Utility-scale wind and solar capacity rose by 20 percent in Southeast Asia last year, as the region comprising the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) brought its total capacity to more than 28 gigawatts (GW), according to a new Global Energy Monitor (GEM) report.

The increase means the region is in a good position to comfortably meet its renewables goals ahead of schedule, a press release from GEM said.

“The growth of renewables across the region is impressive, but so much more can be achieved,” said GEM researcher Janna Smith in the press release.

The report found that a difficult regulatory environment for renewable energy, lack of progress with starting new renewables projects and perpetuating reliance on fossil fuels were presenting challenges to the clean energy transition.

The figures were taken from Wind Power and Global Solar Tracker data.

Vietnam topped the region’s operating utility-scale wind and solar capacity with 19 GW, while the Philippines and Thailand each had 3 GW. Prospective wind and solar in Vietnam and the Philippeans was at 86 and 90 GW, respectively — 80 percent of the total for the region.

The ASEAN region has nearly five times the proposed offshore wind power — 124 GW — than it does onshore wind. That is almost two times the current 69 GW global operating capacity for offshore wind.

However, just a small portion of construction on prospective projects has started — 6 GW, or three percent — a quarter of the average worldwide.

The goal of ASEAN nations is to have 35 percent renewables capacity installed by 2025, so they need just 10.7 GW in addition to projects currently under construction to meet their target. The region has 23 GW in place to start up by next year, so it is in a good position to exceed its goal.

Southeast Asia has some of the fastest growing economies in the world, and is relying on renewables to ensure its energy security, reported CNBC last year.

“Overall, the region’s policies and trends show countries are eager to transition to clean energy,” said Zulfikar Yurnaidi, energy modeling and policy planning manager at the ASEAN Center for Energy, as CNBC reported.

The region’s energy demand has grown by three percent on average annually in the last 20 years, a pattern that will hold until the end of the decade, the International Energy Agency said.

“With the world now aiming to triple renewables capacity by 2030, governments need to make it easier to bring wind and solar power online. Switching to renewables now from coal and gas will save countries time and money on the path to a clean energy future,” Smith said in the press release.

The post Wind and Solar Capacity in Southeast Asia Rose by 20% in 2023 appeared first on EcoWatch.

Rental car company Hertz is selling off 20,000 of electric vehicles in its fleet, with plans to replace these vehicles with internal combustion engine vehicles. 

The company cited high repair expenses and low demand as its reasons to sell the EVs, Utility Dive reported.

However, in 2021, Hertz had committed to offering one of the largest rental EV fleets in the world, stating at the time that as “consumer interest in electric vehicles (EV) skyrockets,” the company was planning to purchase more EVs, including 100,000 Teslas.

In April 2022, the company said it would buy 65,000 EVs from Polestar over the subsequent 5 years, CNN reported. Then, in September 2022, Hertz announced similar plans to buy an additional 175,000 EVs from GM, including electric models from Chevrolet, Cadillac and Buick, over the following 5 years.

But a new filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission from January 11, 2024 revealed that Hertz is looking to offload 20,000, or about one-third, of its EVs. The report noted that Hertz was expecting to use some of the money from the EV sales to purchase more internal combustion engine vehicles.

“The Company expects this action to better balance supply against expected demand of EVs. This will position the Company to eliminate a disproportionate number of lower margin rentals and reduce damage expense associated with EVs,” the SEC report said. 

According to the report, Hertz still plans to offer EV rentals and work toward other EV initiatives, such as expanding charging stations and working with manufacturers to lower the costs of EV repairs.

Experts are concerned about how the sale could impact the EV market as a whole, especially as the company raised concerns over the cost to maintain these vehicles.

“The larger impact of Hertz EV fire sale is the perception hit to the technology,” Karl Brauer, an analyst at used-car aggregator iSeeCars.com, told Reuters. “Mainstream consumers are already hesitant to buy an EV, and this news only supports their concerns.”

Further, some of the EVs currently being sold by Hertz are being offered at significant discounts, and experts are worried this will hurt rates across the secondhand EV market, which has already seen major declines in EV values. As Reuters reported, value in the EV market has declined over 33% from October 2022 to 2023.

