Milk may do a body good, but it’s not so kind to the planet. Milk’s…

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Many Americans stockpiled toilet paper, among other things, during the pandemic, and continue to overbuy…

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Meet Michelle Carnevale, president of 11th Hour Racing, which advocates for sustainability and ocean health…

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Summers keep getting hotter, and the consequences are impossible to miss: In the summer of 2023, the Northern Hemisphere experienced its hottest season in 2,000 years. Canada’s deadliest wildfires on record bathed skylines in smoke from Minnesota to New York. In Texas and Arizona, hundreds of people lost their lives to heat, and in Vermont, flash floods caused damages equivalent to those from a hurricane. 

Forecasts suggest that this year’s upcoming “danger season” has its own catastrophes in store. On May 23, scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that the 2024 Atlantic hurricane season could be the most prolific yet. A week earlier, they released a seasonal map predicting blistering temperatures across almost the entire country. 

One driving force behind these projections are the alternating Pacific Ocean climate patterns known as El Niño and La Niña, which can create huge shifts in temperature and precipitation across the North and South American continents. After almost a year of El Niño, La Niña is expected to take the reins sometime during the upcoming summer months. As climate change cooks the planet and the Pacific shifts between these two cyclical forces, experts say the conditions could be ripe for more extreme weather events.

“We’ve always had this pattern of El Niño, La Niña. Now it’s happening on top of a warmer world,” said Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth, an environmental data science nonprofit. “We need to be ready for the types of extremes that have not been tested in the past.”

During an El Niño, shifting trade winds allow a thick layer of warm surface water to form in the Pacific Ocean, which, in turn, transfers a huge amount of heat into the atmosphere. La Niña, the opposite cycle, brings back cooler ocean waters. But swinging between the two can also raise thermostats: Summers between the phases have higher-than-average temperatures. According to Hausfather, a single year of El Niño brings the same heat that roughly a decade of human-caused warming can permanently add to the planet. “I think it gives us a little sneak peek of what’s in store,” he said.

Since the World Meteorological Organization declared the start of the current El Niño on July 4, 2023, it’s been almost a year straight of record-breaking temperatures. According to the National Centers for Environmental Information, there’s a 61 percent chance that this year could be even hotter than the last, spelling danger for areas prone to deadly heat waves during the summer months. An estimated 2,300 people in the U.S. died due to heat-related illnesses in 2023, and researchers say the real number is probably higher.

All this heat has also settled into the oceans, creating more than a year of super-hot surface temperatures and bleaching more than half of the planet’s coral reefs. It also provides potential fuel for hurricanes, which form as energy is sucked up vertically into the atmosphere. Normally, trade winds scatter heat and humidity across the water’s surface and prevent these forces from building up in one place. But during La Niña, cooler temperatures in the Pacific Ocean weaken high-altitude winds in the Atlantic that would normally break up storms, allowing hurricanes to more readily form. 

“When that pattern in the Pacific sets up, it changes wind patterns around the world,” said Matthew Rosencrans, a lead forecaster at NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center. “When it’s strong, it can be the dominant signal on the entire planet.”

This year’s forecast is especially dangerous, as a likely swift midsummer transition to La Niña could combine with all that simmering ocean water. NOAA forecasters expect these conditions to brew at least 17 storms big enough to get a name, roughly half of which could be hurricanes. Even a hurricane with relatively low wind speeds can dump enough water to cause catastrophic flooding hundreds of miles inland.

“It’s important to think of climate change as making things worse,” said Andrew Dessler, climate scientist at Texas A&M University. Although human-caused warming won’t directly increase the frequency of hurricanes, he said, it can make them more destructive. “It’s a question of how much worse it’s going to get,” he said. 

Over the past 10 months, El Niño helped create blistering temperatures in some parts of the United States, drying out the land. Drought-stricken areas are more vulnerable to severe flooding, as periods without precipitation mean rainfall is likely to be more intense when it finally arrives, and soils may be too dry to soak up water. As desiccated land and soaring temperatures dry out vegetation, the stage is set for wildfires.

While the National Interagency Fire Center expects lower than average odds of a big blaze in California this year, in part due to El Niño bringing unusually high rainfall to the state, other places may not be so lucky. The agency’s seasonal wildfire risk map highlights Hawaiʻi, which suffered the country’s deadliest inferno partly as a result of a persistent drought in Maui last August. Canada, which also experienced its worst fire season last summer, could be in for more trouble following its warmest ever winter. This May, smoke from hundreds of wildfires in Alberta and British Columbia had already begun to seep across the Canadian border into Midwestern states. 

