The Biden administration has announced almost $830 million in grants to support 80 projects across the country to improve aging roadways. The goal of the investments is to make transportation infrastructure more extreme weather-resilient in the face of heat waves, flooding, sea-level rise and other impacts related to climate change.

The first-of-their-kind awards are being funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law’s Promoting Resilient Operations for Transformative, Efficient and Cost-saving Transportation (PROTECT) Discretionary Grant Program, coupled with current PROTECT Formula funding already going to states for similar projects, a press release from the United States Department of Transportation’s Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) said.

“We have seen far too many examples of transportation infrastructure being shut down or damaged by extreme weather, which is more extreme and more frequent in this time of climate change,” Pete Buttigieg, U.S. Secretary of Transportation, said before the announcement, as The Associated Press reported. “America’s infrastructure was not built for the climate that we have today, and the consequences of this are very real and being felt by people in every part of the country.”

Through the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, more than $50 billion has been dedicated to climate adaptation and resilience through the establishment of a National Climate Resilience Framework to advance climate resilience strategies for local communities.

The U.S. transportation system was designed and built mostly before today’s more frequent and severe extreme weather events, which are causing increasing damage to transportation infrastructure, the press release said.

The PROTECT program will be put toward projects to strengthen roads, highways, bridges, public transportation, ports, pedestrian facilities and intercity passenger rail. Increasing their resilience will reduce costs in the short- and long-term by minimizing future reconstruction and maintenance needs.

“From wildfires shutting down freight rail lines in California to mudslides closing down a highway in Colorado, from a drought causing the halt of barge traffic on the Mississippi River to subways being flooded in New York, extreme weather, made worse by climate change, is damaging America’s transportation infrastructure, cutting people off from getting to where they need to go, and threatening to raise the cost of goods by disrupting supply chains,” Buttigieg said in the press release.

Four types of grants are being awarded by FHWA in 37 different states, the Virgin Islands and the District of Columbia.

“Every community in America knows the impacts of climate change and extreme weather, including increasingly frequent heavy rain and flooding events across the country and sea-level rise that is inundating infrastructure in coastal states,” said Shailen Bhatt, FHWA administrator, in the press release. “This investment from the Biden-Harris Administration will ensure our infrastructure is built to withstand more frequent and unpredictable extreme weather, which is vitally important for people and businesses that rely on roads and bridges being open to keep our economy moving.”

Disadvantaged communities are often most at risk from hazards, and the grant program will help further environmental justice by addressing these communities’ needs.

“The program encouraged applicants from all levels of government — from local governments and Tribes to state DOTs — to apply for PROTECT discretionary-grant funding,” the press release said. “Consistent with the objectives of the National Climate Resilience Framework, these awards will help these communities across the country become not only more resilient, but also more safe, healthy, equitable, and economically strong.”

The post Biden Admin Announces $830 Million in Grants to Strengthen U.S. Infrastructure Against Climate Change appeared first on EcoWatch.

Wizz Air, a budget airline based in Hungary, has placed an order for sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) made from human waste.

The SAF is developed by a Bristol, UK-based startup, Firefly, which has come up with a way to turn treated sewage into fuel. Wizz Air recently placed an order for up to 525,000 metric tons of SAF for over the next 15 years from Firefly as a way of investing in the idea, The Guardian reported.

“Alongside fleet renewal and operational efficiency, sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) plays a crucial role in reducing carbon emissions from aviation,” Yvonne Moynihan, corporate and ESG officer at Wizz Air, shared in a press release. “Our investment in Firefly, which has the potential to reduce our lifecycle emissions by 100,000 tonnes CO2-eq per year, underscores our commitment to mainstream the use of SAF in our operations by 2030.”

According to the International Energy Agency, the aviation industry is responsible for about 2% of global carbon emissions, but advancements such as SAF can reduce the impact of air travel. However, as The Guardian reported, developing SAF can be cost- and resource-restrictive. It can be more expensive to develop than conventional aviation fuel, and many SAFs rely on materials with limited stocks, such as spent cooking oil or other food waste.

But Firefly noted that there is a large source of biosolids from treated sewage that otherwise has little value and could be less expensive to turn into SAFs compared to other materials. The sewage sludge can also be blended with up to 50% conventional fuel made from kerosene without needing to redesign or modify aircraft engines, Yahoo! Finance reported.

Firefly’s fuel is still undergoing regulatory testing, but the company has plans to construct a factory for its operations in Harwich in Essex, England, Yahoo! Finance reported. Anglian Water, a utility company, has agreed to supply the biosolids for the facility to turn into SAF. Firefly said it expects to start supplying the SAF by 2028 or 2029.

In addition to helping the airline meet its goal of powering 10% of flights with SAF by 2030, the order for Firefly’s SAF could also help Wizz Air meet the EU’s regulations, which will require 20% SAF for flights starting in the EU by 2030 and 70% SAF by 2050.

“However, achieving our aspiration requires a significant ramp-up of SAF production and deployment,” Moynihan said. “Therefore, we call on policymakers to address barriers to SAF deployment at scale by incentivising production, providing price support, and embracing additional sustainable feedstocks for biofuel production.”

The post Airline Places Order for Sustainable Aviation Fuel Made From Human Waste appeared first on EcoWatch.

By Derrick Z. Jackson

Like almost all things chemical in the United States, the recent announcement by the Biden administration that it is banning a major form of asbestos is both a triumph and a disgrace. 

