A super-hurricane is brewing in the Atlantic Ocean in the opening pages of The Displacements, a novel by Bruce Holsinger published in 2022. “This is the one the climatologists have been warning us about for twenty years,” one character declares. Forty pages in, so-called Hurricane Luna makes a surprise turn for Miami and ends up demolishing Southern Florida with a wall of water, buckling skyscrapers, leveling wastewater plants, and filling the Everglades with contaminated silt. With 215-mile-per-hour winds, faster than a severe tornado, the fictional Luna is the world’s first Category 6 hurricane. 

In the real world, Category 5 is synonymous with the biggest and baddest storms. But some U.S. scientists are making the case that it no longer captures the intensity of recent hurricanes. A paper published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences lays out a framework for extending the current hurricane-rating system, the Saffir-Simpson scale, with a new category for storms that have winds topping 192 miles per hour. According to the study, the world has already seen storms that would qualify as Category 6s.

“We expected that climate change was going to make the winds of the most intense storms stronger,” said Michael Wehner, a coauthor of the paper and an extreme weather researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “What we’ve demonstrated here is that, yeah, it’s already happening. We tried to put numbers on how much worse it’ll get.”

There’s a reason that books like The Displacements invoke Category 6: It grabs your attention, warning of a threat that’s like nothing you’ve never encountered. The concept could help the public grapple with the dangers that climate change is bringing, like more intense storms. But some experts aren’t convinced it would be helpful to work “Category 6” into our hurricane vocabularies.

What storms would count as a Category 6?

The idea of adding a Category 6 has surfaced several times in the last few decades, as storms like Hurricane Dorian in 2019 delivered some of the highest wind speeds on record (185 miles per hour) and flattened whole towns in the Bahamas. The current Category 5 designation refers to any tropical cyclone with wind speeds higher than 157 miles per hour.

The new threshold of 192 miles per hour for a Category 6 would have captured some of the strongest storms ever observed. Wehner and his coauthor James Kossin, a scientist at the climate nonprofit First Street Foundation, found that at least five storms have already reached this tier, and that all of them occurred in the last decade, a signal that a warming world is creating more monster storms. The most powerful of these gales, Hurricane Patricia, slammed into Mexico’s Pacific Coast in 2015 with winds that peaked at 215 miles per hour. By a stroke of good fortune, the storm hit a relatively unpopulated region, causing only six deaths. When another one of the most powerful storms, Typhoon Haiyan, struck the Philippines in 2013 with winds of 195 miles per hour, it killed more than 6,000 people, making it one of the deadliest disasters in modern history.

The Gulf of Mexico hasn’t seen a storm with such high winds in the modern era, but the authors found that conditions in the region are already ripe for a Category 6. That’s because climate change is making the ocean and atmosphere warmer, providing fuel for more intense hurricanes. By undertaking an analysis of atmospheric conditions in the Atlantic, Wehner and Kossin found that there have been several occasions when the Gulf has been hot enough to support a storm with winds of more than 190 miles per hour — it’s just dumb luck that one hasn’t happened yet. As the world gets hotter, the odds that we’ll see such a storm get higher: The authors find that 2 degrees Celsius of warming would triple the risk of a Category 6 storm forming in the Atlantic in any given year.

The pitfalls of adding a new category

It’s becoming clear that flooding is the deadliest aspect of a hurricane. Storm surges account for roughly half of deaths from hurricanes in the United States, and flooding from heavy rain is responsible for more than a quarter, according to the study. By contrast, high winds are behind just 8 percent of deaths. Since the Saffir-Simpson scale is based solely on the speed of their winds, it doesn’t communicate the risks that people should be most concerned about, yet it’s the main thing people usually know about an oncoming storm. 

“The point is, adding a Category 6 just amplifies the miscommunication of the greatest hurricane risks,” said Marshall Shepherd, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Georgia. 

The public is already confused by the jargon in hurricane forecasts, like the “cone of uncertainty” that shows a storm’s projected path, or the difference between a “watch” and a “warning.” Shepherd thinks adding a new category could make that worse. 

“You know, people are creatures of habit,” he said. “They have been conditioned to believe that Cat 5 is the strongest hurricane. ‘OK, now, well, what are the categories?’ To me, it creates a lot more communication inconsistencies and confusion for the public.” 

People often base their evacuation decisions on a storm’s Saffir-Simpson category, according to Jennifer Collins, a professor of geoscience at the University of South Florida. When Hurricane Florence was downgraded from a Category 4 to Category 1 before its landfall in the Carolinas in 2018, people who had evacuated actually turned around and came back, encountering severe flooding as a result, Collins said.

“When they hear Category 5, I think people will react to it,” Collins said. “It’s really when we use those lower categories that people are not reacting when they should.” National Hurricane Center experts have said in the past that adding a new category wouldn’t do much good, since a Category 5 is already considered catastrophic. Since the National Hurricane Center is in charge of the Saffir-Simpson scale, Category 6 won’t happen unless those experts are convinced it’s needed.

The authors of the new paper don’t think that extending the category system would fix these hurricane-communication problems. “We’re not trying to address these other inadequacies,” Wehner said. “We’re trying to raise awareness that climate change is increasing the risk of intense storms, and not just Category 6, but also category 4 and 5.” 