“We are exiting the climate of the 20th century, and we’re entering a new climate of the 21st century,” Dessler said. Unfortunately, our cities were built for a range of temperatures and weather conditions that don’t exist anymore.

To get ready for hurricanes, Rosencrans said people who live in states along the Gulf Coast and Atlantic Ocean should go to government disaster preparedness websites to find disaster kit checklists and advice about forming an emergency plan. “Thinking about it now, rather than when the storm is bearing down on you, is going to save you a ton of time, energy, and stress,” he said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Why this summer might bring the wildest weather yet on Jun 3, 2024.

In 2019, Australia was on the cusp of approving a new coal mine on traditional Wirdi land in Queensland that would have extracted approximately 40 million tons of coal each year for 35 years. The Waratah coal mine would have destroyed a nature refuge and emitted 1.58 billion tons of carbon dioxide. 

But that didn’t happen, thanks to the advocacy of Murrawah Maroochy Johnson, a 29-year-old Wirdi woman of the Birri Gubba Nation, who led a lawsuit against the coal company in 2021, and won. 

The case was groundbreaking in many ways, but perhaps most strikingly, Johnson’s work helped set a new legal precedent that pushed members of the court to travel to where First Nations people lived in order hear their testimonies and perspectives, instead of expecting Indigenous people to travel long distances to settler courts. The lawsuit was also the first to successfully use Queensland’s new human rights law to challenge coal mining, arguing that greenhouse gas emissions from the Waratah coal mine would harm Indigenous peoples and their cultural traditions. Because of the litigation, the mine’s permit was denied in 2022, and its appeal failed last year.

Because of her work, Johnson is now among several of this year’s winners of the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize honoring global grassroots environmental activism.

The last few years have been transformative for Johnson, who is the mother of a toddler and expecting her second baby in a few weeks. Grist spoke with her to learn about what motivates her, how she views the climate crisis, and what other young Indigenous activists can learn from her work. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q. You have been working on behalf of your people since you were 19 years old. What drives you to do this work? 

A. It’s definitely not a choice. First contact here was just 235 years ago. At that point, terra nullius was declared, which said that the land belonged to nobody, which essentially means that the first interaction with colonizing invading powers was one of dehumanization. They saw us here, but to say that the land belonged to no one really says that we are subhuman. They deemed us of a status where we couldn’t own our own land even though they saw us here inhabiting our own lands, living and thriving. And so there’s a long legacy of resistance in first contact frontier wars but also through advocacy over the generations. I’m just a young person who gets to inherit that great legacy.

I was raised by very strong parents. My father, my grandfather, my great grandparents, were all resistance fighters. There’s a lot of responsibility that comes with inheriting that legacy and feeling like you need to do your part. But also, I feel like it’s not a choice because at the end of the day, what’s real is our people, our law, our custom — no matter the colonial apparatus attempts to disappear us, dilute us, absorb us into homogenous Australian mainstream and complete the assimilation process. To me, that’s continued injustice that our people face. And every First Nations person, I feel, every Indigenous person, has an obligation to resist that as well. Because at the end of the day, we First Nations people here in Australia, we are the oldest continuous living culture on the planet, and what comes with that is the fact that we have the oldest living creation stories, we have the oldest living law and custom. That in and of itself is so significant that we can’t just allow it to be washed away. I think that there has to be a continued active effort, by my generation and all future generations, to maintain our ways.

For us, colonial, Western, white contact is just such a small blip in time for how long our people have been here and how long we’ve maintained our ways and law and custom and culture. We have to collectively acknowledge that we have a duty of care and responsibility to maintain the way of our people. I’m really proud of being able to inherit that and also having a responsibility to protect and maintain it.

Q. Can you tell me about your perspective on climate change? 

A. It’s always called human-induced climate change, but I think that that term doesn’t allow for colonial powers to be held accountable, or big polluters. I think it’s actually more accurate to say that it’s colonial-induced climate change, because it’s actually the process of colonization violently extracting and exploiting the resources of Indigenous nations, peoples’ land, especially in the Global South, that’s resulted in the crisis of climate change that we face today. 

I see climate change not just as a crisis, but also an opportunity. In one sense, if what remains of our cultural knowledge is so intimately dependent on our land, and having access to our lands and waters, then climate change is a huge threat. For example, in the Torres Strait and throughout the Pacific, what do you actually do when your country, your homelands, your territory disappears because of the impacts of climate change? What does that mean for our identity that actually derives from being the people of that unique country and that unique place? Climate change could really signal finality of our diverse and distinct and unique cultural identities as Indigenous and First Nations people in the sense that land may become so changed or so disappeared that our people are no longer able to resonate or recognize or identify with it anymore or learn from it anymore. So that’s really scary. 

