Tree Services Pensacola, FL.: October 2022

Monday 31 October 2022

Democrats passed a major climate bill. Why aren’t more midterms ads touting it?

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In the weeks leading up to the midterm election on November 8, environmental groups have been trying to get the attention of the 2 million Americans who care about climate change but don’t usually vote. Their advertisements are appearing on Facebook feeds, popping up on Hulu, and getting delivered to mailboxes week after week. The main message? Your representative finally did something about climate change this year, so you should vote to keep them in office.

“It’s a real holy sh*t moment — in a good way,” says the narrator in an ad for Senator Mark Kelly, a Democrat from Arizona. “Mark Kelly met the moment. Send him back.”

This summer, for the first time in history, Democrats managed to pass wide-reaching federal legislation to tackle climate change, putting $369 billion toward clean energy tax credits. Some think the measures in the bill could reduce emissions 40 percent below 2005 levels by the end of the decade. The League of Conservation Voters and Climate Power Action, two advocacy groups, have emphasized this point in their $15 million “Climate Voters Mobilization” campaign aimed at potential voters around the country, targeting tight races in Arizona, New Hampshire, Kansas, Georgia, Washington, and more than a dozen other states.

But in an election in which control of Congress is at stake, the Climate Voters Mobilization campaign is the exception. Most mainstream advertisements fail to mention anything about the overheating planet. The Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade and the threat to abortion rights has dominated Democrats’ messaging. Republicans, meanwhile, have emphasized rising inflation and crime. Some analyses of political campaigning don’t include climate change at all: In the Washington Post’s examination of more than 1,000 midterm ads since Labor Day, it didn’t even land in the 25 most common topics.

This is a reflection of polls showing that other hot-button issues are top of mind for Americans. But increasingly, climate change is making its way up their priority lists, potentially becoming a swayer of elections. This year, environmental groups are counting on climate voters being an important bloc.

“There are now a set of voters out there where climate is a ‘super-motivator’ for them,” said Pete Maysmith, senior vice president of campaigns at the League of Conservation Voters. “That’s the thing that is really going to help get them to the polls.”

If climate change is becoming such a big deal in elections, where are the rest of the ads touting the groundbreaking legislation that is the Inflation Reduction Act?

One explanation for the dearth of such messaging is that Americans think of climate action as something only a minority of people want, even if they themselves have been calling for such legislation for years. “There’s a misconception that it’s not as popular as it is,” said Heather Hargreaves, the director of Climate Power Action. A study published this summer found that people vastly underestimated public support for measures such as a carbon tax or a Green New Deal. Respondents imagined that a minority of people (37 to 43 percent) backed such measures, but real-life polling found that the vast majority (66 to 80 percent) actually supported them.

Politicians may be susceptible to the same misperceptions as the general public: Another study found that congressional staffers underestimated how many people in their districts wanted restrictions on carbon emissions. It only makes sense to campaign on climate action if you think your constituents care.

Biden speaks into a microphone against a stars-and-stripes themed backdrop — President Joe Biden gives remarks during an event celebrating the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act on the South Lawn of the White House, September 13, 2022.
Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images

Part of the problem is that many people aren’t comfortable talking about climate change. There’s a phenomenon called the “spiral of silence” where people think they’re alone in their concern simply because they don’t hear others saying they’re concerned about it. On top of that, a tiny minority of climate deniers may carry outsized sway in people’s minds, simply because they do speak up.

Consider the growing threat of wildfires in the Western U.S. Many more acres burn compared to 30 years ago, partly because hotter and drier conditions have been spurring bigger, more severe, and longer-lasting fires. “People who don’t really want to grapple with climate change will say, ‘Well, there have always been fires, and there have always been big fires’ — and that’s true,’” said Peter Friederici, a communication professor at Northern Arizona University and the author of the new book Beyond Climate Breakdown: Envisioning New Stories of Radical Hope. “There have been all these ready-made counternarratives that are just sitting there, waiting for us, that encouraged us to think, ‘No, this is really not much of a problem.’”

Climate change can also take a backseat to other problems that appear more visible. For the most part, it doesn’t have “that visceral kick” that immigration, abortion, or the economy does, Friederici said. It’s not something people instinctively react to, like higher gas prices. For most of history, the climate was considered “a backdrop” for dramas with humans as the protagonists. It can be jarring when the background takes center stage.

The philosopher Timothy Morton has described climate change as a “hyperobject” — something so large that we can’t grasp it in an effective way. “It’s kind of everywhere and nowhere at the same time,” Friederici said. “But on some level, we know it’s everywhere, and it affects everything.”

Yet people talk about it, for the most part, like they talk about other issues: On the debate stage, the climate merits a quick question to candidates along with topics like the economy and public safety. “That’s where it becomes super politicized,” Friederici said. “‘Do you believe in it or not? Do you think we should get rid of all new fossil fuel exploration or not?’ And so it quickly turns into this political identity marker, rather than continuing to try to see the fullness of what climate change is, which is a really difficult thing to do.”

In previous elections, candidates who supported doing something about climate change sometimes saw their efforts used against them. Democrats are still “haunted” by the 2010 midterm elections, when two dozen members of the House of Representatives who had supported a cap-and-trade bill to limit greenhouse gas emissions were kicked out of their seats after a barrage of attack ads from conservatives.

But the calculus has changed. This election cycle, it’s hard to find Republican ads that skewer Democrats for supporting the Inflation Reduction Act, Hargreaves said. “We know that Republicans would be using that if they thought it was a working message, but it’s not.” In recent years, Republican strategists have worried that climate change could become an “electoral time bomb” because younger voters disapprove of the party’s stance.

For the 2020 election, the League of Conservation Voters ran a campaign to persuade undecided but climate-conscious swing voters to cast their ballots. The organization believes the effort resulted in a 5.6 percent increase in ballots cast for pro-environment candidates, which translates to nearly 90,000 votes.

Over the past decade, more and more people have come to name climate change as a top concern, according to polling by YouGov. In October 2012, only 3 percent of Americans considered it the most important issue facing the United States, compared to 10 percent today — tied with the number concerned about the economy, and beaten only by inflation. A poll conducted by the Washington Post and ABC News in September found that 51 percent of registered voters considered climate change very important, if not one of the most important issues, for their vote.

This rise in concern has coincided with the effects of a warming planet becoming more visible: monster storms, drought, and megafires that blanket parts of the country with smoke. Almost half of Americans now believe that global warming will harm them personally, according to data from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.

With this in mind, environmental groups are taking a similar approach to 2020’s ad campaign this year. “We’re not trying to talk to everybody,” Hargreaves said. “We still think climate change messaging works with the vast majority of people, but it works best with a certain subset.” Young people and women are more likely to vote with global warming in mind, as are Black, Hispanic, and Asian Americans.

Aside from pointing out the success of the Inflation Reduction Act, the Climate Voters Mobilization’s ads highlighted the urgent need to address the devastation the climate crisis is causing as well as the need to modernize infrastructure to better handle extreme weather. These messages tested well in polling, Hargreaves said, increasing people’s enthusiasm to vote by 7 percent on average, and by 16 percent among Democrats.

