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Chevron cares about life — not the people kind, the kind that’s been compressed and buried under rocks for a hundred million years, now only found in its fossilized form. In other words, oil.
That’s the message of a new spoof of oil company advertisements from Adam McKay, the director of the movie Don’t Look Up, in which an asteroid hurtles toward Earth in an allegory for climate change. The fake commercial cycles through cheesy stock footage of newborn babies, frolicking elephants, and wind-turbine-filled mountainscapes. Meanwhile, the voiceover savagely explains that Chevron’s products are “transforming the planet right this second into a hellish George Miller film” — a reference to the post-apocalyptic Mad Max movies.
McKay posted the video, created by his company HyperobjectTwitterries, on Twitter Thursday with the innocuous question, “Has anyone seen this Chevron commercial?” A day later, it had already been viewed more than 4 million times. McKay recently donated $4 million to the Climate Emergency Fund, which trains and mobilizes climate activists, and joined its board of directors.
Chevron did not respond to Grist’s request for comment in time for publication.
Without listening to the voiceover, the parody looks like any other oil company commercial. The playful, comforting scenes lull you into feeling like everything is fine. That’s a common feature in advertisements from polluting companies, as are “greenwashing” techniques to help them appear more environmentally friendly than they really are.
These tactics are often subtle. “Nature-rinsing,” for instance, is a term for when companies use images of the beauty of nature — wild landscapes, green plants, cute animals — to imply that they are eco-friendly by association. Marketing research has shown that these kinds of images really do work, eliciting pleasant emotions and a more positive view of the advertiser’s brand.
The Chevron parody begins with a majestic shot of coastal islands and then proceeds to flip through nearly 40 nature-heavy images in its 100-second duration: a hummingbird pollinating a flower, buzzing bees, and a river rushing over rocks in a ravine filled with pines. Look closely, and you’ll notice that the colorful fish in one shot are swimming over a bleached coral reef — a sign of the destruction of climate change.
The commercial also channels feel-good vibes with an optimistic-sounding orchestral soundtrack. “We have billions and billions of dollars to pay for this commercial time, this cheesy footage, and this bullshit music, all so that you will be lulled into a catatonic state,” the voiceover says, explaining that “these emotionally loaded scenes will always push aside other thoughts like ‘Chevron is murdering me.’”
Another aspect of polluting companies’ marketing strategy has been to paint fossil fuels as a symbol of abundance, integral to the American way of life. In McKay’s ad, the narrator explains that Chevron sells oil so that “an airplane can take a businessman 3,000 miles to have dinner with someone, or whatever” as the video flashes between images of a kid’s birthday party and a couple kissing at a dining room table. It echoes an advertisement last year from Energy Transfer Partners, the company behind the Dakota Access pipeline. The spot follows two people getting ready for a date — and then rewinds the whole commercial to show you how bad their date would have gone without petroleum products like hair gel or car tires.
The narrator of the fake Chevron ad makes clear that showing footage of happy people and their families doesn’t do anything to clean up an oil company’s emissions: “At the end of the day, we at Chevron don’t give a single f*ck about you, your weird children, or your ratty ass dog.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Chevron’s commercials just got the ‘Don’t Look Up’ treatment on Sep 30, 2022.
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This storywas originally published byThe Guardianand is reproduced here as part of theClimate Deskcollaboration.
Scientists fear methane erupting from the burst Nord Stream pipelines into the Baltic Sea could be one of the worst natural gas leaks ever and pose significant climate risks.
Neither of the two breached Nord Stream pipelines, which run between Russia and Germany, was operational, but both contained natural gas. This mostly consists of methane — a greenhouse gas that is the biggest cause of climate heating after carbon dioxide.
The extent of the leaks is still unclear but rough estimates by scientists, based on the volume of gas reportedly in one of the pipelines, vary between 100,000 and 350,000 tons of methane.
Jasmin Cooper, a research associate at Imperial College London’s department of chemical engineering, said a “lot of uncertainty” surrounded the leak.
“We know there are three explosions but we don’t know if there are three holes in the sides of the pipe or how big the breaks are,” said Cooper. “It’s difficult to know how much is reaching the surface. But it is potentially hundreds of thousands of tons of methane: quite a big volume being pumped into the atmosphere.”
Nord Stream 2, which was intended to increase the flow of gas from Russia to Germany, reportedly contained 300 million cubic meters of gas when Berlin halted the certification process shortly before Russia invaded Ukraine.
That volume alone would translate to 200,000 tons of methane, Cooper said. If it all escaped, it would exceed the 100,000 tons of methane vented by the Aliso Canyon blowout, the biggest gas leak in U.S. history, which happened in California in 2015. Aliso had the warming equivalent of half a million cars.
“It has the potential to be one of the biggest gas leaks,” said Cooper. “The climate risks from the methane leak are quite large. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, 30 times stronger than CO2 over 100 years and more than 80 times stronger over 20 years.
Professor Grant Allen, an expert in Earth and environmental science at Manchester University, said it was unlikely that natural processes, which convert small amounts of methane into carbon dioxide, would be able to absorb much of the leak.
“This is a colossal amount of gas, in really large bubbles. If you have small sources of gas, nature will help out by digesting the gas. In the Deepwater Horizon spill, there was a lot of attenuation of methane by bacteria,” Allen said.
“My scientific experience is telling me that — with a big blow-up like this — methane will not have time to be attenuated by nature. So a significant proportion will be vented as methane gas.”
Unlike oil spill, gas will not have as polluting an effect on the marine environment, Allen said.
“But in terms of greenhouse gasses, it’s a reckless and unnecessary emission to the atmosphere.”
Germany’s environment agency said there were no containment mechanisms on the pipeline, so the entire contents were likely to escape.
The Danish Energy Agency said on Wednesday that the pipelines contained 778 million cubic meters of natural gas in total — the equivalent of 32 percent of Danish annual CO2 emissions.
This is almost twice the volume initially estimated by scientists. This would significantly bump up estimates of methane leaked to the atmosphere, from 200,000 to more than 400,000 tons. More than half the gas had left the pipes and the remainder is expected be gone by Sunday, the agency said.
Jean-Francois Gauthier, vice-president of measurements at the commercial methane-measuring satellite firm GHGSat, said evaluating the total gas volume emitted was “challenging”.
“There is little information on the size of the breach and whether it is still going on” Gauthier said. “If it’s a significant enough breach, it would empty itself.
“It’s safe to say that we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of tons of methane. In terms of leaks, it’s certainly a very serious one. The catastrophic instantaneous nature of this one — I’ve certainly never seen anything like that before.”
In terms of the climate impact, 250,000 tons of methane was equivalent to the impact of 1.3 million cars driven on the road for a year, Gauthier said.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Nord Stream gas leaks may be biggest ever, with warning of ‘large climate risk’ on Sep 29, 2022.
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In the last century, only nine hurricanes with winds topping 150 miles per hour have made landfall in the United States. Hurricane Ian became the tenth on Wednesday afternoon, striking the coast of southwest Florida as a Category 4 storm. Ian submerged entire barrier islands, ripped houses apart, and pushed a huge wall of water toward a chain of seaside cities from Sarasota to Fort Myers. It will likely flood thousands of homes.
