No human organ is safe from microplastic contamination, it seems — not even the testicles. 

Researchers at the University of Mexico recently tested 70 samples of testicular tissue — 47 from dogs and 23 from humans — and found microplastics in every single one. The attention-grabbing study, published last week in the journal Toxicological Sciences, highlights microplastics’ “pervasive presence” in male reproductive systems, and their potential consequences on male fertility. 

The study isn’t the first to identify microplastics in the human male reproductive system; that came last year, when a small-scale analysis identified microplastics in 6 out of 6 testes and 30 out of 30 semen samples. The new paper built on that research by examining many more testes and finding more than 20 times as much microplastic in human samples as the previous study. The most dominant polymer found in the samples was polyethylene, which is the most commonly produced plastic globally. 

The findings add to a growing list of studies finding microplastics throughout the human body, including in livers, lungs, carotid arteries, breast milk, and placentas, the organs that form to provide nutrients to growing fetuses. Microplastics are particles less than 5 millimeters in diameter — about the width of a paperclip — and they tend to slough off of larger plastic items as they break down.

So how do the microplastics get into people’s bodies? The main pathways are through food, beverages, and air. Seafood is a particularly significant source — perhaps because so much plastic pollution winds up in the ocean, where it breaks down and can be mistaken by fish for food. The particles have also been found in dairy milk and other animal products, as well as tap and bottled water, salt, honey, and foods packaged in plastic. Many studies have documented microplastics in dust samples and ambient air, especially indoors. Synthetic clothing, furniture upholstery, and other textiles release microplastics all the time, and one 2022 study estimated that people may inhale more than 48,000 microplastic particles per day.

The mechanism by which microplastics migrate from the lungs and stomach to other parts of the body is not fully understood, but microplastics have been shown to be absorbed into the human bloodstream.

Xiaozhong Yu, an environmental health professor at the University of New Mexico and a co-author of the new study, said he hadn’t expected to see so much microplastic in testicular tissue because of a cell structure called the “blood-testis barrier,” which is supposed to prevent toxic materials from getting into and damaging the testes. 

“After we received the dog results I was so surprised,” Yu told Grist. And he was even more taken aback by the human samples, which had on average three times more microplastic contamination: 328 micrograms per gram, versus 123 in dogs. The most contaminated sample of human testicular tissue contained 696 micrograms of plastic per gram. In a testicle that weighs 20 grams (0.7 ounces), that would translate to nearly 14,000 micrograms of plastic per testicle — about the weight of six 6-inch human hairs.

Yu said microplastics may be hitching a ride through the body via blood vessels and then breaking through the blood-testis barrier, though more research is needed to understand how this is happening.

More research is also needed to understand the exact effects of microplastics on reproductive health, although many scientists agree they’re probably bad news. Some 16,000 chemicals are used to make consumer plastic products, and many of them are endocrine disruptors, meaning they mimic or disrupt the body’s natural hormones. In the canine samples Yu tested, certain types of microplastic were associated with smaller testes and lower sperm count. (The human sperm count couldn’t be counted because the testicles had been preserved in a formaldehyde solution.) 

Some experts suspect that endocrine-disrupting chemicals are contributing to a globally observed decline in sperm count over the past several decades. According to an analysis published last year, human sperm count fell “appreciably” between 1973 and 2018, with the greatest declines in the years since 2000.

Meanwhile, lab studies have already established that microplastics can damage human cells at levels that reflect what people might be exposed to by ingesting contaminated food and water. Last year, a systematic review commissioned by the California Legislature concluded that microplastics are a “suspected” hazard to humans’ digestive and reproductive systems, and that they may contribute to cancer and respiratory problems.

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One of the researchers’ interesting findings was that there was significant variability in the microplastics identified across samples. In humans, testes from those older than 55 showed lower concentrations than those from younger people, and canine testes taken from public veterinary clinics showed higher levels of microplastics than those from private clinics. The authors couldn’t explain these observations, but said they highlighted a “complex interplay of environment, dietary, and lifestyle factors in the accumulation of microplastics within biological tissues.” There’s not yet much research yet on how microplastics impact different populations, but experts say that vulnerable populations are more likely to be harmed by the production, use, and disposal of plastics more broadly.

Although microplastics are virtually everywhere, Tracey Woodruff, a professor of reproductive sciences at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine, said that it’s possible for people to limit their exposure. Because food and water are two of the main ways microplastics can get into people’s bodies, her tips include opting for nonplastic food and drink containers, not storing food in plastic wrap, and shifting away from highly processed foods, which may have more microplastic contamination than unprocessed ones. She also recommends keeping plastic out of the microwave, and — because microplastics are released from synthetic clothing and can migrate through dust particles — washing your hands before you eat. 

