Silica dust, thrown into the air while mining, has contributed to a staggering rise in cases of progressive, incurable, and deadly black lung disease in America’s coal miners. The insidious particulate is particularly common in the seams of low quality coal found in central Appalachia, yet the Mine Safety Health Administration, or MSHA, has for decades pegged safe exposure levels at about twice what the government allows for every other occupation. On Tuesday, the agency finally announced an updated standard, outlining not only a new threshold for exposure, but increased on-the-job safety measures and medical surveillance to protect workers.

“Miners deserve to go home safe and healthy each day and should never have to choose between sacrificing their lungs and providing for their families,” Chris Williamson, MSHA’s director, said in an address on Tuesday in Uniontown, Pennsylvania. “Miners also deserve to retire in dignity and enjoy the fruits of their labor with their loved ones. That’s why we’re all here today to take a long overdue step forward to protect miners from exposure to toxic silica dust.”

Williamson joined representatives of United Mineworkers of America and United Steelworkers in making the announcement, which miners and their advocates have spent years fighting for.

The need was urgent. Silica dust is toxic, and long-term exposure can cause a slow but fatal hardening of lung tissue called progressive massive fibrosis, or, as it’s known among miners and their families, coal-mining areas, black lung disease. The toxin increasingly abounds in mines as companies plumb thinner coal seams with greater impurities. 

The rule, which spans hundreds of pages, covers all miners, regardless of what they dig from the earth, as well as anyone working construction on mine sites. It tightens medical surveillance for black lung by making more frequent clinical visits available to workers at no cost, outlines measures for silica dust monitoring, and, most importantly, lowers the exposure standard to the same 50 micrograms long enforced by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration — 50 micrograms of silica per cubic meter of dust during an eight-hour work day. It also outlined a renewed push for site compliance with stricter consequences, including, Williamson said, “citations, proposed penalties, immediate corrective actions, and if abatement does not occur in a reasonable period of time, withdrawal orders” leading to closure of mines violating the rule.

“Ultimately, this rule’s success will depend on its implementation and enforcement,” he said.

And that, some worry, is exactly where the effort may fail. The new regulations still allow mine operators to conduct their own sampling, a longtime source of grievance for miners and their advocates who simply do not trust coal companies to accurately report silica levels.

“I’m pretty upset,” said Vonda Robinson, the vice president of the national Black Lung Association. Her husband John is 57 and succumbing to the disease; he was diagnosed 10 years ago, far younger than coal miners of previous generations. His doctor recommends a lung transplant, and he’s waiting until the last possible moment, because of the stress the operation places on the body. Those with silicosis tend to live about five years after a transplant.

In the 14 years since MSHA proposed updating the silica dust standard, Robinson and the National Black Lung Association lobbied lawmakers and rallied tirelessly for improved enforcement. Although she feels the regulation announced Tuesday is a “good” rule, “if it’s not enforced, we’re gonna be sitting in the same boat that we were in.”

Regulators allow mines to do their own monitoring because MSHA simply can’t afford to inspect every mine. To do that, the agency, which saw its budget peak in 1979, would have to overcome the consequences of years of budget cuts, and resulting staffing shortages, seen during every presidential administration of this century. Even under the more labor-friendly Biden administration, MSHA saw a smaller-than-expected budget increases in last year’s annual appropriations bill. Mining deaths have also jumped — up 31 percent in fiscal 2023, when 42 workers died — due to accidents, a troubling increase that may signal the agency is having trouble keeping up. The agency also tends to move slowly; it  identified a cluster of black lung cases in the 1990s but failed to act. 

Robinson also worries about other weaknesses in the new regulation. It uses an eight-hour day as an average to estimate silica exposure, but most miners work 10- or 12- hour shifts. It also allows for just four MSHA silica dust inspections per mine per year, a rate that may not capture the true risk of exposure. Recent investigations by National Public Radio also revealed the agency may have undercounted the number of black lung cases recorded in recent years because studies showing explosive growth have not yet been peer-reviewed.

Rebecca Shelton, the policy director at Appalachian Citizens Law Center, has been poring over the rule since its release. She is particularly concerned about coal companies’ continued control over testing, since the industry has had a history of cheating on results. Shelton said monthly mine testing by MSHA would be ideal because the amount of dust in the air can change depending on where in a mine the company is working, ventilation and other factors. The Mine Safety Health Administration dismissed the idea of creating a lower permissible exposure limit because it would be too costly for mine operators, something she said indicates “a prioritization of the economics of the industry over the lives of miners.”

For people like Brandon Crum, a radiologist who X-rays black lung patients and sees the damage first-hand, the disease, and MSHA’s response to it, is personal. He worked the mines, the fourth generation in his family to do so. “It was a dusty job in dusty conditions,” he said.  

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Crum’s radiology office is in Pike County, Kentucky, on the border with West Virginia. He is among the few radiologists certified to read chest X-rays for signs of black lung. After documenting early signs of the alarming and continual rise in the disease, particularly among younger miners — those in their 30s and 40s who worked as little as 10 years underground before becoming so sick they needed transplants or died. In 2016, he joined three young men in making a video pleading for federal action to address the crisis; one of them has since died and the others have come to need lung transplants.

Crum says the disease cuts a wide swath through the region, affects those who have it, those who know them, and those who wonder if they might be next. He relayed his experiences in comments he made to the MSHA when the rule was in its draft stages last year. “I tried to put more of a personal touch on it,” he said. “It not only affects the men, but women and families and entire communities.”

The United Mine Workers of America is supporting the new rule, participating in its promotion and celebrating it as the fruit of many years of hard work, which continued even as, union communications officer Erin Bates said, coal companies refused to acknowledge the scale of the disease. The union went around them to Congress, knocking on doors and making calls for decades. She concedes the regulation isn’t perfect, but is happy anything was adopted at all. “Obviously, we want it to be better,” she said, “but no matter what, more health and safety is better for our miners.”