Just five days ago, Ian was a weak tropical cyclone in the southern Caribbean. The storm underwent a process known as “rapid intensification” as it entered the warm waters of the Caribbean Sea, strengthening to a Category 3 hurricane by the time it made landfall in western Cuba. Scientists have found that climate change may make episodes of rapid intensification more likely by raising ocean surface temperatures. At least six hurricanes underwent rapid intensification during the 2021 hurricane season, and at least 10 during the 2020 season.
More than 200 miles of the Florida coast, home to 2.5 million people, were under a mandatory evacuation order in the days leading up to the storm. On Wednesday morning, the National Hurricane Center predicted that parts of Charlotte County, where the hurricane made landfall just north of Fort Myers, could see between 12 and 16 feet of storm surge — enough to submerge almost all coastal land.
“Nobody alive, nobody who has ever lived in Charlotte County, has ever seen what’s about to come,” Brian Gleason, the county’s communications director, told Grist. “Storm surge at that level is a deadly occurrence. No home is airtight, and if it’s not airtight it’s not watertight. If the wind starts taking out windows, and you’ve got seven feet of storm surge, it’s coming in the house.”
Roughly 30 miles south, Cape Coral resident Linda Bendon was hunkered down in her house with flashlights and a propane grill on Wednesday afternoon.
“This is our first big storm,” Bendon, who moved to Florida from upstate New York after retiring three years ago, told Grist by phone. “Wind is howling, and lots of stuff is flying around. Our bedroom window just blew out, and power is out.”
Bendon’s car has already been struck several times by uprooted trees, and she has been eyeing the rising water level in the canal across the street from her house. The canal is close to overtopping its walls, and flooding is widespread elsewhere in the area.
Initial forecasts suggested Hurricane Ian might hit the Tampa Bay metropolitan area, home to about 3 million people, but it curled south upon entering the Gulf of Mexico and veered toward Cape Coral and Fort Myers. After landfall, meteorologists expect the storm to move north through the state as a weakening tropical storm, then exit into the Atlantic Ocean before turning around and striking Georgia or South Carolina. The storm will drop several inches of rain on areas that have already seen double-digit rainfall totals in the past month, worsening the potential for floods.
“The majority of the state of Florida is in Ian’s crosshairs,” said Deanne Criswell, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, at a press conference on Wednesday morning. The Weather Channel predicted widespread power outages from the coast all the way to the inland city of Orlando, and said some areas could be without power for weeks or months.
Even as Ian passed over Cuba on Tuesday night, it didn’t lose strength. It grew even stronger as it passed over the Straits of Florida. By early Wednesday morning, the storm had recorded winds of around 155 miles per hour, just below the threshold of Category 5 classification. The diameter of the storm stretched more than 300 miles, from Tampa to Havana. Radar scanners picked up individual gusts of 190 miles per hour.
“Catastrophic is an appropriate word,” wrote Phil Klotzbach, a Twitterne expert at Colorado State University, on Twitter.
In Cuba, rampant flooding struck the province of Pinar del Rio, forcing residents to flee to higher ground. By late Tuesday evening, the government had reported that the entire country was without power: The storm had knocked out key transmission lines that convey electricity across the island. Crews were working to restore power through the night and into Wednesday morning.
A woman stands on a flooded street in Havana, Cuba, on September 28, 2022, after the passage of Hurricane Ian. Yamil Lage / AFP via Getty Images
The Florida Keys, which in the leadup to the storm were thought to be distant from Ian’s major effects, also saw widespread flooding. That’s thanks to the so-called king tides, a series of extra-high tides that arrive every autumn thanks to the alignment of the earth and the moon. The rotation of the storm combined with high tide on Tuesday night to produce the third-highest storm surge ever recorded in the Keys, overflowing canals and flooding cars across the islands. Flooding was expected to continue for several days as tides rose and fell.
“The tide keeps getting higher and higher,” Shanna Schroeder, a resident of Big Pine Key, told Grist on Tuesday night. “It’s not raining right now, but it’s very windy. We have water from the canal that is creeping into our backyard.” The water peaked early in the morning on Wednesday, she said, stopping just short of flowing into her house. Tracking buoys near Key West measured waves as high as 25 feet.
But as Hurricane Ian approached landfall, the primary concern for emergency management officials in southwest Florida was storm surge. That’s because the cities of Charlotte Harbor and Punta Gorda sit at the mouth of the Gasparilla Sound, a concave body of water that funnels out to the Gulf of Mexico. They also contain hundreds of man-made canals that funnel water away from homes and out toward absorbent mangrove forests. The storm surge from Ian is pushing all that water backward, overflowing backyard canals and flooding thousands of homes.
“The canal system is meant to convey water from higher parts of the county to the harbor,” said Gleason, the Charlotte County communications director. “When the surge comes up those canals, the 10 to 15 inches of rain that we’re gonna get has nowhere to go except up.”
There were similar concerns in Fort Myers and Cape Coral, which lie along the Caloosahatchee River and also contain hundreds of miles of residential canals. These cities are on the right-hand side of Ian’s circular motion, bringing the worst combination of storm surge and extreme wind. High-end projections suggested that most of the land area in both cities could be underwater for hours, and by Wednesday afternoon nearby barrier islands were already vanishing, along with coastal sections of Fort Myers.
Cape Coral is one of several coastal cities in Florida that faces enormous surge risk thanks to the audacious practices of twentieth-century real estate developers, who drained and reclaimed swampy coastal areas to create large suburbs on artificial land. The city’s intricate canal network allowed it to sprawl out across the marsh. As a result it briefly became the nation’s fastest-growing city, but it also left tens of thousands of people just a few feet above sea level. The scale of the risk became clear after 2017’s Hurricane Irma, which scraped the Fort Myers area on its way out of the Keys. It took years for the Fort Myers region to recover from even that glancing blow. With a direct hit from Hurricane Ian this week, a broader reckoning may be on the way.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline As Hurricane Ian makes landfall, Florida faces historic storm surge on Sep 28, 2022.
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You’ve been seeing commercials like this all your life: An SUV steers off-road into a lush forest. An airplane soars over a pristine coastline. In fast-forward, a tiny green plant sprouts from the soil — something that appears to have nothing to do with the oil company behind the advertisement.
There’s a new word for this old marketing practice: “nature-rinsing.” It’s when polluting companies use images of charismatic animals, green plants, and wild landscapes to suggest that they’re more environmentally friendly than they actually are. Geoffrey Supran, a Harvard researcher who studies fossil fuel propaganda, coined the phrase in a recent working study that analyzed nearly 34,000 social media posts from polluting companies in Europe.
Nature-rinsing is nearly as ubiquitous as nature itself: According to the new report, written in collaboration with researchers at the nonprofit Algorithmic Transparency Institute at the National Conference on Citizenship, environment-related visuals made an appearance in 97 percent of posts from airlines this summer, and well over half of posts from automakers (64 percent) and oil companies (56 percent). “I was shocked by the scale of it when we actually started to quantify it,” Supran said.
The report highlights some striking examples. An Instagram post from the German airline Lufthansa shows an airplane with the bottom half replaced with a shark tail. The Irish Wizz Twitter videos on Twitter that poked fun at airlines for using so many beautiful landscapes in their ads. “Look, a magnificent shoreline and soothing piano music,” the voiceover says as the camera slowly zooms in on green, coastal bluffs. “Showing you this doesn’t prove that we care about the planet.” (It’s the lack of business-class seating that shows they care, according to the ad.)
