Imagine a world where you work three or four days a week. In your free time, you play sports, spend time with loved ones, garden, and engage with local politics. Overnight shipping, advertising, and private jets no longer exist, but healthcare, education, and clean electricity are free and available to all.

That’s the radical vision proposed by philosophy professor and Marxist scholar Kohei Saito. In 2020, as residents in Japan hunkered down during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, Saito published a book that would eventually become a surprise best-seller, titled Capital in the Anthropocene. Relentless consumption and production, the drivers of economic growth, have fueled the climate crisis and global inequality, Saito argues in the book. He instead promotes degrowth — a deliberate shrinking of the economy — as a way to redistribute resources and shift to a slower economic system that prioritizes human welfare and planetary wellbeing. 

No one, not even Saito, could have predicted the response. His book sold more than 500,000 copies in Japan, has been translated into multiple languages, and garnered international media attention. Last month, a much-anticipated English translation, titled Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto, was released in the United States. “Even I thought my ideas were too radical to find much of an audience,” Saito writes in the introduction to the English edition. “Who would read a book on ‘degrowth communism’ written by a basically unknown scholar of political thought in the Marxist tradition?”

Yet Saito’s book has found readers across the world who want to listen. In Japan, when his book was initially released in 2020, decades of economic stagnation and neoliberal reform had crystallized into open frustration as the pandemic widened existing inequalities. For some, the COVID crisis shed light on how policies oriented around economic growth had failed to prevent either the pandemic or rising greenhouse gas emissions.

Meanwhile, in the U.S. and other wealthy countries, climate advocates are increasingly debating whether countries should deprioritize economic growth to slow global warming. On one hand, building out renewable energy and clean technologies will necessarily lead to new jobs and more economic activity. Developing countries also need to grow their economies to raise standards of living. But degrowth advocates, including Saito and economists like Jason Hickel and Tim Jackson, say that simply swapping in clean energy for fossil fuels isn’t enough. They argue that high-income countries, responsible for the lion’s share of global greenhouse gas emissions, should also reduce energy use and resource extraction from developing nations, while focusing on providing the basics — such as food, clean water, shelter, and energy — to residents at no cost. 

Grist sat down with Saito to discuss why his anti-capitalist messages have struck a chord with readers and what degrowth might look like in practice. This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity. 

Q. Why do you think we’re seeing a growing interest in critiquing capitalism, and degrowth in general? 

A. Looking at previous decades, neoliberal reforms really destabilized our society all over the world. And there are a lot of discussions about how we can solve the climate crisis, and how we can solve economic inequality. But these measures are not properly working, and the climate crisis has been accelerating. People are suffering from precarious jobs, low wages, and a lot of competition. And people are indeed unhappy. 

Degrowth and the idea of post-capitalism are of course in some sense utopian at the moment. But at the same time, people who are really looking for an alternative — people who really care about the crisis — can’t find the answer within the existing framework. I don’t claim that my answer is definitive and comprehensive, but it resonates with the general atmosphere of dissatisfaction and discontent, especially among younger generations. 

Q. I want to dig into your critiques of capitalism as laid out in Slow Down. Could you talk about why you think capitalism drives global inequality and climate change?  

A. Karl Marx famously demonstrated that capitalism has the tendency to enlarge economic inequality because capitalism exploits workers so that the capital is accumulated in the hands of the few. And Marx also said that in such a system where people are exploited, nature is also exploited. We didn’t really recognize this tendency for many years because affluent countries, like the U.S., Japan, and the E.U., were able to externalize a lot of costs to somewhere else. 

That means that our affluent lives are often supported by cheap products and cheap resources based on the exploitation of nature and humans in the Global South. 

Capitalism has subsumed the entire planet now because of globalization. That means we externalized all the costs. Now, we don’t have any more space to externalize because China is expanding, Brazil is expanding, India is expanding: Everyone tries to be a capitalist and it doesn’t work anymore. We are encountering the global ecological crisis, the pandemic, the climate crisis, competition for resources — and these things are closely related to capitalism and the tendency to constantly expand. 

Q. Many climate policies today, like Green New Deal proposals, are focused on expanding renewable energy and clean technology, while creating new jobs and continuing to grow the economy. In your view, why are these measures insufficient for tackling the climate crisis?  

A. First of all, I’m not against technology. We need renewable energy. We need electric vehicles and so on. I’m for inventing new technologies and investing more in developing cheaper, sustainable energy. I’m not an advocate of “going back to nature.” 

The problem is that when we try to grow, we sell more products and bigger products. The most representative case is SUVs. Even if we transition to electric vehicles, if we keep building bigger cars, we still use a lot of energy and resources that come mainly from the Global South. So there will be a continuation of the robbing of land and resources, exploitation of mining workers and the destruction of Indigenous life, deforestation, and so on.

I think what’s necessary is: Invest in those green technologies. But at the same time, we should start talking about the need to reduce the number of cars, for example, or industrial meat consumption, or frequency of flying. Maybe we should ban private jets. Maybe we should ban domestic short-distance flights because we can take trains. These things must be also prioritized. 

The problem with the existing mainstream green capitalism discourse is they never talk about reducing our excessive consumption and production, because that’s not something capitalism can accept. For everyone to live a decent life on this planet, the Global North needs to give up what is unnecessary. That’s not something capitalism can do. 

Q. In response, you’re promoting an alternative economic vision of degrowth communism. How could this better achieve global climate goals?

A. Degrowth is about abandoning GDP [gross domestic product] as the single measure of our progress. Degrowth is also about reducing what is unnecessary. 

GDP can be increased by producing what is unnecessary, like private jets. I’m saying, OK, maybe we don’t need these things because that’s only for rich people, and that’s also destroying the planet. So why don’t we spend money and energy on something that is more sustainable and that everyone needs? For example, free internet, free public transportation, free education, free medical care. These things that are mostly commodified, especially in the U.S., must be de-commodified. 

Our current model is that when the economy grows, the pie becomes bigger, so everyone will have a bigger share. But in this process of making the economy bigger, we produce so many unnecessary things. Once we make a transition to a degrowth society, the pie of the economy won’t grow bigger anymore. That means that we need to share existing wealth.

Of course, there are things we cannot share, like private property. But for example, we could share knowledge and education, public transportation, culture, communal farming, electricity, and so on. That means that we can be happier, have more access to essential goods and services, and live a more stable life. 

We will not have a new iPhone every two years. We will not have fast fashion. We will not have industrial meat production. We might not have something like McDonald’s, but we will have more healthy meals. We will have more sustainable clothing that you can wear for many years. You might give up something, but at the same time, you gain social stability, community, and better products. 

Q. Some people have raised concerns that slowing economic growth would hurt countries that are still developing. What would degrowth mean for the Global South?

A. I’m not saying that the Global South should immediately accept the principles of degrowth. We need to build more roads, buildings, schools, and hospitals. We also need to make more power plants and solar panels. 

But I think even when they grow, they should place more importance on satisfying basic needs rather than making things more profitable and competitive, which is how development has been imposed by the World Bank through structural adjustment programs [conditions on loans from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank that require developing countries to encourage privatization and free trade]. We need different models of development in the Global South. 

