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

In the more than a decade since Alabama regulators allowed a landfill to take in tons of waste from coal-burning power plants around the US, neighbors in the majority-Black community of Uniontown frequently complain of thick air so pungent it makes their eyes burn.

On some days, it can look like an eerily white Christmas in a place that rarely sees snow.

“When the wind blows, all the trees in the area are totally gray and white,” said Ben Eaton, a Uniontown commissioner and president of Black Belt Citizens Fighting for Health and Justice, a local group that is pushing to shutter the facility.

Residents of the former plantation town complain of high rates of kidney failure and neuropathy – two symptoms of exposure to coal ash, whose toxic byproduct contains mercury and arsenic. The controversy has been covered for years in local and national news outlets, including a civil rights case Eaton’s group filed – and lost – to close the landfill.

Just last year, coal ash in the state drew national attention when the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) tentatively denied a state clean-up proposal that it found to be too weak for waste coming in part from its largest electricity provider – Alabama Power.

But neither the news from Uniontown, nor the EPA rejection, ever appeared in the Birmingham Times – a historic African American newspaper – or on the online-only Alabama News Center, an investigation by Floodlight found. A search for “coal ash” in the Birmingham Times yields just one reprinted story from HuffPost, and it’s a reference to coal ash in another state.

Both news outlets have financial ties to the main subject of those stories, Alabama Power.

For decades, Alabama Power has sowed influence across the state, according to interviews with more than two dozen former and current reporters, civil rights activists, utility employees and environmentalists.

What’s happening in Alabama is an example of how special interests have taken advantage of the diminishing reach and influence of shrinking mainstream newsrooms in the US. In their place have sprung up fake “pink slime” news sites operated by political interests; a utility that secretly created news outlets to attack its critics; and a Florida publisher who accepts payments for positive coverage.

This investigation into power companies infiltrating local media follows Floodlight’s revelation earlier this month about how utilities wield influence among civil rights groups.

In the last decade, nearly a dozen local reporters and editors were hired to staff the two Alabama news outlets. A Floodlight review of the content since the utility founded the Alabama News Center in 2015 shows it publishes overwhelmingly positive stories about the power company.

Coverage of the utility by the Birmingham Times, which was funded with money from Alabama Power’s charitable arm the Alabama Power Foundation, consists of reprinted stories from the News Center and the utility’s own press releases.

The Birmingham Times executive editor, Barnett Wright, said the outlet’s coverage is limited due to its small staff and having to make hard editorial decisions on what to cover. “The Alabama Power Foundation had or has zero influence in the newsroom,” Wright said in an email. “As the executive editor, I have never had any conversation with the Alabama Power Foundation about any article the Birmingham Times chooses to run or not run.”

Alabama Power and its foundation did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Here is another example of news that readers of the Birmingham Times and the Alabama News Center do not see: when Alabama Power was granted three consecutive electric rate increases in 2022 – raising the average annual cost of electricity by $274 in 2023 – neither publication wrote about the rise, according to a search of their websites.

Residents of this seventh poorest state have the most expensive monthly electric bills in the US. This past summer – after the increases – Alabama Power customers railed against bills topping $700 a month for some households.

“Clearly those communities that are suffering this way don’t have pleasant things to say about those [Alabama Power] folks who are causing the problems in the first place,” said the Rev Michael Malcom, executive director of Alabama Interfaith Power and Light, a faith-based organization that focuses on climate change. “So how best do you silence these people? You control the narrative in the first place.”

Wright countered that he does not have the staff to “give those rate increase stories the comprehensive cover … they deserve.”

But, he added, “that’s a fair question. Our readers turn on lights, flush toilets, take showers and warm their homes, and it’s a story that should be covered and will be going forward – even if I have to write them myself.”

A ‘good news’ site

The Alabama News Center was launched to promote “the good news of this state.” Its stories run in outlets around Alabama and are picked up by national aggregators including Google and Apple News.

It’s ostensibly news – with an electric industry tinge. Recent top stories include a write up of University of Alabama students competing in an electric vehicle battery challenge and a feature on a career day for future lineworkers.

The News Center’s operation is entirely paid for by electricity customers, Alabama Power’s assistant treasurer, Brian George, said at a December public hearing.

he electric company’s power over the news in the state is a significant silencer, according to 15 reporters interviewed by Floodlight. They cite Alabama Power’s digital and broadcast advertising purchasing power and its aggressive stance toward reporters and outlets that publish critical stories.

Floodlight previously revealed the company’s secret hiring of an Alabama-based consulting firm to pay for positive news coverage in three other Alabama news outlets. Coupled with its foray into newsroom financing, Alabama Power now exerts a heavy influence on what news is covered or ignored in Alabama.

The effect is compounded by hundreds of layoffs of news reporters in Birmingham, Montgomery, Huntsville and Mobile in the past decade.

“If you just search Alabama Power and Google News, you’re not going to find a lot that’s very investigative or goes beyond the surface level of just covering press releases. There are a lot of factors that go into that, that aren’t just Alabama Power manipulating the media,” said Lee Hedgepeth, an Alabama-based reporter at Inside Climate News.

Alabama’s powerful power company

Alabama Power is a huge economic driver. Its parent company, Southern Co, employs about 27,700 employees, with more than 6,000 working for Alabama Power.

It’s a significant player in the state’s mostly Republican politics. Using heavy lobbying and campaign contributions to utility regulators and politicians, Alabama Power has created strong allegiances that allow it to secure rate hike approvals without public hearings. The company also operates the nation’s dirtiest power plant.

