This story was co-published with Popular Science.

Electric vehicles are becoming more and more commonplace on the nation’s roadways.

The federal government wants nearly two-thirds of all cars in the United States to be EVs within the next decade. All the while, EVs are breaking sales records, and manufacturers are building charging stations and production plants to incentivize a shift away from fossil fuels in the transportation sector.

With EVs taking the streets by storm, an unlikely industry now wants a piece of the pie.

Trade associations, fuel producers, and bipartisan lawmakers are pushing for biogas, fuel made from animal and food waste, to start receiving federal credits meant for powering electric vehicles.

The push for biogas-powered EVs would be a boon for the energy sector, according to biogas industry leaders. Environmental groups and researchers, however, say the fuel has yet to prove itself as a truly clean energy source. Biogas created from agriculture has been linked to an increase in waterway pollution and public health concerns that have disproportionately exposed low-income communities and communities of color to toxic byproducts of animal waste.

With the nation needing more ways to power fleets of Teslas and Chevy Bolts, the use of livestock manure to power EVs is still in limbo. 

For biogas, there are, broadly speaking, three sources of waste from which to produce fuel: human waste, animal waste, and food waste. The source of this fuel input can be found at wastewater treatment plants, farms, and landfills. 

At these locations, organic waste is deprived of oxygen, and a natural process known as anaerobic digestion occurs. Bacteria consume the waste products and eventually release methane, the main ingredient of natural gas. The gas is then captured, piped to a utility, turned into electricity, and distributed to customers. 

Fuel created from animal waste isn’t a new concept. Farms around the country have been cashing in on biogas for decades, with a boom in production facilities known as anaerobic digesters expected after funding for their construction made it into the Inflation Reduction Act. 

At the end of June, the Environmental Protection Agency finalized its Renewable Fuel Standard, or RFS, which outlines how much renewable fuels — products like corn-based ethanol, manure-based biogas, and wood pellets — are used to cut greenhouse gas emissions, as well as reduce the use of petroleum-based transportation fuel, heating oil, or jet fuel.

Under this program, petroleum-based fuels must blend renewable fuels into their supply. For example, each time the RFS is updated, a new goal for how much corn-based ethanol is mixed into the nation’s fuel supply is set. This prediction is based on gas and renewable-fuel-industry market projections.

These gas companies and refineries purchase credits from renewable-fuel makers to comply with the mandated amount of renewable fuel that needs to be mixed into their supply.

A currency system tracks which renewable fuels are being produced and where they end up under the RFS. This system uses credits known as RINs, or Renewable Identification Numbers. According to the EPA, a single RIN is the energy equivalent of one gallon of ethanol, and the prices of the credits will fluctuate over time, just as gas prices do.

Oil companies and refineries purchase credits from renewable-fuel makers to comply with the mandated amount of renewable fuel that needs to be mixed into their supply. The unique RIN credit proves that an oil seller has purchased, blended, and sold renewable fuel.

Currently, the biogas industry can only use its RIN credits when the fuel source is blended with ethanol or a particular type of diesel fuel. Outside of the federal program, biogas producers have been cashing in on low-carbon fuel programs in both California and Oregon. 

With the boom in demand for renewable electricity, biogas producers want more opportunities to sell their waste-based fuels. EVs might get them there.

During recent RFS negotiations, the biogas industry urged the EPA to create a pathway for a new type of credit known as eRINs, or electric RINs. This pathway would allow the biogas and biomass industry to power the nation’s EVs directly. While the industry applauded the recent expansion of mandatory volumes of renewable fuels, the EPA did not decide on finalizing eRIN credits.

Patrick Serfass is the executive director of the American Biogas Council. He said the EPA could approve projects that would support eRINs for years, but has yet to approve the pathway for biogas-fuel producers. 

“It doesn’t matter which administration,” Serfass said. “The Obama administration didn’t do it. The Trump administration didn’t do it. The Biden administration so far hasn’t done it. EPA, do your job.”

Late last year, the EPA initially included approval of eRINs in the RFS proposal. Republican members of Congress who sit on the Energy & Commerce Committee sent a letter to the EPA, saying that the RFS is not meant to be a tool to electrify transportation.

“Our goal is to ensure that all Americans have access to affordable, available, reliable, and secure energy,” the committee members wrote. “The final design of the eRINs program under the RFS inserts uncertainty into the transportation fuels market.”

The RFS has traditionally supported liquid fuels that the EPA considers renewable, the main of which is ethanol. Stakeholders in ethanol production see the inclusion of eRINs as an overstep. 

In May, Chuck Grassley, a Republican senator from Iowa, introduced legislation that would outlaw EVs from getting credits from the renewable-fuels program. Grassley has been a longtime supporter of the ethanol industry; Iowa alone makes up nearly a third of the nation’s ethanol production, according to the economic growth organization Iowa Area Development Group.

Serfass said biogas is a way to offset the nation’s waste and make small and midsize farms economically sustainable, as well as local governments operating waste treatment plants and landfills. When it comes to animal waste, he said the eRIN program would allow farmers to make money off their waste by selling captured biogas to the grid to power EVs. 

“There’s a lot of folks that don’t like large farms, and the reason that large farms exist is that as a society, we’re not always willing to pay $6 to $9 for a gallon of milk,” Serfass said. “You have farm consolidation so that farmers can just make a living.”

Initially, digesters were thought of as a climate solution and an economic boon for farmers, but in recent years, farms have stopped digester operations because of the hefty price tag to run them and their modest revenue. Biogas digesters are still operated by large operations, often with the help of fossil fuel companies, such as BP. 

In addition to farms, Serfass said biogas production from food waste and municipal wastewater treatment plants would also be able to cash in on the eRIN program. 

Dodge City, Kansas, a city of 30,000 in the western part of the state, is an example of a local government using biogas as a source of revenue. In 2018, the city began capturing methane from its sewage treatment and has since been able to generate an estimated $3 million a year by selling the fuel to the transportation sector.

Serfass said the city would be able to sell the fuel to power the nation’s EV charging grid if the eRIN program was approved.

The EPA’s decision-making will direct the next three years of renewable-fuel production in the country. The program is often a battleground for different industry groups, from biogas producers to ethanol refineries, as they fight over their fuel’s market share.

Of note, the biomass industry, which creates fuel from wood pellets, forestry waste, and other detritus of the nation’s lumber supply and forests, also wants to be approved for future eRIN opportunities. 

This fuel source has a questionable track record of being a climate solution: The industry has been linked to deforestation in the American South, and has falsely claimed they don’t use whole trees to produce electricity, according to a industry whistleblower.

The EPA did not answer questions from Grist as to why eRINs were not approved in its recent announcement. 

“The EPA will continue to work on potential paths forward for the eRIN program, while further reviewing the comments received on the proposal and seeking additional input from stakeholders to inform potential next steps on the eRIN program,” the agency wrote in a statement. 

