While short-lived, the denial came as a surprise. 

This March, Loudoun County, a suburb of Washington, D.C. in northern Virginia that is home to the greatest concentration of data centers in the world, made an unexpected move: It rejected a proposal to let a company build a bigger data center than existing zoning automatically allowed. 

“At some point we have to say stop,” said Loudoun Supervisor Michael Turner during the meeting, as reported by news site LoudounNow. “We do not have enough power to power the data centers we have.”

County supervisors would later reverse the decision, approving a smaller version of the project. But the initial denial sent ripples throughout Virginia, where concern over the rapid growth of data centers and what that means for the state’s ambitious decarbonization goals is growing. 

“It is really a salient issue for climate right now,” said Tim Cywinski, a spokesperson for the Virginia chapter of the Sierra Club, which has been vocal about its desire to slow down data center development in the state. “The data center industry is about 2 percent of global carbon emissions. … In about two years, I think it will surpass the airline industry.”

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Dominion Energy, Virginia’s largest electric utility, has forecast that data centers will be the most significant driver of rising energy demand in the state over the next 15 years. And while the utility has pledged it will decarbonize its Virginia grid by 2045, in line with the Virginia Clean Economy Act passed by the state legislature in 2020, it has also indicated in its most recent long-range plan for utility regulators that new natural gas plants will be needed to meet demand. 

“We are 100 percent committed to achieving the goals of the VCEA. We are not taking our foot off the accelerator with renewables,” said Aaron Ruby, a spokesperson for Dominion. But, he added, “the clean energy transition is more challenging than it was a few years ago. The inescapable reality is we are experiencing unprecedented growth in electric demand.” 

While some environmentalists say the skyrocketing data center growth threatens Virginia’s ability to go zero-carbon, others say it can be done — but it will require new ways of managing the grid. 

“To me it’s not a question of data centers or clean energy,” said Nate Benforado, an attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center. “I think there is a path forward if we make some improvements.” 

‘They just continue to come’

Data centers and Virginia have been hand in glove for almost three decades, since companies like MAE-East, Equinix, and AOL built some of the earliest modern facilities in the Washington, D.C. suburbs. With close proximity to the federal government and the defense firms ringing it, Northern Virginia — and especially Ashburn in Loudoun County, known as “Data Center Alley” — quickly became the beating heart of the U.S. data center industry. 

“There are data centers located in other areas of Virginia, but roughly 80 percent of the industry is located in Loudoun County,” Dominion wrote in a recent long-term plan submitted to state regulators. “To put this in perspective, the aggregate of the next six largest data center markets in the U.S. is not as big as Loudoun County’s market.” 

Lawmakers have embraced the business. Beginning in 2010, Virginia exempted data centers from sales and use tax for many of the key components of their business as long as they met certain criteria: They had to invest at least $150 million in their facility, create 50 new jobs in the locality where it was sited and pay at least 150 percent of the prevailing annual average wage. The exemption remains Virginia’s largest economic development incentive. 

The gambit worked. A 2019 report by Virginia’s legislative watchdog, the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission, found the exemption “has a sizable influence” in attracting data centers to the state. It also has a “moderate economic benefit” for the state, generating about $27 million in Virginia gross domestic product for every $1 million in foregone tax revenue, JLARC concluded.

But as data centers have continued to flock to Virginia, concerns have increased. In Loudoun and neighboring Prince William County, residents complain the facilities’ 24/7 operations produce a constant humming that never stops. Conservationists fear the centers’ expanding footprint is consuming too much land, while their heavy water use could strain local supplies. 

How to deal with the facilities’ power use is also an increasingly urgent question. Data centers are highly electricity-intensive, requiring a steady stream of power to operate around the clock. As the industry expands, more electricity is needed to meet their demand, triggering the construction of not only new sources of power but transmission lines to carry that power from where it’s generated to where it’s used. 

Data center representatives have pointed out many companies in the space have been active drivers of renewables development across the nation. In a statement, Data Center Coalition President Josh Levi noted two-thirds of the renewable power bought by U.S. corporations has been wind and solar contracted to data centers and their customers. Companies have also set their own goals: Google aims to operate its data centers on carbon-free energy by 2030, while Amazon is pushing for net-zero carbon emissions by 2040. 

“Data centers are highly efficient facilities that enable energy savings and efficiencies for homes, businesses, utilities, and other end users,” said Levi. Many, he added, are “on pace to achieve voluntary clean energy targets that predate and outpace many state mandates and targets.”  

‘Absolutely phenomenal’

Even with those commitments, the sheer magnitude of the facilities’ growth in Virginia poses a challenge for utilities, and particularly Dominion. While data centers’ peak energy usage in 2022 was almost 2.8 gigawatts — roughly one and a half times the power produced at Dominion’s largest Virginia plant, the North Anna nuclear facility in Louisa County — the company forecasts they will require roughly 13.3 gigawatts by 2038. Much of that may be due to Amazon Web Services, which Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin last year announced intends to invest $35 billion in data center campuses in the state by 2040, although Dominion does not disclose information about specific customers. 

“The amount of data center load growth we’re dealing with is absolutely phenomenal,” said Devi Glick, a principal at consultancy Synapse Energy Economics, who testified for the Sierra Club at hearings in Richmond this September on the utility’s Integrated Resource Plan, a nonbinding roadmap for how it intends to meet customer demand over the next 15 years. “Everything we’re dealing with is massive and kind of, like, novel.” 

Some environmental groups have challenged the accuracy of Dominion’s forecasts, arguing the utility is overestimating future growth as a way to justify keeping existing natural gas plants running and build new ones, including a proposed peaker plant in Chesterfield County. 