At the time of writing, Hertz has over 600 EVs for sale, over 560 of which are Teslas. But Hertz CEO Stephen Scherr told CNBC that although the demand is currently not there for Tesla and other EV rentals, that demand could increase in the future.

“The reality of EVs and Teslas being the best-selling car will, at some point, render them the best rental car,” Scherr told CNBC. “It’s not yet, so we may have been ahead of ourselves in the context of how quickly that will happen, but that will happen.”

The post Hertz Begins Selling Off EVs, Plans to Buy Gas Vehicles as Replacements appeared first on EcoWatch.

The vision

Contractors at the Salvaged Materials Market ignored the stack of misshapen supplies, but Carmelo saw the makings of his masterpiece in that pile. The sculptor spent an hour scrounging to gather all he needed, then pushed his cart of discarded treasures out the door.

Every footstep fed his mind as they led to a four-story makerspace graffitied in the mismatched styles of his community’s cultures. Carmelo floated to his curtained-off corner, spilled his haul, and began to pick and place parts on his piece-in-progress in a dance that brought his dream from the dark of mind into the studio light.

— a drabble by Syris Valentine

The spotlight

We tend to think of buildings as semipermanent structures. Once they go up, decades or even centuries pass before they come down. But when they do, it’s usually under the weight of wrecking balls and sledgehammers. The shattered remains of the structures that once sheltered us are then often cast into a landfill. Each year, nearly 150 million tons of this debris piles up in dumps in the U.S. alone.

Globally, the act of erecting new buildings and tearing down old ones consumes roughly a third of all resources extracted from the environment every year and produces just under a third of all the world’s waste. But several cities across the U.S. have begun to push the construction sector toward practices that keep materials out of the landfill. The goal: Reuse parts of old buildings in new ones, and recycle the rest.

In 2016, Portland, Oregon, became the first city in the country to institute a deconstruction ordinance, requiring that all single-family homes built before 1940 and slated for removal be deconstructed — that is, taken apart board by board — so their materials can be salvaged for reuse. Since then, more than half a dozen cities from San Antonio to Pittsburgh have followed Portland’s example.

“Ideally, what is being pulled out of these houses is being used for their same purpose,” says Stephanie Phillips, San Antonio’s deconstruction and circular economy program manager. Like Portland’s, San Antonio’s 2022 ordinance specifically mandates that old, historic homes be deconstructed if they’re coming down.

That’s at least in part because the best, and sometimes only, way to get the right materials to rehab historic buildings is from a different home built in the same period. As Phillips says, “Rehabbing buildings is looked at as the pinnacle of climate-wise building.”

Contractors at work deconstructing a home as part of a training in San Antonio in late 2022. City of San Antonio Office of Historic Preservation

A small number of cities go even further. Boulder, Colorado, is one of only two cities nationwide (the other being Palo Alto, California) that requires deconstruction of any and every building slated to come down, regardless of age and whether it’s residential or commercial. Boulder’s ordinance also includes what’s known as a “mandatory minimum.” At least 75 percent of the total weight of a building must be diverted from landfill through either reuse or recycling.

Jackie Kirouac-Fram, executive director of the Portland-based nonprofit ReBuilding Center, believes that a mandatory minimum is necessary to achieve the intent of these deconstruction ordinances: salvaging high-quality materials that homeowners, builders, and craftspeople can then access at affordable rates. Without this requirement, Kirouac-Fram says, Portland has seen particularly low rates of salvage. (Official figures aren’t available, and city representatives didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

While San Antonio also lacks a mandatory minimum, Phillips says the city’s contractors have on average recovered 70 percent of a given building’s weight, with over half of the recovered materials going to reuse. Phillips attributes these figures to the thorough, city-sponsored training contractors must go through in order to qualify for San Antonio’s list of certified deconstruction contractors.

Lumber, bricks, doors, and other reclaimed materials are piled on the side of a deconstruction training site in San Antonio. City of San Antonio Office of Historic Preservation

Meanwhile, in Boulder, despite its mandatory minimum, the city has not provided much training for the local workforce or established certification requirements, according to Emily Freeman, the city’s policy advisor on the circular economy. As a result, some contractors may exploit loopholes to meet the requirements without salvaging so much as a single two-by-four, and property owners have few tools to evaluate the bids they receive. They’re being asked to compare “apples to kiwis,” Freeman says.