This story has been updated.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A new federal rule aims to protect miners from black lung disease on Apr 17, 2024.

In much of the United States, groundwater extraction is unregulated and unlimited. There are few rules governing who can pump water from underground aquifers or how much they can take. This lack of regulation has allowed farmers nationwide to empty aquifers of trillions of gallons of water for irrigation and livestock. Droughts fueled by climate change have exacerbated this trend by depleting rivers and reservoirs, increasing reliance on this dwindling groundwater. 

In many places, such as California’s Central Valley, the results have been devastating. As aquifers decline, residential wells start to yield contaminated water or else dry up altogether, forcing families to rely on emergency deliveries of bottled water. Large-scale groundwater pumping has also caused land to sink and form fissures, threatening to collapse key infrastructure like roads, bridges, and canals. These local impacts have been the price of an economic model that provides big farmers with unlimited access to cheap water.

At a tense twelve-hour hearing that lasted well into the night on Tuesday, California officials struck a big blow against that model. The state board that regulates water voted unanimously to take control of groundwater in the Tulare Lake subbasin, one of the state’s largest farming areas, imposing a first-of-its-kind mandatory fee on water pumping by farmers in the area.

The decision to place the basin’s water users on “probation,” a punishment for not managing their water effectively, could force some of the region’s largest land barons to pay millions of dollars in fees or stop cultivating huge sections of their farmland.

The vote sets up a high-stakes enforcement fight with some of the state’s most powerful farmers, who have fought for years to avoid state intervention on their profitable dairy pens and tomato fields. The state will start measuring water usage and collecting fines later this year, but it has never attempted any such enforcement action before, and there is no way to know yet whether farmers will comply with the fees.

The larger question is whether the state’s policing effort will succeed in forcing a long-term reduction to groundwater usage in the state’s agricultural areas. The success or failure of this effort matters not just for California but also for many other pasture-rich states, from Nevada to Nebraska, that are trying to police their groundwater. If the Golden State can cut water usage without causing political or economic upheaval, it will leave a blueprint for other states trying to manage scarce water.

“Groundwater is one of these collective resources where your pumping has an impact on a lot of other people, and you have to have a mechanism to manage that,” said Ellen Hanak, an economist and water expert at the Public Policy Institute of California, a think tank. “I seriously doubt that the state wants to be taking over basins and managing them, but there has to be a backstop.”

The probation vote for Tulare Lake comes almost a decade after the California lawmakers passed the landmark Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, which requires water users in threatened areas across the state to draft plans for healing their depleted aquifers by 2040. The Central Valley pumps around 7 million acre-feet of groundwater per year, enough to supply more than 15 million average American households, and almost all of it is used for agriculture. 

The vast majority of the state’s 89 troubled groundwater basins have already created viable plans for dealing with the crisis, agreeing to fallow some farmland or replenish aquifers by capturing rainwater. 

But six laggard basins in the Central Valley have never presented the state with adequate plans for fixing their groundwater deficits. Tulare Lake in particular has slow-walked its planning, even as aquifer levels in the area have plummeted and huge sections of land have sunk by several feet. Water officials from the area have submitted several different water management plans with the state over the past few years, and during Tuesday’s hearing even said they would soon unveil another plan that includes a commitment to use less water for farming. But none of this documentation convinced the state that it could trust local officials to stop the rapid decline of the area’s aquifers.

The probation will force all significant water users in the basin to measure their well water usage starting in July, something that has never been done or even attempted in the Central Valley. It will charge these users a fee of $20 for every acre-foot of water they use, with exceptions for individual households, impoverished communities, and public institutions like schools. That fee is lower than the fees that water officials in other basins have voluntarily imposed on large users.

The basin could exit probation within months if local water leaders present the state with a plan that endorses major usage reductions. One state official said he hoped the probation period would be “short.”

“The reality is that probation is a step in the process,” said E. Joaquin Esquivel, the chair of the state water board. “It’s the forcing of something that the locals aren’t willing to do.”

The major forces in the Tulare Lake area are J.G. Boswell, a massive farming company that has dominated Central Valley politics for almost a century, and Sandridge Partners, another large farming enterprise owned by the Bay Area real estate magnate John Vidovich. These two companies together own tens of thousands of acres of tomatoes, nuts, and dairy farms. They both have representatives on the agencies charged with managing groundwater in the Tulare Lake basin. (A representative for the group of groundwater agencies in the basin didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.)

The farmland owned by these two companies sits atop the former site of Tulare Lake, once the largest body of freshwater west of the Mississippi River. Farmers drained the lake in the late 19th century so they could cultivate the fertile soil beneath it, but the lake reappears during wet years as flooded rivers roar down from the Sierra Nevada mountains and fill the Central Valley. When the lake reappeared last year, Boswell and other landowners erected makeshift levees to protect their valuable crops.

Enforcement of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act will transform this landscape and the rest of the fertile Central Valley. Despite recent investments in more efficient drip irrigation systems and recharge projects that can refill aquifers, most areas in the state will have no choice but to farm less land in order to comply with the law by 2040. According to one study from the Public Policy Institute of California, the law will eliminate between 500,000 and 1 million acres of irrigated crops in the valley, or between 10 and 20 percent of the valley’s agricultural land.  

Tulare Lake farmers who spoke at the hearing said the fees could devastate their industry. 

“My concern is with the fiscal strain you’re placing on the small farmers,” said Aaron Freitas, a fourth-generation nut farmer who helps run a smaller operation in the basin, at the hearing. “It’s just not encouraging for us to continue our work or protect the future for our children.”

The state believes this reduction is necessary in order to protect low-income communities and critical infrastructure from the devastating effects of subsidence. But enforcing the transition won’t be easy, especially because the major farmers have drawn water with impunity for so long. Some observers worry that the decision to send Tulare Lake into probation could lead to a dangerous confrontation between state regulators and local agricultural interests.