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Others, including the nonprofit Appalachian Voices, say the forecast is shakier than it appears because so much of the expected demand comes from a very small number of companies. According to figures from Dominion, two firms account for 62 percent of the demand the utility expects to see from data centers in 2030. Five account for 80 percent. 

“If even one of those five companies changes its growth plans, or if one or more counties in northern Virginia takes an aggressively hostile turn against data center expansion, the actual growth in Virginia could be radically different from what Dominion estimates now,” wrote Rachel James, an attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center representing Appalachian Voices, this October. 

Despite those disagreements, there’s little debate that in the near term, data centers’ electricity demand is skyrocketing. Dominion Vice President of Strategic Partnerships Alan Bradshaw told regulators this September that data centers have signed electric service agreements with Dominion that call for the utility to provide over 5.8 gigawatts to various new facilities by 2032. Bradshaw said he wasn’t aware of any data center customer in Dominion territory abandoning a project after such an agreement had been signed. Over 10 additional gigawatts are in earlier stages of development by companies working with Dominion to obtain power for future projects.

“This week we’ve had an executive meeting with a new entrant on the market, and they want to add two campuses that have 1.2 gigawatts of load,” Bradshaw said at the September 21 hearing. “Literally on the way to the courthouse today, we had another customer call us about a half-gigawatt campus they want to meet with us on. So they just continue to come.” 

Zero-carbon or the cloud? 

But while economic development boosters see the uptick in investment as a boon for state and local coffers, environmental groups say if left unchecked, the growth threatens Virginia’s ability to decarbonize its electric grid by 2050. 

“We have to make the hard choice about what data centers look like in Virginia now and if it’s worth the cost,” said Cywinski of the Sierra Club. “And right now, we think it’s not.” 

All of the long-range plans Dominion presented to regulators last year included new natural gas capacity, ranging anywhere from 970 to 2,900 megawatts of the fuel, an approach the company has defended as necessary to ensure reliability. 

“There is no realistic way that we can serve all this growth, keep our customers’ power on around the clock, and only do it with renewables,” said Ruby, the Dominion spokesman. “That is just not realistically possible.” 

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Ruby said the utility’s calculus isn’t just based on available megawatts. It’s also a matter, he said, of how quickly units can be brought online to meet demand in a crisis. Solar and wind can’t produce electricity around the clock, and while nuclear will remain a mainstay of Virginia power supply — it currently accounts for about a third of Dominion’s Virginia capacity — both the North Anna and Surry plants require hours to ramp up. 

In contrast, he said, with a natural gas plant like the new Chesterfield facility the utility has proposed, “we can ramp that up and dispatch 1,000 megawatts to the grid in 10 to 20 minutes.” 

Environmental groups, however, say Dominion shouldn’t be planning to expand its carbon resources in the long term given state law requiring the utility to stop emitting carbon by the middle of the century. 

“The transition to clean energy, that is the commonwealth’s policy. It is in the law. That is what we are working toward,” said Benforado, who along with James represented Appalachian Voices in the September case.

How data centers’ rising power demands may impact Virginia’s ability to transition from fossil fuels to renewables is one of the issues the state’s Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission is tasked with assessing this year. And although lawmakers put forward more than a dozen proposals related to data centers during the last legislative session, the General Assembly delayed consideration of most until the next session, after the state study’s release. Among the bills put forward were proposals to require data centers to meet certain energy efficiency targets to qualify for state tax incentives and have local governments study the regional grid impacts of potential facilities.

“The JLARC study really sucked the wind out of a lot of these,” said Benforado. 

In regulatory proceedings, Appalachian Voices and the Sierra Club have argued that rather than building new gas plants, Dominion should explore other ways to meet data centers’ power needs. Proposals include demand response programs that let energy consumers shift or reduce their power usage during times of high demand, such as extremely cold or hot weather. The environmental groups also argued for long-duration battery storage, an emerging but limited technology, and transmission upgrades.

“I think we need much more sophisticated planning that looks at lots of options, lots of tools,” said Benforado. “I do not accept this idea that we have to build gas. … To me, that’s not backed up by analysis.” 

With as many as 11 gigawatts of power needed over the next 15 years to supply data centers, he said, “I think this is the time we need to refocus our efforts.” 

“Clean energy aside, if you don’t have smart planning, optimized solutions, it’s going to be really expensive to supply 11 gigawatts,” he said. 

Levi of the Data Center Coalition noted that “grid planning and management is ultimately the role of utilities and grid operators.” However, he said the industry “is committed to leaning in as an engaged partner.” 

Rising tensions could complicate the search for solutions. Local conflicts over the industry have led to the ousting of at least one official in Prince William County, and in December 2023, 25 nonprofits and other groups, including the Virginia chapter of the Sierra Club, announced they were forming the Virginia Data Center Reform Coalition to seek more regulation of data centers. 

Still, Benforado said he believed “win-win solutions” could be found in partnership with the industry. 

“I think they’re motivated,” he said. “I hope they’re motivated.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Virginia has the biggest data center market in the world. Can it also decarbonize its grid? on Jun 9, 2024.

Limu kohu is most traditionally destined for poke bowls, but the distinctive-tasting seaweed is now increasingly in demand for cattle to reduce the amount of methane they burp into the atmosphere. 

Parker Ranch cattle are among the first of Hawai’i’s livestock to be fed farmed red algae. In previous trials, the seaweed has been found to reduce the amount of methane the animals belch by an average of 77 percent, according to Kona-based business Symbrosia. 

The algae’s ability to mitigate cattle’s greenhouse gas emissions has elevated Symbrosia and Blue Ocean Barns, another limu kohu farm based in Kona, in the growing international seaweed farming industry.

Fueled by its litany of potential applications and climate change-mitigating properties, the World Bank predicts the industry could be worth almost $12 billion by 2030. And that is attracting immense public and private investment interest across the globe, including in Hawai’i. 

