Change is hard. Change takes courage. And change starts with turning to face the challenge….

The post Earth911 Inspiration: Face the Change appeared first on Earth911.

Though it is internationally known for its catastrophic wildfires and earthquakes, California is no stranger to floods — particularly during the heavy rains that accompany its winters. In fact, 7 million Californians live in flood-prone areas. Despite this, just one in four Golden State homes sitting in what the federal government considers a flood hazard zone are covered by flood insurance. That gap spells trouble for thousands of homeowners in Southern California, which has been battered by a series of storms over the last week. 

The torrential rain and wind are the result of what’s called an atmospheric river, a channel of moisture that can be up to 375 miles wide and carry the equivalent of two Amazon Rivers’ worth of water. Downed trees and mudslides that resulted from the downpour killed nine people, and half a million homes and businesses went without power across the state in recent weeks.

San Diego and Los Angeles, where the river stalled out and dumped more than 10 inches of rain, were hit the hardest. Thousands of homeowners trying to repair the water damage are now in for a rude surprise when they discover that their standard-issue home insurance doesn’t cover floods. The lack of protection stems not only from misperceptions about the likelihood of flooding in sunny California and common misunderstandings of what basic home insurance covers, but also regulatory shortcomings by the federal government, which is supposed to ensure that all the country’s high-risk homes are insured in the event of floods. As climate change intensifies the state’s atmospheric river storms, the problem is only poised to grow.

“[Flood insurance] uptake in California is half the national average,” said Jeffrey Mount, a geomorphologist and a senior fellow at the nonprofit Public Policy Institute of California. “We’re really bad when it comes to that.”

In the eight Southern California counties where the governor has declared an emergency, roughly 52,000 homes and businesses are covered by flood insurance. That’s less than 1 percent of the total number of homes in the region. One reason is cost: A yearly flood policy can cost between $500 and $1,000. In a state with a housing crunch and high cost of living, purchasing flood insurance may be out of reach for many residents who already struggle with the required cost of homeownership, including standard home insurance. Mount added that severe flooding events are quickly forgotten even by those who have lived through them, especially in a state where so many other ecological crises are constantly in the headlines. 

“Disaster fatigue is a real thing,” said Mount. “People wear out hearing they’re going to die from earthquakes, fires, and floods, and they get numb, and they don’t take actions to protect themselves.”

Such concerns are only likely to increase in a warming world. A warmer atmosphere and ocean mean an atmospheric river can pick up more water as it crosses the ocean before dumping water on land. The presence of a strong El Niño, a weather pattern that is characterized by warmer Pacific Ocean temperatures, also supercharged the atmospheric river that hit California this month. 

“The combination of a warming atmosphere and co-occurrence of the El Niño event both conspired to generate the conditions we’ve seen now along with a healthy dose of random luck,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. Although attribution studies have not yet been conducted on the atmospheric river that has doused California in the last week, Swain estimated that absent climate change, precipitation levels would have been 5 to 15 percent lower.

“That’s not a small number,” said Swain. “We’re talking about a couple extra inches of rain, and two inches of rain in Los Angeles would be a pretty big storm in its own right in a typical year.”

Flood coverage is mandatory for those obtaining a federally-backed mortgage in a part of the state that the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, has deemed a “special hazard flood area.” The policy is supposed to protect both homeowners taking on hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and the federal government, which ultimately bears the risk when a borrower defaults. However, FEMA, which runs the national flood insurance program, does not keep track of compliance with the rule. Neither do lenders. As a result, a homeowner may purchase a flood policy when they secure a mortgage but fail to renew it in subsequent years. A 2006 FEMA study found that compliance with the requirement ranged between 43 percent in the midwest and 88 percent in western states. 

California, however, may be the exception in this latter region. Mount, the water policy expert, found that just a quarter of homes in parts of the state with high flood risk comply with the federal rule.

“Nobody’s policing it,” said Mount. “There’s no mechanism to go in and threaten people and say, ‘If you don’t get flood insurance, we’re going to take your mortgage away from you.’”

Mount added that the floods California has seen in the past month are “not floods of the affluent.” People with low economic resilience are often hit hardest by flooding because they tend not to be able to afford insurance and have limited resources to get back on their feet. For instance, in San Diego, which experienced its rainiest day since 1850 last month, low-income communities and communities of color were among the worst affected by flooding. 

“This is a social justice issue,” said Mount. “The people who can least afford it are the ones that usually get whacked, and those same communities can’t come up with the money to try and fix their infrastructure.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Atmospheric rivers are battering California. Why don’t residents have flood insurance? on Feb 9, 2024.

