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It’s a truth universally acknowledged that Americans love to stuff their faces with cow meat. There may be nothing more stereotypically American than grilling burgers on the Fourth of July. Meatloaf is a home-cooking classic. And few dishes in the country’s cookbook have the same cachet as steak or match the succulence of a barbecued brisket. In 2021, Americans ate 20 billion pounds of beef. That’s roughly 60 pounds per person, or a Big Mac every other day, plus a Whopper every three or four days. So it’s no wonder that the United States is the world’s top producer of veal and beef.
But this picture of the country’s beef consumption — a major factor in greenhouse gas emissions from U.S. agriculture, which accounts for about one-tenth of the country’s total — is more skewed than the raw numbers might lead you to believe. New research indicates that not all beef eaters are created equal. A small percentage of the country’s population — just 12 percent — accounts for half of the country’s beef consumption on any given day, according to a paper published on Wednesday in the journal Nutrients.
“It’s startling that it’s concentrated among a small minority,” said Diego Rose, a professor at Tulane University and a co-author of the paper.
From a climate standpoint, these beef guzzlers are not all that different from gasoline superusers — the 10 percent of drivers who account for one-third of the country’s gas use. A single cow can belch up to 264 pounds of methane in a year, the equivalent of burning almost 4,000 pounds of coal or driving a gas-powered car about 9,000 miles. That’s why climate advocates say people should eat less beef if they want to help ease climate change. “Beef is kind of like an environmentally extravagant source of protein,” Rose said. “It’s like the Hummer of the protein world.”
According to previous research by Rose and researchers at the University of Michigan, getting Americans to cut their beef consumption by 90 percent – and other animal products by 50 percent – would reduce emissions by the same amount as taking every single car off the road in the U.S., and another 200 million cars off the roads in other countries, for a year. The good news, in other words, is that the entire population of the United States doesn’t need to be convinced; a focus on changing the eating habits of the small group of beef eaters could go a long way.
Who, exactly, comprises that group? “There’s some of everybody,” Rose said, but men and people between the ages of 50 and 65 are most likely to be big beef eaters, the study found. The study doesn’t explain the gender gap, but other research has linked similar findings to a perception that meat is more masculine and to a conclusion that men’s spending habits are worse for the climate than women’s.
The meat-eating gap doesn’t end with gender. College graduates, young people, old people, and people familiar with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s dietary guidelines all tend to eat less beef, the study found. Past surveys have indicated that Republicans are more likely to eat meat (not just beef) than Democrats. And people with higher incomes tend to eat more meat at first but less meat over time compared to people in the low-income bracket.
It’s not clear whether telling people who eat a lot of beef that their eating habits are contributing to global warming would actually make them change their ways. Some research suggests it might. But many people who feel wrong about eating meat still eat a lot of it. Psychologists call this the “meat paradox.” That term originally denoted the cognitive dissonance associated with consuming animal flesh while feeling morally wrong about animal suffering. But the same mental gymnastics appear to be associated with beef consumption and climate change, too.
Still, that doesn’t mean that ethical arguments are ineffective, according to Peter Singer, the moral philosopher and animal rights advocate who has spent much of his life trying to convince people not to eat meat. In a recent article in the Atlantic, he wrote that meat eaters can be convinced that eating meat is wrong, but the effect of that persuasion “is felt most powerfully at the level of the policy changes that voters will support, rather than in people’s choice of what to buy at the supermarket.” Getting money and lobbyists out of politics would be a start, Singer wrote. While his article focused on animal welfare, it might as well have been about climate change. Top U.S. meat and dairy companies have spent millions of dollars trying to kill climate legislation.
Voters, consumers, and political and corporate leaders still seem far from convinced enough to take collective action to lower beef consumption. Arby’s has shunned plant-based meat and even teased critics with its “Marrot” — a carrot look-alike made from turkey meat. One of the main Republican talking points in opposition to the ambitious climate proposal known as the Green New Deal, which aimed to tackle agricultural emissions without mentioning cows, was: “They want to take away your hamburgers.” Two years ago, a fake story made the rounds alleging that President Joe Biden would limit Americans to one hamburger a month. In response, Representative Lauren Boebert, a Republican from Colorado, told the president to “stay out of my kitchen.”