“There may have to be some kind of law enforcement agency out there when the state goes to meter wells for the fees,” said a person who has been closely involved with implementing the groundwater law, who spoke anonymously because they weren’t authorized to speculate about the consequences of the probation decision. “That’s the worst case-scenario.” 

*Correction: Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this article mistakenly suggested that many states, including Idaho and Nebraska, have not regulated groundwater.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline In a first, California cracks down on farms guzzling groundwater on Apr 17, 2024.

The spotlight

It’s no secret that climate change poses a threat to our agricultural systems. Hotter temperatures and shifting rainfall patterns, as well as extreme weather events, are already placing stress on farms and imperiling our ability to grow certain crops in certain places. Some of the first casualties will likely be sensitive, specialty crops, like the tropical berries that make one of the world’s most beloved beverages: coffee.

But as long as coffee has been around, alternatives have cropped up around it. And today, a new wave of startups is entering the coffee-imitation game, motivated by the threat climate change poses to the world’s coffee supply.

“I was surprised by just how many types of coffee alternatives are out there,” said L.V. Anderson, a senior editor at Grist who explored these alternatives, grouped under the banner of “beanless coffee,” in a feature story last week. “There’s a really strong tradition, in nearly all regions around the world, of making these brewed beverages that have a resemblance to coffee.”

That tradition has often been driven by cost — offering cheaper options, like toasted barley and rye, for the masses who couldn’t afford a specialty item like coffee. And that’s part of the calculus for today’s climate-focused startups as well, which are making coffee substitutes from readily available ingredients, including various pits, roots, seeds, grains, and legumes. As climate change threatens coffee production, it is likely to drive up the price of the real deal, which could fuel demand for affordable alternatives.

But of course, for those alternatives to begin to gain a foothold today, they have to be good.

When Anderson first began reporting the story, “as someone who drinks coffee and is attached to coffee,” she was highly skeptical of what these startups were offering. “I’m not a morning person, and coffee is really important to me to actually, like, wake up and be ready to face the day,” she said. But her editor encouraged her to approach the story with an open mind, which she did — even sampling a couple of the brews.

While she enjoyed them, for the most part, she was keenly aware that they were not coffee. The rich, seductive smell was missing, and the taste was “just slightly off in a way that’s hard to put your finger on,” Anderson said. But, she added, she could see herself getting used to them if she had to.

A latte that Anderson tried at Gumption Coffee in Manhattan, made with beanless grounds from a company called Atomo. L.V. Anderson / Grist

Although coffee is not one of the worst offenders when it comes to the climate impacts of agriculture (like beef and dairy, two other products that have grown their own markets of alternatives), its production does come at an ecological cost. And in many cases, these coffee-less coffee companies are appealing to sustainability-conscious consumers by offering what they claim to be a more eco-friendly option. “I think pretty much all these companies, or most of them at least, are making claims about how their product is deforestation-free,” Anderson said. At least a few startups are also focusing on agricultural waste products to make their brews, helping to keep food waste out of landfills.

These companies may be hoping that early adopters will make the switch based on this sustainability argument, but ultimately, Anderson said, they’re also making a bet that these products will be more climate-proof than real coffee — and that coffee lovers, like Anderson herself, may end up being willing to adjust to the dupes.

“I can’t make predictions about what’s going to happen in the future,” she added, “but I do find it plausible, this vision that beanless coffee companies are pitching for the future — which is that coffee is just going to get really expensive, and it’s going to be hard for people to access coffee the way that they’re used to accessing it.”

In the excerpt below, Anderson explains how beanless coffee is actually brewed, and some of the many many coffee alternatives that are hitting the market. Check out the full piece on the Grist site.

— Claire Elise Thompson

The best coffee for the planet might not be coffee at all (Excerpt)

Coffea arabica — the plant species most commonly cultivated for drinking — has been likened to Goldilocks. It thrives in shady environments with consistent, moderate rainfall and in temperatures between 64 and 70 degrees Fahrenheit, conditions often found in the highlands of tropical countries like Guatemala, Ethiopia, and Indonesia. Although coffee plantations can be sustainably integrated into tropical forests, growing coffee leads to environmental destruction more often than not. Farmers cut down trees both to make room for coffee plants and to fuel wood-burning dryers used to process the beans, making coffee one of the top six agricultural drivers of deforestation. When all of a coffee tree’s finicky needs are met, it can produce harvestable beans after three to five years of growth, and eventually yields 1 to 2 pounds of green coffee beans per year.

If arabica is Goldilocks, climate change is an angry bear. For some 200 years, humans have been burning fossil fuels, spewing planet-warming carbon dioxide into the air. The resulting floods, droughts, and heat waves, as well as the climate-driven proliferation of coffee borer beetles and fungal infections, are all predicted to make many of today’s coffee-growing areas inhospitable to the crop, destroy coffee farmers’ razor-thin profit margins, and sow chaos in the world’s coffee markets. That shift is already underway: Extreme weather in Brazil sent commodity coffee prices to an 11-year high of $2.58 per pound in 2022. And as coffee growers venture into new regions, they’ll tear down more trees, threatening biodiversity and transforming even more forests from carbon sinks into carbon sources.

At many times in the past, coffee has been out of reach for most people, so they found cheaper, albeit caffeine-free, alternatives. Caro and other quaint instant beverage mixes, like Postum in the U.S. and caffè d’orzo in Italy, were popular during World War II and in the following years, when coffee was rationed or otherwise hard to come by. But the practice of brewing non-caffeinated, ersatz coffee out of other plants is even older than that. In the Middle East, people have used date seeds to brew a hot, dark drink for hundreds or perhaps thousands of years. In pre-Columbian Central America, Mayans drank a similar beverage made from the seeds of ramón trees found in the rainforest. In Europe and Western Asia, drinks have been made out of chicory, chickpeas, dandelion root, figs, grains, lupin beans, and soybeans. These ingredients have historically been more accessible than coffee, and sometimes confer purported health benefits.