“These are voters who we know are with us that are otherwise likely just to not show up,” said Maysmith of the League of Conservation Voters. “They’re likely to stay on the couch. And this is the issue that we have every reason to believe is going to get them off the couch and to the polling place.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Democrats passed a major climate bill. Why aren’t more midterms ads touting it? on Oct 31, 2022.

US unveils $1 billion effort to electrify school buses

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Less than 1 percent of the nation’s roughly 500,000 school buses are electric or run on low-emission fuels. That’s about to change.

Nearly 400 school districts across the United States, including in several Indigenous tribal lands, as well as in Puerto Rico and American Samoa, will receive around $1 billion to purchase new, mostly electric school buses as part of a Biden Administration grant program.

The program aims to reduce children’s exposure to harmful exhaust from diesel buses that serve their schools and communities. It is also part of a broader effort by the Biden Administration to address climate change and environmental justice by making it easier for vulnerable communities to have access to zero-emission vehicles.

The grant program’s funds come from $5 billion that the EPA received as part of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. With the grant money, recipient school districts will be able to purchase nearly 2,300 electric buses, quadrupling the nation’s current number. While these lower-polluting buses would make up a small portion of school bus fleets, environmental and public health advocates argue that the positive impacts on children’s health would be profound.

In a press release, WE ACT for Environmental Justice, a Harlem-based organization, praised Wednesday’s announcement and the program’s reach, saying that it would improve air quality and “reduce children’s exposure to asthma-causing pollutants while also protecting the health of drivers and the communities these buses drive through.”

The Biden Administration expects many of the new electric buses to be available to the winning school districts by the start of the next school year, with the remainder available by the end of 2023.

Air pollution remains a major contributor to poor respiratory and cardiovascular health, with vehicles a main culprit. Greenhouse gas emissions from transportation make up the highest portion of total greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., at 27 percent. The World Health Organization estimates that 93 percent of the world’s population breathes air that exceeds its public health guidelines.

Children are particularly vulnerable to the impacts of poor air quality. A 2021 study found that even brief exposure to air pollution, including wildfire smoke and car exhaust, can alter a child’s DNA and increase their risk of heart and lung problems as adults.

Seventy percent of students from low-income families take a bus to school, increasing their exposure to diesel exhaust. Children of color, in particular, are more likely to live near heavy transit routes, industrial facilities, and other sources of vehicular and industrial pollution. This is in large part due to historic housing, zoning, and transit policies that left Black and Brown communities with few other options. As a result, children of color have higher rates of asthma and other respiratory illnesses than white children.

Air pollution also poses other unexpected health risks to children of color. A 2017 study on Latino children in low-income neighborhoods in Los Angeles found that exposure to air pollution during childhood may cause damage to the pancreas — the organ that produces insulin, increasing their likelihood of becoming obese and developing Type 2 diabetes.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline US unveils $1 billion effort to electrify school buses on Oct 31, 2022.

Friday 28 October 2022

A decade after Sandy, Manhattan’s flood barrier is finally in sight — sort of

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When Superstorm Sandy made landfall on October 29, 2012, it pushed 13 feet of storm surge into New York City’s harbor, sweeping across the Brooklyn and Queens waterfronts and wiping entire neighborhoods off the map in Staten Island. Flooding knocked out power in Lower Manhattan, plunging downtown into near-total darkness as water rushed through the streets. The storm caused $19 billion in damages in the city alone, and it was clear that future storms could be even worse unless something changed.

Less than a year later, the Obama administration unveiled a massive federal initiative to ensure that the city not only recovered from Sandy, but built back better. The initiative, dubbed Rebuild by Design, promised to funnel money toward long-term climate adaptation measures in the hardest-hit areas, supplementing the usual barrage of disaster aid with money earmarked for forward-looking projects.

To say that officials aimed high would be an understatement. The Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD, which managed the initiative, threw its weight behind an idea called the “Big U.” The plan, drafted by the firm of Danish celebrity architect Bjarke Ingels, proposed to wrap the island of Manhattan, the financial and cultural capital of the United States, in miles of berms and artificial shorelines, creating a huge grassy shield that would both increase urban green space and defend the city from storm surge. The feds doled out an eye-popping $335 million for the first phase of the project, which soon captured the public’s imagination, in part thanks to iconic renderings from Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) that showed a green paradise enfolding Manhattan. Ingels referred to it as “the love-child of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs.”

If you stand in Battery Park on the southern tip of Manhattan today, 10 years after Sandy, it might be hard to imagine that the city is about to make the Big U vision a reality. Look a little closer, though, and there are signs of progress. Multiple pieces of the borough’s flood barrier have broken ground in the past year, and almost all the money for the system has been secured, with only a few pieces left to fund. After years of planning, design, and debate, the physical structure is starting to take shape.

“Once you start to see it in real life, it feels totally different,” said Amy Chester, the managing director of Rebuild by Design, which has gone on to help other cities plan resilience projects. “I worked in city government forever, and I didn’t expect all these projects to happen, but it happened.”

An early rendering of the Big U berm structure at the Battery. The plan first emerged in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy.
Courtesy of Bjarke Ingels Group

The Big U was a test case for large-scale climate adaptation. It wagered that cities could use a disaster like Sandy as a moment to rethink their relationship with nature, rather than just rebuild what had existed before.

In some ways, the bet paid off. The Big U project did manage to secure funding, and it is now being built, albeit years behind schedule and in modified form. After almost a decade of design work and public engagement, the city has proven that unconventional adaptation projects can work, and that cities can look beyond traditional flood walls and levees.

In another sense, though, the Big U is a reality check for these big projects. The project was kickstarted thanks to a rush of post-disaster money from a presidential administration that prioritized adaptation, but it couldn’t have gotten to this point without New York City’s unparalleled local resources. As Chester puts it, New York is a “different financial animal” than the rest of the country. Whereas other jurisdictions rely heavily on the federal government to fund big infrastructure projects, the city can also command huge amounts of municipal and state funding, which helps open the door for more ambitious and forward-looking projects. Absent a revamp of how the federal government funds climate adaptation, such projects will continue to remain out of reach for most cities.

“There are so many communities across the coastline including other major cities like Houston, Los Angeles, Seattle, Boston, Miami, Tampa,” said Linda Shi, an assistant professor of city planning at Cornell University who studies climate adaptation. “Are they going to see such sums of money? And then what about much smaller municipalities? They for sure are not going to see such levels of investment. That’s a real challenge, to think about how our infrastructure spending is going to meet that gap.”

The first task in the Big U project was to break Ingels’s dramatic vision into achievable chunks.

The $335 million that the city received from HUD went to fund a huge segment along the east side of Manhattan, one of the city’s hardest hit areas by the storm. For centuries, this part of the island consisted mostly of wetlands, before developers filled it in to make room for dense residential neighborhoods and public housing developments. When Sandy hit New York, its storm surge sought out these historical low-lying stretches, but the tidal channels and mudflats that had once absorbed excess water were long gone, replaced by concrete buildings and streets.