Knowing that a small portion of Americans eat much of the country’s beef won’t make the political climate any less hostile. But it might help hone arguments about the benefits of eating less beef and the dangers of guzzling it.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Beef guzzlers: 12% of Americans eat half of the country’s cow meat on Sep 1, 2023.
When people think about “climate fiction,” they tend to imagine the speculative sci-fi of writers like Kim Stanley Robinson, or perhaps the eco-anxiety that pervades a book like Jenny Offill’s Weather. These are books where the visible effects of the climate crisis dominate the plot or at least the thought patterns of the characters. Lydia Kiesling’s Mobility, which came out last month, is a different kind of climate novel: It tells the story of a young woman who doesn’t think that much about the climate crisis at all, despite her ancillary role in causing it.
The protagonist, Bunny Glenn, works for a small, family-owned oil company, first as an administrative assistant and later as a public-relations executive focused on advancing the interests of “women in energy.” She only took the job because she couldn’t find a better one, and she feels vaguely that there’s something wrong with what she’s doing. Nevertheless, she doesn’t have any plans of quitting. In the words of Gillian Welch, she wants to do right, just not right now.
Though Mobility looks superficially like a story about one woman’s aimless young adulthood and middling professional career, the question of Bunny’s complicity in the destruction of the planet can’t help gushing up, complicating the book’s tale of class anxiety and alienation. Kiesling doesn’t force her preoccupation with climate change on the reader, but she does challenge them to look beyond Bunny’s blinkered consciousness and spot the two-way relationship between individual decisions and the slow progress of planetary collapse.
Kiesling’s first novel, The Golden State, narrates a 10-day span in the life of a young mother who moves out to the California high desert on her own to grapple with her new life as a mother. Right from the start, Mobility takes a different tack: Rather than a one-week snapshot of a young woman’s life, the novel charts that woman’s trajectory over the course of several decades, sweeping from the past through the present and into a not-too-distant future.
But if Mobility is a bildungsroman, it’s a somewhat uneventful one. The narrative opens on Bunny as a teenager in Baku, Azerbaijan, where her father has a Foreign Service posting. Diplomats and oil company officials have descended on the Central Asian nation, jockeying for a share of its all-important Caspian Sea petroleum, but Bunny isn’t thinking much about the “the aboveground oil pipes that snaked through the dirt roads and knobby paved streets” of Baku’s urban sprawl. She’s more focused on Eddie, the documentary filmmaker she has a crush on, and Charlie Kovak, a renegade journalist who looks a little too long in her direction.
The wax remains in Bunny’s ears until well into her twenties, by which time she has moved back in with her mother in Beaumont, Texas, a city home to the enormous Motiva oil refinery complex. Fresh off a breakup and stripped of career prospects thanks to the 2008 recession, she stumbles into doing administrative work for an engineering company, then moves over to the new “energy solutions” unit of a domestic oil company, which is starting to invest in solar and other non-fossil technologies. The oil company, privately held and family-run, comes off as a miniature version of Hunt, complete with a patriarchal executive who resembles industry titan H.L. Hunt. Bunny soon makes herself indispensable to that boss, Frank Turnbridge, whoʻs fond of saying that his company thinks in “geologic time.”
The contrast between individual human lives and larger economic and geological forces is omnipresent in the book, sometimes in Bunny’s thoughts and sometimes in more subtle aesthetic juxtaposition, such as when Bunny orders a chicken Caesar at a work lunch in Beaumont and looks out at a “golf course … pale with heat and refinery haze.” The three sections of the book are labeled “Upstream,” “Midstream,” and “Downstream,” oil industry terms for different stages of the production cycle, and each smaller chapter opens with the index price of U.S. crude oil in the year the chapter takes place. As a result, the reader is reminded that not only economies but also personal lives follow the movements of global commodity markets. By the same token, the “mobility” of the book’s title could refer to Bunnyʻs personal mobility through the class strata of Texas or the spatial mobility we gain by burning oil in cars and airplanes.