Ben Lilliston is the director of rural strategies and climate change at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. He said he supported the EPA’s decision to not approve biogas-created electricity for EVs.

“I think the jury is still out around biogas from large-scale animal operations about how effective they are,” Lilliston said.

He wants more independent studies to determine what a growing biogas sector under the eRIN program would mean for the rural areas and communities of color that surround these facilities.

Predominantly Black and low-income communities in southeastern North Carolina have been exposed to decades of polluted waters and increased respiratory and heart disease rates related to the state’s hog industry, which has recently cashed in on the biogas sector. 

In Delaware, residents of the largely rural Delmarva peninsula have become accustomed to the stench of the region’s massive poultry farms. These operations now want to cash in on their waste with the implementation of more biogas systems in a community where many residents are Black or immigrants from Haiti and Latin America who speak limited English, according to the Guardian. 

“I think that our concern, and many others’, is that this is actually going to increase emissions and waste and pollution,” Lilliston said. 

Aaron Smith, a professor of agricultural economics at the University of California, Davis, said electricity produced from biogas could be a red herring when it comes to cheap, clean energy. 

“There’s often a tendency to say, ‘We have this pollutant like methane gas that escapes from a landfill or a dairy manure lagoon, and if we can capture that and stop it from escaping into the atmosphere, that’s a win for the climate,’” Smith said. “But once we’ve captured it, should we do something useful with it? And the answer is maybe, but sometimes it’s more expensive to do something useful with it than it would be to go and generate that energy from a different source.”

Smith’s past research has found that the revenue procured by digesters has not been equal to the amount of methane captured by these systems. In a blog post earlier this year, Smith wrote that taxpayers and consumers are overpaying for the price of methane reduction. He found that the gasoline producers have essentially subsidized digester operations by way of the state’s low-carbon transportation standards. To pay for this, the gasoline industry offloads its increased costs by raising the price of gas for consumers. 

“I think we do need to be wary about over-incentivizing these very expensive sources of electricity generation under the guise of climate games,” Smith told Grist. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The new ethanol? Biogas producers are pushing livestock poop as renewable. on Aug 21, 2023.

This story was co-published with Rappler, a Philippines-based online news publication.

On a sunny June morning, Marilyn Lopez Capentes and Maylen Lopez push a metal cart through a narrow alleyway between modest homes in the Filipino city of Malabon, part of Metro Manila. Passing doorways adorned with plants growing out of plastic soda bottles, they stop at each household to gather waste, which they deposit into separate sacks for trash, recyclables, and organics, before rolling on. 

All the corn cobs, egg shells, and mango peels Lopez and Capentes collect are destined for a nearby materials-recovery facility. There, the food scraps will be composted in towers of colorfully painted stacked tires and upright pipes, or fed into a blue plastic biodigester that powers a small gas burner nearby, on which the workers cook the rice for their lunch. 

“In a waste-management scenario, once you address the organics, most likely you’re already addressing 50 to 60 percent of the waste problem,” explained Rap Villavicencio, a program manager at Mother Earth Foundation, the nonprofit that spearheaded the system at play. 

Another 12 to 20 percent is recyclables, he said, which means this deceptively simple approach can keep up to 80 percent of waste out of landfills. And it comes with tangible benefits for Malabon residents: Less trash in the streets and gutters means less flooding and fewer odors, and the program has created local green jobs to boot. 

It’s the success of this model that inspired GAIA, a nonprofit focused on alternatives to waste incineration, to connect Mother Earth Foundation with the Breathe Free Detroit campaign in Detroit, Michigan, which was established in 2015 to fight a nearby waste incinerator. 

Though the groups have different primary focuses, they’re both fighting pollution that harms their communities. Mother Earth Foundation created a grassroots waste-management solution so effective it influenced the local government. That experience positioned it to offer guidance to Breathe Free Detroit, which is advocating for the community it represents to have more agency over how their waste is managed, too. 

For more than two years now, representatives from each have been meeting regularly via Zoom to encourage one another, share best practices for countering neglect and fighting bad actors, and glean new ideas from what’s worked for their peers on the other side of the globe in a unique cross-cultural exchange. 

“Looking at the success of the Mother Earth Foundation’s efforts in creating a decentralized multiscale composting system, we wanted to make that work here in the city of Detroit,” said KT Andresky, the campaign organizer at Breathe Free Detroit.

Leadership from the Philippines

Founded in 1998, Mother Earth Foundation was started by a group of mothers in Quezon City, seven miles from Malabon, who were frustrated by delayed garbage collection in their neighborhood. 

Over the next 25 years, the nonprofit lobbied for the 1999 Clean Air Act, which regulates activities that cause air pollution, and the 2000 Ecological Solid Waste Management Act, mandating the adoption of systematic waste management. The nonprofit soon emerged as a leader in zero-waste practices in the Philippines and the Asia Pacific region more broadly.

In 2013, the organization turned its attention to San Agustin, a barangay — the smallest political unit in the Philippines, analogous to a ward or district — in Malabon. The barangay had insufficient infrastructure in place to deal with residents’ waste, and as a result, most household trash was taken to an open dump site in a nearby empty lot or left to fester in the streets. 

Besides being unsanitary and unpleasant to live around, all that trash posed a flood risk. As a low-lying barangay near Manila Bay flanked by the Navotas River on one side and the Tullahan River on the other, the area has long been prone to inundation during typhoon season, which is intensifying in the Philippines, one of the nations most vulnerable to climate change. But the trash problem in San Agustin compounded flooding even further, clogging the drains and gutters that would’ve allowed some of the water to drain off the streets.

The community-led waste-management program Mother Earth Foundation helped implement, wherein local waste workers walk the alleys with a cart every day to collect household waste and bring it to a facility where the majority of it can be composted or recycled, has made a noticeable difference. 

“They no longer have to put their waste in the street,” said Ranz Lebria, a program officer at Mother Earth. 

It was hard at first to convince the community to separate out their organic waste for collection when there wasn’t a clear financial return, the way there is for sorting out recyclables like plastic. 

But 10 years into the program, San Agustin residents “have a positive outlook,” she said, and are proud of how clean the system keeps their community. While the foundation funded the early efforts, barangay leaders have seen the benefits clearly enough that they now contribute local government funding to maintain the facilities and pay the waste workers. 

Fighting incinerator pollution in Detroit

Breathe Free Detroit is a campaign that was created in 2015 by a handful of Detroit-based environmental organizations to join the long fight against the euphemistically named Detroit Renewable Power. The waste incinerator spewed toxic particulate matter, including cancer-causing dioxins, into the nearby East Side, a primarily Black community, for decades. 

“Having a facility like that running for 33 years completely devastated the neighborhood that I live in,” said Andresky. “A lot of businesses and families left. Many schools shut down.” 