The problem can feel overwhelming, Woodruff said, but consumers shouldn’t be solely responsible for protecting themselves. She called for policymakers and regulatory agencies to limit the growth of the plastics industry so there’s less of the stuff being produced in the first place. 

“It is prudent to act now,” she said, pointing to ongoing negotiations over the United Nations’ global plastics treaty, where some countries are fiercely advocating for a cap on plastic production. “We don’t need more plastics in our lives.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Microplastics are in human testicles. It’s still not clear how they got there. on May 23, 2024.

In Mexico City, more and more residents are watching their taps go dry for hours a day. Even when water does flow, it often comes out dark brown and smells noxious. A former political leader is asking the public to “prioritize essential actions for survival” as the city’s key reservoirs run dry. Meanwhile, 2,000 miles south in the Colombian capital of Bogotá, reservoir levels are falling just as fast, and the city government has implemented rotating water shutoffs. The mayor has begged families to shower together and leave the city on weekends to cut down on water usage.

The measures come as a so-called heat dome sitting atop Mexico is shattering temperature records in Central America, and both Central and South America are wasting beneath a drought driven by the climate phenomenon known as El Niño, which periodically brings exceptionally dry weather to the Southern Hemisphere. Droughts in the region have grown more intense thanks to warmer winter temperatures and long-term aridification fueled by climate change. The present dry spell has shriveled river systems in Mexico and Colombia and lowered water levels in the reservoirs that supply their growing cities. Officials in both cities have warned that, in June, their water systems might reach a “Day Zero” in which they fail altogether unless residents cut usage.

In warning about the potential for a Day Zero in the water system, both cities are referencing the famous example set by Cape Town, South Africa, which made global headlines in 2018 when it almost ran out of water. The city was months away from a total collapse of its reservoir system when it mounted an unprecedented public awareness campaign and rolled out strict fees on water consumption. These measures succeeded in pulling the city back from the brink.

Six years later, Cape Town stands as a success story in municipal crisis management, but experts say its playbook will be hard for Mexico City and Bogotá to replicate. Instead of focusing primarily on changing public behavior, these cities will need to make big investments to improve aging infrastructure and shore up their water supplies. How they fare in these endeavors will in turn inform future efforts to make the world’s fast-growing cities resilient to increasing climate volatility.

“The bigger question, and what’s relevant for other cities, is now that we’ve experienced this, what can we do going forward to make sure that this doesn’t happen again?” said Johanna Brühl, a water expert at the nonprofit Environment for Development in South Africa who has studied Cape Town’s water crisis.

Coining the very phrase “Day Zero” was part of Cape Town’s solution to a water crisis that many officials had seen coming for years. As reservoir levels fell between 2015 and 2017 amid a drought, city leaders released dozens of statements urging residents to reduce water usage, but no one paid much attention. Only in early 2018, when officials started talking in increasingly apocalyptic terms about a collapse of the municipal water system, did residents — and international media outlets — start to pay attention. 

The city rolled out a set of measures to enforce cuts, including a tariff system that charged more thirsty users a higher price per gallon plus a door-knocking campaign to shame the biggest water hogs. But it was the rhetoric around Day Zero that seemed to be the most effective tool to slash water usage, experts who studied the crisis told Grist. When the local government warned that residents would have to pick up buckets of water from public collection points managed by the military, consumption plummeted. The effort to stave off a water crisis began to look like a grassroots movement, with residents sharing conservation tricks like flushing the toilet with water captured from the shower.

By April 2018, water usage had fallen to about half of what it was three years earlier, a decline that astonished even city officials. As consumption dropped, the city pushed the estimated date of the apocalypse out by a few days, then a few weeks. When a big rain arrived in the early summer and began to refill the reservoirs, the government turned off the countdown altogether, declaring the crisis at a temporary end.

“The big take-home point for any city in terms of navigating that kind of crisis is just to change the culture and to get the needle moving in the right direction,” said Eddie Andrews, the deputy mayor of Cape Town, who was a city council member during the Day Zero affair. “Culture is really important — making sure that you remain on message.”

Political leaders in Mexico and Colombia have both been sending out the same dire warnings: One prominent Mexico City politician warned in March that the city is “at the edge of the precipice,” and last month Bogotá’s mayor announced that the city had only around 50 days of water remaining, with residents looking at “weeks and months” of water rationing. 

