Smart plugs are affordable, easy-to-use devices that bring smart home features to your home electronics….
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Solar panels. Heat Pumps. Electric buses. Those are just three of the things the Chicago Teachers Union, or CTU, is hoping to acquire in their latest negotiations for a new contract, one that would address the rising toll of climate change in the more than 500 schools in which their members teach.
Arguably one of the most powerful unions for teachers in the nation, the CTU held public negotiations last Friday in a crowded elementary school gymnasium, facing off against leaders from Chicago Public Schools, or CPS.
The two entities have a contentious relationship, made clear in the last decade with two strikes and several showdowns during the pandemic. The negotiations were also streamed, but any observers expecting the usual verbal fireworks would be disappointed. Both sides agreed that climate change is a real challenge. Now, they just have to figure out how to pay for the changes necessary.
“Chicago’s buildings, including school buildings, are a major source of carbon emissions,” said Lauren Bianchi, a social studies teacher on the city’s Southeast Side and chair of the CTU’s climate justice committee. “CPS buildings produce yearly emissions equivalent to about 900 railcars’ worth of coal.”
Nationwide, the Biden administration has encouraged school districts to begin thinking about cutting their climate emissions. To that end, the federal government has funneled millions of dollars in federal grants and technical assistance to help schools install solar panels, purchase electric buses, and update heating and cooling systems. But from California to Massachusetts, teachers unions have already started to get loud about climate justice demands.
As heat and extreme weather become more prevalent because of the climate crisis, J. Mijin Cha, an environmental studies professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said it makes sense that climate demands are turning up in union negotiations.
“If you want a green school, you have to really think about what the challenges of the climate crisis will bring to students who are trying to study,” said Cha. “Things like heat and other things that will intensify from the climate crisis are then educational issues.”
In April, Stacey Davis Gates, the union’s president, announced a “transformative” contract proposal in which increased wages were just a starting point. The plan included hundreds of items ranging from a plan to build more affordable housing citywide to providing additional resources for the thousands of migrant children shuttled to Chicago from the Mexican border. On top of that, the union wants energy efficiency and climate resiliency written into their new contract.
To start, the CTU wants to bring the school district’s aging infrastructure into the 21st century. Chicago’s school campuses are on average more than 80 years old, twice the national average according to the National Center for Educational Statistics. The oldest school still in operation dates back to 1874, the same year as the Great Chicago Fire.
And keeping the lights on in the city’s old public schools isn’t cheap.
“Chicago Public Schools will face more than a billion dollars in climate driven cooling costs by 2025,” Ayesha Qazi-Lampert, an environmental science teacher, explained.
The CTU wants to transform the city’s schools into “climate-resilient community hubs,” Qazi-Lampert said to the crowd. To do it, the union wants the school district to install heat pumps, transition to solar and geothermal power, and get all lead contamination out of the school’s drinking water.
Outside the school campuses, the teachers union wants more green spaces — expanded urban canopies and native gardens that beautify the neighborhood and capture stormwater.
“Our school buildings were not designed to withstand frequent and immediate hot and cold extremes,” said Qazi-Lampert. “We’re not only testing the integrity of the building materials, but we’re adding stress to already outdated cooling and heating systems.”
It isn’t just physical infrastructure the union wants to modernize, but also what happens inside classrooms and cafeterias. The CTU is calling for expanded career technical education that puts Chicago students on track for jobs in the emerging clean energy economy. And better lunches for the students to keep students full while they learn inside their newly solar-powered school.
But these updates won’t be quick and they won’t be cheap. Money, especially in the upcoming year, is in short supply. CPS is staring down a nearly $400 million deficit for the next school year as pandemic relief funding is beginning to run dry.
On top of impending budgetary shortfalls, CPS’s chief facilities officer, Ivan Hansen, said there is already a massive backlog of deferred updates. “Our total district immediate critical need is over $3 billion and that is just to bring the buildings to a good repair,” he said.
Still, CPS leadership agrees with the union on the broadest points: CPS has a massive footprint across the city, with over 62 millions square feet in building space and most of it is in decline. On the finer details, the city still had questions.