She recounted hearing of a family whose athlete kids were plagued by asthma once they moved to the neighborhood, and whose symptoms resolved once they moved away. “There was huge disinvestment in this neighborhood, because it pretty much was a toxic place to live,” she added.

After years of campaigning from Breathe Free and other advocacy groups, the incinerator finally shut down in 2019, which many counted as a win. But residents are still living with the health consequences in the form of “rare cancers” and genetic disorders, she said. 

“We lost a lot of neighbors to COVID because of the preexisting condition. We still live with those toxins in our bodies and our lungs and our blood.”

Some East Side residents began composting “as an act of resistance” while the incinerator was still up and running, and Andresky said that interest has increased since its shutdown, as residents are “really protective” of their clean air. By composting locally in backyards and vacant lots, she said, they can reduce the number of exhaust-spewing garbage trucks passing through the neighborhood, which will save the city money and keep the air cleaner.

That’s where Mother Earth Foundation comes in. The two organizations were introduced in 2020 via GAIA, a global nonprofit network they’re both members of. GAIA also connected them to an opportunity through C40 Cities, a global network of mayors working on climate solutions, to receive stipends for their time and participation in the partnership. 

Breathe Free Detroit’s members were eager to learn from Mother Earth’s expertise with composting in a mix of rural and urban settings, which Andresky said parallels Detroit’s landscape dotted with urban farms. Leaders from both groups began meeting regularly on Zoom to talk about multiscale composting efforts as Breathe Free Detroit began its own compost pilot. And after two years of Zoom calls, the two organizations finally got to visit each other in person — reps from Breathe Free came to the Philippines in January, and Mother Earth leaders traveled to Detroit in April. 

Andresky’s main takeaways from the relationship have been about how to get “multiscale, decentralized composting” up and running. 

She wants to see systems like the one in San Agustin that make use of hyperlocal composting sites rather than relying on a big industrial operation, especially since there are so many urban farms in Detroit that could benefit from keeping those nutrients cycling in local soil. To that end, Breathe Free Detroit is currently working on a composting pilot, in the hopes that it will prove to the city that backyard and community composting are worth investing in. 

“A municipal pickup of food waste that is trucked in and trucked out hundreds of miles is not the best zero-waste system,” she said, “and if we’re starting from scratch here in Detroit, we should really establish the best system.”

A true exchange

Breathe Free Detroit is returning the favor and offering lessons from its community experience, too. Though the Philippines was the first nation in the world to ban waste incinerators outright as part of the country’s Clean Air Act, companies from Europe and Japan have used alternate terms like “waste to energy” or “gasification” when describing their facilities to exploit loopholes in the law and build plants in the country anyway. 

The same companies are also pushing to amend the law in question, which Villavicencio sees as tantamount to an admission of guilt — if what these facilities are doing really isn’t incineration, he argues, there would be no push to change the law in the first place.

“It’s a human rights issue. Incinerators are placed mostly in marginalized communities,” he said. “In our case in the Philippines, it’s in the areas of Indigenous people. It’s environmental discrimination.”

On her trip to Manila, Andresky took a detour with Mother Earth representatives to the city of Dumaguete, where a new “gasification” facility recently opened, to try to communicate the urgency of the negative health impacts that accompany living near an incinerator. Her message was very different from the ones locals had been hearing on the radio from politicians, who promised that having an incinerator nearby would be harmless.

“What we’ve learned from Detroit is that it’s hard to stop the incinerator once it’s built already,” said Villavicencio. “And the consequences really are worse [than you’d think], especially when you see it in person.”

The work is far from done, either in the cities Mother Earth works with in the Philippines or in Breathe Free’s part of Detroit. In the former, there’s a long road ahead to push back against the weakening of the incinerator law, and to bring the composting and waste-management systems that have been working well in San Agustin to more barangays. And in Detroit, more organizing is needed to ensure a “just transition for residents” so that the shutdown of the incinerator doesn’t lead to gentrification that pushes original residents out.

Through it all, though, both communities know that they have solidarity from their colleagues on the other side of the globe. Though the formal program that brought them together has officially ended, Villavicencio and Andresky expect their organizations to stay in touch.

“It’s been a great experience, and hopefully there’ll be more international collaborations like this,” said Villavicencio. 

The whole thing has assured him that it’s not just “Western countries who provide technologies or tools to the developing countries,” he adds. “It should be a two-way knowledge exchange.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How 2 communities, separated by an ocean, are working together to manage trash better on Aug 21, 2023.

This story was originally published by Borderless.

The day before Independence Day, the summer sun beat down on dozens of clothes and shoes strewn across the backyard and fence of the Cicero, Illinois, home where Delia and Ramon Vasquez have lived for over 20 years. 

A nearly nine-inch deluge of rain that fell on Chicago and its suburbs the night before had flooded their basement where the items were stored in plastic bins. Among the casualties of the flood were their washer, dryer, water heater and basement cable setup. The rain left them with a basement’s worth of things to dry, appliances and keepsakes to trash, and mounting bills. 

The July flood was one of the worst storms the Chicago region has seen in recent years and over a month later many families like the Vasquezes are still scrambling for solutions. Without immediate access to flood insurance, the couple was left on their own to deal with the costs of repairing the damage and subsequent mold, Delia said. The costs of the recent flood come as the Vasquez family is still repaying an $8,000 loan they got to cover damages to their house from a flood in 2009.

Aggravated by climate change, flooding problems are intensifying in the Chicago region because of aging infrastructure, increased rainfall and rising lake levels. An analysis by Borderless Magazine found that in Chicago and its surrounding suburbs, extreme weather events and heavy rainfall disproportionately affect people of color and those from immigrant backgrounds. These same communities often face barriers to receiving funding for flood damage or prevention due to their immigration status – many undocumented people cannot get FEMA assistance – as well as language or political barriers.

“You feel hopeless because you think the government is going to help you, and they don’t,” Delia said. “You’re on your own.”

The lack of a political voice and access to public services has been a common complaint in Cicero, a western suburb of Chicago where Latinos account for more than four out of five residents, the highest such percentage among Illinois communities. 

One potential solution for communities like Cicero could come from Cook County and the Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT) in the form of their RainReady program, which links community input with funding for flood prevention. The program has already been tried out in a handful of suburbs and is now being implemented in the Calumet region, a historically industrial area connected by the Little Calumet River on the southern end of Cook County. The RainReady Calumet Corridor project would provide towns with customized programs and resources to avoid flooding. Like previous RainReady projects, it relies on nature-based solutions, such as planting flora and using soil to hold water better.

CNT received $6 million from Cook County as part of the county’s $100 million investment in sustainability efforts and climate change mitigation. Once launched, six Illinois communities — Blue Island, Calumet City, Calumet Park, Dolton, Riverdale and Robbins — would establish the RainReady Calumet Corridor.