Instagram / Lufthansa
In recent years, activists have been calling more attention to this kind of deceptive marketing, known broadly as “greenwashing.” Research has found a large disconnect between the fossil fuel industry’s climate-conscious words and real-world actions. States, tribes, and advocacy groups have launched a wave of lawsuits against companies over greenwashing, alleging that it violates consumer protection rules by deceiving the public. A congressional committee has also been investigating oil companies’ misleading advertising.
In contrast, nature-rinsing is subtle enough, and so widespread, that it often goes unchallenged. Supran says that the practice has been overlooked by scholars, advocates, and policymakers. “Maybe this has been hiding in plain sight so effectively that we just take for granted the potential subconscious influences,” he said.
Marketing research has demonstrated the success of these tactics, finding that seeing nature-filled ads elicits pleasant feelings similar to seeing “real” nature. Several studies indicate that this emotional response misleads people and prompts them to view the advertiser’s brand more positively. Supran calls the practice of combining green-sounding marketing language with nature pictures “a powerful one-two punch.” Researchers have found that this double whammy of green messaging can even trick those knowledgeable about environmental problems into thinking companies are greener than they are. In the marketing field, nature-rinsing is known by the inscrutable term “executional greenwashing.”
Twitter / Wizz Air
Nature-rinsing has been around for decades, starting in an era when explicit, heavy-handed pitches were the norm. In the 1980s, Chevron made a series of commercials that looked like low-budget nature documentaries, eventually winning an Effie advertising award for the effort. In one, a grizzly bear awakens from hibernation to play in a grassy meadow where companies were supposedly drilling and exploring for oil mere months earlier. “Do people sometimes work all through the winter so nature can have spring all to herself?” a deep voice narrates. “People do.” In another, a fox pursued by a prowling coyote leaps to safety by clambering into an oil pipe — “a cozy den that keeps her snug and safe.”
The modern version is slightly more subtle as people have become savvier at spotting greenwashing. Take the “Nature or Nothing” campaign from Mercedes-Benz earlier this year, which promoted electric vehicles using close-up shots of a rose, a leaf, and honeycomb. A white circle was overlaid on areas where three lines converged to imitate the German carmaker’s logo. Some observers called it greenwashing, noting that Mercedes-Benz recently faced a lawsuit over its role in contributing to climTwitternge. The advertisements inspired a parody campaign that superimposed the company’s logo over photos of spilled oil, wildfires, and cracking ice.
The recent report suggests that companies know what they’re doing. Posts that use green-sounding claims are statistically more likely to contain nature imagery, according to Supran’s report, which appears to be the first to demonstrate this correlation. “Fossil fuel interests are strategically appropriating the beauty of nature to strengthen their green language,” Supran said.
Companies that can’t convincingly spin their business as “green” may turn to nature imagery more often, Supran suggests. Oil companies can market their (usually tiny) investments in renewables and carmakers can showcase their new electric vehicles. By contrast, airlines’ talking points aren’t as solid: They’re still burning buttloads of jet fuel, with sustainable alternatives facing big hurdles. That might explain why nearly every aviation ad features the beauty of nature: They’re falling back on a safer greenwashing strategy that can easily fly under the radar.
Some countries have already taken steps to regulate the use of nature in advertisements. In France, courts have found that car companies have violated the country’s ethics code by advertising cars off-road in natural settings, a move that one judge declared “environmentally unfriendly behaviour.” Last month, France banned fossil-fuel ads altogether, and next year, it will force carmakers to promote biking, walking, public transport, or carpooling in all advertisements. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has recommended against using images of forests, the earth, or endangered animals if they might mislead people.
But most critiques of greenwashing have focused on language, which is both easier to quantify and easier to discredit. Nature-rinsing doesn’t make a specific statement — the images evoke a feel-good response, burnishing a brand’s reputation. And as research indicates, that emotional resonance is why it’s so persuasive.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline ‘Nature-rinsing’: How polluters use the beauty of nature to clean up their image on Sep 27, 2022.
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This story was produced in collaboration with the Food & Environment Reporting Network, a nonprofit journalism organization.
As a young boy in the 1970s, Vishwanath Thange knew hunger. He usually lived on one meal a day, not enough when you’re working construction. But Thange had to take the work — or starve. He was born in Hiware Bazar, a village tucked deep inside the western Indian state of Maharashtra. Back then, the hamlet was a crime-ridden backwater, desperately poor and largely abandoned by government agencies. Thange’s family owned seven acres, but chronic drought prevented them from growing food to eat or sell. So Thange left, when he was 15, to look for work in nearby cities. About 20 years ago, he returned to Hiware Bazar, and today he is one of the 89 farmers there who have assets worth more than a million Indian rupees — a fortune in a country where 90 percent of the population makes less than 300,000 rupees a year. In the past 25 years, every farmer in Hiware Bazar has prospered, says Thange. “Today,” he says, “not a single person goes to bed hungry.”
Thange recently earned around 2 million rupees from his farm, the equivalent of a bit more than $25,000. The average agricultural household in India, meanwhile, earns the equivalent of $800 as farm income annually. Thange’s income has paid for a good education for his two sons — a significant feat in rural India, where virtually no one can afford education. It also meant a sturdy, comfortable home for his family, and an increase in his land holdings, from seven acres to 25 acres. The average size of a farm in India is just 2.6 acres.
Although Thange’s story is not an exception in Hiware Bazar, it is exceptional for India. Sixty-five percent of the country’s population resides in villages, where farming is the principal occupation. Farming, however, has been unprofitable in recent decades due to drought, a lack of direct integration with markets, high input costs, and low market prices.
Chirodeep Chaudhuri
Vishwanath Thange holds a flower while standing in an irrigated field in Hiware Bazar. Chirodeep Chaudhuri
Chirodeep Chaudhuri
A motorcycle and car drive by the sign for Hiware Bazar, left. Right, painted rocks sit in a village field. Chirodeep Chaudhuri
Chirodeep Chaudhuri
The failure of the agriculture sector is blamed for the epidemic of farmer suicides in the country, which claimed the lives of more than 300,000 people between 1995 and 2014. According to the latest government figures, more than one agricultural worker dies by suicide every hour in the country. Maharashtra, the state where Hiware Bazar is located, reports the highest number of such suicides in the country. Last year, Maharashtra recorded more than 4000 farmer suicides, or over 11 each day.
Climate change has exacerbated India’s agrarian crisis. Last year, the country lost more than 12 million acres of cropland to extreme weather. As droughts worsen, the resurrection of Hiware Bazar holds lessons for villages across the country.
Popularly known as the “village of millionaires,” Hiware Bazar’s model is now being replicated in thousands of villages across India. Through effective watershed management, the rebuilding of natural resources, and a shift to more sustainable, less water-intensive crops — all of which hinged on the participation of residents — the village turned itself into a national “model of development.” The agricultural success has driven progress across the rest of the community, including in healthcare and education.
But Hiware Bazar’s salvation took years of hard work. No one knows this better than Popatrao Pawar, the sarpanch, or head of the village, who spearheaded the village’s transformation. “When we started, it seemed impossible,” he says. “For us, it’s paradise regained.”
Popatrao Pawar stands near a gate being constructed in Hiware Bazar. “The gate will survive even beyond us … as a commemoration of the work that we have all managed to do here,” he said. Chirodeep Chaudhuri
Hiware Bazar lies in the drought-prone Ahmednagar district of Maharashtra, and according to the most recent government data, receives less than half of the national average of rainfall each year. Agriculture there was largely rain-fed, but villagers had traditionally produced enough to feed themselves. Every home had cattle or goats, and dairy production was the primary source of income. But in the decade starting in 1972, the village faced three severe droughts, rendering the land barren, or banjar in local parlance. Wells went dry, fodder to feed livestock disappeared, and villagers turned to the forests on surrounding hills, stripping away the trees for firewood to produce liquor, both for sale and to ease the pain as their livelihoods collapsed.
