This story was co-published with The Lens.

To visit the country’s newest hub for exporting liquefied gas to Europe, follow the Mississippi River southeast from New Orleans, past the recently shuttered Phillips 66 refinery in Alliance and deeper into Plaquemines Parish, a ribbon of land that flanks the lower Mississippi River before dropping off into the Gulf of Mexico. There, strip malls and highways give way to wide expanses of cypress and low marshes that are home to white-tailed deer, alligators, and pelicans. The border between land and water, solid ground and swamp, seems to dissolve. In this part of the Louisiana coast, most exit roads lead over levees and into wetlands traversed by local fishermen and pipeline workers. You’ll pass small fishing hamlets, clusters of trailers lining bayous, and carcasses of old houses.

Towering over this patchwork of lowland and swamp is a massive liquefied natural gas export terminal owned by the Virginia-based Venture Global LNG, one of three in Louisiana. Built on 630 acres of former swampland, an area larger than New Orleans’ French Quarter, the facility known as Plaquemines LNG extends along more than a mile of the Mississippi River. It encompasses thousands of feet of coiled steel pipes for supercooling gas, 130-foot cylindrical storage tanks, and flare stacks that expel tall, airborne flames while the plant operates. At a break in the levee wall that surrounds the property, a sign warns of the hazards inside: “WORK THE PLAN. DON’T RUSH. GET HOME SAFE.” A large metal pipe extends out of the facility and over the highway, bound for the river. 

Venture Global’s terminal in Plaquemines Parish will cool natural gas down to its liquid form so it can be loaded onto ships and exported around the world. When the facility becomes operational in 2025, tanker ships will be able to plug into it and offload more than 25 million tons of natural gas each year, enough to power more than 15 million homes over the same period. The opening will represent a triumph for gas drillers that have sought to sell more of their product abroad and for President Joe Biden, who has championed American gas exports to ensure “the reliable supply of global energy” as Europe weans itself off gas imported from Russia following that country’s invasion of Ukraine. 

In the 18 months since construction on Plaquemines LNG began, Venture Global has transformed the lives of people who have lived in the 23,000-person parish for generations. The streets around the plant became choked with truck traffic, the marsh threaded with pipelines, and the quiet was replaced with the din of construction. Acres of wetland disappeared beneath concrete. The broad ocean skyline of the parish vanished behind a maze of steel. And Venture Global is already working on another plant in the parish, known as Delta LNG.

“I said it would never happen, then you wake up and here it is,” said Henry McAnespy, a fisherman who grew up in the parish and lives down the road from the project. He described the roar of pipeline workers’ airboats at 6 a.m. each morning and the light pollution from the company’s round-the-clock construction. “I live in a place that never gets dark no more.”

Emboldened by a surge in global demand for natural gas, a small group of companies rushed to build an industry along the Gulf Coast, from the southern tip of Texas to southeastern Louisiana, carving up thousands of acres of vulnerable shoreline to clear the way for massive plants and send American fossil fuels overseas. Liquefaction terminals are among the most complex industrial facilities in existence, with footprints that rival those of the largest chemical plants and oil refineries; the first to open — Cheniere Energy’s plant in southwest Louisiana — encompassed an area the size of nearly 700 football fields.

Building them often requires dredging through shorelines and wetlands to build loading docks and lay hundreds of miles of pipelines. Seven of these facilities have started up in the continental United States in as many years, and at least two dozen more are in various stages of planning and construction along the Gulf Coast. A decade ago, the United States had never exported LNG, but earlier this year it became the world’s top exporter of the fuel, surpassing the gas-rich nation of Qatar.

The growth of the LNG industry in the United States has reordered world markets, offering a new energy source to Europe and Asia even as gas exports drive up domestic energy prices. But it’s on the Gulf Coast, and in particular on the rural fringes of the Louisiana coast, that the consequences of the boom have been most visible. Grist reviewed dozens of state and federal records and found that in their haste to greenlight new terminals, regulators are exposing residents of coastal parishes to new and dangerous sources of air pollution from flares and leaks. Louisiana environmental regulators recently cited numerous violations at Venture Global’s LNG terminal in Cameron Parish, but has allowed the company’s project near McAnespy’s home in Plaquemines, on the other side of the state, to move forward. And as gas exporters build their plants on eroding swampland, they are increasing the risk of catastrophic accidents and explosions during floods and hurricanes. People like McAnespy, who live in neighborhoods surrounding the terminals, are right in the blast zone.

“It’s not just that each of these facilities is like a giant death star on sinking land, it’s that there’s so many of them,” said Elizabeth Calderon, a senior attorney at the environmental nonprofit Earthjustice who has worked on cases challenging LNG terminals in south Louisiana. “This is how sacrifice zones are created.”

When John Allaire bought his 300-acre property along the Gulf of Mexico in the 1990s, the southwest coast of Louisiana was a very different place. There was no industry in sight, just wide expanses of wild grasses and wetlands leading to belts of oak trees, known as cheniers, that lined the sandy shore near the Texas state line. Since then, coastal erosion has wiped away almost all those old growth forests, and much of the landscape has been cleared for the construction of new LNG terminals like the one Venture Global built near the border of his property. 

Allaire lives in Cameron Parish, a once sleepy area dotted with fishing hamlets that has transformed over the last decade into one of the world’s most important hubs for exporting natural gas. Three terminals currently operate in the 5,000-person parish; another seven are on the way. If Cameron Parish is where gas companies go to set up shop, carving out pipeline networks and erecting massive liquefaction terminals, then the city of Lake Charles an hour to the north is where they broker business deals. Long a site of petrochemical development and its accompanying pollution, Lake Charles is trying to capitalize off the prime coastal real estate to its south, with local politicians luring gas executives from Germany to Japan with events like the so-called “Americas LNG & Gas Summit & Exhibition,” which they’ve hosted two years in a row at the Golden Nugget Hotel and Casino.

Local officials have celebrated the announcement of every new LNG development in the area, calling the industry a boon for economic growth and employment. Some residents like Allaire have a different perspective. As soon as the Venture Global terminal known as Calcasieu Pass began operating near his home in early 2022, Allaire witnessed a string of problems. 

“Right away you had black smoke, alarms going off at the plant, and flares going constantly,” he said.

Liquefying gas is a dirty process. Terminals like Calcasieu Pass operate nearly around the clock, sucking in gas from a national network of pipelines and liquefying it so it can be loaded onto ships. When there’s too much gas backed up in the pipes, or when other refrigerant chemicals start to build up, the company prevents explosions by burning off gas, which sends orange flames shooting into the sky from the company’s flare towers.

