In a first-of-its-kind hearing, small island nations disproportionately affected by the climate crisis are taking high-emitting countries to court. The suit is being viewed as the first climate justice case with the goal of protecting the ocean.
The prime ministers of the islands of Barbuda and Tuvalu, acting as representatives of Small Island States on Climate Change and International Law (COSIS), are presenting evidence at the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea in Hamburg, Germany. They are seeking an advisory opinion on what obligations countries have to safeguard the marine environment in the face of climate change.
The tribunal will also consider if carbon and other greenhouse gases that are absorbed by the ocean should be included in marine pollution, reported Reuters.
“We come here seeking urgent help, in the strong belief that international law is an essential mechanism for correcting the manifest injustice that our people are suffering as a result of climate change,” said Prime Minister of Tuvalu Kausea Natano, as Reuters reported.
Too much carbon in the ocean leads to acidification and coral bleaching. Low-lying island nations also face the threat of sea level rise, which could submerge them by 2100.
The opinion of the tribunal will not be legally binding, but present an authoritative legal statement for future guidance to countries in formulating laws regarding climate protection.
Natano said Tuvalu had not received any help despite seeking it for decades, reported The New York Times.
The prime minister said the island “will become mostly uninhabitable, if not inundated, in the next few decades. More than 10,000 people will be forced to leave,” The New York Times reported.
The Paris Agreement requires nations to reduce their emissions and states the objective of limiting global heating to well below two degrees Celsius, but countries are allowed to formulate their own plans of action to meet these goals.
Estimates have suggested that half of Funafuti, the capital of Tuvalu, will become flooded by mid-century, reported The Guardian.
“Extreme weather events, which grow in number and intensity with each passing year, are killing our people and destroying our infrastructure. Entire marine and coastal ecosystems are dying in waters that are becoming warmer and more acidic,” Natano said, as The Guardian reported.
Natano said he had confidence in international tribunals and courts not allowing climate change threats to his island to continue unabated.
“Some of these states will become uninhabitable in a generation and many will be submerged under the sea. This is an attempt to use all the tools available to force major polluters to change course while they still can,” said Payam Akhavan, lead counsel and chair of legal experts for COSIS, as reported by The Guardian.
Cows are often described as climate-change criminals because of how much planet-warming methane they burp. But there’s another problem with livestock farming that’s even worse for the climate and easier to overlook: To feed the world’s growing appetite for meat, corporations and ranchers are chopping down more forests and trampling more carbon-sequestering grasslands to make room for pastures and fields of hay. Ruminants, like cattle, sheep, and goats, need space to graze, and animal feed needs space to grow. The greenhouse gases unleashed by this deforestation and land degradation mean food systems account for one-third of the world’s human-generated climate pollution.
Environmental advocates have long argued that there’s a straightforward solution to this mess: Eat less meat. Convincing more people to become vegetarians is a very effective way to limit emissions. Getting rid of meat is one question; replacing it is another. A paper published on Tuesday seeks to address both, finding that giving up meat in favor of meat-like plant products would yield significant benefits for the climate, biodiversity, and even food security in coming decades.
Swapping 50 percent of the world’s beef, chicken, pork, and milk consumption with plant-based alternatives by mid-century could effectively halt the ecological destruction associated with farming, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, China, and Southeast Asia, according to the study in Nature Communications. Such a dietary shift could also lead to a 31 percent reduction in agricultural greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, the study found. That’s the equivalent of not burning 1.8 trillion pounds of coal each year between 2020 and 2050.
Climate policies and investment focus heavily on fossil fuels and the energy sector, but slashing agricultural emissions is also crucial to keeping planetary warming below catastrophic levels, said Lini Wollenberg, the study’s co-author.
“There’s enough evidence to show that if we don’t shift our diets, then we will not meet the 1.5 degree Celsius target by 2100,” said Wollenberg, who researches climate change and food systems at CGIAR and the University of Vermont. “Agriculture has to be addressed.”
Most of the emissions saved by a shift to plant-based foods, like oat milk and Impossible Burgers, would come from staving off agricultural expansion and preserving land. Under a model that assumes the status quo continues, demand for meat would continue to rise globally, and overall land devoted to agriculture would grow by 4 percent — 219 million hectares, about seven times the size of Germany — by 2050. But if people replace half of the meat and milk that they eat with analogs made from plants over the same time period, land used for feeding and keeping livestock would shrink by 12 percent — 653 million hectares, roughly twice the size of India. Sparing that land also would help limit biodiversity loss and conserve water, the researchers found.