While it’s difficult to predict exactly how people would respond to a Category 6 storm, Jennifer Marlon, a research scientist at the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, thinks the designation would be helpful. “It would send a clear signal to coastal residents that your past experience with storms is not a good measure of future impacts,” Marlon said in an email. “Storms are no longer ‘all natural,’ and they’re getting stronger.” 

A better way to communicate hurricane risks?

These days, when a hurricane is headed toward the coast, Shepherd doesn’t talk much about its category at all. Instead, he focuses on explaining threats from storm surge and flooding, sharing visuals that show the risks. 

Over the last decade, the National Hurricane Center has been experimenting with new storm surge maps that highlight the risk of inland flooding rather than the wind speed of a storm. In the lead-up to hurricanes like Ian in 2022, for instance, the agency published new maps every few hours that showed how many feet of flooding will hit each segment of the coast. These maps are simple and easy to understand, and they’ve become a more central part of the NHC’s attempts to communicate storm risk in recent years.

“We likely have entered a new generation of hurricanes, in terms of intensity and rapid intensification,” Shepherd said. “I don’t want to downplay or underplay that, because that’s critical. So instead of worrying about characterizing a new category, my broader message is, ‘OK, what are we going to do, from an adaptation and a resiliency standpoint, to this new generation of hurricanes?’”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Category 6-level hurricanes are already here, a new study says on Feb 6, 2024.

As states across the country roll back how much they pay rooftop-solar owners for the surplus electricity they send back to the grid, Puerto Rico is bucking the trend, protecting its generous solar credits until at least the end of the decade. 

California, Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, and North Carolina have all taken recent steps to change or get rid of these payments, which are known as net metering. But Governor Pedro Pierluisi signed a bill last month extending the U.S. territory’s program. The reason, advocates say, is that net metering is too essential to the archipelago’s clean energy goals, and the security of its people. 

“It is our responsibility to promote the transformation of our electricity system and promote any initiative that aims to avoid: the excessive dependence on fossil fuels, environmental pollution and increasing the effects of climate change,” the law states.

Net metering plays an important role in boosting solar’s popularity. Systems can cost between $10,000 and $20,000 on average, and even more when they include battery storage. The savings earned by selling excess energy offsets those costs, and helps the system pay for itself over time. 

“It provides an incentive for people to go solar, and without it it’s just a lot more challenging financially,” Joseph Wyer, a policy analyst at the solar data firm Ohm Analytics, told Grist. 

States typically adopt net metering policies to promote the technology’s uptake. “If the net metering policy is stable, then the growth of the market should be a lot more stable, too,” said Wyer. 

But utilities that favor reducing or eliminating this compensation argue that the credits granted to homeowners are often overvalued, and that the policy passes on the costs of operating the grid to households that don’t have solar.  The policy tends to attract scrutiny once an area reaches a certain level of solar penetration. When California regulators unanimously voted in 2022 to slash credits by 75 percent, they said the subsidy was no longer needed to propel the technology’s adoption. 

Those pushing to move on from net metering say doing so will help spur battery adoption, and the way to recoup one’s investment on solar panels will shift from selling excess electricity to storing it in a home battery and using that energy at night rather than paying for power from the grid. In Hawaiʻi, the percentage of projects that included battery storage increased from less than 15 percent to more than 80 after it cut its solar credits in 2015, according to Ohm Analytics. 

Net-metering proponents argue that eliminating the benefit causes catastrophic drops in installation rates and undermines renewable energy goals. Three years after Hawaiʻi cut solar credits, Ohm Analytics estimates the household solar market had shrunk by more than half, and that the time it would take to pay off a system increased from five to nine years. Ohm projects California’s household solar market will contract by 42 percent this year, though higher interest rates are also contributing to that downturn. 

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Wyer said that dramatic changes like those in California and Hawaiʻi are reactive, and aren’t the right way to address concerns about cost-shifting or battery adoption. “I don’t think that cutting net metering by 75%, or a very sharp decline, leads to a stable, healthy environment for the growth of electrification.”

A solar slowdown was a risk policymakers in Puerto Rico were not willing to take. The territory currently sources 97 percent of its energy from fossil fuels — and more than half of it from burning coal and oil — but it has ambitious renewable energy goals. Its legislature passed a law five years ago requiring the archipelago to reach 40 percent clean energy by 2025 and 100 percent by 2050. 

Puerto Ricans also view energy resilience as a matter of survival. Solar adoption skyrocketed after Hurricane Maria in 2017, and today more than 110,000 of Puerto Rico’s 1.2 million households have solar arrays. Because of the constant risk of power outages, nearly all of them include battery storage. The archipelago is installing about 4,500 systems per month. All of that sun power is offsetting energy demand by about 600 megawatts during the day, preventing blackouts on a daily basis.

It’s unlikely that the meteoric growth would be sustained without the solar credits that make financing or leasing affordable. The average household income is $24,000. “The intention of the law is to protect consumers,” said Maritza Maymi, legislative director of the Sierra Club Puerto Rico, which petitioned for the bill. 

“For us it’s very important not only to move away from fossil fuels, but also to give energy security to people, especially in times of emergencies,” added Maymi. “Energy is not only a commodity, but a right that people should have access to.”

Puerto Rico’s policy, which was set to expire as soon as this April, offers a one-for-one bill credit for every kilowatt hour that a household sends back to the grid. If a house consumes 800 kilowatt hours in a month and sends 300 kilowatt hours to the grid, for example, it is billed for 500 kilowatt hours. The new law says any study reevaluating the policy can’t begin until 2030, and that changes to the credits cannot take effect fewer than 12 months after they are decided upon. 