The federal government awarded Symbrosia more than $2.2 million in grant funding this year, including a U.S. Department of Agriculture organic market development grant for $1.2 million late last month. 

That catalytic funding will increase the five-year-old operation’s production by 1,600 percent, Symbrosia CEO Alexia Akbay said. That means just over 6,000 cattle could be eating Seagraze, the red algae product, as part of their diet. The cap is currently 250 cattle. 

With a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation, awarded in January, it plans to streamline its currently labor-intensive production process, one that involves three stages of finicky cultivation and drying.

Blue Ocean Barns signed on with two major mainland dairies, as well as ice cream producer Ben & Jerry’s, raising $20 million. Symbrosia last year signed on with Organic Valley, the nation’s largest farmers cooperative, and Danone, the country’s largest yogurt producer. 

The recent injection is “really the next step for us to start expanding commercially for our products, for both local producers like Parker Ranch and then some larger companies like Organic Valley,” Akbay said.

But the company does not appear to be leaving any time soon, given the growing conditions and Hawai’i’s unique climate. Symbrosia is expanding its footprint from a quarter of an acre to 15 acres and looking to increase its staff by 70 positions, Akbay said.

That’s partly because of the year-round growing climate for the seaweed farm.

“We probably harvest a little bit more frequently, ship out product more frequently, just because the seaweed grows so quickly,” Akbay said.

But now the race is on to commercialize and scale the product across the world, given how high demand might be in the future, says Jim Wyban, who developed pathogen-free shrimp which underpins the global shrimp industry.

Going global

Major dairy and beef producers worldwide have started expressing serious interest in methane-reducing seaweed since researchers in Australia discovered its potential. The country’s first commercial harvest was in 2022. 

Meanwhile, the Global Methane Pledge, with 155 signatory nations, specifically targets livestock because they contribute the bulk of agriculture’s emissions. And agriculture accounts for 37 percent of the world’s total methane discharged by humans.

A single cow produces between 154 to 264 pounds of methane per year. The U.S., which commands a 20 percent share of the international beef industry, has a cattle population of more than 87 million.

“They’re going after a really big problem,” Wyban, a leader in Hawai’i’s aquaculture industry, said of the seaweed companies. 

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The global market for seaweed-based animal feed supplements could be worth $1.1 billion by 2030, according to the World Bank. 

There has been local interest beyond Parker Ranch, Hawai’i Cattlemen’s Council managing director Nicole Galase said. But many ranchers want to see results first, Galase said.

Symbrosia’s research with Parker Ranch is slated to last nine more months. The red seaweed has been associated with faster weight gain in cattle, more milk production, and even faster wool production in sheep. 

“We want this research and ingenuity coming up because we do want options. Ranchers are always looking for a way to improve,” Galase said. “That takes research, that takes people trying things.” 

But having a locally-grown and produced product is not going to keep more livestock in Hawai’i, where a large proportion of cattle are shipped to the mainland. The number of cattle shipped to the continental U.S. is mainly determined by how much grass Hawai’i has at any given time, a factor largely dictated by drought, Galase said. 

A valuable crop

There are several other algae-based markets, including construction materials, fertilizers, and other agricultural inputs, bioplastics, biofuels, and fabric.

Each represents an opportunity for greater environmental and economic sustainability, said Todd Low of the state Department of Agriculture.

“There’s three kinds of value to seaweed: There’s the ecosystem services, the filtering of water and benefits to the environment. There’s carbon sequestration, … then there’s this value-added processing,” Low said.

Algae already sits just behind cattle as Hawai’i’s fifth most valuable agricultural crop. It was worth $45 million in 2022. Hawai’i’s entire aquaculture sector is anticipated to reach $600 million by 2034, according to the Department of Agriculture. 

“There’s a whole world of different value-added things,” Low said. “For us, the focus on macroalgae or seaweed is the vehicle into that world.”

State lawmakers have expressed interest in aquaculture recently, though Hawaii has largely ignored fish and algae farming in the past, instead favoring land-based farming. Little has materialized from legislation introduced in recent years.

But algae has still grown as an industry, with little help.

What Symbrosia and Blue Ocean Barns have shown is that Hawai’i can compete in the aquaculture space, Low said. 

“Hawaii Grown” is funded in part by grants from the Stupski Foundation, Ulupono Fund at the Hawaii Community Foundation, and the Frost Family Foundation.

Civil Beat’s coverage of climate change is supported by the Environmental Funders Group of the Hawaii Community Foundation, Marisla Fund of the Hawaii Community Foundation, and the Frost Family Foundation.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Cattle are a major source of greenhouse gas emissions. Hawaiian seaweed could change that. on Jun 8, 2024.

Schools of fish can resemble a single organism as they speed through the ocean in search of food or gather to defend their territory.

A new study has found that it is also easier for fish to swim through turbulent water if they are in a group compared with swimming alone.

“The ecological and evolutionary benefits of energy-saving in collective behaviors are rooted in the physical principles and physiological mechanisms underpinning animal locomotion,” the researchers wrote in the study. “We discovered that, when swimming at high speeds and high turbulence levels, fish schools reduced their total energy expenditure (TEE, both aerobic and anaerobic energy) by 63% to 79% compared to solitary fish.”

Many facets of animal behavior are linked with locomotion — from migration to feeding and reproduction — so many animals have adapted to improve their efficiency of movement.

The researchers proposed a “turbulent sheltering hypothesis,” which asserted that fish moving in schools are able to shield one another from rough water currents, making it easier to travel.