In the worst example she has seen to date, a contractor used the foundation — the heaviest part of a building — as well as patio furniture and mulched trees on the property to meet the requirement to divert 75 percent of the building’s weight.

This reveals another challenge when it comes to mandatory minimums: Such requirements often don’t differentiate between reuse — the ideal form of waste diversion — and recycling. For instance, if lumber isn’t sorted and stored so it can later be picked up and incorporated into a new project, it might instead be sent through a chipper and processed into particleboard.

To address these problems, Freeman and her colleagues are looking to revise and strengthen some of Boulder’s deconstruction practices, which could include hosting trainings and establishing a certified contractors list, similar to San Antonio’s, to ensure everyone has the same playbook of best practices. Freeman hopes that these types of changes would help Boulder to achieve the vision she briefly saw realized in 2023, when the city deconstructed an abandoned hospital. Of the 65-million-pound building, the city recycled or salvaged 60.8 million pounds, or 93.5 percent of the building’s weight. This included structural steel that has found its way into two new city-owned buildings: a fire station and a golf course clubhouse.

Taking salvaged materials and getting them into other buildings is what organizations like Kirouac-Fram’s ReBuilding Center aim to facilitate. It stores salvaged materials that Portlanders can purchase at low-to-no cost. San Antonio has launched its own Material Innovation Center to find the next best use for salvaged materials, including bus shelters, garden beds, and affordable housing repairs.

Paper towel dispensers and mirrors are gathered inside the abandoned Boulder hospital during its deconstruction. City of Boulder

But a final challenge remains in many of these cities: getting contractors to use salvaged materials in their projects. In some cases, the problem is a matter of ease and inventory; contractors don’t want to waste time browsing stacks of mismatched materials when they may not find what they need. In other cases, builders still need to be convinced that giving old materials a second life in new construction won’t compromise a building’s integrity.

Boulder has been struggling to close this piece of the reuse loop. Though the city has incorporated many of the metal beams extracted from the old hospital into new city-owned properties, some leftover steel remains. City officials are still in talks with builders in Boulder to find someone to take what’s left.

“It’s just a matter of convincing the construction world that reused steel is going to be solid,” Freeman says. She hopes that as people see other buildings standing strong with salvaged steel, they’ll start to use it in projects of their own.

— Syris Valentine

More exposure

• Read: more about the rise of deconstruction (Texas Climate News)
• Read: more about the development of Portland’s ordinance, the first in the nation (The Municipal)
• Read: about a startup using mushrooms to recycle building waste (Forbes) (and also on last year’s Grist 50)
• Read: an advice article about repurposing the discards of a home remodel (Grist)
• Read: about the problem of discarded clothing that plagues Chile (Grist)

A parting shot

Habitat for Humanity, the affordable housing organization, sells used home goods at its ReStores. Shoppers can find more than just furniture — the stores often stock building supplies like doors and windows, and even toilets, sinks, and tubs. Here, volunteers arrange plumbing supplies (including a gigantic tub) in a store that opened in 2006 in Portland, Maine.

IMAGE CREDITS

Vision: Grist

Parting shot: Portland Press Herald / Getty Images

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline To keep building materials out of landfills, cities are embracing ‘deconstruction’ on Jan 17, 2024.

The rise of electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles will require a transformation in battery technology,…

The post Best of Earth911 Podcast: Guidehouse Insights’ Sam Abuelsamid Maps the Future of EV Battery Innovation appeared first on Earth911.

An ebike is the most efficient way to travel and reduce your climate impact. With more than 300…

The post How To Recycle eBike Batteries appeared first on Earth911.

For decades, environmental advocates have been pushing back against “greenwashing,” when polluting companies misleadingly present themselves as environmentally friendly. Governments are finally starting to tackle the problem with stricter regulations: The European Union agreed to ban deceptive environmental ads in September, and the U.S. Fair Trade Commission is in the process of updating its guidelines around green advertising. 

But as new rules go into effect, they’re contributing to a different problem: Many companies, even honest ones, are afraid to talk about their work on climate change at all.