In one instance, David Singler, the energy and sustainability program manager for CPS, rebuffed the union’s plans to install solar panels en masse. “If we were to take every square inch of roof and put a solar panel on it, it would only generate a fraction of the amount of energy that we need in the district to operate our buildings,” he said.
Before wrapping up its first public bargaining sessions, CPS and CTU agreed to collaborate more closely on grant applications in the future. Most everything else was left in the air.
But the union is set on getting the district to enshrine its climate-mitigation proposals into the upcoming contract. Davis Gates explains that responding to climate change must be a priority, not just for the union but for the district.
“That contract means nothing if our Earth is on fire,” she said.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Chicago teachers demand climate solutions in their next contract on Jun 18, 2024.
After decades of advocacy, the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe will see 18 acres of land returned to them by the state of Minnesota. The move comes after lawmakers passed legislation last month to formally return state trust lands inside the boundaries of the Mille Lacs Band’s reservation.
Minnesota’s returning of Indigenous land is part of a much broader global landback movement that has been gaining momentum in part due to studies that show Indigenous guardianship leads to more effective ecological outcomes. As conserving biodiversity grows more critical amid rising global temperatures, Indigenous self-determination and traditions of relating to land and waters are increasingly recognized as vital climate solutions.
“This is a great opportunity for us as the Mille Lacs Band to preserve that land in a way that is respectful of nature,” said Kelly Applegate, commissioner of natural resources at the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe. He said the land transfer is expected to be complete over the next month. “Whatever we do, it’ll be in a lens of environmental protection.”
The Mille Lacs’ lands in question are known as state trust lands. These trust lands, established at statehood, are grants of land from the federal government primarily created to support education and are found across the western United States. On the Mille Lacs reservation, those 18 acres represent only a fraction of the 2.5 million acres of state trust lands across Minnesota, including nearly 344,000 acres inside the borders of eight reservations. Trust lands in Minnesota typically generate revenue for education through mining, timber, and land sales, and for the 2023-24 school year, trust lands generated almost $49 million for public and charter schools. The trust lands on Mille Lacs, however, have only generated about $45 annually.
Minnesota is one of 15 states that owns land within federal Indian reservations that generate revenue for non-Indigenous institutions.
“Designating [that land] as a school trust parcel — we had no say in that, it was just a designation that was put upon that land without our original approval,” said Applegate, adding that tribal members never stopped occupying the land in question. He said the band is home to more than 5,000 enrolled members and never relinquished title to the land.
The Mille Lacs measure was 1 of several bills considered by the Minnesota Legislature this year that sought to return land to Indigenous nations and was authored by Senator Mary Kunesh, who has ancestral ties to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and is the first Native woman to serve in the Minnesota Senate.
A bill to return 3,400 acres from the University of Minnesota to the Fond du Lac Band didn’t pass, but university officials said they’re still committed to returning the property. State lawmakers also considered proposals to give back state land to the Red Lake Nation and return land within White Earth State Forest to White Earth Nation. Both measures died after facing opposition.
The Mille Lacs measure sets aside $750,000 of state funds for the state commissioner of natural resources to pay project costs such as valuation expenses, closing costs, and legal fees to complete the transfer, but not everyone is happy about the legislation. The Mille Lacs County Board of Commissioners issued a press release condemning the purchase. Dillon Hayes, county administrator of Mille Lacs County, said the transfer violates the state constitution, specifically a requirement that the state must put the land up for public auction.
“Right, wrong, or otherwise, we really have a process to follow. We have a constitution in the state of Minnesota,” said Hayes. “The board believes that we should be following that process.”
Hayes said that the estimated value of the parcel within the reservation exceeds more than $1 million due to rising property values, and that state schools are missing out on funding not only from the $750,000 appropriated to purchase the property but also from the higher price the land could have fetched at auction.
“Federally recognized Indian tribes, like the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe, possess the financial means to purchase such lands at public sale,” the board wrote in a press release last week. “This legislation unfairly advantages the tribe at the expense of our local schools and taxpayers.”