But Cape Town’s grassroots conservation success will be difficult to replicate. In order for such messaging to work, residents have to trust their government. Indeed, other large South African cities like Johannesburg and Durban have struggled to spur usage reductions during periods of water stress, in part because they are governed by the African National Congress, or ANC. While the ANC has been the country’s dominant political party since its heroic 1994 victory over the apartheid regime that had ruled South Africa for decades, popular enthusiasm for the party has plummeted in recent years as corruption scandals have engulfed its top ranks. Unlike the governing bodies of South Africa’s other major cities, the Western Cape government that oversees Cape Town is led by an opposition party that enjoys far more local support than the ANC.

Manuel Perló Cohen, a professor who studies water infrastructure at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City, said the government in Mexico City doesn’t enjoy the same kind of goodwill, meaning the government’s available tools may be limited to things like mandatory water restrictions.

“It won’t work here, because there’s a lack of confidence in the government,” he told Grist. “People don’t believe in most of what the government says, even if it’s the truth.” Mexico is just weeks away from a major election, and the incumbent leaders in Mexico City as well as the federal government have tried to downplay the water issues even as their opponents seize on it for campaign fodder. 

To really have control over the future of its water, a city also needs to have control over its physical infrastructure. But Mexico City loses almost 40 percent of its municipal water to leakage from pipes and canals, one of the highest rates in the world. This means that residential conservation efforts can only have a limited effect on the overall water budget, according to Perló Cohen. The city has also seen a rise in water theft from canals and reservoir systems: Organized crime groups siphon off public water and use it to grow avocados or resell it to water-starved households at a high markup. Locals call this huachicoleo de agua, using a term coined to describe fuel theft.

While the city government of Bogotá has both the public trust and the political power to implement rotating water shutoffs — which has helped protect reservoir levels — the city’s conservation campaign is lacking another crucial ingredient: enthusiasm. As in Cape Town, residents shared novel ways to reduce water usage during the first week of the crisis, but since then the local media has stopped devoting as much attention to the shutoffs. Water usage has begun to tick back up.

“These types of campaigns are difficult to get across to people,” said Laura Bulbena, a Bogotá-based researcher with the environmental nonprofit World Resources Institute. “It’s rained a little in Bogotá, two weeks passed, and actually the numbers show that water consumption went up. So not only there isn’t enough reduction, there’s not enough water coming into the reservoirs.”

But there are other lessons from Cape Town’s water crisis, ones that any city could follow. In its aftermath, the city diversified its water system and reduced reliance on the main reservoirs that shrank during the drought. Officials now plan to build multiple seawater-desalination plants and recharge groundwater aquifers with treated wastewater. This will put the city on far better footing for future dry spells.

“Every single crisis presents opportunities,” said Andrews, the deputy mayor of Cape Town. “We’ve seen that you can’t just rely on the rainfall. You have to augment.”

Bogotá relies on reservoirs for almost its entire water supply, and officials had long believed that the reservoir system was resilient to drought. Now, they may change course and invest in alternate supplies. Experts say bringing in new water sources wouldn’t break the bank; the local water utility could tap the healthy underground aquifer beneath the city, and Bulbena’s team at World Resources Institute has shown that restoring a natural environment in the nearby Bogotá River could help clean that river’s water for drinking.

“The water system is overall very good in Bogotá, but the city must invest in a backup system, because this El Niño system will probably be repeated frequently,” said Armando Sarmiento López, a professor of ecology at Javeriana University in Bogotá. 

Alejandra Lopez Rodriguez, a policy advocate at the Nature Conservancy in Mexico City, said that the government of that city could also fix its severe leakage problem and build wastewater treatment plants — if officials choose to prioritize those projects.

“We have resources and we have access to financing,” she told Grist. “There are resources available. It just also takes a will and an interest to want to invest in these issues.”

The Nature Conservancy runs a water investment fund in Mexico City that has financed conservation efforts in the pine forests surrounding the metropolis; these forests capture water and help recharge the city’s collapsing groundwater aquifers.

Recharging aquifers and building desalination plants is one thing, but the water crises in these cities have also revealed a stark fact: For many of the poorest residents in a metropolis like Cape Town, clean water was never available in the first place. 