The triumph is that after decades of Sisyphean advocacy by public health groups and scientists, chrysotile asbestos, a known carcinogen, is finally facing an assorted set of deadlines for import and use in this nation. In a bit of rhetorical ecstasy, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan proclaimed that the federal government “is finally slamming the door on a chemical so dangerous that it has been banned in over 50 countries.”

While this administration does deserve credit for acting on asbestos after years of neglect, it is more accurate to describe the White House as politely showing the door to companies who use what is nicknamed “white asbestos.” Two years ago, when the EPA first started proposing rules to get the last uses of asbestos out of current applications, the agency floated a two-year deadline. After heavy lobbying by the chemical industry, which still uses asbestos diaphragms to produce a third of the nation’s chlorine, it now may be up to 12 years before the last chlorine company converts to non-asbestos technology.

The Biden administration is also generally giving a two to five-year phase out period to companies that use asbestos sheet gaskets to seal pipes. The quickest prohibition is six months against asbestos in automotive brakes and linings, other vehicle friction parts and oilfield gear.  Brenda Mallory, the White House’s chair of its Council on Environmental Quality said, “This action marks a major step to improve chemical safety.”

It should be clear that it is only a step, and therein lies the disgrace. Even with this move, the United States remains many steps behind other developed nations when it comes to asbestos and chemical safety across the board—thanks to decades of industrial and political suppression of science, the enduring might of industrial lobbyists, and our ever-divided government.

Deny, Delay, Disinform

Asbestos makers have known since the 1930s that their products were dangerous and yet they purposely buried that knowledge for decades. They banked on being able to avoid consequences for cancers that took decades to develop in workers who inhaled asbestos fibers. Johns-Manville, the 20^th century’s largest asbestos manufacturer, was infamous for a longstanding policy of not telling employees whether asbestosis showed up in their physical examinations.

The entire industry and insurers led by Metropolitan Life copied the same playbook. According to a paper in the International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health, the final draft of a 1957 industry study deleted the internal finding that asbestos miners with asbestosis were more likely to develop lung cancer than a person without asbestosis. That, in turn successfully , dampened the concern of the American Medical Association.

The leading AMA industrial health editor wrote the authors of the industrial study to say he was “particularly pleased” at the findings of no association of lung cancer to asbestosis. The association’s top consultant for occupational disease went so far as to claim in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association that there was “no epidemiological evidence” of increased lung cancer among workers exposed to asbestos.

The legacy of death and disease from disinformation and “disappeared” information haunts us to this day. By the beginning of 2001, according to a 2004 report by the National Bureau of Economic Research, 600,000 people had filed lawsuits over asbestos-related illnesses that had already cost companies $54 billion in legal costs, with an eventual projected total cost of between $200 billion and $265 billion. The NBER said asbestos cases “involve more plaintiffs, more defendants, and higher costs than any other type of personal injury litigation in U.S. history.”

Just two years ago, a Montana jury awarded $36.5 million to a man who worked in the late 1960s at a vermiculite mine and mill in the town of Libby where the mineral was contaminated with asbestos. The operations were owned by W.R. Grace, but the villain, according to the verdict, was the mill’s workers compensation insurer, Maryland Casualty.

The doctors for the insurer did not tell workers that their annual X-rays showed scarring of the lungs. A New York Times feature quoted a 1967 memo from a lawyer of the insurer who feared “the extent and severity of the problem.” The mine was closed in 1990, but its asbestos dust has so far been tied to 400 deaths and 2,400 cases of disease. In 2009, for the first time ever, the EPA declared a public health emergency, calling the asbestos contamination in Libby “the worst case of industrial poisoning of a whole community in American history.”

Still a Modern Killer

Even today, asbestos exposure is still tied to 40,000 deaths a year in the United States and 255,000 worldwide. It was not until the 1970s that the United States began banning the crumbly forms of asbestos insulation on boilers and hot water tanks, fireproofing sprays, and wall patching. By then, no one knew how much asbestos the average American was living with. ”No one has any kind of numbers,” Sandra Eberle, chemical hazards program manager of the Consumer Product Safety Commission told the New York Times in 1984. ”We don’t have statistics on how many homes asbestos is in, and we don’t know whether or not it poses a hazard in those homes.”

Numbers continue to be hard to come by. As many other nations began enacting bans over the course of the rest of the 20^th century, US efforts stalled. In 1989, under President George H.W. Bush, the EPA attempted to ban most products containing asbestos by 1997. The chemical lobby responded by suing the EPA.

A federal court overturned much of the ban in 1991on technical grounds. It faulted the EPA for not adequately evaluating potentially less burdensome alternatives to asbestos and not comparing the toxicity of potential alternatives. Although the ruling was primarily concerned with the EPA’s process, Robert Pigg, a top asbestos trade-group executive, seized on it to claim: “We have known for many years that asbestos can be safely and securely bound in today’s products.”

The result was three decades of mostly federal silence, with untold exposures to workers at plants still using asbestos. In the 2000s, companies such as Georgia Pacific tried to fend off lawsuits over its use of asbestos in its Ready-Mix joint compound in the 1960s and 70s with highly flawed counterfeit research.

In 2022, as the Biden administration launched its effort to ban chrysotile asbestos, ProPublica/National Public Radio interviewed more than a dozen laborers who worked at a chlorine plant that operated until 2021 in Niagara Falls, New York. The story said “asbestos dust hung in the air, collected on the beams and light fixtures, and built up until it was inches thick. Workers tramped in and out of it all day, often without protective suits or masks, and carried it around on their coveralls and boots.”