The practice of “greenhushing” is now widespread, according to a new report released on Tuesday by South Pole, a Switzerland-based climate consultancy and carbon offset developer. Some 70 percent of sustainability-minded companies around the world are deliberately hiding their climate goals to comply with new regulations and avoid public scrutiny. That’s in contrast to just a few years ago, when headlines were full of splashy corporate promises on climate change and even oil companies were pledging to zero out their emissions. The report suggests that this newfound silence could impede genuine progress on climate change and decrease pressure on the big emitters that are already lagging behind.

South Pole found that climate-conscious companies in fashion, consumer goods, tech, oil, and even environmental services are “greenhushing.” Nearly half of sustainability representatives reported that communicating about their climate targets has become harder in just the past year. But companies aren’t giving up on going net-zero — just the opposite. Of the 1,400 companies surveyed, three-quarters said they were pouring more money than before into efforts to cut carbon emissions. They just didn’t want to talk much about it.

“We really just cannot afford to not learn from each other,” said Nadia Kähkönen, a deputy director at South Pole and the report’s lead author. Companies should be sharing the lessons they’ve learned from trying to cut their emissions, engaging one another in hard conversations about “what is working and what is not, and how we can improve it,” she said.

Greenhushing was the most common, unexpectedly, among the greenest companies. Some 88 percent of those in environmental services, a category that includes renewables and recycling, said they were decreasing their messaging about their climate targets, even though 93 percent said they were on track to meet their goals. Consumer goods companies, like those that sell food, beverages, and household goods, were the next likely to be greenhushing (86 percent), more than the oil and gas industry (72 percent).

The survey, conducted anonymously, is the first to offer insight from companies as to why they’re keeping quiet. Environmental service companies had one of the same top reasons as oil companies: heightened scrutiny from investors, customers, and the media. Among all the companies that admitted to greenhushing, well over half listed changing regulations as a reason why they’re not talking about their climate pledges. Some companies also cited a lack of sufficient data or clear industry guidance around how to communicate their green claims.

Their hesitation has real consequences, researchers from South Pole said. For one, it cuts down on the sense of competition and pressure that can drive companies to be more ambitious with their environmental targets. “If you’re hiding what you’re doing, or not talking about it in a prominent way, it can hold back others,” said George Favaloro, South Pole’s head of climate solutions for North America. The trend also could also cut down on sharing tips and tricks for decarbonizing that could help others trim their carbon emissions. 

The report found that greenhushing isn’t unfolding equally across the 12 countries surveyed. American companies aren’t as quiet — likely because the United States has less regulation around environmental claims. U.S. companies were the second least likely to be greenhushing, behind Japan. European companies were on the opposite end of the scale. France, which has laws that explicitly limit greenwashing, led the pack with 82 percent of companies staying mum.

“They’re really up against it in Europe now, and in the U.S., it’s still a bit off in the future,” Favaloro said. “It’s coming, but it’s not quite here yet.” One of the first anti-greenwashing laws in the U.S. went into effect in California earlier this month, mandating that large companies disclose their emissions to back up climate-friendly claims. Lawsuits are also a growing threat: Last year, Nike and Delta Air Lines were sued for making questionable claims about their environmental impacts.

It might be surprising that U.S. companies are unafraid of communicating their climate goals considering the conservative backlash against ESG, short for “environmental, social, and governance,” a set of standards investors use to assess companies. But the ESG drama has more serious consequences for asset managers like Vanguard and BlackRock, which removed references to sustainability goals on their websites last year, than for corporations.

The 1,400 companies surveyed in the South Pole report are some of the furthest along when it comes to corporate climate action. Overall, however, most companies haven’t even started yet. Only 8 percent of a broad group of 77,000 corporations, which includes global Fortune 500 companies, have set a net-zero target, the report found. “The more that even the leaders don’t talk about what they’re doing, it’s going to provide less motivation to get that group in the game,” Favaloro said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Companies are hiding their climate progress. A new report explains why. on Jan 17, 2024.