Ingels’s initial plan for the east side called for a massive tiered berm that would slope up from the water at East River Park, but this vision soon hit a roadblock: Officials in Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration determined that building the berm would be too disruptive for a nearby highway — the busy FDR Drive — and a subsurface power line owned by the utility ConEd. Instead they decided to elevate the whole park on eight feet of artificial fill. But the city made a few serious missteps in communicating with locals about the new plan, and a coalition of locals, artists, and activists soon banded together to oppose it, arguing that it would remove trees and reduce access to a valuable community space.

Despite the public relations nightmare, the city began construction work on the east side project in earnest late last year, and has since ripped up about half the park. Dozens of trucks, cranes, and backhoes now fill the site, laying the groundwork for the fill that will raise it off the ground. The city now expects the project to be complete in 2026.

Activists chain themselves around a tree at City Hall Park in New York City in a protest against the East River Park flood project. — Activists chain themselves around a tree at City Hall Park in New York City demanding then-City Council Speaker Corey Johnson to hold an immediate Oversight Hearing on the East River Park flood project.
Erik McGregor / LightRocket via Getty Images

There’s a similar project in the works on the opposite shore of Manhattan, in an area called Battery Park City. Built in the 1970s on artificial land that extends out into the Hudson River, the neighborhood is governed by a state authority that can issue its own bonds, allowing local leaders to fund an $800 million resilience scheme to construct another segment of the Big U. As in East River Park, the plan here is to create a tiered series of elevated lawns that will stop coastal flooding from pushing inland.

But just like across town, this plan is not going over well with some locals, who have objected to the fact that it will close the park for multiple years. Earlier this summer, the campaigners attracted the attention of Republican gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin, who urged the state to pause construction until local concerns are heard.

“Residents have pointed out that Wagner Park didn’t experience severe flooding during Superstorm Sandy,” said Zeldin in a statement to the press. “Others have raised concerns about the exorbitant cost.” A group of locals is pushing an alternative design for the park, but crews are still expected to begin construction in the coming weeks.

The third and most difficult segment of the waterfront to protect is the two-mile stretch between these two other projects: the southern edge of Manhattan, stretching from lower Battery Park City past Wall Street and up toward the East Side. This stretch of shoreline is home to the towering skyscrapers of the Financial District, the offramps of the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges, the packed historic neighborhood around the South Street Seaport, and another dense cluster of high-rise housing developments, not to mention a thicket of critical transportation infrastructure, including the elevated FDR Drive expressway and a subterranean car tunnel to Brooklyn.

Because the area is so overbuilt, with only a few dozen feet of free space between the water’s edge and the nearest street or building, the city doesn’t have the room to build big flood walls or berms like the ones it’s constructing in East River Park. Much of the waterfront territory in the neighborhood sits on concrete piles, which means it likely couldn’t support the two-story structure needed to protect the low-lying Financial District from a big storm event; the dense network of underground transportation and power infrastructure only further complicates such an effort. Plus, many of the buildings in the Seaport district are designated historic landmarks, making it even harder to build something new in their midst.

Faced with all these challenges, designers had to get creative. In one part of the problem area, near the dense Two Bridges neighborhood, the city chose a novel technological solution from the original Big U plan: a $500 million array of deployable flood walls that can flip up out of the ground during storm surge events, creating a temporary water barrier. Mayor Eric Adams broke ground on that project this week, and it is also expected to finish in 2026. Further down the shore, the city hopes to extend an artificial shoreline out into the water, creating a two-tiered berm with one segment that soars fifteen feet into the air and another that sweeps down toward the river.

An early rendering of the flip-down flood walls now under construction in Lower Manhattan. — An early rendering of flip-down flood walls along the waterfront in Lower Manhattan, first proposed in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy. A modified version of the project is now under construction in Lower Manhattan.
Courtesy of Bjarke Ingels Group

Finding the funds for this last piece may be tricky. Much of the money for the flip-up flood walls arrived six years ago thanks to another Obama-era grant program that funded novel resilience strategies, but the berm around the Seaport will cost around $3.6 billion, according to the city’s latest estimates, and will take more than a decade to complete. Unless the city is hit by another Sandy, there likely won’t be another huge pile of post-disaster federal money for this project, which raises questions about how the city will pay for it. A recent federal grant to help support the project provided only $50 million, at most 1 percent of the total cost of the project.

Victor Papa, the president of the Two Bridges Neighborhood Council, which represents residents in the area, said he’s optimistic the project will come to fruition, and said he wasn’t disturbed by the long timeline.

“We’re feeling very confident,” he told Grist. “I am of the mind that when a project affects thousands of people, in thousands of housing units, that is not an overnight process, that’s a process that’s going to have a learning curve. I think the city did a good job in their design and their implementation.”

Even with most of the funding locked down, the trajectory for finishing the Big U is difficult to predict. The construction timeline for the rest of the project stretches to the end of the decade and beyond, and that’s assuming everything goes well. Future mayors may have to contend with controversy over construction impacts and cost overruns. The long timeline may also jeopardize the effectiveness of the project: the flip-up flood gates, for instance, only provide protection against the sea-level rise that will occur by 2050, which could make them inadequate as little as two decades after they are completed. There’s also the risk that another Sandy could strike while the city is still building the Big U, setting the timeline back even further.

“I think some of the estimates on time that the city put out right after Sandy were the absolute best-case scenario, and not everything turned out to be best case,” said Daniel Zarrilli, a special advisor on climate and sustainability at Columbia University who served as a climate policy advisor to Mayors Michael Bloomberg and de Blasio. “These are big, billion-dollar infrastructure projects and things do tend to take time, which is unfortunate, because time is not on our side.”

Submerged cars on Avenue C and 7th Street in Manhattan during Superstorm Sandy. — Submerged cars on Avenue C and 7th Street in Manhattan during the severe flooding caused by Superstorm Sandy.
Christos Pathiakis / Getty Images

The current framework is also notable for what it leaves out — the city’s ambitions for the Big U are smaller than the original proposal from the Rebuild by Design days. The original berm structure conceived by Ingels would have extended from 42nd Street on the East Side all the way around the island and up the West Side to 57th Street, but the city has lopped off sections on both sides. Rather than push the project up the sides of the island, the city scaled back its ambitions to the barrier segment it knew it could afford.

The responsibility for protecting the rest of Manhattan and New York City now lies with the U.S Army Corps of Engineers, the nation’s chief builder of flood projects. In most other cities, the Corps might have taken charge of storm surge adaptation from the beginning, drafting an infrastructure project and securing money for it from Congress, but that wasn’t the case in New York. The pot of money the city received from HUD allowed it to pursue the nontraditional vision of the Big U, and leaders later rejected the Corps’ controversial proposal to create a five-mile storm gate across New York Harbor.

