Artificial light has made night streets safer for humans and is a convenience, but at what cost to wildlife?
Artificial light at night (ALAN) can disrupt the circadian rhythm of wild animals, interfering with sleep and migratory patterns. It can lead species like moths, sea turtles and frogs dangerously astray and make animals more vulnerable to prey.
“From a biological perspective, natural light regimes, in contrast to other environmental conditions such as temperature, have remained more or less consistent over aeons of Earth’s history. This makes light pollution a novel perturbation to which organisms are unlikely to have evolved the ability to cope with change. Thus, it is not surprising that ALAN has the potential to fundamentally disrupt physiology and behaviour of many organisms,” the introduction to the special theme issue consisting of 16 scientific papers said.
The studies look at the growing prevalence of light pollution, while highlighting the cascading effects it has on the stability and functionality of ecosystems.
“While artificial light at night (ALAN) is crucial for the everyday life of humans… only a tiny fraction of reflected light is used for human vision, while the rest pollutes the environment. With an estimated annual average increase of 9.6% (estimated based on citizen science data), light pollution is one of the most pressing drivers of current global change, and it has become increasingly clear that the loss of the night has serious psychological, health, socio-economic and ecological consequences,” the authors wrote in the introduction.
Until now, studies on light pollution have mostly looked at its consequences for human health, as well as responses to it by particular species. Meanwhile, investigations of light pollution’s effects on highly interconnected communities of species have been lacking.
“Species do not exist in isolation but rather interact in numerous ways,” explained Dr. Myriam Hirt of iDiv and the University of Jena, who led the editing and compilation of the theme issue along with Dr. Remo Ryser, in the press release. “Our aim was to better understand how the brightening of the night sky affects entire ecosystems and the benefits they provide.”
For their studies, several researchers used the iDiv Ecotron — multiple chambers of controlled experimental ecosystems, called EcoUnits — to simulate and alter nighttime light conditions.
They found that artificial light had the ability to reach soil communities underground, affecting soil basal respiration and the efficiency of carbon use; alter plant traits like the hairiness of leaves, as well as lower plant diversity and biomass; affect the activity levels of invertebrates, which was associated with an increase in predation rates at night; and potentially homogenize the times when species are active, causing increased overlap and threatening species.
The studies also found that even low-level light pollution that is less bright than a full moon has wide-ranging effects on the physiological and behavioral responses of species. In addition, it has marked effects on more complex ecological networks and communities such as food webs.
“Their individual responses to artificial lighting and their relationships with one another determine the outcome for the entire ecological system. For instance, an activity shift of diurnal and crepuscular species into the night increases extinction risks in the entire community,” said Dr. Remo Ryser of the University of Jena and iDiv, who was one of the authors in the collection, in the press release.
Another study in the collection looked at the ways in which artificial light causes an indirect domino effect that can have consequences for humans. An example is ALAN’s effect on the behavior and abundance of a vector species like mosquitoes. The study demonstrates ALAN changes lead to alterations in the timing of important behaviors like mating, flight activity and host-seeking, which could have far-reaching consequences on vector-borne disease transmission, such as malaria.
“The benefits of artificial light during the night are undeniable, but its adverse effects should not be ignored,” Hirt said in the press release.
Another paper studied the ways in which various lighting strategies may lessen artificial light’s negative effects, though due to the nuanced approach needed when dealing with ALAN’s effect on different species, any mitigation procedures may not be applicable universally.
Darkness has become an increasingly rare commodity with the meteoric rise in artificial lighting, and this collection of studies puts the spotlight on how the proliferation of a widely used human invention has affected ecosystems as well as human health.
“By acknowledging the impact of this human-caused disturbance on species interactions and feedback loops, the special issue hopes to inspire future research and action that not only helps mitigate the harmful effects of light pollution, but fosters a sustainable coexistence between society’s needs and the natural environment,” the press release said.
This summer, we’ve covered a number of innovative solutions that cities around the world are implementing at a community level to combat deadly heat — things like tree equity, shade structures, and reflective pavement. But as the planet continues to warm, there’s no way around one bedeviling fact: We’re going to need more air conditioning to keep many areas habitable and save lives in the face of rising temperatures.
The problem is that AC also contributes to planetary warming. “We’re kind of stuck in this doom loop of AC right now, where people install more AC, it makes the climate worse. Climate ‘worse’ means people need more AC, and those continue to increase emissions,” says Vince Romanin, an engineer and self-described “thermo nerd.”
So, in order to truly save lives, AC needs to be more equitably distributed to the populations most at risk on a rapidly heating planet, and the technology itself needs an overhaul to avoid skyrocketing emissions.