Applegate said it’s unfortunate that the county isn’t supportive.
“We’re in a new era of restoring land back to Indigenous people, and people shouldn’t feel threatened by that,” Applegate said. “We’re the original caretakers of all of this land, and who better to manage it than the tribal nations?”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The Mille Lacs Band will see the return of 18 acres of state trust land on Jun 18, 2024.
On Saturday afternoon, the Post Fire began in a mountainous region of California, approximately 45 miles northwest of Los Angeles, according to authorities. By Sunday, it had burned more than 14,000 acres of brush and grasslands, forcing about 1,200 people to evacuate the popular Hungry Valley state recreation area, reported The New York Times.
The wildfire was only about two percent contained as of Sunday afternoon, the state’s largest so far this year, CalFire said.
“This is a taste of what’s to come,” said climate scientist Daniel Swain of the University of California, Los Angeles, as The New York Times reported.
About 400 firefighters were fighting the blaze, which CalFire said was moving toward Pyramid Lake, reported Reuters. So far, two nonresidential structures have been destroyed.
Containing the wildfire was proving difficult due to low humidity, high temperatures and strong winds, the state’s firefighting agency said.
Firefighters were building fire lines around the perimeter of the blaze, while water-dropping aircraft tried to stop it from spreading further.
The fire started around 2 p.m. Saturday in Los Angeles County, west of Interstate-5, NPR said.
From there it spread west to Ventura County, where it burned 2,000 acres, mostly in Los Padres National Forest, according to LAist.
Strong winds of 55 miles per hour with gusts as high as 70 on Sunday were forecast to decrease throughout Monday, the National Weather Service said.
CalFire said the cause of the Post fire is being investigated and no injuries have been reported.
According to CalFire data, wildfires have already burned roughly 41,900 acres in 2024, which is higher than the 27,100-acre average for the same period during the past five years.
Spokesperson for the LA County Fire Department Kenichi Haskett said fire officials were optimistic about making progress on the fire, reported The New York Times.
“Our goal is hopefully to be done within the week,” Haskett said.
Swain warned California residents to be cautious of the potential for wildfires as summer begins.
Precipitation extremes due to climate change have been bringing intense rainfall along with drought conditions to the state over the past few years.
Extreme heat has made grasses and brush in the region dry and flammable, with grasslands having a tendency to burn first, since they dry out the fastest, Swain said.
“Even though dryness levels are not record-breaking at this point, what is anomalous is just how much fuel there is,” Swain said, as The New York Times reported.
State and federal officials have used prescribed burning to reduce fuel on the ground and stop fires.
However, Swain explained that, despite efforts to prevent wildfires, climate change is creating a more dangerous and unpredictable environment.
“The more adverse the conditions, the more likely it is you get unlucky,” Swain said, as reported by The New York Times.
The post ‘A Taste of What’s to Come’: Wildfire Near Los Angeles Forces More Than 1,200 to Evacuate appeared first on EcoWatch.
A landmark law to restore a fifth of the European Union’s land and sea by 2030 has been approved by the European Parliament, following months of delays.
Leonore Gewessler, Austria’s Green climate minister, ended the deadlock at the last minute by breaking with the conservative party of chancellor Karl Nehammer. The move sparked an announcement by the party that it would pursue criminal charges against Gewessler for abuse of power, reported The Guardian.
“Today’s decision is a victory for nature,” Gewessler wrote in a translated post on Instagram. “My conscience tells me unmistakably [that] when the healthy and happy life of future generations is at stake, courageous decisions are needed.”
The proposal for the nature law had been weakened as European elections approached, but even with the concessions, it very nearly didn’t pass on Monday.
“Today marks a significant day for Europe as we transition from merely protecting and conserving nature to actively restoring it,” said César Luena, Spain’s member of parliament who led negotiations for the policy, as reported by The Guardian.
For the restoration law to pass, 55 percent of member states that represented a minimum of 65 percent of the bloc’s population needed to vote in favor.