In addition to following Bunny’s entanglement with oil, the narrative also follows her evolution into a pathbreaker for professional women. During the first half of the book, we find her on the outside of conversations between more knowledgeable men, first the expat guys in Baku and then the oil buffs at parties in Houston. But by the end of the book Bunny is at an all-women roundtable at a big conference back in Baku, holding her own with other successful professionals from BP and the American embassy who are gathered together for “the promulgation of various agendas.”
Kiesling herself cares a lot about climate change — she’s written an essay about wildfire for the Wall Street Journal and volunteered with Portland mutual aid groups during that city’s heat wave — and Bunny serves as a kind of alternate version of her author. Sheʻs more or less the same age as Kiesling, and both came of age as the child of a prominent diplomat. But the two take very different paths through the labyrinth of millennial existence. Instead of becoming a writer with left-wing politics who lives in a liberal West Coast city, Bunny becomes a materialistic professional in Texas who talks to finance guys at boring weddings. (The descriptions of bourgeois Houston’s rooftop parties and ugly skyscrapers ring true, though one pities Bunny’s commitment to trying all of the cityʻs ethnic cuisines “in some small portion,” given the average size of an entree in that city.)
Almost as if she can hear Kiesling breathing down her neck, Bunny tries to justify her choices, parroting her bossʻs pro-oil arguments in her conversations with her brother’s environmentalist girlfriend. When she loses the argument, she goes for a swim and reposes in the comfort of her industry expertise, “thinking rebelliously about soft salt domes and ancient stones and flat-bottomed barges transported in pieces across the earth.”
As it follows Bunny through the garden of forking paths, the narrative asks us to reflect on all the unintended consequences of mere existence. Like all of us, Bunny comes into contact throughout her life with any number of random people, from petty colleagues in the engineering firmʻs admin pool to one-night stands at the wedding of a childhood friend. Neither she nor the reader can ever know what effect she has on the course of those people’s lives. In just the same way, she can’t recognize her own role in the destruction of the earth — can’t see that after sowing the wind at her women in energy conferences she will someday reap the whirlwind in the form of heat waves and hurricanes. Even someone like this, the book seems to say, has a fearful agency. When describing Bunny’s mother’s new vegetable garden, the narrator notes that “it had taken very little time, in the scheme of things, to totally remake the earth.”
Or maybe not. Toward the end, after a climactic return to Baku and an encounter with an old flame, the timeline starts to move faster, and the external world pushes in to drown out Bunny’s internal monologue. The narrative becomes a haze of headlines about oil and gas mergers, presidential elections, pandemics, and climate disasters. Is this a sign that Bunny’s habitual ignorance is at last giving way to a more defined political consciousness? Or is the narrative pulling away from its head-in-the-sand protagonist, reminding us that the story of the earthʻs collapse is much bigger than mere human emotions?
The novel’s final feint raises a deep set of questions about how to depict climate change in fiction. After first posing as a novel of slow and delayed self-discovery, Mobility at the end almost seems to adopt the structure of classical tragedy, forcing Bunny to live in the world that her work for old Turnbridge’s oil company helped to create. She “wonders whether she would see her father and brother and sister-in-law again,” Kiesling tells us in the final chapter. “Flying was out of the question for Elizabeth; the turbulence had gotten too bad … they could always drive the van somewhere to get out of the smoke for a while.”
