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.” 

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.

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.”

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.”

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.

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.

This story was originally published by Floodlight, a non-profit newsroom that investigates the powerful interests stalling climate action.

On a November afternoon in 2022, a 57-year old well tapped into an underground natural gas storage reservoir in western Pennsylvania started leaking, fast enough that people a few miles away heard a loud, jet engine-like noise. 

By the time the leak was stopped nearly two weeks later, roughly 16,000 metric tons of methane had escaped into the atmosphere, the equivalent of more than the annual greenhouse gas emissions from 300,000 gas-powered cars.

The blowout of a well at the Rager Mountain gas storage field was the worst methane leak from underground storage since Aliso Canyon in California in 2015. That incident forced thousands of people from their homes and sickened many of them, taking four months to contain. In 2021, 35,000 plaintiffs in one class-action lawsuit were awarded up to $1.5 billion in damages. 

While not as large or imminently dangerous to residents, the Rager Mountain leak was a “disaster,” according to one Pennsylvania regulator. Bloomberg labeled it the United States’ worst climate disaster that year. 

The natural gas that leaked methane in Pennsylvania and California is not stored in tanks but in giant underground geological formations accessed by multiple wells. There are about 400 such storage fields across 32 states.

According to a new report, there are thousands more potential opportunities for a similar situation across the country. The new analysis of data collected by federal regulators suggests there are as many as 11,446 storage wells in the country with the same key risk as the wells that failed at Rager Mountain and Aliso Canyon: They have only a single barrier to failure.

“That population is a lot larger than we had estimated, or other researchers had estimated with state [data],” says Greg Lackey, an author on the study and researcher at the Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory. 

All but one of Pennsylvania’s 49 gas storage fields has at least one potential single point of failure well, researchers found.

Natural gas is primarily made up of methane, a greenhouse gas 80 times more powerful than carbon dioxide in the short term. Methane leaks from oil and gas infrastructure are under increasing scrutiny in the United States and worldwide, as stopping them represents a relatively cheap and effective way to prevent greenhouse gas emissions, the primary cause of global warming.

Leaks from gas storage are only one part of the industry’s methane problem. Such facilities also are at risk of dramatic blowouts that are hard to control because they are connected to large, pressurized reservoirs of gas. 

New rules and fees aim to cut methane leaks

Regulations put in place on gas storage post-Aliso Canyon are still rolling out, including a requirement for baseline risk assessments on all wells by 2027. New EPA rules on methane leaks and repair and a planned federal fee on “waste” methane would impact gas storage as well. 

The fee, which is still being finalized, would force companies to eventually pay up to $1,500 per metric ton of methane in excess of the equivalent of 25,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide, a threshold the Rager Mountain leak meets almost 20 times over. Industry groups have pushed back against the fee, arguing it would harm smaller oil and gas companies and discourage oil and gas production overall.

Many of these wells are decades old and not originally designed for storage. They have gone through the stresses of repeated cycles of injecting and withdrawing gas. Some, like Rager Mountain, are in relatively rural, sparsely populated areas, but others are close to neighborhoods in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and California. 

The Rager Mountain leak was caused by a break below ground in one well’s casing — the barrier between where pressurized gas flows and the geology around it. The well had become heavily corroded from exposure to water, air, and organic matter through an open valve, according to a third-party analysis submitted to regulators and obtained through a public records request.  

“They probably didn’t realize it, but they were creating an optimum case for corrosion,” says Dan Arthur, president of the engineering and technical services firm ALL Consulting, who reviewed the analysis. 

Arthur says older wells in storage fields haven’t been given “as much significance” as they should be, and operators need to make sure they’re fully addressing well integrity.

“Age is a risk factor that you have to consider, but it also depends on how you are caring for the well,” he says. Redundant barriers reduce the risk of methane escaping if the well casing fails, Arthur and Lackey say.

Minimum federal safety standards on underground storage fields were set less than a decade ago in the aftermath of the Aliso Canyon leak. One of the federal agencies in charge of regulating gas storage sites, the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA), only began collecting regular data on underground storage fields in 2017.

More data needed to identify riskiest wells

The number of wells with potentially only one barrier was three times larger than previously estimated before the PHMSA data became available, Lackey says. This “single point of failure” design featured in both the Rager Mountain and Aliso Canyon blowouts is present in as many as 64 percent of all gas storage wells in the United States, his research found.

But the data reported to PHMSA is not enough to confirm how many of these wells actually have a single point of failure that would flag wells at the highest risk of another blowout, Lackey says. Researchers would need more information about each well’s design and construction, he says.