The necessary majority came after Austria and Slovakia changed their votes, pushing the law over the line by 1.07 percentage points.
“I know I will face opposition in Austria on this, but I am convinced that this is the time to adopt this law,” Gewessler said to reporters, as Reuters reported.
The purpose of the nature restoration law is to reverse the decline of natural habitats in Europe, 81 percent of which are classified as unhealthy, according to the European Environment Agency. The legislation includes set targets, like the restoration of peatlands, an important carbon sink.
Twenty EU countries voted in favor of the law, with Hungary, Itay, Finland, Poland, the Netherlands and Sweden voting against, and Belgium abstaining.
Some countries like the Netherlands had expressed concern that the law would impede wind farm expansion and other economic activities. On Monday, Poland said there was no plan for funding the policy’s protection of nature.
The law includes steps to reverse pollinator declines and requires member states to take measures to help plant a minimum of three billion trees, reported The Guardian.
“There is no time for a break in protecting our environment,” said Alain Maron, the Brussels region’s environment minister, as Euronews reported. “Today, the Council of the EU is choosing to restore nature in Europe, thereby protecting its biodiversity and the living environment of European citizens.”
Environmental activists called the vote “historic,” reported The Guardian.
“Today’s vote is a massive victory for Europe’s nature and citizens who have been long calling for immediate action to tackle nature’s alarming decline,” said an environmental coalition led by WWF Europe, as The Guardian reported.
The post EU Approves Landmark Nature Law to Restore 20% of Land and Sea by 2030 appeared first on EcoWatch.
The endangered Przewalski’s horse (Equus ferus przewalskii) is the last wild horse species on Earth, meaning a type of wild horse that is not a descendent of domesticated horses. But in the 1960s, this horse became extinct in the wild. Now, through a managed breeding and care program by the Prague Zoo, Przewalski’s horse has been returned to Kazakhstan’s Golden Steppe for the first time in at least two centuries.
In early June 2024, two Czech Army CASA aircrafts carried a total of seven Przewalski’s horses to Golden Steppe, an area of open grasslands. The first aircraft with three horses landed on June 4, according to a press release from the Prague Zoo.
“After hundreds of years, first Przewalski’s horses have returned to the steppes of central Kazakhstan,” Miroslav Bobek, the director of the Prague Zoo, said in a press release. “We still have a long way to go, but this was a historic moment. The sight of Zeta II running off into the steppe will never leave my memory.”
On June 6, the remaining four horses were transferred to the grasslands. But the project did not go as smoothly as hoped, as eight horses in total were originally planned for the trip. But in the first batch of horses, one horse named Pelle kept sitting in his crate, which the zoo noted could be dangerous for him during the long journey. Some technical difficulties also led to delays, but overall, the horses were transported safely, marking a successful project.
“This is an event of historical import: the seven ‘Przewalski’s’ that we transported here by two CASA planes represent the first individuals of this species in central Kazakhstan in hundreds of years,” Bobek said in an update. “With this double transport, we have taken a major step towards returning the last wild horse to another area where it was found in the past. Our goal is to slowly transport at least forty individuals here, so that a viable population can be set up. Hardly anything could be a better demonstration of the purpose of modern zoos than the Return of the Wild Horses.”
The horses will roam in an area spanning 80 hectares and will be closely monitored by researchers, EuroNews reported.
Przewalski’s horses were once abundant across Europe and Asia, but environmental changes and competition with livestock and humans led their habitat to shrink, the Smithsonian’s National Zoo & Conservation Biology Institute reported. Eventually, they became extinct in the wild. But reintroduction projects, like those led by Prague Zoo, have helped return the species to the wild at sites in Kazakhstan, Mongolia and China.
The San Diego Zoo and the San Diego Zoo Safari Park has also led a major breeding program for the species, with more than 157 Przewalski’s horses bred since 1969. According to the zoo, it sends the offspring to reintroduction programs and other zoos to help with species recovery.
As EuroNews reported, Prague Zoo is slated to transfer additional horses to Golden Steppe in 2025. In addition to the 40 total horses Prague Zoo plans to eventually reintroduce to Golden Steppe, the zoo is expected to send more Przewalski’s horses to Mongolia in two years.
