Most travelers want their trips to be more sustainable, but with rising airfares and general…
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This coverage is made possible through a partnership with WABE and Grist, a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future.
On a sunny day this fall, two Georgia Southern University grad students stood waist-deep in the North Newport River near St. Catherine’s Island on Georgia’s coast, while their professor and a team from the Georgia Department of Natural Resources used a winch to lower pallets full of oyster shells into the water.
The students guided the pallets into place on the muddy river bank. Those pallets, piled with shells, will provide a hard surface for baby oysters to latch onto.
“We are creating a foundation which wild oysters can populate and grow into a independent reef,” said Cameron Brinton, a marine biologist with DNR.
Oysters used to be abundant here: Georgia led the nation in oyster harvesting in the early 20th century, according to the University of Georgia. But by the 1930s, they’d been overharvested. A similar story has played out in other formerly thriving oyster grounds.
Scientists all along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts are trying to bring oyster populations back, and not just because they’re a popular food. Oysters are also important for healthy coastal ecosystems. And researchers are now studying how creating new oyster reefs could help fight climate change by sequestering carbon.
Oysters, Brinton explained, are a keystone species. That means they create habitat for other critters, from small shrimp and crabs to fish like red drum and spotted sea trout that are popular for fishing.
“The majority of commercially and recreationally important species of fish and shellfish will spend a portion of their life associated with oyster reefs,” Brinton said.
And scientists are studying two ways that oyster reefs suck up and store carbon. First, they keep the sediment in the river from washing away.
“There’s lots of organic matter in this sediment in the rivers here,” said John Carroll, a professor of biology at Georgia Southern. “So some of that organic matter gets buried behind the reefs.”
Organic matter has carbon in it, so the oyster reefs can store that carbon and keep it from warming the planet.
Second, by stabilizing the shoreline, oyster reefs also help marshes expand — and marshes themselves are very good at storing carbon.
“As the marsh grasses grow toward the reefs, they’ll also trap a lot of carbon,” Carroll said.
So Carroll and his students are helping the Georgia DNR build these reefs. Then, they’ll track how the shoreline changes and how much carbon it’s storing.
The project is funded by the environmental arm of Yamaha, the boat engine maker. The company, with manufacturing headquarters for the United States located in the Atlanta area, is looking for ways to offset its carbon impact, and a project on Georgia’s coast made sense, said sustainability program manager Josh Grier.
“It’s something that our customers who are out using our products can see,” he said. “Not only are we investigating how we could potentially sequester CO2, but also providing habitat for fish, you know, kind of giving back into the communities where our customers are using our products.”
Marine combustion — that is, ship and boat engines — produced 23.7 million metric tons, or MMT, of CO2 equivalent emissions in 2020, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. That accounts for a tiny fraction of overall transportation emissions, which were more than 1,500 MMT CO2-equivalent in 2020, mostly from roads.
Yamaha is funding similar research into oyster reefs and carbon sequestration in the Gulf of Mexico through Texas A&M University. The two projects could make for an interesting comparison, Grier said, because the Atlantic coast of Georgia and the Gulf coast of Texas differ a lot in their tides, salinity, and other factors that can influence oyster growth.
“They’re such different environments that we’re very curious to see kind of how the CO2 sequestration manifests itself over time,” Grier said.
Once researchers are able to quantify the carbon storage, Carroll said, he’s hopeful Yamaha and other companies will want to fund more oyster reefs.
“There’s lots of need,” he said. “It just boils down to having enough of the materials.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How much carbon can oysters store? Scientists are trying to find out. on Dec 7, 2023.
Fossil fuels usually suck up everyone’s attention at the annual United Nations’ climate summit. But at this year’s gathering in Dubai, COP28, another topic is generating headlines: food.
More than 130 countries signed a declaration on Friday saying that the world must transform its food systems, the source of one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions, “to respond to the imperatives of climate change.” On Saturday at the conference, the Biden administration announced a national strategy to reduce food waste, a huge emitter of methane. And on December 10, the U.N. is expected to call on countries that consume a lot of meat to eat less of it.
All this news comes after years of prodding from scientists and environmental advocates who say the only path to keep global warming below the Paris Agreement’s goal of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) is to do things like limit how much meat we eat in the U.S. and other beef-loving countries. (Livestock alone are responsible for about 15 percent of global climate pollution.)