“It was interesting to see how powerful this dietary change can be and to see all these impacts across the spectrum of sustainability outcomes or objectives,” said Marta Kozicka, an agricultural economist at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria and the paper’s lead author.
The study doesn’t provide a detailed roadmap for overhauling the world’s diet. The United Nations projects that people around the world will be eating 14 percent more meat in 2030. Even as plant-based foods take up more shelf space at grocery stores in the United States than they did five years ago, the foods still make up less than 2 percent of the meat sold in the United States (though a bit more – 15 percent – of the country’s milk).
The paper’s authors acknowledge that replacing half the world’s meat and milk consumption by 2050 “will be challenging and may require a range of technological and policy interventions,” though they conclude that such a scenario “is a realistic one, especially if the novel plant-based alternatives may be combined with traditional plant-based products and other novel meat substitutes, whether cell-based or insect-based.”
Raychel Santo, a food and climate researcher at the World Resources Institute who was not involved in the study, pointed to three areas where people are working to help ease global demand for meat: getting public schools, prisons, and other institutions to substitute meat on their menus with more climate-friendly options; adding labels to food products to indicate their carbon (or methane) footprints; and increasing public funding for research and development of alternative proteins.
“Right now there is very limited public investment in alternative proteins,” Santo said, noting that other climate solutions, like renewable energy and electric cars, have gotten considerably more financial backing from the U.S. government. Santo called the goal of cutting the planet’s meat consumption in half by 2050 a “tall order,” but she also pointed out that previous research has found that just lowering the consumption of ruminant meat alone could halt agricultural expansion and deforestation. That leaves room for replacing red meat with chicken — a shift that many Americans have made in recent decades, mostly due to health concerns.
Some advocates hope that advances in technologies like fermentation and cultivated meat will help displace demand for animal flesh. Chicken patties grown in labs may pick up where beet-bleeding burgers left off.
“Writing off alternative proteins today would be like writing off solar power in the 1980s or writing off electric vehicles in the early 2000s,” said Emma Ignaszewski, associate director at the Good Food Institute, a think tank that promotes meat and dairy alternatives, in an email to Grist. “Transforming the $1 trillion dollar global meat market will take time and continued innovation. Getting to 50 percent market share by 2050 would be a moonshot. But by no means would it be impossible.”
Once a native species of Florida, American flamingos mostly disappeared in the state due to hunting around the turn of the twentieth century. These days they are mostly found in the Caribbean and Central and South America.
Recently, the exotic birds — whose pink feathers come from their diet of brine shrimp and algae containing carotenoids — have made their way into Florida, the Carolinas and as far north as Ohio, Kentucky and Pennsylvania after being blown off course by last month’s Hurricane Idalia.
“The flamingos were just hanging out and sleeping in about a foot of water near the shore,” said Jacob Roalef, a birdwatching guide from Ohio, as CNN reported. “They would wake up and drink some water or look up if a gull flew overhead.”
According to eyewitnesses, some of the flamingos in Florida appear to have come from the Yucatán peninsula, reported The Guardian.
“They continue to pop-up along the Gulf, including here in Treasure Island. They were brought in from Cuba on the back-end of Hurricane #Idalia. Be on the lookout this weekend if you’re going to the beach, might be lucky enough to see a few!” Matt Devitt, chief meteorologist at WINK News in Southwest Florida posted on X.
“It’s a special experience because… after a while, you get used to seeing all the common birds that are here; so to see something different is really uplifting,” said retired U.S. Army doctor Loren Erickson, as The Virginian-Pilot reported.
Nate Swick, digital communications manager for the American Birding Association, said it was likely that the flamingos were swept up by Hurricane Idalia, reported NPR. Swick said, while it was a “fairly common phenomenon,” it’s not something that typically happened with flamingos.
“We’re seeing flamingos all over the place. We’re seeing them in places that we didn’t expect them,” Swick said, according to NPR.
Swick explained that the rare birds might have gotten caught up in the winds of the storm in the Yucatán or while they were flying to Cuba, or in its eye and went with it until it calmed down.
“We have never seen anything like this,” said Jerry Lorenz, the state director of research for Audubon Florida, as CNN reported. “We will get a flamingo or two following storms [but] this is really unprecedented.”
