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The effort to shift the U.S. economy off fossil fuels and avoid the most disastrous impacts of climate change hinges on the third element of the periodic table. Lithium, the soft, silvery-white metal used in electric car batteries, was endowed by nature with miraculous properties. At around half a gram per cubic centimeter, it’s the lightest metal on Earth and is extremely energy-dense, making it ideal for manufacturing batteries with a long life.
The problem is, lithium comes with its own set of troubles: Mining the metal is often devastating for the environment and the people who live nearby, since it’s water intensive and risks permanently damaging the land. The industry also has an outsized impact on Native Americans, with three-quarters of all known U.S. deposits located near tribal land.
Demand for lithium is expected to skyrocket in the coming decades (up to 4,000 percent according to one estimate), which will require many new mines to meet it (more than 70 by 2025). These estimates assume the number of cars on the road will remain constant, so lithium demand will rise as gas guzzlers get replaced by electric vehicles. But what if the United States could design a policy that eliminates carbon emissions from the transportation sector without as much mining?
A new report from the Climate and Community Project, a progressive climate policy think tank, offers a fix. In a paper out on Tuesday, the researchers estimated that the U.S. could decrease lithium demand up to 90 percent by 2050 by expanding public transportation infrastructure, shrinking the size of electric vehicle batteries and maximizing lithium recycling. They claim that this report is the first to consider multiple pathways for getting the country’s cars and buses running on electricity and suppressing U.S. lithium demand at the same time.
“Conversations [about the dangers of mining] can lead folks to think that there’s a zero-sum trade-off: either we address the climate crisis or we protect Indigenous rights and biodiversity,” said Thea Riofrancos, an associate professor of political science at Providence College and the lead author of the report. “This report asks the question: is there a way to do both?”
Riofrancos and the other researchers modeled four scenarios for public transportation in the U.S. that would lead to different levels of lithium demand. In the baseline, the country follows the path it’s currently on, swapping out all gas cars for electric ones by 2050 with few other changes.
The other three scenarios consider what happens when more people are walking, biking, or taking trains and buses. Cities grow denser, commutes shorten, and public transportation expands and is electrified. Governments take away subsidies for owning cars, like free parking, and limit on-street parking and lots. Assuming average battery size stays the same and 8-year battery warranties remain in place, lithium demand drops by 66 percent in the most ambitious scenario as compared to the U.S. staying on its current path. But even the more modest scenarios bring 18 and 41 percent drops in demand for the metal, largely thanks to expanding mass transit and denser urban areas that allow families to live without cars.
“The scenarios were really informed by what already exists in certain places,” said Kira McDonald, a Princeton University researcher. She and her colleagues used real-life examples for their estimates, looking at success stories in cities like Vienna, which has slashed car use in recent years through car-free zones, bike-sharing, and improvements to pedestrian comfort and safety. London, Lyon, and Amsterdam have also all seen steep declines in vehicle ownership after rolling out low-emission zones and adding more bike lanes; in Paris car use has fallen by about 45 percent since 1990.
A worker displays 99.9% lithium inside the El Carmen Lithium processing plant in Antofagasta, Chile, in September, 2022.
MARTIN BERNETTI / Getty Images
The researchers experimented with other variables that could influence lithium demand and were surprised to find that by reducing average battery sizes to 54 kilowatt-hour, close to the capacity of the Nissan Leaf, lithium demand fell as much as 42 percent, even when car use stayed on its current trajectory. While the global average battery is small, with a capacity of around 40kWh, bigger batteries used in the United States have an average capacity around 70kWh, and the report notes a trend toward even bigger batteries with higher capacities like the 150 kWh ones found in electric trucks and SUVs.
Riofrancos said there’s a way around building big batteries, while allowing that there are reasonable concerns about the availability of charging stations and the need for longer battery ranges in certain areas. “But the solution to that is to build more charging stations, not make enormous electric vehicles.”