And it places steep fees on homeowners, which stymie the competing rooftop solar industry. The result is that sunny Alabama trails far behind Alaska – which sees only a few hours of daylight in deep winter – when it comes to clean solar energy.

Alabama politicians have in large part allowed the utility to flourish. Shareholders of the publicly-traded utility receive some of the highest returns on equity in the country. In fact, in 2022 Alabama Power reported more profit than allowed, and this past August had to refund $62 million to its customers.

Even before Alabama Power created its own news entities, four reporters in the state said the utility was aggressive in squashing negative news coverage, including frequently challenging reporting by demanding to meet with top newsroom leaders or threatening lawsuits.

In 2001, Birmingham’s FOX6 station killed a story about an elderly woman who died after life-sustaining equipment was turned off in her home when Alabama Power halted her electric service over failure to pay. Three former newsroom staffers who asked not to be named said a station executive – who later went to work for Alabama Power – spiked the story.

The utility later settled with the family for $15 million. The former station executive did not respond to a request for comment.

Two Alabama Political Reporter journalists recounted separate instances of a critical story they wrote about Alabama Power being killed without explanation by their outlet in 2013 and 2021. Each suspected the articles were held to appease Alabama Power. At least as far back as April 2013, the Alabama Political Reporter was being paid $8,000 a month by Matrix, the consulting firm employed by Alabama Power, leaked records show. The site’s publisher didn’t remember the stories and denied they were killed because of the utility.

Utility foundation buys Black newspaper

Founded in 1964 as a paper written by and for the Black community, the Birmingham Times emerged as the state became a leader in the civil rights movement, including the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march that culminated in brutal police attacks on protesters.

In 2016, the Birmingham Times was sold to the Foundation for Progress in Journalism, a nonprofit established with $35,000 of Alabama Power Foundation money, tax records show. Alabama Power’s charity gave the Foundation for Progress in Journalism $185,000 between 2014 and 2016. The chair of the board for the journalism foundation also was a vice president at Alabama Power.

Birmingham Times publisher Samuel Martin says the paper’s founder at 91 years old had no clear successor and approached the foundation to purchase it. “It was his hope that the Foundation would offer a way to preserve his legacy, with the Times being the only remaining Black newspaper in Birmingham. The foundation agreed,” Martin said in an emailed response.

On the surface, the Times appears to be a typical independent newspaper. It largely publishes profiles and stories about the state’s Black community, sometimes touching on hard topics like gun violence and poverty. A recent issue of the newspaper had a lead story about the city’s Black homeless population. The back of the paper featured a full-page Alabama Power ad. The paper does not disclose its relationship to Alabama Power on its website or in the weekly print edition.

Martin said there is “no reason to reference Alabama Power” on its website or in its paper and stories because “they have no ownership.”

Influencing the Black community has been part of Alabama Power’s playbook for years, Floodlight has learned. In 2018, the utility paid the owner of the consulting firm Matrix LLC $124,000 a month – or nearly $1.5m a year – to maintain ties to Black communities, according to a leaked copy of the contract. One provision called for the Matrix owner to “continue strategic consulting and issue research that promotes [the] Company’s commitment to helping develop the Black Belt region.”

It is also a region, in central Alabama, that suffers from environmental and health impacts linked to coal. Some residents there tape up windows to keep black soot out of their homes.

“By controlling the media, they (Alabama Power) are able to present as good neighbors to the public while drowning out those private conversations that talk about the [environmental] burdens that these communities have to bear,” Malcom said.

Warding off a rate hearing

Alabama Power made its move into newsrooms on the heels of one of the biggest threats to its business model.

Back in 2013, a Republican member of the Alabama Public Service Commission wanted to know why customers’ bills were so exorbitant. Terry Dunn wanted Alabama Power and two other utilities to open their books and answer questions about how rates were determined.

It would be the first time in 30 years that Alabama Power was forced to answer to regulators in a formal public hearing.

Dunn’s more-tenured fellow commissioners pushed back. The Public Service Commission president, Twinkle Cavanaugh, who the year before reportedly received nearly $89,000 in campaign donations from coal interests, rejected Dunn’s call for a hearing as “half-baked.”

Around that same time, a non-profit, Alabama Citizens for Media Accountability, launched a website that attacked local reporters who covered Dunn’s arguments and his tight re-election race.

The group said it was “devoted to exposing liberal bias in the Alabama media.” Articles posted on its website often targeted reporters from AL.com, an online conglomerate of Alabama’s three largest newspapers.

“They went after me a lot,” said John Archibald, a two-time Pulitzer prize-winning editorial writer for AL.com who frequently wrote about Alabama Power.

Public tax filings show that Alabama Citizens for Media Accountability was given $100,000 in 2014 from a non-profit directed by Alabama Power consultant Mike Fields. The funding made up nearly its entire annual budget.

Dunn ultimately lost his re-election bid. Six months later, Alabama Citizens for Media Accountability stopped posting, and its executive director, Elizabeth BeShears, left to join Yellowhammer News, which has financial ties to the Matrix consulting firm, as Floodlight and NPR reported in 2022.

BeShears, spokeswoman for a national school choice group, did not respond to requests for comment.

Alabama Power’s ‘brand journalism’

In early 2015, less than a year after Dunn’s defeat, Alabama Power launched the Alabama News Center. Its motive: to bypass news organizations altogether.

Through the News Center, the utility would no longer have to rely on other reporters and news outlets to get their message out, explained Ike Pigott, Alabama Power communications strategist and former broadcast reporter, in a 2016 podcast about the News Center.