Cory Christopher, Cincinnati Nature Center’s director of conservation, told a local outlet that the flamingos will likely be able to make their way home, reported The Guardian.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) announced that new small-scale solar capacity, or rooftop solar capacity, in the U.S., reached a new high in 2022. The administration estimated that 6.4 gigawatts (GW) of rooftop solar capacity was added last year, the most ever added in a single year.
Since EIA started publishing updates in small-scale solar capacity in 2014, capacity increased from a total of 7.3 GW to 39.5 GW in 2022. About one-third of all solar capacity in the U.S. is small-scale solar, defined as solar power systems with less than 1 megawatt (MW) capacity.
According to the administration, capacity from residential rooftop solar panels makes up the most of total small-scale solar capacity in the country.
“Tax credits and incentives, public policy, and higher retail electricity prices have encouraged the growth of small-scale solar capacity over the past decade. Falling solar panel costs have also played a significant role,” EIA shared on its website.
Newly installed small-scale solar is increasing particularly in California, which has the largest amount of small-scale solar (14.2 GW) in the U.S., about 36%. This can be attributed to the climate of the area as well as the state’s Building Energy Efficiency Standards (Energy Code), which requires newly constructed single-family and multifamily homes that are one to three stories to install solar panels. California also has plenty of incentives, like rebate programs and tax exemptions, that lower the average cost for homeowners to convert to solar power.
New York and New Jersey also have higher shares of small-scale solar capacity in the U.S., at 2.6 GW and 2.4 GW respectively, followed closely by Texas (2.2 GW) and Arizona (2.1 GW). But when considering small-scale solar capacity per capita, Hawaii takes the lead with 541 watts per capita. California follows with 364 watts per capita.
“A large share of Hawaii’s electricity has historically come from oil-fired power plants. These plants rely on expensive fuel imports, resulting in high electricity bills,” EIA stated. “As solar panel costs have fallen, many homes and businesses in Hawaii have added solar panels, reducing their electricity bills and helping the state work toward its target to generate 100% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2045.”
Increasing small-scale solar capacity accompanies growing utility-scale electric-generating solar capacity in the U.S. Earlier this year, EIA predicted that 54% of new electric-generating capacity in the U.S. could come from solar power. Additionally, 2023 could see the highest amount of utility-scale solar capacity to be added in a single year.
When Mike Quigley heard about a new energy transmission line the federal government was considering from Arizona to California in 2018, his feelings were mixed. Quigley serves as the Arizona state director of the conservation organization The Wilderness Society, and supports looking to public lands for the multiple roles they can play in addressing climate change. So in 2018, he supported a shift toward renewables to fight climate change. But the proposed transmission route bisected a wildlife refuge that offered important habitat to several desert species, and also threatened a beloved canyon.
This was a problem. To him, the role of public lands in the climate fight goes beyond their renewable energy potential, or reducing the oil, gas and coal emissions that stem from them. Quigley says healthy public lands naturally clean air and water, support natural carbon storage, and help buffer communities against both the physical and emotional impacts of living with climate change.
And he wasn’t the only one concerned. Officials said the 500kV powerline was needed to connect substations in Tonopah, Arizona, and Blythe, California, in order to provide more renewable energy in the Southwest. But the 125-mile Ten West Link electrical transmission line initially faced significant opposition because of its preliminary proposed route, which cut through Johnson Canyon and the Kofa National Wildlife Refuge near Yuma, Arizona.
Kofa National Wildlife Refuge. Mason Cummings
The 665,400-acre refuge offered crucial habitat for endangered species between the Kofa Mountains and Castle Dome Mountains. Among them were the Sonoran pronghorn antelope. In the early 2000s, “you could count on both hands the number of Sonoran pronghorn left in the United States,” Quigley says.
Since then a successful breeding program had built the population back up. It worked particularly well in the Kofa refuge, where mountain lions were a less prevalent predator than in other areas. Other wildlife, like the desert horned lizard, red-spotted toad, desert iguana, chuckwalla, the elusive Gila monster, and the western diamondback rattlesnake, were among the 702 different species of animals and plants officially found within Kofa. Migratory birds such as white-winged doves, cactus wrens, northern flickers, canyon towhees, Gambel’s quails, and golden eagles would also pass through the refuge in significant numbers in spring and fall.