As a former oil and gas engineer, Allaire knows that a certain level of flaring is to be expected when workers attempt to control pressure variations within their equipment, but too much flaring can be a sign of larger problems. Flaring releases a cocktail of pollutants like carbon monoxide, black carbon, and volatile organic compounds like benzene and formaldehyde. These chemicals are especially dangerous for vulnerable people like pregnant women, whose odds of having a premature birth can double from regular exposure to pollution from flares.

Soon after Calcasieu Pass was up and running last year, Allaire began photographing the flares, which often burned throughout the day and into the night. His kitchen table is now littered with printouts of these timestamped images, which, added together, reveal the frequency of the plant’s mishaps. A report by the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, an environmental nonprofit, found that the facility violated the Clean Air Act by exceeding the pollution thresholds specified in its permit more than 2,000 times last year, according to the facility’s own records reviewed by Grist. This flaring led to the release of numerous chemicals, including between 19,000 and 37,000 pounds of nitrogen dioxide, a greenhouse gas that has been linked to chronic lung disease.

Despite these violations at Venture Global’s first terminal in the state, the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality has signed off on the construction of Venture Global’s second facility in Plaquemines Parish, which the company itself describes as “technologically identical” to the first one near Allaire’s home in southwest Louisiana.

“Talk about an experiment,” Calderon of Earthjustice said of Venture Global’s two newest enterprises. “They want to be allowed to emit air pollution at the levels of their failed engineering rather than at the levels they promised.”

Last month, in a rare move, the same state agency issued a compliance order against Venture Global for “preventable” and “unauthorized” violations at Calcasieu Pass. In the order, regulators detailed the company’s “failure to timely report” its emissions and alleged that it misrepresented the extent to which its equipment had malfunctioned. 

Neither the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality nor Venture Global responded to multiple requests for comment on the company’s permit violations or any other details in this story. In a written response to the department, Venture Global’s lawyers said they will likely dispute certain portions of the order. 

Flaring is just one of multiple ways that LNG terminals release toxic chemicals into their surroundings. Supercooling natural gas until it becomes a liquid at minus 260 degrees Fahrenheit relies on engines known as turbines that burn fuel to produce massive amounts of electricity. The turbines at Calcasieu Pass near Allaire’s house have a generation capacity of 720 megawatts, enough to power more than 500,000 homes at once.

The Environmental Protection Agency considers gas turbines major sources of toxic air pollution, since the combustion process releases a slew of cancer-causing chemicals such as benzene and formaldehyde. That pollution can travel dozens of miles away, diminishing air quality in more densely populated inland areas like Lake Charles. What’s more, enforcement records from the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality indicate that these machines are prone to malfunctions, sometimes for long stretches of time. Last year, three gas turbines at Calcasieu Pass failed repeatedly over two straight months, emitting thousands of pounds of pollutants into the air.

Emissions from LNG terminals across Louisiana and Texas are putting an outsize burden on lower-income neighborhoods. In Cameron Parish where Allaire lives, the median income is $64,000, but more than 14 percent of people are below the federal poverty line, $30,000 for a family of four. A federal analysis of the Venture Global plant in Plaquemines found that two-thirds of residents in a census block near the terminal live below the poverty line. 

Advocates see the LNG buildout as part of a larger industrial expansion that has also disproportionately affected Black people. The cluster of terminals in Cameron Parish is just south of Lake Charles, where nearly half of all residents are Black. There, emissions from LNG terminals are compounded by already high pollution levels drifting in from the nearby town of Westlake, where a maze of chemical complexes emits thousands of pounds of cancer-causing chemicals such as vinyl chloride and 1,3-butadiene every year, causing the air to smell like burnt plastic.

“Our children are dying from asthma,” said Roishetta Sibley Ozane, an activist from Lake Charles who runs the Vessel Project of Louisiana, a local environmental organization. “People have cancer. And yet these industries are allowed to pollute and emit all of this right in our community and nothing is being done about it because it’s going under the radar.”

In a petition sent to the EPA in late May, seven environmental organizations from the Gulf Coast, including Ozane’s, alleged that regulators in Louisiana and Texas are illegally granting permits to oil and gas companies, including LNG operators such as Venture Global. The petition charged that in giving them permits to build new infrastructure without first requiring them to demonstrate through modeling that their facilities will be in compliance with the law, Louisiana has violated the federal Clean Air Act, which prohibits granting a company a permit that will “cause or contribute” to a violation of federal air quality standards. The organizations sent a separate civil rights complaint to the agency in June, arguing that allowing the industrial buildout discriminates against majority-Black communities in Louisiana like Lake Charles.

Regulators in Louisiana and Texas declined to comment on the petition, and the EPA told Grist that it would not comment on an open civil rights complaint.

Allaire said that he plans to continue documenting Venture Global’s flares, and he worried aloud about a new fight on the horizon. Another company, Houston-based Commonwealth LNG, is about to break ground on an export terminal and pipeline network just over his property line. In 2021, Allaire turned away representatives from Commonwealth who offered to buy his land. He said that he refuses to leave, no matter the offer. 

“This is a unique spot, all my kids grew up here,” Allaire said, gazing out his truck’s windshield at the bright green widgeon grass floating on the surface of his pond. “They grew up hunting and fishing and stargazing and campfiring. … It’s not for sale.”

Allaire said that after 40 years working in the oil and gas industry, the year and a half that he’s spent living near an LNG terminal has changed his mind about a few things. When he worked at an oil refinery in the 1980s and 1990s, he wasn’t aware that burning all that fuel would cause carbon to build up in the atmosphere, but now he’s certain about the industry’s impact on the climate. Though natural gas is a less carbon-intensive fuel than oil, burning it for electricity still releases carbon dioxide, and drilling for it can also cause significant leaks of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Yet the companies building LNG terminals in Cameron Parish are assuming that international demand for the fuel will be robust for decades to come. 

“They’re selling it abroad to the highest bidder” with full knowledge of what it’s doing to the planet, Allaire said. He now sees oil as a finite resource, bound to dry up eventually, and believes that the country is going to have to switch to renewables at some point.

“It’s just a question of when,” Allaire said. “How much carbon do we put in the atmosphere hoping that it won’t have catastrophic effects?”

Since Venture Global began constructing its first gas hub in Plaquemines Parish in 2022, Henry McAnespy’s life has changed in numerous ways. A commercial fisherman since high school, the 64-year-old laments the way the company dredged the marsh where he goes fishing to lay 36-inch-wide pipelines. The water pressure in his home, already low after Hurricane Ida damaged the parish’s water system two years ago, is even weaker now; McAnespy and other locals think it’s tied to the company using the limited resource to build its terminal.