The problem is that meat consumption is as politically polarizing as ever. Fox Business recently ran a headline saying world leaders planned to “declare a war on meat” at COP28. “They don’t want solutions, they want a sick, depressed populace,” television chef Andrew Gruel said on the social media platform X.
The political right is also taking aim at climate-friendly alternatives to meat, like cultivated chicken and beef, made from cells grown in labs. State legislators in Florida recently proposed a bill that would make selling cultivated meat a second-degree misdemeanor. In Europe the issue has been just as partisan. Italy’s right-wing government just banned the production and sale of cultivated meat, ostensibly to protect the country’s culinary heritage. And Germany’s far-right Alternative for Deutschland party has been drumming up fears that the left is coming for their fried cutlets. “They will not take away my schnitzel,” a party co-chair said at a campaign event this fall.
Some of the backlash is likely a result of lobbying by the meat and dairy industries and the proliferation of misinformation on social media. But no matter how good it might be for the planet to end factory farming and to stop converting forests into pastures, researchers say meat is inherently political.
“It’s a political relationship between our species and other species,” said Sparsha Saha, a political scientist who studies meat politics at Harvard University. “That’s what makes it a lot different. It’s not a technology.”
Technological solutions tend to be more popular than lifestyle ones, even though some researchers say both may be necessary to avert environmental catastrophe. According to a survey across 23 countries, people in every one but France showed more support for solving the climate crisis through technology and innovation than by changing how they live.
Saha’s research suggests that meat is even more polarizing than gas-guzzling cars. In a recent study published in the journal Frontiers, she found that voters are more likely to oppose candidates who advocate for curbing emissions by eating less meat than those who talk about the need to limit emissions from transportation.
“It’s like asking us to be a different kind of human,” Saha said. “I think that’s why people are so reticent about it. It is kind of a costly thing to bring up. Even as an academic, I have to be really thoughtful about how I’m framing things.”
To Saha, the solution isn’t to keep meat out of political conversation; it’s to talk about it differently and focus on building consensus. Rather than avoid the issue or pretend like it doesn’t have to be political, she thinks the meat-reduction movement would benefit from messaging supported by a broader coalition, including religious leaders, hunters, and even ranchers who oppose factory farming.
“If we had put more thought into how it could be communicated well to people ahead of time we might not be in this position,” Saha said. “It feels like it was sprung on people.”
Saha advises against “quiet meat politics,” an idea articulated in a piece published in 2021 by the Breakthrough Institute, an environmental research center in Berkeley, California. The author of the article, a researcher named Alex Smith, argued for an approach that “avoids political partisanship and culture warring in favor of creating a technological and infrastructural environment that can achieve long-term sustainable change.”
Smith wrote that plant-based burgers, like those made by Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat, have a lot of potential to replace animal products, and he predicted that more people would shift their diets if those alternatives — as well as “more futuristic” lab-grown meat — got cheaper.
Today, Smith is less optimistic. He told Grist he’s “wary of the possibility” that plant-based meat will ever meaningfully displace poultry and beef, and he noted that “we’re still so far from actually knowing the scalability, the actual potential of cultivated meat.” In his view, efforts to lower greenhouse gas emissions from farming can’t only focus on replacing beef. They have to include improving animal agriculture, like developing feed additives that reduce methane. Smith pushed back against the idea that making meat more central in our politics would convince people to eat less of it.
“There’s pleasure involved. There’s culture involved,” Smith said. “I’m relatively skeptical of the idea that we can divert people and push them ideologically, culturally talking-wise towards anything other than that.”
Saha’s paper offers some evidence for a different perspective. To her surprise, she found that voters were more receptive to a theoretical candidate who talked about animal rights than one who talked about the environmental costs of meat eating. That might signal that meat itself isn’t as divisive as some think. Perhaps it’s made more partisan through its connection to another polarizing issue: climate change.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline What would it take to end the meat culture wars? on Dec 7, 2023.
Even if you are not one of the 30 to 50 million people in the…
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According to a new report, an adjustment of three degrees Celsius to the standard temperature of frozen foods could lead to a yearly reduction in carbon emissions equal to taking 3.8 million automobiles off the road, while still maintaining food product safety, a press release from Cranfield University, which contributed to the research, said.
Academia and industry are calling for modification of the current standard temperature, which dates from the 1930s.
“Food saved is as important as food produced,” the report said. “12% of global food production is lost annually due to the lack of cold-chains. If saved, this is enough to feed one billion people a year.”
The report, Three Degrees of Change, by an international team of researchers proposes raising the frozen foods standard temperature from minus-18 degrees Celsius to minus-15 degrees Celsius.