One worker said, “We were constantly swimming in this stuff.”

Chemical Industry Wins Compromise

Yet, none other than the US Chamber of Commerce, the nation’s highest-spending lobbying group, opposed the ban. It claimed, like Pigg in 1991, that the mineral “has been utilized safely in the United States for decades.” The American Chemistry Council unleashed a host of scare tactics. It claimed that an asbestos ban was itself a health hazard that could “cause substantial harm” to the nation’s drinking supply and retard “the production of products necessary to achieve our climate and sustainability goals including batteries, windmills, and solar panels.” 

The council began pining for a 15-year phase-out period for asbestos. Two years later, the final rule clearly reflects a compromise, with the Biden administration saying it recognizes that converting chlorine facilities to non-asbestos technology “requires extensive construction, additional permits, specialized expertise and parts for which there are limited suppliers.”

Even if that compromise holds up against lawsuits, the “final” rule is likely far from a final say on asbestos. While the EPA says that chrysotile asbestos is the “only known form” of the mineral still being used and imported to the United States, there are several other forms that the current regulation is silent on, leaving the door open for their use.

There is also the unresolved issue of “legacy” asbestos installed in walls, ceilings and flooring and basements over most of the 20^th century. In older school buildings, a 2018 EPA Inspector General report said, “substantial amounts” of asbestos were sprayed for insulation and as fire retardants in school buildings, particularly from 1946 through 1972. A 2017 study by the Centers for Disease Control found that deaths from mesothelioma remained “substantial” and were increasing, likely due to workers maintaining or remediating older buildings with asbestos.

The EPA said it will release an evaluation of other types of asbestos and legacy uses by December. But the piecemeal approach is why advocates such as Linda Reinstein, co-founder of the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization, have long pushed for more sweeping federal legislation banning all asbestos fibers in products and requiring chlorine companies to convert to non-asbestos technology in two years, as the EPA had originally planned. Such legislation would make asbestos regulation less vulnerable to the highly variable whims of whoever is in the White House. The legislation is named for Reinstein’s late husband Alan, who died from mesothelioma, an aggressive cancer tied to asbestos exposure.

While Reinstein said in an interview that she was “delighted” that the EPA has issued its current rule, she remained highly concerned that there remain loopholes the asbestos-using industry can exploit, especially since she feels that little has changed in its mentality of putting “profits over people.” She emphasized, “This does not ban what you can find on a store shelf.”

A Painfully Long Journey

The protracted journey to any kind of asbestos ban is a sobering reminder of how long the United States takes to regulate chemicals on any shelf, such as menthol in tobacco products, PFAS “forever chemicals” in our water, pesticides in agricultural fields, and even cosmetics in the bathroom cabinet. National Public Radio’s “Living on Earth” recently featured a study from China finding that women undergoing in vitro fertilization who used skin care products were more likely to miscarry than women who did not use skin care products.

Cosmetics have increasingly been tied to endocrine disruption and cancers. The “Living on Earth” feature served as a reminder that here at home, the United States has banned only 11 chemicals in cosmetics, while the European Union has banned more than 1,300. Leonardo Trasande, director of New York University’s center of environmental hazards, told the program, “The more you unravel the onion, the more you realize–whoa, this is a bigger and more complicated story than you might be able to deal with fully in a lifetime.”

The journey has already spanned several generations to get to where we are on asbestos. We should not have to wait so long to deal with the rest of the chemical world. None other than Reinstein said it best: “What we do matters. What we don’t do matters even more.”

Reposted with permission from Union of Concerned Scientists.

Derrick Z. Jackson is a UCS Fellow in climate and energy and the Center for Science and Democracy. Formerly of the Boston Globe and Newsday, Jackson is a Pulitzer Prize and National Headliners finalist, a 2021 Scripps Howard opinion winner, and a respective 11-time, 4-time and 2-time winner from the National Association of Black Journalists, the National Society of Newspaper Columnists, and the Education Writers Association.

The post A Triumph and Disgrace: The Very Slow Road to Banning Asbestos appeared first on EcoWatch.

The world’s most prominent verification program for corporate climate pledges is reportedly in turmoil following its board of trustees’ unilateral decision this week to allow carbon offsets to count toward companies’ supply chain emissions reduction targets.

In a letter to the board seen by Grist, dozens of staffers and program managers at the Science-Based Targets initiative, or SBTi, said the decision had caused “grave reputational damage” and implied that it risked turning their organization into a “greenwashing platform.”

The letter called for the resignation of SBTi CEO Luiz Amaral and board members who supported the change, as well as the withdrawal of the new policy.

“The actions of the CEO and the board have resulted in significant harm to our organization’s reputation and viability,” the letter said.

The SBTi is a nonprofit that sets standards for corporate emissions reduction targets. It evaluates hundreds of companies’ targets each year and certifies those it deems legitimate. Companies, in turn, advertise the SBTi’s certification as evidence that their pledges are meaningful.

Among the staffers’ main concerns is that access to carbon credits will incentivize companies to offset, rather than reduce, greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation and production of materials they buy and products they sell to consumers. Scientists say companies should do everything they can to limit these emissions, known as “scope 3” emissions, before trying to cancel them out with credits. 

Carbon credits are supposed to represent some amount of carbon emissions that are avoided or removed from the atmosphere — through projects like planting trees or installing wind turbines — but experts say it’s questionable whether they actually work. More than 90 percent of the rainforest-based credits offered by one popular organization were shown last year to be “worthless,” largely because they promised to protect forests that were never under threat. (The issuer of those credits disputed the findings.)