There will be, of course, more usage of resources and energy in countries in the Global South, because right now they are under-consuming. Their development necessarily involves more consumption of energy and resources. That creates some pressure on planetary boundaries. So that means that the Global North needs to consciously degrow because it is over-developing, and has excessive production and consumption. 

Q. You write in the book about how a degrowth transition doesn’t have to happen all at once, and that in fact, it’s already happening. Could you talk about a few examples you see today that represent a step toward degrowth?

A. France has banned short-distance domestic flights — that is one important step. Some European societies are now experimenting with shorter working hours, like a four-day workweek. Free education and free medical care are other examples. We should expand these to free internet, which is something [former U.K. Labour Party leader] Jeremy Corbyn put forward during his electoral campaign a couple years ago. 

We should also introduce maximum limits on annual incomes, worker cooperatives, and social ownership of companies, including water companies and electricity companies. These are some of the basic countermeasures that we can introduce within capitalism. 

Q. Some say degrowth is too politically challenging, and that asking people in the Global North to, for example, cut down their consumption would be quite unpopular. What would it take for such a widespread shift in priorities on a political level? Is pursuing degrowth realistic?  

A. I think it’s in some sense utopian. But believing that capitalism will prosper in the decades to come is utopian too, because we will have more natural disasters, inflation, wars — and these will all accelerate with the climate crisis. So it’s naive to think that our way of life will somehow continue. 

I think more people, especially among the younger generation, are demanding a more radical change. Fifteen years ago, I don’t imagine movements like Sunrise Movement, Fridays for Future, Extinction Rebellion, and Just Stop Oil would get support from society or enough media attention. But I think our perception is radically changing, and people like Greta Thunberg really shifted our discussion to another level. The reevaluation of values can take place actually quite rapidly. 

What I’m trying to do is present new values and principles of a more democratic and sustainable society. If people read my book and find some of the proposals attractive, their perception of the world is starting to change. And I think this accumulation of change can have a very significant impact over time.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Slow down, do less: A Q&A with the author who introduced ‘degrowth’ to a mass audience on Feb 1, 2024.

Climate change is triggering a global health crisis that may approach the death toll of some of history’s deadliest plagues. Unlike the 1918 flu epidemic or the COVID-19 pandemic, which were caused by the widespread outbreak of one type of bacteria or virus, climate change-fueled illness is a Hydra-headed challenge that erodes human health on multiple distinct fronts. Efforts are underway to tally this risk, and a growing body of research indicates that climate-related health threats, such as cardiovascular, diarrheal, and vector-borne diseases, have already killed millions of people — a count that will grow steeper as warming accelerates. 

A recent report from the World Economic Forum, a non-governmental organization that promotes public-private partnership on global issues, and Oliver Wyman, a consulting firm, projects that rising temperatures will “place immense strain on global healthcare systems” in the coming years. Climate change will cause 14.5 million additional deaths by 2050, the report says, and spur $12.5 trillion in economic losses. Healthcare systems — hospitals, emergency rooms, doctors, and nurses — will also have to provide an extra $1.1 trillion worth of treatment by mid-century because of climate change. 

These challenges will be felt most acutely in the Global South, where healthcare resources are already limited and governments lack the capacity to respond to cascading climate impacts such as worsening floods, heat waves, and storms. According to the report, central Africa and southern Asia are two regions that are particularly vulnerable to the overlap of intensifying climate health threats and limited resources. 

“Climate change is transforming the landscape of morbidity and mortality,” the report says. “The most vulnerable populations, including women, youth, elderly, lower-income groups, and hard-to-reach communities, will be the most affected by climate-related consequences.”

In total, the report identified six weather events most likely to trigger negative health outcomes: floods, droughts, wildfires, sea-level rise, tropical storms, and heat waves. The authors examined the direct and indirect effects of each of these events. 

The burden of indirect impacts far outweighed the direct effects. For example, floods can trigger landslides that injure and kill people during or directly after a flood occurs. But the longer-term consequences of flooding kill more people. Floods eat away at coastlines, damage infrastructure, and kill crops, which in turn contribute to the expansion of mosquito habitat, increase moisture and humidity in the air, and fuel food insecurity. Infectious diseases, respiratory illnesses, malnutrition, and mental health issues follow. The report predicts that the greatest health consequences of extreme rainfall and flooding in central Africa and Southeast Asia, two of the regions that face the worst effects of climate-driven flooding, will be malaria and post-traumatic stress disorder, respectively. The economic impact of these illnesses and other flood-related health issues will top $1.6 trillion. 

The report found that floods, which pose the highest risk of climate-related mortality, will kill an estimated 8.5 million additional people globally by mid-century because of climate change. Droughts linked to extreme heat, the second-highest driver of climate mortality, will lead to more than 3 million extra deaths. The report estimates that 500 million additional people could be exposed to vector-borne diseases such as malaria, dengue fever, and Zika virus by 2050, many of them in regions that don’t typically have to contend with those illnesses today, such as Europe and the United States. The authors made these projections using a middle-of-the-road climate scenario, in which governments continue to make slow, halting progress toward achieving international climate goals. If fossil fuel use continues unabated or ramps up further through 2050, the health consequences of climate change will be much more severe, and millions more people will die. 

Daniel R. Brooks, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Toronto and author of a book on climate change and emerging diseases, told Grist that it’s encouraging that business-oriented institutions like the World Economic Forum are beginning to tally the direct and longer-term health effects of climate change. But he noted that more work needs to be done to capture the full scope of the climate change-related public health burden. “These staggering numbers are actually conservative,” said Brooks, who was not involved in the research. 

Large epidemiological blind spots cover much of Africa, Southeast Asia, and other parts of the world that have historically lacked the resources to collect and publish health and climate data. That means studies that use existing data to make their projections, as this report did, necessarily miss a big part of the picture. “It is imperative to recognize that the true toll of storms may be underestimated because of the lack of comprehensive data capturing indirect effects,” the report acknowledged in a section dedicated to the health effects of tropical storms. “This is particularly true for low-income and other vulnerable populations.” 

Developed countries are already armed with much of the information and many of the tools required to avert the mass casualties the report projects. The authors outlined a multi-pronged approach these countries can take. The first step is obvious and essential: Reduce greenhouse gas emissions as quickly as possible. Every tenth of a degree of warming dodged corresponds to hundreds of thousands of lives saved around the world. “The holy grail will lie in prevention,” said Rolf Fricker, a partner at Oliver Wyman and a coauthor of the report. “This is the most important thing.” 

Governments must also treat climate change like a public health crisis, and dedicate resources to establishing climate and health offices that will guide policy and divert resources to where they are needed. The United States is an example of a country that began such a process in 2021 by establishing an Office of Climate Change and Health Equity, which is waiting on congressional funding in order to begin the work of assessing and responding to the risks climate change poses to Americans’ health. The U.S. is something of an outlier in this respect. For example, Fricker, who lives in Germany, said his government hasn’t even begun to quantify the health risks of climate change, despite having to contend with expansive flooding issues and intensifying heat waves in recent years. These climate impacts put hospitals, clinics, and other parts of Germany’s healthcare system at risk. 