“Cooling technologies, such as refrigeration, air conditioning and fans, currently account for more than 7% of all GHG emissions. It is estimated that these emissions could double by 2030 and possibly triple by 2100. Moreover, hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) are the fastest-growing source of GHG emissions in the world because of the increasing global demand for space cooling and refrigeration,” the report explained.
The findings of the study are scheduled to be discussed on December 10 at the United Nations COP28 climate conference on Food, Agriculture and Water day, the press release said.
“It is feasible to use freezing processes as a tool to ensure food safety as microorganisms are completely inactive below -12°C. Microbial growth, the cause of food-poisoning and spoilage, is not therefore an issue in frozen food,” the report said. “Agricultural production fluctuates with the yearly seasons, causing peaks and troughs in supply that result in associated periods of food abundance and scarcity. Freezing food provides a method for helping to smooth out the effect of this seasonality, reducing the risk of hunger in the off-season troughs through the safe storage of excess produce at times of peak supply.”
The temperature adjustment recommended by the report would save about 25 terawatt hours annually — equal to 8.63 percent of the amount of energy the United Kingdom uses each year.
“Additionally, freezing food can help stabilise the price of some products by reducing the influence of seasonal shortages or surpluses on the market; thereby making food potentially more affordable and accessible as well as reducing tensions that can lead to social and political instability,” the report said.
Experts say the new standard would allow for a change in storage practices and the transportation of frozen foods without compromising food quality or safety, according to the press release.
“Meeting the challenges within our global food supply chain demands innovative solutions that [bring] together environmental sustainability with food security,” said Dr. Natalia Falagan, Cranfield University senior lecturer in food science and technology, in the press release. “Cold chains stand as a critical pillar in guaranteeing access to safe and nutritious food and this initiative improves the resilience of food systems and contributes towards global food security, in addition to driving sustainability.”
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In metropolitan areas around the globe, public transportation is going greener. Many cities are working towards eliminating greenhouse gas emissions by transitioning away from fossil fuels — which are responsible for roughly 75% of climate warming GHGs — to renewable energy, and electrifying bus fleets is a priority.
Diesel exhaust from fossil fuel-powered buses contributes to poor air quality in cities, resulting in particulate pollution and the production of ground level ozone. According to Environmental America, replacing all diesel-powered transit buses in the country would eliminate over 2 million tons of GHG emissions every year. Luckily, as technology improves, electric buses are becoming a more feasible option for cities and school districts, with buses operable in different temperatures and topographic areas.
These five cities are among the many paving the way toward electric powered public transit for all.
An electric bus in Chicago, manufactured by Proterra. Regional Transportation Authority
The Chicago Transit Authority has made a big step toward its goal of transitioning to all-electric buses by 2040. In June, the CTA bought 22 new 40-foot buses, bringing the total number of electric buses on the Chicago streets to 47. The windy city has been a test of how battery-electric buses would work in very cold weather. Lithium-ion batteries aren’t as efficient in the cold and get drained much faster — the CTA reports that buses lose about 8% of their charge over 10 miles. Fast charging sites with roof plugins along bus routes have made electric buses possible despite the frigid winter weather.
Chicago’s entire fleet amounts to about 1,900 buses, so switching them out is no easy task — especially since each electric bus costs over $1 million. However, the CTA calculated that electric buses cost less to operate once they’re on the road, amounting to about $2.01 per mile compared to $3.08 for diesel buses. They report that they’ve been prioritizing electric bus services in neighborhoods with high levels of air pollution, which are often communities of color and lower income areas. This summer, the CTA began featuring all-electric buses along the #63 route that serves Chicago’s South Side.
The Mile High City has been cracking down on carbon emissions. In 2018, Denver replaced their entire Mallride fleet — the free buses that go through downtown Denver — with 36 zero-emission electric buses. The transition to electric hasn’t been easy, however — the city canceled an order for 17 new electric buses in April after determining that they didn’t have the space to charge and maintain them. In spite of the difficulties, the Regional Transportation District (RTD) has set a new goal of achieving net zero emissions by 2050.
Electric school buses are where Colorado — including Denver — has had great success. The state will soon double their electric school bus fleet using a mixture of federal and state funding, adding 67 new electric school buses to the 52 that have already been purchased. Denver Public Schools will receive some of the funds, as will schools in the Boulder Valley, Monte Vista, Poudre, and Steamboat Springs school districts.