The SBTi staffers also said the board moved “prematurely,” without notifying or adequately consulting with its technical advisers.

“The Technical Council was neither informed, consulted, nor given approval for such a significant decision,” they wrote, calling this a “clear and apparent breach” of the SBTi’s governance structures. At least one of the SBTi’s technical advisory group members — Stephan Singer, a senior adviser at the nonprofit Climate Action Network — said he resigned from the SBTi over the issue. In his resignation letter, obtained by the Financial Times, he called carbon credits “scientifically, socially, and from a climate perspective a hoax.”

Doreen Stabinsky, another SBTi adviser and a professor of global environmental politics at the College of the Atlantic in Maine, told Grist the move was a “corporate takeover of SBTi that will undermine any ‘science-based’ credibility they had.”

The trustees’ abrupt decision may have been influenced by external pressure to boost business prospects for the voluntary carbon market. Over the past few years, investigations and public scrutiny of “fraudulent” offsets have made prospective buyers wary of carbon credits; perhaps fearing backlash, companies bought 17 percent fewer carbon credits in 2022 than they did the previous year.

If the SBTi softened its position on these credits, it could drive up demand for them. Carbon credit programs would benefit from a bigger pool of interested buyers, and companies would be able to meet their emissions reduction targets more easily. Indeed, dozens of companies told the SBTi in a survey published last month that meeting their scope 3 targets is “too much of a challenge,” and the overwhelming majority of positive reactions to the board’s about-face on carbon credits have come from carbon market funders and participants like the American Forest Foundation, Climate Impact Partners, and Indigo Ag.

María Mendiluce, CEO of the We Mean Business Coalition — which advocates for corporate climate action and is one of the SBTi’s five partner organizations — said in a statement that the move would allow companies to “bring more innovation and investment into cutting emissions from their value chains, while also bringing in much needed funding for climate projects in the Global South.” 

Organizations that set standards for the voluntary carbon market in order to help it grow, including the International Emissions Trading Association, the Integrity Council for Voluntary Carbon Markets, and the Voluntary Carbon Markets Integrity Initiative, also supported the new policy. The last of these recently adopted a similar position on carbon credits used to offset supply chain emissions that raised similar concerns among experts.

“The faulty business model of offset credits is in danger, and this wild move is an attempt to keep the business model alive,” Sybrig Smit, a policy analyst for the nonprofit NewClimate Institute, told Grist. “It’s not an attempt to save the climate.”

Some carbon credit proponents may have lobbied the SBTi board directly for a change in policy. Earlier this week, the Financial Times reported that the Bezos Earth Fund, a $10 billion philanthropic organization created by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and a “core funder” of the SBTi, arranged a two-day meeting in March with SBTi board members, at which representatives of the fund urged the SBTi to allow companies to use offsets.

Read Next

Corporate climate plans are improving, but still ‘critically insufficient’

Joseph Winters

The Bezos Earth Fund is a founding sponsor, along with the Rockefeller Foundation and the U.S. State Department, of a large-scale carbon credit system that was first unveiled at the U.N.’s annual climate summit in 2022. At the time, an independent analysis suggested that the system would need to attract significant business participation in order to have more than marginal impact on greenhouse gas emissions and climate finance. 

The initiative “basically aims to develop a system that will look to sell a lot of credits, and they need to find buyers,” said Gilles Dufrasne, lead on global carbon markets for the European nonprofit Carbon Market Watch.

The Bezos fund and its partners relaunched their carbon credit system at last year’s U.N. summit and said they would finalize a framework for the system by Earth Day 2024, less than two weeks after the SBTi board’s announcement. Dufrasne called the timing “curious.”

The Bezos Earth Fund did not respond to Grist’s request for comment, but the philanthropy told the Financial Times it was uninvolved in the SBTi’s new policy on offsets. A spokesperson said the fund is committed to “ensuring that any use of high integrity market mechanisms is subject to stringent guardrails, limits, and rules so that any use of high integrity carbon credits enhances rather than undermines the integrity of corporate climate targets.”

Neither the U.S. Department of State nor the SBTi board of trustees responded to Grist’s requests for comment. Amaral, the SBTi’s CEO, didn’t respond to a message on LinkedIn.

Across academia and the advocacy world, critics have not held back in repudiating the SBTi board’s decision. Teresa Anderson, global lead on climate justice for the nonprofit ActionAid International, said on X that the move “renders the standard for climate action meaningless.” Alison Taylor, a clinical professor at the New York University Stern School of Business, posted that the move was “good news for voluntary carbon markets, bad news for the overwhelming prevalence of BS in this area.”

Other organizations, including Carbon Market Watch, run their own efforts to evaluate private sector decarbonization plans, but none of them do it at the same scale as the SBTi. In 2022, the organization approved more than 1,000 companies’ climate pledges. It removed hundreds of them from a validation process last month over their failure to submit sufficiently ambitious emissions reduction targets.

“It’s just sad,” said Peter Riggs, director of the environmental nonprofit Pivot Point, describing the niche position the SBTi has held as a widely respected arbiter of corporate climate plans, trusted by both business leaders and climate advocacy groups. “We were hoping SBTi was going to be the exemplar of integrity at a time when other initiatives were still messing around with offsets. And now they’re indistinguishable.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A climate pledge verifier said it would allow more carbon offsets. Its staff revolted. on Apr 12, 2024.

