Last month, Democratic New York City Council Member James Gennaro introduced a bill that would change the way countless New Yorkers do their laundry — by banning laundry detergent pods.

More specifically, the bill — dubbed “Pods Are Plastic” — proposed a ban on dishwashing and laundry detergent pods coated in polyvinyl alcohol, or PVA, a type of plastic that disintegrates when submerged in water. Laundry and soap companies have long argued that the PVA coating is totally safe and 100 percent biodegradable, but proponents of the bill say that neither of those claims is true.

“Products and profit should not come at the expense of the environment,” Sarah Paiji Yoo, co-founder of a plastic-free cleaning product company called Blueland, said in a statement. Blueland, which manufactures PVA-free laundry and dishwasher tablets, helped write the bill and has been a vocal critic of PVA for years. In 2022, the company helped pen a petition asking the EPA to remove PVA from a list of chemicals it has deemed safe to use. (The EPA rejected the request last year.)

The Pods Are Plastic bill faces uncertain prospects in the New York City Council. If it does pass, however, it will only go a short way toward mitigating laundry-related microplastic pollution. Research suggests that billions of plastic microfibers shear off of our clothing every day — when we wear them, when we wash and dry them. And even more microplastics are released upstream, when clothes are manufactured.

“It’s a multi-faceted issue,” said Judith Weis, a professor emeritus of biological sciences at Rutgers University. To solve it, environmental advocates are calling for more systemic solutions — not just a ban on PVA, but new laws requiring washing machine filters, better clothing design, and a shift away from fast fashion.

Long before consumers crack open a container of Tide Pods, their laundry has already begun generating microplastic pollution. That’s because some 60 percent of clothing today is made with plastic. Polyester, nylon, acrylic, spandex — they’re all just different types of fossil fuel-derived plastic fabric. And more plastic clothing could be on the horizon, as fossil fuel companies pivot to plastic production in response to the world’s transition away from using fossil fuels for electricity generation and transportation.

Most media attention has focused on microplastics that slough off of clothing in the wash. And for good reason: According to a 2019 study in the journal Nature, washing machines can generate up to 1.5 million plastic microfibers per kilogram of washed fabric. Too small to get caught in standard washing machine filters, some 200,000 to 500,000 metric tons of these microfibers slip out into wastewater every year and eventually make their way into the marine environment. That’s about a third of all microplastics that directly enter the world’s oceans.

Ocean microplastics are linked to a range of deleterious health effects in marine animals, including inhibited development, reproductive issues, genetic damage, and inflammation. Weis said these observations are alarming for their own sake — “I’m concerned about the marine animals themselves,” she told Grist — but they could also have implications for the health of humans, who might eat microplastics-contaminated seafood. Researchers have found microplastics throughout people’s bodies — in their brains, bloodstreams, kidneys, and, most recently, in 62 of 62 placentas tested — and it’s not yet clear what the impacts could be.

But, as Grist reported last year, there are still many other ways that microplastics escape from our clothing. Just wearing plastic clothes, for instance, causes abrasion and the subsequent release of microplastics into the air. Some researchers think this actually causes more microplastic pollution than doing laundry; they estimate that a single person’s normal clothing use could release more than 900 million microfibers per year, compared to just 300 million from washing. 

And then there’s the manufacturing stage, which is perhaps the least understood source of plastic microfiber pollution. Every part of the clothes-making process can release microplastics, from the initial polymerization of natural gas and oil to the actual weaving, knitting, and subsequent processes that turn fabric into garments. According to a 2021 white paper from the nonprofit The Nature Conservancy and the consulting firm Bain and Company, abrasion from dyeing, printing, and pre-washing clothes releases billions of plastic microfiber particles into factory wastewater every day — and not all of these particles are destroyed or filtered out by wastewater treatment. 

The white paper estimates that pre-consumer textile manufacturing releases about 120,000 metric tons of microplastics into the environment annually — less than laundry or wearing clothing, but the same order of magnitude.

At the opposite end of the textile life cycle are even more opportunities for synthetic clothes to shed microplastics. Disposed textiles that are incinerated can release microfibers — and hazardous chemicals — into the air, while those that are littered or sent to a landfill can release them into the soil. There is some evidence to suggest that earthworms and other organisms can transport these microplastics into deeper layers of soil, where they are more likely to contaminate groundwater.

“While it’s absolutely important to make sure we’re addressing loss that occurs during the wearing and washing phase, … it’s even more important to make sure we’re addressing microfiber pollution across the full life cycle,” said Alexis Jackson, associate director of The Nature Conservancy’s California oceans program.

Unlike other sources of microplastic pollution, detergent pods are intentionally added to laundry. They date back to the early 2010s, when Procter and Gamble introduced its now-infamous PVA-coated Tide Pods — described at the time as the firm’s biggest laundry innovation in a quarter of a century. The PVA design, which reportedly took eight years to come up with, really was a breakthrough: It separated cleansers, brighteners, and fabric softeners into discrete chambers so they wouldn’t mix before entering the wash cycle. And, unlike previous designs, PVA film could dissolve in either hot or cold water.