But the thing that keeps him up at night is the fear that, at any moment, Venture Global’s mile-wide terminal up the road could explode. 

“You don’t have a crystal ball, you can’t tell me what’s going to happen to this plant,” McAnespy said. “I don’t want to live by this and I don’t think any investor would move his family here either.”

Of the five liquefied natural gas terminals in operation on the Gulf Coast, at least four have suffered some kind of leak or blast, whether due to extreme weather or a mechanical malfunction. Multiple incidents at LNG facilities on the Gulf have already demonstrated what happens when supercooled gas escapes from pipelines and storage tanks, underscoring the potential for damage like the kind McAnespy fears. 

In early 2018, liquefied gas escaped through a crack in one of the storage tanks at a facility in Cameron Parish owned by Cheniere Energy, a Houston-based corporation that was the first American firm to export LNG. Workers discovered and patched the leak before any explosion occurred, but an investigation by the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, part of the federal Department of Transportation, revealed other cracks in the tank. The regulator fined Cheniere $2.2 million and ordered the company to stop using two faulty tanks, deeming them “hazardous to life, property, or the environment.” 

A year later, during a separate, previously unreported incident at the same facility, a leak of an unidentified substance caused three construction workers to lose consciousness, according to a lawsuit filed by the workers against Cheniere in Texas state court. The three workers were on the job near one of the plant’s giant liquefaction machines when they became “overwhelmed with the odor of gas.”

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In an incident report provided to the court, one of the workers recalled that he “started to feel weak and [dizzy]” after smelling a “strong odor of unknown chemicals,” and after that he “didn’t remember anything until [he] arrived at the Port Arthur hospital.” Cheniere said it couldn’t figure out the source of the leak, according to court documents, calling its investigation “inconclusive.” (A judge ruled in Cheniere’s favor on procedural grounds last year, but the workers have since filed for a new trial.)

Leaks and malfunctions like these can also trigger explosions. In June 2022, a thunderous blast shook Freeport LNG’s facility in Freeport, Texas, the second-largest export terminal on the Gulf Coast, rattling the town of 10,000. A malfunction in one of the plant’s pressure valves caused gas to back up in a pipeline and leak out into the air, where it formed a dense “vapor cloud” and then ignited. It took eight months for Freeport LNG to repair the damage from the blast and secure permission from the federal government to export gas again.

It hasn’t happened on the Gulf Coast yet, but experts worry that the liquefaction process could lead to much bigger blasts. The Freeport explosion involved a leak of methane, but export terminals also employ a cocktail of chemicals known as refrigerants to condense gas into a liquid, including ethylene, propane, and hexane. They are all even more explosive than gas itself, which means they would cause larger vapor cloud explosions, perhaps large enough to level entire city blocks.

“We have searched high and low to find this answer of how far people would be affected and no one has been able to tell us,” said Naomi Yoder, a staff scientist at the Gulf Coast-based environmental organization Healthy Gulf who studies LNG terminals. “If they don’t have those answers, then what in the world are we doing building these things?”

Venture Global and other gas exporters have promised jobs in cash-strapped parishes that sometimes fail to provide residents with basic services. Officials in Cameron, for instance, are still working to resume medical treatment at the parish’s only hospital, which was damaged by Hurricane Laura in 2020. And in July, Louisiana’s Governor John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, declared a state of emergency in Plaquemines after saltwater from the Mississippi River began seeping into the drinking water supply. In response, the parish and a state agency handed out 200,000 bottles of water. 

Some locals are worried that the new terminals won’t improve these conditions even if they deliver on the promise of more jobs. Supporters of the Plaquemines project say the parish badly needs the 250 jobs and 728 indirect jobs that Venture Global promised to create, since almost the same number of positions were eliminated when the Phillips 66 Alliance Refinery up the road shuttered in 2021. In an effort to lure the company to the parish in 2016, the Louisiana Board of Commerce and Industry awarded Venture Global a 10-year property tax break to build the LNG terminal. That break was worth $83.5 million in the first year of the contract, a sum larger than the parish’s 2022 budget of $75 million. The board recently approved another $29.8 million in payroll tax rebates to the company over 10 years. 

McAnespy appreciates the economic benefit of the terminals, but says companies like Venture Global often ignore the residents who live closest to the facilities.

“The plant is a wonderful economic boost, not just to Plaquemines or the state of Louisiana, but worldwide,” McAnespy said. “My concern is that it’s such a big project that they’re imposing their will on us. Have a little respect for us.”

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Given the chance, McAnespy said, he’d move 10 miles up the road and away from the plant where he would be more confident that his family could easily evacuate if there was an explosion. McAnespy’s house is likely within the blast radius of the plant’s high-powered liquefaction machines, as well as its massive gas storage tanks.

McAnespy said that Venture Global offered to buy the houses of some people living on the east side of Lake Hermitage Road in Plaquemines Parish, which the company considers to be the outer boundary of its blast radius. But people like him just across the street haven’t heard anything from the company.

“I feel like they should come back here and give me an option to buy me out,” he said. “Do your project, just give me fair market value for my property. I’ll pick up my pieces and go live somewhere else.”

---

On a bright day in April, Travis Dardar stood with his boot heels in the shallows of Calcasieu Lake, a few miles away from John Allaire’s house, surveying the area where he took his boat out to catch shrimp each spring. The 38-year-old Dardar has been fishing all his life, beginning in his hometown of Isle de Jean Charles, an island community in southeast Louisiana.

“Back then, fishing wasn’t really a choice for me, you know?” Dardar said, eyes shaded under his camo Louisiana State University baseball cap. “It was the kind of lifestyle we grew up in. We had to eat.”

Like other residents of Isle de Jean Charles, Dardar is a member of the United Houma Nation, a state-recognized tribe, and his family had a strong connection to the island. He rebuilt his family home there twice after successive hurricanes ripped through. But after many of his neighbors moved away and his grandfather died, the place didn’t feel like home anymore. Other residents of Isle de Jean Charles were taking part in one of one of the first climate resettlement programs in U.S. history, and Dardar decided it was time for him to leave, too. In 2015, he and his wife and kids moved west to Cameron, where he could still make a living by shrimping, the only way he’d ever known. 

Dardar quickly got used to life in Cameron, a fishing community just like Isle de Jean Charles. But then came the LNG terminals, one after the other, tearing out patches of wetlands larger than football stadiums and changing the chemistry of the air and water. The export facilities now ring Calcasieu Lake, a gourd-shaped body of water separated from the Gulf of Mexico by a narrow channel that cuts through a stretch of wetlands. Until recently, most of Louisiana’s largest fossil fuel facilities sat well inland from the Gulf. Sitting back from the water gave oil refineries and chemical plants protection from storm surges and easy access to highways and pipelines. LNG export terminals are different: Because they load gas right onto massive tanker ships, these facilities must sit right at the water’s edge, on land that is both undeveloped and especially vulnerable to flooding.

