The coastal communities of Guayama and Salinas in southern Puerto Rico feature acres of vibrant green farmland, and a rich, biodiverse estuary, the protected Jobos Bay, which stretches between the neighboring townships. But this would-be tropical paradise is also the home of both a 52-year-old oil-fired power plant and a 22-year-old coal-fired power plant, which local residents say contaminate their drinking water and air, and harm people’s health. 

“It’s a classic sacrifice zone,” said Ruth Santiago, a lawyer and community activist who has fought against environmental injustice in Puerto Rico for more than 20 years. “A friend calls this ‘the beautiful place with serious problems.’”

Local residents envision a cleaner future as these fossil fuel plants are scheduled to retire within the next several years. They see rooftop solar as the best alternative as the island transitions to renewable energy. 

In November 2023, the federal government allocated $440 million in funding for rooftop solar energy in Puerto Rico, part of a billion dollar energy investment in the island. Officials, in recent years, have acknowledged that the region has suffered as the home of polluting power plants.

After a 2022 visit to Salinas and Guayama, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan announced a plan to spend $100,000 to improve monitoring of the air and water pollution from the coal-fired power plant, which is owned by Virginia-based Applied Energy Services Corporation, or AES.

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“For too long, communities in Puerto Rico have suffered untold inequities—from challenges with access to clean drinking water to fragile infrastructure that cannot withstand the increase and intensity of storms brought on by climate change,” Regan said in a press release. 

The EPA examined a drinking water sample in May 2023 from groundwater near the power plants that supplies drinking water to the region and found that metal levels did not exceed federal criteria. EPA public information officer Carlos Vega said more samples will be analyzed and the EPA will continue to inform the community. No timeline for the additional testing has been established.

For decades, most of Puerto Rico’s electricity has been generated in the southern part of the island. The Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority uses over 30,000 miles of distribution lines to send energy generated in the south to more urban areas, primarily in the north, like San Juan.

Coastal power plants in the south have posed health risks for community members, Santiago said; according to a 2022 report from the environmental law nonprofit Earthjustice, the AES plant produces 800 tons of coal ash waste per day that contaminates the air and nearby waters. Many low-income residents in the south struggle to pay electricity bills that are more than 30 percent higher than in the U.S. as a whole. Nearly half of Guayama’s residents were below the poverty line in 2022. 

AES did not respond to multiple email requests for comment. AES Puerto Rico said that their plants are in compliance with regulations in a 2020 press release.

An EPA inspection in 2021 revealed the coal facility was not in compliance with the Clean Water Act for releasing polluted stormwater without a permit. In 2022, the EPA found the coal plant exceeded legal emission limits for pollutants like carbon monoxide and mercury, according to an Earthjustice analysis. The EPA issued several other violations for the coal plant dating back to 2019, citing it for inadequate disposal of coal ash and endangering residents, according to the Environmental Integrity Project, an environmental watchdog group.

“People know that it’s a terrible impact, but it’s not easy to move to find somewhere else to live,” Santiago said.

Many local residents cannot move because average home prices have increased across the island since Hurricane Maria hit in 2017, according to activists and researchers in Puerto Rico. 

The coal plant is scheduled to retire in 2027, when a 25-year contract expires between AES and the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority. To replace coal, AES has turned to utility-scale solar power.

AES Puerto Rico began construction for the 135-acre Ilumina Solar PV Park in Guayama in 2011. AES Puerto Rico’s coal plant, solar farm and some smaller projects together supplied up to 25 percent of Puerto Rico’s electricity.

A few solar farms have already been built on the South Coast, and in February 2022, the Puerto Rican Energy Bureau approved 18 new utility-scale solar panel projects across the island. Critics say the solar farms are using dwindling agricultural land, and a group of environmental and public health organizations including Earthjustice and the Sierra Club Puerto Rico filed a lawsuit in August 2023 to stop the government of Puerto Rico from allowing the solar farms to be built on ecologically important land.

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A 2019 law mandated that the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority reduce the use of fossil fuels for electrical generation on the island and generate 100 percent renewable energy by 2050. In addition, the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority issued an Integrated Resource Plan in 2020 that includes a plan to retire the Aguirre Power Complex oil-fired plant by 2030. 

Instead of large solar farms, many local organizations in Puerto Rico see a better solution for their region’s electricity production—rooftop solar panels. They prefer this kind of solar energy for communities because unlike large solar facilities, rooftop solar installations do not use up farmland, which in Puerto Rico decreased by 37.5 percent between 2012 and 2018, according to the Census of Agriculture. 

In February, the Department of Energy released results of its study of Puerto Rican renewable energy, named PR100. The study reported the huge potential for rooftop solar in Puerto Rico—up to 6,100 MW by 2050 under the most aggressive scenario—but said utility-scale renewable energy would still be needed. 