Romanin is one of those working on the problem. Several companies, including Gradient where Romanin is CEO (which landed him on the 2021 Grist 50 list), are developing new AC technologies and approaches that are starting to show what a more efficient, less climate-intensive approach to cooling will look like.
Public health organizations like the Clinton Health Access Initiative, or CHAI, have also begun putting resources behind better AC, with the goal of bringing it to those who need it most. “There’s this opportunity to shift what would otherwise be a kind of niche AC for environmentally conscious consumers in high-income countries to actually be a low-cost, high-volume product for the growing middle classes in Nigeria, India, Indonesia,” Neil Buddy Shah, the CEO of CHAI, said in a panel with Grist’s CEO at Climate Week in September. “But the public sector and private sector have to come together and actually guarantee the demand.”
This week and next, we’re covering some of the innovations — both technological and market-based — that are coming together to create the future of climate-friendly, equitable air conditioning. This week, we start with the tech side. What will that future-friendly AC look like? How will it change the HVAC units and window ACs we’ve grown to rely on?
New Yorkers shop for AC units at a Home Depot during a heat wave this summer. Spencer Platt / Getty Images
“There’s this kind of idea that HVAC products are boring and not exciting and ugly and hard to use,” Romanin says. “And that absolutely doesn’t need to be true.” He sees the challenge of creating better, more equitable AC as one that could usher in a new generation of heating and cooling products that offer better overall experiences.
Romanin says he got into the space not only from a desire to bring innovation into a polluting industry, but also to bring better, cleaner HVAC technology to the people who need it most. Gradient has partnered with the New York City Housing Authority as the first customer for its new, all-weather unit — a take on a heat pump that more closely resembles a window AC unit.
As we’ve covered before, heat pumps have been rising in popularity in recent years as a more efficient technology to replace both natural gas heaters and standard air conditioners. Gradient is aiming to increase accessibility and reduce cost with its compact design. It doesn’t require special permitting, holes in the wall, or skilled labor to install, making it a potential one-to-one replacement for multifamily units that rely on window AC, and also enabling buildings to retire their gas heating systems.
The company estimates that it offers up to a 95 percent reduction in direct emissions if it’s used year-round. Some of that, Romanin says, gets transferred to indirect emissions — it’s electric, so if it’s drawing power from a dirty grid, it offers something closer to a 30–45 percent reduction in overall emissions.
Air conditioning alone accounts for about 10 percent of global electricity use today. A substantial portion of the energy thirst related to cooling actually comes not from managing temperature itself, but managing humidity. To try and avoid working overtime to dehumidify through cooling, some other companies have designed ACs that decouple those processes, like the startup Transaera, which uses a drying agent to pull water from the air before cooling it.
Another way that Gradient and other companies aim to save emissions is by using a less potent refrigerant — the substances in AC units that change from liquid to gas to help absorb heat from the room being cooled. The regulatory environment surrounding refrigerants is continuously evolving. For instance, chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs (the chemicals that eat up the ozone layer), used to be common refrigerants until they were phased out and ultimately banned. But today, most refrigerants are still greenhouse gases, often many times more potent than CO2.
Gradient currently uses a chemical called R-32, which has about a 70 percent lower Global Warming Potential than the industry standard, R-410A or Puron (which is also due to be phased out in the next two years).
Still, Romanin would like to do even better. His hope is that the U.S. will move toward allowing R-290, an even more environmentally friendly gas, for refrigeration. R-290 is propane — a naturally occurring gas that is also, obviously, flammable. But in his opinion, manufacturers of synthetic refrigerants have played a role in overselling the flammability risks of propane. “R-32 is also flammable, just to a different level. And many, many fridges use butane as a refrigerant,” he points out.
Other researchers are attempting to remove the need for refrigerants altogether. A team at Harvard designed an AC prototype that uses evaporative cooling, the same process our bodies use to cool us off when we sweat. Water absorbs heat as it evaporates, but in doing so it adds humidity to the air as well — the Harvard researchers managed to avoid this by using a water-repellent coating that effectively separates the water vapor from the cooled air.
In the future, Romanin hopes that Gradient can move into international markets where AC is most needed, and where demand is expected to grow the most. He also sees an opportunity for the industry to shift more broadly into more efficient systems that ultimately offer better experiences.
Where a typical window AC blocks natural light and the ability to open the window for fresh air, Gradient’s unit is designed to give those things back. Gradient
One way to achieve that is through software. Parity, a software company based in Ontario, offers remote HVAC management for large apartment buildings and hotels. The idea is that building owners can save both money and energy by using data on weather, occupancy levels, and building design elements to adjust heating and cooling supply, while still maintaining a comfortable temperature for residents. “When I tell people what I do for a living, they’re like, ‘Oh wow, it’s kind of surprising that that’s not already happening,’’’ says James Hannah, Parity’s managing director for the U.S. He sees energy efficiency as a crucial step toward overall decarbonization. “Regardless of whether you still have a gas-fired boiler or you’ve switched over to some other technology, the best thing to do is to not overconsume,” he says.