Over the past nine years, laundry detergent pods’ market value in the U.S. has grown by 36 percent to $3.25 billion; it’s projected to exceed $3.5 billion by 2025.

To protect that growth, laundry industry trade groups have assured consumers that pods’ PVA plastic coating will biodegrade and not harm people or ecosystems. The American Cleaning Institute, which represents U.S. cleaning product companies including Procter and Gamble, SC Johnson, and Unilever, contends that, “[w]hen exposed to moisture and microorganisms, PVA breaks down into nontoxic components, making it a more sustainable alternative to traditional plastics.” 

But some experts disagree. Notably, a 2021 literature review conducted by researchers at Arizona State University — and commissioned by Blueland — found that less than a quarter of the PVA that reaches wastewater treatment plants actually degrades; 77 percent, about 8,000 metric tons per year, is released into the environment intact. That’s not because PVA can’t be degraded by microorganisms; it’s just that the right microorganisms are often not present in wastewater treatment plants, or the PVA doesn’t stay at the plants long enough to actually break down. According to research sponsored by cleaning product industry groups, it can take 28 days for at least 60 percent of PVA to break down and 60 days for 90 percent of it to degrade.

There isn’t “a single wastewater treatment plant in the United States where water sits with those microbes for anything close to 28 days,” Charles Rolsky, a coauthor of the Blueland-funded study who now works as a senior research scientist at the Shaw Institute in Maine, told The Washington Post in 2022. “At most, it might be a week, but more realistically it’s days to hours.”

In response to Grist’s request for comment, the American Cleaning Institute decried “the misinformation campaign being waged by Blueland” and said the New York City bill to ban PVA was “unnecessary.” A spokesperson for the trade group directed Grist to previously published statements and an online chart saying that the kind of PVA used in laundry detergent pods is of a higher quality than the PVA analyzed by the Blueland-funded study, and that laundry pod PVA “dissolves completely and biodegrades within hours of wastewater treatment.”

Procter and Gamble referred Grist to the American Cleaning Institute’s communications team.

Getting a hold on the clothing microplastics problem will require a range of solutions. Right now, most of the focus is on washing machine filters that conscientious consumers can install in their homes. The best filters available today can theoretically trap upwards of 80 percent of laundry microplastics. Filter-adjacent technologies — like the Cora Ball or Guppyfriend bag that can be placed in washing machines along with laundry — may also help.

A small number of states have considered laws to make filters mandatory for appliance manufacturers, or to incentivize the purchase of filters through consumer rebates. Some companies — like Samsung — are trying to get ahead of potential regulation by devising their own filter technologies that can be attached to standard machines; others are designing washing machines with built-in microplastics filters.

Meanwhile, scientists are trying to design clothes that won’t shed so many microfibers in the first place. Yarns with more twists and woven structures, for example, tend to release fewer microfibers, as do fabrics cut with heat and lasers (as opposed to scissors). 

“I’m optimistic that science can solve this problem,” said Juan Hinestroza, a professor of fiber science and apparel design at Cornell University. With adequate research funding, he thinks it’ll be possible — within less than a generation — to design synthetic clothing that sheds virtually no microplastics.

Perhaps the most holistic solution, however, would be to regulate and limit the use of plastics for clothing and laundry applications altogether. The fast fashion industry in particular is a big contributor to the microplastics problem, if only because of the sheer quantity of synthetic clothing it produces. Weis said it’s time to hold major apparel companies accountable for their products’ release of microplastics, potentially through extended producer responsibility laws that make companies financially responsible for the trash and pollution they create. New York state is currently considering such a law, although it mostly relates to packaging, not clothes or microplastics. Weis also called for general plastic restrictions as part of the global plastics treaty currently being negotiated by the United Nations. 

Yoo supports similar solutions. In the meantime, though, she’s continuing to push for the New York City bill banning PVA. “This bill is about so much more than just pods,” she said. “I get it when people are like, ‘This is not the biggest problem,’ … but I think this can be a really important starting point. It sends an important signal to businesses that plastic products should not be designed to go down our drains and into our water.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Detergent pods are only the start of clothing’s microplastic pollution problem on Mar 11, 2024.

The scientist Paul Crutzen grew tired of the Holocene 24 years ago. The geologic epoch had reigned for 11,700 years, ever since the sprawling ice sheets covering North America and Europe began melting rapidly, and Crutzen thought its time was up. The atmospheric chemist had won a Nobel Prize in 1995 for demonstrating how humanity was destroying the ozone layer, just one of the many ways people had radically altered the planet, from urbanization to releasing greenhouse gases. After repeatedly hearing mention of the Holocene at a scientific conference in Mexico, Crutzen lost his temper. 

Interrupting a speaker, he announced that the world had already entered a new age: the Anthropocene. The notion, which a few people had pondered as early as the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, implied that human activity was a powerful geological force, one rivaling volcanoes and asteroids. “My remark had a major impact on the audience,” Crutzen, who died in 2021, recalled years later. “First there was a silence, then people started to discuss this.” 