The economic and safety stakes were high enough that proponents of extending the net metering policy earned support across all five of Puerto Rico’s political parties. The bill passed unanimously.

“We talked to members from other parties right away and found support across the aisle so that it would not be a partisan bill,” said Maymi. “We gave them social reasons and economic reasons for supporting the bill, and they saw the need to protect the program.”

As for the usual critiques of the costs of net metering, Eduardo Bhatia, a former legislator who drafted the clean energy mandate in 2019, said the benefits to promoting solar adoption outweighed those concerns. “In my eyes, it pays for itself in a dramatic reduction in old and antiquated generation in Puerto Rico, and in [the] purchase of oil and expensive fossil fuels,” Bhatia told Grist.

Bhatia added that concerns over why other consumers should subsidize solar credits don’t consider the collective benefit of transitioning to clean energy, gaining resilience against hurricanes, and taking pressure off the grid. “It has a net positive effect on the whole island of Puerto Rico.”

As for the rest of the country, Wyer said that states that want to take another look at their solar incentives might consider a middle ground between slashing credits and paying the full retail price for them. In New Hampshire, customers receive a credit equal to about 75 percent of the standard electricity rate. That’s enough to entice households to install the systems, and coupled with battery incentives, could get them to consider adding storage for more savings. “You need to find a way to incentivize the battery without killing the solar,” he said. 

Correction: A quote has been corrected to eliminate an error regarding which entity procures Puerto Rico’s energy fuels.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline As states slash rooftop solar incentives, Puerto Rico extends them on Feb 6, 2024.

Limiting average global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, above preindustrial levels has been the gold standard for climate action since at least the 2015 Paris Agreement. A new scientific study published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Climate Change, however, suggests that the world unknowingly passed this benchmark back in 2020. This would mean that the pace of warming is a full two decades ahead of projections by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, and that we’ll cross the 2-degree threshold in the next few years.

Even more surprising than the findings, perhaps, is the fact that they were derived from the study of sea sponges. A research team led by Professor Malcolm McCulloch of the University Western Australia Oceans Institute analyzed sclerosponges, a primitive orange sponge species found clinging to cave roofs deep in the ocean. Sclerosponges grow extremely slowly — just a fraction of a millimeter a year — and can live for hundreds of years. This longevity is part of why they can be particularly valuable sources of climate data, given that our understanding of ocean temperatures before 1900 is very hazy.

By taking samples from these sponges, McCulloch’s team was able to calculate strontium to calcium ratios, which can be used to derive water temperature back into the 1700s. These ratios were then mapped onto existing global average water temperature data so that the team could fill the holes we have at the beginning of the industrial period, when humans began releasing large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Given how well the information gleaned from the sponges matches ocean temperature records from recent decades, the researchers were able to support extrapolating far into the past to show that the average ocean temperature was lower than the IPCC supposes.

This discrepancy is no fault of the IPCC. Existing ocean temperature records only go back to the 1850s, when sailors would throw buckets over the sides of their ships to measure the water temperature. The reliability of these older records is compromised by a number of factors, including the lack of a standardized procedure and the faultiness of 19th-century thermometers. Even beyond these shortcomings, the readings only captured surface water temperatures, which are highly variable and easily influenced by the weather, unlike temperatures from deeper in the sea. Not only this, but that data was only gathered along the major shipping routes of the time, which means only certain parts of the Northern Hemisphere were covered for many years.

Still, until this week’s study, there have been precious few alternative means of determining the average global ocean temperature before widespread industrialization and rampant carbon pollution. This is why the IPCC takes its pre-industrial baseline from the period between 1850 and 1900, well after the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

Ocean temperatures gleaned from the sclerosponges used for the new study could be more reliable than documentary records for a number of reasons. For one, the sponges come from well below the surface sea layer, in what is called the ocean mixed layer, where there is a constant tumult of water and the atmosphere. Far steadier and reliable temperatures can be recorded in this part of the ocean, McCulloch told Grist. “There is no other natural variability, except what’s coming from the atmosphere,” he said.

And because the sponges were sampled in the Caribbean, where major ocean currents like the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation and the El Niño–Southern Oscillation don’t distort water temperatures, the heat differentials that they reveal can more readily be attributed to global heating patterns. “It essentially carries the ocean-warming signal very well,” McCulloch said of the study’s sample.

So why sponges? Much research has been done on coral — McCulloch himself has spent most of his career studying them — but coral doesn’t lend itself well to temperature studies. “They’re pretty complicated critters to work with, actually,” McCulloch said, “because they have a lot of biological control on how they record temperature.”

Sclerosponges, on the other hand, are simpler: They build their skeletons by pumping seawater in and out. “They seem not to fiddle too much with the composition of the calcifying fluid,” McCulloch added. Plus, they’d already demonstrated their reliability in analyses of carbon isotopes (used to track fossil-fuel burning), and are found in the mixed layer of the ocean — the best place for the temperature analysis to occur.