Samantha Gonsalves-Wetherell, a senior at the University of Arizona, has spent years urging university officials to take climate change seriously. As a leader of UArizona Divest, she and her classmates have been pushing the university toward three goals: to divest from fossil fuels by 2029; commit to no further investments in fossil fuels; and to implement socially responsible investing goals. 

“It’s hard to both combat the climate crisis and also fund it,” said Gonsalves-Wetherell. She has met with university officials to ask them what stocks the university has invested in and how much revenue oil and gas investments bring in. 

But until now, she had no idea that the university, like more than a dozen other land-grant universities created through the Morrill Act, earned millions more through another route: nearly 700,000 acres of land taken from Indigenous nations that is set aside for oil, gas and mineral leases.

A Grist investigation published earlier this week reported that 14 universities — including the University of Arizona — receive millions in annual income from more than 8 million acres of surface and subsurface land taken from 123 Native nations. Over the past five years, these properties have generated more than $2.2 billion. Nearly a fourth of the trust lands are dedicated to fossil fuels or mineral mining including coal mining. 

University activists who have been lobbying their universities to pull their endowments out of fossil fuels say Grist’s findings are in line with what they’ve come to expect from their schools: a willingness to overlook their complicity in climate change and societal injustice. 

When Claire Sullivan, a senior at Colorado State University, learned of Grist’s findings, she thought of the land acknowledgement she’s seen on every syllabus and plastered on many walls all over campus. 

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The two-paragraph statement ends with this note: “Our founding came at a dire cost to Native Nations and peoples whose land this University was built upon. This acknowledgment is the education and inclusion we must practice in recognizing our institutional history, responsibility, and commitment.”

According to Sullivan, CSU says all of its fossil fuel investments are indirect, but it hasn’t made any promises to avoid direct investments or phase out any existing ones, despite the disproportionate harm that climate change is wreaking on Native peoples. Sullivan’s exasperation at the university’s intractable stance is topped only by her awe at what she describes as their hypocrisy. 

“It’s just crazy that you could be making this commitment outwardly and just be doing the opposite in practice,” she said.

Not every divestment campaign has been so frustrating. Many university activists, such as at Harvard and Yale, have seen success. Gracelyn McClure is a senior and environmental sciences major at the University of Minnesota. She was only a sophomore when school officials decided to withdraw its investments from fossil fuels by 2028. It was a huge victory, but McClure said the group’s advocacy work isn’t over. 

The group has been meeting with university officials to try to ensure that as contracts for fossil fuel investments expire, the money is being shifted into investments that aren’t similarly harmful. For example, they’ve asked the school not to reinvest in mining that’s opposed by Indigenous peoples.

Even though the initial campaign was successful, the students haven’t yet been able to garner any new promises to avoid nuclear energy or other mining that they fear could harm Native peoples. “They’re not super receptive all the time to our asks,” McClure said of the administration. But she thinks working with Native nations to ensure that reinvestment isn’t negatively affecting their communities isn’t asking for much. 

“It’s the least that the university can do, considering how much they profited from Native land, and bodies too,” she said. 

A spokesman for the University of Minnesota said the university has been working with tribal nations to address its history of stolen land, including returning about 3,400 acres to the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. The spokesman also cited the school’s investments in Native student tuition waivers, Indigenous language revitalization and staff training. 

He added that the school can’t speak to land managed by the state. The University of Arizona and Colorado State University did not comment on the trust lands revenue.

Many students at universities that have pledged to divest from fossil fuels have been turning their attention to different but related causes, says Alicia Colomer, managing director at Campus Climate Network, which supports student climate activists. She worked on the successful New York University divestment campaign and says some of the newer student demands include asking schools to stop putting fossil fuel executives on their boards and stop accepting research money from oil companies. 

To her, learning about the trust lands revenue feels like more of the same problem: “shocking but not shocking.”

She hopes students can sway their institutions to stop practices that are harmful to Indigenous lands and people.

Nadira Mitchell, a Navajo student at University of Arizona, hopes to be part of that change. She’s studying natural resources at the university in the hopes that she will be able to work for her tribal nation one day and make a difference. It has felt isolating to be one of the only Native students in her environmental courses. 

Now, she’s struck by the juxtaposition between how Indigenous people like her own are disproportionately harmed by climate change and university’s investments in fossil fuels.

“It’s mind-boggling,” she said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Campus divestment activists eye fossil fuel profits on stolen land on Feb 9, 2024.