An electric bus in downtown Boise, Idaho on June 19, 2022. Ac530 / CC BY-SA 4.0
Boise’s electric buses are superheroes in the community — literally. The Charging Champ, the Pollution Solution, the Clean Green Machine, and the Silent Rider take to the streets, their facades painted in comic book style designs. The Valley Regional Transit — which serves Boise and other communities in the Treasure Valley region — even made a comic book about the climate-change-fight buses who want to “stop smog in its tracks, and put an end to congestion once and for all.”
The Valley Regional Transit (VRT) doesn’t get state funding, so it relies on money from other agencies. The Idaho state legislature — which is 83% Republican — has presented barriers to getting electric buses on the road, and passed a law that restricts the use of property taxes to fund road construction and transportation costs. Despite the hurdles, the VRT is working to switch out their 54 diesel vehicles with electric. So far they have 12 on the road, 4 of which are the iconic superheroes. They hope that the flashy design — rather than the typical ad-splattered sides of buses — will entice more people to choose to ride the bus, combatting the high congestion and air pollution in the area.
King County Metro was an early adopter of electric buses, and is moving towards a renewable energy-powered fleet by 2035 starting with its 40 electric buses currently in service. In a city on the water, however, there’s also maritime travel to consider. Washington State Ferries are the largest emitters of greenhouse gases in the state transportation system. Hybrid ferries are getting phased in starting in 2023, with the goal of reducing carbon emissions on the water by 76%.
Seattle’s big electric initiative is with Amtrak, which is rolling out its first electric bus. Soon, it’ll run on the very popular Cascades line between Bellingham and Seattle, replacing one of the diesel-powered buses used for this purpose. The bus will be able to make the whole journey on a single charge — an impressive feat for a 200-mile round trip.
An electric New York City bus participates in the Hometown Heroes tickertape parade on Broadway in honor of essential workers who endured the COVID-19 pandemic, on July 7, 2021. Metropolitan Transportation Authority
8.5 million is a lot of people to move, but if anyone is up to the task, it’s New York. Home to the largest public bus system in North America, 60 battery electric buses total are entering service in the city in 2023, and further infrastructure will be installed at 5 depots. Between 2025 and 2026, the MTA plans to enter 470 more electric buses into service, with the goal of all 5,800 of the city’s buses transitioning to electric by 2040. It’s estimated that this transition would avoid emitting 500,000 metric tons of CO2 yearly, helping with statewide efforts to reduce carbon emissions.
The current 2020-2024 capital plan has over $1 billion allocated to electric buses. In a city where daily ridership of subways and buses is 3.6 million, the transition would make the MTA’s electric fleet the largest of its kind in North America. Buses have less ridership than subways, but they’re still an efficient way to travel — bus improvements and new lines have recently been deemed the cheapest and most efficient way to reach LaGuardia airport (over subways), so the city will be in need of more buses than ever.
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According to a new report led by professor Tim Lenton from the University of Exeter’s Global Systems Institute, in collaboration with more than 200 researchers worldwide, Earth’s climate has already warmed enough that humans are at risk of triggering five global “tipping points” that could have disastrous effects on the planet.
If the world warms more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the likelihood of breaching these tipping points increases, as does the chance of crossing others, reported New Scientist.
“Triggering one tipping point could trigger another in a kind of dangerous domino effect,” Lenton said, as New Scientist reported.
The report, Global Tipping Points, was assembled by researchers in 26 countries from more than 90 organizations.
Lenton referred to a tipping point — a slight change in a system that causes drastic changes that are difficult to reverse or are even irreversible due to an intensifying feedback loop — as akin to leaning backwards in a chair.
The five tipping points laid out in the report are: the melting of the ice sheets in West Antarctica and Greenland; the rapid thawing of large swaths of Arctic permafrost; the slowing of the North Atlantic subpolar gyre; and tropical coral reef die-off.
“[T]hese tipping points in the Earth system could, in turn, trigger damaging tipping points in societies, things like food security crises, mass displacement and conflicts. Stopping these threats is possible, but it’s going to require urgent global action,” Lenton said, as reported by WION.
The North Atlantic subpolar gyre is an important circular ocean current associated with the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC), New Scientist said. AMOC is a large system of currents that circulates water in a long cycle from north to south within the Atlantic Ocean, bringing warmth and nutrients to parts of the planet.
According to David Armstrong McKay, a research impact fellow at the University of Exeter, there is evidence that the subpolar gyre could slow down or stop sooner than AMOC.