“It’s helping establish us as a source of news,” Pigott said. “And when you look at the kind of stories that we do, and the degree of professionalism we take with it, it is news. It’s just not coming from what you would traditionally consider a news-only provider.”

Pigott said in creating its “brand journalism,” Alabama Power looked to fossil fuel giant Chevron for inspiration. Chevron in 2014 was caught secretly running a “community news site” in Richmond, California, that published positive stories – many written by a public relations firm – about oil and gas drilling in the state.

“We were looking at the Richmond Standard, we saw it for what it was,” Pigott told the interviewer. “And we saw it as an opportunity to say, ‘Hey, we can get out and we can tell some of our stories too.’” Pigott did not respond to requests for comment.

Alabama News Center divulges that it’s a product of Alabama Power on its homepage. But it does not do so on its stories that are picked up by legitimate news sites. The News Center operates as a state news wire and also reaches national readers through Apple and Google News, which both treat the site as a regular news outlet.

Regardless of ownership, traditional media outlets are bound to ethics standards that maintain a distance between the business operations and working journalists.

“The easy question to answer is, ‘Are you being transparent? Are you levelling with the public about who you are?’” said Dan Kennedy, a professor at Northeastern University’s School of Journalism in Boston.

“But if they’re doing some extremely favorable coverage of the power company, and any fair-minded person looking at this would say, ‘They’re leaving out important information about what the power company’s doing.’ It simply isn’t ethical to do that.”

Today, Alabama has just a handful of reporters fully devoted to covering environmental and energy issues in the state of 5 million people and the country’s third-largest coal exporter.

“I always regarded doing environmental journalism in Alabama like shooting fish in a barrel. There’s always so much to cover,” said Ben Raines, a former AL.com and Mobile Press Register environment editor who won several national prizes for his stories.

Raines left AL.com in 2019 and now spends his days on documentary projects and giving tours of the Mobile River.

“We have lost the firepower of environmental reporting we used to have. And in place of it, we have almost no coverage.”

Floodlight reporters Kristi E Swartz and Mario Alejandro Ariza contributed to this story.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline ‘Control the narrative’: How an Alabama utility wields influence by financing news on Jan 21, 2024.

This story was originally published by WIRED and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

In a roundabout way, coal is solar-powered. Millions of years ago, swamp plants soaked up the sun’s energy, eating carbon dioxide in the process. They died, accumulated, and transformed over geologic time into energy-dense rock. This solar-powered fuel, of course, is far from renewable, unlike solar panels: Burning coal has returned that carbon to the atmosphere, driving rapid climate change.

But what if humans could reverse that process, creating their own version of coal from plant waste and burying it underground? That’s the idea behind a growing number of carbon projects: Using special heating chambers, engineers can transform agricultural and other waste biomass into solid, concentrated carbon. Like those ancient plants captured CO₂ and then turned into coal, this is carbon naturally sequestered from the atmosphere, then locked away for (ideally) thousands of years.

To be abundantly clear: Such “carbon removal” techniques are in no way a substitute for reducing emissions and keeping that extra carbon out of the atmosphere in the first place. But at the annual COP28 conference last month, carbon removal was a hotter topic than ever before. For years, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has insisted that to keep warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures, we’re going to need carbon removal in one form or another, preferably a bunch of techniques working in concert.

If scaled up in the coming years, biomass carbon removal and storage could be one of those techniques. To start, you gather up waste biomass like corn stalks and cook it in a high-heat, low-oxygen environment in a special reactor, a process known as pyrolysis. It’s not burning the material with fire, per se, but blasting it with heat to remove the water content and turn it into concentrated carbon. (Note that this differs from bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, in which you grow crops specifically to burn to produce electricity, capturing the emissions from the power plant.)

“It’s basically like heating it in a pizza oven without oxygen,” says Andrew Jones, CEO and cofounder of Carba, which is using the process to bury carbon. “The optimal place is actually an abandoned coal mine, kind of putting it right back where it came from. We’re basically reverse coal mining.”

The challenge is that microbes love chewing on dead plant material, releasing carbon dioxide as a byproduct, as well methane, an even more potent greenhouse gas. This is an especially acute problem in the Arctic, where permafrost is thawing, releasing ancient plant material for microbes to eat. But it’s also a problem much closer to major human populations: Agricultural waste, landscaping waste from yards, the biomass you’d get from thinning forests (to lessen the amount of combustible material and reduce wildfire risk), such matter is often left to rot, burping up its carbon, or is burned, which releases both carbon and aerosols that are terrible for air quality and human health.

Because the reactor removes the carbohydrates that microbes love, creating charcoal, the carbon that goes into the ground doesn’t become food, so it persists. “If you’re just burying carbohydrates, you always have this risk that you don’t have it in the right conditions,” says Paul Dauenhauer, senior adviser and cofounder of Carba and a chemical engineer at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. “And so if 10, 20, or 30 percent of the material that you bury ends up degrading, that’s a loss of a lot of credibility.”

You don’t even need an abandoned coal mine to get rid of the processed biomass—Carba is burying it in landfills, too—so the technique could be used pretty much anywhere. “Every municipality has wastepaper waste, tree clippings, and grasses, all that kind of stuff,” says Dauenhauer. “But also, you can imagine packaging centers, where they have all the waste cardboard. That’s all carbohydrate and cellulose also.”