But I think the other side is an opportunity because climate change creates a sense of urgency. It’s that sense of urgency that is going to be pushing our peoples to work collectively as Indigenous and First Nations people around the world, to highlight the importance of the shift required to address climate change, but also to recenter our traditional systems of caring for country and sustainability and living in harmony with the land as a solution to climate change — really combat this normalization of colonial history and the global system and power systems as unquestionable. 

Q. That reminds me of how, on the video announcing your Goldman Prize, you mentioned that “there’s a lot to be learned from our ways of being.” Can you expand on that idea? 

A. We’re at this moment where we can really take the best of our traditional ways of being and really use that to influence the decisions that we make about our future. What real climate justice is, to me, is really drawing on the greatest strengths that we have in terms of our traditional law and custom, using that as a guidance system in terms of the decisions we make about what the future looks like.

If you’re going to shift the entire global economy and global structure of how business is done, then you want to be talking to the experts. So you want to be talking to First Nations people and knowledge holders. I think climate change will ultimately lead those who are committed to the current system to be forced to be exposed to the reality that a lot of First Nations people have been living with for a long time: that this current global system doesn’t work for us. In the context of capitalism, it’s designed to work against us and facilitate outcomes for very few. 

Climate change is here because of the current global systems, and that means that, eventually, the system will become obsolete. It already is when it comes to the survival of humanity. I think that ultimately people will come to see that the system doesn’t work for them. It’s never been designed to work for the masses. 

So, I really see a huge shift toward leadership from First Nations people. Indigenous or non-Indigenous, people — this is my hope here in Australia — start to act in accordance with traditional principles of caring for country law and custom and really reestablishing old ways, governing ways, of these lands. I think that’s the only way to really address climate change. And maybe I’ve got a huge imagination, but I see it as part of my responsibility to work as hard as I can toward that goal of creating that reality, one in which a modern society essentially adheres to First Nations law and custom in a modern context.

Q. You’ve talked a lot about the importance of drawing from traditional knowledge. When I think about what it means to be Indigenous, I think about both the knowledge we have and also the challenge in bringing that forward because of how colonialism has eroded our ties to both culture and land. What would you say to Indigenous people who care about land and culture, but are feeling disconnected from both? How do they find their way back? 

A. This is one that I actually really struggle with sometimes because in the Australian context here, we had the Stolen Generation, when Indigenous children were forcibly removed from their parents and indoctrinated. So you have whole generations that have been dispossessed of their cultural inheritance, of their families, and also their peoples have been dispossessed of future generations as well. The colonial process was a finely tuned machine by the time it came through the South Pacific and Australia. In one sense, we’re fortunate that it was only just over 230 years ago first contact happened, but at the same time, this colonial apparatus was so finely tuned that they didn’t need as long to do as much damage as they’ve been able to do.  

Being in a settler colony, we’re dealing with mass incarceration, mass suicide rates, and the disappearing of our people. It feels like it’s hard to catch up. We can’t take a break or catch our breath because we’re dealing with the very real, frontier issues of losing our people. But at the same time, what’s required for healing and to actually rebuild our cultural strength is time. And actually being able to take the time to be on country, to sit with country, to learn, and to reconnect. 

It’s this really delicate tug of war that all First Peoples who have been subject to colonialism have to face, and we have to sort of grapple with on a daily basis, what do we put our energy into? Am I fighting forced child removals and assimilation on the daily? Am I fighting the education system? Am I doing land and country work and going through the legal system? Or am I just sort of operating as an individual, sovereign person, under our own law and custom and that’s how I resist and maintain my strength? It’s so vast in terms of how we have to split ourselves up in a way to deal with the issues at hand, which essentially is the disappearance of our people, but also our way of life and custom. 

At the end of the day, for me, I just have to take heed from my ancestors and my own people that we’ve seen the end of the world before. My great grandparents and their generation saw the end of their world already, and they’ve been fighting. They were in the physical frontier on the front line, and survived that, and saw everything that they knew to be ripped away from them. So I have to just acknowledge that I’m very lucky to be born in the generation I’m born in, with so much more opportunity. But at the same time, there is that huge gap in familiarity with culture and our ways. 

Q. Before your successful litigation against the Warratah mine, you fought against the Carmichael mine, filing lawsuit after lawsuit. But the mine still opened in 2021 and is now in operation. How do you handle such setbacks, and the grief of climate trauma and colonialism? What would you say to other Indigenous activists who are dealing with similar challenges? 

A. Being a young person, going through that, it’s really hard. You’re up against the actual powers that be of the colonial apparatus: the state government, the federal government, the mining lobby itself, and this idea that our traditional lands should be destroyed for extraction and exploitation for the benefit of everybody else. For the benefit of the state in terms of royalties, and for the benefit of the rest of settler Australia, where we, the people and our lands, are the collateral damage. And so for a long time I was very heartbroken, very depressed. For a long time I didn’t know what my next steps were. 