“[The slowing of the subpolar gyre] could happen within about 10 years. It would have pretty major impacts across both sides of the Atlantic,” McKay said, according to New Scientist. “It would cause regional cooling and affect agriculture in Europe and North America, and change the patterns of extreme weather events.”
Manjana Milkoreit, who contributed to the report and is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oslo, said if we want to stop some of these tipping points, we need to do it right away.
“For some tipping points, we have a very short window for preventive action open right now which might close as soon as the 2030s,” Milkoreit said, as New Scientist reported. “We think that the prevention of Earth system tipping points should be the core objective of governance efforts because of the scale and severity of the threats that they represent, their cascading potential and the irreversibility of many tipping processes on relevant human timescales.”
The collapse of fisheries and the die-off of mangrove forests and seagrass meadows are some of the other tipping points.
The report points out that whether or not some systems have tipping points, how far off they are and what the potential impacts would be remains unclear.
Milkoreit emphasized that reducing and eliminating greenhouse gas emissions as quickly as possible is still the best way to limit global heating and reduce the chances of triggering these dangerous tipping points. Additional actions like stopping Amazon deforestation would also help, Milkoreit said.
“Even with a profound acceleration of action, some Earth system tipping points may be unavoidable,” Lenton pointed out. “But still there are things we can do to mitigate the risk they pose by reducing the vulnerability of people to the impacts coming from them.”
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Impossible Foods, Inc., a company known for its plant-based burgers, is adding hot dogs to its lineup starting in 2024. Some New Yorkers will be able to try them this month before they officially hit stores.
The plant-based hot dogs will be the company’s first new product of 2024, although the exact date that this product will be available in restaurants and grocery stores has yet to be revealed.
Impossible’s hot dogs have half the amount of total fat and saturated fat compared to a top beef hot dog brand found in restaurants, according to a company press release. The hot dogs also contain 12 grams of plant-based protein.
The company says that these hot dogs are not made with added or synthetic nitrates or nitrites like some hot dogs made from animals, although they do contain natural nitrates and nitrites from cultured celery powder.
Nitrates and nitrates are naturally occurring in soil and plants but are sometimes added in food processing as preservatives, according to the European Food Information Council (EUFIC). Excessive nitrate levels may limit how red blood cells transport oxygen and may contribute to nitrosamine formation; some nitrosamine compounds may be carcinogenic. Nitrates and nitrites may convert to nitrosamines when cooked at high heat, Healthline reports.
In addition to creating a plant-based alternative to animal-based hot dogs that is lower in fats and high in protein, Impossible Foods says the new hot dog product will be more sustainable compared to hot dogs made from animals. According to the company, the hot dogs are responsible for 84% less emissions, and require 77% less water and 83% less land compared to producing a beef hot dog.
“Hot dogs are an undeniably classic part of American culture and not to mention, they’re a burger’s best friend. It’s long been a priority to add them to our product portfolio,” Peter McGuinness, CEO and president of Impossible Foods, said in a statement. “Our adaptation replicates that quintessential hot dog taste, while offering consumers a nutrient-dense product that’s better for the planet. We want people to see that there’s really no compromise when you choose Impossible products.”
The Impossible Hot Dogs will be joining several other existing meatless items, such as Impossible beef, beef lite, meatballs, spicy chicken nuggets, and patties, regular chicken nuggets and patties, and chicken tenders, all made with plant-based ingredients.
Although the hot dogs won’t be available for purchase at restaurants and grocery stores until next year, Impossible Foods is hosting a pop-up in Midtown New York City on Dec. 16 from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. EST for those who want to preview the product early. Impossible will be giving away its plant-based hot dogs for free, while supplies last. Anyone interested in trying the product can follow along on the company’s Instagram for the pop-up address details.
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As negotiators at the COP28 climate summit in Dubai debate calls for a global phaseout of fossil fuels, a record number of fossil fuel lobbyists have filled the gathering’s hallways and conference rooms: More than 2,400 conference delegates have ties to the fossil fuel industry, according to a new report from Kick Big Polluters Out, a global coalition of more than 450 nonprofits and advocacy organizations that oppose the fossil fuel industry’s influence on climate policy. The data is only available thanks to new transparency requirements adopted by the United Nations at the behest of climate advocates, who have argued that the fossil fuel industry takes advantage of lax reporting standards to push its agenda at the annual COPs.