The study also noted the challenges in deploying rooftop solar, including unstable roofs and lack of property titles. But Puerto Rico has a long way to go to reach the 2050 green energy goal; as of 2022, only 6 percent of electricity generated in Puerto Rico was renewable.

Ruth Santiago’s son Jose and other electricians helped install rooftop solar panels in Salinas neighborhoods through Coquí Solar, a community-based organization working to help low-income and vulnerable residents access solar energy.

The solar kits from Coquí Solar provided homes with solar panels and batteries, which could provide electricity during a blackout. Rooftop solar arrays often cannot meet a home’s entire electricity demand, but the battery storage the solar array generates can run crucial things like refrigerators, lights and medical equipment in case of an electrical blackout, while also reducing a household’s energy bills significantly. 

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The kits cost about $7,000, which Ruth Santiago said Coquí Solar purchased using grants from various Puerto Rico-based organizations and foundations. Coquí Solar, working with other organizations in the area, also installed the equipment in the homes of vulnerable community members for free. Jose Santiago said the elderly and people living with chronic illnesses and disabilities in the area suffer during blackouts, which are frequent on the island.

“Every year, the power leaves for five, six days,” Jose Santiago said. “Sometimes more, sometimes several times, and you don’t want to see the old people in the line at the gas station trying to get ice to put in their fridge. So, [rooftop solar energy] helps them.”

After Hurricane Maria caused structural damages to the island’s electrical infrastructure in 2017, the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority reported that all of their electric consumers, over 1.5 million customers, were without power. Some Puerto Rico residents spent close to 11 months without power, according to climate change and development specialist Ramón Bueno.

“That just sounds like a number, but all we have to think about is how do we deal with losing power for two, three days? That’s radical,” Bueno said. “So, two, three months is very radical. And five times that is even more.”

Ruth Santiago said Coquí Solar’s rooftop solar installments have empowered the community by giving residents “agency” over their electricity generation. The desire for electricity independence had grown in Puerto Rico after recent destructive hurricanes and other impacts of climate change.

Organizations like Coquí Solar have spent years working toward decentralizing solar energy across the island, and Bueno said many are strong and independent.

“They’re pretty articulate framers of an alternative way to move forward with energy systems,” Bueno said. 

Ruth Santiago worried that the retirement dates of the coal and oil plants could be delayed or that a new infrastructure would depend heavily on utility scale solar that would rely on a centralized grid and expose communities to blackouts during and after storms. She hoped that concerns about the community’s health and environment would be enough to force the plants to close on schedule and that rooftop solar would be prioritized over large-scale solar. 

“We need to really go beyond resilience, we need to go toward energy security and sovereignty, and that’s what we’re trying to do, at least create and do these pilot projects, these community-based examples of what that transformation would look like,” Ruth Santiago said. “If we don’t do it now, then when?”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline As fossil fuel plants face retirement, a Puerto Rico community pushes for rooftop solar on May 18, 2024.

The United States Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has proposed the ending of new coal leases on federal land in Montana and Wyoming’s Powder River Basin (PRB) — the nation’s most productive area for the highly polluting fossil fuel.

The new proposal would impact millions of acres of mineral reserves on federal lands, reported The Associated Press. However, the short-term effects will likely be limited since the leases take years to develop and there is less demand for coal.

“This is a monumental decision that will save lives, safeguard our environment, and significantly cut carbon emissions in the United States,” said Drew Caputo, Earthjustice vice president of litigation for lands, wildlife, and oceans, in a press release from Earthjustice. “We are grateful that the Biden administration has shown the courage to end coal leasing in the Powder River Basin and at long last turn the page on this climate-destroying fuel.”

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BLM has issued the final version of a supplemental impact statement (SEIS), as well as an amendment to the land use plan for its Buffalo Field Office, a press release from BLM said.

BLM developed the amendment and SEIS in response to a federal court order from 2022.

“The BLM’s proposed alternative, Alternative A, would amend the 2015 Buffalo Field Office resource management plan and make BLM-managed coal resources in the planning areas unavailable for future leasing. Federal coal production is anticipated to continue through 2041 under existing leases,” the BLM press release said.

The SEIS looks at alternatives to Buffalo Field Office federal coal leases and provides updated data and analysis of the health impacts of fossil fuel development in the area.

In 2022, the 12 surface coal mines that were active in the region produced roughly 220 million “short tons” of coal, down from approximately 400 million tons 14 years earlier.

The Energy Information Administration has said that coal production in both the PRB and the U.S. peaked in 2008 and have declined sharply since.

The proposal brought criticism from Republicans in Congress on the heels of a new air quality regulation by President Joe Biden that could lead to coal-fired plants being shut down if they don’t reduce their pollution, The Associated Press reported.

Environmentalists said the new proposal indicates a shift in the country’s coal policy.