Battery recycling – a nascent industry in the U.S. – could also reduce lithium demand, but it’s unlikely to help much for at least a decade, according to experts. Currently, there just aren’t a lot of electric-car batteries to recycle, as most of the early EVs are still on the roads, and batteries that do putter out often get reused for solar and wind energy storage. While the European Union will soon require new lithium-ion batteries to use some recycled parts, and China makes battery manufacturers collaborate with recycling companies, the United States has no such requirements. The Climate and Community Project report points out that recyclers have also had little reason to recover lithium, as it’s cheaper to mine. Even a fully up-and-running industry that recovers 98 percent of EV battery material could only meet about a third of lithium demand by 2050 if the country continues to rely on cars the way it does now– two thirds would still come from the earth.
Getting Americans out of their cars, even their electric ones, would take sweeping changes to the country’s infrastructure, the fabric of urban areas, and the very culture. Some have described the level of transformation required as unrealistic. But the researchers found examples of successful efforts in big cities around the world, even in the United States. Riofrancos pointed to free bus lines in Providence, Rhode Island, e-bike subsidies in Denver, and efforts in other cities to scale back parking lots.
“The conversations are happening but they’re not connected with congressional funding priorities at all,” Riofrancos said. She added that the Biden administration’s recently released transportation blueprint, with its focus on public transit and land-use planning, is out of step with the emphasis on promoting EVs and domestic lithium mining in the Inflation Reduction Act, the landmark climate legislation Biden signed into law last August.
“I think at this point the question is not whether we decarbonize, but how,” she said. “That’s still an open question, and I think we should be having a broader kind of social and political debate over the different ways forward on this.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A zero emissions future without the mining boom on Jan 24, 2023.
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.
This story is part of the Cities + Solutions series, which chronicles surprising and inspiring climate initiatives in communities across the U.S. through stories of cities leading the way. For early access to the rest of the series, subscribe to the Looking Forward climate solutions newsletter.
Regional Carrillo could walk to his last job in five minutes. In most places, it would be a pleasant commute. But in Phoenix, where summer days routinely top 110 degrees Fahrenheit (and can feel like 150), it’s far from a walk in the park — especially when there are no trees or shade along the way.
“When people move to Arizona, they don’t think we have any climate crisis,” Carrillo, a school teacher, says. “No, we don’t have hurricanes. We don’t have tsunamis. But what we do have is the heat, and the heat kills out here.”
Phoenix’s vote for a cooler future
Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, is known as the Valley of the Sun by the 4.5 million people who call it home. The name fits. Phoenicians braved 22 days above 110 degrees in 2022. Brutal heat is nothing new here, but it’s only getting worse: The number of days above that dangerous threshold is projected to double by 2060. “Phoenix is very much on the front lines of climate change,” says city councilmember and Grist 50 honoree Yassamin Ansari, who has made climate central to her platform.
Maricopa County recorded 339 heat-related deaths in 2021, continuing an upward trend that started in 2014, when 61 people died, and has climbed 70 percent since 2019. As the body’s core temperature rises, the risk of heat stress or heat stroke increases. Once the body’s internal temperature hits 103 degrees, the brain, lungs, heart, and key organs can’t function properly.
Heat season was revving up when Ansari was inaugurated in April 2021, but so too was the city’s response. Six months after Ansari took office, Phoenix established a $2.8 million Office of Heat Response and Mitigation — the first, and so far only, publicly funded office of its kind. Most cities spread such responsibilities across departments, but heat is the agency’s sole focus. Its four employees are charged with preventing deaths and lowering urban temperatures, which they hope to achieve through initiatives as simple as handing out bottled water and as ambitious as doubling the city’s tree cover.
“Our ultimate goal,” says Ansari, “is to save as many lives as we can.”