It’s unclear whether the external world is taking revenge on Bunny for her actions, a la Sophocles, or whether Bunny just happens to have been alive during a specific chapter of ecological collapse — in other words, it’s unclear whether we should think about the narrative in human time or in geologic time. For Kiesling to provide an answer to this question would also be for her to pass judgment on Bunny, and she avoids doing so. There’s a lesson in there for many climate-conscious readers in a country that has emitted the largest share of historical carbon. However Bunny’s life may differ from our own, we too are both guilty and not.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Forget eco-activists: This climate novel stars an oil industry shill on Sep 1, 2023.
Back in 2015, when 174 countries and the European Union came together to finalize the Paris Agreement, each agreed to do its part to slash greenhouse gas emissions. Signatories put forward their own specific targets — known as “nationally determined contributions,” or NDCs — that would, theoretically, add up to limit global warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit).
It’s been largely up to each country to figure out how to achieve these emissions goals. Some countries have begun transitioning their power sectors away from fossil fuels, for instance. Others have levied a tax on carbon emissions or promoted electric vehicles.
But countries also want to work together to achieve their NDCs — and they’re trying to create a new global carbon market to do so. The idea is to allow emissions reductions in one country to count toward the climate progress of another. A country like Indonesia, for example, could plant trees or build a wind farm instead of a natural gas plant, and the project would generate carbon “credits” representing some amount of prevented or reduced greenhouse gas emissions. Another country like the United States would then purchase the credits and claim them toward its own NDC.
In theory, such a carbon market would unlock cost-effective climate mitigation options that otherwise wouldn’t be available. It would incentivize wealthy countries to pay for the least expensive emissions reductions strategies first — most likely projects in the developing world — before paying for costlier options. According to an independent analysis, a U.N. carbon market could halve the cost of fulfilling countries’ NDCs, saving them $250 billion by 2030. Essentially, this means 50 percent more emissions reductions at no extra cost.
A United Nations panel of experts has been working for the past year to hammer out the details of the new market in time for COP28, the U.N. climate conference that’s being held in the United Arab Emirates this November and December. The goal is for the carbon market to begin operating next year.
But many independent experts and advocacy organizations question whether this market will actually help address climate change. Many of the world’s existing carbon markets are plagued by problems, and environmental groups are afraid that a new one could distract wealthy countries from reducing their own outsize emissions, instead encouraging them to offset emissions with unreliable and sometimes harmful carbon removal projects in the developing world.
Now, some environmental groups are calling for a new paradigm — one that isn’t based on market-based carbon accounting. “The time for offsetting is over,” said Carsten Warnecke, co-founder of the nonprofit NewClimate Institute. “What we need now is something completely different.”
Tradable carbon credits are already in widespread use, both in “compliance” carbon markets overseen by regional governments and in “voluntary” markets facilitated by the private sector. Compliance markets, like the European Union’s Emissions Trading System, are used to meet legally mandated emissions reduction requirements. Voluntary markets are more frequently used by big companies — firms as varied as Apple, Chevron, and Procter and Gamble — to meet nonbinding net-zero targets. However, aside from a 1997 policy that’s in the process of being phased out, the U.N. has lacked its own carbon market operating on a global scale.
The U.N.’s new efforts are grounded in a section of the Paris Agreement called Article 6, which recognizes how international cooperation can promote “higher ambition” in countries’ climate plans. Article 6.4 in particular envisions a market mechanism to “contribute to the mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions and support sustainable development.”. Though the idea behind Article 6.4 has been around since the Paris Agreement was written, the U.N. group in charge of designing it, called the Article 6.4 Supervisory Body, didn’t start convening until last year. Since then it’s had six contentious meetings to hammer out the details.
The new market “needs to be a tool enabling the world to address the ambition gap it is facing,” Kristin Qui, the Supervisory Body’s chair, said in a statement following the latest round of negotiations in July.
Experts have warned that the tool’s effectiveness depends on how the panel addresses the divisive issue of carbon removal: efforts to take carbon out of the atmosphere so it doesn’t contribute to global warming.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a U.N. body composed of the world’s foremost experts on global warming, has made it clear that carbon removal will be necessary for the world to meet its Paris Agreement climate targets. But what kinds of removal should be allowed, and whether they should be used to generate credits in the U.N.’s forthcoming carbon market — those are much more difficult questions, and they’ve become a key sticking point for the Supervisory Body.