The study began in earnest in 2013, and the more extensive sample collection was done in 2017, when divers were sent down to chisel sponges off the undersea walls. (They don’t like to be disturbed.) These samples were cut in half, and McCulloch took his halves back to Australia in his luggage. Back in the lab, samples were taken from every 0.5-millimeter length of the sponges — the equivalent of about two years of the sponges’ lives — from the outer layer to the core. The samples were then tested for age with uranium-series dating, as well as the strontium to calcium ratios and for carbon and boron isotopes. (Boron is used to calculate pH levels.)

While the new paper was able to persuade skeptics of its findings during the peer -review stage, on its own, it’s unlikely to dislodge current consensus estimates about how much global warming has already occurred — roughly 1.2 degrees C, according to many current estimates, compared to the 1.7 degrees posited by the new study, which is the first instrumental record of the preindustrial ocean temperature.

“I would want to include more records before claiming a global temperature reconstruction,” Dr. Hali Kilbourne, a geological oceanographer at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, told the New York Times. With more research being undertaken — a team in Japan is looking into Okinawan sponges — we may have those records soon.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline New study says the world blew past 1.5 degrees of warming four years ago on Feb 5, 2024.

Marine heat waves (MHWs) are prolonged periods of ocean warming that can significantly affect coral reefs, fish, kelp forests and other marine life.

A new study led by Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) has found that MHWs are changing the communities of microorganisms that make up the foundation of the oceanic food chain, affecting entire coastal ecosystems.

“While the drivers of individual MHWs can be region-specific and complex, most extreme MHWs are linked to phases of large-scale climate modes, some of which are increasing in frequency and intensity due to climate change,” the study said. “Similarly, the frequency, intensity, and duration of MHWs has been increasing over the last century, linked to anthropogenic global warming, and this trend is projected to continue. In fact, by the late 21st century widespread near-permanent MHW status could be the ‘new-normal’ across large oceanic regions.”

There have recently been marine heat waves off the coast of Tasmania and Australia’s East Coast, a press release from CSIRO said.

A variety of factors can cause MHWs, and El Niño and other large climate drivers can impact their intensity, frequency and duration.

Dr. Mark Brown, lead author of the study, said the research team examined an extreme MHW off the coast of Tasmania in 2015 to 2016 and found it significantly impacted microorganisms.

“The marine heatwave transformed the microbial community in the water column to resemble those found more than 1000 km north, and supported the presence of many organisms that are uncommon at this latitude,” Brown said in the press release. “This reshaping leads to the occurrence of unusual species, the development of unique combinations of organisms, and can cause cascading effects throughout the ecosystem, including changes in the fate of carbon sequestered from the atmosphere.”

During the study, the researchers observed marine microbiota for more than 12 years.

“For instance, we observed a shift away from the normal phytoplankton species at this site towards smaller cells that are not easily consumed by larger animals, potentially leading to profound changes all the way up the food chain,” Brown said.

Dr. Levente Bodrossy, CSIRO principle research scientist, said the team simplified their method in observing tens of thousands of microbes from the ocean.

“This will enable us to evaluate the health of the marine ecosystem and predict how it will change with predicted global warming,” Bodrossy said in the press release. “We’ll be able to better predict the future of fish stocks and marine carbon sequestration in different regions of the global ocean.”

The study, “A marine heatwave drives significant shifts in pelagic microbiology,” was published in the journal Communications Biology.

“Observations like these, especially those done in the open ocean, are difficult to sustain but are crucial for understanding and forecasting the future status of the marine ecosystem,” Bodrossy said.

The post Marine Heat Waves Can Impact Microorganisms Enough to Cause ‘Profound Changes’ to Ocean Food Chain appeared first on EcoWatch.

Firefighters in Chile are battling intense forest fires while the country mourns the 122 people who have been killed in the blazes, reported The Associated Press.

The wildfires have destroyed entire neighborhoods and hundreds of residents are still missing, authorities said, as Reuters reported.

“The wind was terrible, the heat scorching. There was no respite,” said local builder Pedro Quezada, while standing in the ruins of his home in the Valparaiso region, as reported by Reuters.

The fires gained strength and momentum on Friday, reaching the tourist cities of Valparaiso and Viña del Mar.

Entire neighborhoods in Viña del Mar were destroyed, along with the vehicles of residents who sifted through the scorched remnants of their homes.

“From one moment to the next, the fire reached the botanical park. In 10 minutes the fire was already on us,” said Jesica Barrios, a resident of Viña del Mar whose home was destroyed by the fires, as The Guardian reported. “There was smoke, the sky turned black, everything was dark. The wind felt like a hurricane. It was like being in hell.”

Undersecretary of the Interior Manuel Monsalve said on Sunday night that there were 165 active fires, an increase from 154 the previous day. Areas most affected by the blazes were under a curfew of 9 p.m.

Monsalve said cloudy conditions and temperatures that were a little cooler could assist authorities in extinguishing the fires.

“It is Chile as a whole that suffers and mourns our dead,” President Gabriel Boric said, addressing the nation in a televised broadcast, as reported by Reuters. “We are facing a tragedy of very great magnitude.”

The military was called in to help firefighters as helicopters tried to put out the fires from the air.

On Sunday, Monsalve said roughly 14,000 homes had been damaged in the areas surrounding Quilpué and Viña del Mar.

“The sky was black,’’ said Regina Figueroa, a resident of a community outside Viña del Mar, as The New York Times reported. “You couldn’t see anything. Everyone was screaming, shouting instructions, wailing into the wind.”

