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The cupboards locked, the kitchen swept clean with a broom of pine twigs, the children each dressed in their one good outfit — a sleight of hand transforming a band of free-range ragamuffins into a sort of pocket-sized town council — the sun creeping down, down, down toward the boreal horizon, and at last none of us could deny it: Jonathan wasn’t coming. 

So now it only remained to tell Mom. 

I tried first, because I’m weak. 

“Don’t you think it’s time to go get Dad?”

“Miriam, your father’s tired,” she told me. Which is one way to say dying of cancer, I suppose. She was setting the table, for the third time. “Besides, your brother will be here any minute. Then we’ll get Dad. Don’t be impatient.”

I bit my lip to keep from shouting. We had sworn a sacred sibling oath not to yell at her, but she does not make it easy. 

David’s turn. 

“Maybe we should get started anyway, and Jonathan can join —”

“Just wait, I told your sister —”

“Do you even know when —”

“He’ll be here —”

“Have you even spoken to him —”

“I sent a vid, he’s very busy —”

Despite my resolution, that pushed me back over the edge. I was bitterly grateful that my wife was stuck with her herds tonight; she hates to see me angry.

“You don’t even know Jonathan’s coming at all!”

“Miriam, I said I sent —”

“You don’t even know if he got it, the loons —”

And then Leo spoke.

He didn’t have to shout; he never does. It’s funny how the baby of the family became the one we all listen to.

“Mom,” said Leo. “Jonathan’s not coming.”

Silence in the house, and darkness, too, with only a sliver of sun left and the candles not yet lit. 

“I’d better go get Dad,” Mom said.

The seder was my father’s domain. Everything about it was his, year after year. The seder plate was his seder plate. The molding Haggadot, spiral-bound with ancient fossil plastic, were his. Even the recipes, suitably modified for our new diets — hazelnut matzah and algae karpas — came from his family. And, of course, he was the leader of the service, reading the familiar story word for word, year after year. 

This was not the first seder of his illness.

Last year, when my shrunken and sallow father had taken his shuffling place at the head of our seder table, a remarkable transformation overtook him. It was as if the winds of other times and other places filled him like an airship, and suddenly he was not a suffering, shriveled, cancer-crossed dad; he was my father from childhood, from out of every childhood, from when the world was new.

For the fourth cup of wine, for the fourth promise of G-d, he read, just like every year of my life, “I will take you to be MY people,” and deep in my bones I felt the truth of it, that I was of G-d’s people and of my father’s people —

That was the man my father was. Had been.

This was not the first seder of his illness. But it was the first seder of his death.

Dad entered the dining room, with Mom holding his elbow. He made it to his chair. He sat down.

Nothing happened.

We all sat there for a minute, in unfamiliar silence, even the children waiting for what would happen next. Dad blinked at the Haggadah Mom carefully placed in front of him. He tried to lift the first page.

It was too much for him; he let it fall. 

I found myself, of course, looking to Leo at the foot of the table, and I knew David across from me was looking to the same, and my kid began to squirm, and Leo’s face as he stared at Dad showed no legible emotion at all —

“I guess I’ll read,” said Mom.

What is Passover?

David’s the schoolteacher. He’s good at explanations. Me, I don’t explain anything. I just gene-tweak mammoths. 

Working as an eco-pheno-geno-biofeedback climate engineer, you get in the habit of seeing things as very complicated. Is this stand of old-growth taiga spruce a valuable carbon sink? Or is it a “bad voxel” with a dangerously low albedo compared to adjacent snowy grasslands, primed to absorb too much sunlight and turn it into heat? Or is it a useful landmark for navigating a mammoth herd? Or is that bad, because we want to lure the herd onto a different track to reduce the risk of inter-herd conflict? Or —

I write a lot of reports.

Passover is a holiday that celebrates the liberation of the Jews from Egypt and/or Passover is a collection of songs and stories and quizzes and weird little games, like a mixed-up child’s toy chest of traditions and/or Passover is when twenty million of the world’s most anxious people get to explore a fun, seasonal set of dietary restrictions in addition to the year-round ones and/or Passover is the candles, and the wine, and the prayers, and the songs, and/or Passover is a story of a marvelous escape by refugees trapped between an army and an ocean —

I write a lot of reports, and then I go in and change the mammoths. Back in the Pleistocene, extremely long biofeedback loops took care of that automatically, but these days we are on a tighter timetable. So I made the mammoths snow white; that was me. The genetic sequence from polar bears is very well characterized and it takes transcription easily. A white mammoth absorbs less sunlight; the glittering fur reflects more heat back into space. Every good voxel counts.

What is Passover?

Basically, you get all your family in one room, deny everybody food until you’ve made it through a two-hour interactive lecture, while constantly drinking more and more wine, and then act surprised when a fight breaks out.

“Mom, don’t you think —” said David. But she hadn’t listened to him for forty-two years; why would she start now?