Heat is not felt equally
Take a look at Maricopa County’s annual heat death reports and a consistent pattern emerges. “The people most likely to die from heat exposure are disproportionately likely to either be unsheltered or live in mobile homes,” says Lora Phillips, a sociologist at Arizona State University.
Those in lower-income communities of color that have faced historical disinvestment also tend to live with fewer trees and more concrete, which traps heat. With every $10,000 increase in a neighborhood’s annual median household income, Phoenix residents enjoy a decrease of .50 degrees Fahrenheit in daytime surface temperature. “You don’t even need to read reports. You can just drive around and you see what neighborhoods are 10 degrees warmer than others,” says Melissa Guardaro, an expert in sustainability and resilience at Arizona State University.
Carrillo, who also is a community organizer, says this blatant inequality creates an “infrastructure of failure” that is passed down through generations. “Why are the kids not outside?” he says. “It’s because their communities are not built for them to be outside.”
“We don’t have hurricanes. We don’t have tsunamis. But what we do have is the heat, and the heat kills out here.”
– Regional Carillo
That idea provides the framework for Maricopa County’s Heat Action Planning Guide, a 120-page adaptation manual developed through the health department’s collaboration with ASU, The Nature Conservancy, and three nonprofits that helped rally support, and trust, within the community.
The planning guide homes in on three of the county’s hottest and most historically disenfranchised neighborhoods: Mesa, Edison Eastlake, and Lindo Park-Roesley Park. In these areas, residents shared their top concerns about heat; identified hot spots, like bus stops without shelter and sidewalks without tree cover; and offered ideas, like erecting portable shade structures on commuter routes and creating a warning system to let people know when it’s too hot to venture outdoors safely.
Ryan Winkle, the executive director of RAIL CDC — the Mesa partner organization — says this bottom-up approach leads to solutions that are more likely to succeed. He cites tree plantings as an example: In Mesa, most people rent their homes and are not interested in tending young trees. So instead of the standard strategy of planting them in yards, RAIL hopes to establish a neighborhood tree farm where saplings can grow large and strong before being transplanted, minimizing the effort residents must make to keep them healthy.
With this community-driven approach, RAIL has secured $75,000 from various grants and programs to implement some of the Heat Action Planning Guide’s suggestions — starting with a plan to bring sprinklers, shade stops, and vegetation to West Broadway Road and South Grand Avenue, creating a model for additional “cool corridors” that will be established over the next seven years.
Mobilizing life-saving resources — but not fast enough
The county published its Heat Action Planning Guide in 2017, but it’s taken five years to bring these solutions to the streets. The delay highlights the tension between the often slow pace of community revitalization and the urgent need for shade and cooling. This is where the Office of Heat Response and Mitigation comes in.
Following citizens’ requests to accelerate cooling strategies, the mayor and city council approved the establishment of a heat office, which acts separately from the city’s climate and sustainability office, and secured the $2.8 million to get it started.
Pilot projects like the Heat Action Planning Guide have helped the office find its footing. Its leader, David Hondula, an environmental scientist and heat researcher from ASU, is now working to execute some of the plan’s local cooling strategies on a city scale. So far, that has looked like securing funding for short-term relief like emergency cooling supplies and longer-term mitigation strategies, including tree planting and heat-reflective pavement.
Water misters at a Phoenix restaurant kept diners cool as temperatures reached dangerous levels last summer.
Mario Tama / Getty Images
During the height of the 2022 heat season, $600,000 in surplus COVID-relief funding financed cooling supplies like towels, hats, and umbrellas. Hondula’s team also expanded the region’s heat-relief network to 112 cooling centers and 56 hydration stations where anyone can get bottles of water. Outreach initiatives, particularly to the unhoused, increased by a factor of 40 last year, Hondula told AZCentral.
Hondula’s office is awaiting final data from the summer of 2022 to see if these initiatives saved lives. It doesn’t look good. By one projection, the city recorded a record 450 heat-related deaths in 2022. Ansari says preliminary numbers show 331 confirmed deaths and another 128 under investigation.