“I couldn’t believe we were alive. But we were the lucky ones,” Figueroa said. “I lost my mother-in-law, my sister-in law.”

The wildfires were the most severe natural disaster in Chile since an earthquake in 2010 that killed 521 people.

“We are together, all of us, fighting the emergency. The priority is to save lives,” Boric said, as reported by Reuters.

The post Extreme Wildfires Kill at Least 122 in Chile, Hundreds Missing appeared first on EcoWatch.

Voters in Paris approved an increase in parking fees for SUVs In a referendum on February 4. Vehicles weighing over 1.6 metric tons will have hourly parking fees tripled as the city seeks to become a more bikeable and pedestrian-friendly. The passed proposal also comes ahead of the 2024 Olympics to be held in Paris.

As BBC reported, 54.55% of voters agreed to the proposal to increase parking rates for SUVs, but there was only about a 5.7% voter turnout. 

The approved proposal means that parking fees for SUVs will now total 18 euros (about $19), Reuters reported. This rate applies per hour for the first two hours, then increases. Non-residents parking in central Paris could pay 225 euros (about $243) for parking for 6 hours; by comparison, cars under 1.6 metric tons pay about 6 euros per hour, totalling $75 for a 6-hour park, as reported by The Associated Press. Outside of central Paris, the rates will increase to a starting fee of €12 an hour.

With the passed referendum, the increased parking rates will take effect starting in September.

Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo proposed the increased parking rates, noting that these larger vehicles “threaten our health and our planet” as well as take up too much space, The Associated Press reported.

The new parking rules do offer full exemptions, including for people with disabilities, taxis, healthcare workers and tradespeople. EVs have some exemptions; fully electric vehicles under 2 metric tons are exempt from the increased parking rates, according to Le Monde.

According to David Belliard, deputy mayor of transport in Paris, the increased parking rates will impact about 10% of vehicles in the city. The fees could bring up to €35 million per year for Paris, Le Monde reported.

Automotive groups, including 40 Millions d’Automobilistes and Mobilite Club France, have protested the SUV parking rates, arguing that these increases will negatively impact families and that newer SUVs are not any more polluting than older, smaller vehicles.

The passed referendum follows a proposal to ban e-scooters in the city that voters passed last year. Mayor Hidalgo noted the high rates of accidents with e-scooters and the failure to dock them properly, leaving them blocking pathways throughout Paris.

The measures are part of larger goals for Paris to become a more environmentally friendly city. In December, the city reported plans to convert a busy roundabout into an urban forest, and last summer, officials announced the final phase of a Seine restoration project that would make the famous river swimmable again for the first time in a century. The city’s Plan Velo: Act 2 further plans to make Paris entirely cyclable by 2026.

The increased SUV parking rate could influence other cities to follow suit; The Connexion reported that Mayor Grégory Doucet of Lyon, France would implement a tiered parking fee structure, which is expected to take effect before summer 2024.

The post Parisians Vote for Higher Parking Fees for SUVs appeared first on EcoWatch.

Chance Cutrano is director of programs at the Resource Renewal Institute in Fairfax, California. He…

The post Earth911 Podcast: The Resource Renewal Institute’s Chance Cutrano on Putting Fish Back in the Fields appeared first on Earth911.

A reusable cotton shopping bag can be a salve for environmental guilt, but a collection…

The post We Earthlings: Use Reusable Bags Wisely appeared first on Earth911.

This story was supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

Stephanie Joseph loves her dream home, a colonial-style house in the Hudson Valley in upstate New York. She and her husband stayed within a budget, paid off student loans, and made sacrifices all so that their family could live in the peace and quiet of Cornwall, a placid town of just under 13,000 people situated in the Catskills. 

The area is lush and green and dotted with American beech and red maple trees. Joseph regularly sees hawks, foxes, and deer as well as woodpeckers near her house. State parks and a wetlands sanctuary are nearby.

Then came the news in 2022 that land next to Joseph’s home was slated to become a mega-warehouse — just 50 feet from her front door. 

Before she purchased the house, Joseph was told the property next door was owned by the state, relieving her fears about another piece of land so close to hers. Later, however, she discovered that it was privately owned. The proposed mega-warehouse — dubbed the Treetop Warehouse Project — will be more than 1.7 million square feet spread out over five buildings. 

“Our first thought was, oh, my god, we’re going to have to move,” said Joseph. “And we just lost all the money that we put into this house, because who’s gonna want to live next to a warehouse?”

A new report by the Environmental Defense Fund and ElectrifyNY shows that Stephanie is not alone. Nearly one in four New York State residents live within a half mile of a mega-warehouse — the sprawling complexes used for everything from e-commerce to plane manufacturing to farm equipment distribution. 

These warehouses can bring all sorts of disruption to daily life, more noise, more light, and most importantly: diesel pollution from truck exhaust. 

“The main reason it’s a particularly concerning theory is that it produces a large number of very small particles,” according to Dr. Christopher Carlsten, an expert in occupational and environmental lung disease at the University of British Columbia. “And those particles are problematic because they are known to get deep into the lungs.” 

When those particles burrow into the lungs, they can cause all sorts of havoc. Past EDF research has found that diesel pollution contributes to nearly 21,000 childhood asthma diagnoses in the New York City metropolitan area each year. 

“The concern is that research over decades has shown that virtually every part of the body is affected,” said Carlsten. 