That soon became a problem for people, like Dardar, who caught shrimp on Calcasieu Lake for a living. The massive waves created by gas tankers damaged his boat and forced Dardar and his fellow shrimpers to cluster in a corner of the lake where they all vied for a small share of the catch. Another gas company, Tellurian, had announced plans to open a 1,200-acre terminal on the Calcasieu River, which empties into the lake, and they began to worry that the shipping traffic to that terminal would one day push them out for good.

To Dardar, it seemed like a sort of cosmic joke. He’d survived decades of deadly hurricanes only to leave Isle de Jean Charles, and when he finally achieved some measure of stability, a new industry rose up around him, an outside force challenging his livelihood once again. In fact, the plants came to Cameron for the same reason Dardar did: Calcasieu Lake is an ideal access point for LNG tankers coming in from the Gulf of Mexico. 

This summer, Dardar made a choice he’d fought hard to avoid. He took a buyout from Venture Global and used the money to move his family 20 minutes north to the town of Kaplan, where he could continue shrimping in nearby Intracoastal City. Dardar said that in the month since they moved, he sleeps better at night. The air, too, is easier to breathe. 

“Kind of feel like we’re at home,” Dardar said of the new property in Kaplan. He described the final months in Cameron as eerily similar to the end of his time on Isle de Jean Charles.

The rapid expansion of the LNG industry in Cameron Parish might have pushed Dardar away from the coastline, but Venture Global and its fellow LNG exporters are incurring their own risks by setting up along the Gulf Coast. The five active LNG terminals bordering the Gulf of Mexico sit at the end of “Hurricane Alley,” a band of warm water that begins off the northwest coast of Africa and stretches across the Atlantic, providing fuel in the form of heat for dangerous hurricanes to form. 

In August 2020, Hurricane Laura made landfall in Cameron Parish, driving a 17-foot wall of water onto southwest Louisiana’s coast and exacting damage on a third of the state’s industrial facilities, including multiple LNG terminals. A pressure system failure at Cheniere’s facility led to the release of more than 100 tons of pollutants, and a nearby plant owned by San Diego-based Sempra Energy reportedly flared for days after the storm. Two months later, Hurricane Delta swept through, causing more damage to petrochemical plants across the state. 

“These locations can barely handle storms now,” said Jessi Parfait, a native of south Louisiana who works on the Sierra Club’s Beyond Fossil Fuels campaign. “Just imagine 30 years into the future, which is supposed to be the lifetime of these facilities, potentially more. They’re not going to be as protected.”

LNG developers have tried to assure investors and regulators that they’re getting ahead of future hurricanes by weather-proofing their facilities. A representative from Commonwealth LNG, the firm planning to break ground next door to Allaire’s property in Cameron, told Grist that it will build a “storm-surge wall intended to minimize flood damage or disruption of operations.” A representative from Sempra Energy pointed out that its facility is located 18 miles inland and eight feet above sea level, which puts it out of reach of storm surge events. The representative noted that the terminal suffered minimal damage when Hurricane Laura hit in 2020.

But the risks are only increasing. The sea levels off the coast of Louisiana are likely to rise by as much as two feet over the next 30 years, and the waters of the Gulf of Mexico are only getting warmer, which will provide more fuel to hurricanes as they make landfall. By the end of the century, the Gulf Coast region might be as much as 12 degrees F hotter, which will allow rainstorms to hold more moisture.

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Last year, the Sierra Club asked Ivor van Heerden, a noted marine scientist and former Louisiana State University professor, to assess the hurricane risk of Venture Global’s Plaquemines LNG terminal. Van Heerden is perhaps best known for predicting the potential devastation of Hurricane Katrina more than a decade before the storm submerged New Orleans in 2005.

When completed, Plaquemines LNG will be surrounded by a 26-foot storm wall and flanked by two separate levee systems. In his report, however, van Heerden determined that a Category 4 or 5 hurricane like Laura or Ida could still flood the facility and cause widespread damage that would spill into surrounding wetlands and nearby communities.

“It is my opinion after years of studying hurricanes and flooding that this LNG site will be flooded, in the not-too-distant future and perhaps even the next hurricane season,” van Heerden wrote in the report. If a flood ever breached the plant’s levee system, he wrote, there would be a high probability of chemicals “being carried off the site and into homes, businesses, farmland, and fragile coastal wetlands.”

The risks are similar at the five other LNG facilities that now line the Gulf Coast, and future export terminals in Louisiana and Texas will be just as prone to devastation during storms. As van Heerden sees it, the gas industry is on a collision course with rising sea levels and ocean temperatures, building explosive infrastructure in an area that is only getting more vulnerable to climate change. 

Grist sent questions about air pollution and hurricane risk to all five companies that operate LNG export terminals in Texas and Louisiana, and only two responded. A representative from Sempra Energy, said that the company “put[s] the health, safety and security of our workforce, customers and communities at the center of everything we do.” A representative from Commonwealth LNG said that “the safety of our employees, the public, and the environment … have the highest priority in everything that we do.”

Officials in Louisiana ignored van Heerden’s warnings before Katrina, and the result was the most expensive natural disaster in the history of the United States, costing more than $170 billion. If he’s right about the risks of exporting LNG, coastal Louisiana could see a devastating LNG disaster in the coming years, as soon as the right hurricane strikes, and it will be people like Henry McAnespy who bear the immediate damage from chemical explosions and contamination. The effects would also be felt well beyond coastal Louisiana.

“The average American should recognize that when it all goes to hell in a bucket, they’re the ones who are going to be coughing up the money for the remediation,” van Heerden told Grist. “Katrina cost billions of dollars. The cost [of an LNG disaster] is going to be borne by the American public, and it’s going to be a substantial cost.”

Editor’s note: Earthjustice and the Sierra Club are advertisers with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline ‘Death stars on sinking land’: How liquefied natural gas took over the Gulf Coast on Aug 2, 2023.

This story is part of the Grist arts and culture series Remember When, a weeklong exploration of what happened to the climate solutions that once clogged our social feeds.

At Alaska’s northernmost point, a bowhead whale carcass on the beach attracted a visitor: a massive polar bear.

Kiliii Yuyan, a National Geographic photographer, caught a snapshot of the bear while on assignment in Alaska in 2016. He was visiting the Iñupiat as they butchered whales they’d hauled up onto the spring ice. In the image, the bear is looking up at his camera, the fur around its mouth tinted red from blood. Two sideways scars adorn its nose, with a third slash above its right eye raising a large tuft of fur.