“Moving in turbulence is particularly challenging and energetically expensive for solitary fish. Solitary creek chub (Semotilus atromaculatus) swimming in turbulence reduced maximum sustained swimming speed (by 22%) because large turbulent eddies (approximately 76% of body length) disrupt the movement trajectories of fish,” the authors wrote. “Also, the cost of locomotion by solitary Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) can increase by approximately 150% in turbulence.”

To test their hypothesis, the researchers conducted trials with giant danios (Devario aeqipinnatus). They observed the fish swimming in groups of eight or alone in smooth and turbulent water. High-speed cameras were used to observe the fishes’ movements as they swam, while a respirometer measured their energy expenditure and respiration rates.

The experiments showed that fish traveling in schools gathered together more closely in turbulent water as compared with steady water. Solitary fish, however, had to more vigorously beat their tails to keep up the same speed in rougher currents.

“What is the function of schooling behavior in fishes? We show that being in a school substantially reduces the energetic cost for fish swimming in a turbulent environment, compared to swimming alone, providing support for the hypothesis that schooling behavior protects individual fish from the increased energetic cost associated with swimming in turbulence,” the authors wrote in the study, as Phys.org reported.

The results indicated that efficiency of locomotion may be a major component behind the evolution of fish schools. This is useful information for understanding the fundamentals of hydrodynamics, fish ecology and could also be applied to habitat maintenance and design in harboring protected species or hindering invasive ones.

Studies like this one have broader implications as well.

“Moreover, studies on animal locomotion and turbulence have profound implications for a better understanding of the planetary ecosystem, e.g., turbulence generated by groups of fish can contribute to vertical mixing of the ocean,” the authors wrote.

The researchers noted that the study could also inform future research into the group movement energy dynamics of other aquatic or aerial animals.

The study, “Collective movement of schooling fish reduces the costs of locomotion in turbulent conditions,” was published in the journal PLOS Biology.

The post Why Do Fish School? One Reason Is to Help Each Other Through Turbulent Waters appeared first on EcoWatch.

The second edition of The State of Carbon Dioxide Removal report — co-led by University of Oxford researchers — has found that, in order to reach global climate targets, governments must expand tree planting and the use of technologies to increase carbon dioxide removal (CDR) by four times annually.

The report found that it will be necessary to remove roughly 7.72 to 9.92 billion tons of carbon from the atmosphere each year by 2050 to meet the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global heating to 1.5 degrees Celsius, a press release from University of Oxford said.

The researchers emphasized that carbon emissions reductions will continue to be the main avenue to achieving net zero, but CDR will also be crucial.

“Given the world is off track from the decarbonisation required to meet the Paris temperature goal, this shows the need to increase investment in CDR as well as for zero-emission solutions across the board,” said Dr. Steve Smith of University of Oxford’s Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment in the press release.

In order to come up with a “Paris-consistent” CDR range, the researchers factored sustainability criteria into their analysis, including multiple sustainable development goals.

“Deploying a diverse CDR portfolio is a more robust strategy than focusing on just one or two methods. Research, invention, and investment in start-ups show diversification across CDR methods. However, current deployment and government proposals for future implementation are more concentrated on conventional CDR, mainly from forestry,” said Dr. Oliver Geden, a senior fellow with the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, in the press release.

Two billion tons of carbon are being removed annually by CDR, primarily through conventional means like tree planting. Newer methods, such as enhanced rock weathering, biochar, bioenergy with carbon capture and storage and direct air carbon capture and storage, account for 1.43 million tons each year — less than 0.1 percent. Permanent removal methods make up less than 0.05 percent, or 0.66 million tons, per year.

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“There are some encouraging signs in the growth and diversity of CDR research and innovations. But these are tempered strongly by sparse and precarious long-term demand. Governments have a decisive role to play now in creating the conditions for CDR to scale sustainably,” Smith said.

More than 50 international experts contributed to The State of Carbon Dioxide Removal report. It is one of the world’s leading scientific analyses of how much carbon will need to be removed in order to limit climate change, as well as whether we are on course to succeed.

The authors said that while CDR research, start-ups and public awareness have grown rapidly, there are multiple indicators of a development slowdown. They explained that few of the new methods are currently being targeted in government proposals and policies to scale CDR, which makes up only 1.1 percent of investment in start-ups related to climate-tech.

“It is clear that delaying crucial emissions reductions only exacerbates needed mitigation in the future to limit warming well below 2°C, but there are limits to the role sustainable CDR can play the longer the world delays,” said Matthew J. Gidden, an International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis scholar, in the press release.

The authors encouraged governments to put policies into place to increase CDR demand. They said these policies should be embedded into the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s Nationally Determined Contributions, and that governments should develop improved reporting, verification and monitoring systems. Currently much of the CDR demand comes from voluntary corporate commitments to purchase carbon removal credits.

“To meet the Paris Agreement, any kind of climate mitigation must be done sustainably. This report finds that the more sustainable scenarios have higher amounts of emissions reductions and therefore deploy less CDR cumulatively. For the CDR that is needed, it is vital that environmental and social sustainability are explicitly embedded into planning and policy to minimize risks and maximize co-benefits,” said Dr. Stephanie Roe, lead scientist with WWF’s Global Climate and Energy, in the press release.

The post World’s Carbon Removal Must Increase by 4x to Reach Climate Targets, Research Finds appeared first on EcoWatch.

Pharmaceutical pollution is posing new dangers to wildlife, and humans will need to develop more eco-friendly medications to preserve ecosystems, according to a new paper published in Nature Sustainability.

The specific effects that human drugs can have on wildlife has been well documented. One study found that when exposed to antidepressants present in their habitat, crayfish spent more time seeking food, which could put them in greater danger from predators. Another study found signs of methamphetamine addiction in trout that were exposed to water polluted with these drugs. A study of Florida’s waterways revealed 58 different kinds of prescription drugs present in 93 bonefish, with a single fish having as many as 17 different drugs present.