By the 1980s, Hiware Bazar had lost most of its natural assets. Only a fraction of the land could be cultivated, the soil was exhausted, and there was no electricity. At first, people left the village, thinking it would be temporary. Eventually, they just stayed away. Those who remained worked on farms or at construction sites in nearby villages for low wages.
The sun beats down on a dry patch of land in Hiware Bazar. Chirodeep Chaudhuri
“When contractors came looking for workers in Hiware Bazar, villagers would fight for the jobs, beat each other up,” says Arjun Pawar, who was the head of the village between 1972 and 1977.
According to Arjun, alcohol production and sale became the primary source of income. Locals mixed black jaggery, a coarse sugar made from sugarcane juice, with ammonium chloride powder and rotten fruit, like orange and sweet lime, to produce a potent brand of desi daru, Hindi for “country liquor.” An increase in crime followed. Villagers would also assault government officers, such as the forestry officials who prohibited cattle grazing on what remained of the forested hills surrounding Hiware Bazar.
“People would tie up the forest officials to trees, and soon our village became a ‘punishment posting,’ where government policemen, teachers, and health officials were posted only if they had to be punished,” says Arjun.
Men got drunk in the local school’s empty classrooms, recollects Deepak Thange, who was a student in the 1980s. At the time, every child in his village, including him, dreamed of growing up and building a future far from the village.
“There was no hope for Hiware Bazar,” he says. “There was no hope for any of us.”
When Habib Sayyed, a 48-year-old farmer, was a child, he would spend most Saturdays during the monsoons gathering cow dung. He and other children in the village would use the dung to patch the school’s mud floor. Before lessons resumed on Monday, the dung would dry, holding the floor together until the following weekend, when it would have again turned to muck from rain seeping in from the ceiling.
The school was a small, dilapidated structure with a tin ceiling and two rooms that ran only through fourth grade. Today, a new school, Yashwant Vidyalaya, sits at the village entrance, a prominent symbol of Hiware Bazar’s progress. It was revamped in the early ‘90s after Popatrao Pawar, the village head, convinced 18 families to donate parts of their land for its construction. The new school was the first glimmer of hope in the village, says Subhash Thange, who as a young man donated his labor to help rebuild the village. “It promised a better future for the children and built faith in the new administration.”
Habib Sayyed sits on the steps of Yashwant Vidyalaya, a new school he says symbolizes the progress Hiware Bazar has made in recent years. Chirodeep Chaudhuri
And the school has delivered. The literacy rate in Hiware Bazar is 95 percent, compared to 30 percent in 1990. “Our school runs classes up to the 10th grade, and also hosts students from neighboring villages,” Sayyed says. “During the pandemic, even as schools were shut across the country, ours continued after putting a COVID-19 prevention system in place.”
Pawar was initially skeptical about running for village sarpanch. As a boy, he had moved away after fourth grade to complete his schooling; in 1987, he earned a postgraduate degree in commerce. He was not only the most educated person in Hiware Bazar, but he also had a promising career as a professional cricket player if he chose to pursue it. His achievements had earned him the respect and admiration of other villagers.
“He had played cricket with some of the top players in the country at the time, and yet he was humble, always kind and soft-spoken,” says Sakharam Padir, a teacher and one of the first to volunteer with Hiware Bazar’s new village council. Pawar’s success story, he says, gave people hope.
In 1989, some residents asked Pawar to run for office. His family, however, advised him to abandon the village and use his education to secure a white-collar job. As he considered what to do, Pawar’s mother left the village in protest, living at her father’s place for eight days. “She was adamant that I should worry about my own future, as the village did not have one,” says Pawar.
But residents kept pleading with him to help, and Pawar says their persistence, as well as a genuine concern for the place where he grew up, eventually persuaded him to stay. In late 1989, he was unanimously elected to a five-year term as sarpanch.
One of the first things Pawar did was invite villagers to share their concerns. The conversations left him wondering how he would raise the money necessary to begin solving the many problems. The village had all but collapsed; it lacked basic amenities like water, roads, sturdy homes, medical facilities, and toilets.
“It took us four days to prepare this list and it left me overwhelmed,” says Pawar. “All I knew then was that if we were going to emerge from this situation, the entire village would have to work together.”
Together with the new village council, Pawar embraced the idea of shramdaan, or “labor donation,” as a way to get villagers invested in building a better future. He went door to door, trying to convince people to contribute. If most of the villagers were inspired by Pawar and eager to work with him, there were some who resisted. After the village council built fences around its tamarind orchards, for instance, some residents unleashed their goats inside the fences to chew up the leaves and tender branches.
A motorcyclist drives by a community mural in Hiware Bazar. The broad asphalt roads of the village are a rarity in rural Indian villages. Chirodeep Chaudhuri
The council prepared a five-year development plan with education as the priority. Using donated land and labor, the village rebuilt the school. The council then started asking state agencies — like forestry, agriculture and animal husbandry — for help, using the school as evidence that Hiware Bazar was serious about changing its fortunes. The officials, still wary of the clashes they’d had with villagers over the years, were not easily convinced.
“I pleaded with them,” says Pawar.
His persistence eventually paid off. In 1992, the forest department added Hiware Bazar to the Joint Forest Management program. Begun in India in 1988, the national program helped forest communities develop and manage degraded forestland in ways that helped them meet their subsistence needs. Residents replanted 170 acres in the hills around the village, sowing tamarind, mango, arjun, and Indian gooseberry trees, all of which have economic and environmental as well as social and cultural value. The bark and fruit of the arjun tree, for instance, are widely used in ayurveda, the alternative medicine practice with deep roots in India. They started rituals, like gifting plants to newlyweds and organizing tree-planting campaigns for kids. They built water holes for the wildlife and replaced firewood with biogas generated from cattle dung.
Next, the villagers restored the depleted watershed. In 1994, Hiware Bazar joined the state government’s Ideal Village program. The idea was to build resiliency and sustainability by providing safe drinking water, creating jobs, and strengthening education and health care.
Watershed development was central to the program. Years of cattle grazing and clear-cutting in the hills had eroded the soil and depleted the groundwater. Now, with reforestation and a ban on cattle grazing, the soil began to improve. The tree cover slowed the rainwater runoff, holding the soil in place and allowing the water to percolate into the soil.
Villagers built small dams along the natural drainage lines on the hills to trap rainwater, increasing the groundwater and holding the excess as surface water. The same technique was used to trap rainwater within the farmers’ fields. “With the watershed infrastructure, the water table rose almost immediately and the area under irrigation increased,” says Pawar.
Farmers in Hiware Bazar had traditionally grown sorghum and pearl millet, and would often plant water-intensive crops like sugarcane and banana. They extracted groundwater for irrigation through deep wells, depleting the aquifers. Now, the village council started planning crops according to water availability, while also promoting dryland crops, like pulses, and less water-intensive crops, like vegetables. They abandoned wasteful flood irrigation in favor of micro-irrigation, which efficiently delivers water to crops through drip pipes and sprinklers.