The wealthy and middle-class areas of Cape Town receive piped water from reservoirs, but residents who live in the vast townships outside the city have to get water from communal standpipes — the very fate that so frightened middle-class residents of the city in the leadup to Day Zero. In the eastern neighborhoods of Mexico City, many taps have never released water for more than a few hours each day, according to Lopez Rodriguez, and much of that water is from contaminated sections of the aquifer. Lopez Rodriguez speculates that the crisis in Mexico City has drawn international attention because it has begun to affect upper-class neighborhoods that are accustomed to reliable water deliveries from the reservoir system.

Even during the peak of the Day Zero affair, many of the worst-off residents of Cape Town pointed to the same disparity, said Richard Meissner, a professor of political science at the University of South Africa who has studied the city’s response to the 2018 drought.

“I remember that some of the less affluent people in the city said that the campaign is aimed at the more affluent portions of Cape Town,” he said. “They said, ‘They don’t care about us, because for us every day is a Day Zero.’”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline As reservoirs go dry, Mexico City and Bogotá are staring down ‘Day Zero’ on May 23, 2024.

Conservation efforts are more effective when Indigenous peoples and local communities are given more autonomy and involvement over their lands. That’s according to a new study published this month in the sustainability journal One Earth.

Researchers analyzed 648 studies of conservation areas between 1991 and 2020, about half of which had data on either the ecological or social outcomes of specific environmental protection efforts. Authors then categorized each conservation case based on the degree to which Indigenous peoples and local communities were involved, ranging from complete exclusion from the process to having full autonomy and decision-making power recognized by authorities. Researchers then conducted statistical analyses comparing the social and ecological outcomes of each case to determine trends across categories.

They discovered that even though including Indigenous peoples and local communities is often talked about as a moral or ethical imperative, it’s actually better for the environment. The researchers noted their findings have significant implications for ongoing global efforts to ramp up conservation and tackle climate change.

“The findings reveal that more equitable governance, based on equal partnership or primary control for [Indigenous peoples and local communities], are associated with significantly more positive ecological outcomes,” the authors concluded.

The study found that in the hundreds of conservation cases they reviewed, Indigenous peoples and local communities were most often treated as stakeholders or consultees, with little to no power over the conservation project. It was rare for their rights and full autonomy to be respected. 

But in such cases where the latter did occur, the study authors found conservation efforts were far more likely to be successful. Their analysis found that positive ecological outcomes were associated with 85 percent of cases where Indigenous peoples’ and local communities’ autonomy was respected, compared with just 18 percent of the cases where Indigenous peoples or local communities were simply treated as stakeholders. 

The researchers pointed to the Los Lagos Indigenous Marine Areas established by Chile in 2012 as an example of an effective conservation effort.

“Indigenous groups fought for control, access to marine resources, and the ability to restore them through their own values and institutions, eventually winning against the tide of rapid coastal economic development and weak environmental regulations,” the authors wrote. “The shift to inclusive Indigenous institutions and collective custodianship produced transformational positive social and ecological outcomes relative to intensive commercial agriculture.” 

In contrast, the authors found when China established the eco-province of Hainan in 1994, authorities excluded the Li peoples from involvement. 

“The new governance regime was weakly enforced, poorly resourced, and lacked accountability, which reduced effectiveness by providing conditions that were exploited for corrupt logging, relative to when communities themselves helped regulate extraction,” the study said. 

In addition to better environmental outcomes, the researchers found positive social outcomes, such as higher incomes and better social relations, also associated with projects that had the greatest respect for Indigenous rights. More than half of the conservation efforts that recognized Indigenous peoples’ and local communities’ primary control, or full autonomous control, reported positive social outcomes. When Indigenous peoples or local communities were merely consulted, beneficial social effects were negligible.

The authors said their findings are relevant to global conservation goals, which include protecting 30 percent of Earth’s land and seas by 2030, an initiative also known as 30X30. Indigenous peoples have raised concerns that aggressive conservation efforts could lead to further land grabs harming Native peoples, compounding the trauma of colonization. Efforts to preserve large swaths of land such as national parks in the U.S. and elsewhere have often involved removing Indigenous peoples from those lands. 

The study emphasizes that allowing Indigenous peoples to steward their own lands is better for the environment than ignoring their rights. 

“This carries important implications, including for actions toward the Global Biodiversity Framework targets, suggesting a need to elevate the role of [Indigenous peoples and local communities] to conservation leaders while respecting their rights and customary institutions,” the authors concluded. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The key to better climate outcomes? Respecting Indigenous land rights and autonomy. on May 23, 2024.

You may have heard the phrase, “glass is infinitely recyclable.” So why isn’t kitchen glassware…

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The United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) has found that as much as half of the natural pasture land on Earth has been degraded by the impacts of climate change and overexploitation, putting a sixth of the planet’s food supplies at risk.