“We are still responsible the fact this wild horse disappeared and now we can sort of reverse that, and give it back to nature,” Filip Mašek, spokesperson for Prague Zoo, told the BBC. “To sort of be these Noah’s Arks which have all these endangered species. If it’s possible — and sometimes it’s not — we should try and do everything to return them to their original environments.”
The post Last Wild Horse Species on Earth Saved From Extinction and Returned to Native Habitat appeared first on EcoWatch.
Rising CO2 levels have created climate change, the denier’s name for global warming. It’s the…
The post Earth911 Podcast: David Lipsky on His Climate Denial History, The Parrot and The Igloo appeared first on Earth911.
In an often-excerpted passage from his memoir, Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain describes how his perceptions of the Mississippi River changed after he spent months piloting a steamboat up and down its muddy length. “The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book,” he said, allowing him to read the bends and eddies that meant nothing to his passengers. But the tragedy of this “valuable acquisition” was that “the romance and the beauty were all gone from the river.”
“All the value any feature of it had for me now was the amount of usefulness it could furnish toward compassing the safe piloting of a steamboat,” he wrote.
Even for those of us who will never pilot a steamboat, there is a vestigial lesson in this passage about how we perceive and talk about the environment. A body of water like the Mississippi River is something we experience with our eyes, ears, and noses, and it is in large part because of its beauty that we want to protect it. But it also has a specific human history — the river runs between artificial levees, or provides conveyance to ships carrying oil, or drains toxic runoff from factory farms.
In his fascinating new book, The Great River, the writer Boyce Upholt tells the story of the Mississippi not through the eddies and mudflats Twain passed in his steamboat, but through the stories of men who have sought to master the river for well over two centuries. Ranging across thousands of miles, he demonstrates how the United States has deformed and manipulated one of the world’s largest watersheds in the short-sighted service of economic development, often with catastrophic, unintended consequences. If Twain read the river as a book, Upholt gets more specific and reads it as a tragedy wrought by colonial hubris.
This focus on the people who carved and dredged the river for their own ends, rather than on the wilds of the river itself, produces a story that has profound lessons for coastal cities and western deserts as well as those who live in the river’s great watershed.
The most interesting question, Upholt argues, is not how the Mississippi River will fare in a changing climate, but what the history of that river tells us about how the rest of us will fare. In reviewing how “engineers worked to tame this god,” he rings an alarm about other efforts to control the flux of nature. For all our expertise and prowess, he argues, we are little more powerful than the boat passengers Twain mocked as blind to the river’s ways.
The first section of the book recounts the centuries that preceded this effort of domination. Upholt explores a growing body of archaeological research about several Indigenous societies that rose and fell along the Mississippi many hundreds of years before European settlers arrived, including one city, Cahokia, in modern-day Illinois, which housed more than 10,000 people around a central pyramid more than a hundred feet high. He contemplates the cosmic purpose of earthwork mounds like the ones in Poverty Point, Louisiana, which represent “Indigenous knowledge encoded in the land,” telling a story in which “a flood is not a catastrophe but an asset.”
Once the colonists arrive and President Thomas Jefferson sends them rampaging out into the Midwest, Upholt swings up and down the main stem of the river and along its major tributaries, the Missouri and the Ohio, describing how fur traders speared their way downstream in “keelboats [that] hugged the inner bends of the river’s curves,” fortified by “whiskey chased by a cup of river water.” Upholt announces at the start of the book that he won’t proceed in a strict chronological order, which is understandable enough since his book isn’t a traditional work of history, but his attempts to toggle backward and forward in time as well as between various tributaries can often leave the reader feeling lost.
The book hits its narrative stride, however, once Upholt introduces the Army Corps of Engineers, the federal agency that has controlled the river for almost two centuries. Since the 19th century, the Corps has spent untold billions of dollars to dredge, levee, dam, undam, channelize, divert, reroute, and re-reroute the river, attempting to control flooding and facilitate navigation for freight. This audacious effort to tame Mother Nature has achieved a degree of success that could most charitably be described as middling, and some of the best sections of the book are those in which Upholt describes the many levee and dredge projects the Corps has built against the better judgment of river experts, as well as common sense.