All these years later, they’re still discussing it. Since Crutzen’s outburst, the term “Anthropocene” has proliferated through the sciences, humanities, and pop culture. (The musician Grimes named one of her albums Miss Anthropocene.) The task of formalizing the geological era fell to the International Commission on Stratigraphy, the scientific organization which establishes global standards for such things. The Earth system scientists who became part of the commission’s Anthropocene Working Group, created in 2009, found themselves at the center of a contentious debate as the world looked to them for a definitive answer: Are we living in the Anthropocene? 

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As differences came to a head, heated discussions, votes, and resignations ensued. The latest drama came last week, when The New York Times reported that a committee of scholars had rejected the working group’s proposal to declare the Anthropocene an official epoch after 15 years of debate. Some panelists disputed the report of the leaked vote. A press release shared by the committee’s chair said the alleged vote violated the group’s rules and that an inquiry into annulling it was being launched. 

Epochs are typically stretches of several million years designated by clues left in the soil, rocks, and fossils. Even as some headlines suggested that the decision meant Earth hasn’t entered the “age of humans,” geologists and other experts say the vote shouldn’t change how people talk about humanity’s influence on the planet. Since the Industrial Revolution, climate change has warmed the globe by 2 degrees Fahrenheit (1.2 degrees Celsius) and counting. The Anthropocene might still be considered a geological “event,” a more flexible term that would put it on par with major transformations such as the Great Oxidation Event, when oxygen became a major component of Earth’s atmosphere more than 2 billion years ago.

“Nobody is saying that global change caused by people is not significant,” said Erle C. Ellis, an environmental scientist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and a former member of the working group. “It’s just about whether we should narrow down the Anthropocene definition to an epoch beginning in 1952.”

The trouble with pinning down a date stems from the fact that humans have been changing the planet for a long time. The comparatively calm, warm conditions of the Holocene encouraged the development of agriculture. People planted crops and built cities, expanding civilization until they started remaking Earth itself. Somewhere in the midst of all this activity — the clearing of the world’s forests, the rampant burning of fossil fuels, and the testing of nuclear bombs — scientists say the planet entered the Anthropocene.

Last year, the working group settled on 1952 after identifying Crawford Lake in Ontario, Canada, as the best place to find proof of this new age. Almost 80 feet under the glassy surface, the layers of mud at the bottom almost perfectly preserve hints of human history, such as maize pollen from nearby Indigenous settlements of the 13th century and charcoal from a local logging mill in the 19th. A layer of radioactive plutonium from mid-century nuclear weapon testing was selected as a potential “golden spike,” a term for unique geological signatures that typically mark the start of new epochs.

The group found “overwhelming evidence that there was a fundamental change in how the planet works around that time,” said Francine McCarthy, an Earth scientist at Brock University in Ontario, who led a team of 60 researchers collecting and examining soil samples at Crawford Lake. For McCarthy, the controversial vote is a frustrating end to many years of work. “I don’t care what other people feel should be the beginning of the Anthropocene,” she said. “We spent 15 years, millions of euros to answer the question.” 

The awareness that humans might be irrevocably changing their home dates to the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, when steam engines started chugging and industrial factories emerged. George Perkins Marsh, an early American conservationist, declared that humans were reshaping Earth — for the worse — in his influential 1864 book Man and Nature. In 1873, Antonio Stoppani, an Italian priest and geologist, proclaimed that the “Anthropozoic era” had begun, with no end in sight. 

Scholars started reckoning with the concept in earnest after World War II, when radiocarbon from nuclear bomb blasts settled into the rock record. In 1955, 70 researchers from around the world met in Princeton, New Jersey, for a symposium on “Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth” for the first large-scale discussion of how humans had transformed the environment. But it wasn’t until 2000 that the idea really took off. Crutzen, along with the diatom researcher Eugene F. Stoermer, wrote a newsletter proposing the term “Anthropocene” for the current geological epoch.

Since then, the word’s use has steadily increased, and Google search interest followed a similar pattern. By 2014, it had landed in the Oxford English Dictionary. In a surprising twist, the obscure-sounding term had escaped academic journals and entered the domain of popular culture, inspiring artists, novelists, and musicians. The scientists in the Anthropocene Working Group even became stars in a documentary.

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For Dipesh Chakrabarty, a historian at the University of Chicago, hearing the term for the first time was career-changing. Branching out from his work on South Asian history, he began to write about climate change, eventually publishing a handful of books on the subject. “I was very struck that geologists were describing humanity as a geological force,” he said. “That is something much bigger than what I used to imagine humans to be.” 

Not all scholars love the term, though. Some argue that it generalizes the culpability for climate change and other environmental problems, seemingly blaming everyone instead of the countries and industries most responsible. The discussion has spawned a host of bizarre-sounding spin-offs: the Capitalocene (blaming capitalism), the Plantationocene (blaming agriculture), and the Occidentalocene (blaming rich, industrialized countries).

Ellis used to think that formalizing the Anthropocene as an epoch was a good idea, but last summer, after 14 years of heated discussion — and a dispute over narrowing the start date to 1950 — he resigned from the Anthropocene Working Group. Now, he thinks that restricting the term to a technical definition may only confuse the public. The quest to establish the Anthropocene as an epoch was “an experiment in how to communicate the science of humans changing the planet,” Ellis said. “And it is a failed experiment.”