The new UNCCD report — Global Land Outlook Thematic Report on Rangelands and Pastoralists — emphasizes the importance of rangelands and points to ways to better manage and restore them while protecting pastoralism.

“Degradation of Earth’s extensive, often immense natural pastures and other rangelands due to overuse, misuse, climate change and biodiversity loss poses a severe threat to humanity’s food supply and the wellbeing or survival of billions of people,” a press release from UNCCD said.

Most pastures are lost or compromised by conversion to cropland and other changes due to urban expansion and population growth and their accompanying rise in food and fuel demands; excessive grazing; policies that incentivize overexploitation; and the abandonment of land by pastoralists.

These land use changes lead to diminished soil nutrients and fertility, salinization, alkalinization, erosion and soil compaction, which inhibits plant growth. These effects all contribute to fluctuations in precipitation, drought and biodiversity loss on the surface of the land and belowground.

“To have any chance of meeting global biodiversity, climate and food security goals, we simply cannot afford to lose any more of our rangelands, grasslands and savannahs. Our planet suffers from their ongoing conversion, as do the pastoralists who depend on them for their livelihoods, and all those who rely on them for food, water and other vital ecosystem services,” said Joao Campari, WWF’s global food practice leader, in the press release.

Rangelands consist primarily of the natural grasslands livestock and wild animals use to graze and forage. They also include savannas, wetlands, tundra, shrublands and deserts.

Rangelands make up 54 percent of all land on the planet.

“When we cut down a forest, when we see a 100-year-old tree fall, it rightly evokes an emotional response in many of us. The conversion of ancient rangelands, on the other hand, happens in ‘silence’ and generates little public reaction,” said Ibrahim Thiaw, executive secretary of UNCCD, in the press release. “Sadly, these expansive landscapes and the pastoralists and livestock breeders who depend on them are usually under-appreciated. Despite numbering an estimated half a billion individuals worldwide, pastoralist communities are frequently overlooked, lack a voice in policy-making that directly affects their livelihoods, marginalised, and even often seen as outsiders in their own lands.”

The UNCCD report was launched by the authors in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. In 2026, Mongolia will host the meeting of the UNCCD Conference of the Parties — the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists (IYRP).

“As custodian of the largest grasslands in Eurasia, Mongolia has always been cautious in transforming rangelands. Mongolian traditions are built on the appreciation of resource limits, which defined mobility as a strategy, established shared responsibilities over the land, and set limits in consumption,” said H.E. Bat-Erdene Bat-Ulzii, Mongolia’s environment minister, in the press release.

Two billion people worldwide — small-scale farmers, herders and ranchers — depend upon healthy rangelands.

In many states in West Africa, 80 percent of the population is employed in livestock production. And in Mongolia and Central Asia, grazing rangelands make up 60 percent of land area, with livestock herding supporting almost a third of the population.

The report points out that efforts to bolster productivity and food security through the conversion of rangelands to crops in regions that are mostly arid have led to lower agricultural yields and land degradation.

The undermining of rangelands is due to “poorly implemented policies and regulations,” “weak and ineffective governance,” and “the lack of investment in rangeland communities and sustainable production models,” the report said.

More than 60 experts from over 40 countries contributed to the report.

The report details an approach to enable policymakers to restore, manage and stabilize rangelands backed by case studies that describe lessons learned from the missteps and successes of rangeland management.

One of the authors’ primary recommendations is to protect pastoralism — “a mobile way of life dating back millennia centred on the pasture-based production of sheep, goats, cattle, horses, camels, yaks, llamas or other domesticated herbivores, along with semi-domesticated species such as bison and reindeer,” the press release said.

“From the tropics to the Arctic, pastoralism is a desirable default — and often the most sustainable — option that should be incorporated into rangeland use planning,” Thiaw said.

Among the report’s other key recommendations are integrating climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies with sustainable plans for rangeland management to boost the resilience of rangeland and pastoralist communities while increasing carbon sequestration and storage.

The authors also recommend avoiding or reducing the conversion of rangelands and changes to land use that diminish the multifunctionality and diversity of rangelands, especially on communal and Indigenous lands.