“What you don’t get insight into is how many other casings there are, or where the locations of cement are,” Lackey says, describing additional barriers that would lower the risk.

Rager Mountain’s owner and operator, Equitrans, had its own risk ranking of storage wells, according to the third-party analysis. While Rager is the company’s largest field in Pennsylvania, its wells were not the highest ranked in the company’s own risk management plan — others were higher up the list because of their proximity to residential areas.

Both Peoples Natural Gas, the previous owner of the field, and Equitrans “recognized that corrosion was an issue,” so the companies used probes, known as “logs,” to examine the integrity of the well casings. But, the analysis noted, “Such a strategy is dependent on the logging being reasonably accurate.”

A 2016 test of the casing wall of the well that eventually failed underestimated its corrosion, the report says. When Equitrans reran the test after the blowout using an updated algorithm, it showed far more corrosion.


In the wake of the Rager Mountain blowout, Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection said it was considering a  “top to bottom review” of the state’s gas storage industry. Pennsylvania is one of a handful of states that have their own regulations covering gas storage. 

“Everything is on the table for consideration in terms of making sure this industry is regulated appropriately and the public is protected and the environment is protected from potential incidents like this happening again,” said Kurt Klapkowski, acting deputy secretary for DEP’s Oil and Gas Management office, a month after the incident.

‘A huge battery system’

But after a successful effort by Equitrans to move the bulk of the incident investigation to federal regulators, DEP appears uncertain or unable to move forward with such a review. Klapkowski told the agency’s Oil and Gas board in September that regulators were “trying to figure out where our jurisdiction ends or might be preempted by the federal government.”  

Pennsylvania DEP’s investigation into surface and groundwater contamination at Rager Mountain is ongoing, the agency said in an emailed statement, and it “remains committed to its goal of inspecting storage field wells on an annual basis regardless of risk.” 

Wells are assessed through surface inspections and information reported by operators, DEP added, using multiple factors to prioritize wells for inspection, including the potential environmental impact and likelihood of failure, as well as proximity to population.

Equitrans has taken several steps to reduce risk in its storage fields, spokesperson Natalie Cox said in an emailed statement. They include reprocessing older well tests, running additional tests on another 100 wells in 2023, and changing its requirements for when to add protective gel to reduce corrosion. The company did not answer questions about whether these tests led to any well replacements. 

Lackey’s study also found that nationally, while most leaks from gas storage were connected with accidents or well improvement projects known as workovers, leaks from corrosion released a much larger volume of methane.

“If it’s a valve or something that’s broken off on the wellhead, that might be easier to contain, rather than something downhole that would be exposed to higher pressures within the well,” he says. “During workovers you have systems in place to contain the well … whereas with corrosion, that’s something going on silently in the background.”

While a 2016 government task force recommended phasing out single point of failure of wells, ultimately the federal minimum standards only required operators to address them through submitting risk-management plans to federal regulators — plans that are not public. 

The release of gas from Rager Mountain in November 2022 represented about 15 percent of the field’s working storage volume. Underground storage fields act as “a huge battery system,” says Drew Michanowicz, a researcher who has studied their proximity to residential areas. 

Major leaks from storage not only release huge volumes of greenhouse gases but also reduce reliability in areas where natural gas dominates home heating and electricity production, Michanowicz says.

The federal leak investigation at Rager Mountain remains open at least until regulators review work on fixing three temporarily plugged wells in the field, likely in the spring. But Rager Mountain is otherwise operating. In October, with PHMSA’s approval, Equitrans began injecting gas into the field for the winter. 

This story was produced with support from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Why a natural gas storage climate ‘disaster’ could happen again on Feb 3, 2024.

Get ready to navigate the new nuances, challenges and opportunities that 2024 brings to your diverse supplier program

Sea otters started recolonizing their former habitat in a central California coastal estuary several decades ago, and erosion has since slowed by as much as 90 percent, according to a new study.

Elkhorn Slough is an estuary dominated by salt marshes. Its marsh edges and creek banks had suffered from erosion, but when the sea otters moved back in, vegetation began to rebound and establish dense root systems that are able to increasingly withstand waves and flooding, a press release from Duke University said.

One of the big reasons for the remarkable recovery is that sea otters love to eat the marsh crabs who were devouring the coastal ecosystem’s plants.

“It would cost millions of dollars for humans to rebuild these creekbanks and restore these marshes,” said Brian Silliman, senior author of the paper and director of Duke Wetland and Coasts Center and Duke Restore, in the press release. “The sea otters are stabilizing them for free in exchange for an all-you-can-eat crab feast.”