Now, a new paper is highlighting the many ways that prescription drugs for humans are polluting the world around us, which not only impacts wildlife but can also affect humans.

“There are a few pathways for these chemicals to enter the environment,” Michael Bertram, co-author of the paper and an assistant professor at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, told The Guardian. “If there is inadequate treatment of pharmaceuticals that are being released during drug production, that’s one way. Another is during use. When a human takes a pill, not all of that drug is broken down inside our bodies and so through our excrement, the effluent is released directly into the environment.”

As The Guardian reported, there is a wide variety of drugs entering the environment, from legal drugs and prescription medications like caffeine and antidepressants to illegal drugs such as methamphetamine and cocaine. Not only can these drugs lead to behavioral changes in wildlife, but they can also leach into groundwater used for drinking water.

The paper cited a recent study that looked at pollution of active pharmaceutical ingredients worldwide. In that study, researchers analyzed 61 drugs in samples of river water from 1,052 sites in 104 countries, and 43% of sites had at least one drug present at levels higher than ecological safety limits.

The authors of the paper are urging scientists to develop “greener” drugs that will still be effective for humans but will be safer for wildlife. The recommended updates include developing drugs that more quickly and fully biodegrade as well as updating wastewater treatment infrastructure so that it can remove pharmaceutical pollutants before they reach the environment.

“Greener drugs reduce the potential for pollution throughout the entire cycle,” Gorka Orive, co-author of the paper and a professor of pharmacy at the University of the Basque Country, told The Guardian. “Drugs must be designed to not only be effective and safe, but also to have a reduced potential risk to wildlife and human health when present in the environment.”

They also recommended that healthcare professionals and veterinarians be trained on environmental impacts on pharmaceuticals and that there should be prescribing guidelines that take these effects into account.

“More broadly, in seeking to reform the drug life cycle, it is important that we incorporate the One Health approach — that is, recognizing the interconnection between humans, animals and their shared environment — within the rational use of all medicines, not only antimicrobials,” the authors wrote in the paper.

The post ‘Greener’ Drugs Needed to Protect Wildlife, Biodiversity and Public Health From Exposure Damages, Study Says appeared first on EcoWatch.

The first thing Brazilian astrobiologist Rebeca Gonçalves remembers learning as a child was the order of the planets. Her uncle, an astrophysicist, also taught her all about the constellations dotting the night skies over Sao Paulo. “Ever since I was little, I have been in love with space,” she said. 

That led to a career in space agriculture, figuring out how to grow food on other planets. She credits time later spent living among the Kambeba, an Indigenous tribe in the Amazon rainforest she is descended from, for her conviction that it is essential that she do more than explore distant worlds. She wants to preserve this one, too.  

“It’s a very conscientious topic within the world of space agriculture science,” said Gonçalves, noting that “every single piece of research that we produce must have direct benefits to Earth.” 

That ideal makes her latest research particularly timely. She and a team at the Wageningen University & Research Centre for Crop System Analysis found that an ancient Maya farming technique called intercropping works surprisingly well in the dry, rocky terrain of Mars.

Their findings, published last month in the journal PLOS One, have obvious implications for the possibility of exploring or even settling that distant planet. But understanding how to grow crops in the extraordinarily harsh conditions on other planets does more than ensure those colonizing them can feed themselves. It helps those here at home continue to do the same as the world warms. 

“People don’t really realize [this], because it seems far away, but actually our priority is to develop this for the benefit of Earth,” said Gonçalves. “Earth is beautiful, and it’s unique, and it’s rare, and it’s fragile. And it needs our help.” 

Intercropping, or growing different crops in close proximity to one another to increase the size and nutritional value of yields, requires less land and water than monocropping, or the practice of continuously planting just one thing. Although common among small farmers, particularly across Latin America, Africa, and China, intercropping remains a novelty in much of the world. This is partly because of the complexity of managing such systems and largely unfounded concerns about yield loss and pest susceptibility. Modern plant breeding programs also tend to focus on individual species and a general trend toward less diversity in the field. 

This is a missed opportunity, according to Gonçalves. Evidence suggests intercropping can combat the impacts of climate change and unsustainable farming practices on yields in degraded soils, which comprise as much as 40 percent of the world’s agricultural land. “The potential of intercropping really is very high for solving some of the climate change issues,” she said.

That’s why she decided to try deploying it on Mars, where the regolith — the name for dirt on other worlds — has no nutrients or biological life in it whatsoever, not unlike heavily degraded soils on Earth. Working out of a greenhouse at the university, the researchers planted a variety of tomatoes, carrots and peas in a simulation of the loose material covering the planet’s bedrock after augmenting it with a bit of nutrients and soil. 

What they discovered was that although intercropping doubled the tomato yields and led to faster growth as well as thicker plant stems compared to monocropping, the carrots and peas grew better on their own. (The researchers suspect the limited amount of nutrients they added to the coarse regolith is the likely cause.) By contrast, intercropping in sandy soils — the experiment’s control, found in many regions on Earth — significantly increased yields for both the tomatoes and peas. 

While the results may appear mixed, what’s remarkable is that the team could grow anything at all in the simulated regolith, which is, as Gonçalves notes, essentially “grinded stone.”

Of course, agricultural conditions on Mars, where it’s extremely cold and dry with precious little oxygen, are much more extreme than those on Earth, where climate change is prompting chronic droughts and a long-term shift to drier conditions that further depletes water supply.

And yet the dirt covering the Red Planet bears striking similarities to sandy terrestrial soil severely damaged by climate change in arid and semiarid regions around the world, including swaths of sub-Saharan Africa, northern China and southern portions of South America — breadbaskets where water scarcity and volatile rainfall patterns have in recent years led to failed harvests and reduced crop yields. 