When applied to agricultural fields, this sort of carbon is known as biochar, which also improves soils. Biochar can boost crop yields in some cases, says Sanjai Parikh, who created the Biochar Database, an open-access tool at UC Davis for those that make and use biochar. “It’s sequestering carbon still, even though it’s at the surface,” Parikh adds. “That biochar, some of it will degrade, but we’re talking stability of hundreds to thousands of years.”

The material also helps retain water in sandy soils, for instance, which tend to drain quickly otherwise. “Biochar is a highly, highly absorbent material,” says Wendy Lu Maxwell-Barton, executive director of the International Biochar Initiative. “This is why biochar is such an extraordinary soil amendment … it makes it more resilient to both drought conditions as well as flooding.”

Biochar is also quantifiable, Maxwell-Barton says: With a certain amount of biomass, you create a certain amount of carbon to store in soils or underground. Indeed, biochar accounts for 90 percent of the carbon removal market, in which companies pay to offset their greenhouse gas emissions.

Alternatively, it’s harder to quantify exactly how much carbon you’re sequestering by restoring a complex forest ecosystem. Not that humans shouldn’t also protect these habitats—such “nature-based solutions” sequester carbon, bolster species, reduce flooding, and boost tourism industries. The unfortunate risk, though, is that a wildfire might destroy a protected forest, returning the carbon to the atmosphere. Burying carbon as charcoal theoretically protects it better in the long run.

In addition to burying solid carbon or sprinkling it on fields, researchers are also turning waste biomass into liquid carbon—oil, essentially, that they pump back into the ground instead of pumping the fossil variety up. “What we do at the highest level is we make barbecue sauce—or liquid smoke for barbecue sauce—and then we inject it into old oil wells,” says Peter Reinhardt, CEO and cofounder of the carbon removal company Charm.

They also do this with pyrolysis, which spits out solid char for agriculture, but also liquid oil. That’s shipped to abandoned wells and pumped underground, where it solidifies. “There’s about 2 to 3 million abandoned, end-of-life oil and gas wells across the United States,” says Reinhardt. “It’s quite a problem, actually—a lot of them are methane emitters or improperly sealed, with fluid leaking up to the surface.” By pumping its biomass oil underground at these sites, Charm both sequesters carbon and seals up wells that have been leaking greenhouse gases.

Whatever the end product, biomass removal cleverly exploits nature’s own photosynthesis to sequester and then bury carbon. “The genius in this business model, in many ways, is letting nature do most of the work,” says climate economist Gernot Wagner of the Columbia Business School. “This is a natural process that’s been perfected over millions of years, so why not take advantage of it?”

In reality, though, things are more complicated, Wagner says. When fossil fuel companies remove coal or oil from the earth, they’re tapping into huge deposits that are relatively easy to exploit on the cheap, hence the prices of those fuels remain low. But there’s only so much biomass waste available above ground, and it’s distributed across the planet. (Though this is a potential strength of this kind of carbon removal, in that each municipality could process its own biomass waste for storage.) “The more demand there is for biochar, or for this kind of carbon removal technology, the more startups are out there clamoring for the same food waste, corn husk waste, and so on,” says Wagner. “Suddenly, the prices increase, rather than decrease.”

The other potential issue, Wagner says, is the “moral hazard”: If humanity is able to delete carbon from the atmosphere, that’s less incentive to slash emissions. There’s still so much money to be made in fossil fuels, and indeed, oil companies like Occidental Petroleum are investing heavily in carbon removal technologies like direct air capture, in which machines scrub the air of CO₂. That way, they can keep on drilling. “There is always this moral hazard aspect,” says Wagner. “The big, big topic in the background behind any of these carbon removal conversations is: OK, well, we could—or should, frankly—be doing more to reduce emissions in the first place, as opposed to let’s suck it back out after the fact.”

Reinhardt, of Charm, says the carbon removal industry is catering to companies that are indeed reducing their emissions and are trying to do more. “If you look at who’s buying removals, it’s companies that are already doing a lot on the reduction side and are trying to zero-out the remainder,” says Reinhardt. “Every single startup in the carbon removal space is singing that same tune of: Have you done everything you can to reduce? OK, if you have, then great. Let’s talk about how we get you to net zero.”

In the end, the science is very clear that in addition to reducing emissions, humanity has to figure out how to pull more carbon out of the sky. It’s not just going to be about relying on forests to capture carbon, or on enhanced rock weathering that reacts with atmospheric CO₂, or on buried biomass, but ideally some combination of the best of the best techniques, both natural and technological. “We can have lots of different strategies, and they can be highly engineered, or they can be very simple,” says Parikh. “We just need to create all of these tools so that for each location and goal, we can use something to make a difference.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Why humans are putting ‘coal’ and ‘oil’ back in the ground on Jan 20, 2024.

For the first time, scientists have succeeded in mapping the largest deep-sea coral reef in the world, which runs hundreds of miles off the Atlantic coast of the United States.

The massive 6.4-million-acre reef is bigger than the state of Vermont, a press release from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said.

“It’s eye-opening — it’s breathtaking in scale,” said Stuart Sandin, a Scripps Institution marine biologist, who was not part of the study, as reported by The Associated Press.

Since the 1960s, scientists have been aware of some corals off the Atlantic Coast, but the size of the reef was unknown. That is until mapping technology came along that allowed 3D images to be made of the seafloor.