Another concern is where that pollution is usually located. The report found that Black, Hispanic and low-income populations live near warehouses at rates that are more than 59 percent, 48 percent and 42 percent higher, respectively, than would be expected based on statewide statistics. 

For the more than 230,000 residents of the South Bronx that live half a mile from a warehouse, these statistics echo their everyday lives.

Arif Ullah, executive director of South Bronx Unite, says that the problem is historic and dates back to redlining which initially zoned the area for highways and industry. 

“What we’re seeing right now is linked with the legacy of redlining, where certain communities were marginalized and just disinvested in,” said Ullah. 

Proximity to this type of pollution not only impacts the respiratory system, but can affect other aspects of a person’s health.

 “A lot of research has been done on other impacts of air pollution to help in ranging from infant mortality, to maternal health, to heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and even dementia,” said Ullah. 

Ullah stresses that those wide-ranging health effects can add up over a lifetime. 

“At every point in a person’s life, exposure to air pollution is impacting them in a very detrimental way and what that has done for the South Bronx and other communities like ours is diminished the quality of life,” he said. “It’s diminished our ability to thrive.”

Back in Cornwall, Joseph has been fighting the mega-warehouse alongside her neighbors. They’ve formed a group called No Warehouses in the Woods to fight against what they see as an unnecessary burden on the community. She’s concerned not only for her own family, but for all members of the surrounding communities.

“You look at the studies and you realize, the closer that they live to a warehouse, especially a mega-warehouse, the more dangerous the side effects are for them,” said Joseph. “And that’s why a lot of families try to move away from places that are crowded with these warehouses and we thought we were doing that.”

“Unfortunately,” she added, “that doesn’t seem to be the case.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline In New York, 1 in 4 residents now live within a half-mile of a mega warehouse on Feb 5, 2024.

This story was originally published by Capital & Main.

Alert visitors flying into Honolulu’s international airport might spot row after row of suburban rooftops covered with twinkling solar panels. Once they disembark, they can hail an electric vehicle plied by an Uber driver. Traversing the town’s west side, they can ogle the elevated Skyline, Hawaiʻi’s controversial electric-powered light rail. 

It marks a sharp contrast to what they can see to the southeast: tankers floating in azure waters that deliver more than a billion gallons of crude oil annually at an offshore terminal.

This island — like so many others in the Pacific Ocean — is on the front lines of climate change. But unlike most others, it is carving out a place at the vanguard of a renewable energy revolution by leading the decarbonization of what has long been the most oil-dependent U.S. state. 

In 2015, state legislators became the first in the nation to require electric utilities to generate power almost entirely from renewable energy and to mandate that the economy make enormous progress in leaving carbon-based fuels behind — both by 2045. That was a tall order in a state that has historically produced the lion’s share of its electricity from oil and coal, in addition to its heavy consumption of gasoline and airplane fuel.

Today, Hawaiʻi leads the nation in the amount of rooftop solar installed per person, far ahead of second and third place states, Massachusetts and California. The archipelago is on track to hit a 2030 milestone by generating 40 percent of its electricity from renewables — a stark contrast from 20 years earlier, when about 90 percent came from burning petroleum and even more polluting coal. The state ranks third for the highest level of electric vehicle adoption, behind California and Washington. Hawaiʻi also shuttered its last remaining coal plant in 2022. 

“Rooftop solar is our number one success story,” said Issac Moriwake, managing attorney for Earthjustice’s Mid-Pacific regional office. “It jumpstarted our renewable energy growth and also captured the public’s imagination” of what’s possible. 

Yet as it approaches the 10-year anniversary of the first of its pioneering climate laws, which requires utilities to produce virtually all of their power from renewables by 2045, the nation’s fiftieth state faces an energy reckoning that requires tough tradeoffs as it works toward its carbon-free goal. 

An April report commissioned by the islands’ largest utility, Hawaiian Electric, warned that reaching an interim target of slashing fossil-fuel emissions in half across the state by 2030 will be challenging because gas-powered vehicles and machinery won’t suddenly disappear. Long-term investments will take years to pay off, allowing older equipment to keep polluting. And despite ongoing research on how to best electrify air travel, its infrastructure is all but certain to be based on petroleum products for the foreseeable future. 

Former Governor David Ige, an engineer who helped shepherd the state’s groundbreaking clean energy goals, said during a climate conference in Honolulu on an unseasonably warm October day, “We became the first state to commit to a carbon negative future — it’s about transforming our energy systems throughout our communities, and we’ve made tremendous strides to meet those goals. Now we need to step on the gas, big time.” 

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Bumps in the road

Despite Hawaiʻi’s progress, petroleum still accounts for 80 percent of all energy consumed by the state’s 1.4 million residents — largely split three ways between electricity, gasoline for vehicles, and jet fuel. And while electric vehicle sales continue to increase, the gas-guzzling Toyota Tacoma remains the islands’ best-selling car — more than 20 years and running.  

“We’ve made progress on the electric side, but we are not making progress overall,” added Earthjustice’s Moriwake of Hawaiʻi’s transition. “We are not going to get to our overall decarbonization goals unless we confront the transportation sector head on.” 

Moriwake and Our Children’s Trust, a nonprofit public interest law firm, filed a lawsuit in 2022 on behalf of 14 children and teenagers against the state, claiming its transportation department prioritizes highway construction that fuels oil consumption and increases pollution that warms the planet. The case, among several youth-led climate lawsuits pending across North America, is scheduled for trial this summer. 