What this experiment demonstrates, according to the authors behind it, is that this could be an untapped solution to resuscitating depleted farmland — while also tackling agriculture’s widespread land use problem. Past studies have shown that, on average, intercropping with two crops needed 19 percent less land than each individual crop grown in isolation. 

“Take a village in Africa that is suffering with degraded soils, and the farmers are suffering, the community is suffering. If we can have the setup that we have created for a Martian colony, it’s really no different than a small African village, because we could have the same technology there,” said Gonçalves. “It’s really endless, the possibilities that we can have for applying, almost duplicating this Martian colony system, into local communities on Earth.” 

But how adaptable are solutions like these in parts of the world where they are needed most? The short answer: It’s complicated. 

A 2024 paper exploring the challenges of applying technology developed for space research throughout the Global South found that, when analyzing case studies in Guyana, Tanzania, Nepal, and Vietnam, power inequalities and the exclusion of historically marginalized groups persisted because of discourses, structures, and relations stemming from historic colonial structures. This builds on past research that revealed how India’s “green revolution,” in which the country adopted modern methods of industrializing farming, led to unintended agricultural and health consequences for small farmers. 

Gonçalves’ work is part of a rapidly growing body of research in space agriculture driven by billions of dollars of investment and the keen attention of governments, policymakers, and the private sector.

Just two years ago, a team at the University of Florida published a landmark paper revealing how it grew thale cress in lunar regolith collected during the Apollo era. That same year, scientists at Iowa State University grew turnips, radishes, and lettuce in simulated Martian regolith, while other studies nationwide reviewed deployment challenges for research experiments where crops including wheat were germinated in simulated lunar and Martian dirt. Together, these space-oriented investigations further indicate a surge in momentum for a field that seizes upon our collective fixation with other worlds, while subtly exploring solutions to an Earthbound crisis so politicized it prompts feelings of disconnection.  

Although Gonçalves’ study provides a “tantalizing” look at how traditional agricultural methods could be used on Mars, it may not be the “most logical approach” there, said Gene Giacomelli. He considers soilless, or hydroponic, growing procedures the “only approach” to safely begin producing food on another planet. He is the founding director of the Controlled Environment Agricultural Center at the University of Arizona, where he has spent more than 20 years developing a greenhouse for use on the Red Planet.

Still, Giacomelli agrees that intercropping could be useful in the eroded soils of Earth, an idea that also intrigues Thomas Graham. He’s an associate professor at the University of Guelph who has studied space farming since 1997 and believes Gonçalves’ work underscores “the importance of quality soils to a reliable food supply, both on Earth where soils are under considerable pressure, as well as in future space applications.” 

Early in his career, he was involved in a project funded by NASA to build a small greenhouse in the high Arctic tundra of Canada, a “Mars-analogue site” known for its unforgiving conditions. While there, he witnessed the “horrendous food insecurity issues” facing those living in some of Canada’s northernmost remote communities. “Getting fresh food up there is very difficult, if you can get it at all,” he said. “And it’s horribly expensive.” This led him to explore technological solutions to the challenge of growing crops in the most extreme of extreme environments — outer space. 

“I’ve been fortunate to be able to help explore space while helping people ensure that they have a meal to eat,” said Graham. “It also helps with my way to contribute to helping society adapt to the mess that we’ve made with climate change.” 

Solutions like greenhouses developed for colonizing other worlds could, according to Graham, be deployed in drought-ravaged areas on Earth “the very next day” after they’re devised. 

Of course, achieving that in a way that benefits the people that could use it most will rely upon the right combination of funding, political will and inclusive adoption. Without that impetus, the widespread application of these kinds of agricultural techniques may be almost as far away as our capacity to feed those who one day populate the cosmos.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Why a new method of growing food on Mars matters more on Earth on Jun 7, 2024.

For nearly a century, a substantial portion of America’s iconic yellow school buses have been manufactured at a factory in Fort Valley, a town of 9,000 people surrounded by peach and pecan orchards in central Georgia.

Carolyn Allen has worked at Blue Bird for 13 years, and she talks about this fact almost as though it’s a surprise to her. “I live about 15 miles away and I never thought I’d be here,” she told Grist. “I never wanted to work here, because people were always being laid off all the time.” But life’s contingencies brought her to the company anyway: “I got to where I was looking for a job, and this is the one that came open.”

Even though she stayed, Allen wasn’t happy working at Blue Bird. “There was so many things in here that was not right. There was unfairness, favoritism, workload,” she said. “Lord, we worked sometimes six and seven days a week, and people needed to go home and see their families sometimes. And unfair wages.”

So a few years ago, when she got a call inviting her to a union organizing meeting, Allen didn’t need much persuading to get involved. After a long organizing drive, the effort paid off in May 2023, when the factory’s 1,400 employees voted to affiliate with the United Steelworkers.

The new union made national headlines and was congratulated by President Biden, who later hosted one of the organizers at a White House event. The national attention was partly a reflection of the scale of the workers’ achievement: The Deep South is a notoriously difficult place to unionize an auto plant. But the other reason for the national spotlight was that the factory was set to receive up to $1 billion over five years from the federal government in contracts to build electric school buses for districts across the country.

After the vote, Allen put herself forward as a candidate to be elected to the union’s 10-member bargaining committee, and was elected to represent her fellow workers in the quality department. The contract negotiations lasted for a year — and during that period, Allen says she and her fellow workers did not immediately see the benefits of their historic union vote. In fact, she and others said conditions inside the plant initially changed for the worse. Management curtailed lunch breaks and cracked down on worker discipline.

But last month, the workers announced their efforts had paid off in the form of a first contract that guaranteed raises to every factory employee, new retirement benefits, and a profit-sharing agreement with the company.