“This strategic multiyear and multi-agency effort to systematically map and characterize the stunning coral ecosystem right on the doorstep of the U.S. East Coast is a perfect example of what we can accomplish when we pool resources and focus on exploring the approximately 50% of U.S. marine waters that are still unmapped,” said Derek Sowers, the study’s lead author and Ocean Exploration Trust’s mapping operations manager, in the press release. “Approximately 75% of the global ocean is still unmapped in any kind of detail.”

The reef stretches about 310 miles and is 68 miles wide in some places.

The cold-water reef was deemed the largest coral reef habitat in the deep sea discovered to date in the recent study, “Mapping and Geomorphic Characterization of the Vast Cold-Water Coral Mounds of the Blake Plateau,” published in the journal Geomatics.

For the study, researchers put together data from 31 sonar mapping surveys to make an almost complete map of the Blake Plateau seafloor, which is located roughly 100 miles from the southeastern coast of the United States.

The study area runs from the vicinity of Miami to Charleston. The standardized system used by the researchers identified 83,908 separate coral mound peaks.

Scientists nicknamed the largest area of the reef “Million Mounds.” It is made up mostly of stony coral most often found at depths of 656 to 3,280 feet, where waters are an average of 39 degrees Fahrenheit.

“Cold-water corals such as these grow in the deep ocean where there is no sunlight and survive by filter-feeding biological particles. While they are known to be important ecosystem engineers, creating structures that provide shelter, food, and nursery habitat to other invertebrates and fish, these corals remain poorly understood,” the NOAA press release said.

Derek Sowers, an oceanographer with nonprofit Ocean Exploration Trust, said only about three-quarters of the ocean floor has been high-resolution mapped, so there is a chance even bigger deep-sea reefs are still out there.

“For years we thought much of the Blake Plateau was sparsely inhabited, soft sediment, but after more than 10 years of systematic mapping and exploration, we have revealed one of the largest deep-sea coral reef habitats found to date anywhere in the world,” said Kasey Cantwell, NOAA Ocean Exploration chief of operations, in the press release. “Past studies have highlighted some coral in the region, particularly closer to the coast and in shallower waters, but until we had a complete map of the region, we didn’t know how extensive this habitat was, nor how many of these coral mounds were connected.”

^{Prior to Windows to the Deep 2018, this section of the Blake Escarpment appeared to be an area of low slope with no distinct features. Images captured during the expedition show sponges, corals, urchins and other organisms populating outcrops of hard substrate on the seafloor. NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research, Windows to the Deep 2018}

Both deep-sea coral reefs and tropical reefs are at risk from oil and gas extraction and climate change, said co-author of the study Erik Cordes, who is a marine biologist with Temple University, as The Associated Press reported.

“Studies such as this one provide a better understanding of how populations of corals and other deep-sea species may be related across geographically separated locales (a concept known as connectivity) which in turn can offer insight into the resiliency of these populations. This is important for predicting the impacts of human activities on coral communities and for developing solid plans for their protection,” the press release said.

^{The mapping team celebrating World Hydrography Day on board NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer during the Windows to the Deep 2019 expedition. NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research}

The post Scientists Map Largest Deep-Sea Coral Reef Off Atlantic Coast appeared first on EcoWatch.

“Mojo,” a 500+ pound leatherback sea turtle, stranded on Miami’s South Beach just before the new year. He’s estimated to be 30 to 35 years old.

According to NOAA, leatherback sea turtles are the largest turtles in the world. They’re the only species lacking scales and a hard shell and have existed in their current form since the age of dinosaurs. Their build allows them to dive deeper than most marine mammals – with the deepest recorded dive reaching nearly 4,000 feet. They’re highly migratory and can swim over 10,000 miles a year between their nesting and foraging grounds. 

^{A rare and endangered leatherback sea turtle stranded on Miami’s South Beach, likely due to entanglements in marine debris. The Turtle Hospital}

“Leatherbacks act as keystone species within the pelagic, or open ocean, ecosystem, as they control jellyfish populations,” said Callie Veelenturf, the founder and executive director of conservation organization The Leatherback Project. “Jellyfish consume fish and fish larva, so sea turtles contribute to healthy ocean ecosystems and also support local fishing communities by controlling blooming jellyfish populations.” Veelenturf was not involved in Mojo’s rescue or rehabilitation.

Miami-Dade Sea Turtles responded to the emergency call for Mojo on Dec. 29. In an Instagram post, the conservation group detailed how the male sea turtle struggled in the shore break of Miami’s most famous beach. Eventually, they brought him ashore for an initial assessment. In pictures, Mojo appears with wounds on his upper carapace and head. A capture shows the magnificent reptile staring at the lights of the big city. 

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A post shared by Miami-Dade Sea Turtles (@miamidadeseaturtles)

Mojo was transported via Turtle Ambulance to the Turtle Hospital in Marathon, Florida for further assessment and treatment. Manager Bette Zirkelbach told EcoWatch, “The best guess based on his condition is he suffered a severe entanglement, got himself free, got caught in the inshore current and then was not strong enough to swim back out through the surf.” He ended up beached on South Beach and eventually under Zirkelbach and her team’s care. 

^{Turtle rescue technicians tend to Mojo, a leatherback turtle, in the Turtle Ambulance. The Turtle Hospital}

Unfortunately, this is a common challenge for leatherback sea turtles worldwide. Once prevalent in every ocean except the Arctic and Antarctic, leatherback populations are now in rapid decline, NOAA reported. The agency estimates that the global population has declined over 40 percent in the last three generations, with some nesting populations “essentially disappeared” and others “at risk of extinction.” 