“Imbalance between the supply of and demand for animal forage lands leads to overgrazing, invasive species, and the increased risk of drought and wildfires – all of which accelerate desertification and land degradation trends around the world,” said Maryam Niamir-Fuller, co-chair of the UN IYRP International Support Group, in the press release. “We must translate our shared aspirations into concrete actions – stopping indiscriminate conversion of rangelands into unsuitable land uses, advocating for policies that support sustainable land management, investing in research that enhances our understanding of rangelands and pastoralism, empowering pastoralist communities to preserve their sustainable practices while also gaining tools to thrive in a changing world, and supporting all stakeholders, especially pastoralists, to implement measures that effectively thwart further degradation and preserve our land, our communities, and our cultures.”

The post Half of Pasture Lands on Earth Degraded by Climate Change and Overuse, Threatening Food Supply of Billions: UN Report appeared first on EcoWatch.

The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has announced $300 million in grants from the Biden administration’s Investing in America agenda to assist Tribal Nations, States, nonprofit organizations and local governments with assessing and cleaning up the country’s former industrial sites, known as brownfields, a press release from the EPA said.

There are an estimated 450,000-plus brownfields in the U.S., according to the EPA.

“Far too many communities across America have suffered the harmful economic and health consequences of living near polluted brownfield sites,” said President Joe Biden in the press release. “I’ve long believed that people who’ve borne the burden of pollution should be the first to see the benefits of new investment.”

EPA Administrator Michael Regan said on Monday that $2 million would be put toward the transformation of the Kingsessing neighborhood in southwest Philadelphia — a former oil station that officials said is contaminated with semi-volatile organic compounds and lead — into office buildings and a waterfront bike trail, reported The Guardian.

For more than 60 years, the oil terminal along Bartram’s Mile in Philadelphia was filled with petroleum storage tanks, the press release said.

“Brownfields have, across the neighborhood, impacted the quality of our water, the quality of our air and the quality of our soil,” said Maitreyi Roy, executive director of public park Bartram’s Garden, as The Guardian reported. “These types of toxins impede a healthy lifestyle.”

The city has been working to turn the brownfield sites in the area into places where residents can bike, hike, garden and fish, the EPA said.

“With this funding, Philadelphia will be able to work with this site and reconnect Kingsessing to the riverfront,” Regan said, as reported by The Guardian.

EPA’s Brownfields Program furthers President Biden’s Jutice40 Initiative, which has a goal of directing 40 percent of the total benefits of particular federal investments toward disadvantaged communities overburdened by pollution and marginalized by underinvestment, the press release said.

Through the EPA’s Revolving Loan Fund (RLF) Grant Programs and Brownfields Multipurpose, Assessment and Cleanup (MAC) Grant Programs, the investments will help turn once-abandoned and polluted properties into assets for overburdened communities while creating jobs and stimulating economic revitalization.

“The Brownfields Program strives to meet this commitment and advance environmental justice and equity considerations in all aspects of its work. Approximately 86% of the MAC and RLF Supplemental program applications selected to receive funding proposed to work in areas that include disadvantaged communities,” the EPA said.

A total of 181 grants of $231 million will be awarded to 178 communities through MAC Grant Programs, along with $68 million in additional funding for 31 “high-performing” Brownfields RLF Grant Programs. Another approximately $3 million in grants will go toward economic and community development nonprofit Grow America.

Another brownfield site that is being reshaped into a community hub is the Bay Mills Indian Community (BMIC) in Chippewa County, Michigan. The soil and groundwater in the area has long been contaminated by lead paint and asbestos. With the help of Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funding, Tribal Manager Rachel Lyons and BMIC President Whitney Gravelle are working to convert the site into a recreational space with docks for canoeing and kayaking.

Communities of color across the U.S. are disproportionately burdened by brownfields.

Roughly one in 10 people live within a half-mile of a brownfield, with Black Americans about two times more likely than white Americans to be in such close proximity to the hazardous sites, EPA data shows. Hispanic communities are also overburdened by living close to brownfields.

Since 1995, the EPA’s Brownfields Program has provided almost $2.7 billion in grants to clean up contaminated properties for productive reuse. More than 50 percent of funds available during the current grant cycle — roughly $160 million — comes from $1.5 billion provided by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

“President Biden sees contaminated sites and blighted areas as an opportunity to invest in healthier, revitalized communities,” Regan said in the press release. “That’s why he secured historic funding under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, supercharging EPA’s Brownfields program to clean up contaminated properties in overburdened communities and bring them back into productive use.”

The post EPA Announces $300 Million for Cleanup of Former ‘Brownfield’ Industrial Sites appeared first on EcoWatch.