There are two broad categories of carbon removal. Biological removal typically involves sequestering carbon in soil and forest ecosystems, or changing agricultural practices to be less emissions-intensive. Almost all removal happening today falls into this category, and most of it is “land-based” biological removal, rather than marine-based (although there is growing interest in storing carbon in algae and seaweed and sinking it to the seafloor).
The other category, known as “engineered” removal, uses chemical reactions to draw CO2 out of the air. Within this category is “direct air capture,” in which carbon is sucked straight out of the atmosphere, and “bioenergy with carbon capture and storage,” or BECCS, in which CO2 emissions from the burning of crops or other biomass are prevented from escaping into the air. The carbon captured from these processes can be stored in underground rock formations or in durable products like concrete.
Both categories have their own controversies. Biological removal projects carry a high risk of “reversal,” meaning they’re susceptible to wildfires, logging, development, or other activities that could cause them to release their carbon after just a few years or decades, essentially nullifying their climate benefit. (CO2 from the combustion of fossil fuels lasts up to 1,000 years in the atmosphere.) This is on top of concerns about biological removal harming local communities and violating Indigenous peoples’ rights by encroaching on their lands.
Many environmental groups, like the Climate Land Ambition and Rights Alliance, or CLARA, would like to exclude most of this type of removal from the Article 6.4 mechanism. The group said in a letter to the Supervisory Body that virtually all land-based removal projects are “wholly inappropriate for a carbon market.” If any removal is allowed in the new market, CLARA said, it should only include “activities that actually remove net carbon from the atmosphere.”
Theoretically, this could include engineering-based activities like direct air capture — the other category of removal, which scientists agree is more likely to result in permanent carbon sequestration. But there are risks to banking on a suite of technologies that are still in the demonstration stage and are not yet able to store carbon in meaningful quantities: Currently, just 0.01 million metric tons of CO2 is stored with engineered activities every year, compared to 2 trillion metric tons with biological removal. Environmental groups are worried that including engineered removal in the Article 6.4 mechanism could justify continued fossil fuel extraction, and that BECCS in particular could harm biodiversity by competing for land. Some experts have called for a blanket ban on these techniques — not only from Article 6.4, but from “any other articles of the Paris Agreement.”
The Supervisory Body, which has generally been bullish on land-based removal, has expressed skepticism about engineering-based activities’ role in the new carbon market. In a memo this spring, the panel said engineering-based activities are “technologically and economically unproven, especially at scale,” adding bluntly that they “do not serve any objectives of the Article 6.4 mechanism.” The memo drew intense backlash from carbon removal companies, which urged the Supervisory Body to reverse its position before finalizing its rules.
In the background of all this debate about the Article 6.4 mechanism, however, there’s a deeper question: Should there be a new market for carbon credits at all? In an open letter published this July, more than 120 environmental organizations told the Supervisory Body: “There should not be carbon markets, especially those that enable offsets, under the Paris Agreement.”
In addition to turning Global South countries into “sacrifice zones,” they said, foreign carbon removal likely won’t represent real, net emissions reductions, and it could discourage wealthy countries from taking immediate action to reduce emissions domestically.
The letter didn’t offer much of an alternative, but many green groups have spent the past few years envisioning a different approach based on climate “contributions.” The idea is to allow countries, companies, and other polluters to continue supporting legitimate conservation and carbon-sequestration activities abroad, but without claiming the resulting emissions reductions in their NDCs, net-zero pledges, or other climate goals.
One version of this approach has appeared in the private sector, where carbon credits used to “offset” ongoing emissions have fallen under intense scrutiny. Instead of funding climate mitigation activities in order to call themselves “net-zero,” some companies have chosen to simply advertise their financial contributions to those activities.