Earth911 inspirations. Post them, share your desire to help people think of the planet first,…

The post Earth911 Inspiration: Between Every Two Pines Is a Doorway appeared first on Earth911.

Last year’s United Nations climate conference in the United Arab Emirates ended on a surprising high note as the world’s countries endorsed a landmark agreement to transition away from fossil fuels. After weeks of tense negotiation, the conference produced a slew of unprecedented commitments to ramp up the deployment of renewables, adapt to climate disasters, and move away from the use of coal, oil, and gas.

The question at this year’s COP29 conference in Baku, Azerbaijan, is just how much that massive effort will cost. After years of global debate over the scale of funding that developed countries owe less fortunate nations for decarbonization and disaster aid, negotiators have until the end of the conference in December to agree on a hard-fought financial target for climate assistance over the next few decades. This new target, referred to as the New Collective Quantified Goal by climate negotiators, is critical to upholding the 2015 Paris Agreement and addressing the harm of fossil fuel emissions from industrialized countries like the United States. Without funding, some of the poorest nations in Asia and Africa, which have contributed negligibly to the climate crisis, stand little chance of transitioning their economies away from fossil fuels and adapting to a warmer world. 

The last time the world set such a goal, it didn’t work out well. Back in 2009, wealthy countries agreed to send poorer countries $100 billion in climate finance every year by 2020. Though the figure was less than half of the annual global need, according to World Bank estimates, rich countries didn’t even come close to meeting their target until last year. Even then, some aid organizations like Oxfam contend that these countries have overstated or double-counted their aid by tens of billions of dollars. In the meantime, international estimates of total aid needs have ballooned into the trillions. As a result, the talks around climate finance are still marked by frustration and mistrust, and diplomats debating the goal over the past two years have made little progress toward consensus.

As dozens of negotiators head to Colombia later this month for the first in a series of pre-conference talks that will lay the groundwork for the new goal, developing countries are trying to use the failures of the $100 billion promise as leverage for a much bigger commitment. After years of advocacy from climate-vulnerable nations, the economic heavyweights of India and Saudi Arabia are making a formal demand for climate aid to reach $1 trillion per year, broaching a number that will send negotiations into uncharted territory. 

Increasing climate aid by more than tenfold could alter the life prospects of millions of people staring down imminent climate impacts in poor countries in Africa and Asia, but experts say the astronomical number will be a hard sell for many wealthy nations dealing with inflation and domestic turmoil. Plus, the commitment itself won’t mean much without strong safeguards to ensure the money reaches the vulnerable communities that most need it.

“It’s good that countries are using the t-word because that’s grappling with the scale of ambition that we need,” said Joe Thwaites, a climate finance expert at the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council. “But the key question is the political one of how you break that up.”

The world has known for years that the $100 billion goal was fundamentally flawed: The target number was far too low to match the mounting toll of climate change in the developing world, which one recent estimate pegged at around $2.4 trillion per year. And more than two-thirds of the aid from wealthy countries has been through loans rather than grants, forcing poor states to take on higher debt loads to respond to climate disasters. Some countries also tried to count aid to seaside hotels and gelato stores as climate assistance, exaggerating their contributions.

The slow pace of United Nations diplomacy has forced developing countries to wait more than a decade for the opportunity to hash out a new number with their counterparts in the United States and the European Union. Now that that chance has arrived, many of these countries are seeking to raise the floor for climate finance by scaling up their demands to a level that once would have sounded ludicrous. 

In a letter to fellow negotiators in February, India argued that “developed countries need to provide at least USD 1 trillion per year, composed primarily of grants and concessional finance,” or very low-interest loans. Saudi Arabia, writing on behalf of a group of countries in the Middle East, said just a few days later that “we set a [target] of USD 1.1 trillion from developed to developing countries,” plus arrears for the failure of the last goal. There are just 19 countries in the world whose economies are larger than $1 trillion, according to data from the International Monetary Fund.

The fact that India and Saudi Arabia have endorsed this number is significant. India is the world’s most populous country and one of its largest emitters, and it has significant political clout in climate talks as the largest country that still needs aid to finance its energy transition. Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, and it has faced immense pressure to join the United States and the European Union in sending aid to poorer countries. They are the only two countries to name a number so far.

Setting such an ambitious goal comes with pros and cons, experts say. On the one hand, shooting for the moon with a very high target provides poor countries with some cushion against the possibility that rich countries may fail to meet their promises. On the other hand, if voters and political leaders in wealthy countries don’t back the goal, the strategy might backfire and poor countries may end up receiving very little aid. 

The United States Congress, for instance, has fought for months over whether to send around $60 billion in new aid to Ukraine, and it’s a safe bet that many lawmakers would balk at helping with a trillion-dollar global commitment. Mobilizing climate aid in a divided Congress has proven to be a challenging endeavor in previous years. Endorsing a new goal could even become a liability for President Biden and other climate-forward leaders as they stare down an election year. 

Developed countries like the United States, the United Kingdom, and those within the European Union haven’t proposed a numerical target for the goal in their missives to fellow negotiators. Instead, they’ve urged a broader conversation about how to mobilize private money and how to ensure aid contributions are reaching the right communities, with Canada for instance advocating a “pragmatic approach to establishing a quantum [goal size].” The U.S. has shied away from discussion of the size, focusing in its letters on questions about which nations should contribute aid money and which nations should receive it.

“Although this [trillion] number better reflects the needs of developing countries, it will be a difficult outcome to achieve given the current constraints of developed countries — shifting geopolitics, energy security concerns, stagflation, and internal politics,” said Aman Srivatstava, a climate finance expert at the Centre for Policy Research, an India-based think tank.