An illustrated advertisement from 1902 for Postum by the Postum Cereal Company of Battle Creek, Michigan. Jay Paull / Getty Images

Today’s beanless-coffee startups are attempting to put a modern spin on these time-honored, low-tech coffee substitutes. Northern Wonder, based in the Netherlands, makes its product primarily out of lupin beans — also known as lupini — along with chickpeas and chicory. Atomo, headquartered in Seattle, infuses date seeds with a proprietary marinade that produces “the same 28 compounds” as coffee, the company boasts. Singapore-based Prefer makes its brew out of a byproduct of soymilk, surplus bread, and spent barley from beer breweries, which are then fermented with microbes. Minus also uses fermentation to bring coffee-like flavors out of “upcycled pits, roots, and seeds.” All these brands add caffeine to at least some of their blends, aiming to offer consumers the same energizing effects they get from the real deal.

“We’ve tried all of the coffee alternatives,” said Maricel Saenz, the CEO of Minus. “And what we realize is that they give us some resemblance to coffee, but it ultimately ends up tasting like toasted grains more than it tastes like coffee.”

In trying to explain what makes today’s beanless coffees different from the oldfangled kind, David Klingen, Northern Wonder’s CEO, compared the relationship to the one between modern meat substitutes and more traditional soybean products like tofu and tempeh. Many plant-based meats contain soybeans, but they’re highly processed and combined with other ingredients to create a convincing meat-like texture and flavor. So it is with beanless coffee, relative to Caro-style grain beverages. Klingen emphasized that he and his colleagues mapped out the attributes of various ingredients — bitterness, sweetness, smokiness, the ability to form a foam similar to the crema that crowns a shot of espresso — and tried to combine them in a way that produced a well-rounded coffee facsimile, then added caffeine.

By contrast, traditional coffee alternatives like chicory and barley brews have nothing to offer a caffeine addict; Atomo, Minus, Northern Wonder, and Prefer are promising a reliable daily fix.

“Coffee is a ritual and it’s a result,” said Andy Kleitsch, the CEO of Atomo. “And that’s what we’re replicating.”

— L.V. Anderson

Read the full piece here to learn more about how researchers and entrepreneurs are thinking about the future of coffee.

More exposure

• Read: about a Nestle pilot program to offer cash incentives to coffee farmers willing to switch over to regenerative farming practices (Reuters)
• Read: how farmers and researchers in Vietnam are working to rehabilitate the more resilient robusta coffee variety (Al Jazeera)
• Read: how growers in Uganda are developing an even more resilient variety (The New York Times)
• Read: about Atomo’s plans to begin offering its beanless espresso in coffee chain Bluestone Lane (Reuters)

See for yourself

Last week, as we celebrated Looking Forward’s 100th issue, we launched a special opportunity that we are very excited about: a mini drabble writing contest.

Thank you to the many folks who have already submitted drabbles! We love reading all of your visions for a clean, green, just future. We’ve included the prompt here again, for those of you who are still percolating.

Also, we heard from a couple of y’all that the email address included in last week’s newsletter was bouncing. Thanks for letting us know — it should be fixed now!

***To submit: Send your drabble to lookingforward@grist.org with “Drabble contest” in the subject line, by the end of Friday, April 26.

Here’s the prompt: Choose ONE climate solution that excites you, and show us how you hope it will evolve over the next 100 years to contribute to building a clean, green, just future. We’ve covered a boatload of solutions you could draw from (100, in fact!) — so if you need some inspiration, peruse the Looking Forward archive here.

Drabbles offer a little glimpse of the future we dream about, so paint us a compelling picture of how you hope the world, and our lives on it, will evolve.

Here’s what we’re looking for:

• Descriptive writing that makes us feel immersed in the scene and setting.
• A sense of time. You don’t have to put a specific timestamp on your piece, but give us some clue that we are in the future (not an alternate reality), approximately 100 years from now, and that certain things have changed.
• A sense of feeling. Is this vignette about joy? Frustration? Excitement? Nervousness? The mundane pleasure of living in a world where needs are met? Make us feel something!
• 100 words on the dot.

The winning drabbles will be published in Looking Forward in May, and the winners will receive presents! Some Grist-y swag, and a book of your choice lovingly packaged and mailed to you by Claire.

A parting shot

Another climate-proof coffee company that Anderson covered is Stem; instead of cooking up a beanless imitation with more readily available ingredients, this company is working on growing coffee bean cells in a lab. Like cell-based meats, the product will have to clear regulatory hurdles before it can reach markets. But unlike root- and pit-based imitations, the resulting brew would be chemically identical to the real thing. These three photos show Stem’s coffee, from petri dish to pot.

IMAGE CREDITS

Vision: Grist

Spotlight: L.V. Anderson / Grist; Jay Paull / Getty Images

Parting shot: Courtesy of Jaroslav Monchak / STEM

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A wave of climate-conscious startups are brewing ‘beanless coffee’ on Apr 17, 2024.

In 2023, Europe removed a record 487 dams and other river barriers, according to a new report by Dam Removal Europe (DRE), a coalition of organizations including The Nature Conservancy, Rewilding Europe, Wetlands International and World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF).

The number of removals from waterways in 15 European countries was 50 percent more than the year before, a press release from WWF said. More than 2,671.9 miles of rivers were reconnected through the initiatives, restoring ecosystems and boosting climate resilience and biodiversity.

“It is amazing to witness another record-breaking year for dam removals in European rivers. Almost 500 barriers were removed, highlighting the growing support for river restoration to enhance water security, reverse nature loss and adapt to the worsening impacts of climate change,” said Herman Wanningen, World Fish Migration Foundation director, in the press release. “From France to Finland, communities, companies and countries are investing in removing obsolete and increasingly risky barriers to improve river health for people and nature.”