In developing countries, where the resources to establish and fund such operations do not exist, wealthier governments, foundations, and private companies must step in to fill the void, Fricker said. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has dedicated tens of millions of dollars to this effort, and other foundations are doing similar work, but the scale of investment needs to increase exponentially. A tiny fraction of the already limited international climate adaptation funding pledged to the Global South by wealthy nations is dedicated to health projects. More funding would allow at-risk countries to make their hospitals and clinics more resilient to climate change, stockpile medicines and vaccines that can protect people from the projected rise in vector-borne and diarrheal diseases, collect data on how climate change is affecting the public, and educate communities about the dangers at hand and ahead. 

Last week, Barbados, Fiji, Kenya, the United Kingdom, and a handful of other countries proposed a draft decision on climate change and health that calls on members of the United Nations to invest in some of the solutions proposed in the World Economic Forum report. The draft, which may be adopted in the spring at the 77th World Health Assembly — the decision-making body of the World Health Organization — suggests that nations carry out periodic climate and health assessments, conduct disease surveillance monitoring, and cooperate with other governments on the issue of climate change and human health. The draft, if adopted, would mark a historic and important step toward protecting people from the impacts predicted in the report. Brooks, the professor at the University of Toronto, is hopeful that 2024 will produce meaningful progress on the climate-health crisis. “Not only do we have a number of challenges that are being addressed individually by really smart people,” he said, “but all of those challenges connect with and influence each other.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Climate change will kill 14.5 million people globally by 2050 — but mostly not directly on Feb 1, 2024.

Newly discovered documents confirm that the petroleum and automobile industries funded the early climate science of Charles David Keeling at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) from 1954 to 1956. Keeling became known for the “Keeling Curve,” which demonstrated the upward trajectory of the planet’s carbon dioxide levels.

The documents show that industry leaders were aware of the potential impacts of fossil fuels on the environment from early on.

Keeling traveled throughout the coastal areas, desert, forests and grasslands of the western United States measuring background levels of carbon, DeSmog said in a detailed report.

A series of experiments atop the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii led to his famous curve — the foundation of today’s conception of human-caused climate change.

What the recently uncovered documents reveal is that this early research by Keeling was partially funded by “oil and auto companies” through the Southern California Air Pollution Foundation. The foundation was told of the potential future impacts of carbon dioxide emissions from human sources on people and the climate back in 1954.

The Southern California Air Pollution Foundation had been formed the previous year to address the issue of smog in Los Angeles. Some of the foundation’s donors were Ford, Chrysler, American Motors and General Motors.

The automobile and oil companies gave $13,814 — approximately $158,000 today — toward the funding of Keeling’s work, the documents said, as reported by The Guardian.

An internal memo from the U.S. Public Health Service in 1959 also identified the Western Oil & Gas Association — now the Western States Petroleum Association — and the American Petroleum Institute (API) as “major contributors to the funds of the Air Pollution Foundation,” DeSmog reported.

Beginning in mid-1955, the foundation’s board of trustees was kept abreast of research projects through a “technical advisory committee,” members of which included scientists from Chrysler and the Richfield Oil Corporation — today BP — and a senior API official.

“With the discovery of these Air Pollution Foundation documents, it is now possible to date the earliest sponsorship of climate science by the fossil fuel industry to 1954, approximately a quarter of a century before Exxon’s internal research program of the late 1970s,” DeSmog said. “These new documents provide important evidence that the fossil fuel industry has been intricately connected to climate science from its earliest beginnings — not only as a driver of the greenhouse effect behind climate change, but also as a contributor to the scientific discoveries that would transform our understanding of humanity’s relationship with the Earth and its atmosphere.”

DeSmog pointed out that more than three decades after its initial warnings about carbon dioxide’s potential climate impacts, “numerous members and sponsors” of the foundation — including Chevron, BP, API and the Automobile Manufacturers Association — helped start a multi-million dollar assault on climate policies to address global heating while also promoting the denial of climate science funded in part by themselves.

“You just come back to the oil and gas industry again and again, they were omnipresent in this space,” said Carroll Muffett, Center for International Environmental Law’s chief executive, as reported by The Guardian. “The industry was not just on notice but deeply aware of the potential climate implications of its products for going on 70 years.”

Newly revealed correspondence shows the Caltech research proposal was sent by Samuel Epstein — Keeling’s research director — to the Air Pollution Foundation in November of 1954. The proposal highlighted the potential climate impacts from burning “coal and petroleum,” as well as the promise of a new carbon isotope analysis method to pinpoint “changes in the atmosphere.”

Epstein noted that the “possible consequences of a changing concentration of the CO2 in the atmosphere with reference to climate… may ultimately prove of considerable significance to civilization,” DeSmog reported. 

According to a 1955 Air Pollution Foundation Statement of Policy, a third of the foundation’s trustees were from industries “which are or may be contributors in some degree to air pollution,” indicating they were fully aware of the connection between the trustees — which included the president of Chevron (then Union Oil), North American Aviation, Western Airlines, Southern Pacific Railroad, Chrysler, Western Consolidated Steel and Charles F. Kettering, General Motors’ director of research laboratories — and the pollution their companies were generating.

“The principal reason for their membership on the Board, in addition to their recognized standing in the community, is to make certain that they will be parties to all facts and evidence brought to light on the problem so that they and their colleagues in like enterprises can continue to devote their best efforts toward the abatement of air pollution,” the policy statement said.

The data compiled in a paper by Keeling from 1956, “The Concentration and Isotopic Composition of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide,” was funded by a grant from the Air Pollution Foundation. It shows how carbon emissions measurements Keeling took above tropical waters and at various U.S. locations were consistently similar and highlighted the broader scope of his research in predicting the effects of burning fossil fuels on the atmosphere.

“The factors which control the concentration and isotopic composition of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere have been studied with the view of predicting the effect of terrestrial plants, of surface ocean water, and of the burning of coal and petroleum on atmospheric carbon dioxide,” Keeling wrote.

The post Fossil Fuel Industry Was Aware of Climate Threats as Early as 1954, New Documents Reveal appeared first on EcoWatch.

In California, more than 20 million residents were under flood alerts on Wednesday as the first of two atmospheric river storms hit the northern part of the state, reported CNN.

The “Pineapple Express” storms were expected to bring warm, moist air with gusty winds, heavy rain and snow in the highest elevations.

“An atmospheric river over the West Coast will bring heavy rainfall and gusty winds from southern Oregon to central California today, pushing south into southern California into Thursday. Heavy snowfall is expected over the Sierra and Intermountain West through Thursday,” the National Weather Service said.

The predicted heavy rains could help boost long-term freshwater supplies in the state, which have been below average this winter, Reuters reported.

Meteorologist Daniel Swain of the University of California, Los Angeles, said Pineapple Express storms originate in the warm waters around Hawaii.

Swain told reporters the first of the two storms would likely impact the San Francisco Bay Area most on Wednesday evening.

In addition to the flood watch given by the National Weather Service for the Central Coast and Bay Area, high-wind advisories were also posted for the region.