Estuaries on the West Coast were once a vital nursery and foraging habitat for the sea otters. They had shelter in their marsh home and plenty of crabs to eat. In order to keep warm in the cold waters of the Pacific, full-grown otters need to consume about 20 to 25 pounds each day — roughly one-quarter of their body weight.

“Crabs eat salt marsh roots, dig into salt marsh soil, and over time can cause a salt marsh to erode and collapse. This had been happening at Elkhorn Slough for decades until sea otters recolonized the estuary in the mid-1980s,” said Brent Hughes, the study’s lead author and a Sonoma State University associate professor of biology, in the press release. “After a few decades, in areas the sea otters had recolonized, salt marshes and creekbanks were becoming more stable again, despite rising sea levels, increased water flow from inland sources, and greater pollution.”

Local sea otters had thrived in estuaries before fur traders hunted them almost to extinction. Those who did survive were pushed out by development, agriculture and other human activities. Meanwhile, the marsh crab population in Elkhorn Slough grew exponentially.

“(Remodeling a coastline) is usually something only large-scale physical forces, like hurricanes or extreme tidal flow changes, can do,” Silliman said in the press release. “Our study, which draws on field experiments, modeling and before-and-after measurements, underscores the far-reaching benefits that can cascade through an ecosystem when a top predator is reintroduced. It begs the question: In how many other ecosystems worldwide could the reintroduction of a former top predator yield similar benefits?”

For almost a decade, the scientists did large-scale surveys in 13 tidal creeks, as well as small-scale field experiments in five areas around the estuary.

The researchers allowed sea otters to recolonize some of the test sites while excluding them from others. They conducted observations and measurements using aerial photography and on the ground. Their research confirmed that erosion had slowed by up to 80 to 90 percent at sites with large otter populations, with marshes even expanding in some areas. Simulations using modeling demonstrated similar results.

“The return of the sea otters didn’t reverse the losses, but it did slow them to a point that these systems could restabilize despite all the other pressures they are subject to,” Hughes said. “That suggests this could be a very effective and affordable new tool for our conservation toolkit.”

The study, “Top-predator recovery abates geomorphic decline of a coastal ecosystem,” was published in the journal Nature.

“There are important theoretical implications as well,” Silliman added. “This work overturns the well-established bottom-up paradigm that coastal geomorphology is governed by interactions between physical forces and plant structure. Our results unequivocally show that predators also play a keystone role in controlling the course of these tidal creeks.”

The post Sea Otters Restore Degraded California Estuary, Slowing Erosion by 90% appeared first on EcoWatch.

John Podesta already has a lot on his plate. The veteran political strategist has been working for the past year as a senior adviser to President Joe Biden overseeing the rollout of the Inflation Reduction Act, the biggest climate law in United States history. Now, in the wake of another landmark climate agreement at COP28, he’s also going to take over the job of representing the U.S. on the world stage. 

This week, following the news that special climate envoy John Kerry would depart the role this spring, President Joe Biden announced that Podesta would take over the position, putting the latter in charge of the administration’s climate policy abroad as well as at home.

Podesta arrives in this new role at a time when the United States is facing increasingly urgent calls to step up the amount of climate funding it sends to developing countries. As he represents the U.S. in international climate talks, he has a responsibility to follow up Biden’s domestic policy achievements with equal ambition on international issues, said Rachel Cleetus, a policy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

“Despite important progress secured through the Inflation Reduction Act and other domestic policies, the country has repeatedly fallen short, especially on delivering climate finance for low- and middle-income countries to tackle climate change,” she said. She added that Podesta “will need to ensure international climate diplomacy is as much a priority as the domestic climate agenda.” 

Podesta has decades of experience in Beltway politics and has influenced the shape of climate policy under three Democratic presidents. As White House chief of staff to Bill Clinton, he helped Clinton hone his messaging on climate and environmental issues, and he later served as a top adviser to Barack Obama, who tried and failed to sell Congress on a cap-and-trade climate bill. When that bill died in the Senate, Podesta pushed Obama’s focus toward the executive branch, crafting a key regulation of power emissions.

After Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, Biden asked Podesta to return to the White House to help implement the landmark legislation. As Podesta told Grist last summer, this job entailed not only selling the law to companies and local governments but also getting in the weeds on complex policy questions relating to green hydrogen and carbon removal.

However, Podesta has less experience in foreign policy than his predecessor. The outgoing climate envoy served on the Senate foreign relations committee and as Obama’s secretary of state, and he has represented the United States at several United Nations climate conferences. Kerry was instrumental in negotiating the landmark Paris Agreement in 2015 and in hammering out last year’s so-called “UAE consensus” at COP28 in Dubai. The latter accord represented the first time that the world’s nations agreed to transition away from dirty fuels.