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France led the way with barrier removals last year, with the winner from the previous two years — Spain — coming in second, followed by Sweden and its neighbor, Denmark.

The European Union Nature Restoration Law includes the EU Biodiversity Strategy’s dam removal target of restoring a minimum of 15,534.3 miles of rivers by 2030. However, the legislation did not pass the Council of the European Union and remains in limbo.

“The handful of EU countries that are blocking the Nature Restoration Law are also jeopardising the recovery and protection of our rivers, which ultimately will adversely affect us,” said Claire Baffert, senior EU policy officer of water and climate change adaptation at WWF, in the press release. “Across Europe, rivers are littered with often obsolete dams that worsen the health of the very freshwater ecosystems that are vital to providing clean drinking water for us, water for farming and for biodiversity.”

The report, Dam Removal Progress 2023, warns of safety risks presented by obsolete river barriers. Rivers in Europe are broken up by 1.2 million-plus barriers, 150,000 of which are obsolete and pose substantial dangers to wildlife and people.

“Obsolete barriers do nothing but harm the river, increase nature loss and pose a growing risk since they were built to cope with very different climatic conditions. It’s time to re-think the way we manage our rivers by removing all obsolete barriers and letting as many rivers as possible flow freely. A river that does not flow freely is slowly dying,” Wanningen said in the press release.

DRE collected information regarding risks posed by dams to recreational river users like kayakers and swimmers. It discovered 82 incidents resulting in 129 deaths in 16 countries. The victims ranged in age from two to 59 years old — most were in their mid-20s and mid-30s.

“Low-head dams (i.e., weirs) that are especially dangerous due to the formation of an inescapably strong subsurface current (submerged hydraulic jump) are usually called ‘drowning machines,’” the report said. “These structures have caused hundreds of fatalities in the U.S. in the last 20 years; more than any other kind of riverine barrier.”

The risk of any dam collapsing — especially aging and obsolete barriers — is increased by the more extreme flooding and intense storms caused by climate change.

“With tens of thousands of obsolete dams scattered across Europe, the potential for catastrophic failures is a growing risk for downstream communities. Indeed, at least three river barriers collapsed last year due to heavy rain in Norway, Northern Ireland, and Slovenia,” the press release said.

With a number of dam removal projects scheduled for this year, as well as a European dam removal movement network of more than 6,000 people, momentum has been growing.

“Several significant barrier removal projects are on the horizon for the near future,” the press release said. “Croatia is set to proceed with the removal of eight barriers, including parts of old mills and remains of older infrastructure, in Plitvice during April and May, with the aim of restoring natural river flow and biodiversity. Romania is also gearing up for its first barrier removal scheduled for May, a move anticipated to enhance river connectivity and ecosystem health.”

DRE said it wants to make dam removal “business as usual” throughout Europe.

“The support offered by DRE empowered practitioners to restore the connectivity of thousands of river kilometers in the past years, thereby enhancing freshwater biodiversity and enabling migratory fish to access their historical spawning sites after centuries. This impactful outcome was achieved not only through the removal of physical river barriers but also through dedicated and persuasive efforts to influence decision-makers and communities,” the report said.

The post Europe Removed Record Number of Dams and Other Barriers to River Flow in 2023 appeared first on EcoWatch.

Electric vehicles are taking market share away from internal combustion competitors, with new plugin vehicle…

The post Best Earth911 Podcast: Peter Glenn on Financing Your EV Life appeared first on Earth911.

This story was produced by Grist and co-published with Verite News.

When a winter storm knocked out Texas’ power grid in 2021, the scale of the devastation it wrought was exacerbated by a singular fact about the Lone Star State: It has its own electric grid, an “energy island” that has long been uniquely isolated from the rest of the country, with just four transmission lines linking it to neighboring states. When the storm hit, Texas was unable to transfer enough emergency power from other electricity markets to keep the lights on. The death toll was in the hundreds.

A new multi-billion-dollar infrastructure project could mitigate a similar power emergency in the future. For more than a decade, a private renewables developer, Pattern Energy, has been trying to build a 320-mile transmission line linking Texas’ power grid to the Southeast. But the project, known as Southern Spirit, is now facing opposition in not one but two states it would traverse. Entergy, a utility company whose affiliates in Mississippi and Louisiana would stand to benefit if the new project fails, has raised doubts about the proposal before Mississippi regulators. And even if Mississippi moves forward, a bill in the Louisiana legislature — which was revised at the behest of Entergy — could derail the entire project.

It’s not just Texans who would benefit from more transmission. In order for the U.S. to decarbonize its electricity, a lot more power lines will need to be built across the country. Most crucial is the need for more interregional transmission lines like Southern Spirit — those that connect the nation’s patchwork of energy grids to one another. These are especially important for renewable energy, in part for geographic reasons: The sunny deserts of the Southwest and the gusty plains of Texas and Oklahoma are disproportionately strong producers of solar and wind power, respectively, but most of the potential customers for that power are clustered near the country’s coasts. As a result, the Department of Energy estimates that interregional transmission capacity will need to expand by a factor of five in order to meet the Biden administration’s goal of decarbonizing the power sector by 2035.

But at least two major hurdles stand in the way. The first is that transmission lines sometimes face resistance from landowners along the way, who use the permitting and environmental review processes to block development through litigation or similar means. A second, underappreciated obstacle to new interregional transmission lines is resistance from power companies, who may face a strong disincentive to allow competition in the form of cheap, faraway electricity. On a recent podcast appearance, Mark Lauby, chief engineer at the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, an industry group that regulates the national transmission grid, acknowledged this difficulty, asking, “How do I get a [transmission] line through multiple markets when markets themselves don’t want to compete with other markets?”

“We have substantial challenges within markets, within generators, that are trying to stop the building of transmission. It’s not just permitting; it’s also those folks that feel that they actually get gain out of having that stinking solar stuff a ways away, so they can make more money locally,” Lauby added.

