About a year ago, the seas got unusually hot, even by our current, overheated standards. Twelve months of broken records later, the oceans are still more feverish than climate models and normal fluctuations in global weather patterns can explain.

When the seas turn into bathwater, it threatens the survival of the planet’s coral reefs, home to a quarter of all marine life and a source of sustenance for many people living along the world’s coasts. Mostly clustered in the shallow waters of the tropics, coral reefs have one of the lowest thresholds for rising temperatures of all the possible “tipping points,” the cascading feedback loops that set off large, abrupt changes in the ecosystems, weather patterns, and ice formations on Earth. Stable, existing systems wind up in new, completely different states: The lush Amazon rainforest, for example, might collapse into a grassy savanna. Coral reefs might transform into seaweed-smothered graveyards. 

Earlier this month, the world officially entered its fourth — and probably worst — mass coral bleaching event in history, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the International Coral Reef Initiative. Hot water causes corals to expel the tiny algae that live in their tissues, which provide them with food (through photosynthesis) and also a rainbow of pigments. Separated from their algae, corals “bleach,” turning ghostly white, and start to starve. 

The Florida Keys, where water temperatures veered into hot-tub territory last year, saw its most severe bleaching event to date, with scientists “evacuating” thousands of corals to tanks on land. In Australia, the iconic Great Barrier Reef is also facing its biggest test yet. In the Indian Ocean, even coral species known to be resistant to hot temperatures are bleaching. 

“This is one of the key living systems that we thought was closest to a tipping point,” said Tim Lenton, a professor of climate change and Earth systems at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom. “This is sort of horrible confirmation that it is.” 

An estimated 1 billion people around the world benefit from coral reefs, which provide food and income, while also protecting coastal property from storms and flooding. The benefits add up to about $11 trillion a year. With some scientists worried that coral reefs may have already passed a point of no return, researchers are turning to desperate measures to save them, from building artificial reefs to attempts to cool down reefs through geoengineering.

Last year, the warmer weather pattern known as El Niño took hold of the globe, temporarily pushing global average temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming over pre-industrial times. That’s precisely the level at which scientists have predicted that between 70 and 99 percent of tropical reefs would disappear. With a cooler La Niña phase on the way this summer, it’s possible that corals will make it through the current bout of hot ocean temperatures. But each week high temperatures persist, another 1 percent of corals are predicted to bleach. By the early 2030s, global temperatures are on track to pass the 1.5 C threshold for good, compared to around 1.2 C today.

Bleaching doesn’t spell certain death, but the corals that survive struggle to reproduce and are more susceptible to diseases. Even when reefs do recover, there’s usually a loss of species, said Didier Zoccola, a scientist in Monaco who has studied corals for decades. “You have winners and losers, and the losers, you don’t know if they are important in the ecosystem,” he said.

For a coral reef, the tipping point would come when bleaching becomes an annual event, according to David Kline, the executive director of the Pacific Blue Foundation, a nonprofit working to preserve reefs in Fiji. Species would go extinct, leaving only the most heat-tolerant creatures, the “cockroaches” of corals that can survive tough conditions. Seaweed would start taking over. Parts of the world may be approaching this point, if not already past it: The Great Barrier Reef, for example, has gone through five mass bleaching events in the last eight years, leaving little chance for recovery. Florida has already lost more than 90 percent of its coral reefs.

“I think most scientists, myself included, would be very uncomfortable saying we’ve reached a tipping point,” said Deborah Brosnan, a longtime coral scientist who founded the reef restoration project OceanShot. “But in reality, are we very close to a tipping point? I believe we are, just judging by the scale of the bleaching that we’re seeing.”

Reefs around the world have already declined by half since the 1950s because of climate change, overfishing, and pollution. Some scientists argue that the world may have already passed the point of no return for corals long ago, as far back as the 1980s, yet there’s no consensus. “If we really want to have healthy, diverse coral reefs in the future, we need to do something about our greenhouse gas emissions, like, right now,” Kline said. 

Rising temperatures might have already set off other notable tipping points, such as the accelerated melting of the Greenland ice sheet and the thawing of the northern permafrost, which threatens to release vast amounts of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Coral tipping points would unfold on a regional level, with giant blobs of hot ocean water wrecking reefs, what Lenton characterizes as a “clustered” tipping point.

Coral reefs are so vulnerable, in part, because their existence is fragile in the first palace. Reefs are “a verdant explosion of life in a nutrient desert,” Lenton said, only able to exist because of “really strong reinforcing feedback loops within the system.” An intricate web of corals, algae, sponges, and microbes move essential nutrients like nitrogen around, leading to a profusion of life. “It’s not surprising that if you push it too hard, or knock certain things out, you can tip it into a different ‘no coral’ state, or maybe several different states.”

Losing corals could lead to consequences you wouldn’t expect. For example, you can thank corals for the sand on many beaches — they help create it (coral skeletons turn into sand) and protect beaches from erosion, with the structure of the reef calming waves before they reach shore. Reefs contribute to medical breakthroughs — organisms found in them produce compounds used to treat cardiovascular disease and some types of cancer.

Researchers are racing to salvage what’s left of corals and the ecosystems they support. A restoration project in the Caribbean that Brosnan founded, called OceanShot, is building artificial reefs where natural ones have collapsed. The tiered structures provide habitat for creatures that live in the reefs, both the larger species that live on top and the smaller ones that like to hide in crevices lower down. The installations have had good results, with dozens of fish species moving in, alongside invertebrates like lobsters. Even finicky black urchins transplanted on the reef decided to stay. Brosnan’s team is also hoping to deploy them in places where beaches are being lost, since the artificial reefs can also help prevent sand from washing away.

Some preservation attempts are pretty out there. Scientists with the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute in Washington, D.C., for example, are working on deep-freezing coral sperm and larvae through “cryopreservation,” Futurama-style, hoping that they can repopulate oceans of the future. In the Great Barrier Reef, researchers have experimented with brightening clouds with sea salt, a form of geoengineering, to try to protect corals from the hot sun.

Elsewhere, laboratories are breeding corals to withstand heat and ocean acidification. Zoccola works on one such project in Monaco, where scientists are using “assisted evolution” to speed up nature’s process, since corals can’t adapt fast enough in the wild. He calls it a “Noah’s Ark” for corals, hoping that species can live in the lab until, one day, they’re ready to return to the ocean.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Have the world’s coral reefs already crossed a tipping point? on Apr 29, 2024.

After three decades of work, advocates for developing countries scored a major win at last year’s United Nations climate change conference in Dubai: World leaders unanimously agreed to set up a climate reparations fund. As the planet warms, the poorest nations are being hit hardest by drought, rising sea levels, hurricanes, and a slew of other climate impacts — even though these countries did the least to cause global warming, compared to their early-industrializing peers. Enter the so-called loss and damage fund, which is supposed to compensate them for the unavoidable effects of climate change. So far, the international community has pledged more than $650 million to the venture.

Now the tedious, unsexy — and often boring — work of setting up the fund is just beginning. 

This week, a 26-member board is meeting for the first time to discuss the administrative and institutional policies required to operationalize the fund and dole money out to developing countries in need. The board’s to-do list is long. It ranges from the procedural — selecting co-chairs and agreeing on a host country for the fund — to the more substantive: deciding which countries are eligible to receive funding, how to fundraise and replenish the fund, and whether or not the World Bank will help manage the fund. 