“Now in the presence of loved ones and friends, before us the emblems of festive rejoicing —”

She was off. What could we do? We read along, all of us chorusing in unison, siblings, spouses, kids, even Dad managing to mumble.

“Remember the day on which you went forth from Egypt, from the house of bondage —”

And what do you know, she was good.

It was a little cynical, perhaps, to judge my own mother’s reading of the seder strictly on its theatrical merits, but surely we Jews have earned our cynicism. And she was good. Deep voice, solid rhythm. Kept good time in the group readings and didn’t interrupt my kids when they stumbled over the longer, more ornate words and transliterations. I didn’t have to hate this.

So long as I kept my eyes off of Dad.

“Seder,” in English, literally translates as “order.” Nevertheless, our family never reads the Haggadah in the official order. Instead, the whole thing is held together by a complicated web of bookmarks and marginal notes. It’s not the original system, but it works.

That’s why, not twenty minutes into the seder, between the first and second cups of wine, we got to Elijah.

There’s a superstition about Elijah. You leave an extra cup of wine out for him, and then you send the little kids to open the door for Elijah. Then one of the adults sneaks the glass of wine, or secretly rocks the table, and, Look, kids, it’s Elijah, he’s drinking it!

In the Book of Kings, Elijah smites four-hundred pagan priests with fire from heaven. In the Haggadah, he plays a silly little haunted-house drinking game with kids. Being a grown-up is like that, I think. 

“May the All-Merciful send us Elijah the Prophet to comfort us with tidings of deliverance,” said Mom. “Now let us open the door for Elijah.”

David and my kids knew their parts, and they ran, all in a giggling mob, to the front door to fling it open —

And they screamed.

The man at the door did look like Elijah. He was tall, and gaunt, and bearded. He was bundled for the taiga, not the deserts of the Holy Land, but his clothes were stark and worn. One arm was tied up in an impromptu sling.

I must have run for the door when the kids screamed; we all must have. I don’t remember; I never remember running to my kids. I just remember staring, and staring, and staring at the man in the door.

It had been years. There was no reason that the kids should recognize their uncle Jonathan.

Mom bustled Jonathan in the door and she bustled the door shut. She bustled him out of his traveling clothes, and she worried over his injured arm so much that she almost fainted. She ran back and forth with ever-increasing energy and declining effectiveness until Leo stopped her. 

He got her back into her chair at the head of the table, got Jonathan seated at the foot beside him. Dad had not stood up to greet Jonathan; I did not know if he understood that Jonathan had been gone and now he was back. I didn’t know.

David asked Jonathan about his arm. “Grolar bear attack,” he replied. 

It wasn’t surprising. We’ve been driving up the population of grolars for years now. Larger apex predators produce upward cull pressure on herbivore size, which increases winter survivability and population throughput, ultimately allocating more biomass to the mammoths overall. But push it up too hard, though, and you kick off a predation double-bust, which throws your whole cycle out of whack —

Systems are complicated.

The kids were probably desperate to ask Jonathan about the grolars, but they were still scared of him, and he didn’t seem inclined to talk much. So I didn’t ask any follow-up questions, and neither did David.

“Mom,” said Leo, “keep reading.”

Jonathan started in his seat, turning to Leo. “Dad reads,” he said.

Leo did not turn to face him. They had been so close, before, the baby of the family and the eldest; Leo had idolized Jonathan. Jonathan was the sort of man Leo had always wanted to be, since long before the rest of us even knew he would grow into one. But then Jonathan vanished. No surprise Leo took it hard.

“This year Mom reads,” he said.

Jonathan looked at Leo. Looked at Mom. Looked at Dad. Looked away.

In a dining room crowded for seder, it’s hard to find somewhere to look that’s not another watching face, but he managed.

Mom was still staring at her prodigal son, drinking in his face, but Leo managed to catch her eye and gave her a firm nod, and she started reading again.

Passover is a child-friendly holiday. Not really the story of the Exodus itself, which has an unavoidable infusion of the Bronze Age macabre — drowned babies, Moses beating and killing an overseer, blood on the doorpost, spontaneous death plague — but certainly the seder is. The songs have an easy nursery-rhyme simplicity. The ritual food appears in handy sandwich format. The children have dedicated readings; ”Ma Nishtanah” — “Why is this night different from all other nights?” — is traditionally sung by the youngest child present. 

But the Four Children is not, I think, exactly child-friendly.

It’s an odd little bit of text, a piece of Talmudic psychological gristle undigested by medieval pageantry or modern bowdlerization. It notices that the Torah commands us to teach our children the story of Passover four distinct times. Now, a mammoth geneticist would see that reduplication as merely a healthy copy-error redundancy in an inherited text, but the rabbis of the Talmud thought differently. They thought that every word was a perfect, unique gift from G-d.

So they said that four commandments meant four different ways to teach; four different archetypal children. The good child, the wicked child, the simple child, and the one who does not even know how to ask. Each of them receives a different instruction.