In a win for farmers and endangered plants and wildlife, an Arizona district court has revoked the approval of the destructive pesticide dicamba, saying the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) broke the law when it allowed it to be on the market.

Dicamba-based weedkillers have been widely used on soybean and cotton crops genetically engineered by Bayer (formerly Monsanto), a press release from the Center for Biological Diversity — who brought the lawsuit — said.

“This is a vital victory for farmers and the environment,” said George Kimbrell, legal director for the Center for Food Safety and counsel in the case, in the press release. “Time and time again, the evidence has shown that dicamba cannot be used without causing massive and unprecedented harm to farms as well as endangering plants and pollinators. The court today resoundingly reaffirmed what we have always maintained: the EPA’s and Monsanto’s claims of dicamba’s safety were irresponsible and unlawful.”

Dicamba has a tendency to drift, damaging millions of acres of wild plants, animals and crops for which it was not intended. The EPA first approved the harmful pesticide in 2017 for use on crops that were genetically engineered to be able to withstand what would be a deadly dose for other plants.

The United States District Court for the District of Arizona’s ruling overturned the reapproval of dicamba by the EPA in 2020, which specified application restrictions that did not prevent damage caused by persistent drifting.

The EPA has estimated that three-fourths of cotton crops and two-thirds of soybean crops — 65 million acres — are resistant to dicamba. Roughly half those acres were actually sprayed with the toxin.

Some farmers have even gone so far as to plant crops “defensively” to avoid drift damage from dicamba.

The district court ruled that the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act had been violated by the EPA, saying the breach was “very serious,” since the EPA had previously been ruled against by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for failing to consider the significant risks of excessive dicamba use when issuing the previous registration.

“I hope the court’s emphatic rejection of the EPA’s reckless approval of dicamba will spur the agency to finally stop ignoring the far-reaching harm caused by this dangerous pesticide,” said Nathan Donley, the Center for Biological Diversity’s director of environmental health science, in the press release. “Endangered butterflies and bee populations will keep tanking if the EPA keeps twisting itself into a pretzel to approve this product just to appease the pesticide industry.”

Farmers whose crops are unable to withstand dicamba’s intense effects were happy with the ruling.

“Every summer since the approval of dicamba, our farm has suffered significant damage to a wide range of vegetable crops,” said farmer Rob Faux, who is also a communications manager with Pesticide Action Network, in the press release. “Today’s decision provides much needed and overdue protection for farmers and the environment.”

The pesticide threatens endangered species like the rusty patched bumblebee. Beekeepers have reported steep declines in honey production because of dicamba drift, which suppresses the flowering plants bees need to survive.

“We are grateful that the court held the EPA and Monsanto accountable for the massive damage from dicamba to farmers, farmworkers and the environment, and halted its use,” said Lisa Griffith, an outreach and communications coordinator with the National Family Farm Coalition. “The pesticide system that Monsanto sells should not be sprayed as it cannot be sprayed safely.”

The post In ‘Vital Victory for Farmers and the Environment,’ Arizona Court Cancels EPA’s Approval of Dicamba Pesticide appeared first on EcoWatch.

The estimated number of monarch butterflies migrating to Mexico for winter has reached its second-lowest level ever for the 2023 to 2024 overwintering season. The estimate, based on the size of the butterflies’ hibernating forest area, has dropped by about 59% from the previous year, according to officials.

Experts are pointing to extensive heat and drought as well as climate change for the major decline.

Recent years have seen some hope for the migrating monarch butterflies, with a 35% increase in the number of butterflies observed overwintering in Mexico during the 2021 to 2022 season compared to the previous year. 

But monarch butterflies face three primary threats, including habitat loss for their breeding and overwintering; the use of pesticides, which can be toxic to the butterflies or can kill their food source, milkweed; and climate change, which can shift their migratory patterns. By the 2022 to 2023 overwintering season, World Wildlife Fund reported a 22% drop in the amount of overwintering monarch butterflies in Mexico.

According to WWF, monarch butterflies once covered about 45 acres of forested land in Mexico during their 1996 to 1997 overwintering season. Last year, they covered 5.5 acres. With the 59% decline, the 2023 overwintering season saw the butterflies covering just 2.2 acres, The Associated Press reported. The lowest coverage ever recorded was 1.65 acres from 2013 to 2014.

The largest amount of butterflies observed for the current overwintering season were around the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve.

“This is not the first time we’ve observed changes in the locations of the largest monarch colonies,” Jorge Rickards, general director of WWF Mexico, said in a statement. “It’s telling us that we need to intensify conservation and restoration measures not only in the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, but also outside of it.”