The sheer number of lobbyists at the conference — about 1 lobbyist for every 40 attendees overall — has disturbed many activists and world leaders pushing for a fossil fuel phaseout. But just as concerning is how little information is available about why these lobbyists come to Dubai. They gain access to the conference under the auspices of national governments that invite them, trade groups that represent their financial interests, and business organizations that their companies are members of, but it’s difficult to know exactly how they try to influence the talks once they arrive. Organizers with Kick Big Polluters Out say that lobbyists use their association with nondescript-sounding trade groups to hide their direct advocacy on behalf of oil, gas, and other industries.
“For us, this undue influence constitutes a form of corruption and should be much better regulated,” said Brice Böhmer, the climate and environment lead at Transparency International, a German anti-corruption organization founded by former World Bank employees. “This is urgent, as it has been delaying and diverting climate ambition and action.”
Many fossil fuel advocates identified in the report are attending as part of national government delegations, and some even work for state-owned corporations that produce oil and gas. More than a dozen members of the Kuwaiti delegation, for instance, are affiliated with the Kuwait National Petroleum Company, an oil refiner owned by the Kuwaiti government. The delegation from Botswana, meanwhile, includes four representatives who are affiliated with a large coal mine that is jointly owned by the Botswanan government and the De Beers diamond company.
A large number of lobbyists are arriving at COP28 with “host country badges,” indicating they are attending as guests of the United Arab Emirates itself. The president of COP28, Sultan Ahmed Al-Jaber, is also the head of the Emirati oil company Adnoc, and several other representatives from that company are attending under host badges. The host country guests also include senior executives from oil field company Baker Hughes, the petrochemical company Oxy, and Saudi Arabia’s state-owned energy company, which refines and exports the country’s vast oil reserves. Perhaps the most notable member of the host delegation is Darren Woods, the CEO of ExxonMobil, who has touted the company’s hydrogen and carbon capture investments while at the conference.
Activists argue that, even when fossil fuel interests are not invited at the behest of national governments, they can disguise their large presence at COP talks by sending their members under a variety of different trade groups and organizations, rather than sponsoring their own delegations. ExxonMobil, for instance, has at least 17 representatives at COP28 other than Woods, but they are all enrolled under groups such as the United States Council for International Business and the International Council of Chemical Associations.
As the trade groups tell it, they’re trying to give their member companies a voice in complex negotiations. Many such trade groups arrive at COP with a list of actions or goals they’d like to see implemented. The United States Council for International Business, for instance, sent an open letter to U.S. climate envoy John Kerry last month that outlined its agenda for the conference. The letter promised that the group would “engage constructively” in talks about how to measure and enforce net-zero pledges, but it also noted that the group was “concerned” that enforcement of those pledges “risks producing a chilling effect on future voluntary climate action initiatives.”
In the eyes of groups like Kick Big Polluters Out, this amounts to deception — after all, the group’s membership includes Shell, BP, and ExxonMobil.
“Trade associations have always been one of the primary ways big polluters influence these negotiations,” said Rachel Rose Jackson, a researcher at the nonprofit Corporate Accountability. “They provide a direct route for them to influence the talks without having to be super clear about who they are.”
The largest and most influential of these trade groups, with 116 representatives, is the International Emissions Trading Association, or IETA, which touts itself as “a nonprofit business group championing the power of high integrity markets to reach net-zero targets.” The group advocates for the creation of markets that allow countries and companies to buy, sell, and trade carbon offsets to neutralize their own emissions. This carbon accounting is at the heart of many “net zero” emissions pledges, in which a company such as an airline will pay someone to undertake an activity that reduces atmospheric carbon — for instance, by protecting an endangered forest from logging — as a way of canceling out the emissions of the jet fuel it burns to fly its planes.
Among the members of the IETA delegation this year are representatives from BP, Shell, the French oil giant TotalEnergies, and the Norwegian state-owned oil company Equinor. It’s not just oil majors, either: Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Volkswagen, and the Anglo-Australian mining conglomerate Rio Tinto are also attending under IETA’s aegis.
The fact that so many fossil fuel advocates are attending the conference under the auspices of IETA may be a sign that industry interests see carbon markets as an important part of their long-term business strategy. The creation of a voluntary trading system for carbon offsets would ease some pressure on these companies to reduce their direct greenhouse gas emissions. But new research has cast doubt on the validity of the carbon offsets that sustain these markets: According to one estimate, more than 90 percent of the rainforest conservation credits issued by the carbon market company Verra may not exist at all.