But negotiators and climate advocates told Grist that the structure of the new goal matters just as much as the eventual size. The $100 billion goal was too low, but it was also too vague about what counts as “climate finance,” and many wealthy countries focused on doling out loans and private investment rather than no-strings-attached grants. These countries also tended to provide much more assistance for renewables and energy projects rather than the flood and drought aid that many countries have demanded. 

“We don’t need to talk only about the quantum in terms of the money, but also about the quality of the money,” said Sandra Guzmán Luna, the founder of the Climate Finance Group for Latin America and the Caribbean, which helps developing countries in the region track and access climate aid money. 

The most likely outcome is a structure that some negotiators liken to an onion with multiple concentric layers. The United States, the European Union, and other wealthy countries would contribute a chunk of public funding in the form of grants for unprofitable projects like sea walls and drinking water systems. The other layers could include additional grants from new contributors like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which have ample wealth but have never donated much climate aid, or private loans from investors and banks. This approach would mimic the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, a 2022 agreement to protect nature and endangered species that also featured a “layered” set of commitments.

But creating such a complex structure for climate aid ahead of COP29 will be a Herculean task. Despite new endorsements for a $1 trillion goal, rich and poor countries still have huge disagreements about who should contribute to the goal, how much money should come from grants and loans, and how rich countries should be held accountable for their share. Rich countries are advocating a broader group of contributors that would include Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, as well as more flexibility to include private money in their aid contributions. Countries like China and Saudi Arabia, which have huge economies but account for a low share of carbon emissions historically, are pushing for the U.S. and the E.U. to bear the greatest burden.

With COP29 just seven months away, negotiators still haven’t even put their ideas to paper, and drafts of the potential text likely won’t appear until the summer. From there the world’s climate leaders will sprint to settle as many details as possible before the conference clock in Baku runs out. Thwaites likened the process to the puzzle game Rush Hour, where a player has to move several cars around on a grid in order to clear space for one car to escape.

“Even when you think that it’s a done deal, things can fall apart, so it’s hard to make predictions,” said Eleonora Cogo, a climate finance expert at ECCO, an Italian think tank. (Cogo has negotiated on behalf of the European Union in previous climate finance talks.) 

Given how far apart the sides are right now, Cogo says that she doubts countries will be able to work out all the details by the end of COP29. The most likely outcome is a basic agreement on “some core elements” like an approximate size and a promise to work the rest out later. This could produce any number of commitments — a strong promise from rich countries to scale up their grants, a weakened framework like the $100 billion goal, or something in between.

“The asks on the table are so different, and the points of departure are so far away,” said Cogo. “It’s all open.”

Editor’s note: The Natural Resources Defense Council is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How much do rich countries owe in climate aid? That’s the trillion-dollar question. on Apr 12, 2024.

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

Those involved in the Line 5 pipeline controversy have been waiting for the United States Department of Justice — and the Biden administration — to come forward with its opinion on a case that involves tribal sovereignty and foreign relations. 

But when the legal brief came down on Wednesday, no one was satisfied. 

The Justice Department amicus brief backed claims from a Wisconsin tribe that Enbridge, a Canadian company, was trespassing on its lands by continuing to operate the Line 5 pipeline there. The 71-year-old pipeline carries up to 540,000 barrels of oil and natural gas liquids daily from Superior, Wisconsin, to Sarnia, Ontario. 

The DOJ also agreed that Enbridge has been trespassing on the band’s lands for over a decade, and specified the company should pay more than the court-ordered $5.15 million to the band, since the company has made over $1 billion in that time. 

“We are grateful the U.S. urged the court not to let Enbridge profit from its unlawful trespass,” said Robert Blanchard, chairman of the Bad River Band of the Lake Superior Chippewa Indians, located in northern Wisconsin.

But, Blanchard added in a statement, they’re disappointed the U.S. didn’t call for the company to stop trespassing immediately: “Enbridge should be required to promptly leave our Reservation, just like other companies that have trespassed on tribal land.”

Read Next

How the US government began its decade-long campaign against the anti-pipeline movement

Adam Federman

The legal trail began in 2019, when the band sued Enbridge for trespassing. The district ruling came out last June. Both Enbridge and the band appealed.

In their appeal, Enbridge and the Canadian government pointed to the 1977 Transit Pipeline Treaty between the United States and Canada, which promised an uninterrupted flow of oil and gas products between the nations. 

Both Enbridge and Canada argue that shutting down the pipeline before relocating it would violate the pipeline treaty, and would impact energy supplies across the northern U.S. and Canada. 

The court waiting for the DOJ brief, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, was looking for guidance on that question.

But the department stopped short of saying how the court should interpret the 1977 treaty, only recommending that the case be sent back to the district court to more fully consider public interests, including diplomatic relations with Canada, energy concerns around Line 5, and protecting the band’s sovereign rights. 

“The brief does not provide an interpretation of the transit treaty’s provisions, and that was pretty stunning, given that the court asked specifically for that interpretation,” said the band’s attorney, Riyaz Kanji. 

The Bad River Band disagrees with Enbridge and Canada’s interpretation of the pipeline treaty. The band refers to its 1854 treaty with the U.S., which recognizes its sovereign authority over those lands.

Even if the pipeline treaty applies, according to the band, it still allows for pipelines to be regulated, including for pipeline safety and environmental protection. 