Now, though, the Corps has returned to fill in the gaps: The agency this month unveiled a $52 billion plan to build a series of storm gate structures across the city and in New Jersey as well. One structure would extend deployable flood gates up the West Side of Manhattan, approximating the extent of Ingels’s original scheme. If executed well, the Corps plan would also help bolster flood resilience in vulnerable parts of the city that didn’t receive the same jackpot of HUD money that Lower Manhattan did. There were other ambitious Rebuild by Design ventures for some of these places too, including the Bronx and Staten Island, but none so ambitious as the Big U. On its own, a flood barrier around Lower Manhattan wouldn’t help those areas, and might even push more water toward them during storm surge events.

“There’s only so much money that the city had, and the federal funding streams allowed us to do some work, but not all of it,” said Zarrilli. For the rest of it, he said, “we need the Army Corps.”

Even this some-but-not-all achievement would be difficult to replicate in other cities that don’t have New York’s local resources or a pot of recovery money from a friendly presidential administration. Bond measures and federal resilience grants can help fund smaller-scale adaptation projects, but transformative green infrastructure on the scale achieved in Manhattan will likely remain out of reach elsewhere in the United States.

Furthermore, Shi, from Cornell, cautions that new infrastructure can’t be the only way we adapt to climate change. The Big U may be an admirable example of how cities can rebuild for rising seas, but it won’t work unless accompanied by other measures that shift development away from flood zones and help people relocate from the riskiest places.

“I think there is a certain kind of danger to the siren song that the Big U sings for us, because it is so visually appealing that we might think that it is going to solve the problem on its own,” she said. “But that’s just one kind of innovation. And that same kind of imagination needs to be there in those … non-design spaces in order for all of this to actually pencil out.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A decade after Sandy, Manhattan’s flood barrier is finally in sight — sort of on Oct 28, 2022.

A NASA satellite launched to detect dust has discovered huge methane leaks

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On the evening of July 14, NASA launched the Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation, or EMIT, 250 miles up to perch on the International Space Station. With the satellite’s speed in equilibrium with the Earth’s gravitational pull, the instrument took off into orbit and has been circling our planet once every 90 minutes ever since.

EMIT belongs to a category of equipment known as spaceborne imaging spectrometers and was designed to examine how flurries of airborne, mineral dust on the Earth’s surface affect temperature changes across the globe.

In the three and a half months following EMIT’s launch, the tool has not only successfully mapped out massive dust plumes and their effect on the changing climate, but has also identified another key piece to the global warming puzzle: more than 50 methane “super-emitters,” some of which had previously gone unseen.

Methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, is a byproduct of decomposing organic material and the leading component of natural gas — the fuel used in power plants as well as in heating and cooking appliances in buildings. In the 20 years after release, methane is estimated to be 80 to 90 times more effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. In 2021, the amount of methane in the atmosphere soared to the highest level on record. And super-emitters — oil fields, pipelines, landfills, animal feedlots, and other facilities that emit methane at unusually high rates — are a major part of the problem. Researchers have estimated that super-emitters account for between 8 and 12 percent of all methane emissions from the oil and gas sector.

The super-emitters that EMIT identified included oil and gas infrastructure east of the port city of Hazar, Turkmenistan, emitting methane at a rate of 111,000 pounds per hour. Off of Carlsbad, New Mexico, the apparatus detected a previously unidentified 2-mile-long plume rising from the Permian Basin, one of the largest oilfields in the world. A waste-processing complex in Iran, also previously unknown to scientists, was found to emit an estimated 18,700 pounds of methane per hour.

Scientists at NASA aren’t the only ones using satellites to track methane leaks. A French geoanalytics company called Kayrros SAS uses a combination of satellite data and algorithms to identify super-emitter sites. In February, researchers from Kayrros and various climate institutions announced that they had used satellite instruments to identify more than 1,800 major releases of methane globally in 2019 and 2020.

While carbon dioxide lingers in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, methane breaks down after about a decade. Due to this timeframe of atmospheric response, a deceleration in the rate of global warming could come to fruition relatively swiftly if the world confronts its methane emissions.

Last fall, during the annual United Nations climate conference in Scotland, the United States and European Union announced the Global Methane Pledge, an international initiative aiming to slash the world’s methane emissions by 30 percent by the end of this decade. More than 100 countries have signed onto the pledge. Researchers say that slowing methane emissions can be achieved at relatively low cost — for instance, by requiring oil and gas companies to repair leaky equipment and forbidding them from intentionally venting methane into the air. Improving livestock manure management and plugging abandoned oil and gas wells are other strategies that could yield major benefits.

NASA hopes that EMIT can be part of those solutions. “Reining in methane emissions is key to limiting global warming,” NASA administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement. “This exciting new development will not only help researchers better pinpoint where methane leaks are coming from, but also provide insight on how they can be addressed — quickly.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A NASA satellite launched to detect dust has discovered huge methane leaks on Oct 28, 2022.

Thursday 27 October 2022

Report: Global climate ambitions still fall short ahead of COP27

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Last November, world leaders gathered in Glasgow, Scotland, for COP26, the United Nations’ annual climate conference, to negotiate a new pact to keep global warming at bay. Although many countries had scaled up their commitments to cut emissions prior to the meeting, officials at the conference determined that these plans were still not ambitious enough to achieve the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement. The final pact from COP26 called on United Nations members to “revisit and strengthen” their strategies.

But one year later, as officials gear up for another round of talks at COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, next month, little has changed. On Thursday, the United Nations’ Environment Programme published its annual “Emissions Gap Report,” which found that nations’ current climate plans, if fully implemented, would not limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, this century — the ambitious target set down in the Paris Agreement.

“There’s been a bit of a plateau in the progress that we were seeing in the lead-up to Glasgow,” said Taryn Fransen, a senior fellow at the nonprofit World Resources Institute and a lead author of the report. “Globally, the state of progress has really slowed down in an alarming way.”

In order to have a chance at 1.5 degrees C, global emissions must drop 45 percent by 2030. But countries’ current plans — which are called nationally determined contributions, or NDCs, in the parlance of international climate talks — will only cut emissions by 5 to 10 percent by that date, according to the report. It found that the updated NDCs submitted to the U.N. after COP26 shaved off less than 1 percent of projected emissions. If all plans were implemented, the world would still heat up by 2.4 to 2.6 degrees C (4.3 to 4.7 degrees F). Scientists estimate that at 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F), more than a third of the global population could experience extreme heat waves at least once every five years, coral reefs could decline by 99 percent, and sea levels could rise nearly 3 feet.

Multi-line chart showing emissions levels under current and future policies. — Grist / Jessie

The chasm between NDCs and the Paris Agreement’s goals is not the only “emissions gap” the report highlights. Many countries don’t even have policies in place to execute their commitments. Existing policies put the world on a path closer to 2.8 degrees C (5 degrees F) of warming.

“Every fraction of a degree matters,” said Inger Andersen, executive director of the U.N. Environment Programme, in a press release, “to vulnerable communities, to species and ecosystems, and to every one of us.”