“Coal companies in this region already have decades of coal locked up under leases, and it’s hard to imagine they’ll find buyers that far into the future given the competition from more affordable energy sources,” said Mark Fix, a Montana rancher who belongs to the conservation group Northern Plains Resource Council, as reported by The Associated Press.

Government analyses of the BLM proposal have said stopping federal coal leases would lower carbon dioxide emissions from the fossil fuel equal to 293 million tons annually — about the same as produced by 63 million gas-powered vehicles.

“The BLM’s decision to end coal leasing is a sea change in the transition to clean energy,” said Derf Johnson, Montana Environmental Information Center’s deputy director, in the press release from Earthjustice. “As we wind down the coal mining in the PRB, there is an immense opportunity to continue growing the clean energy economy.”

The post ‘Monumental Decision’: Biden Admin Proposes Ending Coal Leasing in Nation’s Most Productive Mining Area appeared first on EcoWatch.

In the past year, nearly two-thirds of the coral reefs on the planet have been exposed to enough heat stress to trigger bleaching, the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said on Thursday, reported Reuters.

Last month, NOAA announced that coral reefs are experiencing a fourth global bleaching event, with El Niño and climate change combining to bring record high ocean temperatures.

“I am very worried about the state of the world’s coral reefs,” said Derek Manzello, coordinator for NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch, as Reuters reported. “We are seeing (ocean temperatures) play out right now that are very extreme in nature.”

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Coral bleaching happens when warm ocean surface temperatures cause the colorful algae that live in the tissues of corals to be expelled. Without the symbiotic benefits of the algae, corals turn pale and become vulnerable to disease and starvation.

The current worldwide bleaching event is the second in the past decade, a press release from NOAA said.

“From February 2023 to April 2024, significant coral bleaching has been documented in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres of each major ocean basin,” Manzello said in the press release.

Since early last year, mass coral bleaching has been confirmed in the Caribbean, Florida, Brazil, Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, the eastern Tropical Pacific, large swaths of the South Pacific, the Gulf of Aden, the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf and other areas of the Indian Ocean.

“As the world’s oceans continue to warm, coral bleaching is becoming more frequent and severe. When these events are sufficiently severe or prolonged, they can cause coral mortality, which hurts the people who depend on the coral reefs for their livelihoods,” Manzello added.

Mass coral bleaching has been documented in at least 62 nations and territories, reported Reuters.

During the previous global event — from 2014 to 2017 — 56.1 percent of coral reefs were subjected to heat stress sufficient to cause bleaching. Another event in 2010 affected 35 percent of reef area, while the first worldwide bleaching in 1998 struck 20 percent of reefs.

“Climate model predictions for coral reefs have been suggesting for years that bleaching impacts would increase in frequency and magnitude as the ocean warms,” said Jennifer Koss, NOAA’s Coral Reef Conservation Program director, according to NOAA.

NOAA noted that Atlantic Ocean corals have been most affected by rising ocean temperatures. Nearly all — 99.7 percent — of the reefs in the basin have been subjecting to heat stress leading to bleaching over the last year, Reuters reported.

Corals are likely to suffer more this summer, with the Southern Caribbean already accumulating heat stress at bleaching levels in some areas.

“This is alarming because this has never happened so early in the year before,” Manzello said, as reported by Reuters. “El Nino is dissipating, but the ocean is still anomalously hot. It won’t take much additional warming to push temperatures past the bleaching threshold.”

The post 60.5% of World’s Coral Reefs Have Bleached in Past Year, NOAA Says appeared first on EcoWatch.

The Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) in the Bay Area of California is set to fully transition its school bus fleet to electric buses. With this move, it is expected to become the first big school district in the U.S. to switch to 100% electric buses with vehicle-to-grid (V2G) capabilities.

The school district has partnered with Zūm, a school transportation services company, to acquire a fleet of 74 entirely electric buses. In addition, the school district will receive bidirectional chargers, which can not only charge the buses but send stored or excess energy from the vehicles back to the grid.

This means the fleet of electric buses and chargers will double as a virtual power plant (VPP). Zūm reported the OUSD fleet VPP is expected to send 2.1 gigawatt hours (GWh) per year back to the grid, which will save about 25,000 tons of emissions.

“Oakland becoming the first in the nation to have a 100% electric school bus fleet is a huge win for the Oakland community and the nation as a whole,” said Kim Raney, executive director of transportation at Oakland Unified School District, as reported by Smart Energy International. “The families of Oakland are disproportionately disadvantaged and affected by high rates of asthma and exposure to air pollution from diesel fuels. Providing our students with cleaner and quieter transportation on electric school buses will be a game changer ensuring they have an equitable and stronger chance of success in the classroom.”