“We can still use the term as we always have,” he said, in the wake of the commission’s vote. “We just don’t need an epoch to attach to it.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Why is the idea of the Anthropocene so contentious? on Mar 11, 2024.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune, a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy.

Many Panhandle residents whose dwellings and possessions burned in the region’s ongoing wildfires may never financially recover for one simple reason: Their homes weren’t insured.

“A lot of the people who have lost a home had no insurance,” Governor Greg Abbott said at a March 1 press conference. “So there are a lot of people in great need right now.”

Texans pay some of the highest homeowners insurance premiums in the country. Increased risk of extreme weather events, at least partially driven by climate change, have driven up those costs. Growth in homeowners insurance rates here outpaced the rest of the nation last year, straining Texans’ ability to pay.

In Texas, those without insurance are also more likely to be those who have a harder time recovering from disaster: lower-income households and rural residents. That means Texans without insurance face a steep — if not impossible — path to restore what financial well-being they had before a disaster strikes.

Patricia Hester, a 76-year-old Fritch resident, is among several Panhandle residents whose home was destroyed by a wildfire that swept through her neighborhood on the town’s south side on February 27. She dropped her homeowners insurance on her manufactured home about a decade ago because of rising costs.

“When you’re on a limited income, something has to give,” Hester said. “You have to eat and be able to get gas in the car. So that’s what I gave.”

It’s common for families, particularly those that are low-income, in areas destroyed by the Panhandle fires to not have homeowners insurance, local officials and community leaders said. Many simply can’t afford it and, because they own their homes outright, nothing requires them to carry it, they said.

Julie Winters, the executive director for Hutchinson County United Way, said about 70 families in Fritch whose homes had been damaged or destroyed asked the organization for assistance on March 1. Most of them didn’t have homeowners insurance, she said.

“This is a lower socioeconomic level of the community that got hit,” Winters said. “They probably cannot afford insurance.”

Texas homeowners who go without insurance tend to be lower-income, according to an analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data conducted by the Texas Real Estate Research Center at Texas A&M University. Homeowners in the state’s rural areas are more likely to not have insurance than their urban counterparts, the analysis found. Some 11 percent of homeowners in the state’s major metropolitan areas don’t have homeowners insurance, whereas about 26 percent of homeowners in rural areas lack it.

Further complicating matters: Several homes that burned down were manufactured homes, which homeowners can struggle to get insured. That’s because insurers consider them more risky investments since they are highly vulnerable to fires and other natural disasters, said Thomas Chandler, deputy director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University.

And homeowners insurance is considered the most clear-cut avenue to seek financial restitution after a major disaster, experts told the Tribune. Going without it means homeowners would have to pay for repairs and rebuilding out of pocket — or rely on assistance from the public and private sectors that may not come.

Officials haven’t determined the full scope of the disaster as the fires continue to rage, though it’s believed hundreds of homes have been damaged or destroyed. The ultimate scale of the damage will determine whether displaced residents and others affected by the wildfires qualify for federal disaster aid under an emergency declaration.

Abbott said on March 1 he is waiting on a full assessment of the damages before requesting a declaration from the federal government.

Even if the assistance that can come with a federal disaster declaration arrives, it likely won’t fully replace what many homeowners in the Panhandle lost, Chandler said.

“It’s really more ‘get back on your feet’ money designed to enable you to just get started again,” Chandler said.

Stacy McFall, a 52-year-old certified nursing assistant who lives in Fritch, said she tried to obtain insurance to cover her childhood home, which she moved into about 14 years ago. But the home didn’t sit on a foundation, she said, so no insurer would write her a policy.

Flames engulfed McFall’s home on February 27. She had just enough time to pack her three dogs and a stack of clothes into her car before she evacuated, she said. McFall’s sister has taken her in for now, but McFall isn’t sure yet how she’ll bounce back.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” McFall said. “You feel kind of numb. You don’t know if you’re going to find a home. Everything is burnt to a crisp and I have to start all over again with everything.”

McFall’s son and daughter, who live in Dallas and Austin, respectively, have asked her to come live with them, she said, but she doesn’t want to move.

“This is my home,” McFall said.

Disclosure: Texas A&M University has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Many homes burned in the Texas wildfires weren’t insured, creating a steep path to recovery on Mar 10, 2024.

This story was originally published by CalMatters.

The system that California uses to screen neighborhoods at risk of environmental harm is highly subjective and flawed, resulting in communities potentially missing out on billions of dollars in funding, according to new research.

The study, by researchers who began the project at Stanford University, investigated a tool that the California Environmental Protection Agency developed in 2013 as the nation’s “first comprehensive statewide environmental health screening tool” to identify communities disproportionately burdened by pollution.

Communities that are designated “disadvantaged” by the system, called CalEnviroScreen, can qualify for significant government and private funding. The tool has been used to designate vast swaths of the Central Valley, communities around the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles, and neighborhoods in the Bay Area cities of Richmond and Oakland, among others.

The researchers found that the screening tool uses a small number of health problems that could bias which communities are designated. About 16 percent of Census tracts in the state could be ranked differently with alterations in EnviroScreen’s model, according to the study.