Drip pipes carry water across a large field in Bhalwani village, near Hiware Bazar Chirodeep Chaudhuri
Before long, farming was working again in Hiware Bazar. By the mid-aughts, the number of trees had increased from 30,000 to 900,000. The amount of irrigated land went from 154 acres in 1994 to 642 acres in 2006. The village council helped farmers get bank loans for tractors, and secured some genetically modified seeds to boost yield, use less water, and resist pests. Farming evolved from subsistence to commercial, with villagers growing and selling wheat, oilseeds, pulses, vegetables, fruits, flowers, and fodder. Incomes rose sharply, and in 1998 the government declared Hiware Bazar to be an “ideal village.”
In the quarter century since this work began, Hiware Bazar has built on its water harvesting and watershed management initiatives. It has introduced “water budgeting,” which considers the total available water in the village from rainfall and conservation efforts, and then makes allocations for drinking, domestic use, and irrigation, while banking 30 percent each year for future use. Crops are planned according to the water budget, and villagers have continued to donate their labor to maintain the infrastructure.
A direct benefit of the village’s agricultural revolution is dairy farming, which is once again integral to Hiware Bazar’s economy. The increased income enabled many farmers to buy more cattle. In 2003, villagers constructed a veterinary clinic to ensure animal health and provide services like artificial insemination. The efforts, in turn, have increased the village’s milk production from 39 gallons a day in 1990 to more than 1,300 gallons today.
A man drives cattle down a road in Hiware Bazar Chirodeep Chaudhuri
With farming revitalized, the wealth spread throughout the community. Every home is made of concrete, as opposed to just two in 1990. The village has 87 tractors, compared to none in 1990; 368 motorcycles, compared to 10 in 1990; and 28 cars, compared to none in 1990. To ensure that the village’s development benefited its poorest citizens, most of whom did not own farmland, the village council leveraged government programs to allot land to these families, and served as guarantors for their agricultural loans.
“I think what worked was that whatever plans and schemes were implemented in Hiware Bazar, villagers did not think of them as government schemes or village council schemes,” says Sakharam Padir. “They thought them to be programs for their own development, for their own family’s welfare.”
Over the past two decades, Hiware Bazar has helped thousands of villages in India replicate its development model. According to a 2019 report by the national government’s policy think tank, India is suffering from the worst water crisis in its history, with 600 million people facing significant water stress and some 200,000 dying every year due to inadequate access to safe water. Agriculture accounts for 90 percent of water usage in India, and most of the irrigated land depends on groundwater sources, which are rapidly being depleted. Hiware Bazar’s development model, with watershed management and water conservation at its core, holds substantial relevance for Indian agriculture.
Within three years of the implementation of Hiware Bazar’s model in Bhalwani, another drought-prone village in Maharashtra, the average income of the village’s farmers rose from 100,000 rupees in 2018 to 500,000 in 2021. In 2018, the village lost two farmers to suicide, but none in the years since.
A farmer in Bhalwani, an adjoining village to Hiware Bazar, covers harvested onions in long lengths of cloth to protect them from the elements. Chirodeep Chaudhuri
Ajay Dandekar, a professor with the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Shiv Nadar University, calls Popatrao Pawar’s contribution to Indian agriculture “immense.” But he says India’s agrarian crisis is complex, and solving it will require fundamental changes in how agricultural commodities are priced as well as in cropping patterns, which are not in line with the rainfall patterns in the country.
“Many things can be learnt from Hiware Bazar,” says Dandekar, who in a 2017 study investigated the reasons behind farmer suicides in two of India’s hardest-hit districts. “But more importantly, along with it, the government must create macroeconomic structures within the agrarian economy that will regulate the prices and benefit farmers.”
In 2020, Pawar was awarded the Padma Shri, one of the highest civilian honors in India, for his work in Hiware Bazar. Today, he is the executive director of the Maharashtra government’s Model Village Program, working to transform a thousand of the state’s most depressed villages into self-sufficient communities. Meanwhile, activists, bureaucrats, and policymakers from across the country — as well as from countries like Germany, South Africa, Bangladesh, and others — have visited Hiware Bazar to study its success.
“In Hiware Bazar, we’ve seen every type of scarcity,” says Pawar. “We know the pain that walks in with scarcity, but we have also tasted the fruits of unity and cooperation. And now, we’re sharing our lessons with the world.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The rebirth of Hiware Bazar on Sep 26, 2022.
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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Flood. Retreat. Repeat. on Sep 23, 2022.
Before we get into today's post, I want to remind you that climate change is real. Big governments continue to poison and pollute. One of the things we all can do is plant more trees as well as saving our existing trees whenever possible. That's why Tree Services in Pensacola is doing everything to benefit the environment, while also beautifying your home's landscaping.
Joe Manchin on Wednesday made public the text of his long-awaited permitting bill, the result of a side deal that the senator from West Virginia made with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer as a condition of passing major climate legislation last month. The bill provoked a variety of strong and polarized reactions from climate experts, environmental justice advocates, and renewable energy boosters, but it’s still unclear how it would change the nation’s energy mix. Even less certain is whether the legislation can pass as a rider to a budget resolution that Congress must pass by the end of the month to avoid a government shutdown.
The bulk of the bill consists of a series of revisions to the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, a sweeping 1970 law that requires federal agencies to review the environmental impacts of nearly all the decisions they make. The legislation would set a two-year ceiling on NEPA reviews of major infrastructure projects and a one-year ceiling on reviews of minor projects, though it isn’t clear what would happen if agencies exceed those timelines, and the bill doesn’t contain any funding to help agencies meet the new mandates. The bill also shrinks the statute of limitations on court challenges against agency permitting decisions from six years to about five months.
In theory, the reforms in the bill will make it easier to build all kinds of energy projects, from mines to pipelines to gas terminals to solar farms. In practice, it’s unclear how big of an effect the bill will have on construction timelines, or how it will benefit fossil fuel projects compared to renewables.
Many liberal and libertarian thinkers have criticized NEPA and expressed support for the bill, saying it would speed up clean energy. The free-market R Street Institute, for instance, has found 40 percent of the active NEPA reviews at the Department of Energy are for clean energy projects, compared to 15 percent for fossil fuels. The liberal columnist Ezra Klein, writing for the New York Times, said that the bedrock environmental law is one of many “checks on development that have done a lot of good over the years but are doing a lot of harm now.”
However, some research has suggested that NEPA review delays are primarily caused not by the constraints of the law itself but by staffing shortages at the administrative agencies charged with undertaking the reviews. The Southern Methodist University law professor James Coleman, furthermore, has written that NEPA reform wouldn’t do much to help renewables, since the main obstacle for those projects tends to be getting approval at the state and local level, where they often run into fierce opposition.
Many of the bill’s opponents also allege that the bill further burdens communities vulnerable to the harms of polluting infrastructure by weakening the review process for new projects and closing off avenues for litigation. Representatives from Greenpeace, the Sunrise Movement, the Indigenous Environmental Network, and dozens of other environmental groups all spoke out against the bill after hosting a rally outside of the U.S. Capitol earlier this month to oppose Manchin’s deal with Schumer.
“By making it more difficult for communities to participate in the permitting process, the fossil fuel industry and others will be able to hastily secure permits without adequate time for review and consideration of the environmental impacts, which will only continue the legacy of pollution that has turned these communities into sacrifice zones,” said Peggy Shepard, co-founder of WE ACT for Environmental Justice, a Harlem-based advocacy organization, in a statement.