OUSD and Zūm are collaborating with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) via its Clean School Bus program, California Air Resource Board via the Heavy Vehicle Incentive Program, the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, Clean Mobility Operations programs and Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) to electrify OUSD’s fleet.

According to the California Air Resources Board, OUSD’s fleet transports 1,300 students to and from school each day. Soon, students will be able to ride emissions-free, electric buses in an area vulnerable to poor air quality. A recent American Lung Association report found that Alameda County is one of the most polluted counties to live in the U.S.; Oakland is located in Alameda County.

Countrywide, student transportation has more than 500,000 school buses, with 90% of these buses using fossil fuels for power. This contributes 8.4 million tons of emissions per year, Zūm reported.

Zūm has set a target to help electrify 10,000 buses in the U.S. and plans to work toward electrifying the larger transportation fleets for San Francisco Unified School District and Los Angeles Unified School District, Electrek reported.

“We at Zūm strongly believe it is time to move beyond pilots and deploy sustainability solutions at scale. Converting the Oakland Unified school bus fleet to 100% electric with VPP capability is the right step in that direction,” Ritu Narayan, founder and CEO of Zūm, said in a statement. “This historic milestone is a win-win proposition: Electric school buses with V2G provide students with cleaner, fume-free transportation and allow us to send untapped energy from the bus batteries back to the grid, creating an enormous impact on grid resilience.”

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The turn to sustainability is an opportunity — economic, social, and environmental, according to author…

The post Earth911 Inspiration: Sustainability Is An Opportunity appeared first on Earth911.

Last July, heavy storms lashed Vermont with record rain, leaving roads torn asunder, communities submerged, and farms washed out. In response, state legislators made a historic move by introducing the Climate Superfund Act to hold Big Oil accountable for the damages spurred by the emissions generated by the extraction and combustion of its products.

The bill has finally wound its way through the legislature, backed by tremendous support in both chambers. It now heads to Republican Governor Phil Scott for his signature, which he has suggested he will not provide. But with two-thirds of the House of Representatives and 26 of 30 Senators supporting the law, the Vermont General Assembly could achieve an easy override should the governor choose to exercise his right to veto. Once the bill takes effect, Vermont will be the first state to make Big Oil pay for the impacts of climate disasters.

“The sad truth is we have had multiple devastating climate events in the past year leading up to the legislative session that really drove home the need for this kind of action with Vermont legislators,” said Ben Edgerly Walsh, who helped champion the bill as the climate and energy program director at the nonprofit Vermont Public Interest Research Group. Politicians of every description received the message of the moment, giving the bill strong support across the state’s Democratic, Republican, and Progressive parties.

The law, which faces an almost certain legal challenge, builds on the polluter-pays principle that guides existing hazardous waste remediation laws, and it will mandate that the largest extractors and refiners of fossil fuels contribute — with amounts relative to the emissions they expelled between 1995 and 2025 — to a fund established by the state treasurer. This Climate Superfund will have a two-fold goal: recoup the costs incurred in responding to and recovering from climate-amplified disasters, and dedicate revenues toward resilient infrastructure better equipped to withstand the storms to come.

Once the bill becomes law, a lot of work remains before Vermont sees even a cent. The biggest task falls on the scientists and government officials who will have to determine what big oil companies must pay into the fund and how much they owe. Attribution science provides the backbone for these calculations and for the Climate Superfund Act as a whole by building quantitative links between extreme weather and the emissions of major polluters. By running models that compare scenarios with and without human-induced greenhouse gas emissions, scientists can determine the degree to which climate change shaped a given bout of extreme weather. This method provides a robust basis for calculating the so-called social cost of carbon, and the financial responsibility of major emitters.

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“Obviously, this is about these companies paying their fair share, not more than that,” said Edgerly Walsh. “We know that in any world, Vermonters are going to wind up paying significantly for the climate crisis, but these companies should pay their fair proportional share of these costs.”

The Environmental Protection Agency currently places the social cost of carbon at $51 per ton, a rate that Vermont’s treasurer can use to calculate how much fossil fuel companies owe the state based on what they’ve emitted. The money is certainly needed. A 2021 report projected that flooding alone could cost Vermont $5.2 billion over the course of the century. Already, the state has spent more per capita on climate disasters than all but four other states, according to the Vermont Atlas of Disaster.

To determine which businesses to levy the costs upon, the bill outlines a “nexus” of association with Vermont. Any fossil fuel company that has conducted business — such as marketing or selling their gas or coal products — in the Green Mountain State can be subject to the law. But the bill sets a high threshold for inclusion by targeting companies responsible for 1 billion metric tons or more of greenhouse gas emissions. This selective approach ensures that accountability falls on the worst offenders, those who have pumped excessive emissions in the atmosphere since the first United Nations climate conference in 1995. But trying to get the biggest fish on the hook in this way also comes with the greatest risk, and this bill will doubtless face legal pushback.