As the world grapples with rising water use and climate-fueled drought, countries from the United States to Israel to Australia are building huge desalination plants to bolster their water supplies. These plants can create water for thousands of households by extracting the salt from ocean water, but they have also drawn harsh criticism from many environmental groups: Desalinating water requires a huge amount of energy, and it also produces a toxic brine that many plants discharge right back into the ocean, damaging marine life. Recent desalination plant proposals have drawn furious opposition in Los Angeles and Corpus Christi, Texas.

But a new startup called Capture6 claims it can solve desalination’s controversial brine problem with another controversial climate technology: carbon capture. The company announced new plans this week to build a carbon-capture facility in South Korea that will work in tandem with a nearby desalination plant, sucking carbon dioxide out of the air and storing it in desalination brine, which it will import from the plant. But that’s not all. Capture6 also claims it can wring new fresh water out of the brine, bolstering the company’s sustainability claims — and its potential profit — even further.

If it works, this facility will deliver a triple benefit. It will decrease the concentration of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, create a new source of fresh water, and limit the polluting effects of desalination. But that’s still a very big “if.”

So-called “direct-air capture” facilities use a chemical reaction to pull carbon dioxide out of the air and fuse it with another substance, preventing it from leaking into the atmosphere. The greenhouse gas can then be stored in solid compounds like limestone or in chemical solutions — or, previous studies have shown, in salty brine. Capture6’s innovation is to source that brine from wastewater treatment plants and desalination plants, which have every reason to want to dispose of it in a way that does not open them to charges of pollution.

The newly announced venture in South Korea, known as Project Octopus, takes the process one step further. The facility will be located at the Daesan Industrial Complex, an oil and gas industrial park in a region of the country that has suffered from water shortages due to an ongoing drought. The Korean state water utility, K-water, is building a seawater desalination plant at the industrial park to provide water to the oil and gas plants, which use thousands of gallons of water to cool down their machinery as it operates.

The Capture6 facility will use the brine created by K-water’s desalination plant to capture carbon dioxide, and it will also use the modified brine to extract even more fresh water that the oil and gas plants can then use in lieu of pumping from less sustainable sources. Carbon6 also says that the solvent produced by its direct-air capture operations can then be used for additional point-source carbon capture at the nearby oil and gas plants, providing a double emissions benefit before the company buries all the carbon deep underwater. In other words, Capture6 will use the byproduct of water production to create even more water, and it will use the byproduct of capturing carbon to capture more carbon.

“It’s an interesting example of solvent-based direct-air capture, but what is innovative here is the pairing of direct-air capture with the brine from desalination,” said Daniel Pike, the head of the carbon capture team at the Rocky Mountain Institute, a nonpartisan climate think tank. “Essentially, what’s going on is the company is saying, ‘Hey, where do we get the chemicals for our solvents? We’ll get them from desalination plants.’”

(Capture6 received funding from Third Derivative, a carbon capture accelerator launched by Rocky Mountain Institute, but Pike himself doesn’t have a financial relationship with the company.)

The company, which has received early funding from several venture capital funds as well as the states of California and New York, announced its first facility last year in Southern California. That facility, known as Project Monarch, will store carbon dioxide in wastewater from a water treatment plant in the city of Palmdale, then sell fresh water back to the city’s water system. 

“What we are trying to do is really to decarbonize the water sector,” said Leo Park, the vice president for strategic development at Capture6. “So we’re trying to integrate our facilities into the easiest thing, which is wastewater and desalination plants.”

The company’s initial pilot facility in Korea will operate on a small scale. The test project will capture 1,000 tons of carbon per year. That’s equivalent to the annual emissions of around 220 passenger cars, and about as much as is being captured at a much lauded direct-air capture facility that began operations in Tracy, California, last year. The company’s carbon capture process will yield around 14 million gallons of fresh water, enough to supply around 80 homes. 

But when K-water’s desalination plant gets running at full capacity, Capture6 says it will be able to capture almost 500,000 tons of carbon dioxide each year by 2026. That’s many times more storage than other direct-air capture facilities have achieved so far. The large-scale plant will also produce around 5 billion gallons of fresh water each year, half as much as the Daesan desalination plant itself and enough to supply around 30,000 homes.

Pike says that the company’s growth goal is extremely ambitious, and it’s unclear whether the facility will have a net negative impact on emissions, given that desalination and direct air capture both require a lot of energy. In the case of Project Octopus, that energy will initially come from Korea’s power grid, which relies heavily on fossil fuels.