Reception inside the Capitol was no friendlier. Schumer and Manchin plan to attach the bill to a so-called continuing resolution, a measure that temporarily funds government operations, forcing senators to vote on keeping the government open rather than approve or deny the permitting deal on a standalone basis. A number of progressive senators, including Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, said they wouldn’t support a funding resolution with the permitting language in it, with Warren saying it “should be debated and voted on separately.” Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, meanwhile, called it a “disastrous side deal,” and a group of several dozen progressives in the House of Representatives have also come out against the deal. Many Senate Republicans, burned by Manchin’s support of the Inflation Reduction Act, have announced their opposition as well.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer walks to the podium during a weekly Senate Policy Luncheon press conference on Capitol Hill in Washington.
Tom Brenner for The Washington Post via Getty Images
A continuing resolution needs 60 votes in order to pass the Senate, so Manchin would need to garner support from at least 10 Republicans even if the entire Democratic caucus supported the bill. Given the number of early defections on both sides, it seems unlikely the bill will find that many supporters outright. What’s less clear is whether all the senators who have announced their opposition would be willing to sink a high-stakes funding bill over their opposition to permitting reform. If the continuing resolution doesn’t pass by September 30, the federal government will shut down, marking the first government shutdown of the Biden administration.
The bill’s other provisions are a mixed bag when it comes to climate. The law would require the Department of Energy to identify a list of 25 “critical energy projects” that will receive expedited consideration by federal agencies. In keeping with Manchin’s all-of-the-above energy philosophy, the list must contain at least five fossil-fuel projects, four mining projects, five renewable energy projects, and one carbon capture project. Only five of the 25 slots are left up to the Biden administration’s discretion.
A section about electrical transmission, meanwhile, garnered praise from supporters of renewable energy. The bill gives the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission expanded authority to promote the construction of new electrical transmission lines between regions of the country, and also allows the commission to allocate the costs of new lines to the electricity users who will benefit from them. That’s a complicated way of saying that the commission can incentivize utilities to build new lines by ensuring it makes financial sense for them to do so. A recent analysis from Princeton found that the United States will have to double the pace at which it installs transmission lines in order to reach net-zero emissions by 2050.
“Senator Manchin’s bill includes provisions that will help streamline the transmission approval process, improving our ability to meet our nation’s decarbonization goals by better connecting our key renewable resources to our largest population centers,” said Gregory Wetstone, president and CEO of the American Council on Renewable Energy, a trade group representing renewable power companies.
Perhaps the most controversial provision, though, is the one that clears the path for the Mountain Valley Pipeline, a 303-mile pipeline that would move natural gas from northwestern West Virginia to southern Virginia. The pipeline has been a key priority for Manchin and has faced sustained opposition from several community groups citing environmental, public health, and safety concerns. A number of lawsuits challenging the pipeline’s permits are pending in state and federal courts, and earlier this year, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals invalidated permits issued by the U.S. Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, and Fish and Wildlife Service.
Connie Fitzsimmons of Blacksburg, Virginia, demonstrates with Appalachian and Indigenous climate advocates against the Mountain Valley Pipeline project. Photo by Craig Hudson for The Washington Post via Getty Images
Manchin’s bill instructs these agencies to re-issue opinions, permits, leases and other authorizations required to operate the pipeline and exempts those federal actions from judicial review. That means community groups would no longer be able to challenge the pipeline’s permits in court. Jared Margolis, an attorney with the environmental group Center for Biological Diversity, said that it’s not clear what the bill’s passage might mean for the pending lawsuits, but it could lead to the lawsuits being considered “moot” and dismissed.
Since Congress passed the nation’s environmental laws, it can dictate where they apply, Margolis said. A bill fast-tracking the controversial Keystone XL pipeline took a similar approach several years ago. If Manchin’s bill passed, Margolis said, it would set a dangerous precedent. “The fact that Congress is getting into project-level skirmishes is surprising and scary,” he said. “If the new thing is going to be getting congressional support, then it becomes about political support and public opinion instead of bedrock environmental laws.”
The pipeline provision caused at least one further defection on the Democratic side of the aisle. Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, whose state would be the pipeline’s final destination, told reporters that the inclusion of the language made the bill “completely unacceptable.”
“I will do everything I can to oppose it,” he said.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Overdue reform or underhanded deal? Here’s what’s in Manchin’s permitting bill. on Sep 22, 2022.
Before we get into today's post, I want to remind you that climate change is real. Big governments continue to poison and pollute. One of the things we all can do is plant more trees as well as saving our existing trees whenever possible. That's why Tree Services in Pensacola is doing everything to benefit the environment, while also beautifying your home's landscaping.
To get the United States running on clean energy will require a lot of metal: A single electric vehicle battery pack could contain around 8 kilograms of lithium, 14 kilograms of cobalt, and 35 kilograms of nickel. A wind turbine can contain more than 4 tons of copper.
Over the next several decades, global demand for these “critical minerals,” a group that includes lithium, cobalt, nickel, and copper, is projected to increase by 400-600 percent driven by a surge in manufacturing of renewable technologies. For some metals like lithium and graphite, it could skyrocket by as much as 4,000 percent.
China dominates this global market, processing 50-70 percent of the world’s lithium and cobalt. But the Biden administration has taken a hard line against providing tax breaks to manufacturers who source metals from countries without free trade agreements with the U.S. That means that developers of technologies like electric vehicles and wind turbines need to find new supply streams – and fast.
But the process of extracting metal and mineral deposits from the earth, known as hardrock mining, has a reputation for contaminating local watersheds and causing irreparable environmental damage. That’s why domestic mining projects often encounter legal challenges and protests when they are initially proposed.
“It’s very hard to open up a mine in the United States. No one wants a mine in their backyard,” said Jordy Lee, a program manager at the Payne Institute for Public Policy at the Colorado School of Mines. “It’s not clear how the U.S. is supposed to mine and produce all these minerals when there’s so much pushback against the industry.”
Domestic mining is governed by a 150-year old law that critics characterize as a relic of the Wild West Era. Unlike laws regulating other extractive industries like oil and gas, the General Mining Law of 1872 doesn’t require companies to pay federal royalties on the resources they extract from public lands. A patchwork of more recent legislation regulates the environmental impacts of mining, but since it is distributed across multiple federal agencies, it can take years before a project gets approved. The Biden administration has recently passed a batch of bills to incentivize the buildout of a domestic supply chain to mine and process the minerals necessary for weaning the country off fossil fuels.
Now, Senator Joe Manchin, Democrat of West Virginia, is proposing legislation that would speed up permitting for major energy and infrastructure projects, including mining. The National Mining Association has said that the bill would help hardrock mining companies meet rising demand by providing some certainty that their projects will get greenlighted.
Environmental advocates and community groups whose land risks destruction from proposed projects see it differently. Mining activity has left deep scars across the American West, where the Environmental Protection Agency estimates that 40 percent of watersheds have been contaminated by hardrock mines. This environmental degradation has had particularly severe consequences for indigenous communities because many live close to the country’s largest deposits of nickel, lithium, cobalt, and copper.
The history of mining in the United States is inextricably linked to the history of westward expansion. The General Mining Law of 1872, inked 150 years ago by President Ulysses S. Grant, proclaimed mineral extraction to be the highest and best use of U.S. public lands, and encouraged waves of settlers to move West, displacing indigenous people from their native lands.