According to the Center for Biological Diversity, monarch butterflies have declined by 85% in the past 20 years. The eastern monarch butterflies migrate from Canada and the U.S. to Mexico for overwintering. Western monarchs, which overwinter in California, have declined 99% in the past two decades.

Monarch butterflies do not currently have federal protections. In 2020, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service noted that these butterflies do warrant protections under the Endangered Species Act, but there were higher-priority species to consider for listing. Biologist Ryan Drum, who works with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, told The Associated Press that the latest count would be considered this year when officials consider whether to list migratory monarch butterflies as threatened or even endangered. 

According to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, monarch butterflies are expected to receive protections later in 2024.

The post Monarch Butterflies Wintering in Mexico Drop to Second-Lowest Level Ever Recorded appeared first on EcoWatch.

Following COVID, we’ve all paid a lot more attention to avoiding illness the past couple…

The post The Environmental Cost of Getting Sick appeared first on Earth911.

Environmental activists and community organizers on the Gulf Coast have spent years pressuring the Biden administration to halt the construction of terminals that export liquefied natural gas, or LNG. As U.S. production of natural gas skyrocketed over the past few decades, energy companies began building massive coastal facilities to liquefy the fossil fuel and transport it by ship to Europe, Asia, and elsewhere. In response, activists staged protests, organized sit-ins, wrote to members of Congress, and broadly made the issue Biden’s “next big climate test.”

When the administration announced that it would pause its approval of new LNG terminals late last month, the climate movement and its allies were largely credited with the victory. Bill McKibben, the renowned founder of 350.org (and a former Grist board member), began his blog post about the news by saying, “Um, I think we all just won.” The decision reportedly came about after senior administration officials, including White House climate adviser Ali Zaidi, learned that young activists on TikTok were drawing millions of views elevating LNG as a major climate issue.

As if to prove the president was listening, the White House has collected dozens of quotes from climate advocates praising the decision. (In some ways, the activists’ celebration belies the reality that the climate impact of constricting LNG exports is far from certain, and the devil is in the details: While a broader buildout certainly has the potential to promote unnecessary fossil fuel use, it may also speed other countries’ transition away from other, more harmful fossil fuels like coal.)

But a broader, less-climate-concerned coalition, representing thousands of manufacturers, chemical companies, and consumer advocates, has also been quietly pushing for the pause — and stands to benefit if Biden curbs LNG exports. The more American natural gas that’s available to be shipped overseas, they argue, the more unpredictable the price of the fuel will be stateside. If, for example, an unexpected gas shortage in another country means U.S. gas companies can make more money selling their product overseas than they can at home, prices will rise as the supply is stretched thin. This volatility would hurt not only households who heat and power their homes with natural gas, but also the profit margins of big companies that rely on the fuel.

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“LNG exports put pressure on domestic markets, which also result in higher energy costs,” said Mark Wolfe, executive director of the ​​National Energy Assistance Directors’ Association, an organization representing state officials who administer federal energy assistance programs, which help low-income households pay energy bills. “There’s an impact on families that are benefiting from these lower prices. That needs to be taken into account.”

Wolfe said that home heating prices have risen more than 16 percent since March 2020, driven in large part by higher natural gas prices. (Hotter summers also mean utilities need more fuel to power a grid stretched thin by air conditioning in the summer, and therefore have less natural gas for heating in the winter.) The result is that 1 out of 6 households nationwide are behind on their energy bills.

“If the administration wants to approve these facilities, they should do it in the context of saying, ‘How do we help families pay their bills?’” Wolfe added. 

It’s not just cash-strapped families that might benefit if LNG exports are limited: The Industrial Energy Consumers of America, or IECA, a trade group representing more than 11,000 manufacturing facilities nationwide, has also been arguing against LNG exports. IECA’s members include fertilizer companies, aluminum smelters, and glass manufacturers, among others. These industries are heavily dependent on natural gas either as feedstock for production or to fuel their operations. As natural gas prices rose in 2022, heavy industries that require large amounts of natural gas or electricity — such as fertilizer production and aluminum smelting — saw their costs skyrocket. That year, multiple steel mills, as well as the country’s second-largest aluminum smelter, paused operations in the face of unsustainable costs. 

Paul Cicio, IECA’s president, has been imploring the federal government to curb natural gas exports since the Obama administration. The last three presidential administrations “have just ignored consumers’ interests,” Cicio told Grist. 

Biden’s team seems to hope to change this perception. In announcing the pause last month, senior administration officials said that the relationship between exports and domestic prices is one of the main topics they plan to study, in addition to climate and environmental impacts, as they consider whether to resume permitting more export terminals. 