“The hunters in particular have a really deep respect for those big-ass, crazy scarred ones,” Yuyan said. “When that bear came down, everyone was like, ‘That one, he’s a survivor. Let him eat. Let him eat!’ Everyone was shouting it.”

It’s different from the polar bear photos that once saturated our media diet. Starting about two decades ago, National Geographic and the like began churning out images of lonely, hungry bears adrift on melting ice floes, painting them as the hapless victims of climate change. Whereas charts and statistics had failed to evince much of a reaction from the public, the polar bear sparked sympathy. 

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But today, that symbol has largely fallen out of fashion. The advocacy group ClimateXChange even says the focus on the polar bear has done a “disservice” to the goals of the movement; a handbook for public engagement for members of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s leading group of climate experts convened by the United Nations, says the image prompts “cynicism and fatigue.” Overexposure has turned the polar bear into a fluffy, environmental cliche, like saving the whales or hugging trees, as opposed to a real-life carnivore with dangerous teeth and claws. 

After so many years of curated photos of perfectly white bears on floating ice, a polar bear with a few scars comes as a surprise — but the imperfections help capture what their lives are really like, Yuyan said. “When we caricature things too much, we just completely lose the intricacies and subtleties of what it means to actually be a polar bear, the things it is that they need, and how it is that we can live alongside them.”

That’s something Iñupiaq hunters know well. The day Yuyan snapped his photograph, half a dozen polar bears were circling the hunters, hiding behind rocks, waiting for the guards to relax and the chance to grab a human for a fresh, live meal. “It’s tense, but it’s not super-duper tense, because everyone’s used to it,” Yuyan, who was named to the 2022 Grist 50 list, said. “Even though the danger is real, the number of incidents is low because the Iñupiat learned how to deal with it really well.”

Similar to how the whale hunters got used to watching out for hungry bears, people around the world are becoming accustomed to living with the simmering threat of climate change. As we’re faced with inescapable wildfire smoke and intolerable heat waves, the once attention-grabbing bear has become just one of a thousand illustrations of a world careening toward disaster: A cracked, dry riverbed. Flames engulfing a forest. Ocean waves lapping at someone’s doorstep. 

Are these images becoming so common that they risk losing people’s attention, too? “You know, we’re just at the start of those sorts of things, but even I find, personally, I saturate on this,” said Andrew Derocher, a biologist at the University of Alberta in Canada. “Like, how many climate change disasters do I have to see in a given week to understand that heavy rains in Italy, or forest fires in Portugal or California or Canada, are symptoms, collectively?”

That the polar bear became the mascot of climate change at all was a bit of an accident. 

“I wanted to study the natural history of polar bears. I actually never wanted to study the unnatural history of them,” said Derocher, a longtime polar bear researcher. “But I spent most of my career looking at the effects of hunting, pollution, and climate change.”

He was among the first to lay out the simple connection between polar bears and global warming: Hotter temperatures would not only melt the Arctic sea ice they live on, but also threaten their preferred prey, ringed seals. In a paper Derocher coauthored in 1993, he warned of habitat loss, lower reproduction rates, and increasing conflict with humans. But the subject didn’t really catch the media’s attention until over a decade later, in 2004, when he helped write another paper concluding that it would be “unlikely” polar bears could survive if the sea ice disappeared completely. “That one kind of went crazy,” Derocher said, spawning dozens of articles and gathering interest from conservation groups.

Derocher’s study was published just months before the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, a blockbuster 1,800-page report that described the widespread havoc that global warming was already wreaking in the sensitive region. In the summer of 2004, in anticipation of the report’s release, a group of high-profile U.S. senators — including John McCain and Hillary Clinton — visited the Arctic island of Svalbard to see global warming’s “ground zero” firsthand.

“The term ‘Arctic’ comes from the ancient Greek word for ‘country of the Great Bear,’” McCain, a Republican from Arizona, reported back to the Senate Commerce Committee. “It has been said that we will have to rename Glacier National Park since all the glaciers are melting. Will we have to do the same for the Arctic, if the polar bear becomes extinct?” Articles began cautioning that polar bears were already shrinking and drowning. 

After the threat had been established, political battles kept polar bears in the headlines. The species became a flashpoint for climate deniers who cherry-picked evidence that the bears were doing just fine. In 2005, environmental groups petitioned the George W. Bush administration to get Alaska’s polar bears listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. Reluctant to acknowledge the threat of climate change, the Bush administration faced a host of lawsuits.

“Every time they missed a deadline, we brought a suit, we won a suit — it sort of ratcheted up the pressure,” said Kassie Siegel, senior counsel for the Center for Biological Diversity. The administration finally relented and listed the species as threatened in 2008, with Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne’s announcement accompanied by videos of happy, healthy bears.

“Trying to make polar bears the symbol of climate change, or the only symbol of climate change — I mean, that was the furthest thing from our minds,” Siegel said.

But the link between polar bears and climate change was becoming more and more ingrained. 

In 2006, former Vice President Al Gore’s slideshow-turned-blockbuster hit An Inconvenient Truth featured a cheesy 3D animation of a polar bear swimming through the open ocean, trying to clamber onto a floating patch of ice only for it to crack apart upon contact. A stranded polar bear was featured on the cover of Time magazine’s global warming issue that same year with the subtitle, “Be worried. Be very worried.” In a study of the portrayal of polar bears in National Geographic magazine, Dorothea Born, a communication researcher, wrote, “No other animal has been so continuously and recurringly associated with climate change.”

It was not surprising that an animal in the Arctic was the first to draw attention as the victim of climate change, simply because the polar region has been warming four times faster than the rest of the globe. The sea ice that normally reflects most sunlight back into space has been replaced by dark blue ocean waters that absorb heat, a feedback loop that propels more warming and more ice melt.

Polar bears are considered “charismatic megafauna,” the class of large animals that tend to attract the most empathy and interest, which also includes elephants, orangutans, and pandas. Of course, sometimes the most important species in an ecosystem isn’t charismatic at all. Consider the polar cod, the Arctic’s most abundant fish, bug-eyed but otherwise unremarkable-looking. “Nobody wants to snuggle up to a little fluffy polar cod doll,” Derocher said. 

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But warming waters threaten the polar cod, the key link between the Arctic’s lower and upper food webs. “All the birds, all the seals, the whales all rely on this ugly little fish,” he said. Derocher sees people’s fascination with the polar bear as inherent to human nature, and noted that it’s not just environmental groups that have tapped into that interest — take Coca-Cola’s long-running marketing campaign.