Read Next

Inside the last-ditch effort to stop the Mountain Valley Pipeline

Katie Myers

That has worried the band’s supporters. Some say the U.S. is failing to meaningfully support tribal sovereignty, instead protecting its interests with Canada.

“From the point of view of the tribe and its allies, this is incredibly concerning that the United States is not advocating for the shutdown or removal of that pipeline” said Matthew Fletcher, a citizen of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians and a law professor at the University of Michigan.

Other Great Lakes tribes have argued that accepting Canada and Enbridge’s interpretation of the pipeline treaty would undermine foundational principles of tribal sovereignty and would have major implications for property rights. 

In a letter to the Biden administration in late February, representatives from 30 tribal nations across the region said the U.S. should fulfill its trust responsibility by rejecting that interpretation of the pipeline treaty. 

Enbridge declined Grist’s request for an interview. In an emailed statement, company spokesperson Ryan Duffy said, “The Government of Canada has made its position clear. Such a shutdown is not in the public interest as it would negatively impact businesses, communities and millions of individuals who depend on Line 5 for energy in both the U.S. and Canada.”

The band, Enbridge, and Canada have until April 24 to respond to the DOJ’s brief. The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals will then decide how to move forward. 

Editor’s note: Enbridge is an advertiser with Interlochen Public Radio. Advertisers have no role in IPR’s editorial decisions.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline DOJ thinks Enbridge Line 5 pipeline is trespassing on tribal lands on Apr 12, 2024.

Major rivers in Russia and Kazakhstan have risen above their embankments, causing more than 120,000 people to have to flee their homes in the worst flooding in some areas in almost a century.

Residents along the 1,509-mile Ural River, which flows through Russia and Kazakhstan, were forced to evacuate by its fast-rising waters, reported Reuters.

Orenburg, a Russian city of about 550,000, was one of the hardest hit.

“It came very quickly at night,” 71-year-old Taisiya told Reuters in the city about 900 miles southeast of Moscow. “By the time I got ready, I couldn’t get out.”

Entire areas of Orenburg were submerged as snowmelt caused the Ural to swell to a level much higher than what was deemed safe by authorities.

The flooding “might be the biggest disaster in terms of its scale and impact in more than 80 years,” said President of Kazakhstan Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, as CNN reported.

In Orenburg, the local government said the flooding caused the evacuation of more than 7,700 people from almost 13,000 residential buildings.

The city’s water levels rose to approximately 33 feet, the mayor said, higher than the critical level of 30.5 feet.

Flooding in the region looked to be far from over.

“The forecast is unfavorable. The water level continues to rise in flood-affected areas,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Wednesday, according to CNN.

Earlier this week, Orsk, a city downstream from Orenburg, was inundated when a dam embankment burst, reported BBC News.

Springtime flooding is common in Russia, but the scale of the event was rare.

The worst of the flooding hit northern Kazakhstan and the Russian Ural Mountains. Waters also rose in the southern portions of Western Siberia, as well as some areas near Europe’s largest river, the Volga, Reuters reported.

According to Kazakhstan’s ministry of emergency situations, emergency crews had removed 310 million cubic feet of floodwaters.

Emergency workers said the extreme flooding was caused by a combination of waterlogged soils, extensive snowpack, rapidly warming temperatures and heavy rainfall.

Residents of flooded regions have asked the president for assistance, while social media posts showed protestors outside Orsk city hall yelling, “Shame! Shame!” reported CNN.

In other footage, demonstrators criticized the Mayor of Orsk, Vasily Kozupitsa.

“We feed emergency ministry workers with pies and dumplings and bring them thermoses… Kozupitsa cannot even provide for emergency workers. Shame!” said one woman, as CNN reported.

The post Rivers in Russia and Kazakhstan See Worst Flooding in Nearly a Century appeared first on EcoWatch.

The annual Global Energy Monitor (GEM) survey, Boom and Bust Coal, has found that coal-fired operating capacity worldwide rose by two percent last year — the highest annual increase since 2016.

China was responsible for two-thirds of the expansion, with a small amount of growth in other parts of the globe, a press release from GEM said.

“Coal’s fortunes this year are an anomaly, as all signs point to reversing course from this accelerated expansion. But countries that have coal plants to retire need to do so more quickly, and countries that have plans for new coal plants must make sure these are never built. Otherwise we can forget about meeting our goals in the Paris Agreement and reaping the benefits that a swift transition to clean energy will bring,” said Flora Champenois, coal program director for GEM.

According to Global Coal Plant Tracker data, 69.5 gigawatts (GW) of coal capacity were commissioned in 2023, while 21.1 GW were retired — a net yearly increase of 48.4 GW and a total capacity worldwide of 2,130 GW.

Beyond the additions in China, new capacity coming online in India, Indonesia, Vietnam, Pakistan, Japan, Bangladesh, South Korea, Zimbabwe and Greece drove the increase.

Outside of China, a total of 22.1 GW were commissioned, with 17.4 GW retired — a net increase of 4.7 GW.

Last year marked the lowest retirement of coal capacity of any year in over a decade.

Since the 2015 Paris Agreement, 25 countries have reduced their coal-fired capacity, while 35 have increased it.

“The world is heading in the right direction in terms of coal’s role in the energy sector, but not quickly enough, and with some risky detours along the way,” said Champenois, as Reuters reported.

Lower coal plant retirements last year in Europe and the United States contributed to the uptick in operating capacity. Nearly half of retirements in 2023 were in the U.S. — 9.7 GW — down from the country’s record high of 21.7 GW in 2015.