The passage is child-unfriendly, not through sex or violence but rather through its crushing essentialism. These days we tell our children, “You can be anything you want to be.” These days we tell them, “You live in a special time, an important time, when there is so much work of tikkun olam, of repairing the Earth. So much work, so many jobs — from rewilding the rainforest to herding mammoths! — and one of those jobs out there is just for you. Just as special and unique as you are.”

But our sages teach us: There are four children. Kiss-ass, shithead, stupid, and double stupid.

In my family there were four of us, too.

Don’t imagine that we missed that part.

In the end, it was simple bad luck. 

Most of the readings in our Haggadah are delivered solo by the leader, or together by the entire table. But the Four Children is tagged with that most perilous note, “A Participant.” Which means we go around the table, clockwise. 

I had the wise child. That gave Leo the wicked.

“The wicked person says, ‘What is this observance to you?’ Because they say ‘to you’ and not ‘to us,’ they reject the unity of G-d and the community of Judaism. To them we respond sharply —” and suddenly Leo was looking at Jonathan, staring at him, teeth flashing as he bit out words, “it is because of what G-d did for me when I went forth from Egypt, for by abandoning us, you would not have known redemption.”

Time for the chorus, and David and I leapt in, “the wicked one withdraws themselves from anything beyond themselves —” and Mom was reading along, and the kids were doing their best, and even Dad was gamely mumbling, but Jonathan didn’t say anything. Neither did Leo.

We trailed off, a comet tail of phonetic rubble. Jonathan’s turn now, but he still wasn’t saying anything. His Haggadah lay open on the table, still open to the page of the wicked child.

“Jonathan,” I said, in the gentlest voice I could manage. “It’s your turn.”

My older brother has never listened to me.

“I don’t deserve this,” Jonathan said to Leo.

All across Leo’s face I could see pain congealing into anger.

“Of course you do,” Leo said. “You left. One day, you just got it into your head to leave us.”

“No,” said Jonathan. “Dad told me to go.”

Jonathan left us when he was nineteen. There was no warning. 

He’d been fighting with Dad more. I think. It was hard to tell. Jonathan and Dad both had a strange, oblique way of arguing. Nothing like me or David or Mom. Just a coldness that settled between words, between actions, that froze the ground and then kept it frozen. And then one day he was gone.

Leo was fourteen; he’d come out a year and a half earlier. (He’s the only Jew I know who’s had both a bat and a bar mitzvah. Good timing.) When Jonathan left, Leo felt abandoned by his brother. He was devastated.

But the rest of us were hurting, too.

It’s a big world out there, and we lived at the very farthest edge of it. I understood that. I could imagine how Jonathan might want to see something different than tundra, tundra, tundra, mammoth. I could imagine how Jonathan might want to escape from the cold in our house and the cold in our family. I could imagine lots of things.

I had to imagine, because he never videoed, never even DM’d.

There’s internet service at the house, at least when the loons — network-relay balloons, high up in the stratosphere — form a tight enough chain. These days that’s most days, since they keep putting them up in the stratosphere. Shiny mylar, amazing albedo. Very good voxels. Back when Jonathan left, two decades ago, the service was less regular. But he could have at least DM’d.

He never did.

Well, he never DM’d me.

“What?” said Leo.

“Dad told me to go.”

“Just because he threw you out of the house didn’t mean you had to leave the continent!”

“No. It wasn’t like that. He sent me back.”

“He what?”

Mom broke in. “You two can catch up later. The simple child —”

Leo stopped her with an outstretched arm.

“Dad sent you? Why? Where?”

Jonathan shuffled uncomfortably in his seat. He was a big man, even if thinned out from his taiga journey home, but he seemed all at once to collapse in on himself. 

“I dunno. Ask him.”

Leo’s eyes narrowed. He turned to look at Dad.

Dad stared blankly back at all of us. He blinked. He licked his lips. I do not know if, at that moment, he could have counted his own children.

“Well?” said Leo. “Where did you send him?”

Dad blinked again. “The simple child asks, ‘What is this?’ To them —”

“Where did you send Jonathan, Dad?”

“… we say, ‘With a mighty arm’ —”

“Where did you send Jonathan?” Leo’s voice was louder than I’d heard it in years. 

“‘… G-d freed us’ —” 

“Where did Jonathan go?” Leo was shouting now, hands flat on the table.

“‘… from the house of bondage.’”

“Where, Dad!”

“Texas,” said Mom. “He wanted us to go home.”

“Dad’s not from Texas,” said David.

“Home is here,” I said, at the same time.

It’s hard to say which one of us Mom looked at with greater contempt. But she loved Leo, and she spoke to him.

“We never told you,” she said. “We didn’t want you to know.”

“Dad’s not from Texas,” said David. “We’re not from Texas. If we were from Texas —”

“You didn’t move here,” I said. “You were sent.”