Thursday could see some streams and roads flood in the southern parts of the state, but Swain said major flooding was not as likely.

A second storm, more powerful than the first, is forecast to reach California on Sunday with more strong winds and even heavier rainfall for Southern California, plus more mountain snow.

“Suffice it to say there will be some flooding in Southern California,” Swain said, as reported by Reuters. “The question is whether it is the unremarkable street flooding we see in any big rainstorm or something considerably more significant than that.”

According to the National Weather Service, fallen trees, in addition to flooding, would be the most likely hazards from the storm, The New York Times reported.

NOAA’s Weather Prediction Center said localized flash flooding was of most concern for urban areas, roads, burn scars and small streams.

The first storm was predicted to move through quickly, reducing the amount of rainfall in any individual location.

The Northern and Central California mountains were expected to get snowfall amounting to a foot or more.

The second storm, expected on Sunday, could turn out to be a “significant atmospheric river event,” according to the Weather Prediction Center, as reported by The New York Times.

That storm could produce even more rainfall and mountain snow than the first.

“The next significant, wetter storm will arrive in California by sometime Sunday and last into early next week. Details are still a bit uncertain, but it will also have the potential to bring flooding rain, landslides and rockslides as well as mountain snow and strong winds. Impacts could be worse with this second storm given the rain will fall on ground saturated by the first storm,” The Weather Channel said.

The post California Prepares for Back-to-Back Atmospheric River Storms, Flooding appeared first on EcoWatch.

New Zealand is set to become one of the first countries in the world to ban per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in cosmetics products, with a plan to prohibit these “forever chemicals” starting at the end of 2026.

PFAS can be found in cosmetics such as mascara, nail polish and shaving cream, where they are used for their spreadability and water resistance. But PFAS have earned the nickname “forever chemicals” because they can take hundreds of years to fully break down.

“We know these chemicals don’t easily break down, they can build up in our bodies, and some can be toxic at high levels,” Dr. Shaun Presow, Hazardous Substances Reassessments Manager at New Zealand’s Environmental Protection Authority, said in a statement.

The ban is slated to take effect starting December 31, 2026. It is a revision to the country’s existing Cosmetic Products Group Standard.

According to PFAS Free, a project by the environmental charity group Fidra, some types of PFAS can take more than 1,000 years to break down. PFAS enter, spread and accumulate both in the environment and in human bodies, and there are growing studies on how PFAS may potential impact wildlife, ecosystems and human health. For instance, a study published in 2023 linked PFAS exposure to higher risks of some cancers, including ovarian, breast and prostate cancers. PFAS have also been found in human blood and breast milk.

A survey by the New Zealand EPA showed that no cosmetic manufacturers in New Zealand had detected any PFAS in their products, but about 90% of the cosmetics in the country are imported, The Guardian reported.

“International research suggests PFAS are only found in a small number of products, but we take a precautionary approach to potential risks from PFAS,” Dr. Presow said. “Banning these chemicals in cosmetics is part of our ongoing response, which includes phasing out all PFAS-firefighting foams and testing for background levels of PFAS in the New Zealand environment.”

In addition to banning PFAS in cosmetics, New Zealand has also updated the Cosmetic Products Group Standard with additional restricted ingredients and more rules on fragrance ingredients. Further, products that contain hazardous ingredients, even if the final product for sale is considered non-hazardous, must comply with the group standard rules.

“We’ve also strengthened the regulations so non-hazardous cosmetic products that contain a hazardous ingredient are now regulated,” Presow explained. “This makes it easier for us to enforce the rules around banned and restricted ingredients that may be found in these products.”

New Zealand has also passed a ban on PFAS in firefighting foam, which will take effect starting in December 2025.

The post New Zealand to Ban PFAS in Cosmetics by 2027 appeared first on EcoWatch.

According to a new global policy report — The Economics of the Food System Transformation by the Food System Economics Commission (FSEC) — how food is produced and consumed worldwide is leading to environmental damage and health impacts that add up to about 12 percent of the world’s annual gross domestic product.

The researchers found that a global transformation of food systems could help achieve worldwide climate targets, prevent 174 million early deaths and result in $5 trillion to $10 trillion in economic benefits, reported AFP.

“Our food systems — the way we produce, market, and consume food — are part of the political, social, economic, ecological, and cultural fabric of our communities,” the report said. “The recent evolution of food systems has fueled – and continues to inflame – some of the greatest and gravest challenges facing humanity, notably persistent hunger, undernutrition, the obesity epidemic, loss of biodiversity, environmental damage and climate change. The economic value of this human suffering and planetary harm is well above 10 trillion USD a year, more than food systems contribute to global GDP. In short, our food systems are destroying more value than they create.”

FSEC is a joint initiative of The Food and Land Use Coalition, EAT and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), which is the report’s lead research partner. The commission brought together a consortium of experts on climate change economics, nutrition, health, natural resources and agriculture to develop a comprehensive economic model of two possible future trajectories for the planet’s food system: the “Current Trends” path and the “Food System Transformation” path, a press release from nonprofit EAT Forum said.

The world’s population has doubled since the 1970s, and food production has had to make changes to keep up. However, the report discovered that intensive food production creates an ever-increasing burden on humans and the planet, AFP said.

“We have an amazing food system,” said Vera Songwe, an economist with the Brookings Institution’s Africa Growth Initiative who is also part of the FSEC, as AFP reported. “But it has done that with a lot of cost to the environment, to people’s health, and to the future and to our economics.”

The total underappreciated costs generated by food systems each year are as much as $15 trillion, including roughly $11 trillion in productivity loss from illnesses caused by food such as hypertension, diabetes and cancer.

An estimated $3 trillion in environmental costs come from current food production and agricultural land use practices, which make up a third of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, according to scientists.

The study’s authors warned we are currently on course for our food systems alone to push global heating past the 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming scientists have said will lead to the worst effects of climate change.

The experts said temperatures could heat up to as much as 2.7 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average by 2100. Meanwhile, food production would be progressively affected by the climate crisis.

They added that implementing better policies would reduce chronic diseases and deaths caused by diet, as well as transform food systems into a means of carbon sequestration.

“In the Food System Transformation pathway, economists model that by 2050 better policies and practices could lead to undernutrition being eradicated, and cumulatively 174 million lives saved from premature death due to diet-related chronic disease. Food systems could become net carbon sinks by 2040, helping to limit global warming to below 1.5 degrees by the end of the century, protecting an additional 1.4 billion hectares of land, almost halving nitrogen surplus from agriculture, and reversing biodiversity loss. Furthermore, 400 million farm workers across the globe could enjoy a sufficient income,” the press release said.

Johan Rockström, PIK director and principal of FSEC, cautioned against not acting to fix the food system, since inaction alone could cause Earth to breach 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming.

“The costs of inaction to transform the broken food system will probably exceed the estimates in this assessment, given that the world continues to rapidly move along an extremely dangerous path whereby it is likely to not only breach the 1.5°C limit, but also face decades of overshoot, before potentially coming back to 1.5°C by the end of this century,” Rockström said in the press release.

Rockström added that phasing out fossil fuels, turning food systems into a carbon sink rather than a producer of greenhouse gases and preserving the natural world would be the only path back to 1.5 degrees Celsius once we overshoot it.