The system raises equity issues because it biases in favor of certain groups over others, and has the potential of pitting groups against each other for funding in what is essentially a winner-take-all, or loser-take-all, system, according to the research.

For instance, “we found the existing model to potentially underrepresent foreign-born populations,” the researchers wrote.

Community groups and environmental justice advocates have said for years that the tool overlooks communities that should be designated as disadvantaged.

At stake is a large amount of funding — about $2.08 billion over just a recent, four-year period, the researchers reported.

The findings come as scientists are increasingly demonstrating that algorithms can be as biased as the humans who create them, and that many disproportionately harm marginalized populations.

“The big takeaway is that if you asked ten different experts in California to come up with their own screening algorithm to determine which neighborhoods are ‘disadvantaged,’ you would probably get 10 very different algorithms,” said lead author Benjamin Huynh, who was a doctoral student at Stanford and is now a researcher at Johns Hopkins University. “These things can come across as very technical, but when you look at the numbers and you see the billions of dollars flowing … these very seemingly technical details actually matter a lot.”

Amy Gilson, a spokesperson for CalEPA’s environmental health office, said the study’s recommendations are being reviewed. Any potential changes to CalEnviroScreen must “go through a robust scientific evaluation” as well as “extensive public process,” she said.

“CalEnviroScreen’s methods are transparent to allow for these types of outside evaluations, and we welcome discussion on the merits of different approaches,” Gilson said in an emailed statement to CalMatters.

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CalEnviroScreen identifies neighborhoods by census tracts — localized regions that typically include between 1,000 and 8,000 residents, as defined by the U.S. Census Bureau. California released its fourth iteration of CalEnviroScreen in October 2021. 

CalEnviroScreen evaluates 21 environmental, public health, and demographic factors to identify which neighborhoods are most susceptible to environmental harm. Among the factors considered: air pollution and drinking water contaminants, pesticide usage, toxic releases, low birth weight infants, poverty, and unemployment rates. The tool then ranks the 25 percent most disadvantaged communities in California — which determines which neighborhoods get billions of dollars in government and private funds.

Under state law, at least a quarter of funds from the California Climate Investments fund must be spent on these communities. That money comes from California’s cap-and-trade market program, which allows polluters to buy credits to offset their emissions. 

In 2022, the fund paid for nearly 19,500 new projects with $1.3 billion, according to the state Air Resources Board. Of that, $933 million was directed to disadvantaged communities or low‑income communities, the air board said.

Huynh said he became interested in CalEnviroScreen’s classification of neighborhoods after reading a 2021 article in The San Francisco Chronicle that found some of San Francisco’s poorest neighborhoods were ineligible for funding, largely due to their ranking in CalEnviroScreen. 

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“Under such a model with high uncertainty, every subjective model decision is implicitly a value judgment,” the study authors wrote. “Any variation of a model could favor one subpopulation or disfavor another.”

The tool only includes three health factors — low birth weight babies, cardiovascular disease, and emergency room visits for asthma. It leaves out other serious health conditions, such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, which the authors said could mean that communities with many foreign-born residents are left out. Asthma may be less prevalent among immigrants or they may be less likely to seek emergency room care, but they still have other serious respiratory issues, the study said.

Also left out are other common health problems, such as cancer and kidney disease, which could skew which neighborhoods are designated as disadvantaged. The authors said changing the tool to include these diseases could mean fewer Black communities are designated as disadvantaged. That’s because it would dilute the importance of low birth weight babies, which disproportionately affects Black people.

Race is not a factor in the screening system. But the researchers found that tweaking the model could make big differences for communities of color: For instance, they found that changes in the metrics would mean more nonwhite communities with high poverty levels would be classified as disadvantaged.

The research team suggested some possible solutions “to reduce equity concerns,” such as using multiple models. Doing so would increase the number of designated communities by 10 percent.

“Because there is no singular ‘best’ model, we propose assessing robustness via sensitivity analysis and incorporating additional models accordingly,” the researchers wrote.

In addition, “a safeguard like an external advisory committee comprising domain experts and leaders of local community groups could also help reduce harm by identifying ethical concerns that may have been missed internally.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline California’s polluted communities could miss out on billions under state’s flawed system on Mar 9, 2024.

Following the hottest year on record, complete with a megadrought in Arizona that led to construction restrictions to reserve groundwater around Phoenix, Arizona has added a new chief heat officer to its Department of Health Services.

The officer’s role is to help with extreme heat preparedness in the state. Dr. Eugene Livar, a physician who was formerly the assistant director for public health preparedness for the Department of Health Services, has been chosen for the role. Dr. Livar had helped in developing the Arizona heat preparedness plan in his former role, The Associated Press reported.

Although Phoenix has its own heat officer, Arizona is the first state to bring on a statewide official dedicated specifically to preparing the public for the effects of extreme heat. The position is part of Arizona’s new Extreme Heat Preparedness Plan, recently announced by Governor Katie Hobbs and the Governor’s Office of Resiliency Director Maren Mahoney.                            

“What I heard time and again, from everyday Arizonans was that our state’s old approach was not enough,” Hobbs said in a press release. 

“Arizona is no stranger to the heat, yet we have always risen to the challenge, protected our neighbors, and built a sustainable and thriving state. This time will be no different,” she added.