At least three of the six communities are holding steering committee meetings as part of the ongoing RainReady Calumet process that will continue through 2026. Some participants hope it could be a solution for residents experiencing chronic flooding issues who have been left out of past discussions about flooding.

“We really need this stuff done and the infrastructure is crumbling,” longtime Dolton resident Sherry Hatcher-Britton said after the town’s first RainReady steering committee meeting. “It’s almost like our village will be going underwater because nobody is even thinking about it. They might say it in a campaign but nobody is putting any effort into it. So I feel anything to slow [the flooding] — when you’re working with very limited funds — that’s just what you have to do.”

Where’s the money?

In Cicero and other low-income and minority communities in the Chicago region where floods prevail, the key problem is a lack of flood prevention resources, experts and community activists say.

Amalia Nieto-Gomez, executive director of Alliance of the Southeast, a multicultural activist coalition that serves Chicago’s Southeast Side — another area with flooding woes — laments the disparity between the places where flooding is most devastating and the funds the communities receive to deal with it.

“Looking at this with a racial equity lens … the solutions to climate change have not been located in minority communities,” Nieto-Gomez said.

CNT’s Flood Equity Map, which shows racial disparities in flooding by Chicago ZIP codes, found that 87 percent of flood damage insurance claims were paid in communities of color from 2007 to 2016. Additionally, three-fourths of flood damage claims in Chicago during that time came from only 13 ZIP codes, areas where more than nine out of 10 residents are people of color. 

Despite the money flowing to these communities through insurance payouts, community members living in impacted regions say they are not seeing enough of that funding. Flood insurance may be in the name of landlords who may not pass payouts on to tenants, for example, explains Debra Kutska of the Cook County Department of Environment and Sustainability, which is partnering with CNT on the RainReady effort.

Those who do receive money often get it in the form of loans that require repayment and don’t always cover the total damages, aggravating their post-flood financial difficulties. More than half of the households in flood-impacted communities had an income of less than $50,000 and more than a quarter were below the poverty line, according to CNT. 

Listening to community members

CNT and Cook County are looking at ways to make the region’s flooding mitigation efforts more targeted by using demographic and flood data on the communities to understand what projects would be most accessible and suitable for them. At the same time, they are trying to engage often-overlooked community voices in creating plans to address the flooding, by using community input to inform the building of rain gardens, bioswales, natural detention basins, green alleys and permeable pavers.

Midlothian, a southwestern suburb of Chicago whose Hispanic and Latino residents make up a third of its population, adopted the country’s first RainReady plan in 2016. The plan became the precursor to Midlothian’s Stormwater Management Capital Plan that the town is now using to address its flooding issues.

One improvement that came out of the RainReady plan was the town’s Natalie Creek Flood Control Project to reduce overbank flooding by widening the channel and creating a new stormwater storage basin. Midlothian also installed a rain garden and parking lot with permeable pavers not far from its Veterans of Foreign Wars building, and is working to address drainage issues at Kostner Park.

Kathy Caveney, a Midlothian village trustee, said the RainReady project is important to the town’s ongoing efforts to manage its flood-prone creeks and waterways. Such management, she says, helps “people to stop losing personal effects, and furnaces, and water heaters and freezers full of food every time it rains.”

Like in the Midlothian project, CNT is working with residents in the Calumet region through steering committees that collect information on the flood solutions community members prefer, said Brandon Evans, an outreach and engagement associate at CNT. As a result, much of the green infrastructure CNT hopes to establish throughout the Calumet Corridor was recommended by its own community members, he said.

“We’ve got recommendations from the plans, and a part of the conversation with those residents and committee members is input on what are the issues that you guys see, and then how does that, in turn, turn into what you guys want in the community,” Evans said.

The progress of the RainReady Calumet Corridor project varies across the six communities involved, but final implementation for each area is expected to begin between fall 2023 and spring 2025, Evans said. If the plan is successful, CNT hopes to replicate it in other parts of Cook County and nationwide, he said.

Despite efforts like these, Kevin Fitzpatrick of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District argues that the scale of the flooding problem in the Chicago region is so large that a foolproof solution would be “prohibitively expensive.” Instead, communities should work toward flood mitigation with the understanding that the region will continue to flood for years to come with climate change. And because mitigation efforts will need to be different in each community, community members should be the ones who decide what’s best for them, says Fitzpatrick.

In communities like Cicero, which has yet to see a RainReady project, local groups have often filled in the gaps left by the government. Cicero community groups like the Cicero Community Collaborative, for example, have started their own flood relief fund for residents impacted by the early July storm, through a gift from the Healthy Communities Foundation. 

Meanwhile, the Vasquez family will seek financial assistance from the town of Cicero, which was declared a disaster area by town president Larry Dominick and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker after the July storm. The governor’s declaration enables Cicero to request assistance for affected families from FEMA.

But the flooding dangers persist.

The day after her home flooded, a neighbor suggested to Delia Vasquez that she move to a flood-free area. Despite loving her house, she has had such a thought. But like many neighbors, she also knows she can’t afford to move. She worries about where she can go.

“If water comes in here,” Vasquez said, “what tells me that if I move somewhere else, it’s not going to be the same, right?”

Efrain Soriano contributed reporting to this story.

This piece is part of a collaboration that includes the Institute for Nonprofit News, Borderless, Ensia, Grist, Planet Detroit, Sahan Journal and Wisconsin Watch, as well as the Guardian and Inside Climate News. The project was supported by the Joyce Foundation.

Editor’s Note: As noted above both this project and the Center for Neighborhood Technology receive funding from Joyce Foundation. Borderless also receives funding from the Healthy Communities Foundation. Our news judgments are made independently — not based on or influenced by donors.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A community-led approach to prevent flooding expands in Illinois on Aug 20, 2023.

Quick Key Facts

1. Overfishing is the removal of fish from their aquatic habitat at a rate faster than they can reproduce. This diminishes their populations and has cascading effects down the food chain, greatly impacting the trophic structures of ecosystems. 
2. Wild-capture fisheries harvested 96.4 million tons of fish in 2018. No other industry in the world removes so many wild animals from their habitat. 
3. Large-scale commercial fishing often entails harmful, exploitative practices — like bottom-trawling and blast fishing — that cause damage to coral reefs and other marine habitats.
4. Non-target marine species — including sea lions, sharks, turtles, and seabirds — are often mistakenly caught as “bycatch” in trawling nets or longlines, and are severely injured or killed in the process. 
5. The fishing industry provides income for 10-12% of the global population, and fish are an important source of protein for 3 billion people. A decline in fish stocks could result in economic instability and a hunger crisis for these communities. 
6. Government subsidies for commercial fishing have long incentivized the fishing of overexploited fish stocks. 