Beyond helping make Texas’ grid resilient, more transmission lines connecting Texas to nearby grids would also help maximize the carbon emissions savings from the state’s abundant wind power. Texas produces more wind energy than any other state, but wind farms are often forced to reduce their output due to inadequate transmission. Building more transmission lines allows producers to produce more wind energy by giving it somewhere to go.

For these reasons, the Southern Spirit project looks like a win-win: If built, it could help decarbonize the region, lower power bills, and protect Texans from a repeat of 2021. It was this last benefit that seemed to finally put some wind in the project’s sails after the storm convinced grid planners at ERCOT, Texas’ energy grid, that more transmission was needed.

But clouds appeared on the horizon last October when Entergy Mississippi expressed concerns around the transmission project in filings before the Mississippi Public Service Commission, which must approve Southern Spirit for the project to move forward.

Neal Kirby, a spokesperson for the Entergy Corporation (the Mississippi utility’s parent company), told Grist in an email that Entergy Mississippi has not taken a position on Southern Spirit overall, but rather has “raised concerns about the impacts of the project on its customers.”

Kirby told Grist that the utility was concerned that “eastbound flows from the line would cause overloads on the system that Southern Spirit would not be required to address or resolve. As a result, Entergy Mississippi homes and businesses may be left with either less reliable electric service or footing the bill for system upgrades to reliably accommodate injections of energy from the new line.”

In other words, Entergy’s system might not be equipped to handle the extra power shipped in from Texas without capital upgrades — and because utilities pass on the costs of approved capital upgrades to consumers as a matter of course, this would mean higher electric bills.

Daniel Tait, a researcher at the Energy and Policy Institute, a nonprofit utility watchdog, called Entergy’s contention that access to Southern Spirit would destabilize the grid and make its energy more costly “absurd and a mask for its anti-competitive behavior.”

Just what might be “anti-competitive” about Entergy’s stance on Southern Spirit was captured in testimony submitted to the Mississippi Public Service Commission by Jeff Dicharry, a transmission planner employed by Entergy, who said the proposed transmission line could force the utility to scale back service at its natural gas plants in Mississippi.

“The predictable result would be an inability to operate [Entergy-operated natural gas plants] Choctaw and Attala during periods with east-bound flow on [Southern Spirit] due to congestion on the transmission system. This would be problematic,” wrote Dicharry.

Tait said Entergy Mississippi’s complaint amounts to “an implicit acknowledgment that this [transmission line] is economically beneficial for customers,” because the Mississippi utility would only reduce operations at its gas plants if the energy flowing in from Texas were cheaper than its own output.

In Louisiana, meanwhile, state legislators are considering a bill that would effectively kill the project by denying expropriation authority — the ability to acquire private property through eminent domain — to all transmission lines that run through the state unless a majority of their power is consumed within the state.

Alan Seabaugh, the bill’s Republican sponsor in the Louisiana state Senate, told Grist his bill was intended to protect North Louisiana landowners from their land being confiscated for a project that does not benefit the state’s residents. The bill passed the Senate by 36 to 1 on March 25 and is pending before the House’s Civil Law and Procedure Committee.

Because Southern Spirit connects Texas to Mississippi, “there is no way to legitimately with a straight face argue that Louisiana’s going to benefit from this one iota,” Seabaugh said, though he clarified that he has not taken a formal position for or against the project.

Adam Renz, Pattern Energy’s director of project development, told Grist that Seabaugh was “very much technically incorrect” in his assessment that Louisiana would not benefit from the transmission line. Though the line does terminate in Mississippi rather than Louisiana, it would deliver energy into a regional grid known as MISO South, which much of Louisiana draws power from.

“The electrons the project will inject into the system can and will flow into the state of Louisiana,” Renz said in an email.

Entergy’s Louisiana subsidiary has not taken a position on Seabaugh’s bill, but the utility was instrumental in the passage of an amendment that exempted any transmission lines within an existing power grid from its purview — effectively ensuring its own future projects would not be affected. “They gave us an amendment to make sure that they were excluded,” Seabaugh said.

Kirby, the Entergy spokesperson, confirmed this. “When the bill author shared the legislation with us, we raised concerns that it may impede projects deemed necessary by MISO or SPP, the entities that are ultimately responsible for making independent determinations about what transmission projects are needed in most of Louisiana,” he said. “Entergy Louisiana suggested to the bill author some language that would address this concern.”

To Davante Lewis, an elected utility regulator in Louisiana who wrote a letter to the state Senate opposing the bill, the amendment effectively “gives the incumbent utilities all the rights to build transmission” and amounts to “pushing interregional transmission costs onto ratepayers,” because utilities have the authority to pass on their capital costs to ratepayers once they get regulatory approval. By contrast, Pattern Energy is privately financing the Southern Spirit project with an investment of more than $2.6 billion, and will recoup that investment from tariffs on power sold over the line once it’s operational. Renz said the project has not received any federal or state incentives.

Lewis, whose commission is currently reviewing a petition for certification by Pattern Energy, has not taken a position on Southern Spirit but said he opposes Seabaugh’s bill because, while it “seems to be directly targeted only at the Southern Spirit transmission line, my concern is what would this mean for transmission buildout” — which he characterized as an important priority for Louisiana ratepayers in the face of growing electricity demand as well as the need to decarbonize.

“Bringing on transmission in order to curb peak demand is vitally important. However, if we look at who has been the biggest objector, it’s been utilities,” Lewis said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Who’s afraid of a 300-mile transmission line that could help decarbonize the Southeast? on Apr 17, 2024.

In a series of 40 action-based initiatives, the European Union is investing $3.71 billion to advance ocean sustainability and conservation in 2024, the bloc’s environment commissioner said.

The announcement was made at the Our Ocean Conference in Greece and is the largest pledge by the EU since the conference began a decade ago, a press release from the European Commission said.