IETA was founded in 1999 by a group of firms that included multiple oil majors, notably BP, and today it is funded by several dozen banks, oil companies, and other large corporations. It now has hundreds of members including Chevron, ExxonMobil, the mining conglomerate Glencore, and livestock giant Cargill. The association describes itself as a “purely business” lobbying effort, but Corporate Accountability says it “exists to ensure that climate policies don’t negatively impact the profits of Big Polluters.”
A spokesperson for IETA declined to discuss the identity of individual delegation members.
This is far from the first time that IETA has dominated a U.N. climate conference. In 2005, it sent more than 400 delegates to the conference in Montreal at a time when the average size of a government delegation was just 22 members. In turn, IETA emerged with a big victory as countries agreed to formalize a carbon-trading scheme. Andrei Marcu, an early president and CEO of IETA, advised the national delegation of Panama at COP23 in 2017, attempting to influence the country’s engagement in climate talks even as he also pushed the interests of big oil companies. And at the 2019 conference in Madrid, the body sent 129 delegates, some of whom handed out pins that said, “All I want for Christmas is Article 6,” referring to an item in the Paris agreement that lays the groundwork for a global carbon market.
The stakes at COP28 are high. After years of work, negotiators hope to reach a global consensus about what offset projects should count under the U.N.’s Article 6 carbon market and about how to monitor the long-term success of offset projects. In a position paper released ahead of the summit, the IETA noted that this year’s Article 6 negotiations presented “the opportunity to avoid extreme politicization and focus on key decisions.”
Bohmer, of Transparency International, said that the new reporting requirements will make this year’s COP somewhat more transparent than previous ones, but he argued that there’s still room for lobbyists to push their own agendas at the talks.
“Some of the requirements are optional and declarative,” he said of the new standards. “This is far from a framework allowing the detection and management of conflicts of interest.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Why are there so many fossil fuel lobbyists at COP28? on Dec 6, 2023.
It couldn’t be simpler. Cherry tomatoes go into a baking dish with olive oil, salt, and pepper — and at the center of it all, a full block of creamy, salty feta cheese. Into the oven it goes to get all melty and roasty and delicious. Then add garlic, fresh basil, and cooked pasta, and you’ve got dinner.
That recipe, originally by Finnish blogger Jenni Häyrinen, took off on TikTok and sparked a feta craze that has affected real-world demand and supply — so much so that the New York Times dubbed the phenomenon “the TikTok feta effect.” Stores couldn’t keep it on shelves, and cheesemakers expanded production to keep up. Häyrinen wrote that feta sales went up 300 percent in Finland after she first posted the recipe in 2019.
#FetaPasta has racked up 1.4 billion views on TikTok as of this writing, with droves of users recreating the viral recipe and adding their own twists. As a casual TikTok user, I have watched the yearslong feta obsession, and similar fads like the recent unlikely rise of cottage cheese, and wondered: Could the platform’s power to influence food trends help inspire a shift toward more climate-friendly eating? Could a humble vegetable — or better yet, a low-impact, vegan protein or a perennial grain — experience the TikTok feta effect?
TikTok creator Max La Manna is a low-waste, plant-based chef with about 150,000 followers on the platform. I asked him what made the feta recipe so successful, and what he thinks about when trying to make his recipes take off on the platform.
“There’s a multitude of different variables that come into play to make a video successful,” La Manna said. One factor he nods to is the ability to capture a viewer’s attention quickly. On TikTok, a user might scroll from a recipe to a makeup tutorial to a montage of funny cats, all in the span of seconds. Creators are trying more and more to hook people in during the very first few seconds of a video, La Manna said. “It’s all these components. It’s the delivery, it’s what’s being filmed, it’s how it’s being filmed.” And, he adds, the personality of the host or creator also plays a big role in how people will respond to a given video.
Screenshots from a video where Max La Manna demonstrates a pasta recipe starring broccoli, kale, and herbs — stems and all. Max La Manna
Cooking videos are, in many ways, perfectly suited to these aspects of TikTok’s ethos. The great appeal of the TikTok cooking video is that it invites you into another person’s kitchen and shows you, in quick-moving steps, exactly how something is made. If that something is an easy, low-effort dish using ingredients you can get at the supermarket — like feta or cottage cheese — all the better. In describing the proliferation of the feta pasta, the New York Times noted that “the videos are just as likely to be made by influencers as by teenagers without large followings.”