In the long term, Gradient wants to move toward an app-controlled experience that would adjust indoor temperatures based on the season or the time of day. The idea is akin to what Parity offers from an efficiency standpoint, but it would also involve a shift in actual demand. For example, the best temperature for healthy sleep is a few degrees lower than what most people would consider a comfortable daytime room temperature. Leaning into these kinds of daily and seasonal shifts could help people feel more comfortable indoors, and also reduce our reliance on constantly blasting the heat or AC.
That desire for a better product could also help drive the scale and the speed necessary to decarbonize, especially in wealthier countries, Romanin believes. From a pleasure perspective, the number one problem that Gradient’s current model solves is giving residents their window back. Rather than sitting on top of the window sill, it straddles it, and its top also serves as a shelf.
“It’s hard to envision what a cool, exciting AC is because they’re all so boring,” he says. “But in reality, the thermal comfort of your home is a very emotional part of your home. And there’s no reason that the products that we use to make our home comfortable couldn’t provide exciting experiences.”
Next week: We look at what it takes to scale decarbonized, emissions-friendly AC to frontline communities around the world.
Read: more about the market-based strategies that could help speed the implementation of cleaner AC technology — in next week’s Looking Forward 🙂
A parting shot
During a heat wave in Japan this summer, some residents donned air-conditioned jackets to venture outdoors — like the senior pictured below, enjoying the popular game of gateball.
Cattle play a colossal role in climate change: As the single largest agricultural source of methane, a potent planet-warming gas, the world’s 940 million bovines spew nearly 10 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions — much of it through belches and droppings.
As such, there’s an astonishing amount of time and money being funneled into emission control. On-farm biodigesters, for example, take a back-end approach by harvesting methane wafting from manure pits. A slew of research aims to curb bovine burps by feeding them seaweed, essential oils and even a bovine Bean-O of sorts. The latest endeavor, a $70 million effort led by a Nobel laureate, uses gene-editing technology in an effort to eliminate that pollution by re-engineering the animals’ gut microbes.
Given the world’s growing appetite for meat and dairy, these novel ventures are crucial to inching us toward international and national climate goals. Yet they beg the question: Wouldn’t it be easier to ditch milk, cheese and beef for plant-based alternatives? Why fight nature when there’s an easier solution, at least from a scientific perspective?
Research shows that even a modest skew away from meat-based diets can shrink an individual’s carbon footprint as much as 75 percent. As it turns out, however, untangling cows from the climate equation is enormously complicated — especially in the United States, where the industry, worth $275 billion annually, boasts the world’s fourth largest cattle population and is its top beef and dairy producer. Achieving a cheeseburger-free America faces formidable challenges. Beyond overcoming cultural shifts — the country’s per-capita consumption of mozzarella, to name one example, averages one pound a month — lies the challenge of meeting nutritional demands and rebalancing the intricacies of an agricultural, food and industrial economy inextricably linked to livestock farming.
For these reasons, greener diets are but one prong in a larger set of food-based solutions for curtailing human-caused climate change, said Stephen Sturdivant, an environmental engineer at the Environmental Protection Agency. “We need a comprehensive combination of strategies to achieve a truly sustainable future,” he said. “We can’t just cherry-pick our way to get there.”
Americans love their beef and dairy. Consumption of both has steadily climbed despite the widely known climate implications. Andia/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
The nation’s taste for meat and dairy is undeniable. In addition to a steady, decade-long-rise in beef consumption, which hit 20 billion pounds in 2021, Americans gobbled up 12 percent more cheese, butter and ice cream than in the previous year, continuing an upward trend that started half a century ago.
There’s a fundamental disconnect, though, between our growing demand for animal-based protein and its enormous carbon footprint. Producing a pound of steak generates nearly 100 times more greenhouse gas than an equivalent amount of peas, while cheese production emits eight times the volume of making tofu.
Although the American beef and dairy industries are among the most efficient in the world — due in part to better breeding, genetics and nutrition — they still leave a significant hoofprint. The nation’s 92 million cattle generate 4 percent of the country’s total greenhouse gasses and account for 40 percent of all agricultural emissions.
However, if those herds were to magically disappear, it wouldn’t eliminate the problem entirely. According to a peer-reviewed study, an animal-free agricultural system would shave just 2.6 percent off the country’s total greenhouse gas emissions. Of course, any reduction would be noteworthy given the nation’s outsized role in climate change — that drop would be equivalent to three times Portugal’s annual emissions — though that benefit would come with drawbacks.