Still, most agree the steps taken thus far have undoubtedly saved lives, as have small acts of kindness people extend to their neighbors. The question is whether they can come fast enough to outpace the threat facing Phoenix — and communities around the world.
Ahead of the next heat season, Hondula’s office is conducting community outreach to determine how to increase tree cover to 25 percent of the city (it’s currently around 13 percent) in an equitable and water-savvy way. His team continues ramping up emergency shelter options for at-risk community members, and will by 2030 create a network of 100 cool corridors in vulnerable neighborhoods to make commutes like Carrillo’s more manageable.
Phoenix is a proving ground, and potentially a template, for a future in which almost everyone will endure ever-greater heat. The city hopes to show that it’s possible to combat this mounting crisis quickly, using strategies that center equity to ensure that no one is left to face this threat alone.
Explore more Cities + Solutions:
New Orleans lost its bike share. Residents stepped up to rebuild it with a focus on equity.
How a California town’s wastewater is helping it battle drought
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Can cities eliminate heat-related deaths in a warming world? Phoenix is trying. on Jan 24, 2023.
I'd like to take this time to remind you that climate change is real. The actions of big governments continue to pollute and poison the environment. Whenever feasible, we should all plant more trees and preserve our existing ones. That's why Tree Services in Pensacola strives to do both while also improving your home's landscaping. Read more about how they're making changes at https://treeservicespensacola.com
This story is part of the Cities + Solutions series, which chronicles surprising and inspiring climate initiatives in communities across the U.S. through stories of cities leading the way. For early access to the rest of the series, subscribe to the Looking Forward climate solutions newsletter.
Standing under a shady tree drooping with pomegranates late last year, Brad Simmons, a retired metal fabricator who has lived in Healdsburg, California, for 57 years, showed off his backyard orchard. Along with the apple, cherry, and peach trees, he’s packed one pear tree, two lemon trees, and a century-old olive tree into his bungalow’s compact garden.
Of course, the small grove requires plenty of water — an increasingly scarce resource in a state that continues grappling with a historic drought despite recent torrential rains. Yet Simmons, like many of his fellow 12,000 residents, has managed to keep much of this wine country community north of San Francisco looking verdant while slashing the city’s water use in half since 2020.
Healdsburg benefits from an invaluable resource that keeps gardens, trees, and vineyards irrigated: free, non-potable water produced by its wastewater-reclamation facility. The plant recycles 350 million gallons of effluent drained and flushed in the city every year, according to city officials, or slightly more than half its annual water consumption. The reused H₂O is used in irrigation, construction, and other applications that require lower levels of treatment than drinking water. This eases pressure on regional reservoirs and wells while enlisting a wide pool of users in promoting an ethos of conservation, all the while helping manage the amount of treated wastewater discharged into the Russian River.
“I worry about water all the time,” Simmons said as he dragged a hose across his parched grass to an enormous box filled with 275 gallons of reclaimed water. The washer-and-dryer-size containers have become a standard lawn fixture around town. “So this is a real lifeline.”
Healdsburg resident Brad Simmons relies on the city’s supply of free recycled wastewater to keep his small orchard of fruit trees verdant.
Naoki Nitta
California’s wastewater projects
Currently, California treats and reuses approximately 728,000 acre-feet, or approximately 18 percent, of the yearly wastewater it produces. But the state has higher ambitions for increasing water security: New goals call for a near threefold increase by 2030 to 2 million acre-feet annually.
Backed by initiatives such as the California Water Board’s Clean Water State Revolving Fund and federal support, including a $750 million grant program, several large projects are in the pipeline. Orange County, for one, is upping capacity on its potable water-purification plant — already the world’s largest — to recycle 130 million gallons of effluent daily. The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California is eyeing a new $3.4 billion recycling facility that would secure a renewable source of drinking water for 19 million customers in the Los Angeles area.
