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

One by one, leaders from across Arizona gave speeches touting the importance of water conservation at Phoenix City Hall as they celebrated the announcement of voluntary agreements to preserve the declining Colorado River in November.

When Tao Etpison took the mic, his speech echoed those who went before him. Water is the lifeblood of existence, and users of the Colorado River Basin were one step closer to preserving the system that has helped life in the Southwest flourish. Then he brought up the elephant in the room: Arizona’s groundwater protection was lacking, and mining companies were looking to take advantage.

“The two largest foreign-based multinational mining companies in the world intend to construct the massive Resolution Copper Mine near Superior,” said Etpison, the vice chairman of the San Carlos Apache Tribe. “This mine will use, at a minimum, 775,000 acre feet of groundwater, and once the groundwater is gone, it’s gone. How can this be in the best interests of Arizona?”

The question is one the state and the Southwest must answer. Mine claims for the elements critical to the clean energy transition are piling up from Arizona to Nevada to Utah. Lithium is needed for the batteries to store wind and solar energy and power electric vehicles. Copper provides the wiring to send electricity where it will be needed to satisfy exploding demand. But water stands in the way of the transition, with drought playing into nearly every proposed renewable energy development, from solar to hydropower, as the Southwest debates what to do with every drop it has left as the region undergoes aridification due to climate change and decades of overconsumption. 

Mining opponents argue the proposals could impact endangered species, tribal rights, air quality and, of course, water—both its quantity and its quality. Across the Southwest, the story of 2023 was how water users, from farmers in the Colorado River Basin to fast-growing cities in the Phoenix metropolitan area, needed to use less water, forcing changes to residential development and agricultural practices. But left out of that conversation, natural resource experts and environmentalists say, is the water used by mining operations and the amount that would be consumed by new mines.

The San Carlos Apache Tribe has fought for years to stop Resolution’s proposed mine. It would be built on top of Oak Flat, a sacred site to the Apache and other Indigenous communities, and a habitat of rare species like the endangered Arizona hedgehog cactus, which lives only in the Tonto National Forest near the town of Superior. The fate of the mine now rests with the U.S. District Court in Arizona after the grassroots group Apache Stronghold filed a lawsuit to stop it, arguing its development would violate Native people’s religious rights.

But for communities located near the mine and across the Phoenix metropolitan area, the water it would consume is just as big of an issue.

Throughout the mine’s lifespan, Resolution estimates it would use 775,000 acre feet of water—enough for at least 1.5 million Arizona households over roughly 40 years. And experts say the mine would likely need far more. 

“By pumping billions of gallons of groundwater from the East Salt River Valley, this project would make Arizona’s goal for stewardship of its scarce groundwater resources unreachable,” one report commissioned by the San Carlos Apache Tribe reads. In one hydrologist’s testimony to Congress, water consumption was estimated to be 50,000 acre feet a year—about 35,000 more than the company has proposed drawing from the aquifer.

The Resolution copper mine isn’t the only water-intensive mining operation being proposed. Many of what the industry describes as “critical minerals,” like lithium and copper, are found throughout the Southwest, leading to a flurry of mining claims on the region’s federally managed public lands. 

“Water is going to be scarcer in the Southwest but the mining industry is basically immune from all these issues,” said Roger Flynn, director and managing attorney at the Western Mining Action Project, which has represented tribes and environmental groups in mining-related lawsuits, including the case over Oak Flat.

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‘The Lords of Yesterday’

To understand mining in the U.S., you have to start with the Mining Law of 1872.

President Ulysses S. Grant signed the bill into law as a way to continue the country’s development westward, allowing anyone to mine on federal lands for free. To do this, all one needs to do is plant four stakes into the ground where they think there are minerals and file a claim. Unlike other industries that make use of public lands—such as the oil and gas industry—no royalties are paid for the minerals extracted from the lands owned by American taxpayers. 

Flynn referred to mining as the last of the “Lords of Yesterday”—a term coined by Charles Wilkinson, a long-time environmental law professor at the University of Colorado who died earlier this year—referring to the industries like oil and gas drilling, ranching and logging that were given carte blanche by the federal government to develop the West after the Civil War and push Indigenous populations off the land. All of those industry regulations have changed, Flynn said, except mining. 

That’s led mining to be viewed as the top use of public lands by regulators who give it more weight than conservation or recreational activities, he said.

“You don’t have to actually demonstrate that there are any minerals in a mining claim, you don’t have to provide any evidence that there is a mineral there at all,” said John Hadder, the executive director of Great Basin Resource Watch, an environmental group based in Nevada that monitors mining claims. “You can just be suspicious—and there’s a lot of suspicion going around.”

Most of Nevada is completely reliant on groundwater, an increasingly scarce resource. Without water, companies hunting critical minerals can’t mine, Hadder said, so they look to acquire water rights from other users, typically by buying up farms and ranches, changing the economics and demographics of a community. When the mines are developed, they can impact local streams, groundwater levels and the quality of the water as toxins seep into aquifers and surface supplies over the years. Now, with the clean energy transition gaining traction, there’s a new mining boom, prompting increasing concerns over how local ecosystems will be impacted. In Nevada alone, there are more than 20,000 mining claims related to lithium, the biggest of which are, of course, drawing controversy.

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Water’s role in mine fights

In northern Nevada, companies have proposed two massive lithium mines—Thacker Pass and Rhyolite Ridge—in groundwater basins that are already over appropriated. Both have drawn heavy scrutiny, the former for being proposed on a sacred site for local Indigenous tribes that is also range for area ranchers and endangered sage grouse, and the latter for threatening an endangered wildflower found nowhere else in the world. 

Now, Canada-based Rover Metals is looking to drill a lithium exploration project near the Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge, a wetland habitat in Nevada near the California border that supports a dozen endangered and threatened species and is one of the most biodiverse places on the planet, which environmentalists call “the Galapagos of the desert.”