Though many countries aren’t matching their words with actions, the United States is no longer one of the major culprits. With the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act in August, the U.S. now has a more credible path to achieving its NDC of cutting emissions by 50 to 52 percent by 2030. This one piece of legislation will cut global 2030 emissions by about 1 gigaton — a billion metric tons — according to the report. “A gigaton is big. A gigaton is around a fifth of total annual U.S. emissions,” said Fransen.

Before the Inflation Reduction Act, the U.S. was viewed with skepticism by the international community due to a history of abandoning international treaties like the Paris Agreement, which former President Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out of, and an earlier climate pact, the Kyoto Protocol, which the U.S. signed but never ratified. Fransen said the new law “says to the international community, ‘We’re serious about this, we’ve passed legislation,’ which we’ve never done before.”

The emissions gap report names three key actions the world must take to get on track: avoid building new fossil fuel infrastructure that will lock in emissions for decades to come, advance and implement zero-carbon technologies, and pursue behavioral changes like more sustainable diets and energy-saving habits.

While the report’s long-term forecast does not look much better than it did a year ago, it doesn’t tell the whole story. The report did not account for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which has scrambled the international energy landscape.

It’s unclear yet whether the result will be net good for the climate. In an attempt to cripple Russia’s economy, the European Union has reduced its imports of Russian oil and gas and announced intentions to turn off the tap altogether over the next several years. The transition to renewable energy, which can be produced locally, has become a matter of energy security. Europe has ramped up its climate ambitions with proposals to increase renewable energy and energy efficiency targets and install millions of electric heat pumps to replace gas heating systems in buildings.

At the same time, European countries are burning more coal and looking to import natural gas from Senegal, Algeria, and other African nations, financing fossil fuel development across the continent. The U.S. is also ramping up natural gas exports to Europe. The emissions gap report notes that early assessments estimate that investments in fossil fuel projects increased this year.

If that’s the case, it’s evidence of a key inhibitor to climate action, according to the authors. Investment in climate mitigation needs to increase by a factor of three to five. The financial system — banks, institutional investors, and the public institutions that regulate them — remains focused on short-term profit and is not accounting for long-term climate risks. In order to change that, the report says financial institutions need better information about climate risks. It also calls for policymakers to step in, both by making polluters pay for their emissions and by incentivizing financial actors to invest in a low-carbon economy.

“We had our chance to make incremental changes, but that time is over,” said Andersen.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Report: Global climate ambitions still fall short ahead of COP27 on Oct 27, 2022.

Tax the rich for climate action? Protect towns from floods? It’s on state ballots this November.

For years, with climate bills stalled in Congress, advocates, community groups, nonprofits, and even businesses have relied on ballot initiatives — where citizens vote on new laws alongside new candidates — to push forward environmental action at the state and local levels. In 2020, Michigan voters approved a proposal to use money from oil leases on public lands to fund parks. Two years earlier, Nevada passed the first step of a constitutional amendment requiring utilities to source 50 percent of energy from renewables by 2030, and Florida voted to ban offshore oil and gas drilling in state waters.

There are fewer climate measures on ballots this time around, but the ones that are up for a vote these midterms are big, mainly New York’s Clean Water, Clean Air, and Green Jobs Environmental Bond Act of 2022 and California Proposition 30, which aims to fund zero-emissions vehicles and wildfire prevention. A smaller $50 million environment and recreation bond measure in Rhode Island would fund municipal climate resiliency.

“It’s unusual for there not to be more [state-level] environmental ballot initiatives,” said Nick Abraham, state communications director at the League of Conservation Voters, “but hopefully it’s a sign of progress.”

If passed, the initiatives in New York and California would marshal billions of dollars for new climate action in two of the U.S.’s most populous states. They would also serve as models for other parts of the country looking to develop their own strategies.

As voters prepare to head to the polls November 8, we’re breaking down these major ballot measures — and others — that have the potential to significantly advance climate progress in the U.S.:

construction works walk around a site where a wall is in construction and in the background the city is visible across the water — Construction workers build a system of walls and flood gates to protect New York City from rising sea levels.
Ed Jones/AFP via Getty Images

New York: The Clean Water, Clean Air, and Green Jobs Bond Act of 2022

New York passed its first environmental bond act in 1910, borrowing money to establish a network of state parks. Since then, voters in the state have approved 10 ballot measures to fund environmental projects, from improving wastewater infrastructure to addressing the impacts of pollution on public health. The 2022 Bond Act would be the first one in over 25 years — and the largest in state history.

The measure got its start in 2020, when former Governor Andrew Cuomo proposed the “Restore Mother Nature Bond Act,” which would have allowed the state comptroller to sell up to $3 billion in state bonds to revitalize fish and wildlife habitat, expand renewable energy, and protect the state from floods. Cuomo withdrew the act over economic concerns during the COVID-19 pandemic, but it’s back for the 2022 midterms, this time with a new, more sober name and an amendment by Governor Kathy Hochul to increase the amount to $4.2 billion.

The stakes:

The Clean Water, Clean Air, and Green Jobs Bond Act would fund environmental projects in four major areas: At least $1.1 billion would go to ecosystem restoration and reducing flood risk, including coastal rehabilitation and voluntary buyout programs, in a state where hurricane frequency and severity is only expected to increase. Up to $650 million would fund land conservation and recreation, including farmland preservation. Up to $1.5 billion would go to climate change mitigation, including funding for zero-emission school buses and strategies to reduce urban heat. And at least another $650 million would go to water quality improvements and climate resilient infrastructure.

The measure would also require that 35 percent of the funds be spent in “disadvantaged communities,” currently defined by a state Climate Justice Working Group using variables like high exposure to flooding, extreme heat, and pollution, and socio-economic factors like race, ethnicity, and income. An economic impact analysis of the act found that it could create or support 84,000 jobs statewide.

Its chances of passing:

With such a wide span of initiatives supported by the proposition, and investments right in people’s backyards, campaigners say it’s likely that this bill will pass. A broad coalition of environmental groups, labor unions, farmers, land trusts, and government organizations have come together in favor of the ballot measure, raising over seven figures. The biggest donors are The Nature Conservancy and Scenic Hudson.

“New Yorkers will vote yes on this one,” said Julie Tighe, president of the New York League of Conservation Voters. “We just need to make sure they know it’s there.”

While the New York State Conservative Party has opposed the measure, there’s no organized opposition, which bodes well for the future of climate funding in New York State.

a person with a hardhat cleans an electric vehicle charing station — An electric vehicle charging station in Los Angeles, California.
Citizen of the Planet/Education Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

California: Proposition 30

California originally had two climate ballot initiatives this year, but a measure to reduce single-use plastics was withdrawn at the last minute after stakeholders negotiated a bill achieving many of the same goals. Now all that’s left is Proposition 30, which would raise taxes for California’s wealthiest residents to fund EV adoption and wildfire fighting. The measure has found unlikely bedfellows: some of the same labor unions that clashed with rideshare companies in 2020 over a proposition to classify drivers as contractors with limited benefits have now teamed up with Lyft in support of Prop 30.