Within Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, the contribution model has drawn attention in two places. The first is actually within Article 6.4, where, during COP27 last year, negotiators agreed to recognize a new kind of carbon credit called a “mitigation contribution” unit. These units could be bought and sold like carbon credits, but they upend the logic of a traditional carbon market because the carbon savings would only count toward emissions reductions in the host country. The donor country would essentially be funding foreign climate mitigation, and could claim progress toward its climate finance goals — promises that rich countries have made to fund climate mitigation and adaptation in the developing world. The donor would remain responsible for reducing emissions domestically, in order to fulfill its NDC.
At COP27, environmental groups said this development signaled an “overdue paradigm shift” that could carry over into the private sector, showing that an alternative to offsetting is “not only possible but better.”
The other place within Article 6 for contribution-based climate action is in Article 6.8, which proposes a web-based platform to facilitate “nonmarket” climate cooperation between countries. Details still need to be ironed out — Article 6.8 is the least-developed part of Article 6 — but proponents have suggested that the platform serve as a kind of “matching facility” to pair countries looking for climate finance with those offering it.
Because this matching facility wouldn’t be governed by market forces, it could give developing countries more latitude to seek funding for projects based on factors other than their potential to mitigate carbon emissions. It elevates what Peter Riggs, CLARA’s co-coordinator, called “co-benefits” — hard-to-quantify but vital objectives like boosting biodiversity, protecting Indigenous rights, and adapting to extreme weather fueled by climate change.
“We feel that 6.8 is actually the better model for contribution because you’re not limited to a carbon metric,” Riggs said, although he added that both this approach and the mitigation contribution units in 6.4 could move things in the right direction.
For now, environmental groups are awaiting an updated Article 6.4 draft that the Supervisory Body is expected to publish before its next meeting in mid-September — a “bellwether,” according to Riggs, that will signal the direction the body’s negotiations will take before COP28. In the near term, it’s likely that activists will focus on blocking the least reliable kinds of carbon removal from Article 6.4’s offset-based carbon market, but Riggs said he’s hopeful that growing recognition of the “shakiness” of the standard offsetting approach could help give more of a foothold to the contribution-based alternatives.
A work program to flesh out Article 6.8 is scheduled to take place in two phases over the next three years, with a progress review set for sometime in 2026.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline As the UN designs a new carbon market, experts call for a different approach on Sep 1, 2023.
A new study found trace amounts of nuclear waste in sea turtles in the Marshall Islands and five locations in the continental United States, underscoring the enduring legacy of nuclear testing and weapons development.
The analysis, published in the journal PNAS Nexus, looked at turtle and tortoise shells at locations tied to nuclear testing including Southwestern Utah, the Oak Ridge Reservation in Tennessee, the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, and the Barry M. Goldwater Air Force Range in Arizona.
Cyler Conrad, an archaeologist at the University of New Mexico who led the study along with 22 other researchers, said the team found evidence of uranium radionuclides in the shells of turtles and tortoises at all five sites. He added that contamination amounts were so small that it’s doubtful the animals experienced health impacts.
“If you take a paperclip and divide it a million times, if you take a millionth piece of that and divide it another million times, that’s about the same quantity that we’re measuring in some of these shells,” Conrad said.
Still, Conrad says the findings are significant because they illustrate how turtles and tortoises, in part due to their long lives and metabolic processes, are able to retain nuclear contamination in their tissues. According to Conrad, turtle shells grow in a sequential style, similar to tree rings, and record isotopic elements such as uranium-236 from spent nuclear fuel.
The study is the first that Conrad knows of that identifies nuclear contamination in turtles in the Marshall Islands, but it’s far from the first to find evidence of historical, military-related pollution in wildlife there. In 2019, a U.S. Army study found dangerous levels of polychlorinated biphenyls, more commonly known as PCBs, and arsenic in fish around Kwajalein Island in the Marshalls, which has served as a U.S. military base for decades and is currently part of the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site.