Florida’s Atlantic coast constitutes some of the main nesting areas for the Atlantic leatherback in the continental United States. However, “significant decreases in recent years” have also been observed in the sunshine state. See the Endangered Species Act’s 2020 Status Review for additional information on leatherback sea turtle abundance and population trends.

So, what’s taking down these “dinosaurs”? According to NOAA, the greatest threat to leatherbacks is becoming bycatch (incidental capture in fishing gear), hunting of sea turtles and collection of eggs for human consumption. Marine debris makes NOAA’s top five list of threats to leatherbacks, with entanglement in lost or derelict fishing gear leading to serious injuries, drownings and even death. 

Veelenturf explained, “Sea turtles are air-breathing reptiles and can only hold their breath for up to 2 hours, so they are specifically susceptible to drowning via entanglement in fishing gear that is set for many hours at a time.” She launched several unrelated projects to combat fisheries bycatch of leatherback sea turtles but was not involved in this rescue.

Luckily for our sea turtle, the veterinary staff at The Turtle Hospital helped him get his mojo back. He received fluids, a long-acting, broad-spectrum antibiotic, vitamins and an anti-inflammatory. With treatment, he regained strength and passed his swim test. Leatherback sea turtles do not do well in captivity and often deteriorate in tank settings, Zirkelbach said. Therefore, when Mojo proved he could swim strong and dive as normal, he was cleared for release – just a few days after his rescue. 

^{After treatment and swim tests, Mojo was released into the Gulf Stream off the Florida Keys. The Turtle Hospital}

“We couldn’t have asked for a better outcome to end the year on!” Zirkelbach celebrated. “Mojo made a big splash returning to his ocean home in time for the New Year! Swim free, Mojo!

All sea turtle rescue and rehabilitation activities were conducted by authorized personnel under FWC marine turtle permits.

^{A group of people and organizations worked together to rescue, rehabilitate and release Mojo, an endangered leatherback sea turtle that stranded itself on Miami’s South Beach. The Turtle Hospital}

The post Rescue, Rehabilitation and Release: A Sea Turtle Success Story to Kick off 2024 appeared first on EcoWatch.

This story is co-published with The Assembly and Spotlight on Poverty and Opportunity. This reporting project was supported by The Uproot Project Environmental Justice Fellowship and produced through the Environmental Justice Oral History Project.

Paul Fisher first heard about the Sampson County landfill on a radio talk show in the early 1990s. Folks were adamantly discussing plans to transform Sampson’s municipal solid waste facility in Roseboro, which had officially been in operation since 1974, into a massive regional dump site that would regularly draw from 44 counties.

Fisher, who lives less than a mile away in the Roseboro neighborhood of Snow Hill, and other residents quickly organized against it, frustrated that the county hadn’t done more to engage them in the process. But officials largely ignored their protests, and the expanded site that opened in 1992 has since grown from an approximate 350 acres into over 1,300 acres — the largest landfill in North Carolina.

Like many residents of Snow Hill, Fisher traces his roots here to the early 1830s, when his great-great-great grandfather was enslaved about eight miles away. His ancestors eventually purchased land just a few miles from where they once labored. Fisher, 75, has spent his whole life here, save nine years in the military. He returned in 1975 to give his two daughters the same rich childhood he had. 

But his children have moved away. They didn’t want to live with the smell and pollution of a dump next door. Now 30 years since the site was regionalized, Fisher is still speaking out.

“It takes three generations to accumulate generational wealth: One to start it, one to build it, and one to enjoy it,” he said. But for his family, the dump has made passing on wealth difficult.

Snow Hill was once a centerpiece of Black excellence in Sampson County: a multi-generational community that had its own barber shop, Boy Scout troop, and community center. Many teachers, lawyers, and doctors lived there; most people were college-educated, or ensured their children would be. Farmers and backyard gardeners drew water from their own wells, grew almost all of their food, and hunted game. 

The community is still heavily agrarian, but much of the natural beauty is gone—and so is the prosperity. 

You notice the smell first, a pungent odor detectable from about 2 miles away; residents say it’s constant and debilitating. Within a few minutes outside, the odor settles into clothing. Homeowners close their vents just to get a good night’s rest, but describe waking up with sinus headaches or shortness of breath. It leaves folks coughing, wheezing, and riddled with respiratory illnesses. 

It attracts pests: buzzards, rats, and even black bears have caused property damage and car accidents. Fisher now carries a gun outside his house, as a pack of 10 to 12 wild dogs have become a constant aggressive presence. Although he’s brought this issue and his other odor, pest, and health concerns to county commissioner meetings, he’s received little response. 

“As far as the landfill is concerned, you can get up and speak until you’re blue in the face, but you don’t ever get any results,” he said. 

Dumped and dispersed

GFL Environmental, a Canadian solid waste company, operates Sampson’s landfill. County commissioners say items like vehicle waste, tires, appliances, untreated medical waste, and animal byproducts that have not passed state inspection are not allowed, nor is anything radioactive, volatile, explosive, toxic, or hazardous as defined by state and federal standards.

But residents say they’ve seen waste that raises concerns — in particular, a lot of dead hogs and industrial waste. According to the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) and local reports, asbestos, sludge containing Gen X from a Chemours wastewater facility, contaminated personal protective equipment, creosote-soaked wood, and ash from burned coal, wood, and tires have been dumped in the landfill for years. In some cases, the community was not informed about potentially harmful materials dumped in the landfill until years later.

County officials tout the landfill as an economic benefit, as it brings in about $2.3 million in host fees annually — income that’s gone toward essential services like ambulances, offset recycling site costs, and helped keep taxes low.