With no livestock to feed, the acreage now used to grow silage and hay could be replaced with food crops. Yet because higher value fruits and vegetables require quality soil, specific climate conditions, and ample water infrastructure, most of that land would be limited to growing calorie-heavy, hardy broad acre crops such as corn and soybeans — a system change that would add its own climate impacts.
In fact, agriculture’s current emissions are a result of a certain balance between crops and livestock, said Robin White, a professor of animal and poultry science at Virginia Tech and the lead author of the research. Crops need fertilizer, a resource often provided by livestock, and producing synthetic versions is an energy-intensive process that typically requires fossil fuels and emits methane. Cattle also help keep agricultural byproducts — from fruit peels and pulp to almond hulls and spent brewery grains — out of landfills, reducing the carbon output of crop waste by 60 percent.
Eliminating the nation’s cattle and replacing feed production with food crops would create more food, White said, resulting in a caloric surplus of 25 percent. That abundance, however, would come with deficits in essential nutrients, as plant-based foods tend to fall short in vitamin B12, calcium, iron and fatty acids. (Although existing studies reflect good long-term health in vegetarians, research on those who eschew all animal-derived foods is inconclusive.)
Larger discussions around sustainability tend to overlook these complexities, said White. Food insecurity is often tied to caloric sufficiency, but doesn’t always reflect nutritional needs, particularly those of vulnerable populations. Pregnant, lactating, and elderly women, for example, are susceptible to anemia and low bone density, mainly due to inadequate iron and calcium intake — nutrients readily available in red meat and dairy products, and easily accessible to large swaths of the population.
“These types of nuances get lost,” said White, when we focus exclusively on the broader metrics of diet change. While balanced choices can work for individuals, keeping the country adequately fed and healthy is a complicated endeavor. “There’s an entire agricultural system behind that food production,” she added, and changing the pieces within it requires careful examination.
A team of University of California researchers, including Ermias Kebreab (left) and Matthias Hess, are using CRISPR gene-editing technology in a bid to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of cattle by re-engineering their gut microbes.
Gregory Urquiaga / UC Davis
Given the scale of the beef and dairy industries, the central role they play in feeding people, and the difficulty of removing them from the economy, cattle clearly aren’t moving on any time soon. For that reason, there’s been no shortage of resources aimed at, quite literally, the gut of the emissions issue.
As with most ruminants, cattle make the most of a paltry diet, converting cud, grains and crop waste into muscle and milk. Extracting all that energy from cellulose and plant fibers requires the work of digestive microbes; cow rumens host entire colonies of bacteria, yeast and fungi that ferment complex carbohydrates into microbial protein, which they then absorb, and volatile fatty acids, which they expel as methane and other gasses.
Several dietary supplements have been shown to minimize bovine bloating. A twice-daily garlic and citrus extract can cut emissions by 20 percent, while a red seaweed additive can inhibit them by as much as 80 percent without impacting animal health or productivity or imparting detectable flavor to the resulting proteins. But having a transformative impact will require industrial-scale production and implementation. The promising strain of seaweed, for instance, prefers tropical waters, and developing a supply chain robust enough to serve tens of millions of cattle with a daily intervention leaves a trail of unanswered questions regarding effective farming, processing and distribution techniques.
Ultimately, tinkering with the animals’ digestive system may hold the most scalable answer. Jennifer Doudna, who won the 2020 Nobel Prize in chemistry for pioneering the CRISPR gene-editing tool, is leading a University of California team that hopes to do just that. The recently launched project aims to identify the offending gut bacteria through metagenomics, another breakthrough technology that maps the functions of complex microbial communities, then restructure their DNA to produce less methane. The goal is to develop an oral treatment for calves that, once administered, will continue repopulating their rumen with the genetically modified microflora.
“We’re trying to come up with a solution to reduce methane that is easily accessible and inexpensive,” Matthias Hess, an associate professor at UC Davis and a project lead, said in an interview. It’s a fix that, if successful, could make a serious dent in tamping down cattle emissions the world over.
Their mission launched earlier this year, funded by the TED Audacious Project. Along with livestock, microbiomes generate nearly two-thirds of global methane emissions through landfills, wastewater and rice paddies. If successful, “our technology could really move the needle in our fight against climate change,” Doudna said in a recent TED Talk.
Even as science tries making cows more climate friendly, the tide of consumption has seen a steady shift. In the last two years, the majority of Americans have upped their intake of plant-based foods, with almost half of Millennials and Gen Z-ers regularly going vegan. But there’s also been another notable tip in the scale: Just 12 percent of the country eats half the nation’s beef. And for many in the meat-heavy minority, the perils of climate change seem to do little in nudging them toward planet-friendlier meals.