What Is Overfishing?

Overfishing occurs when fish are caught faster than their populations can reproduce and replenish themselves, and it’s among the greatest threats to our oceans. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, one-third of assessed fisheries worldwide are pushed beyond their biological limits, which has severe environmental and social consequences. 

While overfishing can occur in any aqueous habitat — oceans, lakes, ponds, rivers, and wetlands alike — it is especially associated with commercial fishing in marine waters, whereby massive numbers of fish are caught at once. Some trawl nets used in ocean fishing are so big, they can hold up to 13 jumbo jets. Today, nearly 90% of marine fish stocks (a stock being defined as a group of the same species that lives in the same geographic area) globally are either overfished or exploited. 

The History of Overfishing 

Fishing itself has happened throughout recorded history, but deep-sea, commercial fishing didn’t arise until the 15th century, and became more commercial in the 19th century with the arrival of steamboats. Around that time, humans began destroying whale populations as they fished them in huge numbers for their blubber to make oil. 

In the 1950s, this type of intensive fishing ceased to be an industry that characterized only a few areas, but extended to the vast majority of fisheries. The 1970s brought the first major signs of overfishing and became clearer in the 1990s when populations of open sea fish started falling dramatically, and Atlantic cod, herring, and California sardines were fished almost to extinction. Canada’s Grand Banks cod fishery collapsed in 1992, leading to massive layoffs in coastal communities and exposing the immediate threat of overfishing. 

Overfishing vs. Illegal and Destructive Fishing 

The term “overfishing” refers specifically to fishing beyond sustainable levels, although illegal and destructive fishing often play a role in population depletion. 

Illegal Fishing 

It’s important to note that overfishing is not the same as illegal fishing. Overfishing is often not illegal, and occurs when there are inadequate catch limits, a lack of standards set by governments, or other management issues. Illegal fishing, on the other hand, entails fishing without a license, with illegal gear, in closed areas, over a set quota, or of prohibited species. It’s often called IUU fishing (Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated), and breaks either regional or international laws. Illegal fishing operations are estimated to be worth about $10-23.5 billion annually, according to the Marine Stewardship Council, although much of this activity goes unreported. Total catches in West Africa, for example, are purported to be about 40% more than what is reported. Illegal operations often do not adhere to sustainability standards, and thus cause damage to fish populations and marine ecosystems. 

Destructive Fishing 

Destructive fishing is also a separate kind of harmful fishing. The term refers to practices that are harmful to fish populations and their habitats based on certain highly destructive methods, like the use of cyanide or explosives. Blast fishing, for one, uses explosives to stun the fish and raise them to the surface of the water, destroying entire sections of coral reefs and other ecosystems in the process. Cyanide fishing — which is practiced widely in Southeast Asia — uses the chemical to stun coral reef fish in order for fishers to capture them alive (although one-third to one-half of fish caught by this method usually die), but corals are seriously damaged in the process of extracting the stunned fish, and by the cyanide itself. 

Causes of Overfishing

The causes of overfishing are manyfold and complex, with multiple factors compounding and contributing to the problem. 

Better Technology 

Fishing is no longer the imprecise, uncertain practice that it once was. Technological advances — like satellite navigation, echo-sounders, and acoustic cameras — have made it easier for fishers to locate fish and capture them with great precision. Huge, commercial fishing vessels also have refrigeration systems on board, which makes it possible for boats to stay out at sea for longer and catch greater volumes of fish at once. 

Population Growth and Demand

Quite simply, there are more people in the world, and so a greater demand for fish. Marine fish provide about 15% of all animal protein consumed by humans, but as populations grow, so does the number of fish needed to satisfy demand. The average increase of global fish consumption has actually outpaced population growth, meaning people are also consuming more fish on average. Between 1990 and 2018, consumption of seafood rose 122%, and as it’s grown, the level of sustainable fish stocks has dropped by about a third from 1970s levels.

Government Subsidies and Incentives

Governmental support is cited as a reason why overfishing continues. Currently, annual subsidies to marine fisheries globally are around $35 billion — that’s about 30% of the first sale value of all caught fish. This financial support (sometimes in the form of lower taxes) that’s given to the fishing industry offsets the costs of doing business, incentivizes the catching of fish beyond sustainable levels, and encourages companies to continue fishing in overexploited areas where they would otherwise be unsuccessful. Subsidies are also an issue of equity in the sector — they are usually given to huge industrial fisheries and not smaller ones run by local people in places like coastal west Africa and the south Pacific, so the locals are forced to compete with these larger, subsidized companies. 

Poor Management of Fisheries 

Fisheries can be managed by governments either locally, regionally, nationally, or internationally, but are sometimes managed poorly with few barriers in place to prevent overfishing. Proper management will consider research on the state of fish stocks and how to sustain their populations, and usually institute catch quotas and other requirements for fisheries. But many fisheries are governed poorly and allow for too much fishing, or have inadequate reporting, monitoring, or enforcement systems that enable exploitation of the stocks.  

Lack of Protection for Oceans 

Oceans cover 70% of the Earth’s surface, but less than 8% (roughly the size of North America) of the ocean is protected. Marine Protected Areas have limits on human activity, but it’s a broad term that could mean many things; some have restricted visitation, allow for sustainable use by indigenous populations, and or even allow for commercial fishing. In fact, 80% of protected ocean areas still allow fishing within their borders. To properly restore biodiversity, a 2021 study suggests that 30% of oceans needs to be protected.

Environmental Impacts of Overfishing

Overfishing poses a huge threat to marine environments, from declining fish populations, to habitat destruction, to ocean pollution, and even the acceleration of climate change.  

Declining Fish Populations 

When fishery stocks fall below biologically sustainable levels, populations suffer and are at risk of becoming either endangered or extinct. Among the most overfished species are Southern and Atlantic bluefin tuna, European eel, cod, swordfish, groupers, and sturgeons. Currently, only 3% of Pacific bluefin tuna remain based on the population’s historic levels. Overall, marine species have decreased nearly 40% in the past 40 years. 

When their populations shrink, fish have to adapt differently. They might change in size, reproduce differently, or mature on a different timeline. When fish are captured when they are too small — a phenomenon called “growth“ overfishing — they never make it to maturity and thus don’t reproduce as much, so the overall yield and population of the fish shrinks. “Recruitment“ overfishing occurs when the adult population is so depleted that there aren’t enough fish to produce offspring. Deep sea fish like orange roughy, for example, grow very slowly given the lack of resources on the ocean floor, often taking decades to reach breeding maturity — so when they are caught, it takes a very long time for their populations to replenish. 