The board was supposed to hold its first meeting at the end of January, but a stalemate among wealthy countries, including the U.S. and those of the European Union, about who to nominate to the board led to delays, putting the meetings three months behind schedule. Much of this work must be completed in just over six months, before the next United Nations climate conference, known as COP29, in Baku, Azerbaijan.

“There’s a very large work plan for the year,” said Brandon Wu, director of policy and campaigns and head of international climate justice work at the nonprofit ActionAid USA. “They are still trying to squeeze in three meetings before COP29 to be able to stay on schedule.” Wu is attending the board meeting as an observer.

The stakes are high. The roughly $650 million that has been pledged so far is a sliver of the estimated need — which researchers have pegged at as much as $580 billion per year by 2030 — and is broadly seen as startup money sufficient only to establish the fund.  As the main contributors to the climate crisis, wealthy countries are expected to be the primary donors to the fund. But before the fund can begin allocating money to poorer nations in need, a number of decisions need to be made.

Key among them is whether the World Bank will serve as a trustee and help manage the operations of the fund. Wealthy nations believe that the bank, which houses several other environmental and climate funds, has the experience, reputation, and administrative know-how to best manage a financial endeavor of this size. But developing countries were initially opposed to the idea, citing the failures of the bank’s past programs and its role worsening debt crises in poor countries. Ultimately, developing countries reluctantly agreed to allow the World Bank to host the loss and damage fund on an interim basis. But that decision was contingent on the bank meeting 11 conditions, including allowing recipients to directly access money from the fund instead of requiring that money pass through an intermediary international institution, such as a United Nations agency or multilateral development bank. The World Bank has until June to deliberate, and report on whether or not it can meet those conditions. 

Initial discussions about those conditions have already hit snags, according to reporting by E&E News. The loss and damage fund’s board and the bank can’t seem to agree on who should sign off on financial agreements when money is disbursed. The World Bank has a number of policies in place to ensure that the money it doles out isn’t misused and meets various environmental and social safeguards. Since the loss and damage fund is expected to hand out money to a range of national and subnational groups as a result of the direct access condition, the bank will likely work with hundreds of entities. That increases the chances that a recipient misuses the money or fails to pay back a loan, putting the bank on the hook. As a result, the bank wants the responsibility — and liability — to lie with the board, while the board has argued that as trustee, the bank should have final signing authority. 

If a project that receives money from the fund is unable to pay the bank back, the bank’s credit rating could be affected, which in turn could lead to a decrease in the bank’s borrowing power, said Michai Robertson, a lead negotiator for the Alliance of Small Island States, a group representing 39 island nations. “They see this as a big cluster of issues,” he said. “If you have one entity from each developing country, that’s 140 countries that can access the fund directly and not use a go-between. The bank sees this as a huge risk.”

If the bank ultimately reports that it cannot meet the 11 conditions, countries will go back to the drawing board to establish an independent fund. Those decisions will be made at COP29 in Azerbaijan. 

Even if the stalemate between the board and bank is resolved, the board will still have many more thorny questions to work out, including which countries will be eligible to receive money from the fund. In the agreement inked in Dubai last year, countries agreed that the fund’s resources are meant for “developing countries that are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change.” But the agreement did not define which countries qualify as “particularly vulnerable.” The phrase has typically referred to small island states and those classified as “least developed countries” in climate talks — but that leaves out countries like Pakistan, which faced catastrophic floods in 2022, and others that are widely seen as appropriate recipients for loss and damage funding. 

Hanging over these discussions is also the question of how the fund will raise the trillions of dollars that will be required in the coming years to address the loss and damage countries will face due to climate change. 

“There’s sort of the elephant-in-the-room question, which is when is the fund actually going to get meaningful amounts of money,” said Wu. If the fund receives very little money, the board will end up designing policies meant to facilitate the transfer of millions of dollars — not the trillions that are needed, he said. 

“The scope of the ambition of the fund is a big question,” he said. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The world agreed to create a climate reparations fund. Now comes the hard part. on Apr 29, 2024.

In 2016, Tony Spaniola received a notice informing him that his family shouldn’t drink water drawn from the well at his lake home in Oscoda, Michigan. Over the course of several decades, the Air Force had showered thousands of gallons of firefighting foam onto the ground at Wurtsmith Air Force Base, which closed in 1993. Those chemicals eventually leached into the soil and began contaminating the groundwater.

Alarmed, Spaniola began looking into the problem. “The more I looked, the worse it got,” he said. Two years ago,  his concern prompted him to co-found the Great Lakes PFAS Action network. The coalition of residents and activists is committed to making polluters, like the military and a factory making waterproof shoes, clean up the “forever chemicals” they’ve left behind.

PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are a class of nearly 15,000 fluorinated chemicals used since the 1950s to make clothing and food containers, among other things, oil- and water-repellent. They’re also used in firefighting foam. These chemicals do not break down over time, and have contaminated everything from drinking water to food. Research has linked them to cancer, heart and liver problems, developmental issues, and other ailments.

The U.S. Department of Defense, or DOD, is among the nation’s biggest users of firefighting foam and says 80 percent of active and decommissioned bases require clean up. Some locations, like Wurtsmith, recorded concentrations over 3,000 times higher than what the agency previously considered safe.

Today, the EPA considers it unsafe to be exposed to virtually any amount of PFOA and PFOS, two of the most harmful substances under the PFAS umbrella. Earlier this month, it implemented the nation’s first PFAS drinking water regulations, which included capping exposure to them at the lowest detectable limit. As of April 19, the agency also designated these two compounds “hazardous substances” under the federal Superfund law, making it easier to force polluters to shoulder the costs of cleaning them up. 

Meeting these regulations means that almost all of the 715 military sites and surrounding communities under Defense Department investigation for contamination will likely require remediation. Long-standing cleanup efforts at more than 100 PFAS contaminated bases that are already designated Superfund sites, like Wurtsmith, reveal some of the challenges to come.

“The heart of the issue is, how quickly are you going to clean it up, and what actions are you going to take in the interim to make sure people aren’t exposed?” said Spaniola. 

In a statement to Grist, the DOD says its plan is to follow a federal clean up law called the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, or CERCLA, to investigate contamination and determine near- and long-term clean up actions based on risk. But many advocates, including Spaniola, say the process is too slow and that short-term fixes have been insufficient. 

The problem started decades ago. In the 1960s, the Defense Department worked with 3M, one of the largest manufacturers of PFAS chemicals, to develop a foam called AFFF that can extinguish high-temperature fires. The PFAS acts as a surfactant, helping the material spread more quickly. By the 1970s, every military base, Navy ship, civilian airport, and fire station regularly used AFFF. 

In the decades that followed, millions of gallons flowed into the environment. According to the nonprofit Environmental Working Group, or EWG, 710 military sites throughout the country and its territories have known or suspected PFAS contamination. Internal studies and memos show that not long after 3M and the US Navy patented the foam in 1966, 3M learned that its PFAS products could harm animal test subjects and accumulated in the body. 