“Nevadans almost more than any other state have had to wrestle with the availability or lack thereof of water for development for its entire history,” said Mason Voehl, the executive director of the Amargosa Conservancy, an environmental group that has helped lead the push to protect the refuge. “This is sort of compounding that already really complex challenge.”

Opponents of the proposal successfully sued the Bureau of Land Management over its approval of the drill site without consulting other agencies about the potential impact on the groundwater supply critical for the refuge. The BLM rescinded its approval, but the company behind it is still pursuing permitting. “A huge win in this world is basically a delay,” Voehl said.

In Utah, too, companies are looking to tap into dwindling water supplies to extract lithium. Compass Minerals planned to extract lithium from the Great Salt Lake, which in recent years has hit record lows, until pushback from regulators and environmentalists caused the company to announce in November it was pausing operations, at least for now. Along the Green River, the largest tributary of the Colorado River, Australia-based Anson Resources is looking to extract lithium from brine buried deep underground. The plan to drill wells 9,000 feet deep and use Colorado River water to extract the brine drew the attention of local environmentalists and the Bureau of Reclamation, which oversees the management of the river, both of which disputed the company’s claim that their process wouldn’t reduce the amount of water available for other uses. 

“We see that [the company] claimed this water is going to be nonconsumptive,” said Tyson Roper, a civil engineer with the Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency that oversees hydropower and water in the West, at a hearing over Anson’s water right. “All the data out there says water will be consumed.”

That could have big implications for other users and water programs in the region, he said, a concern other federal agencies and environmentalists have raised as well. 

“This has the potential to impact much larger operations and allocations established by not only the Green River Block Water Exchange but the Colorado River Storage project as well,” Roper said at the hearing. “The same project that provides water to 40 million people, 5.5 million acres of irrigation, 22 tribes, four recreation areas and 11 national parks.”

These and other proposed mines in the Southwest are critical pieces in U.S. efforts to puzzle together a domestic supply of critical minerals for the clean energy transition. But the mining projects also pose what many view as not only another serious burden on dwindling water supplies in the Southwest, but one that doesn’t face the same scrutiny that other major water users face. To some, the water for mines highlights a tension between the impacts and solutions of climate change as farmers and cities across the region are asked to accept dramatic cuts to their water supplies in the rapidly drying region, and clean energy developers endeavor to exponentially increase the amount the Southwest’s abundant solar and wind resources they harvest. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Is the Southwest too dry for a mining boom? on Jan 28, 2024.

This story was originally published by Honolulu Civil Beat and is republished with permission.

More than 140 insurance industry plaintiffs have joined the cascade of lawsuits filed against utilities and landowners related to the Maui wildfires, a move that could set up a battle over resources available to pay victims of the disaster that killed 100 people and destroyed much of Lahaina in August.

The global insurance industry has swept into Honolulu state court, seeking to collect reimbursements for claims paid to policyholders. Those total more than $1 billion in West Maui for residential property alone, according to the latest data from the Insurance Division of the Hawaiʻi Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs.

The plaintiffs include names familiar to Hawaiʻi homeowners: insurers like State Farm Fire and Casualty Co., USAA Casualty Insurance Co., Island Insurance and Tradewind Insurance. 

Also included are scores of additional companies, such as the French and Australian branches of the giant Swiss Re, Japan’s Mitsui Sumimoto Insurance, and Lloyd’s, the London-based marketplace known for insuring everything from ship cargo, fine art and space satellites to Bruce Springsteen’s voice. 

Defendants include Hawaiian Electric, Hawaiian Telcom, Kamehameha Schools and other unnamed parties the insurers allege were negligent in allowing the fires to start and spread. 

It’s a predictable turn of events, says Robert Anderson, director of the Center for Risk Management Research at the University of California, Berkeley. 

When a company like State Farm issues a policy to a homeowner, Anderson said in an email, State Farm typically buys reinsurance from another company like Swiss Re to cover the risk from catastrophic events, such as a hurricane hitting an urban area “or a wildfire that spreads and takes out a large number of homes, as happened in Lahaina.”

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When such a catastrophe occurs, State Farm would typically pay claims to the insured property owners and get reimbursed by its reinsurers, Anderson said.

If the losses occurred because of negligence, the insurer and reinsurers can sue the negligent parties to recover the payments “in the same way that a health insurance company could seek to recover the costs of treating someone injured in an automobile accident,” he said.

Multiply that by thousands of claims, and it explains the enormous number of insurance company plaintiffs, spread out over 26 states and a half dozen countries, filing suit in Hawaiʻi. It’s also a sign that the global insurance market is functioning adequately to spread the risk of a major catastrophe in Hawaiʻi, said Sumner LaCroix, an economist with the University of Hawaiʻi Economic Research Organization.

“The last thing we want in Hawaiʻi is to find out that two or three companies bear the risk of having a hurricane hit Hawaiʻi,” LaCroix said.

Battle could ensue between victims and insurers

The suit could have major implications in the long run for plaintiffs seeking to recover claims for damages from Hawaiian Electric and the others, said Mark Davis, a Honolulu trial lawyer who is serving as a liaison for dozens of plaintiffs lawyers who have filed suits on behalf of victims in Maui court.

At this point, Davis said, the insurance companies and other plaintiffs have a common goal: to prove that the utilities or landowners or both acted negligently in allowing the fires to start and spread. The insurance industry has had its own teams of investigators, Davis said.

“For the most part their inquiries go hand in hand with the plaintiffs’ inquiries,” he said.

Indeed, the insurance industry’s factual allegations of what happened on Aug. 8 mirror the allegations in many of the negligence suits filed by residents.

But eventually, Davis said, Lahaina residents will find themselves competing with the insurance companies for the same pot of money. 

To the extent that the insurers have paid claims, they’ll likely try to assert priority over the homeowners, which happened after lawsuits related to California wildfires drove Pacific Gas & Electric Co. into bankruptcy in 2019, Davis said.