Sampson County Board of Commissioners Chair Jerol Kivett said in an email that while the funds are important, “they do not, however, negate our responsibilities for environmental stewardship.” But the county has ignored the health concerns the landfill creates, said Maia Hutt, a staff attorney for SELC who is working with the local Environmental Justice Community Action Network on the landfill. 

A 2021 N.C. Division of Air Quality permit application review showed it was emitting about 32 tons of hazardous air pollutants per year as of 2019 — almost twice as much as it did in the previous four years. Per the permit application, EPA considers the landfill “a major source” of hazardous emissions, including the liver- and kidney-damaging chemical toluene and carcinogens benzene and ethylene dichloride. In 2020, the landfill ranked first in the state for vinyl chloride emissions, which have been linked to rare forms of liver cancer.

Methane emissions are also a growing concern, said Hutt, and the landfill is considered one of the biggest emitting landfills in the country at nearly 33,000 tons in 2021. Sampson County ranked second in the country for methane emissions from municipal solid waste landfills that year. 

Groundwater contamination is also a concern, though many Snow Hill residents were moved off well water and onto county water soon after the landfill was regionalized. The county gets its water from groundwater stores in the nearby cities of Clinton, Garland, Roseboro, and Turkey, and many residents still don’t trust what comes from their taps. 

Researchers at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill released a report on water tests in August 2023 that found nearby waterways had about 10 to 20 times more PFAS — a group of forever chemicals that has been linked to liver disease, kidney disease, developmental and immune system impairments, and cancer — than sites upstream. 

Whitney Parker, a fourth-generation Snow Hill resident and community activist, discovered as a part of this study that the stream running behind his grandmother’s property was contaminated with PFAS. “And if you have land you want to try to rent out for people to use, it won’t pass the soil test. We’ve lost a lot of income because of that toxic place,” he said. 

A detailed EPA facility report lists no violations of the Clean Air Act or Clean Water Act at the landfill over the last five years. But Hutt stressed that complying with policy doesn’t mean there’s no harm. “The question is, can you be in compliance with your permit and still be hurting people? The answer is yes,” she said. “And I think that’s where we see this legacy of weak permitting in communities of color.”

While the landfill’s permits limit pollutants like benzene and vinyl chloride, a chemical known as 1,4-dioxane that is thought to cause liver cancer is not limited. There is no federal standard for emerging contaminants like this, and although the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality  has adopted a groundwater standard for 1,4-dioxane and regulates its release, GFL claimed in its July 2022 water quality report that it is not required to control its release. The report noted that the substance was “detected at quantifiable concentrations” greater than state groundwater standards at landfill monitoring locations. 

DEQ said tests for 1,4-dioxane have shown decreasing levels at the locations it monitored, and at concentrations that are not expected to travel beyond the allowable 300 foot compliance boundary. “The state and the facility continue to monitor the situation and actions will be taken if required by monitoring results,” wrote Melody Foote, a DEQ public information officer.

Advocates say permitting also does not take the cumulative impacts of multiple waste streams into account. “There is not a house in this community that has not had a person who has suffered from some type of cancer or kidney failure,” said Parker. In addition to the landfill, Sampson is the second-largest hog-producing county in the country, a growing poultry producer, and home to an Enviva wood pellet plant.

A community left in the dark

County commissioner briefings dating back to the early 1970s seem to indicate that the decision to place the landfill in Snow Hill was rushed. 

Sampson County NAACP President Larry Sutton believes it was also racially motivated, based on his research into records at the county clerk’s office. Sutton, 73, was born on his family’s land in Clinton about eight miles down the road from Snow Hill. But he spent a lot of time as a child riding up and down the old two-lane Highway 24 that bisected the community. In June 1970, the Sampson County Commissioners set aside funding to establish a solid waste disposal program that consisted of several smaller, easy-access municipal landfills across the county. But the plan received a number of complaints from residents about odor, and air, water, and soil contamination.

The county decided to consolidate its waste system into a single centralized landfill site in Snow Hill in March 1973. Environmental surveys determined that only about 30 percent of the Snow Hill site was suitable for a central landfill due to a high water table, but the county still approved construction, claiming they could fill the unsuitable land with tires and other solid materials. 

Many community elders don’t recall learning about the landfill until after it was already built. According to Kivett, the original landfill, though small, was not lined and would not have met modern environmental standards now set by the EPA. It was prone to massive fires caused by unchecked methane emissions — at least twice a month according to Parker, a child at the time — that would burn for days. 

“There is plenty of land in our county where no one lives,” said Shelda Parker, 76, one of the 1992 protesters. “They could have put that landfill anywhere, but they chose to put it in the middle of our community.” In February 1992, the county entered a contract with Browning-Ferris Industries (BFI) to privatize operations at the landfill and transform it into a regional site. Snow Hill residents publicly pushed back against the expansion. Despite assurances that the facility would not expand beyond about 525 acres, some feared that BFI would turn their community into a mega-landfill site. For many others, the concern was not about meeting federal regulations, but about whether Snow Hill should have to receive waste from “almost a third of North Carolina.” 

“They fought tooth and nail,” said Whitney Parker, whose older cousin Ed Parker was a founder of Concerned Citizens for Sampson County, which spearheaded the protests in the ‘90s. The group wrote op-eds, held community education sessions, canvassed, and spoke out at commissioner meetings leading up to the vote. 