“The Vermont legislature has understood from the get-go that the fossil fuel industry would very likely use all the tools at its disposal to shirk accountability,” said Anthony Iarrapino, a lawyer who was consulted on the legal framework of the bill. The precedent set by other superfund laws and the expertise behind the scientific testimony have, according to Iarrapino, made the legislation robust enough to withstand challenge in the courts. “They have been very thorough in their analysis,” he said. The attribution method outlined within the bill is also understood to be quite conservative and will almost certainly underestimate how much Big Oil owes, which should further defend the law from claims of excessive burden.

Should the bill survive the legal challenges as expected, Vermont will be the first state in the nation to force Big Oil to pay for the climate disasters caused by its products, succeeding where New York, Maryland, and Massachusetts haven’t. Each has introduced similar legislation, but their efforts have stalled or failed. Last month, however, California joined the mix, introducing its own superfund bill that is currently maneuvering through committees. Such bills demonstrate how states and the nation can conjure creative solutions to the challenges ahead — including the ever-salient question: how to make polluters pay.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Vermont passed a bill making Big Oil pay. Now comes the hard part. on May 17, 2024.

As the planet grapples with the ever-starker consequences of climate change, a debut book by Lumbee citizen and Duke University scientist Ryan Emanuel makes a convincing argument that climate change isn’t the problem — it’s a symptom. The problem, Emanuel explains in On the Swamp: Fighting for Indigenous Environmental Justice, is settler colonialism and its extractive mindset, which for centuries have threatened and reshaped landscapes including Emanuel’s ancestral homeland in what today is eastern North Carolina. Real environmental solutions, Emanuel writes, require consulting with the Indigenous peoples who have both millennia of experience caring for specific places, and the foresight to avoid long-term disasters that can result from short-term material gain. 

Born in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1977, Emanuel was one of a handful of Native students at school. He spent summers visiting family in Robeson County, North Carolina, the cultural center of the Lumbee Tribe, or People of the Dark Water, where he played outside with other children, occasionally exploring a nearby swamp, one of the many lush waterways that slowly wind through the region, with a cousin. Today, Emanuel visits those swamps to conduct research. He describes them with an abiding, sometimes poetic affection, such as one spring day when he stands calf-deep in swamp water, admiring white dogwood flowers floating on the dark surface as tadpoles dart underneath. 

But that affection lives with tension. Emanuel describes trying to collect “reeking” floodwater samples from a ditch after 2018’s Hurricane Florence. In Emanuel’s retelling, a nearby landowner — a white farmer who uses poultry waste as fertilizer — threatens to shoot Emanuel. The sampling, the man believes, would threaten his livelihood, which is wrapped up in North Carolina’s extractive animal farming industry — a system of giant, polluting “concentrated animal feed operations” overwhelmingly owned and operated by white people, and exposing mainly racial minorities to dirty air and water. They are a sharp contrast to the small backyard farms and truck crops grown by Emanuel’s aunties and uncles back in Robeson County a generation ago. As the man holds his gun and lectures about environmental monitoring, Emanuel reflects silently that they are standing on his ancestors’ land. Ever the researcher, he later finds deed books from around the Revolutionary War showing Emanuels once owned more than a hundred acres of land in the vicinity. Still, he holds a wry sympathy for the man, who, he notes, is worried that environmental data will jeopardize his way of life in a place his family has lived for generations. 

Eastern North Carolina is a landscape of sandy fields interwoven with lush riverways and swamplands, shaded by knobby-kneed bald cypress trees and soaked with gently-moving waterways the deep brown of “richly steeped tea,” Emanuel writes. In addition to water, the region oozes history: It includes Warren County, known as the birthplace of the environmental justice movement, where local and national civil rights leaders, protesting North Carolina’s decision to dump toxic, PCB-laden soil in a new landfill in a predominantly-Black community, coined the term “environmental racism.” It’s also the mythological birthplace of English colonialism, Roanoke Island. On the Swamp draws a through line from early colonization of the continent to ongoing fights against environmental racism and for climate justice, with detailed stops along the way: Emanuel’s meticulous research illustrates how the white supremacism that settlers used to justify colonialism still harms marginalized communities — both directly, through polluting industries, and indirectly, through climate change — today. 

With convoluted waterways accessible only by small boats, and hidden hillocks of high ground where people could camp and grow crops, the swamplands of eastern North Carolina protected Emanuel’s ancestors, along with many other Indigenous peoples, from genocide and enslavement by settlers. Today, with climate change alternately drying out swamplands or flooding them with polluted water from swine and poultry operations, it’s the swamps that need protection, both as a geographic place, and an idea of home. The Lumbee nation is the largest Indigenous nation in the eastern United States, but because the Lumbee Tribe gained only limited federal recognition during the 1950s Termination Era, its sovereignty is still challenged by the federal government and other Indigenous nations. Today, federal and state governments have no legal obligation to consult with the Lumbee Tribe when permitting industry or development, although the federal government does with Indigenous nations that have full federal recognition, and many industrial projects get built in Robeson County. 