Still some states have adopted a legal principle known as the “made whole doctrine,” which means insurers can’t jump the line ahead of insured property owners until the insured property owners’ damages are completely covered. Otherwise, a property owner could collect from both their insurance company and the wrongdoer if negligence is proven. All of this sets the stage for a fight between the individual plaintiffs and the insurers if they can prove the utilities or landowners were negligent.

“Inevitably, that is a big struggle later on as they start to dole out resources,” Davis said. 

Hawaiian Electric and Hawaiian Telcom declined to comment. Paul Alston, an attorney for Kamehameha Schools trustees also declined to comment. Lawyers for the insurance companies did not return calls.

Hawaiian Electric, meanwhile, does not have the resources to reimburse the property insurers for the massive claims paid out so far, if the insurers were to prevail in their suit. The company’s stock price has plummeted since the fires. Rating agencies have slashed Hawaiian Electric’s bond rating, meaning it will cost more for the company to borrow money. And Hawaiian Electric has largely tapped out its lines of credit to raise cash.

The company is pursuing federal grant funds, which it hopes to steer to rebuilding infrastructure, but that money can’t be used to pay damages. Meanwhile, a big chunk of proceeds from a woefully inadequate insurance policy, worth $165 million, that could be used to reimburse the insurers has already been pledged to a settlement fund for people killed and injured in the fires.

The company has promised $75 million to the so-called Maui Recovery Fund. Makana McClellan, a spokesman for Gov. Josh Green, said the fund expects to have $175 million total when it becomes operational on March 1. Green previously announced the state, Kamehameha Schools and Maui County also would provide funding. McClellan said more details would be available this week. 

Each victim could receive more than $1 million from the fund if they choose to drop their legal claims, Green has said. 

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But the fund is not meant to address property damage. And how much money will be available to cover such claims isn’t clear. After putting $75 million in the recovery fund, the company theoretically would have $90 million. But Hawaiian Electric has been bleeding cash on lawyers.

When the company held its quarterly earnings call for the period ended Sept. 30, Hawaiian Electric revealed it had spent $27.6 million on fire-related expenses to that point, including $10.8 million – or about $1.5 million a week – on legal fees. And that was as the lawsuits had just begun pouring in. It remains to be seen how much Hawaiian Electric’s lawyers have cannibalized the company’s liability insurance at this point, 24 weeks after the fire.

Meanwhile, the staggering amount of insurance losses is becoming clear. According to the Hawaiʻi Insurance Division, as of Nov. 30, insurers reported 3,947 claims for residential property in West Maui, including 1,689 total losses. Estimated losses totaled $1.54 billion, of which insurers had paid $1.09 billion.

Perhaps the only good news in all of this, Davis said, is that insurance companies don’t appear to be squabbling about paying claims, which he said isn’t surprising given that so many homes were completely burned. 

“There’s not a lot to talk about if you bought ‘x’ amount of insurance and your house is dust,” he said. 

Civil Beat’s coverage of Maui County is supported in part by grants from the Nuestro Futuro Foundation.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Insurance companies are going after Hawaiian Electric to reimburse Lahaina fire claims on Jan 27, 2024.

A new study has discovered that small coastal estuaries contain concentrations of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) “forever chemicals” high enough to indicate a worldwide issue.

For the study, the researchers looked at the distribution, occurrence and risks of PFAS during the dry season in three micro-estuaries, a press release from Hebrew University of Jerusalem said.

“Microestuaries have a crucial role in supporting biodiversity and human life quality in heavily populated areas. They are also the last barrier controlling fluxes of pollutants from the land to sea,” the authors of the study wrote. “The need for green zones and ecosystem services is constantly on the rise, with few to null open areas available to provide these necessities in highly urbanized areas.”

The study, “Exploring Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS) in Microestuaries: Occurrence, Distribution, and Risks,” was published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology Letters.

The research team analyzed 120 samples from estuaries and found surprisingly high concentrations of PFAS that exceeded the recommended thresholds for aquatic ecosystems and recreation, the press release said.

“The increasing proportion of wastewater to fresh water in streams, a trend projected to extrapolate to temperate regions due to climate change, consequently leads to chronic exposure of estuaries to elevated PFAS concentrations. Unless removed at wastewater treatment plants, this exposure disqualifies the estuaries as a vibrant aquatic system for human recreational activity, such as kayaking and fishing,” the study said.

PFAS are commonly found in firefighting foam used in industrial zones, refineries and airports.

“There are thousands of PFAS synthesized and used globally. A recent work identified and classified 4730 different PFAS, and out of those, 256 are commercially available products. The large number of PFAS makes it difficult to monitor their fate and reactivity in the environmental compartments,” the study’s authors wrote.

Wastewater effluents — especially those coming from refinery facilities within industrial zones — have been found to be a point source of PFAS pollution.

“This anthropogenic stress may intensify due to climatic change, especially in semiarid regions already struggling with water scarcity. Aquatic ecosystems in these regions often suffer from low freshwater input and a constant discharge increase of wastewater of various qualities. This scenario, predicted to expand to more temperate zones, consequently limits dilution of pollutants transported in water. In the case of persistent highly toxic pollutants, e.g., per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), the potential exposure of wildlife and humans cannot be ignored,” the authors wrote in the study.

The researchers emphasized the need to address PFAS impacts through focused interventions, the press release said. This is especially necessary in regions where industrial activities meet micro-estuaries.

Though the three micro-estuaries in the study had similar characteristics — like watershed size, precipitation, morphology and water volume — the study underscored how connectivity to the sea, alterations in water input and local human activities can greatly change the concentrations, distribution and occurrence of PFAS.

The study stressed the need for focused environmental management tactics to protect estuaries from PFAS contaminants. It also brought attention to the necessity for regulatory measures and overarching environmental monitoring to safeguard these vital ecosystems.

“Although systematic works on PFAS occurrence in rivers found them to be dominant pollutants in estuaries, the global perspective is still missing unlike research done for other key pollutants,” the authors wrote. “This study’s findings raise concerns of an alarming health risk to the constantly growing population which lives in proximity to these ubiquitous aquatic systems and the adjacent coasts.”