The link between polar bears and climate change became so strong that context often got lost in favor of the predominant narrative. When the filmmakers and wildlife photographers Paul Nicklen and Cristina Mittermeier came across a starving polar bear in Manitoba, Canada, in 2017, the resulting footage went viral, reaching an estimated 2.5 billion people. “This is what climate change looks like,” read the text on National Geographic’s video of the emaciated polar bear. There was one problem: There was no evidence the bear was starving because of climate change specifically. All polar bears eventually die, and factors like old age, sickness, or injury can lead to starvation. The magazine editors later admitted they had gone “too far” in drawing a definitive connection to global warming.

“We had sent a ‘gut-wrenching’ image out into the world,” Mittermeier wrote in a retrospective of what had gone wrong with the photo’s reception. “We probably shouldn’t have been surprised that people didn’t pick up on the nuances we tried to send with it.”

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The specificity of the polar bear’s story, when turned into something that was supposed to represent climate change broadly, became its downfall. It positioned the problem as something unfolding far away (at least to the vast majority of the population that lives outside the Arctic) and hurting animals as opposed to people. “How do you convey a global issue with a single image of a polar bear?” asked Kate Manzo, who researches international development and imagery at Newcastle University in the United Kingdom. “You can’t, right?”

In an article titled “Why we’re rethinking the images we use for our climate journalism” in 2019, Fiona Shields, photo editor for the Guardian, explained that the publication would be using fewer polar bear photos going forward. “These images tell a certain story about the climate crisis but can seem remote and abstract — a problem that is not a human one, nor one that is particularly urgent.”

The icon caused a dilemma for conservation groups, too. “When the symbol gets bigger than the region itself and people don’t realize that the polar bear is just one piece of a whole diverse web of life in the Arctic, then it can become almost a barrier,” Leanne Clare, at the time a communication manager for the World Wildlife Fund’s Arctic Program, said in 2018. (The World Wildlife Fund declined to comment for this article on the use of polar bears to promote conservation.)

It was around that year that Derocher thinks the polar bear’s status as a climate change mascot hit a “saturation point.” “In some respects, it just was no longer news anymore,” Derocher said. “Because I think you cannot find a person who can read that hasn’t heard about polar bears and climate change. It’s just such a done deal.” In addition, journalists slowly stopped offering a platform to climate deniers, eliminating the sense of controversy that had driven earlier coverage. 

As climate change began to have visible effects in richer countries, the movement to new imagery happened naturally. “It’s hitting home in a way that it didn’t before,” said Manzo, who recalled seeing photos of wildfires in Spain, flooding in the United Kingdom, and the famous image of a kangaroo surrounded by flames in Australia during the bushfires in 2019 and 2020.

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“Maybe polar bears aren’t on the front page anymore because you don’t need polar bears on the front page,” said Kristin Laidre, an ecologist at the University of Washington. “You can put Manhattan under a pall of wildfire smoke, and that’s a much more powerful, potent symbol, perhaps, than a critter that lives far away that most people will never see.” Twenty years ago, however, cities weren’t regularly blanketed with apocalyptic smoke. Back then, Laidre said, the polar bear “was one of the main sources of information showing that climate change was real.”

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Old news or not, the facts of the situation have remained the same — polar bears are still threatened by global warming. Over the last four decades, Arctic sea ice has declined by an average of 13 percent per decade, shrinking at a faster rate than any time in at least 1,500 years. As early as the 2030s, the Arctic’s ice may completely disappear during the month of September, when it typically reaches its lowest levels.

For the estimated 2,500 polar bears that live in Baffin Bay between Canada and Greenland, bears of every age tend to be unhealthier than they used to be. They have fewer cubs, and their movement patterns have changed as the sea ice breaks up early, Laidre said.

As bears have gotten more desperate for food, they’ve also been pushed into more contact with humans. These days, you’re more likely to hear about a polar bear attacking people or eating trash than one stranded on the sea ice. Bears end up gnawing on butchered whale carcasses instead of stalking fresh seals.

Climate change is by no means affecting polar bear populations uniformly, though. Alaska, for example, has two populations of polar bears. While the Chukchi Sea population between Alaska and Russia appears to be doing fine, the one in the Beaufort Sea to the north of the state is shrinking, and may have declined by as much as 50 percent since before we started seeing the effects of climate change, Derocher said.

For Yuyan, the National Geographic photographer, the polar bear’s decline doesn’t fit with the tidy narrative implied by mid-2000s media coverage. “When the sea ice vanished, we expected them to all just sort of perish of starvation. And that is happening in some places,” Yuyan said. “But we also see polar bears that have adapted and figured out how to hunt from very isolated sea ice shelves, who had the ability to hunt in open-water situations, where they previously had never been observed doing that kind of thing.” Some bears, in other words, are adapting, though climate change remains a real threat to their survival. 

Yuyan thinks it’s a good thing that the world is moving on from the photographs of the sad polar bear stranded on the ice. It gives the impression that the Arctic is “either frozen, or it’s all doomed. And it sends the message that polar bears are helpless victims,” he said. “You’re basically just ironing in cultural biases. And that’s not really our job. Our job isn’t to tell people what they already know. They already know it. Our job is to tell them what they don’t know, to surprise people, and to help them understand that the world is more complicated and more beautiful than we will ever know.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Why the climate movement doesn’t talk about polar bears anymore on Aug 2, 2023.

In order to fulfill the ambition of the United States federal government’s REPLANT Act, the U.S. Forest Service has funds available to plant more than a billion trees in the next nine years. The problem is, there aren’t enough trees. Not only that, but U.S. tree nurseries don’t have enough variety of species necessary to meet the goal.

Cities around the world are suffering from urban heat islands made unbearable by record heat waves. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, air temperatures underneath trees can be as much as 25 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than directly above blacktop.

A new study by scientists at the University of Vermont (UVM) has shown that the limited diversity of tree species available has frustrated how much the forest service can do to respond to the climate crisis by planting trees, a press release from UVM said.

“Trees are this amazing natural solution to a lot of our challenges, including climate change. We urgently need to plant many millions of them,” said professor and director of the UVM Forestry Program Tony D’Amato, who co-led the research, in the press release. “But what this paper points out is that we are woefully underserved by any kind of regional or national scale inventory of seedlings to get the job done.”

The study, “A lack of ecological diversity in forest nurseries limits the achievement of tree-planting objectives in response to global change,” was published in the journal BioScience.

In their research, the team of 13 scientists looked at 605 plant nurseries in 20 northern U.S. states. They found that just 14 of them were operated by the government, and only 56 of them grew and sold seedlings in adequate amounts for reforestation and conservation.