But the reality is that I feel very much so guarded by my ancestors and all our people. I had time to mourn and get back on my feet before the opportunity to join the Youth Verdict case against the Waratah coal mine came along. 

All I can say is we kept going. We’re fighting for our people, every single day. And something that I was always reminded of along the way was that even though it might not be the silver bullet that makes significant change, it’s still important that we create our own legacy of resistance and that we do our best every day to maintain what we hold dear.

We’ve got to do the work because we’ve got to do the work. It stands on its own and it’s our obligation as traditional custodians every day to do the work of maintaining and protecting country. We put on the record that we don’t consent, this isn’t free, prior, and informed consent as we are entitled under the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. And every step of the way, just maintaining that resistance, even if it’s just telling our story and challenging the prevailing, dominant, colonial narrative, I think is important to do every single day. 

So in terms of advice, I think it’s to keep going. Take a break when you need to. And have a cry, because I cried for like eight years straight, but I think just knowing what some of my own people have been through and the horrors that they had to deal with, it’s the responsibility that we inherit to maintain the fight and continue on as best we can. 

We might not be able to solve everything in one or two generations. But again, we’re the oldest living culture on the face of the earth. So, in that respect, we’ve been here the longest and, as long as my generation and our future generations maintain our own identities, cultural identities, and resistance as best as we can, we’ll be here long into the future as well. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How an Aboriginal woman fought a coal company and won on Jun 3, 2024.

Composting is a magic process where kitchen waste transforms into rich, black soil. Even those…

The post 10 Weird Things You Can Actually Compost appeared first on Earth911.

This story was originally published by CapitalB.

The story of  “John Doe 1” of the Democratic Republic of the Congo is tucked in a lawsuit filed five years ago against several U.S. tech companies, including Tesla, the world’s largest electric vehicle producer.

In a country where the Earth hides its treasures beneath its surface, those who chip away at its bounty pay an unfair price. As a pre-teen, his family could no longer afford to pay his $6 monthly school fee, leaving him with one option: a life working underground in a tunnel, digging for cobalt rocks. 

But soon after he began working for roughly 2 U.S. dollars per day, the child was buried alive under the rubble of a collapsed mine tunnel. His body was never recovered. 

The nation, fractured by war, disease, and famine, has seen more than 6 million people die since the mid-1990s, making its conflict the deadliest since World War II. But, in recent years, the death and destruction have been aided by the growing number of electric vehicles humming down American streets.

In 2022, the U.S., the world’s third-largest importer of cobalt, spent nearly $525 million on the mineral, much of which came from the Congo.

As America’s dependence on the Congo has grown, Black-led labor and environmental organizers here in the U.S. have worked to build a transnational solidarity movement. Activists also say that the inequities faced in the Congo relate to those that Black Americans experience. And thanks in part to social media, the desire to better understand what’s happening in the Congo has grown in the past 10 years. In some ways, the Black Lives Matter movement first took root in the Congo after the uprising in Ferguson in 2014, advocates say. And since the murder of George Floyd and the outrage over the Gaza war, there has been an uptick in Congolese and Black American groups working on solidarity campaigns.

Throughout it all, the inequities faced by Congolese people and Black Americans show how the supply chain highlights similar patterns of exploitation and disenfranchisement.

Bakari Height, the transit equity organizer at the Labor Network for Sustainability, says the global harm caused by the energy transition and the inability of Black Americans to participate in it at home are for a simple reason. 

“We’re always on the menu, but we’re never at the table,” he said. “The space of transportation planning and climate change is mostly white people, or people of color that aren’t Black, so these discussions about exploitation aren’t happening in those spaces — it is almost like a second form of colonialism.”

Height said, however, when Black people are in the room, these conversations are not only more prevalent, but also more action-oriented. His organization supports Black workers and helps craft policies that support “bold climate action in ways that address labor concerns without sacrificing what science is telling us is necessary.”

While the American South has picked up about two-thirds of the electric vehicle production jobs, Black workers there are more likely to work in non-unionized warehouses, receiving less pay and protections. The White House has also failed to share data that definitively proves whether Black workers are receiving these jobs, rather than them just being placed near Black communities. 

“Automakers are moving their EV manufacturing and operations to the South in hopes of exploiting low labor costs and making higher profits,” explained Yterenickia Bell, an at-large council member in Clarkston, Georgia, last year. While Georgia has been targeted for investment by the Biden administration, workers are “refusing to stand idly by and let them repeat a cycle that harms Black communities and working families.”