The board of commissioners was majority white at the time, and when it came time to vote, all of them approved. “It was unanimous — no consideration for the protests or for anyone’s health, clean air, soil, or property values,” Parker said. Even the commissioner for District 4, who lived in Roseboro, voted in favor.

Looking to the future

Whitney Parker grew up in Snow Hill on land that his parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents cultivated before him. He was born four years after the original municipal landfill was built and describes his childhood as a “paradise.” 

He went to college in Greensboro and returned home in 2003 to take care of his parents. Their downturn was swift and unexpected — an independent duo who suddenly found themselves in and out of the hospital. His mother was diagnosed with kidney disease followed by cancer. Both passed within six months of each other in 2021. 

“Almost everyone in the community is going through what I’ve gone through,” he said. He stayed in Snow Hill and has since dedicated his time to fighting for the closure of the landfill.

“As a fourth-generation heir, I can’t enjoy the fruits of all my grandparents’ labor. We’re the last gatekeepers for preserving what we saw our grandparents work on,” said Parker.

Parker is among the residents who have renewed the push to hold the county and landfill accountable, connecting with other North Carolina organizations involved with Justice40: A Time for Righteous Investment, a southern-based climate justice group. 

“The biggest motivation for me is paying homage to the people who fought before me,” Parker said. 

Among their concerns is another company, Sapphire RNG, which has approached the county and DEQ to collect methane from the landfill via a digester. 

It’s been touted as a solution to the methane problem: If the landfill won’t close, at least they can reduce the emissions and use what’s collected to produce energy. Commissioner Kivett pointed to it as evidence that GFL is putting “an emphasis on expanding technologies to manage potential environmental hazards.”

But community members say it’s another way for a private business to profit while they still experience harm. 

The facility is also projected to bring more traffic. About 250 trucks haul waste to the site daily, which is expected to increase as the landfill begins capturing and transporting renewable natural gas offsite. The current trucks are prone to spillage on their way to the facility, leaving waste, sludge, and sometimes dead animals on the road that get swept into people’s yards or left for young people to stand in as they wait for the bus. Despite requests for truck figures from DEQ and SELC as a part of permit review, Sapphire RNG did not share traffic estimates.

On October 4, 2023, DEQ approved Sapphire RNG’s air permit request, after SELC and community groups requested additional information about potential impacts. While Hutt, the SELC staff attorney, noted that some updates were made to the permit, such as including a PFAS-monitoring provision, this “must be the beginning, not the end, of the state’s efforts to protect the people of Snow Hill.” 

In a move that surprised the community, the DEQ announced in early October that it would invest more than $4 million to improve water infrastructure in Sampson County. The state has also begun conducting PFAS water testing in the Snow Hill community, and on November 16 held a meeting to update those residents still using well water on the status of private wells. Thirty-one wells had been tested, and six households are now receiving bottled water from the state due to high PFAS concentrations. 

But DEQ has not officially connected the PFAS contamination to the landfill. And some community members are skeptical of the new interest in Snow Hill’s well-being. “This is an attempt to cover up and counter future litigation,” Parker wrote in an email to The Assembly. His organization hopes to conduct water testing in 2024 to ensure the state data is accurate.

In September 2023, Snow Hill community members filed a formal complaint against the landfill to the Sampson County chapter of the NAACP in the hope that the organization can advocate on their behalf. “Residents of the Snow Hill community need to be part of the conversations, in the room, with a seat at the decision-making table,” said Sutton in a written statement. “What is more basic to healthy living than ensuring clean water and air?”

Taryn Ratley, a fourth-generation Snow Hill resident and Parker’s cousin, says the county needs a more comprehensive health assessment. “We’re going in debt buying air purifiers, water purifiers, candles, fly spray, fly traps,” she said. “The buzzards are picking the shingles off our roofs and the insurance won’t pay for it. It’s almost like a prison in our own houses.”

A comprehensive study would include interviews with residents, reviews of health records, and evaluating whether there is a causal relationship between the landfill and poor health outcomes in the community. In October 2023, the Environmental Justice Community Action Network in partnership with researchers from Grambling State University in Louisiana and Georgia State University announced they would perform a health assessment of Snow Hill residents like what Ratley suggested. Other opportunities for formal community engagement are fast approaching. The landfill’s current air permit expires in June, and it will need to submit a new permit application to DEQ. The process gives the community another chance to plead their case about the landfill’s harms. 

The smell is another issue. State law requires landfills to have odor “management practices” or install “control equipment.” But Hutt noted that the Sampson County landfill does not, while one located in a predominantly white community in Apex does. 

“Both the company itself and our state seem to think it’s okay to do the bare minimum because they’re in Sampson County,” Hutt said. 

DEQ spokesman Shawn Taylor said the Sampson County landfill has not met the requirements necessary for an odor management plan, which include “existence of objectionable odors” as determined by DEQ, but the agency is “currently investigating odor complaints.”

Landfills in the U.S. have an average lifespan of 50 years, and according to DEQ, the Sampson County landfill is not expected to close until 2042 — which will put the community at about 70 years of waste collection. Fisher fears that even then, the county could just build a new one nearby. 

“There’s no county, I don’t think, in North Carolina that would accept a regional landfill. Not nowadays,” he said. “And the only way this gets shut down is if it goes somewhere else.”

Fisher is just hoping to curb the impacts enough to keep his family’s land in the family. “They don’t make any more land,” he said. “If my father or grandfather accumulated some land, then there’s no use in me giving it away and not taking care of it.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A decades-long battle against North Carolina’s largest landfill is ramping up on Jan 19, 2024.