Hikers and birdwatchers came out in force to see the migrations. The local community worried that the project would harm tourism to the desert region. JC Sanders, a retiree and off-highway vehicle enthusiast, was among those concerned. Sanders particularly loved taking his all-terrain vehicle on Kofa’s open travel routes and through the nearby Johnson Canyon. “It gives populations like me, the elderly, an opportunity to see isolated areas and the animals,” he says. “Bighorn sheep have very little fear of vehicles out there in the wilderness.”
A series of public meetings revealed deep community opposition to the project. Sanders is vice-chair of the Arizona Peace Trail, a coalition of 14 Southwestern off-highway vehicle groups advocating for a 675-mile trail from Bullhead City to Yuma. He and his counterparts met multiple times with the project engineers, even taking them to the prized Johnson Canyon site.
A group of off-highway vehicle enthusiasts at the Kofa National Wildlife Refuge. Mason Cummings
To overcome the impasse, The Wilderness Society, federal agencies, and locals worked together to identify an alternative route for the transmission line along Interstate 10. A conservation nonprofit called the Sonoran Institute, which had been trying to identify promising energy corridors, had previously studied this route. It runs parallel with I-10 along the West-wide Energy Corridor to avoid Kofa, then joins an existing power line route once it gets west of the wildlife refuge.
This new path avoids environmentally sensitive areas like the Kofa refuge, recreation areas, populated regions, significant cultural resources, and the Colorado River Indian Tribes reservation. As an added bonus, it utilizes existing infrastructure, minimizing the project’s environmental impact. “It fulfills its primary purpose of taking non-carbon-emitting energy to market, and it does it in the least environmentally damaging way possible,” Quigley says. “This is an example of how that can work in practice.”
The project broke ground this spring, with Vice President Kamala Harris and other federal officials in attendance. Power is expected down the line by 2024.
While the new route may be slightly less direct, it will likely save money by avoiding litigation when a project is publicly opposed, says Justin Meuse, The Wilderness Society’s director of government relations for climate and energy. He says the Ten West Link project shows it is possible to responsibly develop renewable energy projects and transmission on public lands by ensuring meaningful public participation from the outset.
Vice President Kamala Harris receives a briefing at the groundbreaking ceremony of the Ten West Link transmission line. AP
Sanders, a retired civil engineer himself, says maintaining good relationships between officials, groups, and members of the public is key to working out mutually agreeable solutions. “Rather than standing up and opposing a proposal, get to know the people and let them know what your specific concerns are,” he says. “Work on alternatives — help them out. Help them achieve the ultimate goal. Public involvement is critical on any project like this.”
The ultimate goal, environmental experts explain, is to bring more decarbonized energy online— without replicating some of the environmental injustices practiced by the fossil fuel industries. “We want to reach our clean energy future, but we don’t want to repeat the mistakes of the past,” Meuse says, particularly when it comes to community involvement.
That means providing sufficient time for public comment periods for proposed projects, Meuse says. In his experience, a standard 45-day public comment period often passes without communities or neighborhoods even knowing it has opened.
Longer response times are “worth it in the long run,” he says. “You see a lot of the discourse about community opposition to wind and solar site location that could be addressed with more time to comment—and early and effective outreach—rather than just jamming the project through.”
Advocates believe that the positive solutions found for Ten West Link can be replicated elsewhere. The Biden administration, for instance, is currently updating and expanding a plan for solar in the western United States that was developed in 2012. When complete, the plan could incorporate an additional five states, and focus on identifying low-conflict areas for development based on wildlife habitat, distance from cultural resources, and proximity to existing infrastructure.
The 200-megawatt Dry Lake Solar Energy Project in Nevada is another example of this success. The area to be developed—some 1,635 acres of public land near Las Vegas—was pre-screened by the Department of Interior’s Bureau of Land Management as a low-conflict area. Meuse says that, as a result, the project’s permitting time has been about half its typical length.
Ensuring that federal agencies have enough resources will facilitate these kinds of community-oriented approaches. While the Inflation Reduction Act included $1 billion for conducting national environmental policy analyses, more is needed on a regular basis for historically underfunded agencies, Meuse says.
“It’s the kind of model that takes investment, time, and engagement,” he says. “That’s what we prioritize — ensuring that nobody’s getting steamrolled in the name of our clean energy future.”
The Wilderness Society has been working since 1935 on uniting people to protect America’s wild places. With more than one million members and supporters, The Wilderness Society has led the effort to permanently protect nearly 112 million acres of wilderness in 44 states and ensure sound management of public lands. We believe that public lands can and should be a critical part of the solution to the climate crisis and a healthy future for all. We work to rapidly and fairly phase out fossil fuel development, responsibly ramp up renewable energy development, and protect and restore natural carbon sinks – like old-growth forests – on public lands and waters.