Solidarity activism reached a national stage last week at the Morehouse College graduation ceremony, when professors at the school sent clear messages to President Joe Biden. Samuel Livingston and Cynthia Hewitt unfurled a Congolese flag as Biden gave his speech. And Dr. Taura Taylor, wearing a DRC pin on her cap, stood up, raised her fist and turned her back to the president. Yet, less publicized has been the work of Congolese and Black American groups building bridges, including the Congo Initiative based in the Congo and the D.C.-based group Friends of the Congo.

Friends of the Congo has worked on several educational campaigns at home, brought Black Americans to the Congo for activism trips, and offered regular support to Congolese youth leaders. 

The work is sorely needed, as “John Doe 1’s” story has only become more common in the country. 

Roughly 75 percent of the world’s reserves of cobalt, the precious mineral with a sometimes reddish, teal, or violet tint needed for cellphones, laptops, and electric car batteries, lie under the chalky surface. 

On average, an electric vehicle battery requires 30 pounds of cobalt, meaning millions of tons of the mineral is needed for America’s EV boom, which will continue to push thousands of Black women, men, and children into pits and tunnels. In the U.S., these battery packs range from around $7,000 to nearly $30,000, while Congolese miners make mere dollars for mining most of the material found in them. 

“The country,” explained Maurice Carney, executive director of Friends of the Congo, “was designed for extraction, not development.” 

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“Cobalt mining is the slave farm perfected”

Of the 255,000 Congolese citizens mining for cobalt, 40,000 are children. They are not only exposed to physical threats but environmental ones. Cobalt mining pollutes critical water sources, plus the air and land. It is linked to respiratory illnesses, food insecurity, and violence. 

Still, in March, a U.S. court ruled on the case, finding that American companies could not be held liable for child labor in the Congo, even as they helped intensify the prevalence. 

Companies operating in the country are “primarily concerned about their own welfare, filling their own pockets. They’re not really concerned about the welfare of the Congolese people,” Carney said earlier this year. 

Carney, a former research consultant for the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, has spent years pointing out the link between the Congolese and Black American struggles.  

“What we say to people is that in a country that’s so critical to the future of the planet, a country that we’re all connected to through our cellphones and iPads or electric vehicles — even if you’re in California, you’re connected to the Congo,” he said. 

“Congolese women have the highest metallic content in the body in the world because they’re digging in the soil to get those minerals,” he added.

Similarly, in the U.S., as poor birth outcomes have been linked to higher exposure to pollutants, pregnant Black women are more likely to live in poor-quality environments compared to white women.

Cobalt accounts for as much as 60 percent of the batteries that drive our lives because the mineral possesses a unique electron configuration that allows the battery to remain stable at higher energy densities. This means cobalt-heavy batteries can hold more charge. 

While there has been a push to use alternative minerals in electric batteries, most other options are unstable and unsafe for the user. Some experts have argued that the U.S. should turn its attention to Canada, which is among the top five countries producing cobalt and the only nation in the Western Hemisphere with deposits of all the minerals required to make next-generation electric batteries. But it is a more costly venture that, to this point, has yet to make waves in the U.S. 

In the interim, no one knows how many women, men, and children have been killed in the Congolese operations, but the tally, which is likely to be thousands of lives per year, is expected to rise, researchers believe.

In the coming years, it is estimated that more than half of the world’s cobalt will be used just for EVs. The federally subsidized push to increase electric vehicle production by 2030 calls for a 15-fold increase in battery production. Already, the nation’s imports of cobalt increased by 35 percent from 2021 to 2022. 

Still, the U.S. has been slow to acknowledge its role. 

In a February White House press briefing about the U.S.’ effects and efforts on the environment across the African continent, the Congo and cobalt were never mentioned. And earlier this month, Amos Hochstein, White House senior adviser for energy and investment, encouraged mining minerals in “risky” countries in the name of the clean energy transition.

“We can all live in the capitals and cities around the world and say, ‘I don’t want to do business there.’ But what you are really saying is we’re not going to have an energy transition,” he said. “Because the energy transition is not going to happen if it can only be produced where I live, under my standards.”

The Congo is home to more than 90 times the amount of cobalt reserves found in the U.S., where Native American tribes are being exploited for the resource. (Over two-thirds of America’s cobalt is on Native American land.) 

It is one of several movements around the clean energy transition where workers and activists are highlighting how the greening of the world is coming at the expense of Black and Native lives.

Recently, the push for mining in the Congo has reached new heights because of a rift in China-U.S. relations regarding EV production. Earlier this month, the Biden administration issued a 100-percent tariff on Chinese-produced EVs to deter their purchase in the U.S.