PCBs are synthetic organic chemicals that are long-lasting in the environment and can be harmful to human health. Another recent study found pollution in fish, including high levels of mercury and lead, surrounding several Marshallese atolls.
The paper also builds upon decades of research illustrating how nuclear waste bioaccumulates in sea creatures. Conrad said the study’s methodology of analyzing shells is new, but noted past studies have found previous evidence of radionuclides in turtles. A 2020 study of sea turtles in the Montebello Islands found contamination of turtle eggs and tissues.
The findings coincide with Japan’s decision to release treated, contaminated wastewater from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant into the Pacific Ocean. The move prompted China to ban seafood from Japan, inspired protests in Fiji and South Korea and has particularly frustrated Indigenous peoples in the Pacific who have spent decades fighting against the dumping of nuclear waste in the region. Between 1946 and 1958, the Marshall Islands were the site of 67 U.S. nuclear tests, leading to health and environmental harms that the Indigenous people of the islands continue to grapple with.
Conrad hopes the study inspires more research into turtles and tortoises and how they record nuclear history.
“They’re taking in all of this information, they’re depositing this, and they’re acting as a really critical library for us to be able to reconstruct the history of the world in different ways,” Conrad said. “They’re experiencing what humans are experiencing and they’re able to record this in a very unique way.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Researchers find nuclear fingerprints in sea turtle shells on Aug 31, 2023.
Engaging in nature-based activities is an effective way for everyone in the family to improve mental health….
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This coverage is made possible through a partnership with WABE and Grist, a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future.
On a punishingly hot August morning, Jake Price walked through his rows of citrus trees, tucked in the back corner of a field behind an elementary school. They looked like an image right out of a commercial for Florida orange juice: lush, leafy trees, many of them laden with plump fruit.
Only this wasn’t in Florida, it was in Georgia.
Price is an extension agent for the University of Georgia in Lowndes County, and his trees are in Valdosta, about half an hour from the Florida border. He’s growing several kinds of small citrus fruit, including a type of mandarin known as a tango, one of the easy-to-peel varieties that’s easy to throw in a kid’s school lunch.
“Look how much fruit this tree has,” Price said, approaching one of the tango trees. “There’s probably 25 pounds per tree on these.”
Citrus is a new crop for Georgia, one that’s taking root thanks to the combined forces of climate change, crop science, and disease in Florida. Although that citrus powerhouse is just to the south, historically it’s been just enough colder in Georgia to discourage farmers from growing citrus. Freezing was considered too big a risk, a threat that could take out the fruit just as it’s ripening.
But a new citrus industry in Georgia is growing rapidly. There were very few citrus trees in the state a decade ago. Now, there are more than 500,000 trees across nearly 4,000 acres.
The burgeoning industry faced its biggest test yet last winter. Around Christmas, citrus trees in southern Georgia had to weather six days below freezing. Many of their leaves shriveled up and died. By January, the frigid air had killed limbs and split huge wounds into trunks and branches, weakening them permanently. Farmers worried the freeze could hurt their new crop.
But Price isn’t a farmer. He’s a scientist, so the cold snap became an experiment.
Most citrus trees are hybrids: a delicious fruit like tangos grafted onto the roots of a variety with other desirable traits, like a manageable size or resistance to pests and diseases. Price is conducting a study to find out which rootstocks weathered the freeze well and which took a lot of damage or are struggling to bounce back.
“It’s kind of a rare opportunity to get some data on which rootstocks give the best cold protection on these tangos, so I’m gonna get it while the getting’s good,” Price said.
Farmers will be able to use his findings to ensure they’re planting trees that can weather Georgia winters, which aren’t as cold as they used to be.
“I just remember being cold a lot,” Price said of his childhood in the 1970s. “You would be cold in October. But now, October, we’re still in the 90s sometimes.”