“The global food system thereby holds the future of humanity on Earth in its hand,” Rockström said.

The post Global Food System Must Be Transformed for Health of People and Planet, Study Finds appeared first on EcoWatch.

The vision

“You used to go to India every year, Ammamma?” Reyna asks me, eyes wide.

“Every year. We were very lucky.”

“Do you think you’ll ever go back?”

“With the flight restrictions, it’s almost impossible,” I say. “Now I think it’d take me three trains and a whole-ass ship. No, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to go back. But sometime in the future … I think you will.”

— a passage from “Cabbage Koora,” by Sanjana Sekhar

The spotlight

Nearly 4 in 5 people support doing “whatever it takes” to mitigate climate change, according to a survey published late last year by the firm Potential Energy. An increasingly large majority of people the world over want to see their governments taking decisive action.

But support for specific policies is somewhat of a different story. Notably, in the same survey, messaging about a “mandate,” “ban,” or even “phaseout” received less support than the prompts that didn’t include those words — in some cases, up to 20 percentage points lower. “This finding is particularly important as climate policy advances from the ‘behind-the-scenes’ policies like clean energy standards to the policies that more directly affect individual citizens’ lives — in their kitchens, homes, garages, and farms,” the survey report noted.

This week’s drabble is a snippet from the cli-fi short story “Cabbage Koora: A Prognostic Autobiography” — one of the finalists in this year’s Imagine 2200 contest, a Grist project that asks writers to envision hopeful climate futures. In “Cabbage Koora,” we see a future where everybody (or at least, the characters we meet) does their part: Cities are rewilded, food is grown in front yards, and cooperatives are formed around sharing resources and volunteering. Another aspect of that future is limiting carbon-intensive forms of travel. In three vignettes, spanning 2023 to 2077, the main character grows from a young woman living in L.A. who visits her grandmother in India once a year to a grandmother herself, living in a much changed L.A., where long-distance travel is heavily restricted.

Although the regulations aren’t described in detail, author Sanjana Sekhar references something akin to a carbon crediting system, in a conversation where the main character’s daughter tries to convince her to visit them in Duluth, Minnesota:

“OK, so India’s off the table,” Gita says, cutting off my thoughts, “but more realistically, can you come here, Amma? I told you, Gloria and I can arrange for the flight permits — we have so many credits from volunteer days with the ceremonial burning crews.”

In this fictional tale, the family seems happy enough to accept the climate-conscious travel restrictions. They stay in touch through increasingly sophisticated communication technology, and they share in preserving cultural and culinary traditions, from afar. But what the story doesn’t show is how society arrived at this restricted future — and any opposition that may have stood in the way.

Is this a realistic version of how we might address the carbon intensity of air travel? And if so, will people adapt, as readily as the characters in “Cabbage Koora” seem to? In today’s newsletter, we’re exploring “fiction to reality” — the link between one imagined aspect of a clean, green, just future and the seeds of that future that are visible today.

[Read more “fiction to reality” based on past Imagine contests]

“It’s unrealistic to think that regulation can work on its own,” said Matto Mildenberger, an assistant professor and researcher who specializes in climate politics and political drivers of policy inaction. That’s partly to do with public opinion — preventing people from doing things they want to do is unlikely to be a winning proposition. But, Mildenberger said, the more significant source of opposition is the companies and trade groups that stand to lose out in the green transition. “You can’t expect a large industry that profits from selling a product to sort of quietly go into the sunset.”

The debate around gas stoves in the U.S. provides an interesting case study. The gas industry has been selling the public on their superiority for well over a century, including with a catchphrase popularized in the 1940s that’s still around today: “Now we’re cooking with gas.” More recently, gas companies have paid social media influencers to extoll the unique virtues of cooking over a gas flame. And these techniques appear to be working to stall electrification efforts. (Mildenberger co-authored a recent survey that found that 31 percent of Americans want a fully electric home; an additional 29 percent would like an electric home with a carve out for their gas stoves.)

Earlier this month, a federal appeals court upheld a ruling that struck down a ban on natural gas in new buildings in Berkeley, California. Although the ban was not specific to stoves, they quickly became the focal point; the lawsuit against Berkeley’s ban was brought by the California Restaurant Association, which claimed that the local government was overstepping in trying to regulate the appliances Americans use in their homes. That 2019 law was the first of its kind in the nation, and the ruling casts doubt on the dozens of cities that had followed Berkeley’s lead.

For Mildenberger, this has been evidence of one of the reasons he thinks “bans” are a risky strategy when it comes to changing public behavior. “I think that these bans have turned out to be a very useful and salient rallying cry that the fossil fuel industry has been able to use to mobilize the public,” he said. While political scientists and economists are far from unified in their thinking around these issues, Mildenberger’s perspective is that policies to help people understand and reap the benefits of making a change are crucial drivers in effecting that transition, and eventually can bring public opinion to a place where opposition to a ban wouldn’t be as easy to stir up. In the case of home gas usage, if a ban is coupled with, for instance, incentives to purchase heat pumps and other electric appliances, it can be framed more as a push toward more efficient, safer homes and less as a phaseout of natural gas.

“I think that, in all likelihood, the real transformative change that happens in our home electrification systems is going to come from the benefits that people perceive rather than a ban,” he says. “On the other hand, you know, it’s 2024 now. We have at most 10 years before this particular window of addressing some of the worst impacts of climate change closes.”

A group of climate activists, including Greta Thunberg, gathered in Farnborough, U.K., earlier
this month to protest a planned airport expansion and call for a ban on private jets. Mark Kerrison / Getty Images

When it comes to flying, many companies are working to develop sustainable aviation fuels and even electric aircraft — but these technologies aren’t yet commercially available. That means that reducing the carbon footprint of flying, whether by choice or by law, currently means accepting some restricted mobility — or a different mode of transport.

Last May, France became a test case in flight restrictions when it officially banned short-haul domestic flights on routes already serviced by high-speed rail routes. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the ban was challenged by the Union of French Airports and the European branch of the Airports Council International — but, in contrast to the American courts in the natural gas example, the European Commission ultimately gave France’s ban the green light.

One reason for the different outcomes stems from EU law: The Air Service Regulation sets rules for air services in the EU, and specifically allows member states to limit air traffic rights due to environmental concerns when other transportation is available.

Another key difference: The flight ban’s origins actually lie in public opinion: A more ambitious version was originally recommended by the Citizens’ Convention for the Climate that the French government convened in 2019 and 2020.

The version of the ban that ultimately passed is severely limited, which has been a source of criticism from climate advocates. It currently only affects three routes, from Paris’s Orly airport to the cities of Nantes, Lyon, and Bordeaux. In order to fall under the regulation, the comparable train journey must be no longer than 2.5 hours, with frequent and timely service, and it doesn’t apply to connecting flights. But because the nature of the ban is to essentially replace short plane trips with comparable train travel, the government could restrict more routes when the measure comes up for review in three years, as the country continues to improve its rail system. And several other European countries are eyeing similar legislation.