Currently, China owns about 80 percent of the legal mines in the Congo, but tens of thousands of Congolese people work in “artisanal” mines outside these facilities, where there are no rules or regulations, and where the U.S. gets much of its cobalt imports.  

“Cobalt mining is the slave farm perfected,” wrote Siddharth Kara last year in the award-winning investigative book Cobalt Red: How The Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives. “It is a system of absolute exploitation for absolute profit.”

While it is the world’s richest country in terms of wealth from natural resources, Congo is among the poorest in terms of life outcomes. Of the 201 countries recognized by the World Bank Group, it has the 191st lowest life expectancy.

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Dreaming of actual societal benefits

The exploitation of Black workers in the Congo has contributed to some Black transit activists in the U.S. not fully supporting the transition to electric vehicles, despite the benefits for health and reducing pollution for some Black communities at home. The American Lung Association says 110,000 lives would be saved and 2.7 million childhood asthma attacks avoided by 2050 if Biden’s goals are reached and transportation pollution is lowered. 

But today, although EVs do not directly emit fossil fuels, the energy generated to charge an EV mainly comes from polluting fossil fuel power plants, which are disproportionately found in Black communities.

The activists say that moving toward more mass transit options would create actual societal benefits.

 “We don’t all live in big cities, but mass transit is still 100 percent the better option,” Height said. “More investment in mass transit options gives us different ways and methods of looking at how we can clean up many of these systems.”

While America’s dependence on cars has grown to the second highest globally, American buses, subways, and light rail lines consistently have lower ridership levels, fewer service hours, and longer waits than those in virtually every comparable country. 

It is true, Height acknowledged, that electric buses still rely on cobalt, but investment in mass transit options would dramatically lower the nation’s dependence on the mineral and the need for new infrastructure. Infrastructure, he said, that is not being used. Since 2021, the federal government has doled out nearly $10 billion for public electric vehicle charging infrastructure, for example, but only four states have built stations using the money. 

As it is now, EVs are also perpetuating economic inequality. Statistically, most households purchasing EVs earn more than $100,000 per year. The median Black household takes in just $46,000 annually, which could explain why only 2 percent of EV drivers are Black. 

Height believes that these discrepancies show the need for other investment options. While the Biden administration has allocated more than $65 billion for electric vehicles, the nation’s biggest climate spending bill allocated just $1 billion for clean heavy-duty vehicles like buses.

The investment, Height said, also “needs to come with a behavioral shift. People need to question: Do you really need a vehicle if you’re going to the same place that your neighbor is going, or the same direction as the people down the street? 

“We need to do it before this next individualistic idea of you get an EV, you get an EV, and you get an EV takes root,” he argued. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Electric vehicles need cobalt. Congolese miners work in dangerous conditions to get it. on Jun 2, 2024.

This story was originally published by CalMatters.

California’s utilities regulator adopted new rules for community solar projects on Friday, despite warnings from clean energy advocates that the move will actually undercut efforts to expand solar power options for low-income customers.

The state’s biggest utility companies advocated for the new rules.

Community solar projects are generally small-scale, local solar arrays that can serve renters and homeowners who can’t afford to install their own rooftop solar panels. They are one part of the state’s overall strategy to eventually run the power grid entirely by renewable energy.

The California Public Utilities Commission’s 3-1 ruling preserves and expands programs that will allow any ratepayer to subscribe to a pool of projects and receive a 20 percent rate reduction, said Commission President Alice Reynolds. But it also reduces future compensation for solar providers and residents.

The commission calculates the benefits derived from distributed, small-scale solar power projects, which provide a “service” by sending clean energy to the power grid and reducing transmission costs by serving nearby communities. Solar developers are compensated for the value of the benefit their project provides.

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The formula adopted this week essentially reduces the value of distributed small-scale renewable energy in the future, providing less of an incentive for new community solar projects to be built.

In the near term, the subsidies and incentives that help promote community solar installation will remain in place, paid for by a recent $250 million grant California received under the federal Solar For All program.

One of the concerns for solar advocates is what happens after that pot of funding runs out and the financial incentive to develop solar evaporates.

“The foundations of a sustainable program should not be built on one-time money,” said Derek Chernow, Western Regional Director for the Coalition for Community Solar Access.

While California has been a leader in promoting solar energy and advocating for an electric grid running carbon-free, the state’s efforts to encourage smaller solar projects have been lackluster. One example of a missed opportunity that critics point to is not requiring community solar projects to have battery storage systems that would allow power to flow after the sun sets.

“We are not done here today, ” Reynolds said, adding the programs can be modified and improved in the future.