The post Study Finds Alarmingly High Levels of PFAS Contamination in Small Estuaries appeared first on EcoWatch.

Following pressure from climate activists, the Biden administration announced a freeze on new liquefied natural gas (LNG) export permits while it examines their effects on climate change.

The move could delay decisions on new LNG plants until after the presidential election in November, reported Reuters.

“This pause on new LNG approvals sees the climate crisis for what it is: the existential threat of our time. During this period, we will take a hard look at the impacts of LNG exports on energy costs, America’s energy security, and our environment,” President Joe Biden said, as CNN reported.

During the break, the United States Department of Energy will administer an economic and environmental impact review on projects wanting export permits to Asia and Europe, Reuters said.

While European countries and companies work on weaning themselves off Russian gas, they are relying on LNG from the U.S. At the same time, Asian countries use it to reduce their consumption of coal.

U.S. officials said there would be national security exemptions in case more LNG is needed, emphasizing the freeze would not harm U.S. allies.

U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm said the review would take months, followed by a public comment period.

“As our exports increase, we must review export applications using the most comprehensive, up-to-date analysis of the economic, environmental and national security considerations,” Granholm said on a call to reporters, as reported by The Washington Post.

On the same call, Ali Zaidi, the White House national climate adviser, said “the United States has been an unwavering partner to our allies in Europe, who, by the way… are our partner in calling for a transition away from fossil fuels.”

In the past four years, the U.S. has doubled its exports of LNG and is now its biggest exporter in the world.

LNG’s growth in the U.S. has led to opposition from activists, including youth groups, who say the new projects can bring dangerous pollution to local communities, contribute to the world’s fossil fuel reliance and lead to more emissions not only from burning the gas, but from potent methane leaks, Reuters reported.

“LNG projects across the Gulf South are already harming people’s health, wrecking the environment, raising prices for families, and threatening our national security. We can’t afford to rubber-stamp these climate Death Stars that will decimate both local communities and our planet. Now, the Biden administration needs to finish the job – let’s make the pause permanent,” said Ebony Twilley-Martin, executive director of Greenpeace USA, according to Greenpeace.

Environmental groups applauded the move.

“This is a milestone,” said Roishetta Ozane, founder and director of The Vessel Project of Louisiana, as reported by Reuters. “It sets the stage for potential rejections and slows down progress of these projects.”

Young voters are an important part of Biden’s base and will be crucial to helping him get reelected.

“Young people are the largest voting bloc in this country and they vote for the issues that they care about,” said Michelle Weindling, youth-based Sunrise Movement’s political director. “It needs to be seen that leaders are leading boldly and unapologetically to solve this crisis.”

The post Biden Freezes Approval of Liquid Natural Gas Exports to Consider Climate Impacts appeared first on EcoWatch.

A new study using model predictions has uncovered a likely rapid accumulation of microplastics around Santa Cruz Island, an island in the Galápagos National Park of Ecuador.

The model predictions point to an accumulation of plastics sized from 1 micron to less than 5 millimeters in waters around the human-populated island. The researchers behind the study evaluated the feces of the Galápagos penguin, an endangered species, and the prey of these penguins.

In addition to analyzing data around Santa Cruz Island, the researchers modeled for broader areas, including the Bolivar Channel Ecosystem and the western areas of the Galápagos Islands, to which the Galápagos penguins are endemic.

The modeling predicted rapid bioaccumulation of microplastics across the food web, with the most microplastics building up in the endangered penguins, then moving down the food web to barracuda, anchovies, sardines, herrings, black-striped salema and zooplankton. The authors published their findings in the journal PLOS ONE.

“The model predictions highlight the accumulation behavior and residence time of microplastics in the gut,” Karly McMullen, first author of the study from the Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries at the University of British Columbia, said in a statement. “With microplastics emerging as a prominent ocean pollutant, entering the environment every day, there is a growing concern for marine fauna and coastal wildlife, particularly if this anthropogenic threat is reaching even the most remote and protected areas such as the Galápagos Archipelago.”

Galápagos penguins are endangered, with an estimate of fewer than 2,000 individuals remaining. According to the World Wildlife Fund, some of the top threats to the species include climate change, bycatch and pollution.

The study authors wrote that plastic pollution is only getting worse, with an estimated 170 trillion plastic particles in the ocean. The model predictions revealed the rising risks of bioaccumulation across food webs. The researchers noted that in their specific study, the Galápagos penguins are “the canary in the coal mine,” revealing that more more research on microplastics and more efforts to reduce microplastics are crucial not just for the Galápagos ecosystems, but global ecosystems.

“The goal of this food web bioaccumulation modeling work was to provide science and data to support risk management of hazardous plastic waste, reduce microplastic emissions in the oceans and marine remote UNESCO Heritage sites such as the Galápagos Islands, and inform local and international marine policy to conserve endangered, endemic seabird species of Galápagos Marine Reserve,” Juan Jose Alava, senior author of the study and principal investigator of the Ocean Pollution Research Unit at the University of British Columbia’s Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, explained in a statement. “It is imperative that we prioritizing efforts to reduce the input of microplastics into vulnerable ecosystems and food webs, particularly such as that of the endangered Galápagos penguin.”

The post Microplastics May Be Accumulating in the Food Chain of Endangered Galápagos Penguins appeared first on EcoWatch.

Author Margaret Atwood picks words to matter, and she thinks humans are still soft-pedaling the…

The post Earth911 Inspiration: Climate Changes Everything appeared first on Earth911.

Over the past decade, the United States has become the world’s largest exporter of liquefied natural gas, or LNG. Since the fracking boom, gas companies have erected seven massive export terminals along the Gulf Coast, allowing them to sell fracked natural gas overseas for the first time. These terminals compress natural gas into a dense liquid so it can be loaded onto tanker ships and moved around the world like oil. 