For smaller communities or those with limited resources, however, a more modest approach can be just as effective, says Anne Thebo, senior researcher at the Pacific Institute, a nonprofit water conservation think tank in Oakland, California.
“The local context can really give communities flexibility in developing their water-reuse plans,” she notes. Agricultural communities hold an advantage here, she says, because many forms of irrigation don’t require recycled water that’s clean enough to drink. But all communities have some flexibility in their ability to use treated effluent, because water used to irrigate timber or lawns can be lower in quality than that used for pasture grass like alfalfa or crops that can be eaten raw, such as strawberries and lettuce. Developing a water-recycling plan that suits the needs of the community can diversify a region’s water portfolio and offset overall demand.
Healdburg’s approach
Reuse wasn’t Healdsburg’s main priority when it upgraded the wastewater plant in 2008. The city needed to comply with environmental discharge regulations into the Russian River, which included meeting a higher threshold of nutrient and pathogen removal. The $29.3 million enhancement added pathogen-filtering membranes and UV light to a process that already included filtration and a microbial scrubbing. The additional measure purifies wastewater to near-drinking quality, making it clean enough to release into the 1,485-square-mile watershed.
Still, even at that quality, regional water authorities limit discharge to October through mid-May, when rain typically swells river volumes and reduces the risk of negative impacts. For the remaining months, “we have to figure out what to do with it,” says Healdsburg’s water and wastewater engineer Patrick Fuss. This became the core challenge, and eventual success, of Healdsburg’s program — ensuring that there’s enough demand for that supply.
“I worry about water all the time.”
– Brad Simmons
Although state regulations allow the agricultural use of triple-treated water, they also require permits that outline specific uses, largely to ensure the safety of groundwater and the public. Healdsburg’s original permit included wine-grape irrigation along with residential, landscaping, and industrial use. But finding sufficient takers for the treated water was, for years, a challenge, Fuss says. While the recycled water is free, it’s non-potable and requires separate plumbing and tubing, making for a potentially expensive outlay. Others had unfounded concerns about nitrate, mineral, and chemical residues in the supply tainting their prized grapes.
As a result, treated wastewater continued to cascade into the river until three years ago, when municipal actions driven by the escalating drought pushed the city into full compliance with the discharge rules. The multifaceted approach tightens the amount of wastewater coming into the system through water-conservation measures, while increasing demand for recycled water.
Fuss laid some of the groundwork for that by enlisting vintners through a door-to-door campaign, and engaging potential participants in planning a pipeline extension for easier delivery to them. Meanwhile, the city required the use of reclaimed water in all construction projects, making it available at two fill stations. Finally, as state and regional water restrictions tightened last year, Healdsburg started free residential deliveries of up to 500 gallons per subscriber every week.
Accommodating a diverse range of users is crucial, says Fuss, to balancing supply and demand. “We know we can achieve compliance during a drought, when the influent — the amount of wastewater we need to treat — is reduced because people are conserving, while the demand on the other end is greater,” he says. A wet or normal year would flip the equation, which, without sufficient spigots, would quickly overflow the system.
Managing wastewater discharge quality is actually a major motivator of water-recycling projects in California, says Thebo. And as a rule, developing multiple benefits seems to be the common driver to success. “They’re at the core of the partnerships that form between cities, growers, environmental groups, and the slew of other stakeholders. And they’re also what gets the community and local politicians engaged.”
In Healdsburg, there seems to be no shortage of community engagement. Popularity, in fact, killed the residential delivery program, which at its peak served more than a quarter of city households. “It was [financially] untenable as a long-term strategy,” says water and wastewater superintendent Rob Scates, “but it definitely helped get the word out.” The water is still given away at filling stations, and several hauling companies deliver for a small fee (Simmons reports paying $40 for each biweekly delivery).