In a call with reporters, Zaidi said that the decision reflected Biden’s “aggressive approach to cutting costs for consumers.” He noted that manufacturing groups like IECA had been pushing the administration for price relief, making common cause with climate advocates.

“You saw, even today, different manufacturers from around the country who represent a diversity of manufacturing interests here in the United States, raising concerns, asking the department to study the impact of expanded exports on reliability and on prices,” he said. 

In an interesting twist, many of the manufacturers who would benefit from a permanent halt to the LNG buildout have themselves been the target of campaigns by the very same Gulf Coast activists who pushed the pause. IECA member companies Mosaic and CF Industries operate some of the nation’s largest fertilizer plants in the polluted Louisiana region known as “Cancer Alley,” and they have been accused by environmental activists of harming nearby communities with toxic emissions. Natural gas is a key ingredient in fertilizer production, so these companies would take a direct hit if gas prices rise. As members of IECA, they’ve found themselves on the same side of the LNG debate as environmental groups like the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, which coordinated several protests against gas export terminals.

The United States has only been exporting LNG in large quantities for about eight years, but a growing body of data shows that these exports do influence domestic natural gas prices. The Energy Information Administration, for instance, has found that increasing LNG exports “results in upward pressure on U.S. natural gas prices.” The agency projected that, if additional LNG terminals are built and exports increase, domestic prices could increase by 25 percent by 2050. 

This has not always been the dominant point of view. In approving past LNG terminals, the Department of Energy assessed whether the facilities would promote the public interest. Over the years, the agency has commissioned a series of reports addressing the issue and repeatedly come to the conclusion that more exports would actually improve consumer welfare. An analysis conducted during the Trump administration found that, as exports increased, domestic production of natural gas also rose, mitigating the harm of supply shortages and ultimately resulting in more jobs and higher wages. The study also concluded that households that held shares of stock in LNG companies stood to benefit from their profits.

“These additional sources of income for U.S. consumers outweigh the income loss associated with higher energy prices,” the report noted.

That study, however, has been criticized for making faulty assumptions about families’ investments in natural gas exporters, and the Energy Department is expected to undertake a new round of analyses assessing both the climate and economic impacts of exporting LNG.

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To be sure, domestic prices won’t automatically and permanently increase as a result of U.S. exports. Rather, price trends in Europe and Asia will have a much stronger influence on prices stateside than they once did. This has always been the case in the oil market, which is why political decisions in the Middle East can cause gasoline prices to rise or fall in the United States — but it hasn’t been the case for natural gas until now. 

Tyson Slocum, an energy director at the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, refers to this as “importing volatility.” By allowing gas producers to ship a substantial share of American supply overseas, the United States is signing up for a much more volatile and unpredictable energy market. If prices rise in Europe or Asia as a result of a war or political disruption, heating bills and manufacturing bills in the United States will rise as well.

“All it takes is one mishap, one outage, one issue, and you will experience significant price volatility during those moments,” said Slocum.

For example, when an explosion in the summer of 2022 shut down Freeport LNG, one of the nation’s largest export terminals, the loss of export capacity helped weigh down domestic gas prices and prevented high energy bills the following winter. Each time the company announced it was moving toward restarting the terminal, the cost of purchasing natural gas on the market rose; with every delay in the restart, it fell again.

Limited pipeline capacity is one reason for the price crunch. Large-scale natural gas buyers typically purchase capacity in a pipeline, locking in the transportation infrastructure needed to move natural gas from oil and gas fields to their facilities. As a result, utilities and manufacturing companies are often competing with LNG terminals for pipeline capacity. 

“LNG terminals have market power over us,” said Cicio, the manufacturers’ representative. “They get 20-year contracts from countries like China, and they lock in firm pipeline capacity for 20 years.”   

That means that even if natural gas production is at an all-time high, pipeline capacity can prove to be a bottleneck. With fewer pipelines being built, manufacturers are increasingly struggling to compete with LNG companies, Cicio added.  

These restrictions are leading to higher costs for consumers, analysts have found. Clark Williams-Derry, an energy finance analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a think tank, looked at long-term natural gas prices and compared them against the prices since the pandemic. He found that U.S. consumers — including homeowners, utilities, and industrial customers — would have spent about $111 billion less on natural gas between September 2021 and December 2022 absent the price spikes that resulted from the Russian invasion of Ukraine, when European countries abruptly ditched their Russia-provided gas and desperately sought it from elsewhere, including from U.S. exporters. 