“Even assuming you have the solvent, you have an intense energy need just to power a direct-air capture process, and a big challenge we have in direct-air capture is how to improve energy efficiency,” he said. “Then, what they’re doing is they’re also running a very energy-intensive process for deriving the solvent, moving a lot of water around. It’s a lot of energy, a lot of water. That big picture is the challenge here.”

If Capture6 can prove that its facilities store more carbon than they emit, the company won’t have any trouble monetizing its technology. The oil and gas companies in Daesan will buy its produced water for their cooling needs, and K-water will rely on the company to minimize the environmental harms of desalination, which generated backlash when the plant was first announced.

“There were a lot of local concerns about brine discharge, because [locals] were worried that it was going to impact the marine ecosystem and fishing activities,” said Park. “Our solution can help minimize brine discharge, so there’s an additional environmental benefit we can generate. This is one of the reasons K-water wanted to work with us.”

Even so, the full-size Capture6 facility will only absorb around half of the brine that the K-water desalination plant produces, meaning the utility will still have to release a lot of toxic liquid into the ocean. Park says he hopes the company can eventually scale up far enough to absorb all the plant’s brine, but they’re not there yet.

Unlike many other direct-air capture companies, Capture6 doesn’t need to sell carbon credits to make money. Park hopes to someday sell credits to private companies seeking to offset their emissions, but for the moment Capture6’s main revenue source is the same as any ordinary desalination plant: water. Park says the company could build future facilities at lithium mines, which also produce brine and need water to operate.

But Ekta Patel, a researcher and doctoral student at Duke University who studies the politics of desalination, said the big question about this business model was how much energy it takes for Capture6 to make the new water. 

“My mind jumps immediately to the issue of energy,” she said. “How much more energy does reclaiming the additional water take, is it from renewable or nonrenewable sources, and what does that do to the cost of the water?” She added that if “addressing challenges related to carbon emissions and water” required a jump in energy usage, the solution was just “shifting around resource problems.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Can carbon capture solve desalination’s waste problem? on Jan 17, 2024.

A big challenge for anyone trying to take on climate change is finding solutions that don’t create new problems. Climate scientists, for instance, agree that the world needs more solar panels, wind turbines, and transmission lines. But building all that infrastructure takes up a lot of land, and that land could be a critical habitat for endangered animals, teeming with wildflowers and birds and insects, or a great place for Indigenous peoples to forage for traditional foods. 

According to a recent study in the journal Nature Communications, areas around the world that are well suited for wind, solar, and other forms of clean energy overlap with some 10 percent of the land that’s important for biodiversity and other human needs like clean water and wood for fuel. The United States alone would need tens of millions of acres of sunny plateaus for solar arrays and windy ridges for wind mills to stop burning oil, gas, and coal. The potential for conflict between conservation and developing renewables is even higher than it is between conservation and farming, mining, or drilling for fossil fuels, the study found. 

That finding was the “biggest surprise” for Rachel Neugarten, a researcher at Cornell University and one of the paper’s authors. “Renewable energy is absolutely critical for climate goals,” she said. “However, if it’s located in the wrong places it could have negative impacts.” 

Neugarten’s team mapped the entire world for biodiversity, pressure from farming, mining, and other forms of development, and 10 of “nature’s contributions to people” — from crop pollination to recreation. The researchers found that only 18 percent of the land that humans need is currently protected from urban expansion and resource extraction, more than one-third of which is highly suitable for agriculture, mining, oil and gas drilling, or clean energy projects. In Ireland, for example, 60 percent of the land is well suited for renewables, agriculture, or mining while also important for grazing, storing nutrients like nitrogen, and recreation, the authors wrote.  

“One of the key takeaways from this study is that it is possible to achieve conservation, climate, and development goals, but that this will require careful planning,” Neugarten said. “We need to think carefully about how decisions in one sector, such as renewable energy development, might undermine goals in other sectors, such as habitat for pollinators or biodiversity conservation.” 