A 2022 study in Germany looked at what exactly motivates people to want to fly less, and to support policies that would restrict flights. One of the strongest factors was “perceived behavioral control” — people who felt they had options to travel without flying were less likely to fly in the first place, and more likely to support environmental policies that would reduce air travel. It’s the same story Mildenberger pointed to with heat pumps and induction stovetops, and the same idea behind France’s ban: If people have appealing replacements for carbon-intensive activities, they’re more likely to give those up — and less likely to see it as a sacrifice.

“The existence of alternatives and the associated perception of control over (sustainable) travel options are central to promoting sustainable mobility,” the study concluded.

The survey also looked at whether people’s attitudes toward air travel would be swayed when they were informed about its impacts, both within Germany and globally. “What was surprising to me is that we provided information on the different justice aspects, and none of that had any influence on people’s intentions,” said Jessica Berneiser, a psychologist and the study’s lead author. One test group received supplemental information explaining how the climate cost of air travel is unfairly distributed, while less than 5 percent of the world’s population has ever even been on an airplane. But these global justice concerns didn’t sway the respondents.

In some ways, it goes to show why regulations are necessary in the first place. “Information is not everything,” Berneiser said. “We cannot rely on, ‘If we just inform people about all the negative effects, the world will be a great place.’ We need policy to actually support climate-friendly behavior.”

But while global justice didn’t rise to the top as an indicator of support for reduced air travel, another type of justice did: intergenerational. Concerns for future generations and the disproportionate climate burdens that they will bear was a strong factor. And while a sense of behavioral control over different travel options more strongly predicted people’s personal intentions to fly less, Berneiser noted, a belief in intergenerational justice was a stronger predictor of support for policies to reduce air travel.

The survey by Potential Energy that found support for doing “whatever it takes” to mitigate climate change turned up a similar finding to the flight study: Generational messaging proved to be 12 times more motivating than other narratives tested. The report called this framing “Later is too late,” because “it’s putting our children’s futures at risk” and “it’s our responsibility to leave behind a world that’s safe and livable for future generations.”

This is a theme that lies at the heart of “Cabbage Koora.” It’s a story about family, and the passing on of traditions and values and a persistent hope for a better future. At the story’s ending, the main character reflects:

I think of the two generations before me, who saw the world change so much in their own lifetimes: my ammamma watching India gain independence from the British Raj, and my amma, moving to a completely different continent and building a new life from scratch.

I think of the two generations after me: Gita, who didn’t see stars for the first three decades of her life until regulations helped clear the smog. Reyna, who’s never seen the snow but can do 31 chakkars and accompanies her mom to volunteer for ceremonial burn support.

I think of the descendants that follow, from whom I borrow this earth.

— Claire Elise Thompson

More exposure

• Read: a previous fiction-to-reality newsletter that looked at airships as a potential low-carbon form of travel
• Read: how other cities are learning from the defeat of Berkeley’s ban and finding alternative ways to electrify buildings (Grist)
• Read: about the growing coalitions of climate-concerned citizens who have given up flying (New York Times)
• Read: about two high-speed rail lines under development in the Western U.S., thanks to new federal funding (Condé Nast Traveler)

A parting shot

A photo of the Tokaido Shinkansen, the world’s first bullet train line, which started running in Japan in 1964 and remains part of a sophisticated network that connects the country. Smart Cities Dive ranks Japan number one in global leaders of high-speed rail infrastructure.

IMAGE CREDITS

Vision: Grist

Spotlight: Mark Kerrison / Getty Images

Parting shot: Philip Fong / Getty Images

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline From fiction to reality: Could people ever embrace a ban on flying? on Jan 31, 2024.

The rise of fast fashion resulted in a tidal wave of clothing in the world’s…

The post Best of Earth911 Podcast: Wearwell Cofounder Erin Houston Builds Circular Clothing Lifestyles appeared first on Earth911.

Mansur Arief never imagined himself working in mining. As an artificial intelligence researcher finishing a PhD at Carnegie Mellon University, he developed safety algorithms for self-driving cars. But then he took a postdoctoral position at Stanford University, where he met Jef Caers, the director of the new research program Mineral-X. Caers’ program seeks to reinvent mining for the clean energy economy by using advanced data science tools to help companies find and extract critical minerals like lithium in a more sustainable manner — and by developing protocols to engage local communities at the exploration phase, so they can decide whether or not new mining should be permitted on their land.

Arief was fascinated to discover that his skillset — developing AI algorithms that make complex decisions from real-world data — could be applied to searching for the minerals desperately needed to build out clean energy technology. (From 2017 to 2022, demand for nickel and lithium, which are essential components in the batteries that power electric vehicles, jumped by 40 percent and 300 percent, respectively.) He’s currently involved in a Mineral-X project focused on the strategic design of critical mineral supply chains for the United States. Eventually he hopes to take on a larger role in another early-stage project that aims to reduce the mining sector’s carbon footprint in his home country, Indonesia.

“I believe this is a new field that requires lots of attention, and it has huge potential moving forward,” Arief told Grist.

However, Arief’s interest in mining makes him an outlier among young professionals. In the U.S., as well as other mining powerhouses like Australia and Canada, the mining industry is facing an unprecedented workforce crisis as today’s youth choose not to pursue careers in a sector they see as stagnant, hidebound, and out of touch with their values. Enrollment in university programs that train mining experts is cratering, and companies are struggling to attract new talent to replace their aging staff. The blue collar mining workforce of drillers, machine operators, and others who actually extract the minerals faces challenges, too. To beef up domestic critical minerals mining, the U.S. will likely need more of these laborers. It remains to be seen whether there are enough young people willing to replace mine workers on the brink of retirement today, much less grow the workforce to meet skyrocketing demand. 

“Mining, and anything related to mining right now, is less attractive on average to young people,” Jim Faulds, who directs the Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geology, told Grist. 

The mining industry’s poor reputation has arguably been earned. In many parts of the world, the industry has devastated local ecosystems, upended Indigenous communities, and exploited its workers. Yet in order to meet international targets for slowing climate change, the world needs enormous amounts of lithium, cobalt, copper, nickel, and other metals that are key ingredients in clean energy technologies. Securing these commodities could mean opening hundreds of new mines worldwide.

To meet this need, the industry is racing to address shortages of young experts with the technical skills needed to discover mineral deposits, develop mines, and operate extraction sites. That includes the geoscientists who identify and characterize mineral deposits to help companies determine if they are economical to mine, the mining engineers who determine the best way to get mineral-rich rocks out of the ground, and the metallurgists tasked with separating minerals of interest, like cobalt, from everything else inside those rocks. Across each of these specialized fields, Faulds said, the mining industry is feeling a workforce squeeze.

New workers “are getting scooped up immediately,” he added.

That sort of hiring demand, Faulds said, usually translates to increased enrollment in the  technical training programs that churn out these professionals. But that’s not what’s happening. According to the American Geosciences Institute, a nonprofit umbrella organization for geoscience professional associations, 27 percent of the existing geosciences workforce is expected to retire by 2029. Without enough new graduates to replace them, the organization projects a shortage of approximately 130,000 workers by the same year.