In a 2022 Senate committee hearing, residents from Oscoda testified about the health impacts, such as tumors and miscarriages, from the PFAS contamination at Wurtsmith. In 2023, Michigan reached a settlement after suing numerous manufacturers, including 3M and Dupont. Today, thousands of victims across the country are suing the chemical’s manufacturers. While some organizations and communities have tried to hold the military financially responsible for this pollution — farmers in several states recently filed suits in the U.S. District Court in South Carolina to do just that — the DOD says it’s not legally liable.

Congressional pressure on the Pentagon to clean these sites has been growing. In 2020, National Defense Authorization Acts required it to phase out PFAS-laden firefighting foam by October, 2023. Since passing that law, Congress has also ordered the department to publish the findings of drinking and groundwater tests on and around bases.

Results showed nearly 50 sites with extremely high levels of contamination, and hundreds more with levels above what was then the EPA’s health advisory. Following further congressional pressure, the military announced plans to implement interim clean-up measures at three dozen locations, including a water filtering system in Oscoda.

According to a report by the Environmental Working Group, it took an average of nearly three years for the Department of Defense to complete testing at these high-contamination sites. It took just as long to draft stopgap cleanup plans. Today, 14 years after PFAS contamination was discovered at Wurtsmith, the first site to be tested, no site has left the “investigation” phase, and there has yet to be a comprehensive plan to begin permanent remediation on any base.

The Department of Defense says any site found to have PFAS contamination exceeding the Environmental Protection Agency’s previous guideline of 70 parts per trillion will receive immediate remediation, such as bottled waters and filters on faucets. When a site is found to be contaminated, the EPA says, the department has 72 hours to provide residents with alternate sources of water.

After six years spent working with various clean up initiatives, Spaniola says waiting for the military to take action has taken a toll on the people of Oscoda. “The community had a really good relationship with the military,” he said. “I’ve watched that change from a very trusting relationship to a terrible one.” 

Dozens of states have mandated additional requirements to treat PFAS in municipal water systems, but such efforts often overlook private well owners. That’s leaving thousands of people at risk, given that in Michigan, where some 1.5 million people drink water from contaminated sources, 25 percent of residents rely on private wells.  

Nationwide, the Environmental Working Group found unsafe water in wells near 63 military bases in 29 states. While the DOD has tested private wells, it has not published the total number of wells tested or identified which of them need to be cleaned up. 

“For those who are on well water, it’s a real problem until there’s a bit of recognition for some sort of responsibility for the contamination,” said Daniel Jones, associate director of the Michigan State University Center for PFAS Research. He is advising cleanup efforts near Grayling, Michigan. “It sort of comes down to who has pockets deep enough to pay for the things that need to be done.”

The EPA’s recent decision to designate PFOA and PFOS “hazardous substances” under the federal Superfund law is unlikely to provide quick financial assistance to communities, even though the agency has made $9 billion available for private well owners and small public water systems to address contamination. Whether that support reaches private well owners is up to individual states, which can work with regional EPA offices to draft project plans before applying for grants to secure funding.

The agency has established a five-year window for water systems to test for PFAS and install filtering equipment before compliance with the newly tightened levels will be enforced. While EPA says the new PFOA and PFOS regulations do not immediately trigger an investigation or qualify them as Superfund sites on the National Priorities List, decisions for each site will be on a case-by-case basis.

“It is a tremendous win for public health, it is tremendously important and cannot cannot come soon enough, particularly for military communities who have been exposed for decades,” said Melanie Benesh, vice president of governmental affairs at the Environmental Working Group. Benesh hopes that the new rules help push the Defense Department to move more quickly.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline US military bases teem with PFAS. There’s still no firm plan to clean them up. on Apr 29, 2024.

This story was originally published by Capital B.

At the edge of Saginaw Street, a hand-painted sign is etched into a deserted storefront. “Please help, God. Clean-up Flint.”

Behind it, the block tells the story of a city 10 years removed from the start of one of the nation’s largest environmental crises. 

Empty lot. Charred two-story home. Empty lot. Abandoned house with the message “All Copper GONE,” across boarded-up windows. 

John Ishmael Taylor, 44, was born in this ZIP code, 48503, and he’s seen firsthand the neglect of the place he loves, one he hopes will be reborn for his young children. 

“The water crisis, no more jobs, the violence,” Taylor said, has left Flint like a “ghost town — a ghost town with a whole bunch of people still here.” 

Over the past decade, Flint’s water crisis has revealed how government failures at every level could effectively kill a city while opening the country’s eyes to how an environmental crisis could wreak havoc on all facets of life, make people sick, destroy a public school system, and kill jobs. 

Four years after Flint residents reached the largest civil settlement agreement in Michigan history, Taylor and tens of thousands of other victims still haven’t received a penny from the $626.25 million pot. The only money doled out has gone to lawyers involved in the case, not those who’ve been haunted by the crisis’s true impacts. Still, even when residents ultimately receive the funding, most expressed doubts that the payouts will have any true benefits for their life.

In many ways, Taylor’s life shows the violent and widespread nature of America’s water crisis. After being born in Flint, he’d spent his preteen years living outside Jackson, Mississippi, where brown water has flowed through Black homes for decades. 

Taylor, a single father, moved back to Flint permanently in January 2014. Within a year, lead levels in the drinking water of three of every four homes in his ZIP code were well above federal standards.

His youngest son, Jalen, was born 52 days before the start of the water crisis, which is recognized as April 25, 2014, the day the city infamously switched its water source from Lake Huron to the Flint River. 

The rashes started immediately for baby Jalen, speckling the inside of his legs with coarse, red blotches. Within a few years, he was diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and a form of autism spectrum disorder; both ailments are associated with lead poisoning. 

Taylor says he has battled with anxiety in the aftermath as 20 percent of the city’s residents and hundreds of businesses packed up and left. Flint’s unemployment rate is now 1.5 times higher than the national average as 70 percent of children grow up in poverty. 

He wonders what that means for his children. 

“I always wonder how they’re gonna do because this is a long-term effect — we’re talking about lead poisoning. This is going to be with them for most of their life. It’s depressing,” he said, and he’s felt no restitution. He believes it has led to a citywide mental health crisis. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1 out of 5 Flint residents reported having poor mental health, which is nearly 40 percent higher than the U.S. average. 

Angela Welch, who has lived in Flint for four decades, understands the health implications intimately.  She recently tested for lead levels in her blood at 6.5 micrograms per deciliter. Anything above 5 micrograms is considered extremely dangerous for your health. 

Since the start of the crisis, Welch has developed chronic skin and cardiac issues, had multiple surgeries, and lost part of her leg to amputation. Her brother Mac showed Capital B the scars along his body from water-induced rashes.

Welch questions what repair looks like for her family. “We gotta be dead to get our money? They want us dead to receive anything from the crisis.” 

The federal Environmental Protection Agency and officials with Flint’s mayor’s and city attorney’s offices did not respond to multiple requests from Capital B for comment.

Residents argue that even though they’ve brought the country’s water woes to the forefront, they’re in a worse position today despite hundreds of millions of dollars of investment — and they want you to know that your city can be next. 

“We’re seeing it happen to Jackson,” said Nayyirah Shariff, a community activist, whose water is still testing for lead at levels three times higher than federal limits. 

“It’s like they have the same playbook to decimate a city.”