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With electric bills soaring for many Californians, she also was critical of the impact of “cost shift,” the idea that the subsidies provided to community solar projects are costs borne by all ratepayers. It’s a fundamental fairness argument that the commission has applied in other proceedings, to justify reducing subsidies.

But changing or reducing the subsidies and other incentives to a still-maturing industry, advocates argue, will result in fewer solar installations, ultimately cutting out low-income ratepayers from the benefit of renewable energy. Community access solar programs are supposed to ensure that at least 51 percent of the energy derived from the projects serves disadvantaged customers. 

Late last year, the commission overhauled incentives for owners of apartment buildings, schools, and businesses that install solar panels. Those regulations were another in a string of recent decisions the commission has taken to reduce financial incentives for rooftop solar. In late 2022, the commission reduced payments to homeowners who sell excess power from newly installed solar panels on single-family homes.

Advocates have been bemoaning what they say is California’s lagging clean energy leadership and criticizing Governor Gavin Newsom, who delivered a keynote speech at the Vatican Climate Summit last week, for not holding the state’s powerful utilities and oil companies to account.

The commission’s community solar decision was quickly added to the list of what critics say is a concerning pattern of backtracking on critical renewable energy policies.

“The CPUC’s recent series of decisions threatens to unravel California’s clean energy progress,” said the Solar Energy Industries Association in a statement. “It’s past time for Governor Newsom and state leaders to reign in the commission before it inflicts more damage on customers and the state’s clean energy economy.” 

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As it had in earlier closely-watched decisions, the commission heard from a myriad of organizations, including the solar industry and environmental justice groups, advocating for programs that would expand access to clean energy and reduce power bills. 

There was scant public comment during the morning hearing but at least two state legislators voiced their opposition to the proposal. Assemblymember Christopher Ward noted that the updated proposal had only been released this week and decried it as “fatally flawed.”

“This does not reflect the intent of the bill,” Ward, a Democrat from San Diego, told commissioners, referring to legislation he authored that required the commission to review its rules. The unintended result of today’s decision, he said, would be to discourage new projects.

An aide to Senator Josh Becker, a Menlo Park Democrat, read a letter from the lawmaker saying that experts doubt the policies will expand access to clean energy.

In extensive remarks, Commissioner Darcie Houck outlined several concerns about the decision, including her view that it didn’t go far enough to benefit ratepayers in low-income communities. Much of the commissioner’s dissent centered on provisions that she said will disincentive adoption of solar and won’t allow for a “just and equitable energy transition.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline California sides with big utilities, trimming incentives for community solar projects on Jun 1, 2024.

There are currently more than 200 coal-fired power plants in operation in the United States, but the country has been scaling back since reaching its coal generation peak in 2011. By the end of 2026, the U.S. is projected to have retired half of its coal capacity.

Coal plants emit toxic pollutants into the air, water and soil, leaving a legacy of contamination that must be cleaned up after their decommission.

But what happens to coal plants after they shut down?

Michigan’s Environmental Law & Policy Center (ELPC) sees retiring coal plants — once viewed as industrial scars on the landscape — as “canvases for the creation of new greenways, parklands, wildlife habitat, and clean energy development,” a press release from ELPC said.

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“If you look around Michigan, and you look around many of the other states in the Great Lakes region, there is a large number of coal plants sitting on the shores of the Lakes. And lakefront property is, of course, valuable. If you look at it as a coal plant site — which is how most of us are used to looking at a plant where there’s been a coal plant operating for 40 or 50 or 60 years — it’s sometimes easy to forget that these sites are often right along the lakefront or right along a river, or in some cases, next door to a state or international wildlife refuge,” Howard Learner, president and executive director of ELPC, told EcoWatch.

From 2010 to 2019, 290 coal plants with more than 100 gigawatts (GW) of capacity were closed across the U.S.

“Once these coal plants retire, each of the sites begins a multi-year retirement process that includes decommissioning, remediation, and redevelopment,” the press release said.

Major Michigan utility company Consumers Energy has plans to retire two of its remaining coal plants 15 years ahead of schedule by 2025. Their closure presents a unique opportunity for the repurposing of the industrial brownfields they will leave behind into hubs of renewable energy, community collaboration and environmental solace.

“About 10 years ago, we began to map out where the coal plants are around the Midwest that we thought might be shutting down in the reasonably near future, either because they were very old and using old technology that was being displaced in the market, or the economics were leading to the plant shutting down, or other factors. And we came up with a list of plants from our energy expert side that seemed to be candidates for retirement over the next decade. Then we mapped that out with a natural resources perspective — not an energy perspective — but where are they located, and what added values in terms of outdoor recreational use, beaches for public use and access, wildlife habitat and conservation purposes might be achieved in some of these locations,” Learner told EcoWatch.