The squabbling engineers who have led the Corps, often hapless but always unfailingly self-serious, are the closest that Upholt gets to main characters, and their stories function as parables about the relationship between the U.S. and the environment it sought to colonize and reshape. The most famous of these was the contest between James Buchanan Eads, a brilliant civil engineer who advocated making space along the river’s banks for its water to flow and flood, and Andrew Humphreys, an Army general who advocated sealing most of the river off with man-made levees. Humphreys won the debate, with catastrophic results: In 1927, as the Corps of Engineers was finalizing its levees along the lower river, a massive flood burst through them and inundated much of Louisiana and Arkansas, killing 500 people and displacing hundreds of thousands more.
A more sympathetic character is Harold Fisk, an Army Corps cartographer who designed beautiful maps of the river’s vestigial pathways, showing how it had meandered back and forth across the heartland in the centuries before the Corps walled it off — one such map adorns the cover of Upholt’s book. Fisk’s now-legendary ribbon map “highlighted rather than obscured the wildness of the Mississippi,” and in the process discovered that the river was on the verge of cresting its banks in Louisiana and rushing southwest away from New Orleans, which would have left the city high and dry.
The pinnacle of the book is when Upholt visits the Old River control system, which was designed to hold the river in place and prevent Fisk’s prophecy from coming true. As he approaches the site, Upholt sees “concrete wing walls flare outward, funneling water toward a series of five steel gates” held in place by giant beams, and then “just upstream a second line of gates, six times longer, looms over a patch of batture … from a concrete catwalk built along the confluence, the river looked like a varicose vein … so swollen that it was ready to pop.”
It’s hard to comprehend the modern Mississippi until you’ve seen this structure. Its hubris typifies the destructive human effort Upholt is trying to depict throughout the book, and holds a lesson for regions and nations attempting to tackle the threat of climate change. If the world’s wealthiest and most powerful nation struggled to tame nature before the Earth warmed by a degree and a half, it does not bode well for its efforts to fend off sea level rise with concrete walls or solve drought problems by constructing more dams.
But the solution, as Upholt makes clear in the end, isn’t just to tear everything down, to insist on seeing the river as a pure manifestation of nature. Rather, he points us back to the Indigenous earthworks that preceded colonization, relics of a society that tried to live with the rhythms of a flood-prone river rather than change those rhythms to suit human needs, finding a harmony between Twain’s two ways of seeing the Mississippi.
“This river has never been alone,” Upholt writes after seeing an earthwork in Louisiana near a village of the Grand Bayou Atakapa-Ishak/Chawasha Tribe. He goes on to describe the half-submerged earth structure as “a monument … not to the beauty of empty nature, but to the possibility of a human connection”; rather than a “celebratory” structure, he sees the mounds as “insurance, anchor amid the chaos. They provide a lesson in how to respect nature without seeing it as something separate from human life.”
In the matter of climate change, an area where politicians often appeal to the ferocious power of nature and to our ability to right the course of the Earth itself, it’s a point well taken. To really achieve sustainability, on the Mississippi or elsewhere, we’ll have to give up some amount of control.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Downstream effects: The cautionary tale of the Mississippi River on Jun 17, 2024.
No one wants to adorn themselves with environmental destruction and human suffering. Unfortunately, there is…
The post How to Find Ethical Jewelry appeared first on Earth911.
Amid a divided state Legislature, Pennsylvania Democrats and Republicans are finding rare common ground in a bill designed to usher in a new industry for capturing climate-altering carbon dioxide and burying it underground.
Among other provisions, Senate Bill 831 would create an enforcement structure for carbon capture within the state, set a low bar for gaining consent from landowners near sites where carbon is injected into the ground and, in some cases, spare the fossil fuel industry from seismic monitoring — that is, watching for earthquakes, a known risk.