Allen says she was “amazed at the things that we got.” With this contract, she says, she can finally see the bigger purpose of her taking the job she’d never really wanted. ”It took a long time, but I believe that’s why I am here now,” she said.

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In 2023, organized labor became core to the climate movement

Katie Myers

Blue Bird’s union contract sheds light on the bigger question of what the green manufacturing boom the Biden administration has sought to spark means for the nation’s resurgent labor movement. Soon after the passage of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act, a tension between Biden’s climate and labor goals became apparent. The new green jobs in sectors like electric vehicle and battery manufacturing were overwhelmingly going to Republican states where unions have a small presence and so-called “right-to-work” laws hinder union organizing. Concerns that workers would be left behind in the EV transition led the United Auto Workers to briefly withhold its endorsement for Biden’s reelection. But unions have also seen the growth of green industry in the South as an opportunity for new organizing, not just a hurdle. The union vote at Blue Bird was one example; another was the UAW’s landslide victory in April at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga whose primary product is the ID.4, Volkswagen’s flagship electric car. This was part of an ongoing push by the UAW to organize nonunion auto and battery plants. In May, the union lost a vote at a Mercedes-Benz plant in Alabama, but has petitioned the National Labor Relations Board for a new election, alleging illegal union-busting tactics by management.

Blue Bird’s union vote and its new contract, which is in place for three years, might seem to demonstrate that Biden’s strategic vision of economic renewal designed to counteract what the administration views as a host of overlapping problems — in particular, global warming, Chinese global power, and the blighted wake of deindustrialization — can also create favorable conditions for organized labor.  As a political matter, this narrative is favorable to a president who has frequently boasted of his aspiration to be the most pro-union president in history. But practically speaking, it’s difficult for the federal government to directly intervene in support of unions, even at factories it subsidizes. “What the Biden administration has used is the tools they have at their disposal, to attach labor standards to federal loan and grant programs,” Jason Walsh, executive director of the Bluegreen Alliance, a coalition of labor unions and environmental organizations, told Grist. For example, he said, some of the federal grant programs include a requirement “that applicants should be submitting community benefit plans as part of their applications that include language like, for example, a clear demonstration that you’re going to respect the bargaining rights and the rights of workers at this facility to organize into unions. Those are powerful hooks but it’s not the same as pegging federal funding to unionization. We don’t have that statutory authority.”

At the Tennessee facility, the union vote was arguably assisted by a different Biden policy: the recently finalized tailpipe emissions standards, which encourage electric vehicle production. In light of this policy, Volkswagen could not credibly threaten closure of its sole American EV plant in the event of unionization (a standard union-busting tactic).

In the case of Blue Bird, the grants to build electric school buses — disbursed through the EPA’s Clean School Bus Program, funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law — included a “union neutrality” provision prohibiting grant recipients from using the funding to sway workers against joining a union. But the provision is hard to enforce — and at Blue Bird, according to many workers, it was at times openly flouted: The union accused management of retaliatory firings during the union drive (although they later withdrew their NLRB complaints, so the matter was never officially adjudicated, and the fired workers were later reinstated).

The contract negotiations certainly could have gone worse. In right-to-work states where unions can’t force workers to pay dues, companies often drag out negotiations. “What is quite common is for workers to successfully unionize and then a company draws out bargaining of the first contract as long as possible, trying to frustrate workers and frankly disillusion them, and then try to get them to decertify,” said Walsh. “That is a very common union-busting tactic. It’s notable that that did not happen with Blue Bird.”

Alex Perkins, a longtime Steelworkers staffer who played a leading role in organizing workers at the plant, said the contract that Blue Bird workers won was among the strongest he has negotiated. Every worker will receive at least a 12 percent raise, and the lowest paid workers will see a raise of 40 percent. Perhaps more remarkable is the profit-sharing agreement. The contract includes a trigger in which net company profits of over $30 million entitle workers to a 4 percent share of those profits. Perkins said he represents workers at 20 companies across Georgia and Alabama, none of whom have such an agreement.

Perkins said the profit-sharing proposal was suggested by members of the bargaining committee, not Steelworkers staff, and reflected workers’ awareness of the government funding for electric buses. “The employees felt that with them making record profits, they should have a share in that,” said Perkins. 

More broadly, he thinks government subsidies for EV production helped them achieve a strong contract simply because the extra cash gave extra space for the company to be generous with workers. “Quite honestly, if you look back four years ago, Blue Bird was really struggling, so they have rebounded really well since they started producing EV buses,” Perkins said. “Had it not been for the EV buses I don’t think they would have financially been in a position to give the employees the contract.”

Workers and union organizers said the national spotlight may also have compelled the company to bargain in good faith. “The company was a little slow with us,” Allen said, “and I think that once they found out that they were part of things I think they changed their minds.”

That spotlight was awkwardly apparent in January, when, with contract negotiations still ongoing, Michael Regan, the head of the EPA, visited Georgia to announce a new round of $1 billion in electric school bus grants to be awarded across the country. (Another tranche of $900 million was issued last week.) The press conference took place in a school gym in the Atlanta suburbs, and speakers included Georgia Democratic congressmen Hank Johnson and Raphael Warnock, as well as Blue Bird’s CEO, Phil Horlock, and a member of the bargaining committee, Craig Corbin.

The event was held at Stone Mountain Middle School, which was set to receive some of the new buses, and featured marching bands and cheer squads from around the school district. Scattered among the students in the bleachers were a few factory workers and union representatives. After the conference, the politicians piled into a Blue Bird electric bus for a short ride and an explanation of its benefits from a company engineer. (“All right, y’all, we’re headed to homeroom,” Warnock said.)