With its new Power Plants to Parklands (P2P) initiative, ELPC plans to reinvision the redevelopment portion of the transition from wasteland to sanctuary.

“Historically, coal plants were situated on lakes and rivers because of their reliance on water for cooling systems. As a result, these facilities often occupy marquee waterfront locations, making them prime for public use. However, retired coal plant sites are too often left as a blight in the community. Many are fenced off from the public, as off-limits as prisons,” the press release said.

Since they are already connected to the energy grid, retired coal plants come with the infrastructure needed for clean energy redevelopment.

“All these coal plant sites are, of course, hardwired into the electric grid. They have coal plants that were generating electricity, so they have transmission lines, and nobody has to fight the battle of whether some community likes or opposes transmission lines or some of the battles that are popping up on energy storage or solar projects,” Learner said.

ELPC is collaborating with communities in Michigan, as well as a variety of stakeholders — including environmental groups, municipal governments, businesses and utilities — to turn former coal plants into parklands where there is community support and it is ecologically and financially feasible to do so.

“It’s like repurposing an old railway station for a more modern transportation hub,” ELPC said. “With transmission lines already in place, these sites sidestep the red tape that can stunt the deployment of new clean energy facilities. In addition, these new clean energy plants offer an opportunity to reinvest in the communities formerly supported by the aging coal plants.”

ELPC is currently focused on Michigan sites where coal plants are either closed or scheduled to be shut down in the next three years.

One example is the Daniel E. Karn Power Plant. Owned by Consumers Energy, the plant will be redeveloped to provide over 85 MW of solar — enough to power about 20,000 homes.

“Just think about it. If you’ve had a high voltage transmission line going into the Daniel E. Karn coal plant site — which is over in Essexville, Michigan, on Saginaw Bay — and the coal plant shut down, it’s a great place to develop, as Consumers Energy is doing, almost 100 megawatts of solar energy, because that’s hardwired right into the transmission grid,” Learner told EcoWatch.

Two of the Karn site’s units have been retired and two others will continue operations using oil and natural gas in times of peak demand when needed until 2031.

“The coal plants are shutting down,” Learner said. “But what happens too often is the coal plant gets shut down, the utility puts a fence around it and a couple of security guards, and there it sits. And hopefully the toxic materials get cleaned up, perhaps not, and it’s an old brownfield, it’s an eyesore. That’s the default. This is an opportunity to create real value for the future.”

ELPC is collaborating with the Saginaw Basin Land Conservancy as site planning for decommission begins, engaging members of the community to find out what they would like to see most before coming up with a draft conservation plan.

“As an example of the ecological significance, the Karn Power Plant sits on the Saginaw Bay of Lake Huron, a critical area for migratory birds. The bay and its surrounding wetlands provide essential habitat for over 1,000 species, making it an essential stopover point along the Central Flyway of North America,” ELPC said.

Two other projects ELPC is currently working on are the Trenton Channel Power Plant — a 220 MW energy storage facility owned by DTE Energy — and the J.H. Campbell coal plant.

“The Trenton Channel coal plant, which is about 20 miles south of Detroit, is immediately adjacent to the Detroit International Wildlife Refuge. The Campbell coal plant, which is in West Olive, Michigan, sits right along the Lake Michigan shoreline and the Pigeon River corridor. These are all plants that have significant parkland value and potential, outdoor recreation use potential and wildlife habitat protection opportunities,” Learner told EcoWatch.

Another benefit of reusing retiring coal plant sites is that it helps maintain and can increase local tax revenue that gets lost by retiring coal plants.

“Consumers Energy wants to develop the largest battery energy storage facility in the country at the Campbell Coal Plant site. That will be a lot of property tax revenues. At the Karn coal plant site, they’re putting in 85 megawatts of solar. To give you a perspective, that’s about 250,000 solar panels. Again, that will be property tax revenues,” Learner said.

The P2P initiative imagines the repurposed sites as public green spaces where residents can enjoy a “sense of place” and connect with the healing power of nature unblemished by fossil fuels’ destructive impacts.

“As the curtain falls on the era of coal plants in Michigan and the U.S., ELPC’s Power Plants to Parklands project isn’t just about repurposing retired coal plant sites; it offers an opportunity for utilities, stakeholders, and communities to collaborate in shaping a more sustainable and prosperous future for the region,” ELPC said. “ELPC’s P2P initiative aspires to be a model for the nation — a blueprint for communities navigating the closure of coal plants.”

The post Power Plants to Parklands Is Turning Michigan’s Retired Coal Plants Into Community Hubs of Solace, Wildlife and Solar Energy appeared first on EcoWatch.