Jewish history is a litany of expulsions. First exile, second exile. The Roman diaspora. The Spanish Inquisition. The Khmelnytsky Uprising. The pogroms. The Holocaust. These episodes enter gentile history as genocides, as exterminations, and this is not inaccurate. But the Jews of a later era are descended from survivors, and survivors fled. They knew when to flee, and how fast to travel. 

The story of the Exodus is perhaps not a surprise.

“You could have told us,” said David. “There’s no shame in it. Half of my class’s parents are from Texas — they made new lives, they raised families, they talk about it —”

“Yes,” said Leo. “They talk about it.” He was still staring at Dad. Dad blinked aimlessly — and blinked again, with sudden recognition, and said, quite clearly and distinctly, “Jonathan.”

Silence at the seder table.

“Jonathan,” he said again. But he was not looking at his oldest son; he was looking at his youngest.

“Yes, Dad,” said Leo, quietly.

“Jonathan, you’re back.” 

“Yes, Dad,” said Leo, and beside him Jonathan mouthed the same words.

“Jonathan, did they forgive me? Can I go home?”

Leo clenched his jaw, his fists. He turned to his older brother.

“No, Dad,” said Jonathan. “You can’t.”

What happened in Texas was complicated. Drought in the Rio Grande. Crop failures across the Great Plains, from Nuevo León to Iowa. Mass migration along several distinct axes. Dismemberment of the petrochemical industry. Rocket riots over Project Sunshade. Paramilitary violence and military violence. 

System failures are as complicated as systems themselves.

But not everyone who left Texas was a refugee.

“They took me to a museum,” Jonathan said. “I marched in and applied for family repatriation, and they looked my name up on a list and said, ‘You’d better come with us.’ And I thought —”

I do not think I had ever seen my brother cry before. Nobody needed to ask him what he thought. 

“But I went and they showed me, Dad. The Hall of Exiles. They have a museum and you’re in it. They have the drone cams and the SWAT group chats and the interoffice wiki. Dozens of people died in that holding cell —”

“Hot summer,” said Dad. He sounded ancient. He sounded like a boy.

“You had water and you didn’t give it to them.”

“Such a hot summer,” said Dad. “They just kept coming.”

“A new king arose over Egypt,” I said, “and he said, ‘Look, the Israelite people are too numerous for us. Let us then deal shrewdly with them.’”

“Hottest summer of my life,” said Dad. “Nothing like here.”

“Then why did you send me back?”

Dad stared, for a long time. His jaw went slack.

“I want to go home.”

We couldn’t get anything out of Dad after that. He went back inside, to where that metastatic shadow-self was eating him.

The next day, out on the range with my wife, checking in on the pregnant mammoths and tagging the youngest calves, telling her the story, I could not believe it didn’t end right then. But the truth is, we kept going. None of us were ready for the seder to end.

We drank all four cups of wine. We counted out the plagues. We ate algae karpas and horseradish from the backyard. The kids hid the hazelnut afikomen. Leo hugged Jonathan. Jonathan hugged Mom. The mammoth brisket was delicious. We sang “Dayenu,” because even a single miracle would have been enough.

Out on the range with Thea, I thought about my parents’ lies. About my father’s crimes. About fleeing, and being sent. 

When a loon is near, I could look up my father’s trial. I could dig up his conviction in an old database. I don’t need to, though. The sentences were all the same. Climate remediation for the remainder of natural life. Forty years in the desert. 

Those sentenced ended up all over. The olam is wide, and there’s more than enough tikkun to go around. “It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you at liberty to neglect it.”

The world is very complicated, and sometimes when I try too hard to understand it all I get confused. Which is why I’m grateful for my wife.

She gets up in the morning. She puts her feet on the permafrost. She tends to the mammoths.

To me, those animals are 5.8 billion genetic base pairs locked in a chaos cascade with maybe half a trillion other ecological variables, bending the curve of an ecosystem away from catastrophe. That’s what I write in my reports. 

Thea doesn’t think about them that way. She puts her hands on a snowy, furry flank; a trunk wraps around her shoulders. That’s enough.

So I told her the story, all of it, and I waited at the end for her insight. And because she’s wiser than I am, she waited instead for me. And I realized: I know how the story ends. The same way it always does: l’shana haba’ah b’yerushalayim. 

Next year in a more just world. Next year, in the city of peace.

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A Seder in Siberia on Jan 22, 2024.

Lagos State, which includes Nigeria’s most populous city of 15.4 million, has announced a ban on single-use plastics and styrofoam in order to reduce the plastic pollution that chokes the region.

The ban would be immediate, according to a statement from the state government, but enforcement and implementation would not be so straightforward, environmental experts said, as AFP reported.

“Following the menace which single-use plastics especially non-biodegradable Styrofoam are causing on the environment, the Lagos State government through the Ministry of the Environment and Water Resources is hereby announcing a ban on the usage and distribution of Styrofoam and other single-use plastics in the State with immediate effect,” Tokunbo Wahab, the state’s environment and water resources commissioner, said on social media.