Hawaiʻi’s greenhouse gas emissions are indeed headed in the wrong direction, with per capita amounts higher than those of 85 percent of countries on Earth, attorneys wrote in the 2022 complaint. The state’s energy sector — which includes electricity production and transportation — accounted for about 88 percent of these emissions. 

As the lawsuit plays out in the court system, energy providers are experimenting with how to decarbonize the islands’ aviation system — a vast and complicated problem that lacks substitute fuel options, environmental consultants noted in the Hawaiian Electric report. This question is pivotal as Hawaiʻi’s economy is driven by tourism fueled by air travel.  

The state’s largest air carrier, Hawaiian Airlines, and its refinery, Par Hawaiʻi LLC, partnered to study the commercial viability of “locally produced sustainable aviation fuels — to replace all or a percentage of traditional kerosene-based jet fuel.” 

Jet fuel makes up a larger share of the state’s consumption — about two-fifths of all petroleum products — than of any other except Alaska, federal statistics show. 

For millions of tourists landing at Oʻahu’s Daniel K. Inouye International Airport each year, taking an airplane is the only feasible way to reach the island — although not at all the cleanest.

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Renewable energy and the promise of cheaper electricity?

Electricity costs for Hawaiʻi, the Earth’s most geographically isolated population center, with access to few traditional energy resources, have long been three times higher than the U.S. mainland average. Policymakers hoped that lower-cost production from wind and solar would bend that curve — a theory that has yet to become reality. In fact, costs have come down markedly for those who can afford solar panels, but they remain stubbornly high for the much larger number of residents without their own clean energy options. 

In the state that already had the highest cost of living, escalating oil prices driven by the early stages of the war in Ukraine — which forced Hawaiʻi to find other suppliers — contributed to about 8 percent of the islands’ consumer inflation, compared to 6.9 percent on the mainland, according to Hawaiʻi Chief State Economist Eugene Tian. Rising oil prices translate into a tax on almost everything since nearly all goods in Hawaiʻi must be transported here. 

The state’s transportation and oil premium should, at least theoretically, have been favorable to the shift toward renewable energy because solar panels and other sources of renewable energy infrastructure became financially competitive sooner than in other states with lower power costs. But amid the many high-stakes investments in the state’s renewable energy revolution, electricity prices have not yet come down for most residents, and no one is sure when they will. 

The state’s electric utility says what customers don’t see — yet — is the ability of renewables to even out unpredictable swings in petroleum prices due to demand surges from military conflicts, speculators or refinery outages. 

The push to decarbonize island power grids by “adding large-scale renewable generation and energy storage will help keep costs stable; no more peaks and valleys tied to fluctuations in oil prices,” said Darren Pai, Hawaiian Electric’s manager of external communication. “In the long term, we know rates will be much less than they would be if we stayed on oil.”

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The Maui fires and climate-changed islands

The United States’ deadliest wildfire in over a century leveled the historic town of Lahaina on Maui in mere hours in August, stunning the nation and killing 100 people. Record temperatures, tinder dry vegetation and reduced rainfall contributed to the blaze. While investigations continue, the County of Maui filed a lawsuit saying the utility failed to shut off electricity from its suspended power lines quickly enough. The electric utility has said that an earlier fire was triggered when its power lines fell in high winds, but denied responsibility for the fire that destroyed Lahaina. But the company’s stock valuation cratered last summer, and has been slow to recover.

As weather catastrophes attributed to climate change multiply, the islands’ clean energy transition is at a crossroads. 

On Oʻahu, the Hawaiian archipelago’s tourist hub, waves often cover Waikiki Beach at high tide and slap up against sea walls bordering hotel restaurants, spraying diners. In all, the authors of a report to the Hawaiʻi Legislature on sea-level rise predict that global warming will cause seas around the islands to rise by up to 8 feet by 2100, putting tens of thousands of households in the path of tidal flooding. 

Meanwhile, the window is narrowing to cut greenhouse gas emissions enough to keep temperature rise below the 1.5 degree Celsius threshold, beyond which many international scientists say droughts, floods, and wildfires will become substantially more frequent and extreme. Scientists who focus on slowing global warming caution that models show urgent emissions cuts are necessary to both curb temperature rise and save many islands. 

Climate change is at the root of the Lahaina wildfire, according to Charles Fletcher, interim dean of the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology at the University of Hawaiʻi at Manoa. 

Computer models show that to keep overall temperature rise below 1.5 Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit), greenhouse gas emissions must be cut by 45 percent (from 2010 levels) by 2030, Fletcher said, adding that the trend is moving in the opposite direction. Figures compiled by the United Nations from national climate action plans show that global emissions are forecast to increase over the next seven years by 9 percent. 

During a presentation at the October climate conference, Fletcher said, “This decade is a pivotal decade.”

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Who benefits from the islands’ solar boon?

Hawaiʻi’s shift toward renewables is unevenly distributed. In 2022, Oʻahu and Maui — which are collectively home to four in five residents in the state — produced 28 percent and 36 percent, respectively, of their power from renewables. The less-populated but heavily touristed island of Kauai, however, generates 60 percent of its electricity from renewables, and at lower costs, thanks to widely distributed utility-scale projects.  