The authors suggest that a way around this problem would be to build wind or solar farms on land that’s already been cleared or degraded. That could mean installing solar panels on abandoned industrial sites or above parking lots, Neugarten said. But she also recommended coupling renewables with agriculture. As two examples, she pointed to an 18-acre solar array in Minnesota that’s nestled among pollinator-friendly flowers and bee hives, which can power more than 100,000 homes, as well as a wind farm on a cattle ranch in Arizona. 

The paper doesn’t address whether there’s actually enough land to fit all the solar and wind farms that the world needs without threatening biodiversity and causing other ecological damage. That’s still an open question, Neugarten said. The United States would need a swath of earth about the size of five South Dakotas to generate enough clean power to run a carbon-free economy by 2050, according to an analysis by Bloomberg News and Princeton University. And you can’t just stick wind turbines and solar panels anywhere: A solar farm needs to be on flat, sunny terrain, close enough to the electrical grid to keep transmission costs from skyrocketing. 

Still, some research indicates that there doesn’t have to be a dramatic tradeoff between conservation and clean energy. The Nature Conservancy, which helped fund Neugarten’s study, released a report last year showing that the U.S. could deploy a lot of wind and solar without significant damage to the environment. The report outlined three courses of action: combining solar and wind on the same land, installing solar panels on farmland, and using solar panels that tilt to absorb more sunlight and produce more energy. 

Where and how renewable energy projects get built affects biodiversity more than the amount of clean energy produced globally does, according to Ryan McManamay, an ecologist at Baylor University who wasn’t involved in Neugarten’s study. “It’s quite possible to meet more needs of the population and have a lower biodiversity impact based on thoughtful considerations of how things are developed,” he said.

Scientists also say the environmental consequences of building a lot of wind turbines and solar panels likely won’t be as dire as continuing to burn gargantuan amounts of fossil fuels. Climate change itself poses a major risk to biodiversity. 

“There has been some rhetoric about green versus green, which is setting up renewable energy in conflict with biodiversity conservation,” Neugarten said. “I really do think it’s feasible to do both if we put our minds to it.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How to build renewables without threatening biodiversity? Carefully. on Jan 17, 2024.

Air pollution emissions in the United States have decreased considerably since the Clean Air Act of 1970 was enacted, but the benefits have not always been equally felt.

According to a new study by researchers at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, the amount of the improvements is largely dependent on demographics, with socioeconomic and racial/ethnic inequalities in air pollution reductions felt especially in the energy and industry sectors, a press release from the Columbia Mailman School said.

The study was an examination of changes in emissions from air pollution in the U.S. over the past four decades. Previous studies have looked mostly at imbalances in concentrations of pollutants at a given point in time, rather than at emissions.

In looking into the socioeconomic and racial/ethnic disparities regarding changes in air pollution emissions, the research focused on data from counties in the contiguous U.S. during the period 1970 to 2010.

“The analyses provide insight on the socio-demographic characteristics of counties that have experienced disproportionate decreases in air pollution emissions over the last forty years,” said lead author of the study Yanelli Nunez, who is an environmental health scientist in the Columbia Mailman School of Public Health’s Department of Environmental Health Sciences, in the press release.

By focusing on air pollution emissions, Nunez and colleagues were able to pinpoint sectors that are potentially contributing to disparities in exposure.

The researchers used Global Burden of Disease Major Air Pollution Sources data in analyzing emissions from six air pollution source sectors, including energy (nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide), road transportation (nitrogen oxides), industry (sulfur dioxide), agriculture (ammonia); residential (organic carbon particles) and commercial (nitrogen oxides).

Average air pollution emissions in the U.S. have decreased markedly during the 40-year study period from every source sector except residential organic carbon particles — mostly from solid biofuels used for indoor heating — and agricultural ammonia emissions.

The biggest emissions decreases were for sulfur dioxide from energy generation and the industrial sectors. Nitrogen oxide emitted by energy generation, commercial activities and transportation showed moderate decreases.

Although emissions from most pollutants had gone down, the research team discovered that certain populations had increases in emissions or relatively smaller reductions. One example is that an increase in the average Indian American or Hispanic population percentage in a county was associated with a relative increase in nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide and ammonia emissions from energy generation, industry and the agricultural sectors, respectively.