“This is a way for the industry to siphon money out of consumers’ wallets and into the gas industry within the U.S.,” said Williams-Derry.

Critics of Biden’s pause argue the decision may affect international energy security, especially for America’s allies — like the NATO members who faced energy shortages after the sudden loss of Russian gas. “The Biden administration’s freeze on LNG projects is a gift to Putin,” Mike Sommers, the president of the American Petroleum Institute, the largest oil and gas trade group in the U.S., wrote in a recent column. But the benefits of the LNG export industry’s growth to American national security, and international energy security, are growing outdated. 

For decades, Europe has imported cheap and abundant gas from Russia via pipeline. The energy relationship between the two geopolitical powers has given Russia political leverage over Europe — a dynamic that was thrown into particularly sharp relief when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. Europe could only punish President Vladimir Putin so much for starting an unprovoked war, given that it continued to rely on Russian gas to heat its homes.

The LNG export industry, and even Biden himself, advocated for using natural gas exports as a bludgeon to beat back Russian influence in Europe. But since then Europe has been diversifying its gas resources, building out LNG import infrastructure, and stockpiling natural gas thanks to ever-larger imports of American gas. Its position now is far less precarious than it was in the early 2000s, or even than it was a couple of years ago. Last month, a long list of left-leaning European lawmakers signed an open letter to Biden, saying that Europe’s LNG demands are already being met by existing import infrastructure

“Europe should not be used as an excuse to expand exports that threaten our shared climate and have dire impacts on U.S. communities,” the European members wrote.

U.S. Representative Sean Casten, a Democrat from Illinois, is suspicious of industry claims, particularly as they apply to Europe in 2024. “We know that the forward contracts for the new gas that’s going in are primarily going to Asia, not to Europe,” he told Grist.

South Korea, Japan, India, and China are all growing gas markets for American LNG exporters. The industry’s chief focus isn’t international energy security, Casten said — it’s making sure it has somewhere to sell its product, particularly as the U.S. continues to pivot to renewable sources of energy. (Representatives for the Natural Gas Supply Association and the Center for LNG, which represent LNG exporters, did not respond to a request for comment.)

“For the producing industry to survive, they have to export,” Casten said. “Their success depends on access to export markets.”  

While natural gas producers stand to benefit from more exports and price spikes, low-income American families bear the brunt of market expansion and volatility. Wolfe, the executive director of the ​​National Energy Assistance Directors’ Association, said families signed up for energy assistance in record numbers over the last few years, and a record number are in debt to their utilities. In fiscal year 2023, 7.3 million households received some form of energy assistance — a 25 percent increase from the previous year.

“We’re worried,” said Wolfe. “The nation needs a better strategy to help families.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The unlikely coalition behind Biden’s liquefied natural gas pivot on Feb 8, 2024.

A class of chemicals commonly used in plastic food containers and cosmetic products may have caused about 10 percent of the United States’ preterm births in 2018, according to a study from environmental health experts at New York University. 

The chemicals, called phthalates, are typically added to plastics like food packaging, shopping bags, and shower curtains to make them more flexible. They’re also used in scented cleaning and beauty products, as they make fragrances last longer. There are dozens of different kinds of these chemicals, and when ingested, they can interfere with hormones that regulate the reproductive system.

The NYU study, published in Lancet Planetary Health, examined a cohort of more than 5,000 mothers in the United States, and found that those with the most phthalate in urine samples collected at three points during their pregnancies were the most likely to experience a preterm birth — a finding that the researchers said is consistent with other studies. After controlling for confounding factors such as the mothers’ age, tobacco use, race, and education, they estimated phthalate exposure contributed to more than 56,000 preterm births in the U.S. in 2018. 

A birth is considered preterm if it happens before 37 weeks of gestation, compared to 39 to 41 weeks for “term” births, and a birth that’s even a week or two early can have profound impacts on a child’s development.

“You might think a few days in a pregnancy isn’t such a big deal, but those are crucial days of fetal development,” Leonardo Trasande, an environmental health researcher at NYU and lead author of the study, told Grist. Babies born prematurely often require costly neonatal care and are more likely to experience health problems as they grow older. Taking into account those negative health outcomes — both the immediate costs of caring for preterm babies and their potentially reduced productivity later in life — Trasande’s team estimated that the phthalate-related preterm births in 2018 could cost society as much as $8.1 billion.

Phthalate exposure is just one way the plastics industry externalizes harms. Its products are of course made from fossil fuels, and making them release billions of tons of greenhouse gas every year — not to mention toxic air and water emissions that disproportionately affect frontline communities. The material can also leach a variety of hazardous chemicals as they’re used, and when they’re incinerated, sent to a landfill, or cast off as litter.