Hello, and welcome to this week’s edition of Record High. I’m Jake Bittle, and today we’re going to talk about not having fun in the sun.
We recently asked Record High readers to tell us about how extreme heat has changed the way they approach travel, outdoor sports, and other recreation. For many of us, these experiences are deeply important for our own health and our relationships with loved ones. One reader wrote back with a response that stuck with me.
“Our favorite vacation spot is Disneyland, California,” they said. “In the 1970s through 1990s, we were able to go there in the summer, but not now. It’s too hot and the air conditioning in the park makes the outdoor walkways even hotter. It’s also hotter in Phoenix where our daughter lives, so we see her and her family less often.”
Thousands of people in the United States and globally have had to make similar adjustments as the world endures its hottest summer on record. Travelers have canceled trips to places like Italy and Greece as triple-digit temperatures scorch Southern Europe, organizers have called off concerts and sporting events from Arizona to Long Island, and hikers have collapsed or even died on trails like those in Utah’s Mount Olympus, where officials had to conduct an emergency heat rescue back in July.
In sunny states like California and Florida, many of the most popular recreational activities take place outdoors, fueling a booming tourism industry. A few decades ago, summer was the best time of year to go on a hike, take out your boat, or visit a theme park, but now it’s almost unbearable.
A hiker finishes her hike early to beat high temperatures on Monday, July 10, 2023 in Phoenix. The city experienced 110 degree F temperatures for a month straight this summer. AP Photo / Matt York
Disney’s iconic theme parks have taken this shift on the chin. The entertainment giant saw overall attendance numbers at its Florida theme park slump this summer during a period when the heat index at the park reached an astonishing 112 degrees Fahrenheit. That was in line with a broader slowdown in central Florida tourism that affected SeaWorld and Six Flags as well.
Even blogs that are devoted to the company’s attractions published articles about crowdswaiting in the hot sun for rides and offered “Tips for Surviving Disneyland When it’s Super Hot.” Part of the problem, as our reader pointed out, is that the company runs huge AC units to keep its indoor offerings cool, and these units leak heat exhaust into outdoor areas, making it even more unpleasant to walk around.
At least you can go inside at Disney World. Other forms of outdoor recreation, such as running and hiking, are even more dangerous when the temperature gets high because the body never gets a respite from the heat of the sun. By this July, at least seven people had died in national parks while hiking outdoors, according to data CNN obtained from the National Park Service. Most of these deaths were in the dry Southwest where the unrelenting sun can cause heatstroke in a matter of hours.
“Unfortunately, Ms. Lindstrom was in town from Oregon, where it doesn’t get this hot.“
Scott Douglas, captain of the Phoenix Fire Department, after a hiker died on a city trail
This heat can sneak up fast on people who aren’t prepared for it. Jessica Lindstrom, a 34-year-old nurse and mother of four, was visiting Phoenix from Oregon last month when she went for a hike in the Deem Hills Recreation Area in the city’s northern suburbs. Lindstrom was reported missing at around 8:30 a.m., and Phoenix police found her dead about nine hours later. She had grown up in Arizona, but the local fire chief attributed her death to a shock of extreme heat.
“Unfortunately, Ms. Lindstrom was in town from Oregon, where it doesn’t get this hot,” Scott Douglas, the captain of the Phoenix Fire Department, said in a press conference at the time. The temperature in Phoenix that day reached a high of 113 degrees.
In theory, it’s incumbent on theme park owners and local government agencies to communicate with visitors about the risks of extreme heat, and shut down facilities when necessary, but doing so can put them in an economic bind. A city like Orlando nets about $31 billion from tourism every year, equivalent to 20 percent of its total economic output, and shareholder-driven companies like Disney have every financial incentive to keep parks open even if attendance numbers are low.
In the meantime, more families will likely do what our reader’s family did, and just stay home.
By the numbers
Data from the city of Phoenix shows that average foot traffic on the city’s trails tends to plummet during the summer months as temperatures reach triple digits and officials shut down city parks. This data is from 2020 and 2021, so they don’t reflect trends from this year’s killer summer.
The limits of survival: A new study in the journal Science Advances found that parts of the world have already become too hot for human health as heat and humidity in the Persian Gulf and South Asia cross critical thresholds. My colleague Zoya Teirstein breaks down the study and what it means for the future toll of extreme heat.