The industry is poised for more massive growth: There are several other export projects awaiting approval from the Biden administration’s Department of Energy, and more in the pipeline beyond that. If approved, these facilities could almost double the nation’s export capacity by the end of the decade. The question of whether or not to approve this surge in exports has become one of the biggest climate issues President Biden faces as he begins his reelection campaign. 

The administration appeared to move toward answering that question this week. The Department of Energy announced on Friday that it would pause approvals for new LNG exports for several months while it reviews how it regulates them. The administration will develop a new approach over the coming year that will foreground the potential climate impacts of exporting natural gas, suspending approvals in the meantime. The decision doesn’t affect active export terminals.

“During this period, we will take a hard look at the impacts of LNG exports,” said President Joe Biden in a statement about the measure. “This pause on new LNG approvals sees the climate crisis for what it is: the existential threat of our time.” In a press call with reporters, senior administration officials noted that U.S. LNG export capacity has more than tripled since the Department of Energy first developed standards for deciding whether to ship gas overseas.

Environmental activists greeted the news of a pause as a victory for nearby residents and the climate. Roishetta Ozane, an activist in Louisiana who has organized to try to stop LNG terminals, said the news “shows that the government recognizes the need to protect the rights and well-being of [Gulf] communities.” Bill McKibben, the longtime climate activist who founded 350.org, said the decision meant Biden had “done more to check dirty energy … than any of his predecessors.”

But the ultimate outcome of the Biden administration’s pause on export approvals is far from certain. Gauging the public interest of new LNG exports is easier said than done, especially when it comes to how those exports affect the trajectory of global warming.

On the one hand, of course, natural gas is a fossil fuel, and burning it releases carbon dioxide. There’s no question that its use contributes to climate change — and that the raw emissions from U.S. LNG would be very large. Venture Global’s CP2 project in Cameron Parish, Louisiana, one of the largest proposed LNG terminals, could move enough gas to produce around 5.7 billion tons of carbon dioxide over its 30-year lifespan. That’s more than 20 times as much carbon as Alaska’s controversial Willow oil project, which Biden approved last year, according to an analysis by the Sierra Club.

However, each country that buys American LNG will be buying it to replace existing sources of energy. If the administration stops permitting new exports, the energy demand in Europe and Asia won’t go away — those countries will just use other sources to meet it. The ultimate impact of exporting gas on the world’s carbon budget — the fast-diminishing amount of carbon dioxide that can still be emitted if global warming is to be limited to internationally-agreed levels — depends on how exactly that substitution plays out. If, for example, the gas mostly replaces more carbon-intensive energy sources like coal, it might actually stretch that carbon budget further than it otherwise would have lasted.

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“The reason these export terminals are interesting is because it’s a way that the U.S. government can maybe have an effect on international emissions,” said Sean Smillie, an energy researcher who studied the global LNG market as part of a doctoral project at Carnegie Mellon University. “But we’re not really sure which direction that would go.”

In the case of Lake Charles LNG, one of the largest terminals awaiting approval from the Department of Energy, the exported gas would have a few different destinations. The company behind the project, Energy Transfer, has signed six long-term contracts to supply gas to various buyers. Four of those contracts would send gas to Asian countries including China, and two of them would sell it to oil traders like Shell, which would flip it to the highest bidder. Venture Global’s CP2 project, meanwhile, has inked three long-term supply contracts in Europe, three in Asia, and three with speculative traders. In order to determine the total climate impacts of exporting LNG, the Biden administration will have to calculate how all these contracts balance against each other. (Neither Venture Global nor Energy Transfer could be immediately reached for comment.)

“The question we’re trying to answer is just completely muddled,” said Arvind Ravikumar, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin and a codirector of a research group focusing on energy policy. “The answer is, ‘It depends.’ You have to carefully consider what’s happening in other countries. What are they doing with LNG?” 

This looks different in every country. Some buyers like China use LNG to replace coal for heating, which has a beneficial effect on the climate, since coal creates more carbon dioxide than natural gas does to produce the same amount of energy. India uses it as a feedstock for fertilizer production. Other countries like Germany are buying it to replace Russian gas that they stopped buying after Russia invaded Ukraine and to avoid having to restart shuttered coal plants. 

“The industry might say that that’s true everywhere,” said Ravikumar. “They’d say anyone who buys U.S. LNG replaces coal or dirtier gas. I don’t think that’s true.”

Ravikumar points out that countries such as South Korea and Japan buy LNG to generate electricity, which they could also theoretically get from carbon-free sources if they invested in solar or wind farms, or even built nuclear power plants. In those cases, there’s a solid argument that LNG exports slow down the energy transition.

Nowhere is this dilemma more vexing than in Europe. The continent has been the leading purchaser of LNG from the United States over the past two years, as countries such as Germany race to replace lost Russian gas. This export surge has helped the continent break its previous energy dependence and disentangle itself from Vladimir Putin’s regime. For this reason, gas industry groups in the U.S. say LNG exports are critical for ensuring global energy security.

“U.S. LNG provides energy security to our allies in Europe and around the globe and has helped minimize the largest European energy crisis in recent history,” said Charlie Riedl, the head of the Center for LNG, a liquefied gas trade association, in a November press release. “Limiting U.S. LNG exports will only cause higher energy costs at home and in Europe.” The statement came as Democrats in Congress pressured the Biden administration to reject new export applications.

But some experts say that Europe doesn’t need any more gas from the United States. The continent’s political leadership recently poured billions of dollars into heat pumps and renewable energy — mitigating the need for natural gas for both home heating and electricity. As a result, most analysts expect that European gas demand will fall over the coming years. By the time new gas shipments start flowing from proposed export terminals in 2026 or 2027, Germany might not even need them. Indeed, some argue the widespread availability of new cheap gas might encourage increased energy consumption, adding more emissions to the global carbon ledger.

“There is no reason to believe that Europe’s energy security depends on further expansion of LNG export capacity that would only come online towards the end of this decade,” said Felix Heilmann, a policy analyst at the German think tank Dezernat Zukunft who has studied the LNG industry.