Honeywell International is one of the largest companies in the world, ranking 115th in the…

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A new report on the macroeconomic effects of climate change has estimated that these damages are as much as six times larger than previous estimates. According to the report, each 1 degree Celsius increase in global temperature can be linked to a 12% decline in global gross domestic product (GDP).

The report, “The Macroeconomic Impact of Climate Change: Global vs. Local Temperature,” is a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). It found that the “Social Cost of Carbon” could be around $1,056 per ton of carbon dioxide emissions. 

The findings are much higher than previous estimates; the Interagency Working Group estimated the cost to be about $51 per metric ton, while the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimated $190 per metric ton of carbon emissions, E&E News reported.

According to Statista projections, the amount of global carbon emissions for 2023 was about 37.55 billion metric tons.

Further, the new NBER report found that if the world continues at a business-as-usual warming scenario, it could lead to a welfare loss of about 31%, emphasizing the economic importance of reducing emissions.

“There will still be some economic growth happening but by the end of the century people may well be 50% poorer than they would’ve been if it wasn’t for climate change,” said Adrien Bilal, co-author of the report and an economist at Harvard, as reported by The Guardian. “I think everyone could imagine what they would do with an income that is twice as large as it is now. It would change people’s lives.”

According to NASA, the world has already experienced about 1.36 degrees Celsius in warming as of 2023 when compared to the pre-industrial average global temperature from 1850 to 1900. In February 2024, a controversial study was released that predicted the world has already surpassed 1.5 degrees Celsius warming, the target outlined in the Paris Agreement to curb the worst impacts of climate change. 

In a poll by The Guardian published earlier this month, hundreds of top climate scientists from around the world indicated that they expected global warming to reach at least 2.5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century.

Even if the world does keep warming to the 1.5 degree Celsius limit, the global GDP could still decrease by about 15%, the report found.

“That is still substantial,” Bilal told The Guardian. “The economy may keep growing but less than it would because of climate change. It will be a slow-moving phenomenon, although the impacts will be felt acutely when they hit.”

The post Climate Change Costs the World 12% in GDP Losses for Every 1°C of Warming, Report Says appeared first on EcoWatch.

This coverage is made possible through a partnership with Grist and Interlochen Public Radio in Northern Michigan.

Like many buildings in this part of rural northern Michigan, the Tsuber Auto garage in the Village of Mesick is heated with propane, delivered by truck once or twice a month to the tank outside. 

On a recent morning, owner Vyacheslav Tsuber was sitting behind the counter of a small, brightly lit lobby with his son — one of eight kids. As Tsuber walked to the cavernous shop in the back, the smell of drip coffee mixed with rubber and grease. 

On average, he said, it costs anywhere from $3,000 to $5,000 a year to heat the shop. But that could soon change. DTE Gas Company, a subsidiary of Michigan’s largest utility, is expanding its natural gas network to the area, giving over 1,000 homes and businesses the choice to switch to natural gas. 

Natural gas is more climate-friendly than the propane and wood used in much of the region, according to DTE. The switch could also slash heating bills. 

“If the cost of natural gas is going to be nearly half of what propane costs, for a lot of people, this is an easy decision,” Tsuber said. 

The choice many see is between propane and natural gas, because that’s how DTE presented the project. What’s left out of that equation, say climate advocates, is a third option: electrification. Instead of locking in fossil fuels for decades to come — and reducing the incentive for people to electrify their homes — why not make it easier to switch to electric heating instead? 

Supporters of natural gas see it as a bridge fuel, something consumers can use on their way to a sustainable future.

But critics say we don’t have that kind of time.

As Sam Stolper, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan School of Sustainability puts it: “We have really ambitious [climate] goals for good reason. They’re needs, not just goals, and we’re not going to hit them if we keep making decisions to switch to natural gas … instead of going straight to electrification.”

To him, the solution is clear. “It’s on governments to make it so that households are able to choose that option,” he said. 

Natural gas is a fossil fuel made up mostly of methane, an extremely potent greenhouse gas that is much more efficient at trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. 

There have been major efforts to encourage more home electrification. The federal Inflation Reduction Act is providing tax credits and rebates for technologies like heat pumps.  

Still, getting off natural gas can be lengthy, pricey, and complicated, as Grist’s own reporters have experienced, requiring a deep dive into federal tax incentives and equipment upgrades.

The way homes are heated in the United States varies by region. In Michigan, natural gas is the primary heat source for more than three-quarters of households and the leading source of electricity. It also has the most natural gas storage of any state. That makes natural gas an especially attractive option for utilities since they can buy it from elsewhere during the summer, store it, and sell it for less in the winter. To make electricity more affordable, utilities’ rates would have to change substantially, said Parth Vaishnav, an assistant professor of sustainable systems at the University of Michigan.