The purple swatch at the base of the pipe indicates where De La Montanya Vineyard connects to Healdsburg’s reclaimed, non-potable supply. The vineyard uses the recycled water to irrigate its pinot noir and chardonnay grapes.
Naoki Nitta
The city, however, isn’t taking chances. As extra insurance, it recently broadened permissible uses to include pastures, commercial orchards, and nondairy livestock. And plans are in the works to extend the pipe network — painted purple to denote the non-potable supply — directly into town for municipal irrigation, thanks to a $7 million state grant. “Word’s gotten out that the water quality is very good, and it’s a pretty reliable system,” says Scates. “Now [users] are really hooked on it. They keep us in compliance.”
As an early adopter, Dennis De La Montanya, owner of De La Montanya Vineyards, has no apprehension. He’s been irrigating the grapes that produce his award-winning pinot noir and chardonnay off the purple pipes for years. “It’s been a real boon in terms of water availability. And we don’t put a strain on groundwater resources or the public water system,” he says. “It’s a win-win.”
Tangible outcomes like this make the real value of recycled water apparent, says Thebo. “So many of the challenges of water scarcity can feel intractable. But when people can see solutions that impact their daily life, I think it becomes a point of pride for the community.”
Explore more Cities + Solutions:
New Orleans lost its bike share. Residents stepped up to rebuild it with a focus on equity.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A California town’s wastewater is helping it battle drought on Jan 23, 2023.
If you care about the environment, you know that planting trees is one of the best things you can do. Trees help the environment by taking in carbon dioxide and giving oxygen. If you have to get rid of a tree, make sure to only do it a last resort. At Pensacola Tree Services, we are dedicated to helping your home and the environment. We are committed to delivering the best possible service for both. Simply go here for more info Tree Removal in Pensacola
A new study shows that pesticides are a key contributor to climate change, from their manufacturing, transportation, and application, all the way to their degradation and disposal. That’s according to researchers at the Pesticide Action Network North America (PANNA), who say that while pesticides have been critical tools in agricultural production, their efficacy is on the decline while climate change exacerbates the need to use more.
According to PANNA, the pesticide-climate change connection is a loop: Pesticides add emissions to the atmosphere that accelerate climate change, warming climates stress agricultural systems and increase the number of pests and insects, requiring more pesticides.
Compared to agriculture chemicals like nitrogen fertilizer, with well-known negative environmental impacts, greenhouse gas emissions from pesticides are understudied and underestimated. Producing one kilogram of pesticide requires, on average, 10 times more energy than one kilogram of nitrogen fertilizer. Some pesticides, like sulfuryl fluoride, used on insects like termites and beetles, are themselves greenhouse gases: emitting one ton of sulfuryl fluoride is the equivalent of emitting nearly 5,000 tons of CO2. Researchers also say that oil and gas companies add to the issue and profit from it: 99 percent of synthetic pesticides are derived from petroleum.
California uses nearly 20% of the pesticides applied annually across the United States. The state grows fewer commodity crops than other regions, but supplies a third of the country’s vegetables and two-thirds of the country’s fruits and nuts. Because fruits and vegetables have such high value any losses would be significant and expensive – causing California farmers to use nearly five times more pesticides than the national average to avoid losses.
“Over the years, billions of pounds of pesticides have been used in California alone, which can spike greenhouse gas emissions, especially when synthetically made,” said Asha Sharma, Organizing Co-Director at PANNA and co-author of the report. “Nearly all – 95% – of California farmers are farming conventionally. Only 5% is organically farmed. With pesticides, this scale is important.”
Rising temperatures have led to a drop in crop resilience: heat stress, changing rainfall patterns, and more insect pests in more places creating higher demand for synthetic chemicals and pesticides. Some research reports that less than .01% of pesticides reach target pests, which means the excess chemicals end up on other plants or in the soil, water, and air. Hotter temperatures make this problem worse, vaporizing pesticides into a toxic gas, poisoning those exposed.