This matches projections from the International Energy Agency, or IEA, a global energy research institution. The IEA said in its annual energy outlook last year that it expects global gas demand to peak by 2030, meaning “there is little headroom remaining for either pipeline or LNG trade to grow beyond then.” 

The question of timing is critical, since the climate impacts of new export terminals will extend far beyond the end of the decade. These terminals cost billions of dollars to build, and companies need to operate them for decades in order to reap back their initial investments. The same goes for the import terminals that countries such as South Korea and Pakistan are building to take American gas. Environmental groups argue that building more LNG infrastructure now will “lock in” a dependence on gas in many countries, forcing them to keep burning fossil fuels even as renewables expand. In the call with reporters, a senior Biden administration official said the potential for this dependence was one of the administration’s concerns in the pause.

This might not be as much of a concern in Europe, since countries like Germany have invested in cheaper and more flexible floating import terminals that don’t need to operate for decades. In other parts of the world, though, there is a risk that LNG might slow down the adoption of solar in countries like Pakistan.

“If you build an LNG terminal today, it’s not like it’s going to operate for five years and then shut down,” said Ravikumar. “Between now and 2030, at the global level, on average, LNG might reduce global emissions compared to a counterfactual scenario, but 20 years from now, it might not.”

For Smillie, the researcher who studied LNG at Carnegie Mellon, that uncertainty will make the Biden administration’s analysis very difficult. The export question has become a divisive issue in climate politics, but the effects of a U.S. policy in either direction won’t be clear for years — and they depend largely on decisions in other countries besides the United States.

“A huge part of the story is other countries’ climate policies and climate laws,” he said. “At the end of the day, that’s what will determine whether these LNG terminals have a positive or negative effect on the climate. That’s not really something we can predict.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The big question behind Biden’s liquefied natural gas pause on Jan 26, 2024.

The past five years have been something of a blur for the crew at Energy Concepts Enterprises. The company, which has been installing solar panels in and around Fresno, California, since 1992, could barely keep up with demand as consumers embraced the technology in ever-greater numbers. Every year was busier than the last.

Until 2023, when business plummeted. According to marketing director Carlos Beccar, sales fell from as many as 40 systems a month to 10, or less. “It’s been an incredible downturn,” he said. “We laid off half of our staff and we’re probably not done.”

California is leading what analysts expect to be the first year-over-year decline in residential solar installations since 2017. Energy consultants at Wood MacKenzie anticipate that the state, which accounts for the bulk of the United States market, will see a 41 percent drop in 2024. Nationwide, they predict a 12 percent contraction.

“We’re expecting the first half of the year to be pretty tough for installers,” said Zoë Gaston, a principal analyst for residential solar at the firm. She said she’s heard of more than 100 bankruptcies already across the country.  

One culprit is high interest rates, which have made it more difficult for homeowners to afford expensive solar projects. Gaston said this is especially true in states that have traditionally seen a higher portion of systems purchased with loans, such as Texas, which saw a 29 percent drop in installs between the third quarters of 2022 and 2023. Leased systems have picked up some of the slack and, excluding California, installations are anticipated to grow roughly 4 percent this year — but any growth, should it happen, would be in stark contrast with recent annual growth rates that have sometimes topped 40 percent.

Beccar says interest rates have been a factor in California’s decline too, but a relatively minor one that his company was prepared to weather. The much bigger factor has been a state Public Utilities Commission rule change that slashed the rate at which homeowners can sell power back to their electricity provider. The state’s largest utility, Pacific Gas and Electric Co., or PG&E, stated in an annual report that the new rules will reduce compensation for solar new customers by about 80 percent. Wood Mackenzie says the new net metering rates have caused the payback period for residential systems to almost triple, from five or six years to 14 or 15. 

“It’s like they put a brick wall in front of us,” Beccar said, explaining that for many homeowners exploring solar the large upfront investment no longer makes sense. While the company was able to get by most of last year installing systems it had sold before the change, the lack of new sales has installations grinding to a halt and workers sitting idle. “I think the impacts are going to be more severe coming up.”

The commission argued that the rate change brings homeowner compensation more in line with the value of the electricity they produce, rather than having other customers subsidize the program. Another goal, it said in a statement, was also to encourage the addition of battery storage to residential solar systems. In an email, spokesperson Terrie Prosper said battery installations have indeed jumped dramatically, and she contended that payback periods remain in the range of five to eight years. Major utility companies in the state, including PG&E, lobbied in support of the changes. 

Of course the utility supported the bill, said Bernadette Del Chiaro, executive director of the California Solar and Storage Association. “They have natural gas in their middle name,” she said. The association, along with environmental groups, opposed the net metering overhaul. Del Chiaro says the “cost-shift” narrative is misleading and that the commission based its findings on flawed modeling, rather than utility bills, with the end result being less solar deployment. 

“All of this flies in the face of where America is trying to go in terms of clean energy,” she said. 

A number of other states are poised to potentially follow California, such as Oregon and Wisconsin. This worries Thomas Devine, a solar installer who left California after its recent changes. His company still operates in five other states. “It frustrates the hell out of me,” he said. “We can’t afford to have this spread across the country.”

Gaston expects the nationwide slowdown to be relatively short and the rebound larger than it was after the 2017 slump, which occurred when several companies quit the residential solar business. “There is some upside at the end of the year if the interest rates come down,” she said, also noting that the Inflation Reduction Act extended the 30 percent credit on solar until 2032. Current headwinds have muted its effects, she said, but “in 2025, we’ll start to see more of the benefits.” 

Beccar is optimistic that his company will survive the slump, but he hates the term “rebound.” To him, it conjures images of a basketball bouncing back to almost the height from which it was dropped. 

“This is going to be one of those things where it’s like when you throw those weight balls,” he quipped. “You throw it really hard, and it comes back up about an inch.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How California is casting a cloud over residential solar on Jan 26, 2024.