Even more disappointing for the researchers was the “overwhelming scarcity of seedlings” from varied species and “seed collection zones,” which refer to local climates and conditions that trees have adapted to, they wrote in the study, according to UVM.

The research team found that forest nurseries have a tendency to keep a limited inventory of a few tree species, such as those used in commercial timber production, rather than species necessary for ecological restoration, climate adaptation or conservation. They also discovered that, in many areas, no locally adapted trees were available.

“The world is thinking about a warming climate — can we plant towards that warming climate? We know we’re losing ecologically important species across North America and around the world. So, the goal is: can we restore these trees or replace them with similar species? It’s a powerful idea,” said Peter Clark, UVM applied forest ecologist and lead author of the study, in the press release. “But — despite the excitement and novelty of that idea in many policy and philanthropy circles — when push comes to shove, it’s very challenging on the ground to actually find either the species or the seed sources needed… [F]inding the diversity we need to restore ecologically complex forests — not just a few industrial workhorse species commonly used for commercial timber operations, like white pine — is an even bigger bottleneck.”

The researchers said a much larger amount of seedlings and diversity within those is needed at regional nurseries in order to achieve a successful tree planting program directed at addressing climate change.

The financial risk and novelty involved in providing increased variety “likely generates uncertainty among forest nurseries, hampering investment,” the authors of the study wrote.

Another issue is that the number of nurseries, especially in the northeastern U.S., has gone down in recent years.

Seedlings from a different region might also have trouble succeeding in a new area, the researchers found. For instance, 80 percent of the seedings in the study found in northern states were produced in north central states.

“Such concentration of production will hinder tree planting efforts,” the researchers wrote, “because species and seed sources likely originate from similar geographic or bioclimatic zones.”

This is exacerbated by seedlings being sensitive to stress. A mismatch between when they are available, such as earlier in nurseries farther south, and when they need to be planted, like in northern soils after the last frost, could be an issue.

The researchers suggested improvements in financing and policy, as well as expanded research and better training to help alleviate these issues.

Government agencies like the U.S. Forest Service, as well as state governments, rely on seed zones from the 1970s based on climate conditions that are very different from those predicted for the future. Also, forest research and policy has been centered around timber production species rather than those that are more adapted to changing climates and a more diverse array of tree species. Clear policies regarding tree genetics and tree species’ movement are also lacking in many government policies.

The scientists recommended an expansion of state and federal investment in seed collection and public tree nurseries.

“This strategy may stimulate production from private nurseries once a stable demand is apparent,” the authors of the study wrote.

This year, the federal government invested $35 million in expanding the capacity of the federal nursery, but the authors of the study said that, due to “the existing (and growing) reforestation backlog, declines in nursery infrastructure, and complex needs for diverse seeds and seedlings, it is likely that substantially more public investment in the form of grants, loans, and cost-share programs will be needed to reinvigorate, diversify, and expand forest nurseries.”

“People want trillions of trees,” Clark said in the press release, “but often, on the ground, it’s one old farmer walking around to collect acorns. There’s a massive disconnect.”

The post U.S. Forest Service Plan to Plant More Than a Billion Trees Limited by Lack of Seedlings, Study Finds appeared first on EcoWatch.

The Department of Energy announced on Monday that it will provide nearly half a billion dollars to install rooftop solar and battery back-up systems on the homes of some of Puerto Rico’s most vulnerable residents. The funding could cover the installation of as many as 40,000 photovoltaic systems, providing a measure of energy security to an archipelago long burdened by frequent and prolonged blackouts. 

The program, which Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm outlined at an event in San Juan, is part of the $1 billion Puerto Rico Energy Resilience Fund that Congress approved last December. The fund is intended to provide reliable and affordable energy to the highest-need households, many of whom endure power outages daily or weekly. 

After Hurricane Fiona left the entire archipelago without power last September, President Biden put the Department of Energy in charge of a multi-agency effort to overhaul the U.S. territory’s energy system, which is in disrepair and depends upon fossil fuels to generate 97 percent of its electricity. The campaign includes a two-year study to find the most effective path toward Puerto Rico’s goal of achieving a zero-emission grid by 2050, streamlining approval processes, and deploying the billions of dollars allocated for Hurricane Maria recovery that have not yet been spent.

The effort will take years, and in the meantime, Puerto Ricans suffer from the persistent anxiety of not knowing when the power will go out next. In the last year, the number of rolling blackouts there exceeded the North American utility standard by 570 times, according to DOE. 

“That should be seared into our souls,” Granholm told a group of federal and local officials, industry leaders and community members on Monday, “because that is unacceptable, and that is what we are trying to fix.” 

The $450 million that Granholm announced will be directed toward the lowest-income households. It will be reserved for people who are medically vulnerable and depend on plug-in medical equipment, and those who live in “last-mile” communities, mostly located deep in the main island’s central mountain ranges. After Maria, some of these municipalities lacked power for nearly one year. 

“To say they’re remote and rural communities does not do justice to their circumstances,” said C.P. Smith, executive director of Cooperativa Hidroeléctrica de la Montaña, which has installed microgrids in rural areas in the central mountains. “They might have one road coming out of there, no wider than a small car. They’re the last to get power because after a storm it’s not just about restringing wires, it’s about repairing a road to get a truck up there to restring the wires.”

The focus on “very low-income” families will supplement an already robust solar industry in Puerto Rico. Photovoltaic panel and battery installations skyrocketed after Hurricane Maria, and some 3,000 installations are done monthly now. More than 85,000 households have PV systems. But the poorest households have not been able to participate in the transition according to PJ Wilson, president of the Solar and Energy Storage Association in Puerto Rico, and are burdened by electricity prices at least 50 percent higher than the national average. 

“We’re very glad that it appears that their intention is to focus these funds on the people who are truly so low-income or disabled that they have no other viable way to acquire solar and storage,” Wilson said. “Hopefully this helps lift people out of poverty.”

Most of the money will go directly to solar installation companies, nonprofit energy providers and electric cooperatives that will install, own and maintain the systems. An innovative $3.5 million “Solar Ambassador” program will determine which households receive them. The ambassadors will go into communities and identify households most in need — a stark contrast from other widely criticized first-come, first-served programs in Puerto Rico.

“No one ever pays for that ground game part of community organization for energy development,” said Smith. “The ambassador program will help get the message out there and identify people who we know are having a hard time.”

Another notable aspect of the program is its third-party ownership model, which takes the onus off households to maintain the systems. Installers must manage and maintain them for at least 20 years and replace worn-out batteries, and the program allocates consumer-protection funding to hold solar companies accountable. Installers will cover just 5 percent of the cost, making it easier for nonprofit energy providers and small cooperatives to participate.