Styrofoam is widely used in food service and delivery by markets and street vendors in Lagos, but it and other packaging build up in the area’s drains and roads, reported AFP.

The new measure received praise from some, while others wondered what alternatives there would be for merchants and manufacturers.

“Our state cannot be held hostage to the economic interests of a few wealthy business owners compared to the millions of Lagosians suffering the consequences of indiscriminate dumping of single use plastics and other types of waste,” Wahab said, as Business Day reported.

Climate and Ecological Protection Initiative co-founder Folawemi Umunna said correct implementation of the ban was key.

“This is wonderful news for the environment on different levels and if this is effectively executed, capable of reducing a substantial amount of CO2 emissions in tonnes in the Lagos State perimeter,” Umunna said, as reported by AFP.

According to the United Nations Environment Programme, each year the planet’s rivers, lakes and oceans are polluted with 21 to 25 million tons of plastic trash.

Other African countries like Tanzania, Botswana, Mali, Ethiopia, Kenya, Mali, Malawi, Cameroon, Morocco, Uganda, Rwanda, Botswana and South Africa have either banned single-use plastics or placed a high tax on them, Times of India said.

Tanzania prohibits travelers from bringing plastic bags of any thickness into the country. The exception is bags that zip shut used to carry toiletries, as long as they are not disposed of there. Visitors to Tanzania are encouraged to use cloth bags.

“The convenience of single use plastic comes at a huge cost to the society. We must all make small sacrifices for our collective well-being,” Wahab said, as Business Day reported.

The post Nigeria’s Lagos State Bans Single-Use Plastics and Styrofoam appeared first on EcoWatch.

Ottawa’s 4.85-mile Rideau Canal Skateway, the largest ice skating rink in the world, reopened on Sunday after remaining closed last year due to climate change.

Every winter from January to early March, the gigantic rink on the Rideau Canal — a UNESCO World Heritage Site — is transformed into a commuter’s dream connecting suburbs to the downtown area of Canada’s capital city, EcoWatch reported previously.

The canal’s frozen skateway did not open for the first time last year, the National Capital Commission (NCC) said, because there was not enough ice, Reuters reported. The lack of ice was said to have been caused by a mild winter due to climate change.

“Our team learned a lot from the challenges we faced last year and were able to put measures in place, helped by more seasonal temperatures, to make it happen this year,” said Tobi Nussbaum, CEO of NCC, as reported by Reuters.

The famous skating rink first opened 53 years ago.

“The idea to turn the Rideau Canal into a skateway came from then-newly appointed NCC chair Doug Fullerton. In January 1971, a team of NCC employees armed with brooms and shovels turned his idea into a reality,” NCC said. “At the area between the bridges, lighting and music were added to increase the enjoyment of skating in the evening… That season, hundreds of thousands of residents and visitors made their way onto the ice to start a new winter tradition.”

The icy throughway is the site of Winterlude, three weekends of community events featuring Indigenous arts and crafts, ice sculptures and street performers.

Last year was not the first time the Rideau winter wonderland closed due to warm temperatures. The El Niño winter of 2015-16 also caused the natural rink to shut down after its first month because of thin ice, EcoWatch said.

The world’s longest skating rink is only allowed to open when there is a minimum of 12 inches of ice on the canal, the NCC said earlier, as Reuters reported. This means there needs to have been 10 to 14 days in a row of temperatures from minus four to minus 14 degrees Fahrenheit.

A risk assessment due to climate change was commissioned by the Standards Council of Canada and the NCC to gauge how the Rideau Skateway is affected by climate change.

The skating rink’s second season of 1971-72 was its longest on record at 95 days, according to the NCC, while an average season is 50 days.

“[T]he NCC should prepare for seasons with less than 40 days of skating approximately 50% of the time” under a moderate emissions scenario, the risk assessment said, as reported by Reuters.

The post World’s Largest Ice Skating Rink Reopens in Canada After Lack of Ice in 2023 appeared first on EcoWatch.

An intense drought has led to a 36% decline in traffic for the Panama Canal, one of the most important maritime trade routes in the world.

Officials have denied ship crossings 36% as the canal has decreasing water levels from the drought, The Associated Press reported.

According to Ricaurte Vásquez, the administrator of the Panama Canal Authority, the decline of water in the artificial waterway could exceed previous cost loss estimates of $200 million this year, reaching up to $700 million in 2024.

The ongoing drought has disrupted trade, with Panama Canal Authority reporting the driest October in 2023 since October 1950. That month, authorities established reservation slots for transit. In November, the authority adjusted the daily transit to 31 vessels per day as part of its water-saving measures. In normal conditions, 38 vessels per day were permitted to cross the canal.

The canal authority recently reduced the number of vessels allowed through the waterway to 22, Fortune reported. With higher-than-usual rains in November 2023 and more water management measures, officials said there may be enough water to allow 24 vessels per day in the canal through April.

“It’s vital that the country sends a message that we’re going to take this on and find a solution to this water problem,” Vásquez said, as reported by The Associated Press.