Climate change is heating up winters especially fast. The average winter temperature in Albany, Georgia, has risen 6.5 degrees Fahrenheit since 1970, according to Climate Central. That means fewer sustained freezes, so Georgia is increasingly fertile ground for citrus.
Farmer Justin Jones decided to take advantage of these changes when he was looking to diversify his crops. He was growing the Georgia staples of pecans and cotton at his farm near Albany, in southwest Georgia, but wanted to add something new to the mix.
“It goes back to the old adage, just don’t put all your eggs in one basket,” he said. “Spread out your risk a little bit.”
Farming always involves risk from the weather, diseases, insects, and all kinds of other factors that can affect crop yields. And climate change is throwing new curveballs at growers.
Peaches — the state’s iconic fruit, though far from its largest crop — need a certain amount of chill hours in winter to produce fruit, so the same winter warming that’s helping citrus is hurting peaches. And in 2018, Hurricane Michael, which rapidly gained strength as it approached the Florida Panhandle thanks to warmer water temperatures, cut a wide swath of devastation across southwest Georgia farms, hurting that year’s crop and doing long-term damage to peach and pecan trees.
This year, Georgia peaches are in crisis. An unusually warm January and February coaxed peach trees to bloom early. A typical seasonal freeze in March then devastated the blossoms. The federal government declared a natural disaster in 18 Georgia counties following the freeze, to help farmers cope. Similar dynamics have also slammed Georgia blueberries in the past few years, even though blueberries are usually one of the top 10 crops in the state.
In his bid to spread out his risks by diversifying, Jones found citrus appealing because it has the potential to make good money: Each tree can bear a lot of fruit, so farmers can get a lot of revenue out of each acre. Because the industry is so new in Georgia, he was also able to open a packing house — an additional revenue stream. Jones now grows satsumas and navel oranges.
“We have a piece of fruit that looks like it’s grown in California, but tastes like it’s grown in Florida, which is what everybody wants,” he said.
Georgia growers like Jones are also taking advantage of an opening in the citrus market created by disease. Citrus greening, caused by bacteria spread by a bug known as the Asian citrus psyllid, has devastated Florida’s citrus industry since it first arrived in 2005. As of 2022, the state had less than half the citrus acres it did in the 1990s.
“Unfortunately, in the farming community, in the farming world, somebody has to do bad for somebody to do good,” said Jones.
Growers in Georgia are taking steps to keep out the disease that’s decimated Florida’s citrus, and Senator Jon Ossoff, a Georgia Democrat, is now pushing for the state to have a seat on a national panel on citrus disease.
“We have to be conscious of what we’re doing here in Georgia, in order to protect not only our industry, but our sister state industry,” said Lindy Savelle, president of the Georgia Citrus Association.
Despite the disease and the recent growth of Georgia citrus, Florida still has about 100 times the citrus acreage Georgia does. And the nascent industry is an even smaller fraction of Georgia’s overall agricultural output, which boasts more than a million acres of cotton, over 600,000 acres of peanuts, and about 20,000 acres of blueberries, compared to just 4,000 acres of citrus.
Still, the industry is gaining steam. This year, the state legislature established a citrus commodity commission, a signal it’s becoming a big enough crop to need research and marketing.
Last winter’s sustained freeze will likely hurt this year’s citrus crop, as trees that took heavy damage expend their energy regrowing limbs and leaves instead of producing fruit. But because citrus ripens in late fall and winter, Price and other experts said the trees have time to recover and regrow — unlike the peach trees that had their delicate blooms destroyed by the later freeze in March.
Now that Georgia’s small citrus growers have shown they can survive a bad winter, Savelle said, bigger farms are getting interested.
“The confidence level of our growers is continuing to go up,” she said. “They realize, ‘Well, my gosh, if I can handle 17, 15 degrees for four days, that’s a 30-year weather event. I think I can do this.’”
Even though the freeze may hurt this year’s crop, Savelle said it was also a big test — and Georgia citrus passed.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline As winters warm, the citrus industry squeezes into Georgia on Aug 31, 2023.
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