What Flint tells us about the nation’s water crises 

Flint opened the nation’s eyes to a brewing water affordability and infrastructure crisis, ultimately leading to billions of dollars invested in cleaning the country’s drinking water, improving water plants and roads, and building climate resilience. 

There are roughly 9 million lead pipes in service across the U.S., and they’re everywhere, from the oldest cities across Massachusetts to Florida, which leads the country in lead pipes but where infrastructure and the average home is among the nation’s youngest. In November, the Biden administration outlined a plan to replace all 9 million within the next decade, making 50 percent of the $30 billion price tag available from the federal government.  

Yet Flint residents and experts told Capital B that the main flaws of the federal government’s plan have been realized in the city over the past decade: It is complicated, time-consuming, and costly to identify and replace water lines. Not to mention, as Shariff explained, replacing lead water lines is not the “magical silver bullet” to eradicate the issue. The lead service line in her home was replaced in 2017, yet her water is still filled with more lead than federal limits allow. 

As officials have claimed that the use of water filters and replacement of lead water lines has solved the crisis, including an infamous declaration by former President Barack Obama in 2016, some residents in Flint have felt confused about the true safety of their water. 

When approached by Capital B in April, James Johnson explained how a state-conducted test for lead in his drinking water in 2023 returned a clean bill of health. However, public records show Johnson’s property’s lead results were actually 19 parts per billion. The federal limit is 15.

“I don’t know what to think [about the water,]” Johnson said after Capital B explained the results. “We just use filters. We have been since ’14, but they said it’s all clean.”

Flint officials did not respond to Capital B’s request for data related to the status of its water line identification and replacement work. This month, a federal judge found the city in contempt of court for missing deadlines for lead water line replacement and related work in the aftermath of the water crisis.

In addition, as the nation focuses on drinking water, lead lines have created another crisis that rarely gets attention: how lead contamination has torn through kitchens and bathrooms. Flint residents told Capital B that since the crisis began, they’ve had corroded toilets fall through floors, and their shower heads turn black from buildup every few months. 

“Dirty water doesn’t just impact service lives,” explained Claire McClinton, a Flint resident and former autoworker. “It’s very naive to think that was the only thing that was impacted, and people do not have the money or support to fix these things.” 

All the while, Flint has had amongst the most expensive water bills in the country. A 2016 analysis revealed that the average household was paying more than $850 annually for water services, making it the most expensive average bill in the country. Today, the average bill is $1,200 annually.

McClinton is afraid that as the country chugs on with its focus on drinking water, Black communities will be harmed by efforts to cut costs, or worse, boxed out of their access to publicly run water systems. More than 20 percent of Americans now rely on private companies for drinking water, a substantial increase compared to 2019, according to the National Association of Water Companies. On average, private water utilities charge families 59 percent more on their water bills than public utilities. 

“We don’t want corporations to benefit from all this spending — we should want to keep our water public,” McClinton said. 

Still, public water systems have their challenges supporting Black communities as well. Failing public water systems are 40 percent more likely to serve people of color, and they take longer than systems in white communities to come back into compliance. Funding to reach these communities remains faulty despite the Biden administration’s goal of spending 40 percent of funds on “disadvantaged communities.” 

A Capital B analysis found that 27 percent of drinking water funds from the bipartisan infrastructure law went to “disadvantaged communities” in 2022, and the two states that received the most funds characterized for “disadvantaged communities” were Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, where less than 10 percent of residents are Black. 

McClinton said it’s bittersweet to watch Flint purportedly influence the nation for the better while things remain “broken” for Black communities.  

“The system has failed us. We did all the things you’re supposed to do; we participated in water studies, and our water is still dirty, and our health is still bad,” she said. “There’s this thing where they say every generation lives better than the next generation, but all of that is turned upside down right now, and the water crisis is just a manifestation of it.” 

‘The start of the second civil war’

In a stream of whiteness, Confederate flags, and Make America Great Again signs, the 60 miles between Detroit and Flint tell the story of Black life in Michigan, Welch said. “Because we are a majority here and have conquered [Flint and Detroit], they want to get back at us,” she said. 

Over the past decade, as Detroit’s financial crisis peaked and Flint’s water crisis began, far-right white-led groups have surged and a white-led militia plotted to abduct the state’s governor.

“It feels like the start of the second civil war,” Welch said, all while Flint is “left behind.”  

It’s seeing this shift intensify that has led some residents to see deeper racial undertones in not only Flint’s battle over water affordability and rights, but also the nation’s.

“The power structure is coalescing over water,” McClinton said. 

Flint’s issues began primarily because of a plan that was concocted to save the city money during its water-delivery process. Similar situations are happening outside of Chicago in a majority Black and Latino town, and in Baltimore. 

Not to mention the glaring similarities between Jackson and Flint, both majority-Black cities where local Black leadership was overridden by white leaders at the federal and state levels. In Jackson, after an EPA lawsuit against the city allowed the federal government to take control of the water, residents are still fighting to be included in the process. 

The attack on Black life has also widened the racial gap within the city, Shariff said. 

In a commemorative event headlined by a public health researcher from Michigan State University and attended by roughly 50 people the week before the 10-year-anniversary, just five attendees were Black.

It’s events like these, Shariff says, that highlight the disconnect between local leaders, academic researchers, and those directly impacted by the crisis. “All this money these places are spending feels like for nothing,” she said. “People marching in the streets weren’t asking for book talks or community health assessments. We asked for reparations and resources for Black self-determination.”

The crisis is a chronic illness

For some residents, like Taylor, there is still hope that the settlement checks will hit their bank accounts and improve their lives. Children affected by the water crisis are expected to receive 80 percent of the record settlement.

As Flint schools have crumbled in the aftermath of the crises, in addition to experiencing an 8 percent increase in the number of students with special needs, especially among school-age boys, Taylor hopes to use the money to better their educational opportunities and put them through college.

However, for others, including Welch and Shariff, the expected payout of $2,000 to $3,000 for adults feels like a slap in the face. There is also a lot of confusion around the settlement process, with two residents telling Capital B they thought the money was already gone, which stopped them from attempting to be a part of the process. 

In a lot of ways, although harder to find, opportunities have reached the city in recent years, including through a guaranteed income program for every pregnant person and infant in the city. The new program “prescribes” a one-time $1,500 payment after 20 weeks of pregnancy, and $500 a month during the infant’s first year. 

Yet, it still remains challenging to remain confident in change. 

“With all the experiences we’ve had over the 10 years, our hopes have been dashed,” explained McClinton, who every April 25 helps to organize a day of commemoration for Flint residents.  As Capital B has reported, the water issues afflicting Black communities are violent in many ways, and it trickles down into increasing situations of despair around housing, mental and physical health, and communal violence. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic widened the racial death gap in Flint, Black residents’ death rate climbed at a rate that was more than twice the city’s death rate between 2014 and 2019, according to Capital B’s analysis of state data.

Several Flint residents explained how the mental health strain caused by the water crisis created a cycle of “disunity” and the inability to trust not just the government or the water flowing out of their pipes, but also the people around them. 

“Everyone is just on edge,” Taylor said, “and that has everything to do with the water.” 

In the city’s Black areas, it’s hard to find a block without an abandoned home or grassy field full of trash and plastic water bottles. Taylor said it’s depressing to drive through your neighborhood to see your former schools empty, graffitied, and boarded up, or parks closed and desolate.