A global study of factors that encourage greener diets found that climate risk perception is but one influencing factor, along with health implications and economic circumstances. Yet it’s the people around us, said Sibel Eker, the report’s lead author, who hold the most sway in changing individual attitudes, beliefs and values — in other words, there’s power in herd mentality.
“If there are more vegetarians or flexitarians around you, you tend to think that this is the norm in society,” said Eker, a sustainable service systems researcher at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria. “So if you have the intention of changing your behavior, the social cost [to do so] becomes lower.”
In fact, when it comes to influencing environment-related behaviors such as recycling and ditching cars, social norms and comparisons are incredibly effective, far outpacing other drivers such as financial incentives and public appeals, according to a separate study by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. And positive visibility and reinforcement — by individuals, a community or mass and social media — do more to encourage climate action than shaming people who aren’t fully on board, Eker said. Otherwise, it just makes the matter alienating and polarizing.
In the end, the overarching nature of the food system requires a collective approach to shrinking its enormous emissions. While there’s no denying the outsized environmental footprint of animal-based foods, dietary shifts are part of a much larger strategy around food-based climate action, said the EPA’s Sturdivant. Along with improved farming practices such as maximizing yields and minimizing inputs, reducing food loss and waste is just as critical. And for these reasons and more, Meatless Mondays, vegan Fridays, and less polluting cows all have their place in mitigating the role cattle play in warming the world.
For car buyers considering whether to go electric, one tradeoff they must weigh is whether to give up the convenience of finding a gas station almost anywhere and being able to refuel in minutes. Fast-charging an EV can take 20 to 30 minutes, and charging stations, for now, are not ubiquitous.
The gap between the two experiences is narrowing, however, as charge times speed up and stations become more common. An unprecedented agreement between the nation’s leading EV company and one of the world’s oil giants may bring them even closer.
British energy company BP announced Thursday that it will spend $100 million buying Tesla ultrafast chargers to build out its “BP pulse” network in the United States. It will begin installing the self-branded chargers next year at its BP and Amoco gas stations, AMPM and Thorntons convenience stores, and TravelCenters of America truck stops, as well as at large “Gigahub” charging sites in major cities.
“Combined with our vast network of convenience and mobility sites on and off the highway, this collaboration with Tesla will bring fast and reliable charging to EV drivers when and where they need it,” Richard Bartlett, global CEO of BP pulse, said in a statement.
The deal marks the first time Tesla will sell its chargers — further cementing its dominance of the EV charging space — and is one of the largest investments by an oil and gas company into the technology in the U.S. Coupled with a federal initiative to build charging infrastructure along highway corridors, BP’s move could help reshape where drivers access public charging.
But it also raises questions about how much EV charging should mimic the experience of refueling a combustion car, and whether drivers will want to plug in at convenience stores and gas stations.
BP may seem an unlikely candidate for such a big bet on EVs. It produces about 2.3 million barrels of oil daily, and its fossil fuel dealings earned it a record $28 billion in profits last year. The company is perhaps best known for the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster, in which a drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico exploded, killing 11 people and releasing 200 million gallons of oil into the ocean over 87 days.
This new strategy included expanding its convenience-store business and building EV charging networks. BP announced plans this year to invest $1 billion in U.S. charging infrastructure by 2030 and to install 100,000 charge points globally by then. It also acquired the TravelCenters of America chain of truck stops, adding another 280 potential installation sites.
Now BP will gain access to one of the most recognizable chargers in the U.S. Tesla has more than 12,000 Supercharger stations across North America, owns more than 60 percent of the fast-charge hardware in the U.S., and is known for having the best reliability, locations, and user experience.
The 250kW BP chargers will use Tesla’s “Magic Dock” connector, which is compatible with both Tesla’s charging standard and the CCS standard currently used by most other automakers.
While BP is the first petroleum company to buy chargers from Tesla, it’s not the only one trying to find its way in the EV transition.
Shell has said it wants to become “a national EV charging network provider,” and own more than 200,000 EV charge points globally by 2030. In April, it bought the EV charging network Volta for $169 million. Chevron announced a partnership with Freewire Technologies last year to install charging stations at its gas stations. It also has invested in the charging startup Electric Era.
The oil majors are likely preparing for a fast approaching transformation of American roads: The analytics firm S&P Global Mobility estimates that there will be nearly 41 million EVs in the U.S. by 2030.
“If battery electric vehicles do prove to be the major means of light passenger vehicle transportation moving forward, the core business model for the oil majors of providing gasoline to these vehicles is going to struggle,” Graham Evans, director of auto supply chain and technology at S&P Global Mobility, told Grist. “And therefore how do they replace that? By providing EV charging.”
Fossil fuel companies may also be feeling pressure to change how they’re publicly perceived, said Evans. “It’s not necessarily just hedging their bets, but perhaps starting to add some meat on the bone of the narrative around decarbonizing what they do, and meeting some kind of net-zero target for the future, as difficult as that will be to achieve.”