The stakes:

The proposition would increase the income tax for people making over $2 million a year by 1.75 percent for a 20-year period (or until three years after statewide emissions drop to 80 percent of 1990 levels.) The money generated — an estimated $3.5 to $5 billion a year — would go to three areas:

A zero-emissions vehicle infrastructure fund would receive 35 percent to build charging stations, and another 45 percent would go to rebates and other incentives for electric vehicle purchases, with at least half of all EV-related money being spent in low-income communities. The last 20 percent would go to a fund for wildfire prevention and suppression, with a priority on hiring and training new state wildland firefighters.

Its chances of passing:

Proposition 30 is the standout contested measure on the California ballot, and while so far the majority of voters support it, it’s uncertain how the finally tally will shake out.

A string of environmental, labor, and public health organizations including the American Lung Association, the Union of Concerned Scientists, firefighter groups, electrician unions, and even actress and environmentalist Jane Fonda have supported the proposition. They argue that it would help reduce air pollution from wildfires and gas-powered cars, and that the wealthiest individuals in the state should pay. The California Democratic Party endorsed the initiative, as did the controversial rideshare company Lyft.

In September, Governor Gavin Newsom paced around in a television ad telling Californians, “I gotta warn ya” about Proposition 30. He called it “[Lyft’s]’s sinister scheme to grab a huge taxpayer funded subsidy.” Rideshare companies, by law, will have to log 90 percent of their miles in electric vehicles by 2030 to meet California’s Clean Miles Standard. Lyft has spent over $45 million to support the proposition so far, although Prop 30 supporters point out that revenue from the tax would go to the same electric vehicle programs that Newsom funds with his own budget. Plus the EV incentives would go to Lyft drivers to buy cars, not directly to the company itself.

Newsom’s break with his own party to come out against the measure gave a boost to opponents, including the state Republican Party, the Chamber of Commerce, three large timber companies that make money on wildfire salvage, and the California Teachers Association, which would like to see more money go to schools. Besides calling it a Lyft tax grab, opponents argue that with the state’s recent $10 billion investment in EV goals and a budget surplus of over $90 billion, California doesn’t need to raise taxes. Newsom has expressed concerns that the proposition would destabilize California’s tax revenue, which relies heavily on high-income earners. But a report released in early October shows the measure could help the state make major strides towards meeting its climate goals while supporting middle- and low-income residents.

The No on Proposition 30 committee has raised around $15 million in contributions, mostly from wealthy individuals who would be most likely to pay the new tax. On the other side, the Yes on 30 coalition is a broad and powerful one; although support has been slowly slipping in the polls over the past few months, an early October poll from the University of California, Berkeley found 49 percent of voters support the measure, 37 percent oppose, and 14 percent are still undecided.

Other ballot measures to watch:

In Rhode Island, voters will be deciding on Question 3, a $50 million environment and recreation bond measure that would fund small business energy loans, watershed and forest restoration, and land acquisition. The bulk of the money, $16 million, however, would go to municipal climate resilience, helping communities improve coastal habitats and floodplains and strengthen infrastructure.

In most states, bonds that create public debt have to be brought before voters. Rhode Islanders haven’t rejected a bond measure since 2006, and have approved 29 since then. With no formal opposition, and a supporting coalition that includes political leaders, the Rhode Island Infrastructure Bank, and various conservation groups, this one is likely to pass.

While there aren’t many state climate ballot initiatives to watch this year, local ballots are a different story. No organization tracks all environmental initiatives at the county and city level, but the Trust for Public Land’s LandVote Database lists 58 land conservation and park measures on local ballots across the U.S. That number does not include initiatives to reduce emissions or adapt to climate change without a land-based component.

In Cochise and Graham counties in Arizona, Wilcox Basin residents will vote on new restrictions on large groundwater wells; a yes vote would mark a new precedent of a rural community restricting its own water use and successfully regulating large-scale farms. In Denver, voters will revisit a landmark 2020 initiative to increase sales taxes by .25 percent to fund climate action; they’ll also weigh in on a requirement for all buildings and food waste producers to provide recycling and composting. A local tax measure in Los Angeles would generate $227 million annually to prioritize the creation of parks and recreation spaces in areas lacking access to greenspace. In Illinois, a proposed county tax increase on the ballot would be used to establish forest preserves in Chicago’s southeastern suburbs.

Those are just the tip of the iceberg. “This year we’re seeing a lot more equity initiatives,” said Andy Orellana, associate communications director at the Trust for Public Land. While there will still be a need to ensure funds are spent equitably and correctly, Orellana sees it as a hopeful sign of progress.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Tax the rich for climate action? Protect towns from floods? It’s on state ballots this November. on Oct 27, 2022.

Wednesday 26 October 2022

How sunken basketball courts could protect New Yorkers from the next Superstorm Sandy

Almost every time it rains in New York City, the grounds of the South Jamaica Houses start to flood. As the storm drain system overflows, water collects across the sprawling public housing development in southeast Queens. Before long, floodwater pools up on the basketball court and in the yard behind the senior center. If it rains for more than a few hours, the water starts to slosh over streets and courtyards. These aren’t the monumental floods that make national headlines, but they make basic mobility a challenge for the complex’s roughly 3,000 residents. Sometimes the water doesn’t drain for days or weeks.

“It happens all the time,” said William Biggs, 66, who has lived in the development for 35 years. He gestured at the basketball court, which is cracked and eroded in places. “It pools all the way through the court, all the way back toward the buildings, all along that wall there. And the reason is that we don’t have any drainage. The storm drains don’t work.”

“If you put some fish in there, you could go fishing,” added Biggs’ friend Tommy Foddrell, who has lived in the development for around two decades.

That decrepit basketball court will soon become a centerpiece of New York City’s efforts to adapt to the severe rainfall caused by climate change. In the years to come, construction crews will sink the court several feet lower into the ground and add tiers of benches on either side. During major rainstorms, the sunken stadium will act as an impromptu reservoir for water that would otherwise flood the development.

The project will be able to hold 200,000 gallons of water before it overflows, and it will release that water into the sewer system slowly through a series of underground pipes, preventing the system from backing up as it does today. Just down the block, work crews will carve out another seating area arranged around a central flower garden. That project will hold an additional 100,000 gallons of water.

In the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy, which struck New York City 10 years ago this month, the city spent billions of dollars to strengthen its coastline against future hurricanes. Sandy had slammed into the city’s southern shoreline with 14 feet of storm surge, inundating coastal neighborhoods in Queens and Staten Island. The city’s biggest climate adaptation goal in the years that followed was to make sure that these coastal neighborhoods were prepared for the next storm surge event.

But the next Sandy turned out to be a very different kind of storm. In September of last year, the remnants of Hurricane Ida dumped almost 10 inches of rain on New York City, including three inches in a single hour. Rather than indundating the city’s shoreline, the storm dumped heaps of rain on inland neighborhoods, overwhelming neighborhood sewer systems and filling up streets with water. The flooding killed 13 people, most of whom lived in below-ground apartments that didn’t typically see flooding.