As job opportunities have become harder to find, so has housing. Nearly all of the dozen residents Capital B spoke to for this story said they experienced housing insecurity at times over the past decade. 

Due to a lack of affordable housing options, the average stay at the city’s housing shelter has increased from less than two months to over five. The public housing waitlist has ballooned to two years, even as some public housing buildings still have high levels of lead in the water, including the Richert Manor homes where Welch lived for many years at the height of the water situation. 

In the meantime, as race, namely being Black in America, stands as the biggest risk factor for lead poisoning, more so than even poverty or poor housing, Flint residents say their home serves as a warning to other Black communities. 

Nationwide, Black children have the highest blood lead levels. As such, even as billions are pumped into fixing the issues, the next generation of Black Americans will remain altered by the impacts of lead poisoning. 

As Shariff said: “The water crisis is like having a chronic illness — I mean, it gave me a chronic illness — but it is basically like you’re dealing with it, and it never goes away.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A decade later, Flint’s water crisis continues on Apr 28, 2024.

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Blake Dollier spoke excitedly as he watched the construction crews pulverize concrete along a quarter-mile stretch of U.S. Highway 52 where it passes through West Lafayette, Indiana.

Soon, the Indiana Department of Transportation, or INDOT, where Dollier works as the public relations director, will install a series of copper coils under the highway’s surface to test a new technology Purdue University researchers developed that can provide power to electric vehicles wirelessly as they drive past.

“Wouldn’t it really be something if we could just drive over the road and catch your charge for your vehicle as you drive across it?” Dollier said during a phone interview, watching the progress from the parking lot of one of the department’s satellite offices in West Lafayette.

The state began construction of its new pilot project this month, and officials say they believe it could spur greater adoption of EVs and redefine the way people think about them. The project, they said, which is being done in partnership with Purdue and the engine manufacturer Cummins Inc., will be capable of providing power to vehicles even as they cruise by at speeds of up to 65 miles per hour.

Ultimately, Purdue researchers and state officials hope the project will open up EVs to a wider customer base, largely by reducing battery costs and quelling concerns over range anxiety — the fear that an electric vehicle will run out of juice before reaching its destination. One in four U.S adults say that they would seriously consider buying an EV for their next purchase, but more than half of those who don’t want to buy an electric vehicle blame range anxiety, according to a survey conducted by AAA last year.

While Indiana’s project wouldn’t be the first “dynamic EV charger” in the nation — Detroit installed a similar pilot project on a residential road last fall — it would be the first time the technology was installed on a highway.

If successful, the technology could also help to electrify long-haul trucks, which are among the most difficult vehicles to decarbonize, said Nadia Gkritza, a civil engineering professor at Purdue University and the project’s lead researcher. 

That’s because heavy-duty trucks would require significantly larger batteries due to their size, weight and the long distances they tend to travel, Gkritza said. However, she said, if they could receive power as they drive, it would allow those vehicles to carry smaller batteries, lowering overall costs and reducing the number of stops to recharge.

“Really the possibilities are endless,” INDOT’s Dollier said. “And we’re just hopeful that this is something that can really benefit a lot of people here in the state of Indiana and maybe even across the country going forward.”

INDOT says the pilot project should be complete by next summer, though private vehicles won’t be able to use it — at least not yet. Cars and trucks must be equipped with special receivers for the wireless charging to work, meaning current models are incompatible. The coils are installed underground and use magnetic fields to deliver the electricity wirelessly. Each coil only activates when a receiver is above it, Purdue researchers say, so the infrastructure won’t pose a threat to pedestrians, animals or other vehicles.

Kaylee Dann, executive director of Greater Indiana Clean Cities, a clean energy advocacy nonprofit that isn’t involved with the project, agrees that the new technology could spur greater EV adoption in Indiana and nationwide. In fact, she said, the project is coming at a time when more and more Hoosiers are choosing to go electric.

While Indiana’s overall EV adoption rates still pale in comparison to California and other leaders in the EV market, the state saw an astounding 1,200 percent increase in registered electric vehicles between 2016 and 2022, according to a state report published last year. Some 24,000 electric vehicles were registered in Indiana last year alone, according to the state’s Office of Energy Development.

Dann believes that leaning into EVs has been a smart financial move by the state as the nation pivots to cleaner transportation options. Two recent federal policies — the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act and the Environmental Protection Agency’s new tailpipe pollution standards, finalized last month — are expected to dramatically increase domestic production of EVs nationwide in the coming years.

Indiana is already experiencing some of that economic gain. According to a state report published last September, Indiana has received about $8.2 billion in investments related to EV production since 2021. Those include a $3 billion investment by General Motors and Samsung to manufacture EV batteries in the city of New Carlisle and an $803 million investment by Toyota to expand its EV production in the city of Princeton.

“We’ve seen a lot of investment from manufacturers,” Dann said. “So we’re gonna see a big influx of EVs being produced in the state.”

But the biggest benefits to the state could be environmental.

In its annual State of the Air Report, the American Lung Association ranked the Indianapolis metro area the 10th worst city in the nation for year-round particulate matter pollution known as PM2.5. Regular exposure to PM2.5, which is produced any time something combusts, has been linked to increased health risks, including greater risk of asthma attacks, cardiovascular and lung diseases and even premature death. 

Because EVs draw power from batteries, not from burning fuel, a higher adoption of them would lead to better air quality for any state. Gkritza said that reducing air pollution is one of the broader goals of Indiana’s pilot project. “Greenhouse gas emissions, air quality, these are really bad across those freight corridors, transit corridors — we have communities that are negatively impacted by freight movement,” she said.

More EVs also means fewer greenhouse gas emissions, Dann said, which helps to slow climate change. Transportation is America’s largest source of greenhouse gas emissions, according to the EPA, making up nearly a third of the country’s carbon footprint.

In Indiana alone, EVs contribute 60 percent less carbon pollution than their fossil fuel counterparts, Dann said, despite the fact that the state’s electricity — the fuel for EVs — is predominantly produced by coal-fired power plants. More than half of the state’s electricity in 2021 was generated by coal, according to the Indiana Department of Environmental Management. 

Having strong EV charging infrastructure in Indiana could be a boon nationwide, given the state’s centralized location in the U.S. 

Indiana has more interstate highways passing through it than any other state, Indiana Governor Eric Holcomb touted in a 2021 report. It’s also home to the nation’s second largest FedEx hub and 41 freight railroads, he added, noting Indiana’s motto of being the “Crossroads of America.”

“Simply put,” Holcomb wrote, “the world moves through Indiana.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A highway in Indiana could one day charge your EV while you’re driving it on Apr 27, 2024.

To meet clean energy and net-zero targets by 2030, as set during COP28, the International Energy Agency (IEA) says that rapid expansion of battery storage capacity is necessary.

According to the agency, a rollout of batteries needs to increase six-fold compared to current rates in order to meet global climate goals.

IEA reported that battery costs have decreased by more than 90% over the past 15 years. Last year, battery rollout increased over 130% compared to 2022, and globally, battery capacity increased 42 gigawatts (GW). The increase in battery storage has also contributed to an increase in electric vehicle sales, which have risen from 3 million in 2020 to nearly 14 million in 2023.