Gas companies looking to add EV charging are also getting a generous boost from the $5 billion National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure, or NEVI, grant program, which funds the installation of charging stations along “alternative-fuel corridors,” mainly interstate highways.
The Biden administration has designated “alternative fuel corridors,” mainly major highways, along which it wants to install hundreds of thousands of EV chargers. Grist / USDOT
Part of the administration’s effort to install 500,000 EV chargers by 2030, the program requires that chargers be installed every 50 miles along the corridors, and within one mile of exits. Some states go even further, mandating amenities like WiFi, 24-hour access to bathrooms, and food for purchase.
Those rules are giving gas stations, convenience stores, and travel centers a competitive advantage. Of the $90 million dispersed so far, they’ve received more than 60 percent of the funding, according to Loren McDonald, founder of the analytics firm EVAdoption.
“They tend to be the ones that best fit all the different requirements,” McDonald told Grist. “We’ve seen all of the majors step up, because they have the resources, they have the real estate, they have everything.”
But some transportation advocates say that strategy doesn’t reflect where drivers want to plug in, or how those dollars can best benefit communities.
“Gas stations are not the place to charge,” Corrigan Salerno, a policy associate at the transportation advocacy organization Transportation for America, told Grist. “We can’t just do everything we used to with [combustion] vehicles but with EVs.”
That’s because refueling an electric car is a fundamentally different process. Charging an EV to 80 percent (the optimal level to preserve battery life) with a fast charger takes 20 to 40 minutes, depending on the car and charger speed. That’s not an amount of time that drivers want to spend at a gas station or convenience store, said Salerno, who added that Tesla chargers get favorable ratings from customers not just because of reliability, but because they are often located within walking distance of amenities.
“People are really affected by the environment that they charge at,” he said. “The quality of the site needs to be considered more than proximity to the highway, otherwise people might end up regretting buying their EVs because of the misery of charging at bad sites.”
Offering a few chargers may not be that advantageous for gas-station operators either. Most of their profits depend on a high volume of convenience-store purchases, which requires a lot of customers spending a little bit of time on site, not the reverse.
“It probably won’t drive the transition between the initial phase of showing you’re in the game,” Ryan Fisher, BloombergNEF’s head of charging infrastructure, told Grist.
Fisher predicts that in the long term, more public charging will take place at bigger sites. BP is planning so-called Gigahubs, which could charge more than 100 cars at a time, in city metros and near airports. The company has already installed one in Birmingham, England, with 16 ultra-fast chargers and 150 Level 2 chargers, similar to the ones drivers use at home.
For now, much of this large-site installation is occurring at retailers like Walmart, which has more than 1,300 chargers through a partnership with Electrify America and plans to build its own network. “The supermarkets subsidize the energy, they get you in the store, you buy more stuff,” said Fisher. “It’s a reasonably simplistic model to think about.”
And it’s one that creates real competition for oil and gas majors, something they’re less accustomed to in the fuel market for combustion cars.
There’s also the question of whether EV drivers will want to give their money to the fossil fuel companies that willfully ignored climate change for decades and deceived the public about its impact. Evans of S&P Global said that he hasn’t seen data on EV drivers’ feelings about the oil majors, but that when choosing where to charge, necessity may trump distaste.
“At the moment there is such a lack of prevalent, reliable charging infrastructure,” he said, “that if you have charging stations and they work reliably, consumers will use them.”
Humanity is messing with the Earth’s “salt cycle,” with potentially dangerous consequences for drinking water supplies, crop production, and ecosystems. That’s according to a new study published in the journal Nature Reviews Earth & Environment on Tuesday. It’s the first time that scientists have documented the extent to which humans have changed the salt content of the land, water, and air across the globe.
Researchers in Maryland and four other states found that 2.5 billion acres of soil around the world have gotten saltier, an area roughly the size of the entire United States, and it’s stressing out plants. Salt is even getting kicked up into the air: In arid regions, “lakes are drying up and sending plumes of saline dust into the atmosphere,” such as the Aral Sea in Central Asia, the study says.
Salt pollution presents an “existential threat to our freshwater supplies,” according to the study. It can corrode drinking water pipes, exacerbating lead pollution in water supplies, as it did in Flint, Michigan. “They had all these lead pipes that were leading to their houses and the chloride would basically pull the lead into solution,” Sujay Kaushal, the study’s lead author, told the Washington Post. “They didn’t add enough corrosion inhibitor, and then kids had high levels of lead in their blood.”
Before humans came along, salt moved to the Earth’s surface over long geological periods, surfacing as rocks broke down and cycling through the water and air, available for the animals and plants that needed it. Some research suggests that salt was key to the development of life on Earth.