Threats to rainforest photosynthesis: In additional research news, scientists have found that plants in the Amazon rainforest cannot perform photosynthesis at temperatures above 116 degrees Fahrenheit. As my colleague Katie Myers reports, if the Amazon reaches that temperature on a continuous basis, its lush, biodiverse jungle could collapse and give way to a drier, savannah-like environment.
Students get “heat days”: As the Northeast faced down a grueling heat wave last week, some school districts let students stay home until temperatures abated. CNN’s Rachel Ramirez wrote about the rise in “heat days,” a climate-fueled mirror image of the beloved Northeast snow day, and examined how heat disrupts childhood learning.
States withhold cooling money: While the federal Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program has almost always been used to help households pay for heating costs, the money can technically also help pay for air conditioning. But as Thomas Frank of E&E News reports, the states that administer the program haven’t caught up with the new reality of climate change, and most haven’t released any money for that purpose.
Heat wave roasts the U.S. Open: The world’s greatest tennis players had to play through humid, 90-degree conditions during the later rounds of last week’s U.S. Open in New York City. The muggy weather made it difficult to hit big serves and forced players to change sweaty shirts several times. Players had a range of responses to the heat. Serbian great Novak Djokovic, who ended up winning the men’s tournament, said it was “not easy, but you’ve got to fight.” Russian phenom Daniil Medvedev, who played Djokovic in the final match, issued a more serious warning, saying that “one player is going to die and you are going to see.”
Whenever Ram Amar explains his idea for mitigating climate change, people usually look at him strangely and ask if he’s crazy. It’s easy to see why.
His startup, Rewind, wants to sequester a gigaton of carbon each year — about 10 percent of what climate scientists deem necessary each year to reach net zero by 2050 — in a remarkably simple way. The elevator pitch goes like this: Gather millions of tons of agricultural waste and send it to the bottom of the Black Sea, where it won’t decay. Wilder still, an ancient Greek ship that sank 2,400 years ago helped inspire the idea.
At first glance, the proposal might seem counterintuitive. The carbon that plants absorb from the atmosphere through photosynthesis is released when they decompose (or, alas, are compressed over eons to make fossil fuels). This is where the Black Sea comes in. Unlike most other large bodies of water, it is mostly anoxic, meaning there is precious little oxygen — and almost none at all at depths beyond 300 feet or so. It takes a long time for anything to biodegrade down there, which explains why dozens of intact shipwrecks litter its floor.
After selling his software company to Google in 2019, Amar pondered growing seaweed to sequester carbon, but realized that anything it captured would eventually return to the atmosphere. He put the sequestration idea aside until he met Peter Kroust, a German marine biologist who suggested stashing carbon in the Black Sea — something that occurred to him after cycling along the Danube and seeing tons of agricultural waste headed downriver. “And at that point, it was just like a click,” Amar said with a laugh. After getting initial funding (he wouldn’t say how much), they launched Rewind in Tel Aviv last year.
It’s an intriguing idea, and Rewind, which employs 12 people, just wrapped up a yearlong experiment in the Black Sea and the Sea of Galilee (portions of which are anoxic) that suggests it could work. The research team left a bit more than 650 pounds of hardwood submerged in a linen bag at a depth of 820 feet. The material retained 97 percent of its biomass over the 12 months that followed. “We saw that there is some degradation over the first three months, and then from three months on it stayed mostly consistent,” Amar said. “That’s really great.”
In their control of pine submerged in normal water, the researchers recorded 10 percent degradation in six months. The reduced rate of decay in anoxic water can be attributed to lignin, a key organic polymer, found in the tissue of most plants, that does not break down without oxygen. Amar’s team plans further experiments at depths of 3,200 feet, followed by two deposits to be made more than a mile down.
Kobi Kaminitz, the chief technology officer at Rewind, prepares an underwater camera for testing organic matter in the sea. Photo courtesy of Rewind
Similar tests with wheat stalk, corn stover, and grapevines revealed varying levels of decay, but Amar said this small amount of degradation won’t be a problem 7,200 feet beneath the surface. “Whatever does break down will stay in the deep Black Sea and will not mix and float back up into shallower layers where it can come in contact with the air,” he said.