Researchers say the solution is agroecology. Agroecological farming emphasizes conservation agriculture, ecological processes that adapt to local conditions, and practices like intercropping, where two or more crops grow together to increase biodiversity and promote plant health. It also prioritizes the health and decision-making power of farmers and agricultural workers, which has been shown to improve crop yields, profitability, and resilience against climate impacts.
The report says agroecology leads to better public health, improved food security and sovereignty, and enhanced biodiversity and social benefits, such as better cooperation between farmers and communities. Researchers add that a shift across the entire food production system would be costly, but that there are ways to incentivize the transition through subsidies, similar to support for adopting green technology.
“Conventional farming methods don’t account for environmental externalities and health costs. Organic food is more expensive because it accounts for those things,” Sharma said. “A different system would cost more, yes, but the critical role of government is to make sure that people, regardless of income level, can afford food without pesticides.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How pesticides intensify global warming on Jan 23, 2023.
If you care about the environment, you know that planting trees is one of the best things you can do. Trees help the environment by taking in carbon dioxide and giving oxygen. If you have to get rid of a tree, make sure to only do it a last resort. At Pensacola Tree Services, we are dedicated to helping your home and the environment. We are committed to delivering the best possible service for both. Simply go here for more info Tree Removal in Pensacola
This story is part of the Cities + Solutions series, which chronicles surprising and inspiring climate initiatives in communities across the U.S. through stories of cities leading the way. For early access to the rest of the series, subscribe to the Looking Forward climate solutions newsletter.
Geoff Coats still remembers how he felt when, in May 2020, all 1,350 bicycles in New Orleans’s popular bike-share program vanished.
“It was horrible,” says Coats, who managed the service, called Blue Bikes, for its owner, Uber. “For a lot of people, it was a little bit of PTSD from Hurricane Katrina, when the national chains could have reopened weeks after the storm but stayed away. It felt like, once again, when we’re down, we get kicked.”
Blue Bikes, which New Orleans launched in 2017 to reduce emissions and offer reliable transportation to low-income residents, was flourishing before COVID shut down the city. It had recently converted all its pedal bikes to electric and was in the process of doubling its fleet. But Uber paused the program when the pandemic hit, then spun it off to the micromobility company Lime as part of its investment in that company. Lime wanted to bring electric scooters to New Orleans. The city wasn’t interested in scooters and eventually canceled the contract. Seemingly overnight, the bikes were gone.
Of the nearly 300 bike-share and scooter-share programs in North America, more than half are privately owned, a figure that is quickly growing. That leaves most micromobility programs vulnerable to market whims, a precarious position for a mode of transportation upon which many people depend. Lime’s departure could have been the end of bike sharing in New Orleans. Instead, Coats began devising a plan to bring it back.
But this time, he decided, Blue Bikes would be run by the community it served.
* * *
The origins of New Orleans’s bike-share program date to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. As New Orleans began to imagine what rebuilding could look like, residents called for better transportation options. In a city of more than 375,000, about one in five New Orleanians does not own a car. Without reliable transit, getting anywhere — to work, the supermarket, a doctor’s appointment — is difficult.
New Orleans built its first bike lane in 2008. Within seven years, it had over 100 miles of lanes and trails, including Lafitte Greenway, a park connecting the French Quarter to other neighborhoods. As biking infrastructure grew, so did the community’s ambitions. “They started to say, ‘Hey, other cities are starting to do this thing called bike share,’” says Coats. “‘What if we could do that?’”
New Orleans’s first foray into bike sharing started promisingly enough: In 2016, the city signed a five-year agreement with Brooklyn-based bike-share outfit Social Bicycles (later renamed Jump) and hired Coats, an entrepreneur and lifelong cyclist, to manage the program. Blue Bikes launched in 2017 with 700 bicycles. But then, in 2018, came the first of two ownership changes as the program bounced from Jump to Uber to Lime.