In the first scenes that we spend with Whitney Siegel, Emma Stone’s character in The Curse, she is assuring everyone around her that she is a good person. She tells us that she is bringing jobs to a struggling community, personally subsidizing her neighbors’ rising rents, upholding the work of local artists — all in service of a “holistic home philosophy” that surrounds her self-designed and -developed carbon neutral homes.

The insistence is both ominous and unsettlingly familiar. A common critique of the environmentalist is that she is out of touch; she demands too much; she does not understand the day-to-day life and demands of everyday folk. She is an idealist, too concerned with abstract and/or distant concerns — the atmosphere! the deep sea! the future! — and at the same time overly preoccupied with inconsequential and less-than-thrilling things: LED lightbulbs, proper separation of recyclables, low-flow toilets.

Perhaps this description makes you, if you are an environmentalist, uneasy. It’s an unflattering reflection, to be sure — but that discomfort is the currency of The Curse, a new Showtime series from directors Benny Safdie and Nathan Fielder. The plot surrounds Whitney and her husband Asher Siegel (the latter played, to horrifying effect, by Fielder), who are trying to parlay their Doug Aitken-ripoff passivhaus properties into an HGTV reality show starring themselves. 

Although the show quickly gained a cult following, it has also been described using phrases such as: “the hardest to watch thing I’ve ever seen,” “physically curled in pain,” and “weekly anxiety nightmare.”

Energy-efficient insulation and circular plumbing may not seem like the stuff of nightmares, but the show is so distinctly unsettling because it exposes its characters as their absolute worst selves. And it’s Whitney, a dedicated ambassador of the carbon-neutral lifestyle, who gradually reveals herself to be the most ethically warped, self-serving, malicious character on a competitive roster.

Why does someone who has committed their career — their entire public image, no less — to building climate-friendly homes make such a believable monster? 

I chatted with Jennifer Bernstein, editor-in-chief of the journal Case Studies in the Environment, who watched the show, to try and parse what exactly makes Whitney’s environmentalist protagonist such a disturbing character. She observed that it’s “this lack of self-awareness paired with this idea that her idea of the good life has some moral high ground and should be everyone’s idea of the good life.”

Indeed, those who oppose environmentalism and its purported ideals tend to reference a desire for control: They want to take away your gas stoves, your burgers, your trucks. Some of Whitney’s eeriest moments, exposing a self equal parts desperate and domineering, occur when she attempts to explain the gospel of her eco-living mission. When the buyer of one of her passive homes disconnects the expensive induction stove and replaces it with a gas one, breaking the self-contained “passive” ecosystem of the home, Whitney insists to Asher that they need to be “more discerning” about who they’re selling their homes to; that some people “do not deserve to be part of what we’re building.” She tells a couple making an offer on another home, when they intend to put in an air conditioning unit that would also void the house’s passive certification, that they’re throwing away an opportunity to be “members of a very exclusive club,” “part of history.” 

It’s impossible to argue that an $800,000 eco home isn’t a marker of some degree of elitism. Not all trappings of a green lifestyle are expensive, but those of a type of green lifestyle certainly are. Whitney and Asher repeatedly attempt to reassure residents of the working-class New Mexico community where they build their homes that their developments are not a force for gentrification — an assertion so obviously false that what’s unclear is whether they’re lying to themselves or their neighbors.

Passive homes are kind of the archetypal example of a climate solution that makes a lot of sense, but one that also requires a lot of money. The reduction in energy usage that a passive home can provide, compared to the average drafty house, is as high as 90 percent. Residential energy is responsible for about 20 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, so that’s not an insignificant offering. But as Project Drawdown points out in its analysis of insulation as a climate solution, the embodied emissions in actually building passive houses that can withstand hot climates (like the Southwest, for example) makes the potential energy savings less appealing. 

Des Fitzgerald, an expert on green urbanism at the University of Cork’s Radical Humanities Laboratory, says that a significant contingent of the environmental movement has a blind spot around status and expense associated with eco-living. Green development in a community will more often than not inflate property values, driving out lower-income residents. But Fitzgerald also explains how a sort of assumed supremacy of an environmentally conscious way of life can drive people away as well.

“So much of the public discourse around the use of environmentally-friendly materials in housing, and planning more generally, really grounds itself in being empirically rigorous and well-grounded in research,” said Fitzgerald. “The reality is, a lot of attachments people have to this as a form of living are not really scientific or rigorous or empirical. It has this symbolic, quasi-religious quality to it — and I think it has to do with those deeper associations we have with green stuff and status.” 

In other words, a green lifestyle is as much defined by actions that are proven to reduce emissions as it is by talismans and touchstones of sustainability — and, as often as not, those talismans become status symbols more than legitimate climate solutions. Claire McNear for The Ringer brilliantly clocks, for example, the eco-accessories of Whitney and Asher’s “certain breed of moneyed class anxiety”: the Tesla, the New York Times-featured Birkenstocks.

Is there anything uglier than an aspiring cult leader with no charisma? About halfway into the series, Whitney retitles their show “Green Queen,” happily shunting Asher aside and making herself the star. But any passion for “green” values appears limited to her aspirations for fame and recognition. Bernstein, for example, notes that Whitney never once talks about climate change, or nature, or anything remotely related to the environment away from the cameras. 

The 10th and final episode features an effort to publicize the couple’s show to a mainstream audience, where they make a bizarre appearance on the Rachael Ray Show. Asher and Whitney loom on a large screen behind a host who briefly interrogates them, bored and half-engaged, on the many ways in which a passive home is unappealing to the average American: You can’t have air conditioning, or a basement for your husband’s TV, or yes, gas stoves. 

Whitney’s smile becomes increasingly tense. Is she struggling not to snap, to berate Ray and her middle American audience for prioritizing their shallow preferences above saving civilization from devastating climate change — a fate from which she, the Green Queen, is offering salvation? Or is she mourning yet another failed opportunity to get viewers for the show? 