The solar industry also proved to be a rare economic bright spot for the state during the economic tumult of recent years. Honolulu Mayor Rick Blangiardi recounted how the clean energy revolution buttressed construction in the city during the COVID downturn, when tourism essentially ceased.

“Sixty percent … of the 17,000 [development] applications we were receiving for permits came from the solar industry,” said Blangiardi at an October 19 solar conference at a Honolulu park as the setting sun cast purple, orange, and red light over the Pacific Ocean. 

The first-term mayor added that a new policy enacted by his office in late October aims to help speed the transition by making it easier for companies to obtain permits to install solar panels on multifamily buildings and condo complexes on Oʻahu. 

Meanwhile, solar providers — who pushed for the change — are having a tough time finding new spaces on which to install utility-scale systems around the islands in a state with some of the country’s most complex land-use laws. 

Even as leaders on the island of Oʻahu seek to help the solar industry expand its reach, many of the state’s residents cannot afford to install a rooftop system while renters aren’t allowed to take the initiative. Almost 40 percent of households are renters and are at risk of being left behind by the solar revolution when there is no utility-scale effort powering their homes.

And economists here agree that those with panels enjoy lower electricity costs, even as they tend to drive up such prices for those who remain reliant on the fossil fuel-powered grid, because fewer customers are covering the costs associated with the power grid’s core infrastructure.

“Anyone who has rooftop solar has a pretty sweet deal — I have a guilty conscience for it myself,” said Michael Roberts, an economics professor at the University of Hawaiʻi Manoa, in an interview. “I pay an effective electricity price that is a third of what other people pay.” 

The Legislature has sought to make the clean energy revolution more equitable by creating the Hawaiʻi Green Infrastructure Authority a decade ago and capitalizing its loan fund with the proceeds of a $150 million bond. The body’s mission is to help the 44 percent of state residents who struggle to afford basic expenses so that they are able to afford a solar system. 

The “Green Bank” targets low- and moderate-income households and nonprofits, and doesn’t require a credit score to qualify for a loan. The amount borrowers repay via their monthly bill is based on estimated utility bill savings. 

The program allows renters to benefit from solar because the costs of a sun-powered system are tied to the electrical meter at their home, and thus an individual renter’s bill, and can be transferred from tenant to tenant when residents move. Its benefits could bring tremendous savings to residents because electricity costs from solar are lower than rates paid by residents who rely on fossil fuels, said Gwen Yamamoto Lau, the authority’s executive director. 

In one case, a low-income family’s monthly energy bill averaged $610. After the bank-financed installation of a solar and battery system, the bill dropped to $460 a month — leading to a projected savings, over the two-decade life of the system, of $39,342.

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Electrification of buildings and transportation stalls

Perhaps the biggest challenge, experts note, is Hawaiʻi’s electrification of other sectors, like transportation and commercial and industrial buildings. That effort is behind schedule and could stymie the state’s ability to meet a commitment to halve greenhouse gas emissions from 2005 levels by 2030. 

Then there is Hawaiʻi’s outsize dependence on aviation, ground, marine, and military transportation that generates almost half of the islands’ emissions, compared to 28 percent for the rest of the U.S., according to Hawaiian Electric’s report from April. 

The lion’s share of the islands’ petroleum use is in its transportation sector. Most residents who commute still drive alone to work — in a gas-powered car. But for those who drive an electric vehicle, there are also frustrations. Uber drivers who rely on an electric vehicle readily note the lack of fast-charging ports that cut into their income as they wait in line to use a charger for hours. This doesn’t count the time it takes to charge — which can be an additional hour or two, depending on charger speed. 

There are about 19,500 registered electric vehicles in Hawaiʻi and about 800 public charging stations. Industry analysts estimate that the car-to-charger sweet spot is about one station for every eight to 12 vehicles. Hawaii’s current ratio is about one for every 24. 

As the number of electric cars on the road outpaces the number of available charging stations, the state is widening lanes, making it easier for more cars to be on the road, said Moriwake, the Earthjustice attorney who filed the lawsuit on behalf of Hawaiʻi’s youth. 

“The state’s Department of Transportation has the Kuleana” — Hawaiian for responsibility — ”to build and maintain a system that is decarbonized, according to the law, and the Supreme Court made clear this is a constitutional right,” Moriwake said.

In a September 2022 reply to the filing, legal counsel for the Hawaiʻi Department of Transportation argued that the agency is complying with clean energy laws by “weighing the options, timing, costs and benefits of a wide range of responses to climate change.” 

Meanwhile, state legislators argued that transitioning from an oil-based economy to one powered by clean energy is urgent, both because of the worsening risks from climate change and security issues that arise from transporting petroleum from far-flung and sometimes unstable countries in the Middle East and Africa. 

While fossil fuel prices are volatile and hard to predict, the cost of solar panels has reliably fallen over time, said Hawai’i state Senator Chris Lee, at the Honolulu climate conference. Federal research shows that the cost of a 22-panel residential system fell by 75 percent between 2010 and 2020.

“We are in a precarious, risky situation right now — our future is not in our control,” he said.

“Fuel supplies come from nations far and wide, and the anxiety from this keeps us up at night,” added Lee, who worked on the state’s groundbreaking clean energy laws. “We need to take the future back into our hands.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The promise and the perils of Hawaiʻi’s renewable energy revolution on Feb 4, 2024.