Not all of those lost geoscientists would have worked in mining. But given that the number of students completing degrees in mining disciplines has been falling for years — alongside the number of new faculty hires and university mining programs — experts believe a talent shortage is coming into view.

“Anecdotally, I expect there to be a shortage [of economic geologists] in the near future if not already,” Graham Lederer, a researcher with the U.S. Geological Survey’s Geology, Energy, and Minerals Science Center in Reston, Virginia, told Grist. “Mining engineering and extractive metallurgy are facing similar, if not more severe, workforce issues.”

Indeed, the number of mining engineering degrees awarded in the U.S. has fallen 39 percent since 2016, according to a 2023 report by the consulting firm McKinsey & Company, while the number of mining and mineral engineering programs nationwide has fallen from 25 in 1982 to just 14 today. The trends are so stark that Deborah Ross, a member of Congress representing central North Carolina, raised the problem at a recent Congressional hearing on establishing domestic supply chains of critical minerals, noting “we’ll likely not have the workforce … to fulfill our national mineral needs.” Earlier this month, the National Academies of Sciences hosted a workshop to discuss how the U.S. can meet the workforce needs of the domestic minerals sector.

The problem isn’t limited to the U.S. Australia is the world’s top producer of the lithium needed for electric vehicle batteries, but interest in mining engineering has plunged even more precipitously there, with program enrollment falling 63 percent since 2014. In Canada, a top producer of the battery metal nickel, 70 percent of young people who responded to a recent poll said that they “probably” or “definitely” wouldn’t consider a career in mining — higher than the percentage who said they wouldn’t consider careers in oil and gas. The UK’s mining workforce is also aging fast: According to a 2022 report by the nation’s Mining Education Forum, a staggering 80 percent of mining and mineral processing engineers are now over the age of 50.

There are a host of reasons mining has lost its luster. But a key factor experts emphasized in interviews with Grist is the industry’s reputation for polluting the planet and exploiting its workers, in a quest to dig up things we either don’t need or that are actively harmful.

“The mining industry keeps mining coal and diamonds and gold to make money,” Caers, the Mineral-X director, told Grist. “People don’t want to get involved in that.”

A mining engineer by training, Caers cut all ties with the oil and gas sector in 2022 to focus on critical minerals for the energy transition. He believes new technology, combined with strong environmental stewardship and socially responsible development, is key to reinvigorating youth interest in mining. Many of the students Caers works with, like Arief, have a background in computer science or artificial intelligence, and are now learning how their skills can be used to help locate new deposits of critical minerals in the enormous datasets collected by geologists.

“There is, in fact, a lot of interest in critical minerals, and there’s lots of interest in using new technology,” Caers said. “But the mining industry doesn’t tap into that enthusiasm.”

In addition to failing to prioritize critical minerals extraction over cash-cow commodities like gold, Caers feels that the industry at large isn’t advertising itself enough on university campuses like Stanford, which have a large number of tech-savvy students who want to work on climate solutions. 

A few startups are bucking the trend. The most prominent is KoBold Metals, a Bill Gates-backed minerals exploration company and Silicon Valley’s first mining unicorn, a term for a privately held startup valued at over a billion dollars. KoBold, an industrial affiliate of Mineral-X that has financially backed the latter and collaborated on its research, is developing machine learning and artificial intelligence tools to scour the Earth’s crust for new deposits of lithium, copper, cobalt, and nickel. Its staff of about 200 employees includes roughly equal numbers of geoscientists, data scientists, and software engineers, according to KoBold president Josh Goldman. While a few years back recruiters at KoBold might have needed to spend a lot of time explaining why the company’s mission mattered, today “it’s in the zeitgeist,” according to Goldman. 

“Everybody’s worried about lithium supply, everybody’s worried about copper,” he added.

Goldman acknowledged that potential young hires often have “some hitches about joining a mining company.” But he said KoBold is typically able to assuage their concerns by explaining its ethical principles, which include only doing exploration and extraction in places where it can get strong community buy-in. “That is a very frequent topic of conversation,” Goldman said. 

Another startup that’s bringing young people into the mining sector is Nth Cycle. It works with both mining and recycling companies to extract critical minerals from scrap metal, electronic waste, and mine waste using its novel “electro-extraction” technology, which replaces traditional high-heat smelting with an electricity-driven filtration process to separate and refine metals. Company founder and CEO Megan O’Connor says that the company’s 35-person staff is composed mainly of fresh-out-of-college engineers who “never thought that they would ever be in mining.” But Nth Cycle’s mission of developing more sustainable approaches to extracting and recycling the metals needed for the clean energy transition struck a chord with them.

“We are sustainability [and] circular-economy-related, but focus on doing that for the mining industry,” O’Connor told Grist. (O’Connor was a 2022 Grist Fixer.) “That’s definitely how we’ve seen people get excited.”

But these startups are the exception rather than the norm in an industry dominated by large multinational firms that mine a wide variety of commodities worldwide and tend to adhere to local labor and environmental standards, even when those standards are poor. And it remains to be seen whether the broader mining industry can clean up its act enough to attract the young talent needed to support the energy transition — especially in more traditional fields like economic geology and mining engineering.

Finding top-tier geologists with years of experience in mineral exploration “is pretty difficult already,” Goldman said, citing a “talent drain” from the industry in the 2010s when new, high-quality discoveries dwindled and major mining companies reduced their exploration efforts. As KoBold begins to develop its first mine — an underground copper and cobalt mine in Zambia — it’s already struggling to find local experts with the skills to design and build it, Goldman said.

“For us, it’s important not to just have global talent in mine design and mine building, but Zambian talent in leading that project,” Goldman said. But with the nation not having built a large new underground mine in decades, “that’s really hard.”

As hiring challenges loom in the U.S. as well, lawmakers are stepping in to try to bolster the nation’s workforce: A provision in the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act calls on the National Science Foundation to make new funding opportunities available to train undergraduate and graduate students in mining engineering, while a bipartisan bill introduced in the Senate last year, the Mining Schools Act of 2023, would require the Department of Energy establish a grant program to support domestic mining education. (The bill hasn’t passed out of committee yet.) Faulds, of the Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geology, called the Mining Schools Act “a start” but warned that the $10 million in funds the bill authorizes every year for eight years isn’t a “huge amount” when spread across the entire country.

In addition to technical experts, the mining industry will need blue collar workers to support additional critical minerals extraction. Today, there are approximately 375,000 people working in the minerals mining sector and another 97,000 working in coal mining in the U.S., according to Conor Bernstein, a spokesperson for the National Mining Association. Many of those workers are employed in jobs like construction, drilling, trucking, ore processing, and equipment maintenance. If the U.S. is going to ramp up production of critical minerals, this blue collar workforce will likely need to grow, although exactly how much will depend on technology trends and domestic mining policy.

“However you game the estimates … the number of blue collar workers our industry will need in the coming years is poised to increase,” Bernstein told Grist. 

At the same time, the mining sector will face widespread retirements by the late 2020s, according to a 2014 report by the Society for Mining, Metallurgy, and Exploration. “The challenges identified in that report have now collided with surging mineral demand driven by the energy transition,” Bernstein added.