The Extreme Heat Preparedness Plan noted that federal funding from the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) has been historically allocated in an inequitable way, so Hobbs has requested action to better allocate the funding to help low-income families with weatherization.

The plan has set other short-term goals to reach before summer, including additional support and improvements for cooling centers via a statewide cooling center coordinator. The plan aims to add more cooling centers as well, including six mobile units that use solar power. The state will work toward strengthening power grid resiliency, particularly in rural areas, and providing more information and education on heat-related health outcomes.

For the long-term, the plan outlined several goals for heat preparedness, including growing the workforce specialized in weatherization and energy efficiency, improving heat mitigation design in affordable housing, creating statewide heat-informed community lifelines, building neighborhood Resilience Hubs that offer community support and double as cooling centers, and growing the clean energy economy, among other efforts.

According to the plan, last year included the hottest summer on record for Arizona, which led to a record-high number of heat-related deaths in Maricopa County, The Associated Press reported. The 2023 heat season led to a total of 579 heat-related deaths, as confirmed by Maricopa County Department of Public Health (MCDPH). Statewide, there were over 4,000 emergency room visits for heat-related issues.

“It’s critical that Arizona build a sustainable and resilient state,” Mahoney said. “I’m proud to lead this effort across state agencies and in partnership with various sectors, including health and human service providers, the business community, and scientific experts to protect everyday Arizonans and ensure we have the tools we need.”

The post Arizona’s Health Department Adds Chief Heat Officer appeared first on EcoWatch.

Our cities are choked by traffic and drowning in pollution that the humanity an estimated…

The post Electric Scooters: Navigating the Path to Sustainable Urban Mobility appeared first on Earth911.

Shakespeare captured so much of our world, and he recognized that nature finds a way…

The post Earth911 Inspiration: The Sparks of Nature! appeared first on Earth911.

It’s been six years since cities in California started the trend of taking Big Oil to court for deceiving the public about the consequences of burning fossil fuels. The move followed investigations showing that Exxon and other companies had known about the dangers of skyrocketing carbon emissions for decades, but publicly downplayed the threat. Today, around 30 lawsuits have been filed around the country as cities, states, and Indigenous tribes seek to make the industry pay for the costs of climate change.

Until recently, most of these cases had been stuck in limbo. Oil companies were trying to move them from the state courts in which they were filed to federal courts, a more business-friendly setting. But just in the past year, the Supreme Court declined to hear their arguments to relocate these cases on three separate occasions, most recently clearing the way for Minnesota’s case to proceed in state court. That means executives from Exxon Mobil, BP, and other oil giants may soon have to defend their actions in front of a jury.

“Last year was a really pivotal year in terms of getting past the industry’s big push and their delay tactics,” said Alyssa Johl, vice president for the legal program at the Center for Climate Integrity, an environmental advocacy organization that provides support for these cases. “That issue and that effort has been put to rest, and now they have to face the music.”

The long delays might have strengthened the legal arguments against fossil fuel companies. Researchers have uncovered more details about what oil companies knew about climate change and when, and the science connecting fossil fuel emissions to climate disasters has matured, arming cities and states with more evidence. All the while, the effects of climate change — the heat waves, the blazes, the wildfire smoke — have only grown more obvious, and more costly. Last year, the U.S. recorded a billion-dollar disaster every two weeks.

“With each month and with each year that these cases are stalled, the impacts for communities just grow,” said Delta Merner, the lead scientist for the Union of Concerned Scientists’ litigation hub. “I think that’s important context for understanding these cases, and for understanding the additional cases that have been filed over the last six years.”

That might explain the spread of lawsuits from coastal cities and states to inland areas like Minnesota, Colorado, and most recently, Chicago. With the third-largest city in the country suing BP, Chevron, Exxon Mobil, and other oil titans for lying about climate change, a quarter of Americans now live in cities and states that are taking fossil fuel companies to court, according to the Center for Climate Integrity.

One of the cases that’s furthest along, filed by Massachusetts against Exxon Mobil in 2019, is already in the process of “discovery,” the last major step before a trial. In this stage, both sides try to uncover evidence that could help their case in court. The discovery process could unearth further details of oil companies’ deception, such as what individual CEOs or other company executives did with the information they learned about climate change, Johl said. 

“It’s really what the industry fears the most,” Johl said. “They don’t want anyone digging through their archives and divulging their innermost thoughts and secrets.” Much of what the public learned about the tobacco industry’s effort to cover up the link between lung cancer and smoking, for example, came out of the discovery process, made public as part of a major settlement in 1998, when Philip Morris, R.J. Reynolds, and other tobacco giants agreed to pay states $206 billion over the next 25 years. 

The discovery phase of the Massachusetts case is expected to wrap up later this year, and it could head to trial as early as 2025, Johl said.

Oil companies have plans to fight back, though. In response to the new lawsuit from Chicago, industry representatives characterized the lawsuits as a “waste of taxpayer resources” and contended that climate change should be addressed by Congress, not the courts. “They’re going to raise issues every step of the way and raise defenses every step of the way,” Johl said. 