In writing that’s both affectionate and candid, On the Swamp is a warning about, and a celebration of, eastern North Carolina. Though the region seems besieged by environmental threats, Indigenous nations including the Lumbee are fighting for anticolonial climate justice. 

Grist recently spoke with Emanuel about On the Swamp.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length. 

Q. What motivated you to write this book? 

A. Many years ago, I thought that I wanted to write a feel-good book about celebrating the Lumbee River and the Lumbee Tribe’s connection with it, and talking about all the reasons why it’s beautiful, and amazing, and important to us. So I thought that I would write this essentially nature story, right? But as my work evolved, and as I started thinking more critically about what I actually should be writing, I realized that I couldn’t tell that love story about the river without talking about difficult issues around pollution, climate change, and sustainability, and broader themes of environmental justice and Indigenous rights. 

Q. Could you tell me about your connection to place?

A. I have a relationship to Robeson County that’s complicated by the fact that my family lived in Charlotte, and I went to school in Charlotte, and we went to church in Charlotte. But two weekends every month, and every major holiday, we were in Robeson County. And so I’m an insider, but I’m also not an insider. I’ve got a different lens through which I look at Robeson County because of my urban upbringing, but it doesn’t diminish the love that I have for that place, and it doesn’t keep me from calling it my home. I’ve always called it home. Charlotte was the place where we stayed. And Robeson County was home. 

I can’t see the Lumbee River without thinking about the fact that it is physically integrating all of these different landscapes that I care about, [and] a truly beautiful place. 

Q. In 2020, after years of protests and legal battles, Dominion Energy and Duke Energy canceled the Atlantic Coast pipeline, which would have carried natural gas 600 miles from West Virginia to Robeson County. In On the Swamp, you note that a quarter of Native Americans in North Carolina lived along the proposed route of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline. What was the meaning of the Atlantic Coast pipeline project for Lumbee people?

A. That was an issue very few Lumbee people paid attention to, until they saw the broader context to the project and realized that such an outsized portion of the people who would be affected by the construction and operation of that pipeline were not only Native American, but were specifically Lumbee. I think that’s what generated a lot of outrage, because for better or for worse, we’re used to being treated like a sacrifice zone. 

The Atlantic Coast pipeline gave us an easy way to zoom out and ask questions like, “OK, who is going to be affected by this project? Who’s making money off of this project?”

It was also a way to engage with larger questions about things like energy policy in the face of climate change and greenhouse gas emissions. [It] brought up philosophical questions of how we feel about the continued use of fossil fuels and the investment in brand new fossil fuel infrastructure that’s going to last 30, 40, or 50 years, at a time when everybody knows we shouldn’t be doing that. 

Q. At the end of the day, the Atlantic Coast pipeline didn’t happen. What do you think is the main reason?

A. The collective resistance of all of these organizations — tribal nations, committed individuals, grassroots organizations — was enough to stall this project, until the developers realized that they had fallen into the Concorde fallacy. Basically, they got to the point where they realized that spending more money was not going to get them out of the hole they had dug in terms of opposition to this project. 

But as long as [developers] hold on to those [property] easements, there’s certainly a threat of future development.

Q. You write that people can physically stay on their ancestral land and still have the place taken away by climate change, or by development projects. Can you talk a little bit about still having the land but somehow losing the place?

A. The place is not a set of geographic coordinates. It’s an integration of all the natural and built aspects of the environment. And so climate change, deforestation, these other types of industrialized activities, they have the potential to sweep that place out from under you, like having the rug pulled out. All of the things that make a set of geographic coordinates a beloved place can become unraveled, by these unsustainable processes of climate change and unsustainable development. I think that the case studies in [On the Swamp] show some of the specific ways that that can happen. 

Q. Could you talk about your experiences as a researcher going out in the field, navigating modern land ownership systems, and how that connects to climate change?

A. I don’t know if it’s fair to say that I have to bite my tongue a lot, but I kind of feel that way. When I hear people talk about their ownership of our ancestral lands — I’m a mix of an optimist and a realist, and I understand that we’re not going to turn back the clock. And frankly, I’m not sure I want to, because Lumbee people are ourselves a product of colonial conflict, and we wouldn’t exist as the distinct nation that we are today, if it were not for the colonial violence that we survived. We might exist as our ancestral nations and communities, but we definitely wouldn’t be Lumbee people. So this is a complicated issue for me. 