Whitney’s own personal curse is that she simultaneously embodies two wretched archetypes of green lifestyle advocates. The first is that of the green influencer, who preaches about climate change while making money from convincing you to buy stuff — the right stuff, though — and profiting off the consumerist culture that is the mortal enemy of environmental progress. The second is the aforementioned eco-tyrant, who wants to ration your water and electricity and beef. We are repulsed by the first because she’s a hypocrite, and by the second because she’s a bossy control freak.

There’s no doubt Whitney is unlikeable, but it’s not just because of her personal qualities. There’s a part of us that wants environmentalists to be frauds and fascists, because we want them to be wrong. We want their claims about the climate-saving value of low-impact homes and plant-based diets and electrifying everything to be ridiculous. Because if they are right, then we have to transform so many things about our homes and diets and economy and overall ways of life to forestall apocalyptic ecological collapse. 

But what if the frauds and fascists are, on some level, operating on a belief system that is fundamentally right? That more or less defines the moral that weaves through The Curse’s most surreal moments: that people can really mean well and want to do good in the world, and still be awful and self-serving; that ego and desire for power and status can still propel the most ostensibly ethical mission. And when something righteous is driven by something rotten, can it ever actually do good? Or is it just cursed?

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Why we love to hate Emma Stone’s environmentalist in ‘The Curse’ on Jan 26, 2024.

The 85-mile stretch of land along the lower Mississippi River in Louisiana is among the most studied industrial corridors in the country. Over the past several decades, advocates, scholars, and journalists have published numerous reports detailing the dangerous concentrations of toxic chemicals in the environment and their effects on the health of the region’s residents, many of whom are Black and low-income. It’s why the area is known around the world as “Cancer Alley.”

A report published on Thursday by Human Rights Watch sheds new light on the experiences of residents living near the region’s sprawling petrochemical complexes, and includes details of a first-of-its-kind analysis that found higher rates of poor birth outcomes among women living in south Louisiana. In the areas with the worst pollution, for instance, the report found that more than a quarter of babies are born with low birth weights, more than double the state average. 

The researchers put much of the blame on state regulators, who have repeatedly permitted plants in areas where the air is already choked with pollution and have failed to enforce federal standards. To that end, Human Rights Watch recommended that the Environmental Protection Agency initiate an investigation into whether the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality should be the agency administering the Clean Air Act in the state.

Human Rights Watch’s lead researcher on the report, Antonia Juhasz, told Grist that she hopes her team’s work will help to spur change at the state and federal levels. Headquartered in New York City, the organization is best known for its work documenting the cases of jailed activists, dictatorships, and humanitarian conditions in crisis zones around the world, not for its North America-based research. 

“We were hoping that we could provide additional research by applying Human Rights Watch’s unique model of going in and documenting harm in a very careful, interview-by-interview process that has been applied all around the world to human rights,” Juhasz said.

The study comes as the fossil fuel industry ramps up its build-out throughout the region, with at least 19 new petrochemical projects in the works, and as southern Louisiana comes under greater scrutiny. In 2022, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and the Environment David Boyd identified the area known as Cancer Alley as one of the 50 most polluted places on Earth. Boyd said these “sacrifice zones” represent “a stain upon the collective conscience of humanity.” 

Much of the new report is descriptive, painting a picture of giant industrial facilities belching out huge plumes of black smoke that drift over the homes, schools, and outdoor spaces where people live, work, and play. Juhasz interviewed 37 residents living in the nine parishes between Baton Rouge and New Orleans and found that severe respiratory conditions such as bronchitis and childhood asthma are common. 

“Residents said these ailments added stress to already at-risk pregnancies, resulted in children being rushed to emergency rooms and kept inside to avoid polluted air, missed days of work and school, sleepless nights due to wracking coughs, and the deaths of family members and friends,” the report reads.

It also details the results of a yet-to-be-published study finding rates of low birth weight (less than 5.5 pounds) soared as high as 27 percent in census tracts with high levels of air pollution. By contrast, the national rate is 8.5 percent. (The analysis is currently under peer review for the publication Environmental Research: Health.) To complement this research, Juhasz interviewed people such as Ashley Gaignard, 46, a resident of Donaldsonville in Ascension Parish, which has the highest reported amount of toxic air pollution in the region, with more than 22 plants operating within its borders. All three of Gaignard’s children had low birth weights and two were premature. Her son Jason, 23, was born with an undeveloped lung. The condition contributed to severe lifelong asthma that has led to frequent emergency room visits and nebulizer treatments.

Juhasz said this research is important because birth outcomes are not often considered in studies of exposure to toxic air pollution. “Most women are unaware of this risk,” she said. “Most medical professionals are unaware of the risk. And so that information is not getting shared or acted upon.” 

The report lays out a list of recommendations to various state and federal agencies to improve conditions in Cancer Alley. In particular, Juhasz and her team suggested that the EPA initiate an investigation into whether it should withdraw the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality’s authority to administer the Clean Air Act in the state. In addition to weak enforcement protocols and a permitting process that repeatedly allows more industrial development in Black communities, the report notes, the state agency has adamantly denied claims that residents living near the region’s hulking chemical plants are getting sick from the pollution. 

A former EPA staffer and air pollution expert, Scott Throwe, said he doubts whether such an investigation would be fruitful, and he could not think of a time in his 30 years at the agency when one was conducted. But he agreed with the report’s argument that the federal government’s lack of action in Cancer Alley has been disappointing. At the start of his term in 2021, EPA Administrator Michael Regan promised to make the disproportionate pollution in Black neighborhoods across the country a priority for cleanup, and specifically visited Cancer Alley residents on a “toxic tour” of the South. More than three years later, Throwe said, not much has changed. 

“I was happy to see Mr. Reagan’s initial efforts and intentions, but unfortunately, I really think the follow-through has just been anemic,” he said. “I just don’t see the efforts to hold the states accountable.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Human Rights Watch blames Louisiana regulators for low birth weights in Cancer Alley on Jan 26, 2024.