Less than 10 percent of plastics are recycled worldwide, and some evidence suggests that recycling may actually increase their toxicity.

The American Chemistry Council, which represents the nation’s plastics and petrochemical industries, objected to the NYU study. The group’s High Phthalates Panel — which describes itself as “dedicated to promoting the benefits” of three kinds of phthalates — told Grist the study inappropriately grouped phthalates that are “toxicologically distinct from each other” and established an associative, not causal, relationship between the chemicals and adverse health outcomes.

“Studies such as these have been criticized for lack of scientific quality, credibility, and reliability,” the group said.

Kimberly Yolton, a developmental psychologist and epidemiologist at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, disagreed. It’s difficult to draw a direct causal link between specific chemicals and birth outcomes, she told Grist, but the large sample size included in the NYU study paints a “very strong association” and is consistent with previous research.

“The findings reinforce a lot of other studies that have already come out,” she added.

Indeed, the new research isn’t the first to raise concerns about phthalates. In 2022, a landmark study led by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences suggested that phthalate exposure is associated with a 14 to 16 percent greater likelihood of a preterm birth. Other research has linked phthalates to cancer and male reproductive problems, and found that people of color face disproportionate exposure to them.

Scientists aren’t sure exactly how phthalates cause preterm births, but some hypothesize that the chemicals lead to inflammation that can contribute to preeclampsia, a pregnancy complication characterized by high blood pressure.

In 2008, the Federal Drug Administration banned several phthalates from children’s toys, clothes and childcare items. A handful of states have gone further — Maine, for example, explicitly prohibits the sale of food packaging that contains phthalates, and Washington’s Toxic-Free Cosmetics Act bans the chemicals from personal care and beauty products.

Still, the federal government lacks strong rules for phthalates in common items like food packaging, and the chemicals remain ubiquitous. Last month, Consumer Reports tested a wide selection of fast foods and supermarket items, and found phthalates in almost everything — iced tea, chicken nuggets, canned tuna. The organization warned that the chemicals may be coming not only from plastic food packaging, but also from conveyor belts, tubing, and other machinery used to process foods. Phthalates can also enter meat when animals eat crops grown in contaminated soil or drink contaminated water.

Other common places to find phthalates include plastic wall coverings and flooring, medical devices, furniture, electronics, and coatings for medication. Previous studies have found phthalates in the bodies of more than 90 percent of all adults and children sampled. Some companies have begun replacing the most common kinds of phthalates with less-studied substitutes, but the NYU researchers found that these alternatives also heightened the risk of preterm birth.

To avoid phthalate exposure, Trasande suggested buying fragrance-free products and avoiding foods that come in plastic packaging. “We need to reduce our plastic footprint,” he said, suggesting stainless steel and glass as safe alternatives. 

Although phthalate-free plastics exist, there are still thousands of other potentially hazardous chemicals used in the manufacturing of plastics, and Trasande said it would be better to avoid the material altogether. On a more systemic level, he urged policymakers to restrict plastic production as part of the global plastics treaty currently being negotiated by the United Nations.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Chemicals used in plastic food packaging linked to 10% of preterm births in 2018 on Feb 8, 2024.

In 2021, when China banned bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, crypto miners flocked to the United States in search of cheap electricity and looser regulations. In a few short years, the U.S.’s share of global crypto mining operations grew from 3.5 percent to 38 percent, forming the world’s largest crypto mining industry. 

The impacts of this shift have not gone unnoticed. From New York to Kentucky to Texas, crypto mining warehouses have vastly increased local electricity demand to power their 24/7 computing operations. Their power use has stressed local grids, raised electricity bills for nearby residents, and kept once-defunct fossil fuel plants running. Yet to date, no one knows exactly how much electricity the U.S. crypto mining industry uses. 

That’s about to change as federal officials launch the first comprehensive effort to collect data on cryptocurrency mining’s energy use. This week, the U.S. Energy Information Administration, an energy statistics arm of the federal Department of Energy, is requiring 82 commercial crypto miners to report how much energy they’re consuming. It’s the first survey in a new program aiming to shed light on an opaque industry by leveraging the agency’s unique authority to mandate energy use disclosure from large companies.

“This is nonpartisan data that’s collected from the miners themselves that no one else has,” said Mandy DeRoche, deputy managing attorney in the clean energy program at the environmental law nonprofit Earthjustice. “Understanding this data is the first step to understanding what we can do next.”