“Mitigation and adaptation are not enough. We must also focus on protection and restoration to insulate land and seas from harmful human activity and to give space to nature to heal,” Prime Minister of Greece Kyriakos Mitsotakis said, as Reuters reported.

The goal of the Our Ocean Conference is to foster international support for sustainable development and marine conservation, the press release said. At this year’s conference, the EU is seeking to cover all the event’s themes: marine protected areas, marine pollution, sustainable fisheries and blue economies, ocean and climate change, maritime security and more.

The EU has committed as much as $2.02 billion for sustainable fisheries under the Recovery and Resilience Facility. These funds will be put toward efforts in Spain, Portugal, Greece, Cyprus and Poland for resilience and recovery plans to support reforms and investments in aquaculture and sustainable fisheries.

The bloc has also pledged $1.44 million to fund marine biodiversity in areas that are part of the Marine Biodiversity of Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction Agreement (BBNJ). Another $25.5 million will go toward the protection and conservation of marine ecosystems and biodiversity in the Maldives, the French Southern and Antarctic Lands and Southern Africa’s Blue Benguela Current.

Additional funding will be provided for ocean observation programs and the advancement of ocean models research for climate forecasts, as well as sustainable blue economies in places like Italy, Portugal, Mauritania, Western Africa, Mozambique, Angola and the Mediterranean region.

The EU is also pledging $98 million to help secure a sustainable blue economy and restore “our blue planet” through EU Mission: Restore our Ocean and Waters.

“The ocean and seas cover 71% of the Earth’s surface. The ocean is under pressure: it suffers from global warming, unsustainable practices, illegal fishing, pollution and the loss of marine habitats,” the press release said. “Originally launched in 2014, the Our Ocean Conference has since mobilised more than 2,160 commitments worth approximately $130 billion.”

In addition to ocean threats like plastic pollution, habitat destruction and overfishing, in February, global ocean temperatures reached a record high, according to the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.

“The ocean is part of who we are, and our shared responsibility,” said Virginijus Sinkevičius, EU Commissioner for Environment, Oceans and Fisheries, in the press release. “One year after the conclusion of the BBNJ Agreement, I am glad to reiterate, here in Greece, the EU’s ambition to continue acting as a driving force towards ocean sustainability.”

The post EU Announces $3.71 Billion Investment in Ocean Sustainability appeared first on EcoWatch.

As ocean water heats up, swaths of once-technicolor coral reefs have begun turning white, putting ecosystems across the globe at risk.

Scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the International Coral Reef Initiative announced on Monday that the world is undergoing its fourth global coral bleaching event, marking the second such occurrence in the last decade. According to Derek Manzello, coordinator of NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch program, scientists have documented significant coral bleaching across every major ocean since early last year. 

The current bleaching event, caused by long-lasting high ocean temperatures, has hit reefs in more than 53 countries and territories and 54 percent of all areas with reefs. Some places, such the Caribbean, Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, and large parts of the South Pacific, began documenting widespread bleaching in early 2023. Now, with recent reports from countries along the Indian Ocean and the South Atlantic confirming that none of the four major ocean basins have been left untouched, the event has been determined to be truly global, according to NOAA and the International Coral Reef Initiative. 

“Unfortunately, we’re likely to see bleaching events continue to happen, and they’re likely to get worse,” Manzello said. Previous mass bleaching events happened in 1998, 2010, and between 2014 and 2017. According to Manzello, the current event is likely to engulf more reef areas than ever before.

In February, ocean temperatures hit a record high, and since last June, each month consecutive has been the warmest of that month ever recorded. Although a period of ocean cooling, known as La Niña, is expected to bring relief this summer, the amount of bleached coral reefs will increase by about 1 percent per week while high temperatures persist.

Bleaching occurs when corals become stressed by rising sea temperatures and expel the algae living within their tissues, causing them to turn white. Corals are invertebrate animals and rely on the algae as a symbiotic source of food. If temperatures remain high for too long, bleaching can lead to mass coral death. Even in well-protected areas, like Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, up to half of coral have been killed by warming temperatures.

Die-off of coral threatens not only the health of marine ecosystems, but also the livelihood and food security for people who depend on them. According to some estimates, economic activities that rely on healthy coral reefs are worth $11 trillion dollars every year.

The world’s oceans, which absorb 90 percent of heat trapped in the atmosphere by greenhouse gases, have experienced more frequent and more intense marine heatwaves over the past century. Last year’s first warning sign came from the southern tip of Florida, when an unprecedentedly severe and long-lasting heat wave caused hot tub-like temperatures and bleached corals. In response, NOAA took steps to save reefs, such as moving young corals to deeper, cooler water, and deploying shade to keep reefs out of the sun.

“This should be seen as a global warning,” Manzello said, adding that cutting back greenhouse gas emissions is an essential part of any solution. “Ocean health is being impacted drastically by climate change, but we still have time to get things right. We still have time to stop this trend.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The world’s 4th coral bleaching event has officially arrived on Apr 16, 2024.

Studies have recently detected microplastics in human lungs and blood, and previous research shows humans ingest and inhale many microplastics even at home. In 2020, scientists uncovered microplastics in human organs for the first time. Now, researchers are making sense of how microplastics that are ingested can make their way from the gut to other organs.

Researchers studied mice that were exposed to and ingested microplastics over a four-week period and found those microplastics moved to organ tissues of the brain, liver and kidney. The team also noted metabolic differences in the colon, liver and brain after the microplastic exposure. The scientists published their findings in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives.

“We could detect microplastics in certain tissues after the exposure,” Eliseo Castillo, associate professor at the Department of Internal Medicine at University of New Mexico’s School of Medicine, said in a statement. “That tells us it can cross the intestinal barrier and infiltrate into other tissues.”