“Air pollution emissions do not perfectly capture population air pollution exposure, and we also know that neighborhood-level air pollution inequities are common, which we were not able to analyze in this study given the data at hand,” said Marianthi-Anna Kioumourtzoglou, senior author of the study and a Columbia Mailman School associate professor of environmental health sciences, in the press release.

An increase in the amount of emissions reductions was also associated with an increase in the median family income in a county in all pollution source sectors examined by the researchers except agriculture.

“In this study, we provide information about potential racial/ethnic and socioeconomic inequalities in air pollution reductions nationwide from major air pollution sources, which can inform regulators and complement local-level analysis,” Kioumourtzoglou added.

The findings of the study were published in the journal Nature Communications.

“Policies specifically targeting reductions in overburdened populations could support more just reductions in air pollution and reduce disparities in air pollution exposure,” Nunez explained. “This is an important lesson gained from 53 years of Clean Air Act implementation, which is particularly relevant as we develop policies to transition to renewable energy sources, which will have a collateral impact on air quality and, as a result, on public health.”

The post U.S. Air Pollution Rates Down, but Vary by Demographics appeared first on EcoWatch.

Last year was the hottest year on record by a wide margin, and 2024 has a one-in-three shot at being even hotter, according to the Annual 2023 Global Climate Report by the United States’ National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Scientists from the European Union found that Earth’s average temperature last year was 1.35 degrees Celsius higher than the pre-industrial average, bringing it close to the 1.5 degrees Celsius marker, reported Reuters.

NOAA said ocean surface temperatures also reached record warmth last year.

Last week, a newsletter by James Hansen, former NASA scientist who first warned of the dangers of climate change in the 1980s, said temperatures could increase by up to 1.7 degrees Celsius by May of next year, Time reported.

“We are now in the process of moving into the 1.5°C world,” Hansen told the Guardian. “You can bet $100 to a donut on this.”

Last year’s scorching record heat was the result of global heating caused by greenhouse gas emissions produced by humans burning fossil fuels, coupled with the El Niño climate pattern appearing halfway through the year.

“Unlike the previous two years (2021 and 2022), which were squarely entrenched in a cold phase El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) episode, also known as La Niña, 2023 quickly moved into ENSO neutral territory, transitioning to a warm phase episode, El Niño, by June. ENSO not only affects global weather patterns, but it also affects global temperatures,” NASA said. “Despite 2021 and 2022 not ranking among the five warmest years on record, the global annual temperature increased at an average rate of 0.06°C (0.11°F) per decade since 1850 and more than three times that rate (0.20°C / 0.36°F) since 1982.”

NOAA said not only is there a one-in-three chance this year will be warmer than last year, there is a 99 percent likelihood 2024 will be among the top five warmest years on record.

“The interesting and depressing question is what will happen in 2024? Will it be warmer than 2023? We don’t know yet,” said Christopher Hewitt, head of International Climate Services at the World Meteorological Organization, as reported by Reuters. “It’s highly likely (El Niño) will persist until April, possibly May, and then beyond that we’re not sure — it becomes less certain.”

El Niño’s effects usually peak during winter in the Northern Hemisphere before changing to a La Niña phase or a neutral pattern.

El Niño will peak in the Southern Hemisphere summer, so authorities are on the lookout for drought, extreme heat and wildfires.

Extreme heat warnings were issued for Western Australia by the country’s meteorology bureau this week.

Southern Africa was facing the “high likelihood” of below-average rainfall, according to Lark Walters, a Famine Early Warning System Network decision support adviser.

“We’re estimating over 20 million will be in need of emergency food assistance,” Walters said, as Reuters reported.

In North America last year, the average temperature was the warmest ever recorded — 2.01 degrees Celsius higher than the average from 1910 to 2000. Ten months were above average, with December 4.88 degrees Celsius warmer than normal — blowing away the 1939 record by 1.39 degrees Celsius.

“North America’s yearly temperature has increased at an average rate of 0.14°C (0.23°F) per decade since 1910; however, the average rate of increase is more than double the rate (0.34°C/0.61°F) since 1982,” the NOAA climate report said.

The post NOAA: 1-in-3 Chance 2024 Could Be Even Hotter Than 2023 appeared first on EcoWatch.