Another case that’s at the front of the pack is Honolulu’s suit seeking damages from Exxon Mobil, Chevron, and Sunoco, among others. In October, the Hawaiʻi Supreme Court dismissed the companies’ appeal to throw out the suit, clearing the way for a trial. Last week, the companies asked the Supreme Court to toss that ruling.

The industry’s current line of argument in the Honolulu case (and others) is that these lawsuits are about the broader issue of emissions and pollution, and that the federal Clean Air Act preempts any claim brought by cities and states. So far, this approach has seen some modest success. In January, Delaware’s Superior Court denied oil companies’ motion to dismiss the state’s case against them while granting a few concessions, including that out-of-state emissions were the territory of the Clean Air Act, beyond the limits of state law. Emissions that originated in Delaware, however, were fair game.

As these climate cases have slowly begun to proceed, recent months have brought lawsuits from California, cities, and tribes. Last September, the state of California demanded that oil companies fund efforts to recover from extreme weather. In December, the Makah and Shoalwater Bay tribes along the coast of Washington state became the first Native American tribes to take oil companies to court over the costs of responding to climate-related risks from rising seas, flooding, and ocean acidification. Meanwhile, Hoboken, New Jersey, and a collection of cities in Puerto Rico have added racketeering lawsuits to the mix, alleging that oil companies engaged in a conspiracy of deception.

New research has made it harder for oil giants to say they couldn’t have known the outcome of burning so much fossil fuel. A study published in the journal Science last year found that Exxon’s scientists predicted the effects of climate change with startling accuracy in the 1980s. Exxon’s models nearly matched actual temperature changes over the past several decades.

Then there’s the blooming area of scientific inquiry that connects climate change to extreme weather events. Researchers are now able to quantify how corporate emissions have fueled climate disasters, a critical development for these cases, Merner said. “This is the cutting edge where the science is moving towards — to be able to look not just at these global averages, but to see what is happening regionally.”

A study Merner coauthored last year found that 37 percent of the forests burned in the Western United States since 1986 can be linked to carbon pollution from a group of 88 of the world’s largest fossil fuel producers and cement manufacturers. Last June, Multnomah County — home to Portland — cited the research in its lawsuit against oil companies over their contributions to a deadly heat wave that hit the Pacific Northwest in 2021. In newer cases, like Multnomah’s and the ones filed by Indigenous tribes, the oil industry is sticking to its strategy of trying to move the case to federal courts, according to Margaret Barry, who maintains a climate litigation database at Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center.

The new and improved science linking climate change to weather disasters has been a game changer for all of these cases, Merner said. “We can’t sit back and argue whether or not climate change played a role in extreme weather or public health problems that we’re facing today, because attribution science shows that it does and can calculate what that role was.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Big Oil faces a flood of climate lawsuits — and they’re moving closer to trial on Mar 8, 2024.

This story was produced by Grist and co-published with Honolulu Civil Beat.

Hawaiʻi’s main utility is poised to radically revise how it compensates households for the power their batteries send to the grid, a move critics fear will stunt the potential for using that energy to prevent blackouts and hinder the state’s transition to 100 percent clean energy.

Hawaiian Electric, which serves every island except Kauaʻi, will launch the Bring Your Own Device program on April 1, offering households incentives to deliver power during peak demand. But the compensation is nowhere near what customers who joined an earlier battery program received, and some solar advocates worry it’s so low that people may not enroll at all.

That would be a missed opportunity to help build a modern energy system, said Rocky Mould, executive director of the Hawaiʻi Solar Energy Association. “It’s depriving us of the potential for a really viable grid service program that would benefit all. We should be moving as fast as we can to get off oil.”

The changes come amid a broader debate over how much to pay customers for power drawn from their solar panels and batteries. Several states, most notably California, are deeply cutting their so-called net metering programs, which are meant to boost solar adoption. However, Puerto Rico’s legislature recently voted unanimously to preserve the archipelago’s payment scheme until at least 2030, deeming it essential to meeting its clean energy goals. 

The utilities and regulators favoring reductions say the credits are too costly for the ratepayers who subsidize them — a point Hawaiian Electric made to Grist in supporting the changes. Those favoring incentives argue that rollbacks can impede solar’s growth, prolong dependence on fossil fuels, and undermine energy resilience.

Hawaiʻi is under a legal mandate to use only clean energy by 2045, and has long been a leader in rooftop solar adoption, which comprises almost half of Hawaiian Electric’s renewable generation portfolio. But when it slashed compensation rates in 2015, installations dropped by more than half. The market recovered as customers found a new way to save money: Adding batteries and consuming stored power at night rather than buying it from the utility. Nearly every photovoltaic system installed now includes at least one battery. 

In 2021, as the state prepared to shutter its last coal power plant, it needed those batteries. With utility-scale renewable projects behind schedule, the state faced a generation shortfall. If households allowed Hawaiian Electric to tap their batteries, a resource called a virtual power plant, it could supply some of the capacity lost when the plant went offline. 