When we think about the front lines of climate change, we don’t often think about Robeson County, North Carolina. But because our community is so attuned to that specific place, we’re not going to pick up and move if the summers get too hot, or if the droughts are too severe. That’s not an option for us. So I think that some of the urgency that I feel is not too different from the urgency that you hear from other [Indigenous] people who are similarly situated on the front lines of climate change.

Q. Something else that you make a really strong point about in this book is that something can be a “solution” to climate change, but not sustainable, such as energy companies trying to capture methane at giant hog farms in Robeson County. How should people think about climate solutions, in order to also take into account their negatives?

A. The reason why people latch onto this swine biogas capture scheme is if you simply run the numbers, based on the methane and the carbon dioxide budgets, it looks pretty good. 

But a swine facility is a lot more than just a source of methane to the atmosphere, right? It’s all these other things in terms of water pollution, and aerosols, and even things like labor issues and animal rights. There are all these other things that are attached to that kind of facility. If you make a decision that means that facility will persist for decades into the future operating basically as-is, that has serious implications for specific people who live nearby, and for society more broadly. We don’t tend to think through all those contingencies when we make decisions about greenhouse gas budgets. 

Q. What are some ways that the Lumbee tribe is proactively trying to adapt to climate change?

A. Climate change is not an explicit motivation [for the Lumbee Tribe]. If you go and read on the Lumbee Tribe’s housing programs website, I don’t think you’re going to find any rationale that says, “We’re [building housing] to address climate change.” But they are.

Getting people into higher-quality, well-insulated and energy-efficient houses is a big deal when it comes to addressing climate change, because we have a lot of people who live in mobile homes, and those are some of the most poorly insulated and least efficient places that you could be. And maybe 40 years ago, when our extreme summer heat wasn’t so bad, that wasn’t such a huge deal. But it’s a huge deal now. 

Q. What is the connection between colonialism and climate change for eastern North Carolina, and why is drawing that line necessary? 

A. The one sentence answer is, “You reap what you sow.” 

The longer answer is, the beginning of making things right is telling the truth about how things became wrong in the first place. And so I really want this book to start conversations on solving these issues. We really can’t solve them in meaningful ways unless we not only acknowledge, but also fully understand, how we got to this point. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline In a debut book, a love letter to eastern North Carolina — and an indictment of colonialism as a driver of climate change on May 17, 2024.

A new World Weather Attribution (WWA) study has found that the sweltering late-April heat wave across Southeast Asia and the Middle East was 45 times more likely due to human-caused climate change.

For many days, temperatures above 104 degrees Fahrenheit scorched large portions of the continent, from Lebanon, Syria, Palestine and Israel to Vietnam, the Philippines, Myanmar and Thailand.

“From Gaza to Delhi to Manila, people suffered and died when April temperatures soared in Asia,” said Dr. Friederike Otto, a member of the WWA study team and a senior lecturer in climate science at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment in London, as The Guardian reported. “The additional heat, driven by emissions from oil, gas and coal, is resulting in death for many people.”

The study said global heating increased temperatures by nearly two degrees Celsius in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine and Israel. In the Philippines, thousands of schools were shuttered amid soaring temperatures.

“In terms of intensity, we estimate that a heatwave such as this one in West Asia is today about 1.7°C warmer than it would have been without the burning of fossil fuels. In the Philippines the intensity increase due to human-induced climate change is about 1.2°C,” WWA said.

In India, Myanmar, Vietnam, Laos, Bangladesh, Thailand and Cambodia, temperatures reached 114.8 degrees Fahrenheit.

“Climate change is an absolute gamechanger when it comes to extreme heat,” Otto said.

The heat wave was especially hard for outdoor workers and those living in informal housing and refugee camps.

“Heat impacts certain groups like construction workers, transport drivers, farmers, fishermen etc. disproportionately. It both impacts their livelihoods and causes a reduction in income, and results in personal health risks,” WWA said. “The heatwave added pressure to the many challenges already faced by people in refugee camps and conflict zones, such as water shortages, difficulties to access medicines and poor living conditions for the large population that lives in makeshift tents that trap heat. With limited institutional support and options to adapt, the heat increases health risks and hardship.”

The research team combined climate models and weather data to compare how likely heat waves would be in the current climate and in one without human-caused global heating.

They found that El Niño had little effect on a higher chance of heat waves.

“Heatwaves are arguably the deadliest type of extreme weather event and while the death toll is often underreported, hundreds of deaths have been reported already in most of the affected countries, including Palestine, Bangladesh, India, Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia and the Philippines,” WWA said. “The heat also had a large impact on agriculture, causing crop damage and reduced yields, as well as on education, with holidays having to be extended and schools closed in several countries, affecting millions of students.”

The team said South Asia’s heat is becoming more frequent during the pre-monsoon season.

They examined how human-caused climate change affected the intensity and likelihood of the 15-day heat wave in the Philippines and the three-day West Asia.