The bill, sponsored by state Sen. Gene Yaw, a Republican representing north central Pennsylvania who has personal ties to the fossil fuel industry, cleared the Republican-controlled Senate on a 30-20 vote in April. It now moves to the House of Representatives, which is controlled by Democrats.
But a coalition of environmental groups said the bill is riddled with problems. Landowners could be left in the dark when the collected carbon is pumped into the ground near their properties, they said. Additionally, carbon dioxide could eventually leak into the atmosphere, posing a risk to both the environment and public health: In Satartia, Mississippi, a pipeline carrying carbon dioxide ruptured, sending 49 people to the hospital complaining of labored breathing, stomach disorders and mental confusion.
“Our concerns with this were pretty significant,” said Jen Quinn, legislative and political director at the Pennsylvania chapter of the Sierra Club.
In introducing the legislation, Yaw pitched the bill as a proposal to direct state regulators to take over responsibility for the permitting process for carbon dioxide injection wells from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
In reality, the bill, as written, would go much further than that. It would allow operators to inject carbon dioxide into underground geologic formations with permission from just 60 percent of the nearby landowners. It would allow operators to apply for a waiver ceding liability for these wells to the state after 10 years of a well’s completion. And it would allow operators to forgo seismic monitoring of the storage fields into which the carbon dioxide pumped into the earth, if they can prove that the field does not “pose significant risk.”
Several of these provisions, Quinn said, are “setting the bar very low.”
A report by the Ohio River Valley Institute, a nonprofit environmental think tank, showed that no state sets the landowner consent bar at less than 60 percent.
The report also argued that waiving operators’ liability over their carbon storage fields will lead to negligence: Operators that know they won’t be held responsible for any mess in the long run won’t be incentivized to run a clean operation, the report said.
Capital & Main reached out to Sen. Yaw, author of SB 831, and did not hear back by publication time. However, he said in a press release that the bill is a “proactive step” to building out the state’s carbon capture industry.
Environmentalists have long splintered over carbon capture and sequestration, known as CCS. The practice of collecting carbon dioxide from power plants and storing it underground has been criticized as costly, dangerous and largely unproven. While some say it is a useful tool among many for addressing the climate crisis, others call CCS a boondoggle that could offer a lifeline to the fossil fuel industry, which has rallied around the technology.
Environmentalists worry that in Pennsylvania, which has centuries of oil and gas drilling under its belt, the state’s geology could prove treacherous. “This idea that they’re going to go all in on carbon capture and try to inject this stuff in the same places where it’s like Swiss cheese … is just plain stupid,” said Karen Feridun, co-founder of the grassroots Better Path Coalition, a staunch opponent of burying carbon in the earth.
The state is dotted with orphaned and abandoned oil and gas wells, including many that likely have yet to be located. The wells create pathways underground through which gases can travel and potentially seep into waterways or leak into the atmosphere, undoing the progress of capturing the carbon in the first place. A 2009 report by the state’s Department of Conservation and Natural Resources said that the state’s legacy oil and gas fields could “constitute a leakage pathway for reservoir gases, including injected CO2.”
“The safest course of action would be to avoid the oldest of these oil fields,” the report added.
Feridun said she also anticipates that an influx of carbon dioxide injection wells will come with a maze of pipelines to transport the carbon.
Because the bill would permit operators to get consent from only 60 percent of property owners atop an injection site, some landowners would be left without a voice in the process, the southwestern Pennsylvania-based Center for Coalfield Justice warned in an online petition opposing the bill. The petition urges signatories to send a message to their representatives with language such as: “If 40 percent of people within a carbon storage field don’t want carbon injected beneath their feet — the project can move forward anyway.”
Ethan Story, advocacy director at the Center for Coalfield Justice, believes few Pennsylvanians are aware of the bill and what it could mean to them. “Landowners, in addition to elected officials in some communities, are very unaware and uneducated on this proposal,” he said. “The immediate reaction from a majority of the community members that we have talked to and presented this information to has been met with great pause.”
SB 831 has been met with a different reaction in the state Legislature, where it’s earned — and sometimes lost — votes from Democrats and Republicans alike.