The canal serves 170 countries and connects to 1,920 ports, according to the Panama Canal Authority. The drought and shipping restrictions in the Panama Canal, along with conflicts in the Red Sea, could increase shipping costs and delays.

Climate change and the current El Niño have been linked to the drought and declining water levels in the canal, and the declining water levels impact not just global shipping but also water supply for about 50% of Panama. 

“The water problem is a national problem, not just of the Canal,” Vásquez said. “We have to address this issue across the entire country.”

Drought has caused several issues with shipping in the Panama Canal in recent years. Most notably, in August 2023, around 200 ships were stuck in a traffic jam in the canal because of the low water levels, Business Insider reported.

The rainy season for the country is expected to begin in April, which could bring some relief, while El Niño is likely to last through March 2024.

The post Drought Cuts Panama Canal Traffic by 36% appeared first on EcoWatch.

Despite its other environmental impacts, including toxic waste that requires centuries or millennia of storage…

The post Earth911 Podcast: Can Nano Nuclear Energy’s Microreactors Deliver Equitable Electricity? appeared first on Earth911.

When we think of “plant-based meat,” we might envision a veggie burger filled with savory…

The post How Is Plant-Based Meat Made? appeared first on Earth911.

Chantell Dunbar-Jones remembers when her hometown of Lewisville, Arkansas, seemed to have oil wells on every corner. The small town, located in the southwestern part of the state, sits atop the Smackover Oil Formation, one of the largest oilfields in the United States. For a long time, nearly everyone worked for the oil industry. Dunbar-Jones’ father started with Phillips 66 but was shunted to smaller and smaller companies as wells started closing in the late 1990s and the industry shifted toward Texas. In the years since, the town has seen residents and businesses leave in pursuit of brighter futures.

The area’s fortunes began to look up late last year, when ExxonMobil, alongside a couple of other companies, announced its intention to begin producing lithium in the region by 2027. It opened a test site on the Smackover formation, which spans three states and could supply 15 percent of the world’s lithium. It’s got folks in Lewisville cautiously hopeful that the change could turn things around.

“We are just very excited, trying to get all our ducks in a row and be able to take advantage of what’s coming,” said Dunbar-Jones, who has served on the city council for seven years.

ExxonMobil joins a growing rush to supply the natural resources needed to drive the green transition. Oil producers and coal companies like Ramaco Resources are looking to collaborate with the Department of Energy to uncover them and, in some cases, wring more money from land they already own. 

Lithium and other minerals like cobalt, nickel, and silicon are essential to producing solar panels, wind turbines, and the batteries that power electric vehicles. Right now, the vast majority of these critical minerals come from Argentina, Australia, Chile, China, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. There’s only one rare-earth elements and one lithium mine in the U.S., and the Biden administration has made more than $407 million available for domestic exploration and production through the Inflation Reduction Act. That influx compounds the effect of other investments at various links in the domestic clean energy supply chain. These subsidies have made cashing in on the green transition attractive to fossil fuel companies, many of which have access to potentially productive land and the experience and equipment to mine it. In places known for their reserves of oil and coal, such as the Powder River Basin of Wyoming and southern Arkansas, fossil fuel companies are descending on newly discovered stores of critical minerals. That’s left some people excited by the promise of economic revitalization and others nervous that they’ll be revisited by all the worst social and environmental impacts of fossil fuel extraction. 

Dunbar-Jones, so far, sees few reasons for concern. Mostly, Exxon’s announcement, alongside similar announcements from companies like Standard Lithium, feels like a great excuse to dress up Lewisville and collaborate with surrounding towns to open the region up for business. She’s been told the area could see hundreds of new jobs. “We’re losing people to lack of adequate housing, lack of adequate employment,” she said. “Now that lithium is coming, everyone’s trying to come back.”

The land around the Smackover Oil Formation remains scarred by years of eager and often ill-planned petroleum extraction, its streams contaminated by oil and brine. Exxon and other companies looking for lithium have participated in public meetings where they’ve allayed environmental concern, Dunbar-Jones said, declaring their methods to be safe and environmentally sound. But she still wonders.

“How can you really know before they come in and get started?” she asked.

ExxonMobil did not respond to a request for comment, but in a statement announcing the lithium project said the process by which it will mine the lithium is safe and produces fewer carbon emissions than hard rock mining and requires significantly less land.

Critical minerals extraction is subject to a relatively loose framework of regulations, and it can be quite destructive, said Marco Tedesco, a climate scientist at Columbia University who has researched its extraction worldwide. To exploit the Smackover formation, Exxon plans to tap the lithium-rich brine 10,000 feet below ground using a process called deep lithium extraction. “They pump lithium from the bottom — similar to fracking,” Tedesco said, adding that the process requires an immense amount of water. The brine evaporates, leaving lithium salts and other byproducts, some valuable and some toxic. “People living by a mine, they have a right to exploit this economic opportunity,” he said, but in practice, Tedesco sees most of the benefits leaving the communities where extraction happens.