But that process has been accelerated by industrialization. Salinization has been supercharged by a host of factors: irrigation, deicing roads, mining, wastewater treatment, and even the use of salt-laden household items like detergent. The researchers looked at lots of different kinds of salts, like calcium and magnesium, not just the sodium chloride that sits in the salt shaker on your dinner table. And they found so much of it, they worried that salt could cause “serious or irreversible damage across Earth systems.”
In coastal areas, sea-level rise can send salty ocean waters into the groundwater, making it undrinkable. In the United States, aquifers near the coastline — many of which are below sea level — supply 95 million people with drinking water. It only takes 2 or 3 percent seawater to make the groundwater undrinkable, and removing salt from water is difficult and expensive.
The rise of saline dust in the air presents a different problem for water supplies. Since salt can alter the freezing temperature of water, this salt-rich dust could accelerate snowmelt, according to the study, presenting a problem for communities that rely on snowpack for their water supply, like many in the western United States.
The biggest contributor to the issue in the U.S.? Dumping salt on the road for safer driving during winter weather. Road salt made up 44 percent of the country’s salt consumption from 2013 to 2017, the study says. That salt helps make roads less icy, but it eventually runs off and contaminates streams and drinking water.
There are methods available to lessen the environmental impact while helping prevent cars from skidding across roads. In Minnesota, the state has experimented with “smart salting” — training workers to apply salt without wasting any — to cut salt usage by 30 to 70 percent. Washington, D.C. uses beet juice brine, with a lower sodium content than plain old salt. Wisconsin, playing to character, has incorporated cheese brine, preferably from provolone and mozzarella, into its efforts to deice roads with less salt.
More than a third of food produced in the U.S. ends up being thrown away, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). This not only wastes the food itself, but the resources that were used to produce, process, transport and distribute it. Much of it ends up in landfills, where it breaks down and generates methane, a greenhouse gas more potent than carbon dioxide.
Earlier this month, the EPA released two new reports that quantify methane emissions from food waste in landfills and provide new recommendations for managing food waste, a press release from the EPA said.
“Wasted food is a major environmental, social, and economic challenge,” said EPA Administrator Michael S. Regan in the press release. “These reports provide decision-makers with important data on the climate impacts of food waste through landfill methane emissions and highlight the urgent need to keep food out of landfills.”
The findings of the reports highlight how important it is to reduce food waste and manage the disposal of it in ways that are easier on the environment.
One of the reports, “Quantifying Methane Emissions From Landfilled Food Waste,” said that approximately 58 percent of methane emissions released into the atmosphere from landfills are from food waste, 61 percent of which is not captured, but released into the atmosphere.
A group of local government officials from 18 states have written a joint letter urging the EPA to phase out food waste disposal in landfills by 2040 in order to reduce methane emissions.
“Without fast action on methane, local governments will increasingly face the impacts of warming temperatures, sea level rise, and extreme weather events,” the officials, including the mayors of Minneapolis and Seattle, said in the letter, as Reuters reported.
According to the EPA, about 14 percent of methane emissions in the U.S. come from landfills. In 2020 methane produced a total of more than 60 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.
Based on its recent findings, the EPA has updated its Food Recovery Hierarchy, which is a tool to help officials understand the best ways to manage the environmental impacts of food waste, the press release said. The new ranking is called the Wasted Food Scale.
Research by the EPA has found that preventing food waste remains most beneficial for the environment. The new EPA reports suggest the focus should be put on diverting food waste from landfills through less waste, which will result in a reduction in environmental impacts.
The new research is the first quantification of methane emissions from landfills by the EPA. The agency found that, from 1990 to 2020, while total emissions from landfills decreased, food waste in landfills produced more emissions. These findings indicate that the diversion of food waste from landfills would be effective in reducing methane emissions from these landfills.
A coal plant in Jefferson County, Alabama has topped the list of worst greenhouse gas polluters in the U.S., according to data recently released by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). This latest annual recognition is the eighth consecutive time for the notorious Alabama Power facility in Jefferson County, called the James H. Miller Jr. Electric Generating Plant.
In an analysis by Inside Climate News, reporters found that the plant emitted nearly 22 million metric tons of greenhouse gases in 2022. The majority of the emissions, about 21 million metric tons, consisted of carbon dioxide.
By comparison, this single plant produces more emissions than several individual countries, including Cambodia, Guatemala and Iceland, according to data from the European Commission.
Teisha Wallace, a spokesperson for Alabama Power, said in a statement that the plant was an essential part of the company’s services, and AL.com reported that Wallace said the company sourced about one-third of the electricity for its customers from clean energy sources, those sources mainly being hydropower and nuclear energy.