Destruction of Ecosystems 

Overfishing not only threatens the species themselves, but also the ecosystems they live in — particularly already-threatened coral reefs. It has been found to be the most serious threat to coral reefs, and it’s predicted that 90% of global coral reefs will be dead by 2050 due to commercial fishing. Besides blast- and cyanide-fishing practices, reefs are also impacted by trawling (sometimes called “bottom dragging”), a fishing tactic of dragging large nets along the ocean floor to catch fish. When algae-eating species are overfished, algae can also propagate unchecked and eventually smother the coral it grows on.

Bycatch

Bycatch is closely tied to overfishing, and constitutes one of its largest environmental impacts. Because commercial fishing hauls in huge numbers of fish at once, unwanted fish and animals are often caught in the process and are then merely discarded. Unwanted (or “non-target” species) are swept up when trawling for large quantities of fish using indiscriminate, non-selective gear that captures all wildlife in its path, including other species of fish, sea lions, dolphins, turtles, sharks, and even sea birds. Bycatch is sometimes returned to the ocean, but the animals often die or are injured so severely that they cannot reproduce. 

Billions of fish and hundreds of thousands of sea turtles and cetaceans are lost every year as bycatch, according to the World Wildlife Fund. Six out of seven species of sea turtles are either threatened or endangered as a direct result of fishing — they often get caught when fishers trawl for shrimp or prawns on the ocean floor, where turtles like to forage. Sharks are very susceptible, too, and about 50 million are killed every year as bycatch by unregulated fisheries. More than one-third of all sharks, rays, and chimaeras are now at risk for extinction due to overfishing alone. 

A fishing practice called “longlining” — whereby a line is sent out with hundreds or sometimes thousands of baited hooks — results in a lot of bycatch. Longlining is usually employed to catch tuna, swordfish, and halibut, but other fish go after the hooks, too. Sea birds also get caught in the lines when they dive under the water to fish. 

Disruption of Food Chains

The removal of fished species and the death of bycatch can seriously impact marine trophic structures. Fish are a part of complex marine food chains, serving as food sources for larger fish and feeding on smaller fish or vegetation. Sharks, for example, are large predators that regulate smaller species below them, so when large numbers are lost as bycatch, smaller fish populations might grow too large. If there are unnaturally high numbers of fish, they might feed too heavily on vegetation that’s needed by other species, further impacting the ecosystem and causing a ripple effect through the food chain. 

Plastic Pollution From Ghost Gear 

When fishers engage in huge fishing operations, they leave a lot of trash in their wake. Up to one million tons of fishing gear is abandoned in oceans every year, smothering animals, corals, and other marine habitats. This “ghost gear” makes up 10% of all ocean plastic pollution, but constitutes the majority of large plastic items. In terms of weight, 86% of plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is fishing nets. Like other ocean plastics, this gear breaks down slowly over time, releasing microplastics into the ocean as it degrades.  

Climate Change

Our oceans are carbon sinks, meaning they absorb carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere, effectively mitigating climate change. In all, the ocean absorbs 25% of our CO2 emissions and 90% of heat generated by humans.  Fishing activity removes sequestered  “blue carbon” from the ocean and releases it into the atmosphere.

Carbon is sequestered in the bodies of phytoplankton, which convert CO2 into sugars, but disrupting marine habitats and food webs impacts their activity. Carbon stored in the sediment of the seafloor is also released when bottom trawling disturbs its surface.

Social Impacts of Overfishing

Besides the environmental impacts of overfishing, exploiting our oceans also impacts economies that depend on fishing for income, and communities that rely on fish as a source of protein. 

Fishing as Livelihood

The fishing industry is currently valued at $362 billion, and supplies income for 10-12% of the world population, from both large- and small-scale fishing operations. 60 million people globally work either directly or indirectly in the fishing industry, but if fish stocks are overexploited and can no longer be profitably harvested, many of these jobs could disappear. Coral reef areas are also tourism hubs for activities like snorkeling and boating. If these ecosystems are destroyed by trawling and destructive fishing, local communities that depend on tourism will also suffer. 

Food Security 

Sustaining fish populations is also a matter of food security. Globally, 3 billion people depend on seafood as a protein source, especially in the Maldives, Japan, Iceland, Cambodia, and western coastal communities in Africa, all of which could face a food crisis if fish stocks drop so low that they cannot replenish themselves. Because of poorly managed fisheries, the Marine Stewardship Council estimates that 72 million more people every year are missing out on getting enough protein. 

What About Farmed Fish?

Fish farming (also called aquaculture) raises fish in captivity for consumption. The Southern bluefin tuna was first bred in captivity in 2009, and now about half of the fish eaten in the U.S. are farmed. Aquaculture is often touted as a solution to wild-caught fish, but it comes with its own set of issues. Carnivorous fish — like tuna and salmon — need to eat smaller fish in order to grow. So while these fish themselves are grown in farms, their prey are still being fished — often unsustainably — in order to feed them, merely displacing the problem. There are nutritional drawbacks to farmed fish as well. Wild fish get omega-3s (a fatty acid that is a main benefit of eating fish) from eating aquatic plants, which they don’t get in fish farms when fed a diet of corn and soy. A growing body of research suggests that, contrary to prior assumptions, fish do feel pain and stress, which are heightened when living in confined conditions. 

Solutions to Overfishing

There are, however, solutions to overfishing — both on the personal and the legislative level. 

Remove Incentives and Subsidies 

Subsidies make it possible for companies to keep fishing in overfished waters, even when these ventures become less profitable as fish populations decline. It’s widely understood that ending subsidies would be effective at preventing overfishing, as 54% of high-seas fishing grounds wouldn’t be profitable in their absence. The World Trade Organization made moves in 2022 to curb subsidies by securing the Fisheries Agreement, under which countries are working to ban subsidies to IUU fishing and overfished stocks. 

Better Management Systems  

Better management of fisheries could reduce overfishing, as could enforcement of rules, including catch limits/quotas, whereby only a predetermined amount of fish can be caught every year; catch-share programs, which distribute harvest allowances to companies or individuals, who can then either use or sell them; and gear restrictions that only allow for species-specific nets or other devices that prevent bycatch, like turtle excluder devices (TED) that allow megafauna and turtles to escape shrimp nets. 

Small-scale fisheries in Japan and Chile have found success in using rights-based management. Under this system, exclusive ownership is given to a person, company, or municipality (like a village or community), which removes the tragedy-of-the-commons mentality and gives the owner an incentive to avoid overfishing the waters. 

Better Fishing Methods 

Technological advances have contributed to overfishing, but they might also offer a solution. The Global Environment Facility (GEF) and the FAO instituted a program in 2018 that promoted fish aggregating devices (FAD), which are essentially floating devices that lure fish rather than catch them with large nets. So far, the program has seen a successful reduction of bycatch in Pakistani fisheries. SafetyNet Technologies has also developed a method of using LED lighting on gear that changes color and intensity to evoke behavioral responses from fish, allowing them to target specific species. These are among the many technological innovations being explored to reduce bycatch and other harmful effects of commercial fishing. 