“Unfortunately, history is scattered with a systematic disregard for transparency and a lack of accountability by corporations,” Tedesco said.  

Water scarcity is a big topic in Wyoming, a cold, dry state with expansive strip mines, intensive fracking, and a growing industry in critical minerals. Coal has been tied to the identity of  Gillette, a small town in the northeast corner of the state, for over 100 years. The Powder River Basin holds most of the nation’s recoverable reserves. Coal company Ramaco Resources, with the help of a Department of Energy national laboratory, discovered what may be the nation’s largest deposit of rare-earth metals on land it bought for $2 million in 2011. Rather than dig for coal, Ramaco will tap what it says will be a $37 billion bonanza in critical minerals. 

Shannon Anderson, the staff attorney for the environmental organization Powder River Basin Resource Council, doesn’t see anything unusual in what Ramaco is doing. “Companies are really good at reinventing themselves when there’s a market opportunity to do that, ” she said, and the mining industry has been eager to join the clean energy supply chain. Research has shown that mine tailings, acid mine drainage, and other toxic coal waste may in fact be a decent source of critical minerals. Despite his opposition to many of President Joe Biden’s clean energy policies, Senate Democrat Joe Manchin, who represents the coal-producing state of West Virginia, had little trouble pushing to bolster domestic critical minerals supplies, in hopes that might make mine waste profitable for coal companies. What has changed in Anderson’s 16 years of work are “the astronomical level of subsidies that are driving these decisions.” 

In Wyoming, grassroots organizations and the communities they serve are particularly concerned about water consumption and pollution, both ongoing problems in the state’s high deserts. “We’ve been dealing with the impacts of coal for a long time,” Anderson said.  “Are we ready to deal with the impacts of new kinds of mining for a generation or two?”

Anderson also expressed concern that the Biden administration’s goodwill toward “energy communities” — defined as those regions once dependent on fossil fuels and faced with diversifying their economies — could result in further exploitation in those communities, which Biden has made a priority for investment through clean energy programs.

While many federal grants and loans focus on improving housing, broadband, and energy efficiency, a few focus on mineral research, biofuels, and natural gas infrastructure. Since January 2021, the Department of Energy has announced an estimated $41 million in projects to support critical minerals exploration in former mining communities.

Despite these funding opportunities, many of these places may fall short when it comes to tax revenue, environmental regulations, and cleanup. Laws vary from state to state, but most of the places that saw a massive resource wealth extracted by coal and oil companies received only a small percentage of that windfall through wages, state royalties, local severance taxes, and company largesse like building parks or other amenities. 

The severance taxes on critical minerals, which fall under the “general minerals” tax category, are in general lower than those paid on coal and oil. Under the 1872 mining law, they don’t yield state royalties at all. For that reason, ensuring communities see a financial benefit requires rethinking how those revenues are shared. “You can’t design a tax system to do a one-for-one replacement,”  said Anderson.    

The 1872 mining law also doesn’t apply to private land or land east of the Mississippi River. That land is instead regulated by the Clean Water Act and other laws, and by permitting processes that are looser than those for oil and coal. Within this patchwork of federal, state, and local laws and land ownership schemes lie many loopholes for some kinds of mining waste. Blaine Miller-McFeeley, a mining expert at the environmental law nonprofit Earthjustice, cautioned that there are many ways for oil and gas companies to evade responsibility for the long-term effects of mineral mining.

“The current administration is not applying strong enough diligence standards to money that’s going out the door,” Miller-McFeeley said. ”They have the opportunity to set a high bar so that we are not moving our sacrifice zones from oil- and coal-impacted communities to mining-impacted communities.”

“These oil and gas and coal companies are greenwashing themselves,” he added, “by saying the way they’ve always done mining, which is the destructive, toxic way, is the solution to climate change.”

The Biden administration has noted these challenges, and an Interior Department interagency working group is attempting to reform the 1872 mining law to allow for more stringent environmental regulation and public process — though mining industry representatives and Republican officials have criticized these efforts, and they are currently stalled. Environmental Protection Agency officials contacted by Grist affirmed broad support for a new, tightly regulated leasing system that allows the U.S. to meet increased critical minerals demand with greater attention to water quality and communities’ rights to say no to new development, or if the development is wanted, maintain transparent communication with mining companies.

Ramped-up regulation, Marco Tedesco said, could help ensure the communities that provide the materials needed to wean the country off of fossil fuels see more of the benefits, and fewer of the problems, that fossil fuel extraction brought them. But he cautioned that will happen only if rural, working-class communities like Lewisville and Gillette are involved in a public and transparent process to shape the policies needed to do that.

“Involving communities at decision level in the early stages, investing in addressing environmental impacts, projecting the consequences on future generations, and sharing the economic and financial benefits with the communities should be moving together,” Tedesco said, “like the elements of a choir.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Oil companies used to run this town. Now they’re back — to mine for lithium. on Jan 22, 2024.