Homeowners would need an incentive to do that, so Hawaiian Electric rolled out the Battery Bonus program. Customers on Oʻahu and Maui who agreed to let the utility draw power for two hours each evening, when demand is at its peak, received an upfront payment based on the size of their battery. They also earned a monthly incentive of $5 per kilowatt committed and a credit equivalent to the retail rate (the highest in the nation) for the electricity they contributed. On average, customers received around $4,250 when they signed up, a regular payment of $25 monthly, and a healthy discount on their bill.

The program was highly popular, especially on Oʻahu. “We already had a lot of traction with our customers installing batteries with their systems, but when they shut down the coal plant and introduced Battery Bonus, it just poured rocket fuel on the fire,” said David Gorman, co-founder and president of RevoluSun, the largest solar installer on the island. Still, Battery Bonus was a temporary program tied to the coal plant’s closure. Hawaiian Electric stopped accepting new signups on Oʻahu in December after the island reached its maximum enrollment capacity of 40 megawatts. (The program remains open on Maui, which has not yet reached its cap.)

Virtual power plants, or VPPs, allow states to reduce reliance on fossil fuel power plants and tap into clean energy without the costs and delays associated with building utility-scale projects. But the approach is dependent upon customer participation, and the incentives offered in Bring Your Own Device may not prove as compelling. The upfront payment is capped at $500, a small dent in the typical $9,500 purchase price for a battery. 

Solar advocates are even more concerned about how Hawaiian Electric plans to pay households for their power. For most customers, the rates paid in the program set to take effect next month are far lower than the retail price of electricity. Although the batteries will serve the household’s load before exporting energy to the grid, customers will pay the retail rate for any power they need once the pack is depleted.

“It’s disincentivizing customers from participating,” said Mould, who added that a more complicated rate structure also could make the systems difficult to sell. “When you’re sitting across the proverbial kitchen table from a customer and selling these things, you really need something that’s simple and where the value proposition is easy to explain.”

Gorman said the new program won’t necessarily cause solar installations to plummet like the changes to net metering did, but he agrees it could undercut VPP participation. “The electricity rates are so high that you don’t need those upfront incentives and rebates in order to think going solar is a good idea,” he said. “A PV plus storage system still has a very attractive payback period.” 

In other words, customers may still get batteries, but they’ll keep that power for themselves. Widespread abstention from grid programs would undermine efforts to rein in electricity prices and meet Hawaiʻi’s clean energy goals, said Issac Moriwake, managing attorney for Earthjustice’s mid-Pacific region who was part of an appeal to the Hawaiʻi Public Utilities Commission to revise parts of the BYOD program. 

“You ought to consider the big picture of how not only individual systems, but the aggregate, are able to respond to grid needs on call, and respond to emergencies,” said Moriwake. “There’s big-time value there.”

A system in which customers use their stored power only for their own needs is fundamentally inefficient, Moriwake added. “You’re talking about the utility spending gazillions of dollars to build their own huge utility-sized battery, and then customers are getting their own batteries, just duplicating investments and duplicating efforts,” he said. 

In an emailed statement, a representative for Hawaiian Electric told Grist the new program is meant to keep rates affordable for customers who don’t have rooftop solar systems. 

“Hawaiian Electric understands the position expressed by solar advocates,” the statement said. “However, there is an equity issue that must be considered as Hawaiian Electric rolls out these incentive programs. While we want to encourage customers to enroll in our programs, we also want to ensure the costs for the programs are spread fairly across customers, including those who are facing financial challenges.”

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Moriwake said that position loses sight of the urgent need for Hawaiʻi to move beyond fossil fuels. Despite being among the first states to set clean energy targets, Hawaiʻi relies on imported oil to meet 75 percent of its electricity consumption. “I think particularly in the era of climate emergency, let alone brownouts and supply shortfalls, that we have to move past the nickel and diming around getting the rooftop solar compensation exactly right,” he said.

Hawaiʻi has also found itself grappling with generation shortages. On January 8, for the first time in almost a decade, failures at an Oʻahu oil-burning power plant coupled with a shortage in utility-scale stored energy caused an outage and led the utility to ask customers to conserve energy as it instituted rolling blackouts across the island. Home batteries enrolled in Battery Bonus kicked in, but that wouldn’t have been enough to meet demand. 

“It begs the question, had we had a fully subscribed, operational program, what number would it have taken to avoid the blackouts altogether?” Mould said.

Hawaiian Electric also stressed that reducing demand also provides its own service to the grid. “The goal of BYOD is to reduce system-wide load during the evening peak when demand for electricity on the grid is typically the highest. When a customer consumes energy from their battery on site, they’re offsetting their load and helping achieve that goal.” 

Those concerned about the new program await its impacts. Its rollout was to begin March 1, but was delayed a month to give the utility time to implement changes ordered by the utilities commission based on early objections to the program. Legislation to mandate retail-rate compensation is also pending, but won’t be heard this session. Solar advocates remain hopeful that, if enrollment remains low, Hawaiian Electric will adjust its compensation. 

That’s what happened with Battery Bonus. When the utility introduced the program, it was more restrictive in who could participate and offered fewer incentives. Enrollments stalled, and as the power plant closure loomed, Hawaiian Electric expanded the incentives. Participation picked up. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How changes to Hawaiʻi’s home battery program could hinder its clean energy transition on Mar 8, 2024.