“The electricity and transport sectors are two key pillars for bringing down emissions quickly enough to meet the targets agreed at COP28 and keep open the possibility of limiting global warming to 1.5 °C,” IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol said in a statement. “Batteries will provide the foundations in both areas, playing an invaluable role in scaling up renewables and electrifying transport while delivering secure and sustainable energy for businesses and households.”

As The Guardian reported, the global investment in battery storage reached $150 billion in 2023, most of which (about $115 billion) went toward electric vehicle batteries. The biggest investments in EV batteries happened in China, the U.S. and across Europe. Investments in battery storage for electricity grids increased by about five times compared to the previous year as well.

According to the IEA’s Special Report on Batteries and Secure Energy Transitions, battery usage in the energy sector has increased, reaching about 2,400 gigawatt-hours (GWh) in 2023. This is about a fourfold increase over 2020.

While battery costs are falling, demand is increasing and storage capacity is rising, costs need to continue to decline and expansion must increase sixfold by the end of this decade to limit the worst impacts of climate change.

To increase utility-scale battery storage, IEA recommends policy changes to remove restrictions that keep battery storage from accessing energy markets as well as changes to taxing structures, which can sometimes cause double taxation on battery storage projects.

Additionally, the report addresses the need to improve recycling rates to reduce the need to extract raw materials, like lithium and cobalt, for batteries. Recycling improvements and investments in battery innovation will be needed to stabilize the supply chain and help bring costs down.

“The combination of solar PV and batteries is today competitive with new coal plants in India,” Birol said. “And just in the next few years, it will be cheaper than new coal in China and gas-fired power in the United States. Batteries are changing the game before our eyes.”

The post Battery Energy Storage Capacity Must Increase 6x Faster to Meet Global Climate Goals: IEA appeared first on EcoWatch.

Close to 20 billion pads, tampons, and applicators enter North American landfills every year. The…

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In the summer of 2022, heavy rainfall damaged a water treatment plant in the city of Jackson, Mississippi, precipitating a high-profile public health crisis. The Republican Governor Tate Reeves declared a state of emergency, as thousands of residents were told to boil their water before drinking it. For some, the pressure in their taps was so low that they couldn’t flush their toilets and were forced to rely on bottled water for weeks. 

Many of the city’s 150,000 residents were wary that their local government could get clean water running through their pipes again. State officials had a history of undermining efforts to repair Jackson’s beleaguered infrastructure, and the city council, for its part, didn’t have the money to make the fixes on its own. So when the federal government stepped in that fall, allocating funding and appointing an engineer to manage the city’s water system, there was reason to believe change may finally be near. 

But as the months wore on, hope turned to frustration. The federally appointed engineer, Ted Henifin, began taking steps to run the city’s water system through a private company, despite Mayor Chokwe Lumumba’s objections. Advocates’ repeated requests for data and other information about Jackson’s drinking water went unanswered, according to a local activist, Makani Themba, and despite Henifin’s assurances before a federal judge that the water was safe to drink, brown liquid still poured out of some taps. Faced with these conditions, a group of advocates sent the Environmental Protection Agency a letter last July asking to be involved in the overhaul of the city’s water system. 

“Jackson residents have weathered many storms, literally and figuratively, over the last several years,” they wrote in the letter. “We have a right and responsibility to be fully engaged in the redevelopment of our water and sewer system.” The letter was followed by an emergency petition to the EPA containing similar requests for transparency and involvement. 

Earlier this month, a federal judge granted the advocates their request, making two community organizations, the Mississippi Poor People’s Campaign and the People’s Advocacy Group, parties to an EPA lawsuit against the city of Jackson for violating the Safe Drinking Water Act. A seat at the table of the legal proceedings, the advocates hope, will allow the city’s residents to have a say in rebuilding their infrastructure and also ward off privatization. The saga in Jackson reflects a wider problem affecting public utilities across the country, with cash-strapped local governments turning to corporations to make badly needed repairs to water treatment plants, distribution pipes, and storage systems, a course that often limits transparency and boxes locals out of the decision-making. 

“This isn’t a uniquely Jackson problem,” said Brooke Floyd, co-director of the Jackson People’s Assembly at the People’s Advocacy Institute. “We need ways for all these cities that need infrastructure repairs to get clean water to their communities.”

The roots of Jackson’s water crisis lie in decades of disinvestment and neglect. Like many other midsize cities around the country, such as Pittsburgh and St. Louis, Jackson declined after white, middle-class residents relocated to the suburbs, taking tax dollars away from infrastructure in increasing need of repair. Between 1980 and 2020, Jackson’s population dropped by around 25 percent. Today, the city is more than 80 percent Black, up from 50 percent in the 1980s. A quarter of Jackson’s residents live below the poverty line, with most households earning less than $40,000 a year, compared with $49,000 for the state overall.

Over the decades, antagonism between the Republican state government and the Democratic and Black-led local government created additional obstacles to updating Jackson’s water and sewage infrastructure. A Title VI civil rights complaint that the NAACP filed with the EPA in September 2022 accused Governor Reeves and the state legislature of “systematically depriving Jackson the funds that it needs to operate and maintain its water facilities in a safe and reliable manner.” The biggest problem, the NAACP argued, was that the state had rejected the city’s proposal for a 1 percent sales tax to pay for infrastructure updates and by directing funds from the EPA’s Drinking Water State Revolving Loan Fund away from the capital city. 

“Despite Jackson’s status as the most populous city in Mississippi, state agencies awarded federal funds” from the EPA program three times in the past 25 years, the complaint read. “Meanwhile, the state has funneled funds to majority-white areas in Mississippi despite their less acute needs.”

In the absence of adequate resources from the state and local government, Jacksonians have learned to fend for themselves, Floyd told Grist. At the height of the water crisis in 2022, federal dollars helped fund the distribution of bottled water to thousands of residents, but when the money dried up, people organized to secure drinking water for households still reckoning with smelly, off-color fluid running from their taps. When Henifin began posting boil-water notices on a smartphone app that some found hard to use, one resident set up a separate community text service. Floyd said that for some residents, these problems are still ongoing today. 

“There’s this sense of, we have to provide for each other because no one is coming,” Floyd said. “We know that the state is not going to help us.”

Henifin has told a federal judge that he’s made a number of moves to improve Jackson’s water quality. The private company that he set up, JXN Water, has hired contractors to update the main water plant’s corrosion control and conducted testing for lead and bacteria like E. coli. But residents and advocates point out that while the water coming out of the system might be clean, the city hosts more than 150 miles of decrepit pipes that can leach toxic chemicals into the water supply. Advocates want the city to replace them and conduct testing in neighborhoods instead of just near the treatment facility, changes that the city has federal money to make. In December 2022, the federal government allocated $600 million to Jackson for repairs to its water system.

But the worry is that this money will be spent on other things. Henifin is the one who handles the federal funds. By court order, he has the authority to enter into contracts, make payments, and change the rates and fees charged to consumers. 

Themba, the local activist, said that Henifin has not responded to residents’ demands for additional testing and access to monitoring data that already exists. Because JXN Water is a private company, it’s not subject to public disclosure laws requiring this information to be shared with the public. (Henifin did not respond to Grist’s requests for comment.) 