Cryptocurrencies like bitcoin bypass the need for financial institutions by adding data to a public ledger, or “blockchain,” to verify all transactions. To win money, computers using energy-intensive mining software race to confirm additions to the blockchain. According to initial estimates published by the U.S. Energy Information Administration last week, cryptocurrency mining could account for between 0.6 percent and 2.3 percent of total annual U.S. electricity use. To put that into perspective, in 2022, the entire state of Utah consumed about 0.8 percent of electricity consumed in the U.S. The state of Washington, home to nearly 8 million people, consumed 2.3 percent. 

“It’s a tremendous amount of energy that we don’t have transparency into and that we don’t understand the details about,” DeRoche told Grist. One reason why it’s so difficult to track crypto mining’s energy use is the size of mining facilities, which can range from individual computers to giant warehouses. Smaller facilities are often exempt from local permitting requirements and frequently move to source cheaper electricity. Data on larger operations’ energy use is often hidden in private contracts with local utilities or tied up in litigation over individual facilities, said DeRoche. 

The Energy Information Administration, or EIA, is in an unusually powerful position to require greater transparency from crypto miners. Under federal law, the agency can require any company engaged in “major energy consumption” to provide information on its power use. In July 2022 and February 2023, Democratic members of Congress including Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Rashida Tlaib sent letters to the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy, calling for the agencies to exercise that authority over crypto miners and “implement a mandatory disclosure regime as rapidly as possible.”

In late January, the EIA sent a letter to the White House Office of Management and Budget requesting emergency approval to survey crypto mining facilities, taking the first step in creating such a regime. The letter raised concerns that the price of bitcoin had increased 50 percent in the last three months, incentivizing more mining activity that could stress local power grids already under strain from cold weather and winter storms. 

“Given the emerging and rapidly changing nature of this issue and because we cannot quantitatively assess the likelihood of public harm, we feel a sense of urgency to generate credible data that would provide insight into this unfolding issue,” EIA Administrator Joseph DeCarolis wrote in the letter. The White House approved the survey on January 26. 

While its total electricity use is poorly understood, cryptocurrency mining’s impacts on utility bills and carbon pollution have been widely documented. A recent analysis by the energy consulting firm Wood Mackenzie found that bitcoin mining in Texas has already raised electricity costs for residents by $1.8 billion per year. In the winter of 2018, utility bills for residents in Plattsburgh, New York, rose by up to $300 as nearby bitcoin miners gobbled up low-cost hydropower, forcing the city to buy more expensive electricity elsewhere. 

Crypto’s skyrocketing electricity demand has also revived previously shuttered fossil fuel power generators. Near Dresden, New York, the formerly shut-down Greenidge natural gas plant reopened in 2017 exclusively to power bitcoin mining. In Indiana, a coal-fired plant slated to power down in 2023 will now keep operating, and a crypto mining facility is setting up shop next door. AboutBit, the crypto mining startup that owns the facility, told the Indianapolis outlet IndyStar that the facility had nothing to do with the coal plant remaining open. DeRoche pointed to other gas plants in New York and Kentucky where crypto mining operations have created renewed demand for fossil fuels. 

In Texas, crypto miners are also paid by the state’s power grid operator to shut down during heat waves and other periods of high demand. Since 2020, five facilities in Texas have made at least $60 million from the program, according to The New York Times. Those subsidies come without much payoff or jobs for local residents, DeRoche said: Even large mining operations employ at most only a few dozen people, the Times reported. 

Bitcoin mining companies, however, maintain that they benefit local residents. Riot Platforms, one of the country’s biggest bitcoin mining firms, stated in a press release in September that the company “employs hundreds of Texans and is helping to revitalize communities that had experienced economic hardship.” Crypto mining businesses also dispute claims that they overuse energy resources. In a May 2022 letter to the Environmental Protection Agency, the Bitcoin Mining Council, a group representing bitcoin mining companies, made the dubious claim that “Bitcoin miners have no emissions whatsoever.” The group added, “Digital asset miners simply buy electricity that is made available to them on the open market, just the same as any industrial buyer.”

Policymakers are finally starting to catch up to the industry’s impacts on the climate and neighboring communities. In November 2022, the state of New York enacted a two-year moratorium on new crypto mining facilities that source power from fossil fuel plants. 

The EIA’s surveys of crypto mining companies beginning this week will identify “the sources of electricity used to meet cryptocurrency mining demand,” DeCarolis, the EIA administrator, said in a press release. The data will be published on the EIA’s website later this year. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Bitcoin mining uses a lot of energy. The US government is about to find out how much. on Feb 8, 2024.