Now the city is trying to retool its climate plans to be prepared for the intensified rainfall of the future. This time, the New York City Housing Authority, or NYCHA, is at the heart of the effort. The South Jamaica Houses project is the first in a series of initiatives that will turn NYCHA developments into giant sponges, using the unique architecture of public housing to capture rainfall from so-called “cloudburst” events and prevent floods like those caused by Ida. Three of these projects are already in the works in three different boroughs, supported by a hodgepodge of federal money.

Adapting for cloudburst events is very different from adapting for storm surge. While the latter requires building large new infrastructure projects along the coastline, preparing for inland events like the former requires squeezing new water storage infrastructure into an already-crowded street grid.

“There’s already a system to deal with stormwater in these neighborhoods — there’s a big stormwater sewer under the street,” said Marc Wouters, an architect whose firm helped design the South Jamaica Houses flood project. “But those are undersized for these bigger rain events that are coming.”

Even before Hurricane Ida, city officials had long been aware that cloudburst events could cause flooding even in landlocked neighborhoods. There just wasn’t much money to address that threat. The federal disaster relief system allocates most adaptation money to communities that have already suffered disasters, not communities trying to prepare for disasters that haven’t happened yet.

That meant that the vast majority of the money the city received after Superstorm Sandy went to protection against coastal storm surge: The city rebuilt massive sections of the Rockaway and Coney Island beaches, bought out whole neighborhoods on Staten Island, and charted an ambitious plan to surround Lower Manhattan with an artificial shoreline. That kind of money wasn’t available to protect against hypothetical cloudburst disasters.

But there was one city department that had already started to plan for stormwater flooding. A few years before Hurricane Ida, NYCHA had hired Wouters’s firm to hold a design workshop at South Jamaica Houses, interviewing residents about their flood problems. Those conversations led to the basketball court design, the city’s first major attempt to retrofit a public housing project for cloudburst flooding. It’s a strength of the project that it also promised to fix the dilapidated court: maintenance of the city’s public housing stock, which is home to well over 300,000 New Yorkers in all five boroughs, is notoriously behind schedule. Bundling long-desired repairs with climate adaptation promised to be a win-win.

“If you sink the basketball court into the ground and have it as a temporary collection pond, then it would justify rebuilding the basketball court,” said Wouters.

A rendering of the South Jamaica Houses cloudburst project in Queens. The development’s basketball court will catch and store rainwater.
Courtesy Marc Wouters Studios

The South Jamaica project was cheap enough that it didn’t require a big federal grant, but NYCHA officials wanted to take the South Jamaica houses model to other housing projects. The authority’s climate adaptation study identified dozens of developments that were at high risk of stormwater flooding, but it didn’t have the money to replicate the South Jamaica project. Like most public housing authorities across the country, NYCHA often struggles to find the money for even basic capital repairs, thanks to a long decline in federal funding over several decades. Most of New York City’s climate adaptation money, meanwhile, was flowing toward coastal protection projects.

Luckily, the flooding from Hurricane Ida coincided with a rush of new federal spending on climate resilience. In the waning days of the Trump administration, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, launched a new resilience grant program. The bipartisan infrastructure bill signed by President Biden last year expanded that program as well as an existing disaster mitigation fund. The first tranche of this new funding became available just as New York City was reeling from Ida, and the city quickly grabbed two more grants to replicate the South Jamaica concept at a pair of public housing developments in Brooklyn and Manhattan. The two grants together total around $30 million. That won’t make a dent in the authority’s broader adaptation needs, but it’s a start.

During severe rainfall events, the city’s ordinary storm drain system fills up, and all the extra water starts to pool in the lowest-lying areas — a phenomenon known as “combined sewer overflow.” The task for designers like Wouters is to find a place to store excess water, whether above or below ground, before it filters into the storm drain system.

This looks a little different in every development. At Harlem’s Clinton Houses, one of two projects where NYCHA has secured a grant from FEMA, officials will have ample room to carve out a large “water square” like the one at the South Jamaica basketball court, as well as install underground basins where water can accumulate. These basins will be able to hold a combined 1.78 million gallons of water, slowly releasing it out into the East River so it doesn’t spill onto nearby streets. At Breukelen Houses in Brooklyn, underground storage isn’t an option: Because the housing complex is so close to the ocean, its water table sits just a few feet below street level, making it impossible to excavate new storage tanks. Designers will instead have to create natural water sinks above ground, perhaps by lining streets and walkways with thirsty grasses that trap water in their roots, making the whole development one big sponge.

These strategies are enabled by the fact that the average New York public housing project looks very different from a typical city neighborhood. Instead of mid-rise buildings on a grid of intersecting streets, a development like Clinton Houses consists of much taller towers arranged around central courtyards and walkways. There are no streets that allow cars to pass through, and the footprint of each building tends to be smaller.

This unique architecture is a blessing when it comes to flood resilience. Most NYCHA developments contain ample open space for water storage projects like the South Jamaica basketball court, allowing officials to look beyond the usual underground pipes and tanks. In addition to solving flood problems for NYCHA residents, these fixes can also help surrounding neighborhoods by catching water before it flows out onto other streets, reducing the total burden on a neighborhood’s storm drain system. In other neighborhoods, the city will have to settle for smaller-scale interventions like sidewalk rain gardens.

“NYCHA developments interrupt the street grid and create large amounts of green space within a dense urban environment, [and] are clustered in parts of the city where green space resources other than NYCHA developments are limited,” Nekoro Gomes, a spokesperson for the authority, told Grist. “For this reason, NYCHA’s campuses provide an opportunity for management of larger volumes of water than would be possible within the typical street grid configuration in the city.”

William Biggs stands on the basketball court at the South Jamaica Houses in New York City. The city plans to turn the court into a stormwater protection system.
Jake Bittle / Grist

Still, there is a bitter irony in the post-Ida funding surge at NYCHA. The new federal money may help solve flooding issues at the developments that are lucky enough to get it, but it won’t solve the numerous other infrastructure issues that have plagued the developments. The authority has spent the past several years embroiled in a scandal over its attempts to conceal missed lead paint inspections, and the federal monitor assigned to supervise the authority has concluded that some 9,000 children are at risk of dangerous lead paint exposure. Dozens of boilers have also failed at agency projects in recent years, leaving thousands of residents to brave winter temperatures with no heating.

At South Jamaica Houses, stormwater flooding is far from the only issue. The development’s wastewater system is also prone to failure, and in 2015 it backed up and flooded the inside of buildings with fecal matter and sludge. Residents of the Clinton Houses, meanwhile, have suffered through outbreaks of toxic mold in recent years. Breukelen Houses residents have been pleading with the city to take action on gun violence that has claimed several lives in the development.

The authority’s extensive repair backlog is in part the result of a decrease in federal funding over the past several decades, but NYCHA officials have also made serious and wasteful mistakes, like working with shoddy contractors. The flood project in South Jamaica Houses might mitigate this shortfall by killing two birds with one stone, but it wouldn’t need to do so if NYCHA had been able to fix the basketball court in the first place.