The pageantry demonstrated that this wasn’t ordinary bureaucratic grantmaking but retail politicking in a swing state. Large banners reading “President Joe Biden: Investing in America” adorned the gym and the school bus. While the school bus grants are just a small portion of the administration’s suite of climate investments, their political importance stems from their visibility in communities. Unlike the tax credits for planned factories or subsidies for clean energy, their impact is already being felt by families (and voters) nationwide. In addition to reducing fossil fuel consumption, electric school buses have strong health benefits for children when compared with traditional diesel buses, whose harmful exhaust is linked to higher asthma rates. Some studies show upgrading to cleaner buses even increases school attendance.

Later that day, Regan drove to Fort Valley to tour the Blue Bird factory itself and address the workers. There, asked by a reporter to comment on speculation that the labor protections in the EPA grants had helped the workers unionize, he said, “Those labor protections were built in for a reason, and as far as we can tell, those labor protections have been respected for all of those who are applying for these grants, so we’re excited about moving forward.” 

Four months later, contract negotiations concluded — and set an example for workers elsewhere. “The Blue Bird contract, like the contracts won by UAW members with the Big Three, should send a signal in flashing red lights to every non-union worker at vehicle manufacturing plants across the country, but particularly in the South, that the pathway to better wages and benefits on the job runs through a yes vote for unionization,” said Walsh.

Carolyn Allen, who had never been in a union before Blue Bird, is closely watching union drives at other auto plants. “We was excited for the ones that made it, disappointed at the ones that didn’t come through,” she said. “I was happy that at least they were trying to get through, because everyone needs a union.”

Whether organized labor can use the energy transition to make inroads remains an open question — but the contract in Fort Valley suggests that the urgent demands of decarbonizing America’s economy can be accomplished by a revival, not a weakening, of worker power.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A labor win at Georgia school bus factory shows a worker-led EV transition is possible on Jun 7, 2024.

Despite the fact that clouds envelop two-thirds of the planet at any given time, transport water on the wind, and shield the Earth from the sun, surprisingly little is known about how climate change affects them. Atmospheric scientists are not yet certain, for instance, whether rising temperatures will lead to more or fewer clouds, or make them better or worse at reflecting the heat of the sun. 

To help unravel those mysteries and others, the European Space Agency and the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency lofted a satellite into orbit last week aboard a SpaceX rocket. The Earth Cloud Aerosol and Radiation Explorer, known as EarthCARE, will uncover the inner workings of clouds as well as how they, and tiny airborne particles called aerosols, shape — and are shaped by — climate change.

“Clouds are the number one cooling blanket we have on the planet,” said Pavlos Kollias, an atmospheric scientist from Stony Brook University who has been supporting the EarthCARE mission since 2008. 

A cloud’s effect on temperature greatly depends on the height where it happens to float. Low-level formations, such as the blanket-like stratocumulus, do a particularly good job of keeping the planet cool by reflecting most of the sunlight that strikes them. Since they fly so close to the ground, their ambient temperatures are similar to those of the landscape below, and they transfer most of the Earth’s heat to space rather than holding it in the atmosphere.

The cooling effect this provides is so pronounced, Kollias said, that without it the planet would be 15 degrees Celsius warmer — or nearly 30 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s the difference between a mild spring and a blistering summer.

Though the impact clouds have on the planet in the present is well known, scientists are uncertain about how that may evolve as temperatures rise. “If you perturb the system by adding temperature,” Kollias said, “we don’t know how the clouds will respond.” They could become more common and more dense, thereby mitigating climate change in a minor way, or they could become less common and less dense, speeding climate change along.

High-altitude clouds, like the wispy cirrus, for instance, are typically made of tiny ice crystals and often trap the Earth’s heat more effectively than they block the sun’s light, both of which seems to make them more sensitive to warming. Aerosols, small particles like sulfates and sea salts, introduce further complications by impacting climate both directly, by reflecting sunlight, and indirectly, by acting as the nuclei around which clouds condense. Efforts to clean up industrial emissions are reducing airborne aerosols, with pronounced effects on climate.

All of this makes cloud dynamics one of the greatest sources of uncertainty in climate models, something EarthCARE aims to help resolve.

Kollias is eager to work with the data that will begin beaming down from the new satellite later this year. The mission carries an instrument never before used in space: a cloud profile radar. The device will emit successive bursts of radio waves, measuring the signal reflected by the vapor below. This information will help researchers better understand the size and circulation of the countless droplets that comprise a cloud. EarthCARE will also map the surface profile of clouds and aerosols with a method known as lidar that reflects a low-power laser off these atmospheric formations. Those measurements coupled with images captured by the spacecraft will provide a three-dimensional view of the ubiquitous pillows and blankets of condensation drifting through the sky.

The European Space Agency named EarthCARE its sixth Earth Explorer mission back in 2001. Though delays plague seemingly every satellite, EarthCARE faced notable and protracted setbacks due to the complexity and sophistication of the radar and lidar systems. It reached a point where, Kollias said, some outside the mission began to doubt whether the nearly $900 million satellite would ever reach the launchpad. Yet “nobody gave up,” Kollias said. “Everybody kept working.”

All that made last week’s successful launch a particularly emotional affair. 

“Personally, I was very nervous in the moment,” Kollias said of the launch. But he added that the prolonged process has inadvertently given the scientific community more time to prepare to work with EarthCARE’s data. Numerical models have improved dramatically in the 23 years between selection and launch, researchers have more computing power available to them than ever before, and machine learning now allows big data to be digested with comparative ease.

The intervening years have also given the world a taste of the climate disasters yet to come. As a result, an added urgency drives the desire to resolve the uncertainties clouds introduce into climate models, so scientists can look out with finer eyes to tell us what the decades ahead hold.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A new satellite could help solve one of our climate’s biggest mysteries: Clouds on Jun 7, 2024.