“The observational data for the whole month of April confirmed that the role of climate change is likely of similar magnitude to the heatwaves studied in 2022 and 2023, and the results of a full attribution analysis would not be significantly different,” WWA said.

In Gaza, the hot temperatures made living conditions more dire for 1.7 million displaced people.

The study said that, if the planet reaches warming of two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the probability of extreme heat rises significantly.

“If the world warms to 2°C above pre-industrial global mean temperatures, in both regions the likelihood of the extreme heat would increase further, by a factor of 2 in West Asia and 5 over the Philippines, while the temperatures will become another 1°C hotter in West Asia and 0.7°C hotter in the Philippines,” WWA said.

The study’s findings in South Asia were based on observations.

“Similarly to what we found in previous studies, we observe a strong climate change signal in the 2024 April mean temperature. We find that these extreme temperatures are now about 45 times more likely and 0.85ºC hotter. These results align with our previous studies, where we found that climate change made the extreme heat about 30 times more likely and 1ºC hotter,” WWA explained.

The findings suggest that strategies and action plans to combat existing heat waves face challenges due to rapidly growing cities, exposed populations, an increase in informal settlements, a rise in energy demands and a reduction of green spaces.

“While many cities have been implementing solutions like cool roofs, nature based infrastructure design, and adherence to climate risk informed building codes, there is limited focus on retrofitting and upgrading of existing buildings and settlements, with infrastructure deficits (e.g. asbestos roofs), to make them more liveable,” WWA emphasized. “Some countries such as India have comprehensive heat action plans in place, yet to protect some of the most vulnerable people, these must be expanded with mandatory regulations, such as workplace interventions for all workers to address heat stress.”

The post Southeast Asia’s Deadly Heat Wave in April Was 45x More Likely Due to Climate Change, Study Finds appeared first on EcoWatch.

South Florida suffered through brutal heat and humidity this week when the heat index (the “feels like” temperature) in Key West reached 115 degrees F — matching the record for any time of year. With rising temperatures, flooding on sunny days, and toxic algae blooms, Floridians recognize that something’s amiss. Ninety percent of residents accept that climate change is happening, according to a new survey from Florida Atlantic University, and two-thirds want their state government to do more to address the problem. 

But Governor Ron DeSantis, the former Republican presidential hopeful, is moving in the opposite direction. On Wednesday, as heat records fell, he signed legislation deleting most references to the words “climate change” from the state’s laws and removing emissions reductions as a priority for energy policy. It also bans the construction of offshore wind turbines off Florida’s coasts, weakens regulations on natural gas pipelines, and prevents cities from banning appliances like gas stoves. 

Along with two other bills DeSantis signed on Wednesday, the new law “will keep windmills off our beaches, gas in our tanks, and China out of our state,” he wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. “We’re restoring sanity in our approach to energy and rejecting the agenda of the radical green zealots.”

The phrase “climate change” has been swept up into America’s culture wars, viewed as a “Democrat” issue that Republicans like DeSantis want to distance themselves from. “I think a lot of it is messaging and rhetoric,” said Yoca Arditi-Rocha, the executive director of the CLEO Institute, a climate education and advocacy nonprofit in Florida. But at the same time, the law will have a real impact, she said. “This is a really good opportunity for the gas industry to push out more infrastructure and boost more expansion.”

The measure, which goes into effect July 1, will remove eight references to climate change from the state’s laws, leaving seven intact. It swaps language in a 2008 policy prioritizing the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions as a goal for the state’s energy policy with the new aim of making energy “cost-effective” and “reliable.” Arditi-Rocha questioned whether the new law would fit that objective, arguing that investing in renewable sources would better diversify the state’s energy mix. The Sunshine State already relies heavily on gas, which supplies 74 percent of Florida’s electricity. Solar provides about 5 percent.

The law also removes a requirement that government agencies purchase fuel-efficient vehicles and strips away a clause that gave state officials the authority to set renewable energy targets for Florida.

Eliminating climate-related language could send a signal to green entrepreneurs that their industries are not welcome in Florida. “I just think it puts us at a disadvantage to other states,” Greg Knecht, the executive director of The Nature Conservancy in Florida, told Grist in March. Even though Florida isn’t particularly windy, with no wind farms in operation, it’s possible that as offshore wind technology improves, it would make sense someday, had the state not banned it this week.

DeSantis is well aware of the consequences of climate change. In recent years, he’s poured money into adapting to sea level rise, signing legislation that awards $640 million for resilience projects to respond to coastal threats and $28 million for flooding vulnerability studies for every county. But some threats get a different treatment. Last month, DeSantis signed legislation that blocks cities from making local rules to protect outdoor workers from extreme heat.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline DeSantis says he’s ‘restoring sanity’ by erasing climate change from Florida laws on May 16, 2024.