“I don’t know if [grant money] is the only way to make those improvements, but it certainly is incredibly helpful,” said Wouters of the secondary benefits at a project like South Jamaica Houses. “And I think it becomes really an efficient use of federal dollars, because you’re spending each of those dollars to do multiple things.”

NYCHA’s new generation of flood projects will prepare some of its developments for an era of more intense rainfall, but they’ll only address one of many challenges that public housing residents face. In other words, there’s more than one kind of resilience, and NYCHA is far from equipped to tackle all of them.

Biggs, for his part, isn’t yet optimistic about the flood resilience project near his home at the South Jamaica Houses. He rattled off the a litany of the development’s other maintenance problems, like the doors that don’t lock and allow people who don’t live in the complex to wander in and out at will.

“Thirty-five years I’ve been here, and I’ve never heard of anything changing,” he said. He recalled the conversations around the basketball court plan, but he doesn’t think they will lead to anything tangible. “They always do a good dress-up, but they haven’t fixed shit yet.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How sunken basketball courts could protect New Yorkers from the next Superstorm Sandy on Oct 26, 2022.

Tuesday 25 October 2022

Rishi Sunak is ‘better news than Truss’ on climate change, but by how much?

Over the past several months, Britain has seen the death of a monarch, the proclamation of a new one, the resignation of Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and the election of his replacement, Liz Truss, who almost immediately sent the British economy into freefall.

Now, Britain is getting its third prime minister in just as many months. Truss resigned on Thursday after a six-week run; Rishi Sunak, the country’s chief financial minister, was selected as the new leader of the Conservative Party and will take her place in 10 Downing Street.

Truss set a low bar on environmental issues during her short tenure, carrying out what was dubbed by her opponents as a “war on nature.” While Sunak’s record on climate policy has been arguably poor, environmental advocates are hopeful that he will at least deliver on some of his party’s 2019 environmental manifesto, which contains a moratorium on fracking and a strong commitment to decarbonizing the economy by 2050.

“He’s obviously better news than Truss, that goes without saying,” said Chris Venables, head of politics at the Green Alliance, an independent cross-party environmental think tank based in the United Kingdom.

Sunak, a former investment banker and one of the wealthiest people in England, was elected to British parliament in 2015 and selected by Johnson as Chancellor of the Exchequer in 2020, overseeing the state’s economic and financial matters. After Johnson resigned in July, Sunak campaigned for prime minister, but lost to Truss. Her platform of tax cuts and free market economics, however, quickly led to massive inflation, the pound depreciating in value, and runaway government borrowing.

“Her environmental policies were also very much a factor in her demise,” said Venables, adding that Truss was very close to people aligned with the fossil fuels agenda. In the last month under Truss, the U.K. saw a concerted attack on the basics of environmental protection: Truss and right-wing members of Parliament sought to wipe over 570 rules on environmental protection inherited from the European Union off the slate. Her new “investment zones” policy stoked fears among conservation groups that development would harm wildlife. She scrapped a popular new payment scheme in the works for farmers to implement conservation practices. And she also planned to restart fracking.

Sunak, on the other hand, has declared his support for conservation, for reforming farm payments, and for meeting Britain’s net-zero goals, though much of his climate agenda remains to be seen.

Sunak has historically aligned with his Conservative Party colleagues to vote against efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. While chancellor, he implemented cuts that ended a nationwide home insulation subsidy program, though he has since talked about prioritizing home insulation across Britain by launching a new, improved program. Under pressure from the Labor Party, he instituted a windfall tax – levied when unexpected circumstances, like war or natural disaster, result in larger-than-usual profits for an industry – on oil and gas companies, but it included a tax break for corporations that re-invested in new fossil fuel production. Campaigning over the summer, he reaffirmed his opposition to both onshore wind and farmland solar development, two of the cheapest ways to generate electricity in the U.K. He wants to increase offshore wind capacity and also supports increased drilling for gas in the North Sea.

“He has been elected on no ticket, so he didn’t have to say what he was going to do,” said Venables. “Britain needs state intervention and investment in areas that are hard to decarbonize and there haven’t been many signs that he is willing to do that.” As chancellor, he shepherded England through the pandemic by increasing spending for social support, which he has since tried to reign in. Over the summer, Sunak ran on a fiscally conservative agenda. Still, said Venables, there are some things he’s done for the climate.

At the last United Nations’ climate meeting, COP26 in Glasgow, Sunak articulated a center-right approach to tackling the climate crisis and committed to making Britain the “world’s first net zero aligned financial center,” pledging $120 million to the Taskforce on Access to Climate Finance. He oversaw the creation of the U.K. infrastructure bank to unleash climate capital and, even if enforcement and timescales leave much to be desired, he mandated that every company in the U.K. have a climate plan. At the same time, he was criticized for cutting overseas aid to developing countries, failing to pay the U.K’.s fair share toward the $100 billion global climate target, and cutting taxes on domestic flights in the runup to COP26.

While Truss asked King Charles III not to go COP27 in Egypt, environmentalists expect Sunak to go, and hope that he will support Charles’ attendance as well. The new monarch has been hailed as “the climate king” for his history of speaking out on biodiversity loss and global warming, although many have been quick to point out the role of the monarchy in creating the climate crisis through colonial rule.

Some hope Britain’s current economic and energy crises may spur Sunak, often characterized as sensible and pragmatic, to rethink his past policies. Fuel bills are 2.5 times what they were a year ago, and would be five times more were it not for government support. “We’re going into a winter where we’re expecting millions of households to fall into fuel poverty,” said Venables. “Literally the only way through is to insulate homes and build out renewables.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Rishi Sunak is ‘better news than Truss’ on climate change, but by how much? on Oct 25, 2022.

Monday 24 October 2022

380 million tons of plastic are made every year. None of it is truly recyclable.

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No plastic is truly recyclable — not even the water bottles and milk jugs that people usually toss into their blue bins.

According to a new report released on Monday by Greenpeace USA, no plastic product meets a common industry standard for recyclability, even though they bear the familiar “chasing arrows” recycling symbol. The report says industry-backed recycling labels on yogurt cups, ketchup bottles, food trays, and other products perpetuate a “fiction” that recycling will ever scale up to handle the 380 million tons of plastic that companies churn out every year. The U.S. plastic recycling rate has never topped 10 percent, and a report from earlier this year revealed that it has now fallen to just 5 percent.

“Corporations are hiding behind plastics recycling and hoping that it will completely solve the plastic waste crisis that they have helped create,” said Lisa Ramsden, a senior oceans campaigner for Greenpeace USA. She called on companies to scale down plastic production and replace single-use products and packaging with reusable alternatives, like bottles that can be refilled.

Greenpeace’s report, titled Circular Claims Fall Flat Again, builds on a previous report the organization published in 2020. Back then, the group found that only certain kinds of bottles and jugs met the federal government’s definition for “recyclable” and could legally bear the chasing arrows symbol: Those bearing the numbers 1 and 2 to indicate the kind of material they’re made of, polyethylene terephthalate (PET) and high-density polyethylene (HDPE), respectively.

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