“Relative to natural gas, electricity is really expensive in Michigan — more expensive than it is in many other states,” he said. “If you go from natural gas to a heat pump, it would raise almost everybody’s bills by quite a lot, and the problem would be worse for people on low incomes than for people on high incomes.”

Financial considerations and logistical legwork can make the prospect of adopting cleaner heating daunting. For some, it’s not really an option at all. 

“Not everyone, unfortunately, has the luxury to worry about a lot of environmental concerns,” said Conor Harrison, a geography professor at the University of South Carolina.

“Sometimes we are too quick to think about individual choices,” he said. “Changing a heating system in a house, like that is a major, major project. And it’s one that people typically don’t do until they have to.”

Then there are factors like the strength of the power grid and the resilience of its infrastructure, which experts say could complicate electrification. 

“Of course, you have freedom to choose how you heat your home, but frankly, only up to a point,” said Gernot Wagner, a climate economist with Columbia Business School. “If the electric grid isn’t capable of sending more power to your home, then you’re up a creek when it comes to installing a heat pump.”

Local initiatives have proved key to encouraging communities to embrace renewable energy in some cases. In others, municipal governments have moved to ban natural gas altogether. 

But sometimes it’s not just about choosing the cleanest option. Places like Mesick and Buckley have worked for years to make natural gas a reality, eyeing economic benefits for the community. 

“Propane was good, but natural gas is so much cheaper. That’s why it becomes, really, the frontrunner,” said Takis Pifer, the mayor of Buckley.

Pifer, who previously worked as an analyst for DTE, acknowledged that other energy systems can work — he had a heat pump installed in his home — but said it made sense to give consumers more choices.

There’s also hope that the addition of natural gas will give a boost to businesses in the area. 

“It’s exciting. It’s a good thing for town,” said Debbie Stanton, who has worked as Mesick’s village clerk for over two decades. 

Stanton isn’t against renewable energy; she got a grant to install a heat pump for the village office. But she said natural gas will create additional options for people living there; in the past, businesses looking to set up shop in Mesick opted to go to places that had a gas hookup. And with rising prices, saving on heating bills could help residents. 

“I raised three kids, and I spend more on groceries right now for the two of us than I did when I had my three kids at home,” she said. “You listen to people that have families, they’re spending $500 a week on groceries. So there’s not a lot of money left over for other things, and maybe being absolutely green isn’t their priority at this time.”

Oil and gas companies have long promoted natural gas as a clean energy source, despite knowing that it was a major contributor to climate change. 

Despite Michigan’s goal of economy-wide carbon neutrality by 2050 and calls for reducing reliance on fossil fuels, it has by no means shunned natural gas.

Last year, the state awarded $50 million in grants for “low-carbon energy infrastructure” — much of which went to expanding biogas and natural gas. As Planet Detroit reported at the time, utility and gas industry lobbyists donated tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions to legislators who wrote and sponsored the bills behind the funding. 

DTE received $7.28 million as part of that, making the roughly $17 million gas main extension project possible, said Scotty Kehoe, the utility’s director of gas operations for Greater Michigan.

“Natural gas is one of those ways that we’re reducing our carbon footprint,” he said. “While natural gas might not be a renewable energy source, it is a very clean energy source.”

Despite utilities continuing to push forward with natural gas, the energy landscape is changing. 

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After a major methane leak at a Pennsylvania storage reservoir in 2022, the federal government began rolling out new rules for gas storage facilities, along with plans to fine companies for leaking methane.

More homeowners are buying heat pumps than gas boilers. Federal incentives for heat pumps and energy-efficiency measures may help reduce the demand for natural gas heating. 

Some places, like a remote community in Washington state, have created a cooperative finance model to fund heat pump installations. 

And Michigan is harnessing federal incentives to start offering home-energy rebates for efficiency upgrades and electrification this fall — right around the time DTE is planning to finish its natural gas project. 

Back at the auto shop in Mesick, mechanic Vyacheslav Tsuber is considering all this. Some of his heating equipment will have to be replaced in the next few years, and natural gas would be convenient. Still, he said, he has more homework to do. 

“We are very conscious to make sure that our decisions [are] environmentally friendly,” he said, “Or [are] at least better than what we use right now.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Northern Michiganders are getting off propane — and on to natural gas on May 22, 2024.