Affirmative votes in the Senate came from a handful of Democrats, including state Sens. Jay Costa from Pittsburgh and Christine Tartaglione from Philadelphia. Those who opposed the bill included Sen. Doug Mastriano, a far-right Republican from south central Pennsylvania who made headlines in 2022 with a failed gubernatorial run and his full embrace of various hard-line policies, including a firm pro-fossil fuel stance.
Carbon capture “is, to a degree, cutting across what we would probably classify as traditional ideological divisions,” said Sean O’Leary, senior researcher, energy and petrochemicals, at the Ohio River Valley Institute, a nonprofit think tank.
One of carbon capture’s most crucial endorsements in the state came from Gov. Josh Shapiro. Shapiro, a Democrat, ran on an all-of-the-above strategy for tackling the climate crisis. He has now thrown his weight behind the technology as the state has pursued federal funding for hydrogen hubs. Carbon capture was also recently included in two of the governor’s climate proposals.
“Carbon capture is crucial to Pennsylvania’s energy future,” Shapiro spokesperson Manuel Bonder told Capital & Main. “We are glad to see a bipartisan group of senators agree with the governor that we need to invest in carbon capture and sequestration.
“The Administration looks forward to continuing to work with leaders in both parties to ensure bipartisan legislation contains appropriate environmental, public health, and safety protections as it moves through the legislative process,” Bonder added.
Shapiro’s support for carbon capture could be key to getting SB 831 over the goal line in the Democratically controlled state House, despite warnings from environmentalists. It also has the backing of the Pennsylvania State Building & Construction Trades Council, which makes campaign contributions to members on both sides of the aisle and which has supported fossil fuel and renewable projects alike.
The bill currently sits in the House Consumer Protection, Technology, and Utilities Committee, where a handful of more straightforward climate bills — including one that would improve school district access to solar energy and another that would legalize community solar projects across the commonwealth — have advanced with unanimous support before winning votes on both sides of the aisle on the full floor.
Capital & Main reached out to Democratic Rep. Rob Matzie, chair of the House Consumer Protection, Technology and Utilities Committee, for comment on the bill. Matzie did not respond by publication time. In the past, he has championed bills that proved to be a boon for fossil fuels, including one subsidizing a Shell Chemical Appalachia LLC plastics plant in southwestern Pennsylvania. When Shapiro released his carbon capture-infused energy plan, Matzie signaled his support: “These proposals will create good energy jobs, promote opportunities for technologies that will deliver power while reducing their carbon footprint, and — most importantly — maintain our status as a net exporter of energy,” he said in a news release in March.
It’s an open question whether some of the provisions of SB 831 that are stoking environmentalists’ concern will make it through the House. But Democratic Rep. Emily Kinkead has offered an alternative proposal to the bill that incorporates provisions to protect environmental justice communities that have long been scarred with the detritus of the oil and gas industry. It would also offer heightened protections for landowners situated near carbon sequestration projects. Kinkead, from Pittsburgh, circulated a memo describing the bill on March 25 but has yet to introduce formal legislation.
Kinkead told Capital & Main she’s not certain such legislation will pass, but she hopes it will at least offer a starting point for negotiations to amend SB 831.
“I think the goal of my bill is, at the very least, to demonstrate that we don’t have to do it exactly the way that it’s outlined,” she said. “We can incorporate some better practices.”
If SB 831 passes the House without amendments, O’Leary, the Ohio River Valley Institute senior researcher, fears immediate repercussions for residents. At least one company — Omaha, Nebraska-based Tenaska — is already planning carbon dioxide injection in the fracking-heavy southwestern part of Pennsylvania. The company envisions using 80,000 acres stretching across Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia for up to 20 injection wells that would extend as far as 10,000 feet horizontally underground. This will require a yet unknown number of pipelines. Those who oppose burying carbon under their land, but fall into the 40 percent minority, will be out of luck.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Pennsylvania landowners could be forced to accept carbon dioxide burial on their land on Jun 16, 2024.