Themba points to Pittsburgh as an example of a place where residents fought privatization of their water system and secured a more democratic public utility. In 2012, faced with a lack of state and federal funding, the city turned over its water system to Veolia, an international waste- and water-management giant based in France. Over the following years, the publicly traded company elected for cost-cutting measures that caused lead to enter the water supply of tens of thousands of residents. A local campaign ensued, and advocates eventually won a commitment from the city government to return the water system to city control and give the  public a voice in the system’s management.

“What we’ve learned from all over the country is that privatization doesn’t work for the community,” Themba said. “We want what works.”

The court order that designated Henifin as Jackson’s water manager in 2022 does not outline what will happen once his four-year contract expires in 2026. Last month, the Mississippi Senate passed a bill that would put Jackson’s water in the hands of the state after Henifin steps down, a move that the manager recently said he supports and that Jackson’s mayor strongly opposes. That bill soon failed in the House without a vote. Now that they are part of the lawsuit, advocates hope they’ll have a chance to influence the outcome, before it’s too late. 

“Jackson residents have felt left out of the equation for so long,” Floyd said. “If we lose this, that’s a big deal.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A water crisis in Mississippi turns into a fight against privatization on Apr 26, 2024.

This story is published as part of the Global Indigenous Affairs Desk, an Indigenous-led collaboration between Grist, High Country News, ICT, Mongabay, Native News Online, and APTN.

Last September, Nicaraguan state security forces arrived at Indigenous Miskitu leader Brooklyn Rivera’s home in Bilwi, on the North Caribbean coast. Pretending to be health workers, officers allegedly handcuffed Rivera and beat him with batons before putting him in the back of an ambulance and driving away. More than six months later, Rivera’s family still doesn’t know where he is, or if he is alive. 

Although Rivera had spent decades fighting for Miskitu autonomy and land rights, Carlos Hendy Thomas, another Miskitu leader, said that the recent targeting began with Rivera’s April 2023 trip to New York for the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, or UNPFII, the world’s largest gathering of Indigenous leaders and activists, and a place for Indigenous peoples to bring attention to issues their communities face. Hendy Thomas said that before Rivera left for New York, government officials warned him not to speak out against the government. He did so anyway, and when Rivera tried to board a plane to return home, he was told that the Nicaraguan authorities had not approved his reentry. Instead, Rivera flew to Honduras and crossed the border back into Nicaragua to return to Bilwi.

A few days before his arrest, Hendy Thomas told Rivera he should leave the country for his own safety, but Rivera insisted his people needed him. That was the last time the two spoke. This year, Hendy Thomas came to the Permanent Forum to ask the United Nations to pressure Nicaragua for information. “We are hoping that by coming here, at least this would come to light, and the U.N. would intervene to get him out from jail, if he’s still in jail, or if he’s even alive,” Hendy Thomas said. 

Rivera’s situation is reflected in a growing trend of Indigenous leaders facing retaliation for speaking out at UNPFII and other international spaces. With few options for Indigenous peoples to advocate in their own countries, especially where regimes refuse to even recognize their existence, many leaders turn to the international community for help. But even that option is becoming less feasible for many Indigenous peoples.

According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, the number and severity of reprisals against people for engaging with the United Nations system has increased. Just in the past two years, Indigenous leaders attending U.N. meetings have faced attempted kidnapping, harassment, arrest, intimidation, online censorship, travel bans, smearing, and other forms of reprisal. 

Hernan Vales, the chief of the Indigenous Peoples and Minorities Section at the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, said that his office has seen an increase in reported cases of reprisals, but declined to give specific numbers. Vales and other U.N. experts also believe that there may be many more cases that go unreported. A 2023 U.N. report on the issue also says that more people are simply choosing not to engage with the U.N. because they are afraid of repercussions. According to the report, for example, 38 Indigenous Yukpa people decided not to meet with U.N. officials in Venezuela after being stopped by military forces while on their way to the gathering. 

“We cannot tolerate those who bring critical perspective to the United Nations being silenced,” Vales said in a statement. “We need to do more.”

But even with the increased attention and resources available, UNPFII forum members, U.N. experts, and Indigenous leaders say that the problem is still getting worse. Roberto Borrero, who is president of the United Confederation of Taíno Peoples, has attended every session of the Permanent Forum since it began in 2002 and said that the frequency and severity of reprisals has increased, and that the U.N. needs to do more. 

“It really speaks to the credibility of the U.N. to highlight and follow up on this issue,” he said. “If they don’t, the U.N. is going to be even more increasingly seen as ineffective.”

Last year, Edward Porokwa, an Indigenous Maasai leader from Tanzania, attended UNPFII to call attention to human rights violations carried out against Maasai communities, including forced evictions, land-grabbing, and resource deprivation. At the forum, said Porokwa, Tanzanian officials followed him, took videos and pictures without his permission, and said that he was not a legitimate representative. Porokwa said that throughout the forum, he also received anonymous phone calls saying that what he was doing was not right and the government was watching him. 

In Tanzania, Maasai activists have faced arrest and persecution, and Porokwa, spooked by the warnings, decided not to return home for nearly six months. “It was very terrible,” he said. “I could not meet my family. I could not communicate with everybody, because they made me really feel like my life was in danger.” Despite the incident, Porokwa returned to UNPFII this year with an even larger delegation of Maasai leaders. 

Indigenous leaders believe that governments are targeting their U.N. participation because it embarrasses them on the world stage. Exposing human rights abuses to the international community can also have financial impacts. Just this week, the World Bank announced that it is suspending $50 million in funding for a tourism project in Tanzania that has faced allegations of killings, forced evictions, and rape. 

In a statement delivered at UNPFII, Hamisi Malebo, the executive secretary of the United Republic of Tanzania’s National Commission for UNESCO, denied what he called the “baseless and factually inaccurate” allegations made by Maasai leaders. “Tanzania is guided by the rule of law and respect for human rights,” Malebo said. “The government does not condone acts of threat, intimidation, and harassment of its citizens, human rights defenders, and other nonstate actors pursuing this common objective.”

Brian Keane, director of Land Is Life, a nonprofit that advocates for Indigenous rights, says that although threats at the U.N. tend to be less overt than cases like Rivera’s, intimidation and harassment should be taken just as seriously, especially knowing that they can lead to more serious repercussions back home. “It’s a big issue,” he said. “There’s this kind of constant bullying that goes on trying to silence people that are here to speak up for their rights,” he said. 

On the second day of the two-week UNPFII session, Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim, Indigenous Mbororo from Chad and the chair of the forum, delivered a statement condemning any reprisals. 

Last year, a young Indigenous woman from Asia whose name Grist is withholding to protect her identity, was on her way to her local airport to attend UNPFII, when her car was surrounded by a convoy of government vehicles. Officials attempted to drag her out of her car, and it was only after bystanders rushed to her defense that she was eventually permitted to leave. She said she is more careful now. But even after the experience, she returned to UNPFII this year. “I have to continue my work,” she said. “I see my meaning of life that way.”

In July 2022, Yana Tannagasheva, an Indigenous Shor activist from Kemerovo Oblast, Russia, attended a U.N. meeting in Geneva to speak about the harms of coal mining in her community. After she spoke, Tannagasheva and other witnesses say a Russian representative aggressively approached her and demanded to know her name and personal contact information. Tannagasheva, who has lived in exile in Sweden for six years, says the experience shattered her sense of security. “It was so awful. I wanted to cry,” she said. “I was surprised it can happen during a U.N. session.”

