’t change much for tense negotiations about water management between states that use the Colorado River, it’s a rare moment of durability and stability for at least one area that uses the river’s water.

“Now more than ever, there is a desire to look for long-term permanent solutions on the Colorado River,” said the Colorado River District’s Amy Moyer. “This is one that exists for Colorado.”

Across the Colorado River Basin, that imbalance and the growing harm of climate change have also compelled environmental groups to raise alarm about potential damage to ecosystems for plants and animals. Management decisions about the river’s water tend to prioritize cities and agriculture over the natural world.

Proponents of the Shoshone water right transfer say it will help push back on the harms of water shortages, at least on one stretch of the Colorado River.

“Being able to stabilize or make permanent existing rights is very helpful as we look at addressing and dealing with climate change and its impact on streams,” said Bart Miller, healthy rivers director at the conservation group Western Resource Advocates. Miller’s group receives funding from the Walton Family Foundation, which also supports KUNC’s Colorado River coverage.

Policymakers are struggling to make significant reductions to the amount of water used by cities and farms, and climate change means less water will enter the river system in the future. Environmental advocates say the Colorado River District’s ownership of the Shoshone water provides some insurance against those realities by adding predictability and protection to a stretch of the Colorado River.

This story is part of ongoing coverage of the Colorado River, produced by KUNC and supported by the Walton Family Foundation. It was produced in partnership with The Water Desk, an independent initiative of the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Environmental Journalism. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline In $100 million Colorado River deal, water and power collide on Feb 17, 2024.

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