“The four units at Miller are among the largest and most efficient in the country,” Wallace wrote in a statement, as reported by Inside Climate News.
Alabama Power’s parent company, Southern Company, has set a goal to transition to net-zero emissions by 2050. It noted its progress, with stats including a 91% decrease in coal units since 2007.
But a report from the Sierra Club found that Southern Company is not on track to meet targets that curb impacts of the climate crisis, and the organization graded Alabama Power with an F for its clean energy transition efforts.
“The utility industry is not moving at the pace that’s necessary to respond to the climate crisis,” Leah Stokes, an energy analyst, said in a statement. “They still don’t have adequate plans to retire dirty coal plants, stop building gas plants, and build new clean energy. That’s what we know they have to do, and they are delaying the clean energy transition.”
Alabama Power is one of several top polluters in the U.S. It is followed by the company Ameren’s Labadie coal power plant in Missouri, which emits 15.9 million metric tons, and the DTE Energy fuel-oil power plant in Monroe, Michigan, which is responsible for 14.9 million metric tons of emissions. The EPA has developed a map that shows top emitters by location and the Facility Level Information on GreenHouse gases Tool (FLIGHT) to see all emitters and filter them by sector, facility, location, and other factors.
Although the news of the worst polluters in the U.S. is grim, the EPA’s report did show a little bit of hope. According to the data, emissions from the top polluters in the country had reduced slightly, about 1%, in 2022. In total, the top emitters were responsible for 2.7 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent last year. AL.com reported that the 7,586 industrial facilities in the report make up about half of the country’s emissions.
The Antarctic ice sheet is of vital importance to the climate. Ice reflects sunlight, keeping the planet cool. The sheet contains 70 percent of all the freshwater on the planet, which, if it were to melt entirely, would absorb heat and cause global sea levels to rise by around 200 feet.
A new modeling study of the Antarctic ice sheet by scientists from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at University of California, San Diego (UCSD), suggests that, as water beneath the glaciers melts and flows out to sea, it causes ice to melt faster, a press release from UCSD said. The process is known as subglacial discharge.
The simulation by the model suggests this meltwater effect is enough to cause significant global sea-level rise in scenarios of high greenhouse gas emissions.
Current models being used to generate major projections of sea-level rise, like those by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, are not taking the extra ice loss from the meltwater into account.
If the meltwater process is determined to be a key driver of Antarctic ice sheet loss, current projections could be underestimating the rate of sea-level rise all over the world.
“Knowing when and how much global sea-level will rise is critical to the welfare of coastal communities. Millions of people live in low-lying coastal zones and we can’t adequately prepare our communities without accurate sea-level rise projections,” said Tyler Pelle, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral researcher at Scripps, in the press release.
The study, “Subglacial discharge accelerates future retreat of Denman and Scott Glaciers, East Antarctica,” was published in the journal Science Advances.
For the study, researchers simulated the glacial retreat of two East Antarctic glaciers — Denman and Scott — through 2300 using various emissions scenarios, then applied the contributions to sea-level rise, the press release said.
The Denman and Scott glaciers combined have enough ice to cause sea levels to rise nearly five feet. In a scenario with high emissions stemming from no new climate policy that results in 20 percent higher carbon emissions by 2100, sea-level rise from subglacial discharge increased by 15.7 percent, from 0.74 inches to 0.86 inches by 2300.
The two glaciers sit next to each other on top of a continental trench with a depth of more than two miles. Once the glaciers’ retreat reaches the top of the trench’s slope, their sea-level rise contribution is predicted to accelerate considerably.
When subglacial discharge was taken into account, the model calculated that the two glaciers retreated past the slope approximately 25 years earlier.
“I think this paper is a wake up call for the modeling community,” said Jamin Greenbaum, study co-author and researcher at the Scripps Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, in the press release. “It shows you can’t accurately model these systems without taking this process into account.”
Greenbaum said one of the main things to take away from the study, other than the importance of subglacial discharge in the speeding up of sea-level rise, is how important what humans do to curb greenhouse gas emissions is for the future. When the model was given a low emissions scenario the glaciers did not retreat all the way into the trench, thus avoiding breakaway contributions to rising sea levels.
“If there is a doomsday story here it isn’t subglacial discharge,” Greenbaum said in the press release. “The real doomsday story is still emissions and humanity is still the one with its finger on the button.”
And meltwater isn’t only occurring with the Denman and Scott glaciers.
“Subglacial meltwater has been inferred beneath most if not all Antarctic glaciers, including Thwaites, Pine Island, and Totten glaciers,” Pelle said in the press release. “All these glaciers are retreating and contributing to sea-level rise and we are showing that subglacial discharge could be accelerating their retreat. It’s urgent that we model these other glaciers so we can get a handle on the magnitude of the effect subglacial discharge is having.”