More than a quarter of the wild seafood that the world eats comes from the seafloor. Shrimp, skate, sole, cod and other creatures — mostly flat ones — that roam the bottom of the ocean get scooped up in huge nets. These nets, called bottom trawls, wrangle millions of tons of fish worth billions of dollars each year. But they also damage coral, sponges, starfish, worms, and other sand-dwellers as the nets scrape against the ocean bed. Environmentalists sometimes liken the practice to strip-mining or clear-cutting forests.

According to a new study in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science, bottom trawling may be even worse than many people had thought. Dragging nets through the sand — which occurs over some 5 million square kilometers, a little over 1 percent of the ocean floor — isn’t just a threat to marine life. The study found that stirring up carbon-rich sediment on the seafloor releases some 370 million metric tons of planet-warming carbon dioxide every year, roughly the same as running 100 coal-fired power plants. 

“I was pretty surprised,” said Trisha Atwood, a watershed scientist at Utah State University and the paper’s lead author. The findings, Atwood added, suggest that restricting bottom trawling could have “almost instantaneous benefits” for the climate.

The paper follows a study by some of the same scientists published in the journal Nature in 2021 – one that drew a lot of media attention as well as criticism from other researchers who thought its results were way off. In 2021, Atwood’s team found that bottom trawling unlocks more carbon from the seafloor than all of the world’s airplanes emit each year. But they couldn’t say how much of that carbon ended up in the atmosphere heating the earth and how much of it stayed in the water. 

So that’s what they set out to do in the latest study. The team used fishing vessel data to map regions where trawlers have disturbed the seabed — like the North Sea off the coast of Europe — and applied ocean circulation models to estimate how much carbon dioxide flows from the sea into the air. They found that more than half of the carbon set loose by trawling makes its way into the atmosphere — and does so relatively quickly, within less than a decade.

“The most important finding here is that these emissions are not negligible,” said Juan Mayorgas, a marine data scientist at the National Geographic Society and co-author of the paper. “They are not small. They cannot be ignored.”

The world’s oceans are sponge-like in their ability to absorb carbon, soaking up a quarter of all the carbon dioxide that humans spew into the air. In fact, a lot more carbon is stored in the sea than in all the soil and plants on Earth. But until recently, little attention had been given to how much the oceans emit. “We know the oceans aren’t a closed system,” Mayorgas said. “At the same time the ocean is absorbing CO2, it’s emitting it.” 

Most climate goals and policies don’t take emissions from sea-based activities like trawling into account. Atwood and Mayorgas said their study could help change that. “Now,” Mayorgas said, “countries can put all the information on the table and say, ‘Here’s how many jobs trawling produces, here’s how much food it produces, here’s how much carbon it’s emitting.’”

But there’s one big caveat: Not everyone agrees with their research. The 2021 paper — which provided data for the new study — has drawn considerable backlash from scientists who called the results “wildly overestimated.”

“I’m very skeptical about their estimates,” said Jan Geert Hiddink, a marine biologist at Bangor University in the Netherlands, in an email. The team’s emissions estimates are off by “several orders of magnitudes,” he said, and “are likely to lead to misdirected management actions.” 

Hiddink, who co-authored a comment in Nature criticizing the 2021 paper, argues that carbon stored in the seabed is a lot less likely to be converted into carbon dioxide than Atwood’s team assumes in their models. He said that trawling in some locations — like shallow coastal areas that have muddy sediment and hold more carbon than deeper, sandier areas — is likely to spew some carbon dioxide into the water and atmosphere, but that more detailed research is needed to understand exactly how much gets unleashed. Hiddink suggested that some of the carbon dioxide that Atwood’s team claims to be released by rustling up the ocean floor is actually emitted naturally by microbes that break down decaying fish skeletons and other organic matter. 

“There’s no way the kinds of numbers they’re talking about are anywhere realistic,” said Ray Hilborn, a fisheries scientist at the University of Washington. (Hilborn has been criticized for getting financial support from the fishing industry for his research. In response, Hilborn said he’s been open about funding sources and pointed out that he has also received support from environmental groups like The Nature Conservancy and Environmental Defense Fund.)

Atwood said Hiddink’s critique is “entirely theoretical” and doesn’t align with empirical studies as closely as her team’s models. Enric Sala, a researcher with the National Geographic Society and lead author of the 2021 paper, also pushed back against Hiddink’s points, saying in a prepared statement that they “lack quantitative support.” 

Still, Atwood and her colleagues acknowledge that it’s not entirely clear how easily the sediment churned up by trawling releases carbon dioxide. Studies on that issue are “extremely limited,” the authors wrote. She said the latest paper is valuable for figuring out the proportion of carbon dioxide that winds up in the air after trawlers unleash it into the water. 

“All of us agree,” Atwood said, “that this is an area that we need more research in.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Bottom trawling shreds the seafloor. It may also be a huge source of carbon emissions. on Jan 22, 2024.