European Union countries and the United Kingdom made up about a quarter of retirements, led by the UK, Italy and Poland.

“But the accelerated growth in coal capacity may be short-lived, as low retirement rates in 2023 that contributed to coal’s rise are expected to pick up speed in the U.S. and Europe, offsetting the blip. Heightened capacity additions would also be tempered if China takes immediate action to ensure it meets its target of shutting down 30 gigawatts (GW) of coal capacity by 2025,” GEM said.

In Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and EU nations, coal operating and pre-construction capacity decreased last year to a total of 7.1 GW, the lowest level on record. Just four of these countries — the U.S., Türkiye, Australia and Japan — are still considering new coal projects.

“The global coal landscape has been in transformation for almost a decade, marked by a collapse in the amount of planned coal power plants following the adoption of the Paris Agreement in late 2015. There has been a 68% reduction in global pre-construction capacity since then, and new construction starts are at their lowest outside of China since data collection began,” the press release said.

Since January, 101 countries have either abandoned the last decade’s plans for new coal or have officially committed to the United Nations No New Coal Energy Compact.

“Thankfully, various countries are making clear that shutting coal down is possible, and most of the world is closing in on ‘no new coal.’ Of 82 countries with coal power, 47 have reduced or kept operating capacity flat since the 2015 Paris Agreement,” GEM said. “Austria, Belgium, Sweden, Portugal, Peru, and the United Arab Emirates have retired or converted their last operating coal plants, while Slovakia, the UK, and potentially others are projected to join them in 2024.”

However, coal capacity around the world has actually gone up 11 percent since 2015.

China and India are the two largest coal consumers in the world, together accounting for 82 percent of total pre-construction coal capacity.

Along with China and India, nine other countries — Bangladesh, Indonesia, Zimbabwe, Kazakhstan, Russia, Pakistan, Laos, Türkiye and Vietnam — account for 95 percent of coal capacity under consideration, with India accounting for nearly 50 percent outside of China.

“In order to meet the 2015 Paris Agreement goals and put the world on a pathway to no more than 1.5°C of global warming, reducing the use of coal for power generation is the single most important source of emissions reductions,” the press release said. “To align with that goal, modeling by the International Energy Agency and others finds that OECD countries should eliminate coal power by 2030 and the rest of the world by 2040.”

Just 317 GW — 15 percent — of the world’s coal operating capacity has been committed to be retired in accordance with those goals. An additional 210 GW — 10 percent — has a closure commitment in place that must be sped up in order to keep pace with global climate targets.

While most global coal operating capacity is currently under some sort of net zero or similar pledge, 1,626 GW — 75 percent — continues to be without a closure commitment.

“Phasing out operating coal power by 2040 would require an average of 126 GW of retirements per year for the next 17 years, the equivalent of about two coal plants per week. Accounting for coal plants under construction and in pre-construction (578 GW) would require even steeper cuts,” the press release said.

The post Coal Capacity Increased 2% Globally in 2023, the Most Since 2016 appeared first on EcoWatch.

The impacts of climate change on marine life, from rising sea surface temperatures to ocean acidification, have long been studied, but new research is shedding light on the extent of these effects both currently and in the future.

Scientists developed a method that fully considers the consequences of warming oceans and acidification on fish and invertebrate animals, without canceling out certain other impacts, such as when one species begins eating more and another eats less.

“To gain a better understanding of the overall worldwide impact of climate change, marine biologists calculate its effects on all fish or all invertebrate species lumped together,” Katharina Alter, of the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ) and lead author of the study, explained in a statement. “Yet, effects determined in different individual studies can cancel each other out: for example if invertebrate animals such as snails profit from a certain environmental change and other invertebrates, such as sea urchins, suffer from it, the overall effect for invertebrates is concluded to be zero, although both animal groups are affected.”

Previously, scientists determined three main ways that climate change can affect marine life, including reduced chances of survival, increased metabolism and weakened skeletons of invertebrates. By using the new method to evaluate the effects of climate change on marine life, researchers found negative impacts on behavior, physiology, reproduction and physical development for fish and invertebrates.

According to Alter, these findings, which were published in the journal Nature Communications, showed that the negative consequences on marine life are likely greater than previously thought.

The researchers also estimated how acidification, which happens as increasing amounts of carbon dioxide in the air dissolve into the ocean, could continue to impact marine life in the future, both with and without intervention.

“Our new approach suggests that if ocean warming and acidification continue on the current trajectory, up to 100% of the biological processes in fish and invertebrate species will be affected, while previous research methods found changes in only about 20 and 25% of all processes, respectively,” Alter said.

Even in a lower carbon emissions scenario, the researchers determined that acidification will impact about 50% of biological processes in invertebrates and 30% of biological processes in fish, still higher than previous estimates.

In addition to calculating negative impacts of climate change on fish and invertebrates, the researchers considered any potential beneficial outcomes for species for a more comprehensive look at all “hidden impacts” that ocean warming and acidification have on marine life.

“The new calculation method weighs the significant deviation from the current state irrespective of its direction — be it beneficial or detrimental — and counts it as impact of warming and acidifying seawater,” Alter said. “With our new approach, you can include the broadest range of measured responses and detect impacts that were hidden in the traditional approach.”

The study authors noted that more research is needed to determine links between the changes to biological processes, both positive and negative, in marine life and how these could affect ecosystems at large.

The post Climate Change Is Likely Impacting Marine Life More Than Previously Thought, Study Finds appeared first on EcoWatch.