Whether the industry will have the same difficulties finding young people to work blue collar mining jobs that it faces recruiting technical experts is unclear. But there are other trends at play that could help critical minerals companies find the workers they need: The U.S. coal industry has been cratering for years, creating an economic void that needs to be filled in coal communities nationwide. Many of the coal miners now facing layoffs or early retirements could be retrained to work in lithium or nickel mining or processing, said Erin Bates, the communications director for United Mine Workers of America, which represents more coal miners than any other North American union.

“A lot of these coal miners have massive skill sets,” Bates said. “They learn so much in the coal mine, that any other job they move into in that realm … they will be able to learn.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The climate case for a career in mining on Jan 31, 2024.

This coverage is made possible through a partnership with Grist and Interlochen Public Radio in Northern Michigan.

On a Sunday morning in Charlevoix, a small town surrounded by lakes in northern Michigan, people gathered in the Greensky Hill Indian United Methodist Church. The small, one-room log building is almost 200 years old and the hymns are sung in English and Anishinaabemowin.

It was December, so Pastor Johnathan Mays was leading an Advent service, one of his last, since he would soon retire. In between reflections on scripture, Mays touched on an important venture: The church is planning to install solar panels on their larger meeting hall, working with Michigan-based nonprofit Solar Faithful to do so.

Greensky Hill has a long history of environmental care and stewardship, grounded in Anishinaabe culture, with a majority Native congregation.

One of the ministry’s priorities is the “greening of Greensky Hill.”

Mays said that prompts them to ask “how we can use our space and our resources to address those issues for climate care, or creation care, or what some people call Earthkeeping?”

As Greensky Hill works to become more sustainable, it’s switching from propane to heat pumps to become more energy efficient. Mays said solar will allow them to use renewable energy and give that energy back to the grid. 

“The biggest issue was how can we get this huge building off of greenhouse gas creation?” he said, referring to the meeting hall, which was built in the 1990s. 

Across the country, houses of worship are pursuing solar systems.

As of 2021, about 2 percent of houses of worship in the United States have solar systems, according to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which the University of California manages for the U.S. Department of Energy. That’s disproportionately high; houses of worship make up only 0.6 percent of all non-residential buildings.

But these projects can be difficult to execute. Congregations can have tight budgets, older buildings and more pressing priorities. And switching energy systems can mean a lot of bureaucratic paperwork for which they might not have the staff. 

And, because houses of worship generally don’t pay taxes, they’ve also had trouble capitalizing on renewable energy tax benefits.

One alternative has been for them to work with third parties that could benefit from the tax credits. For instance, an investor could buy and install solar panels on a church. The church would buy that power from the investor, but wouldn’t own the panels — an arrangement called a power purchase agreement.

Now, they have another option. The federal Inflation Reduction Act has made it possible for governments and tax-exempt entities, including houses of worship, to get tax credits for renewable projects. Called direct pay, the program provides them with a tax credit worth up to 30 percent of the installation cost. That can help cover some expenses, and advocates say it’s critical to getting more congregations to consider solar.

“I expect in the coming year, it’s really going to boom, the solar on houses of worship,” said Sarah Paulos, the programs director for Interfaith Power and Light. “It makes a lot of sense. If they can cut their utility bill way back, then they have more money to do what they’re there for, which is their mission.”

Interfaith Power and Light might sound like a local utility (or maybe a prayer group) but it’s actually a national network focused on climate action and religion, started in 1998 as a coalition of Episcopal churches that worked together to buy renewable energy. It has since expanded to other denominations and faiths.

Paulos has worked in this field for almost 20 years. She said when she started, there were a lot of climate deniers, especially in churches.

“In the beginning, people of faith were really, really being courageous and stepping out and talking about responding to climate change through renewable energy and energy efficiency as a moral call to care for creation,” she said.

Read Next

How to sell solar in coal country

Hannah Wilson-Black

While there’s increasing acceptance that climate change is happening, religious Americans are still far from unified in their views.

A 2022 Pew Research Center survey found that most religious adults believed they should protect the Earth. But for a variety of reasons, highly religious people tend to be less concerned about climate change than other adults in the U.S. 

One way to reach people and engage them in climate action is through tangible efforts like solar, said Leah Wiste, the executive director of Michigan Interfaith Power and Light.

“In the public conversation, I think we’ve kind of failed to see the leadership that people of faith and conscience are taking on these issues,” she said.

Local involvement is critical to getting more people to install solar and non-residential buildings – such as schools or houses of worship – are part of that.

A study published last November in the journal Frontiers in Sustainable Energy Policy found that when non-residential buildings install solar, they can spur other installations in the area.

But raising awareness of solar doesn’t necessarily make it more equitable. 

The researchers say it’s unclear how effective houses of worship can be in encouraging more solar in their communities “without directly addressing low-income barriers to solar adoption,” like budget constraints and lower home ownership rates.

And houses of worship with solar are located disproportionately in “relatively wealthy, white and educated census tracts,” according to Berkeley Lab, mirroring the broader trend. 

Still, many people working at the intersection of religion and renewables say these projects are an opportunity for more people in those communities to learn about solar.

“Part of that can happen just through the simple physical act of putting a system on the roof,” said Galen Barbose, a scientist at Berkeley Lab. “But houses of worship are also in a unique position to be able to sponsor events, talk to their membership, and potentially really serve as emissaries for solar energy.” 

Rob Rafson has worked to put solar panels on churches for years. He’s the president of the solar energy company Chart House Energy. 

About a year ago, Chart House Energy teamed up with the Climate Witness Project, Michigan Interfaith Power and Light, and climate activists in the Detroit area to launch Solar Faithful. 

Rafson wanted to make it easier for houses of worship to adopt solar.

“It’s been a very big challenge,” Rafson said. “Because churches — they’re nonprofits, they don’t have a budget, they don’t want to borrow money, and the size project… is too small for investors to invest in.”

Despite such challenges, congregations have managed to install panels. At the First Lutheran Church in Muskegon, a new solar array shines on the roof.

“They’re hard to see,” said Pastor Bill Uetricht. He’s walking around the church, craning his neck, trying to get a good view of the panels. “You can see that it’s on about half of that roof up there.”

Now that it has solar panels, the church needs to buy less power from utilities. That’s expected to lower the energy bill.

It’s an example of a power purchase agreement. By purchasing the solar-powered energy, First Lutheran will pay off the project cost of around $175,000 to an investor. Buying the power from their own array, they’re slowly paying back their investor. Once that’s done, the power that comes from the array is essentially free.

Uetricht said First Lutheran got involved with solar when a couple in the congregation gave the church two panels they didn’t know what to do with.

“I contacted a cousin of mine who works in alternative energy, and I said, ‘Hey, send me to someplace where I can do something with these two panels,’” Uetricht said.

They ended up working with Solar Faithful. 

Uetricht said installing solar panels is one way of fulfilling their mission. He said that the world doesn’t belong to us, but that it is a gift – one that we haven’t been caring for.

“Old technologies have contributed to that lack of care,” he said. “So it only makes sense that we would be at the forefront of encouraging alternative energy sources.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Across the country, houses of worship are going solar on Jan 31, 2024.