The program’s structure was in large part shaped by a vigorous community outreach campaign led by Granholm. In the last year, she has been to Puerto Rico five times to gather input from Puerto Ricans at town halls and roundtables. A spring visit to the home of a couple in the mountain town of Orocovis, where their son relied on a ventilator to breathe and a small diesel generator was the family’s only lifeline in a blackout, underscored the urgency of the problem, Granholm told Grist in March. “It’s life or death,” she said. 

The department incorporated public concerns about paying for repairs, prioritizing those most in need, working with existing community networks, and ensuring equitable access to information about the program and the ability to apply. 

Such an approach represents a seismic shift compared to what Puerto Ricans have experienced from local and federal governments, especially in the time after Hurricane Maria caused $90 billion in damage and claimed more than 4,000 lives, according to Charlotte Gossett Navarro of the Hispanic Federation.

“What we have unfortunately experienced with a lot of the recovery money in Puerto Rico is it goes straight into the hands of the state government, and they design their programs behind closed doors,” said Gossett Navarro. “There has not been any meaningful space for communities to help design the programs, and what results is programs that are announced just full of errors in how they will be executed, and the people you want to benefit are not benefitting from it.”

Those doing the hard work of bringing solar to Puerto Rico were buoyed by Granholm’s announcement, though a few questions remain on the details of the program.

“This has all the good elements, we’ll see what the stew is like when you cook them all together,” said Jorge Gaskins, board president of Barrio Eléctrico, a nonprofit energy provider serving residents across Puerto Rico. 

Gaskins and other nonprofit and industry representatives said they want to know more about who would pay for the 20-year maintenance of the systems, as well as how the $450 million can cover 30,000 to 40,000 households. (Systems typically cost about $30,000 per household.) In an emailed response, the department told Grist that the leases would include a “minimal contribution from the homeowner for ongoing maintenance” and that the money is meant to incentivize installations and can be combined with solar tax credits to maximize its impact. 

Applications for installation funding and the ambassador program opened Monday and will close on September 18 and 25, respectively. DOE aims to announce recipients in October, and the first systems could be online by next summer. 

A second tranche of the $1 billion Puerto Rico Energy Resilience Fund, the details of which will be announced in the coming months, will support energy solutions for multi-family residences. 

The accelerated timeline underscores the dire need for reliable, affordable power in Puerto Rico. Heat indices in parts of the archipelago have reached 125 degrees this summer, and hurricane season is just weeks away. Granholm said Monday that every agency moving Puerto Rico toward a resilient and clean energy future must work as quickly as possible. “Our hair should be on fire,” she said. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline DOE commits $450M to install rooftop solar for highest-need Puerto Ricans on Aug 1, 2023.

As a child, Joycelyn Chui often helped her grandmother in the kitchen. She would separate eggshells and onion peels in little bowls, to compost them in her grandmother’s garden. For Chui, sorting and composting food waste with her grandmother planted a seed that has now germinated into Restaurant 2 Garden, a community composting project in Seattle’s Chinatown International District.  

Restaurant 2 Garden is a hyperlocal organization that takes food waste from restaurants in Chinatown and converts it to compost for Danny Woo Community Garden—the only green space in the neighborhood. Elderly immigrants from Asian American and Pacific Islander communities cultivate the community garden, and grow foods relevant to the community, such as chrysanthemum and goji berries. 

Restaurant 2 Garden is one example of recent statewide push to increase recycling and composting rates. Washington, along with California, is one of the first states to enact a sweeping set of policies targeted at organics and food waste to get food out of the garbage. Some of these measures are now being codified into law: House Bill 1799—passed in June of 2022—seeks a 75% reduction of organic material going to landfills by 2030, and a 20 percent increase in donations of edible food by 2025. These targets are a joint effort between local governments and the state. Cities and counties are now required to offer organics collection to businesses, if there is a facility available that can process organic waste. For businesses in areas with organics management, the statute calls for businesses to separate their organic waste and either subscribe to an organic waste collection service or process them on site.  

Initiatives like Restaurant 2 Garden will be critical in helping make this legislation successful, says Heather Trim, executive director of Zero Waste Washington, a nonprofit that advocated for House Bill 1799.  

“What usually happens is a business contracts with a private or a commercial hauler, and will pay for their material to be hauled to a commercial compost,” says Trim. “What Restaurant 2 Garden is doing is jumpstarting the little mom and pop shops and helping [composting] happen on a localized scale.”

Seattle already has industrial-level facilities that process compost, which can help keep nutrients from organic materials in circulation. But even though residents and businesses are required to separate food and paper for composting, a lot of food still ends up in the landfill.

“We know there’s a continued need for deeper engagement with our community to do a better job at keeping food out of the landfill,” says McKenna Morrigan, strategic advisor for waste prevention and product stewardship at Seattle Public Utilities. 

Morrigan argues that community composting initiatives like Restaurant 2 Garden can help local businesses in culturally responsive ways, and support the circular economy—where materials are used as efficiently as possible and waste is recaptured. 

“Our focus going forward is to support the circular economy for organics, which means doing our part to ensure that the city is purchasing compost made from the organics collected here, and that they’re being used in the many different applications where compost is beneficial,” adds Morrigan. 

Compost can be used by the city for landscaping, amending soil, erosion control, stormwater filtration, and new construction. House Bill 1799 also requires local governments to use compost products in relevant projects and prioritize getting compost from places that produce it locally. All counties in Washington State will now be required to consider—in their growth plans—where compost facilities could be sited, and the bill aims to make it easier for compost facilities to obtain bank loans and grants so they can expand.

Back in Seattle, Restaurant 2 Garden currently works with two restaurants, both in close proximity to Danny Woo Community Garden. Since opening, it has collected over 5,000 pounds of food scraps and harvested a similar amount of compost. It’s not yet a fully closed loop: While community gardeners are using compost to grow food, the yield isn’t enough to provide food for restaurants. 

But Chui and her co-founders—Elizabeth Chong Baskerville and Jennifer Cheung—are looking to expand to another plot of public land in the neighborhood. They want to build a demonstration site where people can see how food scraps are converted to compost, a process Chui sees as using public land to provide a public service. 

She says the resourcefulness of her immigrant, refugee community deserves a lot more attention. “What modern-day ‘environmentalism’ is promoting, we’re already doing,” she says.

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This story was produced in partnership with Communities of Opportunity, a growing partnership that believes every community can be a healthy, thriving community.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Seattle’s Restaurant 2 Garden shows circular economy strengths on Aug 1, 2023.