Of course, another factor is that the dish in question has to actually be appetizing. When I asked Katie Burdett, a farmer and recipe creator with 350,000 TikTok followers, about the success of the feta pasta, she noted simply, “You know, feta baked down with herbs and tomatoes is really good.” (I’ve tried it. It is good.)
Still, it’s famously impossible to predict, or control, what trend or ingredient or single piece of content is going to go viral. “I’ve been lucky to have many viral videos, and sometimes they’re confounding to me,” Burdett said. One of her most popular formats is ASMR harvest videos. Her recipes haven’t tended to perform quite as well, and she suspects part of the reason is that the algorithm likes to see her staying in one lane.
TikTok also has features that can quickly amplify momentum and lift up some surprising things. Copycats and reaction videos or “duets” can turn a minor trend into a sensation as other creators try to piggyback on something that is already working. “When one viewer, one creator sees a video doing well, then they try to spin off of that and make something,” La Manna said. “‘Oh, that cheese video did really well. I’m gonna do something similar that’s using cheese.’” It happens a lot with cooking videos, because creators can also add their own flare to a trending recipe.
In a way, the feta effect may be a combination of creator skill, luck, and a volume game. More videos = more chances for one to take off. In that case, the odds of a shortage-inducing craze for a vegetable or other climate-friendly food are rising every day, thanks to the growth of plant-based creators on TikTok — a trend in and of itself.
However, both Burdett and La Manna offered that in hunting for a climate-friendly food sensation, I may be asking the wrong question altogether.
That ability of viral videos to inspire people to try new things is a positive, Burdett believes — and there’s no reason that couldn’t happen for low-impact ingredients. But, she added, as a farmer, she has concerns about the pendulum swing of food trends. Many crops take a long time to grow or produce, and farmers often plan several years in advance. If and when a fad fades, it can pose problems for producers, she said. “I hope that there’s not an overcorrection on the side of a maker, then, who … makes a lot of investments in their infrastructure or livestock or all different kinds of things, and then the next year that trend’s over.”
Rather than trying to increase consumption of a particular food, climate-friendly TikTokkers may prefer to help people reduce overconsumption. “I think that I am seeing more of a trend from a lot of the food content creators leaning more in a sustainable direction,” Burdett said.
Many of her recipe videos focus on seasonal eating and how to use up the harvest. That seasonality is one thing that sets fruits and vegetables apart from ingredients like feta — some veggies do, in a sense, go viral when their moment arrives. “That’s mostly when I hear from people,” Burdett said. “‘Oh my God, I have way too much zucchini. And I don’t want it to go to waste, I put all this time and energy and money into growing this and so, like, help.’” She enjoys that back-and-forth with her followers and the opportunity to offer recipes for specific scenarios. “I think that it can be really important to use that platform to give people resources to empower them,” she said.
Katie Burdett with a lettuce harvest from her home garden in Michigan. Courtesy of Katie Burdett
La Manna echoes that sentiment, and emphasizes the importance of cooking resourcefully and using up what you have — not only to avoid food waste, but also to avoid wasting money. He recently published a cookbook, You Can Cook This!, inspired by two years’ worth of asking his digital community about the ingredients they most often throw away. The book focuses on 30 of the most commonly trashed ingredients, from broccoli stems to bagged leafy greens, and offers recipes to keep them from going to waste. If one of these recipes were to “go viral,” we would never see its ingredients fly off the shelves as feta has done — that’s the opposite of the point.
All that said, if La Manna had to nominate one ingredient to be the next feta, his candidate is stale bread. From breakfast (french toast!) to dessert (bread pudding!), old bread has tons of easy and potentially viral uses that ought to keep it out of the compost bin, he said — it can thicken sauces, it can replace nuts in a pesto, it can even be the base for a hearty and thrifty soup. “Let’s make stale bread sexy.”
— Claire Elise Thompson
Andrée Nieuwjaer, a resident of Roubaix, France, poses in front of her pantry filled with reusable glass jars of staple foods, holding a sponge she made out of potato bags. Nieuwjaer’s household is one of 800 to participate in a program called Roubaix Zéro Déchet, or “Zero-Waste Roubaix” — an educational initiative that gives residents tools to reduce their household waste. In a story published today, Nieuwjaer told Grist’s Joseph Winters that she would be eating for free all winter, with imperfect or slightly-past-its-prime produce she sourced for free and then preserved. She estimates that she saves around 3,000 euros a year from her waste-reduction efforts.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline TikTok made cottage cheese cool. Can it do the same for climate-friendly eating? on Dec 6, 2023.