According to Amar, carbon dating shows that the deepest parts of the Black Sea haven’t had contact with the air in two millennia, making it an excellent carbon (and methane) sink. The company is confident the science stacks up, but because Rewind hopes to fund the project by selling carbon credits, its process must be vetted by independent experts to ensure it works.
There are several potential pitfalls, the biggest of which is carbon sequestration being difficult to measure. There also is little recourse should something go wrong. “Once you put material in the deep sea, it is almost impossible to get it back again without a huge expense,” said Martin Palmer, a geochemistry professor at the National Oceanography Center in South Hampton, England. “So you need to be 100 percent confident that the process is safe.”
Palmer also notes that although organic matter is better preserved in anoxic environments, it still undergoes degradation that results in some level of methane production. “You would need to be very sure that you would not exceed the methane solubility in the Black Sea waters, or there could be problems,” particularly in an area that is seismically active, Palmer told Grist.
And then there are the logistical challenges, including where to source so much biomass. However, the Black Sea is bordered by six agriculturally productive countries that generate a lot of waste. Much of it is usually burned, or shipped down the Danube and dumped into the sea at depths above the anoxic zone, where it degrades and releases carbon. Given the existing infrastructure for moving all that material, Rewind calculates that the carbon needed to transport it far from shore to dump it at an appropriate depth would amount to no more than 3 percent of the carbon that could be sequestered. With a volume of more than 131,000 cubic miles, there is plenty of space to do the job.
However, stashing a gigaton of carbon a year will require such large quantities of biomass that it will demand geopolitical coordination. That means convincing politicians, policymakers, and the public. Communicating the idea that his startup isn’t simply dumping waste in the sea — something Amar calls the “understanding gap” — won’t be easy, especially in such a politically tense region. Rewind remains in the early phases of those discussions with government agencies and officials, but is confident it can sell them on the idea.
“As humanity, we’re a huge intervention to the planet,” he said. “So we’re trying to fix the biggest intervention we’ve made, with a smaller intervention.”
His idea, though perhaps counterintuitive, may not be as crazy as it first sounds.
Four months before the close of 2023, the United States has already broken its record for the number of weather and climate disasters with damages exceeding $1 billion in a calendar year.
There have been 23 “billion-dollar disasters” to date this year, according to a monthly report issued Monday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, or NOAA. The last calendar-year record was set in 2020, with 22 disasters costing $1 billion. (NOAA adjusts its count of past years’ billion-dollar disasters to account for inflation.) This year’s 23 disasters have cost Americans a total of nearly $58 billion and caused at least 253 deaths.
The events include Hurricane Idalia, the strongest hurricane to hit Florida’s Big Bend region in 125 years, and the Lahaina fire storm, the deadliest wildfire in the U.S. in more than a century. A winter storm in the Northeast, flooding in California and Vermont, and 18 severe storm events — including thunderstorms, tornado outbreaks, and hail storms — also contributed to the record.
The 23 billion-dollar disasters to date this year included a hurricane, a wildfire, two floods, a winter storm, and 18 severe storm events. Courtesy of NOAA
With 12 weeks remaining in the Atlantic hurricane season and autumn wildfires common in the West, the U.S. is likely to end the year with an even higher number of billion-dollar disasters. According to the National Interagency Fire Center, much of the country faces above-normal risk of significant wildfires in September, though parts of southern California are expected to have below-normal potential.
In a statement released Monday, Rachel Cleetus, policy director and lead economist for the Climate and Energy Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, called the NOAA report “sobering,” and “the latest confirmation of a worsening trend in costly disasters, many of which bear the undeniable fingerprints of climate change.”
Cleetus said the staggering financial losses underscored the need for more funding and attention toward climate resilience and adaptation. “It’s imperative that U.S. policymakers invest much more in getting out ahead of disasters before they strike rather than forcing communities to just pick up the pieces after the fact,” she said.
The 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act included nearly $50 billion for climate resilience projects and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act added several billion more, including $2.6 billion for coastal communities, $235 million for tribes, and $25 million for Native Hawaiians.
It will be years before the country sees the possible benefits of those investments. In the meantime, the federal government is struggling to keep up with the immediate impacts of natural disasters.
As part of a supplemental funding request that Congress is currently considering, the Biden administration requested $16 billion dollars in additional funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, to get the agency’s disaster relief fund through the fiscal year, which closes at the end of September.
“The science is clear that adapting to runaway climate change is an impossible feat,” said Cleetus, “so we must also sharply curtail the use of fossil fuels that are driving the climate crisis.”