Kerry’s close relationship with his Chinese counterpart, Xie Zhenhua, also allowed the United States and China to make progress on climate cooperation even amid a broader geopolitical chill. Last year, for instance, the two nations signed a joint agreement to accelerate renewable energy deployment. When Kerry gave his notice just months after Xie announced his retirement, The Guardian hailed the moment as the “end of an era in global climate politics.” 

Podesta engaged at length with China and India on climate issues when he served in the Obama administration, and he too consulted on the Paris accord.  Some observers said Podesta would likely continue on the path Kerry set in the climate envoy role.

“John Podesta is certainly a steady pair of hands,” said Li Shuo, director of the China climate program at the Asia Society Policy Institute, a think tank. “He has dealt with the China file very extensively together in the Obama administration with John Kerry, and I am expecting a continuation of where John Kerry left.”

But other climate advocates expressed concern about Podesta’s past focus on domestic affairs, and his plan to advise Biden on domestic and international matters simultaneously. 

“This stance suggests that international negotiations will become a secondary priority, despite the urgent global necessity to drastically escalate climate action,” said Harjeet Singh, head of global political strategy at the environmental group Climate Action Network, in a statement. He said the appointment “casts a shadow of doubt over the United States’ commitment to global climate leadership.”

The White House did not respond to Grist’s request for an interview with Podesta before publication.

Biden’s 2021 appointment of Kerry as the first ever “special envoy on climate change” drew the ire of many Senate Republicans, who accused Biden of bypassing the normal confirmation process for ambassadors and other senior diplomatic officials. Biden has appointed at least 40 special envoys, according to Ballotpedia, far more than any previous president. These diplomats handle issues from Yemen to the Arctic to Iran’s nuclear program. 

Congress passed a funding bill in 2021 that closed the loophole allowing for special envoy positions, meaning that future climate diplomats will be subject to confirmation by the Senate, just like their ordinary ambassador counterparts. The very idea of a climate envoy is anathema to many Republicans in Congress, meaning any successor Biden appoints will face a tough road to confirmation. If Donald Trump wins another term in November, the position will almost certainly vanish altogether.

In an apparent attempt to avoid this new Senate confirmation requirement, Biden has announced that Podesta will serve as “senior adviser” for “international climate policy.” Shelly Moore Capito, a Republican senator who is influential on climate issues, said the move was an attempt to “circumvent Congress on environmental policy.”

The biggest item on Podesta’s agenda will be the “new collective quantified goal,” a fundraising target that the world’s countries are hoping to hammer out at COP29 in Azerbaijan in November. Rich countries set a goal in 2009 to send poor countries $100 billion per year for decarbonization and disaster response, but they have lagged far behind schedule on meeting it. As the next climate conference approaches, developing countries are demanding that the United States make much stronger financial commitments. 

In addition to figuring out how the U.S. should engage with these demands, Podesta will also have to wrangle countries like China and Saudi Arabia, which weren’t obligated to donate to the funding pool established in the 2009 agreement. These countries are in a limbo zone between developed and developing, and much of the controversy around the “new collective quantified goal” has centered on how much they should be expected to contribute.

Some climate activists said the changing of the guard would give the Biden administration a chance to reposition itself in global climate talks. Many of these activists have criticized Kerry for rebuffing financial demands from developing countries — just last summer he told Congress that he would “under no circumstances” commit the United States to a policy of “climate reparations.” When rich countries launched a loss and damage fund at COP28 to help poor countries address the consequences of climate change, the United States volunteered to contribute just $17.5 million, a fraction of what smaller countries like Italy and Japan pledged.

Kerry and other U.S. diplomats have often focused on extracting commitments from other countries at climate talks rather than making commitments themselves, said Brandon Wu, policy director at ActionAid, an economic justice advocacy organization.

“Rather than engaging in the traditional U.S. negotiating tactics that Kerry favored — telling other countries what to do while pretending the U.S. is a leader despite its record of failure — he needs to shift the tone and substance of U.S. climate diplomacy altogether,” Wu said of Podesta. “It’s no easy job, but that’s the natural consequence of so many years of inaction from the world’s biggest historical climate polluter.”

The job is made even harder by the fact that the special climate envoy doesn’t control federal spending. Even if Podesta does pledge more international funding, it will be up to Congress to pass a law that makes that pledge a reality. With Congress split between Republicans and Democrats, and the outcome of the next presidential election still anyone’s guess, it will be hard for the diplomats opposite Podesta to take him at his word.

Zoya Teirstein contributed reporting to this story.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline John Podesta is a DC veteran. Can he make climate deals on the world stage? on Feb 2, 2024.