A century later, the Cold War spawned another mining boom, as uranium was needed for nuclear weapons. Government incentives helped develop mining from an industry of pickaxes and shovels to one that employed massive machinery to blast through mountaintops and scrape the surface of the earth. At the time, the only law governing mining was the one Grant had signed in 1872, and companies were allowed to abandon sites without cleaning up the toxic by-products they left behind. The consequences of this unregulated activity were disastrous: More than 22,000 abandoned hardrock mines around the country still pose an environmental hazard to the surrounding area.
A train carts copper ore out of mines in Ducktown, Tennessee in 1939.
Wolcott, Marion Post
After a national environmental movement swept through the nation in the 1960s, President Richard Nixon signed a series of laws that changed how the mining industry is regulated, including the Clean Water Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, and the Endangered Species Act. Regulations passed in the 1970s mandated that companies clean up project sites after they finished. But by the time these measures were implemented, demand for critical minerals had waned as the Cold War came to a close. When the tech boom started in the late 1990s, companies needing lithium and other metals for cell phone batteries and high-speed cables sourced them from other parts of the world. As countries like China and Chile built out their hardrock mining industries, the U.S. focused on developing other industries, like oil and gas.
“We used to be the largest lithium producer in the world and now we’re one percent of it,” said Ben Steinberg, a former Department of Energy official who represents the mining industry at the public relations firm Venn Strategies in Washington, D.C.. “So the knowledge about how mining operates, and what its value is to the country, is largely lost.” This is all the more challenging, Steinberg said, because many of the people who live near new extraction projects are against mining at the very moment when the country suddenly needs a lot more of it.
“It’s a big threat,” said Joe Kennedy, a Western Shoshone activist who spoke to Grist after a day of lobbying against the mining industry in Washington, D.C. His tribe’s lands, which stretch across parts of Nevada, California, Idaho, and Utah, have been contaminated by uranium extraction and open pit gold mining. Today, numerous companies are looking to open new gold and lithium mines in the region. “We’re playing with fire, and we’re probably going to get burned.”
The question of how much the U.S. should develop its hardrock mining sector is hotly contested. The impact of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on the European economy has highlighted the risk of relying too heavily on foreign nations for critical resources. Numerous environmental organizations have pointed out that the development of a circular economy in which critical minerals are recycled rather than continually extracted could decrease the country’s need for mining. The environmental watchdog Earthworks estimates that recycling has the potential to reduce demand by approximately 25 percent for lithium, 35 percent for cobalt and nickel, and 55 percent for copper by 2040. But more recycling isn’t likely to meet the demands for critical minerals anytime soon.
“This isn’t the choice of yes or no for the need for minerals that come from the ground,” said Steinberg. “This should be a conversation about how.”
Both Lee and Steinberg think it’s possible to mine for critical metals sustainably with the consent of locals, and also avoid repeating the mistakes of the twentieth century. But doing so will require Congress to pass stronger laws and standards.
That’s why the Biden administration recently convened an interagency working group on mining reform, which has been directed to come up with recommendations for creating new environmental standards and defining procedures for incorporating local recommendations.
But some people living near proposed project sites have argued that certain parts of the country are simply too culturally precious to mine. Take Chi’chil Biłdagoteel (known in English as Oak Flat), a forested region of southeast Arizona where mining giants Rio Tinto and BHP want to build a copper mine on land sacred to members of Western Apache and Yavapai tribes. The companies hope to extract the metal material by blasting through underground ore deposits, a method that could create a crater up to two miles wide and 1,000 feet deep. Tribal members and their allies have been fighting the project for nearly two years in federal court.
In Washington, members of the the San Carlos Apache Nation protest a proposed copper mine on their native land.
Win McNamee / Getty
“There are different types of sustainable mining, and one of those is the actual process of choosing where,” said Blaine Miller-McFeeley, a senior legislative representative at Earthjustice. “That is just as important as choosing how.” He called the bill Manchin is pushing in Congress “a sellout to industry” because it would enable mining companies to force through a project without taking concerns of the community into account, undermining the administration’s purported goal of giving locals a say in the permitting process.
Kennedy of the Western Shoshone tribe said that after witnessing decades of biodiversity loss and water contamination on his tribe’s land at the hands of mining companies, he is skeptical that domestic hardrock mining will become a truly sustainable industry.
“There would have to be a lot of built trust,” Kennedy said. “I mean, the Western Shoshone should be the ones to say yes or no to this type of project because it is Western Shoshone territory. It is Shoshone land, and that really is the bottom line.”
To Steinberg, Manchin’s bill is a “step in the right direction,” because it would streamline an outdated permitting process, but he agreed that there are certain places that should be off limits.
“We have the Grand Canyon. Probably shouldn’t mine in the Grand Canyon,” Steinberg said. “But we can’t plan millions of years of geology, and earth’s deposits are where they are, so we need a process and place for the industry and governments and the public to come together to make this vision about where to mine.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How a clean energy future is colliding with mining’s dark past on Sep 22, 2022.
Before we get into today's post, I want to remind you that climate change is real. Big governments continue to poison and pollute. One of the things we all can do is plant more trees as well as saving our existing trees whenever possible. That's why Tree Services in Pensacola is doing everything to benefit the environment, while also beautifying your home's landscaping.
The Senate has historically been the place where climate policy goes to die. Most climate bills garner zero Republican support, and Democrats haven’t had the 60 votes required to pass legislation since 2010. The recent Inflation Reduction Act was a unique exception — the bill’s $369 billion in climate and energy spending was pushed through with 50 Democratic votes under an arcane process called “budget reconciliation.”
But on Wednesday, the Senate flipped the script and voted to approve an international agreement designed to drive down greenhouse gas emissions. Sixty-nine Senators, including 19 Republicans, voted in favor of ratifying the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol, which sets a timeline for the world to phase down the use of hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs. (The Senate must approve international treaties by a two-thirds vote before the President can ratify them.)
“Ratifying the Kigali Amendment, along with passing the Inflation Reduction Act, is the strongest one-two punch against climate change any Congress has ever taken,” said Senator Chuck Schumer after the vote.
HFCs are chemicals used in heating and cooling equipment like refrigerators, air conditioners, and heat pumps. They were adopted in the 1990s as a substitute for another chemical, chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, which were found to be destroying the ozone layer.
In 1987, in a historic show of international cooperation, every country in the world came together to ratify the Montreal Protocol, an agreement to phase out CFCs. But it later became clear that the replacement chemicals created new problems. When HFCs leak into the atmosphere, they can be thousands of times more powerful than carbon dioxide at heating up the planet.
So in 2016, the world came together again to negotiate the Kigali Amendment, an update to the Montreal Protocol that requires participating countries to cut HFC pollution by at least 80 percent by 2050. It’s a plan that scientists estimate could shave off half a degree Celsius (0.9 degrees Fahrenheit) of global warming by the end of the century — a significant amount considering the planet has already warmed 1.2 degrees C (2.2 degrees F) since the preindustrial era. But former President Donald Trump never sent the amendment to the Senate for approval.
Scott Heins/Getty Images
The U.S. did, however, take action through another path. In December 2020, Congress passed a bipartisan law called the American Innovation and Manufacturing Act, which requires U.S. companies to phase down production and use of HFCs by 85 percent in 15 years. Federal agencies have already begun enforcing new rules to limit HFCs, as required by the law, by blocking illegal imports of the chemicals.
The law was supported by the manufacturing and chemical industries, which have also lobbied for the U.S. to approve the Kigali Amendment. As Jean Chemnick of E&E News notes, phasing out HFCs “offers virtually no downside for U.S. businesses.”