Legislation and Governmental Intervention 

Even with new technological solutions, legislation is needed to implement management strategies and ensure compliance. Legislation around overfishing in the United States has seen success in helping fish species rebound. The Magnuson-Stevens Act — which provided for the management of marine fisheries in U.S. waters — passed in 1976 and is credited with helping Atlantic sea scallop and haddock populations rebuild, but hasn’t been updated or reauthorized since 2006. The Seafood Import Monitoring Program (SIMP) managed by NOAA is a federal traceability standard, whereby importers have to report data about where fish were harvested for over a thousand different species. Before SIMP was implemented, almost a third of all wild-caught seafood imports to the U.S. were from illegal fishing operations. However, some environmental groups have argued that the program needs to be more stringent.

Protected Oceans 

While some Pacific island nations have historically protected their oceans, the U.S. and European countries didn’t manage coastal fisheries until the 20th century. Only 8% of the ocean is currently classified as Marine Protected Areas (MPAs), which are protected along a spectrum: minimally, lightly, and highly/fully protected, which prohibits any kind of extractive activity (including drilling, mining, and fishing, aside from subsistence and recreational fishing under some circumstances). Science has shown that even under the best management by fisheries, an ocean ecosystem doesn’t receive all of the benefits of a fully protected MPA. Creating more MPAs would give species the chance to replenish within their borders. Ultimately, fisheries would benefit from these protections, too, as fish populations rebound within MPAs, and then often go back to fishing areas — a phenomenon referred to in the industry as “spillover” — and can be caught once again. 

Buy Sustainable Fish 

On the personal level, choosing sustainably caught fish creates an impact. The U.S. is a top importer of seafood (Americans consumed around 6.3 billion pounds of seafood in 2019, 90% of which was imported), so our choices can have a large influence on global practices around fisheries. Here’s how to choose sustainable fish for yourself and your household:

1. Eat locally sourced fish when possible, or join a community-supported fishery (CSF), which is similar to a CSA.
2. Use seafood guides to choose the best seafood, like the Environmental Defense Fund’s Seafood Selector or the Seafood Watch app from the Monterey Bay Aquarium, which shares recommended species. 
3. Look for labels on fish packaging from vetted third-party organizations, which award their certifications to fisheries that meet their standards. Some of the best are the Marine Stewardship Council, BAP (Best Aquaculture Practices), and the Aquaculture Stewardship Council.

Takeaway

Huge demand for fish and inadequate management of fisheries has allowed overfishing to continue. If unchecked, this decline in fish populations will have devastating impacts on the environment, food security, and the many economies that depend on the fishing industry. However, the many legislative and technological solutions to overfishing are in our hands.

The post Overfishing 101: Everything You Need to Know appeared first on EcoWatch.

Early in the morning of November 8, 2018, a strong gust of wind blew down a power line owned by Pacific Gas & Electric, the power utility that serves most of California. As the line hit the ground, it ignited a bed of dry pine needles, starting a fire that soon spiraled out of control. The blaze, which became known as the Camp Fire, would go on to destroy more than 18,000 structures and kill dozens of people — ranking it as the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California’s history.

In the years after the fire, PG&E faced a barrage of civil and criminal lawsuits from fire victims, municipal governments, and insurance companies, seeking to hold the utility accountable for starting the blaze. As the company’s stock tanked, it filed for bankruptcy protection, and later pleaded guilty to 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter over fire deaths. In order to exit bankruptcy, the company paid out $23 billion to various plaintiffs and creditors.

PG&E has since drafted a plan to spend $50 billion by 2026 on grid protection and repairs, but it still has a ways to go. The utility can only borrow limited amounts of money thanks to its recent bankruptcy restructuring, and last year it laid off thousands of workers who trim trees around power lines to prevent fires. Starved for cash, the compan has raised rates: the average PG&E customer’s bill will rise 18 percent this year, and 32 percent by 2026. 

Power lines and other electrical infrastructure have ignited hundreds of fires in the American West over the past 10 years, and these wildfires have destroyed thousands of homes and burned millions of acres. In just the latest example, the deadly wildfires in Maui this month appear to have been ignited by power infrastructure. In the aftermath of these events, victims and insurers have increasingly sued large investor-owned utilities for billions of dollars in damages, laying blame for the fires at the feet of the corporations who control the electrical infrastructure that kickstarted the blazes. 

“It seems like there’s this historic trend of utilities just paying for fires, paying for fires, and then there’s a catastrophic one and they get walloped,” said Todd Logan, an attorney at the law firm Edelson PC who has won lawsuits against PG&E and Pacificorp. “And then they actually start changing their practices.” 

The trend began in California, where state law makes it easy to hold utilities accountable for starting fires, but it is now spreading to other states like Oregon, where fire victims won a trial last month against the Berkshire Hathaway-owned utility Pacificorp over a devastating 2020 wildfire, and Colorado, where victims sued the utility Xcel last month over the 2021 Marshall Fire. The payouts that stem from these lawsuits could cost these companies billions of dollars.

While these lawsuit victories are helping victims to rebuild their homes, some experts also believe this wave of legal action and the massive payouts that have come with it have made it harder for utilities to fund grid upgrades that can prevent future fires. In many cases, as these investor-owned utilities work to fireproof their infrastructure, they’re passing the cost of system improvements and delayed maintenance down to their customers in a region where electricity rates are already high.

“Ratepayers definitely have to pay for the cost of the utility doing things” like burying power lines and trimming trees, said Michael Wara, a senior research scholar at Stanford Law School and an expert on how climate change affects utilities. “With the lawsuits, too, there are significant penalties, and somebody’s going to have to pay for them — and the reality is it’s going to be the customers of the company and the shareholders.”

A large power company like PG&E presides over a vast network of wires and transformers, extending over thousands of square miles of service territory. Almost any part of that network can cause a fire if it falls over or scrapes against flammable wood. It’s almost impossible for a utility to eliminate risk altogether, but there are a number of measures they can take to reduce it. Until the last few years, though, few utilities had bothered to take them.

For a long time, most big utilities would keep energy flowing through their wires almost all the time, until a snowstorm or heat wave caused one of their lines to break or blow up. Instead of spending money to forecast weather disruptions or harden their power lines against those disruptions, they just spent money to fix them afterward. In the case of PG&E, this allowed legacy transmission lines to grow old and worn-down, increasing the risk of ignition. 

“They basically used to run the system until it would break and then repair the part that broke,” said Wara. “It’s a cheap way to maintain a system, and the benefit was to customers because it kept rates lower. It is much more expensive to do preventative maintenance.” 