Representatives from the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, the Republic of Nicaragua, the Russian Federation, and the United Republic of Tanzania did not respond to requests for comment.

Binota Moy Dhamai, Tripura from the Chittagong Hill Tracts in Bangladesh and the chair of the Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, said that reprisals threaten the entire international system and its goals. “If it continues like this then what is the meaning of talking about the sustainable development goals? What is the meaning of talking about peace-building?” he said.

Despite the risks, Carlos Hendy Thomas, from Nicaragua, has no plans to give up his fight. In 2020, Hendy Thomas’ son, who would have inherited his title of hereditary chief, was murdered. The murder, which Hendy Thomas believes was orchestrated by the state because of his son’s defense of Miskitu land rights, was never investigated. Hendy Thomas, who lives in the United States, says he is not that worried about his own safety, even though he is concerned about his family back home. 

“I don’t really care about me,” he said. “They already killed my son. I’m afraid, but I’m speaking. If I don’t, who will?”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Indigenous leaders are risking their lives to speak at the UN on Apr 26, 2024.

In Washington, a dozen dams dot the Columbia River — that mighty waterway carved through the state by a sequence of prehistoric superfloods. Between those dams and the hundreds of others that plug the rivers and tributaries that lace the region, including California and Nevada, the Western United States accounts for most of the hydroelectric energy the country generates from the waters flowing across its landscape. Washington alone captures more than a quarter of that; combined with Oregon and Idaho, the Pacific Northwest lays claim to well over two-fifths of America’s dam-derived electricity. So when a drought hits the region, the nation takes notice.

That happened in 2023 when, according to a recent report, U.S. hydroelectric power hit its lowest level in 22 years. While the atmospheric rivers that poured across California provided the state with abundant energy, the Pacific Northwest endured low summer flows after a late-spring heat wave caused snowpack to melt and river levels to peak earlier than normal. Though dam turbines kept spinning throughout the year — proving that even during a drought the nation’s hydro system remains reliable — last year offered energy providers in the West a glimpse of the conditions they may need to adapt to as the world warms and seasonal weather patterns shift.

While models predict climate change will plunge California and the Southwest deeper into drought, what awaits Washington and Oregon is less clear. The Pacific Northwest will get warmer. That much is certain. But in terms of the rain that places like Seattle and Portland are known for, things get fuzzier.

“Whenever you bring in water precipitation and you’re looking at climate model results, they go in all directions,” said Sean Turner, a water resources and hydropower engineer with Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The Evergreen and Beaver states could get drier or wetter — or both, depending on the time of year.

Nathalie Voisin, chief scientist for water-energy dynamics at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, said much of the latest research suggests an increase in total annual hydroelectric power in the region, but, as Turner noted as well, uncertainties remain. “So as a trend, we see an increase” in annual precipitation, Voisin said, “but we also see an increase in variability of very wet years and very dry years.”

Even during wet years, however, the water won’t fall in a gentle mist evenly distributed from new year to year end. The bulk of it, Voisin said, is expected to come from atmospheric rivers streaming overhead between fall and spring, with rivers running low in late summer as the snow and ice in the mountains that rim the region melt ever earlier and no longer keep the waters as high as they historically have.

These are things that the Bonneville Power Administration — the federal agency responsible for selling energy from the 31 federally owned dams along the Columbia and its tributaries to utilities throughout the region — has a keen eye on. In a fact sheet detailing the agency’s plans to ensure its hydropower resources remain resilient, the administration wrote, “By the 2030s, higher average fall and winter flows, earlier peak spring runoff, and longer periods of low summer flows are very likely.” Those times of lower hydroelectric generation will coincide with periods when rising temps are expected to drive people to demand more from their thermostats to keep comfortable.

Given this, if Western states like California, Washington, and Oregon are to meet the 2045 goals for 100 percent clean energy they’ve set, their utilities are going to have to get creative. As it is, when hydropower fails to meet demand, methane, also known as natural gas, tends to fill the gap — even if power companies can’t say for sure that that’s their backstop.

Seattle City Light, for instance, which provides electricity to over 900,000 people across much of the Seattle area, reportedly has been carbon neutral since 2005 thanks in large part to an energy mix that is nearly 90 percent hydropower — around half of which is supplied by Bonneville Power. But with its standard fleet of hydroelectric plants generating below average, Siobhan Doherty, the utility’s director of power management, said it has had to procure new sources of energy to ensure it can comfortably meet customers’ needs. A fair portion of that power comes from other dams in the area, but some of it is also provided by what Doherty called “unspecified” sources purchased from other providers.

Across the West, when utilities like Seattle City Light purchase energy to cover hydropower shortfalls, most of it comes from gas-powered peaker plants, according to Minghao Qiu, an environmental scientist at Stanford University. As a result, emissions rise. Over the 20-year period examined in a study of how droughts impact grid emissions, Qiu and his colleagues found that temporary prolonged hydropower declines led to 121 million tons of carbon emissions. Qiu also found that the plants belching all that pollution often lay far from where the energy is needed.

While the seemingly obvious solution to this challenge is to rapidly deploy wind and solar, Qiu found that this didn’t actually solve the problem.

“So what really happened there is an implicit market that whoever can generate the electricity with the lowest costs are going to generate first,” Qiu said. This means that solar and wind will send all the energy they can because they’re by far the cheapest; hydropower then provides what it can, followed by fossil fuels like methane to plug any holes. “So when hydropower sort of declines,” Qiu said, “the wind power and solar power is already maxed out,” typically leaving gas plants as the remaining option.

Nonetheless, in a bid to keep its grid carbon-free in the long term, Seattle City Light recently signed agreements to buy energy from two independent solar projects, each with at least 40 megawatts of capacity, and is negotiating other, similar arrangements. The fact Bonneville Power has seen a sharp rise in requests from renewable energy developers to connect to its transmission lines suggests other utilities in the region are exploring similar deals.

While those solar farms, in a sense, address the demands that hydro alone can’t meet, the West’s dams help make utility-scale renewables work. Regardless of the inevitable expansion and improvement of turbine and photovoltaic technology, wind and solar will always be intermittent and weather-dependent. In those moments when the gusts stop blowing and the sun stops shining, something has to top off the grid. “Hydro does that better than anything,” Turner said.

Many of the dams administered by Bonneville Power are already equipped to spin up or down as demand dictates, and their ability to meet these moments was perhaps no more apparent than during the lethal heat dome that gripped the Pacific Northwest for one blistering week in June 2021. As streets cracked and power lines melted, the region’s homebound populations drove electricity demand to record levels. To keep the grid going, Bonneville Power relied on the controversial dams along the lower Snake River. The agency released a statement a month after the heat wave, revealing how critical the four lower Snake River dams were during that disaster. At times, they provided well over 1,000 megawatts of power, which is roughly the average draw in Seattle. And while there are credible reasons to remove the dams, Bonneville Power said that without those resources it likely would have had to resort to rolling blackouts to ensure the system wasn’t pushed past its limits.

That experience, and the many more like it that are sure to come, suggest that even as year-to-year dips impact the nation’s dams, the power they provide will long remain a critical component of a carbon-free future.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Rivers are the West’s largest source of clean energy. What happens when drought strikes? on Apr 26, 2024.