Microplastics are tiny fragments of plastics. Humans have produced over 7 billion metric tons of plastic since the 1950s and every year, we produce about 400 million metric tons of additional plastic waste. Most plastics become waste in landfills or the environment, but they don’t biodegrade. Instead, they crack and break down into small pieces. These tiny plastic fragments can be found in our drinking water or food sources, such as seafood. In homes, microplastic pollution can also be found in dust, so humans may also inhale plastics.

As reported by Reuters, scientists estimate that humans consume about 5 grams of microplastics per week, or about enough to fill a soup spoon. Estimates suggest humans consume about 21 grams of microplastics per month and 250 grams per year. Over a lifetime of about 79 years, humans may consume 20 kilograms of microplastics.

“These mice were exposed for four weeks. Now, think about how that equates to humans, if we’re exposed from birth to old age,” Castillo said. “Now imagine if someone has an underlying condition, and these changes occur, could microplastic exposure exacerbate an underlying condition?”

The scientists plan to further their research by examining whether different diets, such as a high-fat diet compared to a high-fiber diet, can impact microplastic exposure and ingestion. Aaron Romero, a Ph.D. student of Castillo’s, is also researching how and why microplastics change gut microorganisms to further determine how these plastic fragments could potentially affect health.

“Research continues to show the importance of gut health. If you don’t have a healthy gut, it affects the brain, it affects the liver and so many other tissues,” Castillo said. “So even imagining that the microplastics are doing something in the gut, that chronic exposure could lead to systemic effects.”

The post Ingested Microplastics Can Move From the Gut to the Brain and Other Organs, Study Finds appeared first on EcoWatch.

A new study led by scientists from the University of Exeter has found that the risk of seabed creatures being exposed to plastics depends on how they feed and interact with their environment, rather than simply reflecting pollution levels in their local area.

All ocean plastic ends up sinking to the seafloor, a richly biodiverse habitat. The marine species who live in this unique environment burrow into the sediment and process food in a variety of ways that determine their levels of plastic exposure, a press release from the University of Exeter said. 

“We know very little about the global seafloor and the species living there, but the impact of plastic pollution is growing even in parts of the deep ocean never seen by humans,” said Dr. Adam Porter, postdoctoral research fellow with the University of Exeter’s Convex Seascape Survey — a five-year project that examines ocean carbon storage — in the press release.

The research team found that seabed creatures living in parts of the ocean with high plastic pollution levels — particularly the Mediterranean and Yellow Seas — had ingested the most plastics.

“The Mediterranean and Yellow Sea animals were the most contaminated in all the studies we looked in. The Mediterranean has repeatedly been identified as likely one of the most contaminated places on Earth given the population numbers surrounding it, its semi-enclosed nature (i.e. not much outflow relative to the N. Atlantic) and the number of rivers that run in also. The Yellow Sea samples are from an area highly polluted – again likely due to regional circulation patterns and proximity to the highly populated cities along the coasts of S.E. Asia,” Porter told EcoWatch in an email.

The highest plastic levels were found in Blue and Red Shrimp (Aristeus antennatus), who live in the northwestern parts of the Mediterranean, and another shrimp species, Crangon affinis, from China’s South Yellow Sea. Each of the Blue and Red Shrimp were found to have 164 microplastics, while individual Crangon affinis had ingested 294 microplastics.

In 93 percent of studies, microplastics were found in animals living on the seafloor.

“We know that species experience sub-lethal (stress/inflammation/false satiation (feeling full) etc.) and indeed lethal effects from ingesting plastic; but this must be caveated with the understanding that these experiments often use high concentrations in order to find the tipping point at which a particular type of plastic becomes lethal,” Porter told EcoWatch. “However, there are a huge number of studies that show that plastics cause internal abrasions, block gut passages, cause inflammation responses due to having plastic in their guts and generally cause harm. This coupled with all the other threats animals on the seafloor face may just be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.”

Many earlier studies had focused on mussels and other filter-feeding bivalves, the press release said.

“Contrary to previous thinking, it turns out that many filter feeders have fairly effective methods of releasing unwanted particles rather than ingesting them,” Porter said in the press release.

The researchers found that predators, seabed scavengers called deposit feeders — as opposed to filter feeders — and omnivores were the most likely to take plastic into their bodies. Especially susceptible were marine animals like crabs, as well as starfish, sea urchins, brittlestars, sea cucumbers and squid.

The study, “Microplastic burden in marine benthic invertebrates depends on species traits and feeding ecology within biogeographical provinces,” was published in the journal Nature Communications.

“Organisms living in the seabed, such as clams, worms and shrimps may not seem that important, but they are essential for regulating and recycling the planet’s resources and form the base of the food web,” said co-author of the study Jasmin Godbold, a marine ecology professor at the University of Southampton, in the press release. “Our findings suggest that previous assumptions about the risk of exposure to plastic in our oceans are likely, for better or for worse, to be far from the reality. Irrespective of the amount of plastic pollution, some species are relatively unaffected, whilst others are disproportionately vulnerable.”

The findings of the study will assist scientists and policymakers with filling in knowledge gaps and focusing their actions as details of the Global Plastics Treaty are finalized.

“The only true conservation strategy is to stop producing so much plastic – especially single-use plastic. Such items may only be used for minutes or even seconds, but they persist in the ocean for hundreds of years,” said study co-author Tamara Galloway, a marine scientist and ecotoxicology professor at the University of Exeter, in the press release.

Porter agreed that the best way to stop the damage plastics are doing to marine ecosystems is to bring an end to our reliance on them.

“The key is to stop plastics from entering the environment. It’s too big a job to clean up, plastic is forever in our ecosystem now; we just need to stop any more getting in. Plastic is such a useful product, but our use or abuse of it is what has caused the situation we see today; using a product that lasts hundreds of years to carry water around for a matter of minutes or hours, only to be too often discarded. Unfortunately, at the rate plastics are entering the marine environment the seafloor looks to only experience increasing microplastic concentrations which may have realised or unintentional consequences for life on the seafloor,” Porter told EcoWatch.

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