But now that business model has come back to bite the utilities. The lawsuits against Pacificorp in Oregon and Xcel in Colorado both argue that the utilities should have cut power to vulnerable areas before the fire. The jury in the Pacificorp trial, for instance, found that the power company acted negligently when it didn’t shut off electricity to 600,000 customers on the dry Labor Day weekend of 2020. That decision caused multiple fires that destroyed thousands of structures and killed 11 people. Hawaiian Electric, the utility that supplies power to Maui, is also facing criticism for failing to shut off power during the high-wind event that fueled the wildfires on the island. Video and data obtained by the Washington Post appear to show that a power line caused the island’s first fire.

In the years since the record-breaking 2017 and 2018 fire seasons, California’s utilities have shifted away from that model, said Caroline Thomas Jacobs, the director of the state’s new Office of Energy Infrastructure Safety, which was created in 2020 to prevent another Camp Fire-like blaze from devastating the region.

“We’re seeing exponential change in a short period of time,” said Thomas Jacobs. “Only five years ago, when I came into this whole space, it was fundamentally an analog business. They used paper to record everything, and they knew that your power was out because you called them.” Not only did they not plan for climate change, they didn’t assess fire risk at all.

Now, Thomas Jacobs says, the state’s utilities have entered the 21st century. Big power providers like PG&E and Southern California Edison have hired in-house meteorologists, invested millions in advanced fire modeling, and deployed hundreds of sensors across their grid networks so they can identify risky areas. They’ve also instituted a new regime for shutting off electricity when fire risk is high: PG&E can now cut power to precise areas with the flip of a switch. 

But the larger challenge facing utilities like PG&E is upgrading physical infrastructure itself, which can cost tens of billions of dollars — money that gets harder to raise as settlements add up. Most utility-caused wildfires happen when falling trees or dead branches scrape up against power lines, or when those power lines blow over onto dry ground. The surest way to reduce ignitions is to trim vegetation around power lines, as well as by insulating lines or burying them underground. All these measures, however, come at significant cost. 

In some cases, this “grid hardening” effort has proven difficult for California utilities. PG&E has trimmed thousands of trees and undergrounded more than 300 miles of power lines, but Thomas Jacobs’s department chastised the utility earlier this year for its growing backlog of asset repairs, saying the company “has not been able to show that it has adequate resources or proper planning to address its backlog given the continual increase.” (PG&E says it is working to accelerate the repairs.)

Meanwhile, SoCalEdison has opted to insulate its wires rather than bury them, which is faster and cheaper but may not provide the same level of long-term fire resilience, says Wara.

Furthermore, in PG&E’s case, it’s unclear just how effective these infrastructure efforts have been. Earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal reported that PG&E scrapped its tree-trimming program altogether in the face of new evidence that it wasn’t reducing risk despite almost $2 billion in expenditures to date. (PG&E disputes this, saying that it is “focusing investment on programs to enable permanent risk reduction.”) Meanwhile, one recent study found that power line undergrounding in California tends to benefit wealthy communities and leave low-income areas behind. 

The key question utilities are asking themselves is how much of this infrastructure improvement work they need to do in order to avoid being found liable for starting fires, says Wara. The answer depends on where the utility is. In every state except California, plaintiffs must prove that a power provider acted with recklessness or negligence. That’s what happened in the Oregon trial against Pacificorp, and it’s the argument in the Colorado case as well.

In California, though, a legal standard known as “inverse condemnation” means that a utility is liable for a wildfire as long as any part of its infrastructure helped start the blaze, even if the utility tried to prevent ignition. This standard led to numerous settlements over the years against utilities like SoCal Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric, but most of them were relatively small. That changed with the big lawsuits that followed the 2017 and 2018 wildfire seasons.

The threat of litigation imposes a dual financial obligation on utilities. On the one hand they have to pay out damages to victims and insurance companies, and on the other they have to spend on grid upgrades to avoid future lawsuits. PG&E is the most extreme example of this money crunch: The utility had to pay out a $23 billion settlement package to exit bankruptcy in 2020, and has since spent billions more on grid repairs, including ultra-expensive undergrounding. Meanwhile, in Oregon, Pacificorp may have to pay upwards of $1 billion in damages to victims of the 2020 fires that its infrastructure was found to have started.

As utilities spend to upgrade their grids and avoid future lawsuits, they also raise electricity prices on customers, making it more expensive for them to run their fridges and air conditioning units, says Logan. In order to raise rates, the companies must get permission from state regulators, but regulators tend to approve the increases without much hubbub. 

In addition to PG&E’s double-digit rate increase this year, Oregon’s Pacificorp raised rates by 14 percent as it worked to implement its wildfire mitigation plan. That increase came before the utility lost at trial against fire victims last month. SoCal Edison already raised rates in 2021 to finance the insulation of its power lines, leading to a $12.41 monthly increase for the average customer; the utility is also facing multiple fire lawsuits and may have to raise rates still further.

Experts disagree about just how necessary these rate increases are. Logan, the Edelson attorney, says companies like Pacificorp return plenty of money to their shareholders and don’t need to pass costs onto consumers. Logan is also leading the lawsuit against Xcel in Colorado.

“The notion that they’re financially constrained to me is completely absurd,” he told Grist. “Investor-owned utilities get a guaranteed 16 percent year-over-year yield, and when it dips down, you can just go back to the ratepayers like a tax. It’s one of the most unbelievable business offerings ever.” 

Logan points out that investment firms like Vanguard, Apollo, and Third Point have invested in PG&E. Meanwhile, Pacificorp is a subsidiary of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, a massive conglomerate led by one of the world’s richest men. 

In response to a request for comment, PG&E said its “system has never been safer, and we continue to make it safer every day.” The company also said that damages from previous legal settlements “were paid by shareholders and did not impact customer bills.” Pacificorp declined to comment.

Even so, the task of upgrading an entire grid network is enormous, and the capital costs of vegetation management and grid hardening are unprecedented for most big power companies, says Kevin Schneider, a utility expert at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

“It’s fair to say that these are big companies and they have a lot of money, but also, look at what they’re being expected to do,” he told Grist. “These are big ledger values, and they were not originally set up as organizations that were meant to be tackling climate change problems. Now they’re trying to rethink a system that needs to be designed to last another 50 years.” He added that utilities in the West are also trying to prepare for the increased energy demand that will accompany the coming transition away from fossil fuels.

Adapting to climate change will require rebuilding roads, water systems, and transit lines, and local governments across the country are already struggling to keep up. When it comes to power infrastructure, though, the adaptation effort in the West is being led not by governments but by some of the nation’s largest companies, investor-owned businesses that must also think about returning profit to shareholders.  This dynamic has meant that even when the law allows victims to wrest money away from the big utilities responsible for many of the region’s worst fires, it’s ordinary residents who end up footing the bill for adaptation.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Utilities are getting sued over wildfires. Who’s bearing the cost? on Aug 18, 2023.