That’s because the American chemical and heating and cooling industries have cleaner alternatives at the ready, and stand to gain from cornering the market for these new chemicals internationally — especially as global warming increases demand for air conditioning. But even though companies are taking action domestically, if the U.S. failed to ratify the amendment, American companies would eventually face trade restrictions in countries that have joined the agreement. Supporters said ratifying the amendment would help the U.S. outcompete China, which has been slower to adopt alternatives. It has been a key priority for President Joe Biden, who submitted the amendment to the Senate for approval last November.
“Ratifying Kigali means ensuring U.S. companies dominate the export markets,” Senator Bob Menendez, a Democrat from New Jersey, told his colleagues on the Senate floor on Tuesday. Ratification could spur 33,000 new American manufacturing jobs, he said, citing industry estimates. But “failure to ratify means U.S. businesses that employ tens of thousands of people across the country will not be able to sell many of their products in key countries.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The Senate just approved an international climate treaty, with bipartisan support on Sep 21, 2022.
Before we get into today's post, I want to remind you that climate change is real. Big governments continue to poison and pollute. One of the things we all can do is plant more trees as well as saving our existing trees whenever possible. That's why Pensacola Tree Services is doing everything to benefit the environment, while also beautifying your home's landscaping.
On stormy days—and sunny days too—residents of Jacksonville, Florida watch water filling the streets, rising up to stop signs, and spilling onto front stoops and into parked cars.
As a result, annual flooding damage currently costs homeowners and insurance companies $20 million per year nationally, with economic losses concentrated in Florida and California. As storms grow stronger and sea level rises, that damage is on track to reach $32 billion annually by mid-century. But for residents here, the wreckage — measured in family members lost, and homes and heirlooms too damaged to recover — can hardly be quantified.
For some living in the McCoys Creek watershed, a historically Black part of Jacksonville, witnessing floods again and again in the same places feels like Groundhog Day. “We come out just to see who’s next,” resident Nicole Newsome told CBS Action News Jax in March 2022, after two people were rescued from cars swept away by flood waters at the corner of McCoys Creek Boulevard and King Street.
Jacksonville’s flooding is a result of a century of attempts to tame and channel the St. Johns River and its tributaries, such as McCoys Creek and Hogans Creek. Some of these interventions have tried to channel water in certain directions, while others have tried to constrain its flow for the sake of efficient shipping and expanded development. With its waterways constricted, and its lowlands filled in, by the 1950s, industry set up shop on the city’s higher ground. Draper’s Egg & Poultry Company built a chicken processing plant and The E.O. Fertilizer Company set up a factory near where McCoys Creek meets the St. Johns River, releasing chemicals and further destroying native ecosystems. In addition to this industrial pollution, which disproportionately impacted residents living nearby, today, these blacktopped areas can no longer absorb storm waters.
After decades of mismanaging flood risks, residents and local grassroots organizations are now working with city officials to finally take a markedly different approach. Gloria McNair, the manager of community engagement and equity for Groundwork Jacksonville, is leading an effort to rehabilitate McCoys and Hogans creeks. She hopes to develop a remediated green space that connects city neighborhoods through what’s known as the Emerald Trail: 30 walkable miles that will encircle the urban core.
For many living in Jacksonville, the plan, which began in 2014 with a feasibility study, was seen as a long-needed shift from a water management model focused on building more barriers to one that embraces the natural power of waterways and their surrounding ecosystems. But some residents feared the improvements would have unintended consequences. “‘Do you think once there’s this beautiful trail right here outside my home, that they’re going to allow me to stay here?” McNair recalls one resident of North Riverside, a Black neighborhood near McCoys Creek, asking her.
Residents’ skepticism was well-founded. “These are people who’ve already had unfortunate things occur,” McNair said. Many Black residents living in neighborhoods along the proposed Emerald Trail have borne the brunt of prior planning and redevelopment efforts, including residents whose properties were redlined or who were displaced in the 1950’s by highway construction. Green infrastructure efforts elsewhere, like trails and parks built in East Boston and in South Philadelphia, have restored waterways and enhanced overall cities’ resilience to climate change, but also raised property values, property taxes, and displaced Black and Latino residents — a phenomenon that scholars have coined “climate gentrification.”
For the trail restoration and flooding prevention plan to deliver its intended social benefits, McNair realized, it would be essential to focus on a deep commitment to helping residents stay in their houses and communities, and to engaging residents at every single step of the planning process. At their core, McNair says, “our strategies are anti-displacement strategies.”
So McNair spent time meeting residents in their homes, learning about their concerns, such as not being able to afford home improvements. Seeing that McNair and Groundwork Jacksonville were responsive to feedback, rather than solely focused on their own agenda, residents grew increasingly involved. Meeting numbers rose from the single digits to the hundreds. McNair developed a survey to guide a 10-year neighborhood vision for equitable development. The results showed that residents were concerned about maintaining the neighborhood’s character and history during any creek restoration; how to obtain funding for housing and home repair; wanting access to employment opportunities; and developing strategies for improving environmental stewardship. The plans to bring the Emerald Trail to life now include home improvement help, job training, and access to experts on property tax exemptions and other programs designed to ensure that residents are not displaced and can prosper from the economic benefits of the redevelopment effort.
Over the past five years, the same residents who were once skeptical about the project have become the Emerald Trail’s greatest advocates. At a recent event called Creek Fest, many offered feedback on proposed designs of the Emerald Trail system. Six local residents have served as technicians to perform water monitoring on McCoys creek, and a team of three residents serve on the McCoys creek task force, which meets with city officials and architects to ensure that residents’ desires for amenities and how they’d like to interact with the creek are included as plans evolve. The effort is a prime example of the kind of approach that could be significantly amplified by funding from the Biden administration’s Justice40 commitment, which mandates that residents living in “disadvantaged communities” receive the benefits of at least 40 percent of federal investment in clean energy and climate resiliency projects.
Directly and meaningfully involving residents has also improved the city’s overall safety. When providing feedback on designs, residents pointed out that while permanently closing some streets by creating cul de sacs to let the creek expand would be beneficial, closing off certain overpasses could trap residents in the event of a flood — a block-specific dynamic that planners were not attuned to. “When we talk about public private partnerships, that [should] include residents, the stakeholders of the community,” McNair said. “You need to have their input, their feedback and their support when you’re moving forward, especially in a project that’s going to affect them so directly.”
Since those two cars were swept away by floodwaters on McCoys Creek Boulevard in March, the city has made progress in its new approach to floodwater management. A major stretch of the boulevard that ran parallel to the creek has been removed, creating a natural, roadless flood basin to be buttressed by grasslands, palms, and cypresses. The Emerald Trail is due to be completed in 2029, providing climate resilience and social benefits to an area that’s long grappled with racist policies and decades of disinvestment.
Along the connecting green ribbon, “there will be a way to walk and talk and visit and get to know each other again,” McNair said.
River Network is the only national nonprofit whose sole purpose is to connect and strengthen the efforts of water leaders affiliated with over 8,500 local groups, agencies, tribes, and utilities working for healthy rivers and clean water across the US. We elevate equity across all our work, and for 30+ years, we’ve delivered tools, training, financial support, and mentorship, including through leading-edge collaboratives tackling equitable development and urban flooding at the community level.
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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline What does community-led climate work look like? on Sep 21, 2022.