It felt like, once again, when we’re down, we get kicked.”
– Geoff Coats
Although New Orleans canceled its contract with Lime, it still wanted bike-sharing options. “The city was very committed to the original goals of providing affordable, equitable transportation,” says Dan Jatres, New Orleans’s infrastructure projects administrator. “So the conversation shifted to, ‘What is the next step?’”
As Coats packed up the warehouse and said goodbye to employees he had to lay off, he started making plans to revive Blue Bikes. He donated Jump’s bike stands and tools to local nonprofit Bike Easy, under the condition that it would return them if he managed to relaunch Blue Bikes. He secured financial support from the program’s original title sponsor, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana, as well as the Greater New Orleans Foundation. Within three months, Coats and his sponsors were ready to approach the city.
They proposed that Blue Bikes be run by a new nonprofit called Blue Krewe. The city would provide space for bike racks and waive permit fees. The two funders would provide the capital for startup costs, including a fleet of bicycles. The City Council unanimously agreed. By September 2021, residents were kicking their legs over 500 shiny new rides in neighborhoods throughout New Orleans. Since then, they’ve made more than 289,000 trips.
Cyclists in New Orleans take a spin on electric bicycles owned by the community-focused nonprofit bike-share program Blue Bikes. Courtesy of the Friends of Lafitte Greenway
* * *
Jatres says switching to a nonprofit model has allowed New Orleans to build a bike-share program better aligned with the city’s goals of providing affordable, equitable transportation. “If you’re a private company, you ultimately have a profit motive,” he says. “And that’s not always in line with providing transportation in areas that have historically been underserved.”
Blue Bikes costs less to use now — just 15 cents per minute, or $25 a month for a membership. People who use Medicaid or SNAP benefits pay only $4. The program covers roughly the same area as before, but Blue Krewe has a review process to ensure bikes are distributed equitably. There is an emphasis on connecting people in less advantaged areas to their jobs downtown and in the French Quarter.
Coats is especially proud that Blue Krewe has abandoned the gig-economy employment model and hired 20 full-time mechanics, technicians, and other employees who earn a living wage with health and retirement benefits. “We wanted to ensure that [transportation] equity wouldn’t be delivered on the backs of an inequitable labor model,” he says.
Patrick Urbine, Blue Krewe’s community engagement manager, says the nonprofit model lets him design programs people need, without worrying about whether his ideas are scalable across a multinational company. Blue Bikes offers 30-minute ride vouchers to people who attend fitness classes in Lafitte Greenway. It also covered rides to flu and COVID vaccine appointments, and is expanding a program that locates stations near health clinics in underserved areas.
“One of the riders I chatted with lost 40 pounds because he was riding Blue Bikes every single day,” says Urbine. “It is proof that Blue Bikes are a form of affordable, healthy, and fun transportation for folks.”
* * *
In December, New Orleans released its new climate action plan. It calls for half of trips within the city to be non-automotive by 2030. Blue Bikes will play an important role in reaching that goal — the plan calls for expanding its fleet from 800 to 2,000 bikes.
Right now, the Blue Bikes fleet is about half as big as it was under Uber, underscoring one tradeoff that comes with eschewing corporate stewardship: Funding is harder to come by. “We’re doing more incremental growth at a pace that matches the financial realities,” says Jatres. “While that’s different from a private system, I think ultimately it will be more sustainable.”
The number of bike- and scooter-share programs in North America is rising. From 2020 to 2021, such programs grew by about one-third. As more cities embrace micromobility options, Coats believes New Orleans’s community-driven approach can serve as a model.
Launching such a program, he says, is easier than when he started in 2016. “Now there are people who will sell you bikes, there are people who have the management software, the apps.” To other places considering a nonprofit model, he recommends leveraging what those companies can provide and focusing on what they cannot: a genuine connection to the people being served. “You know your community better than anyone will.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How to build a better bike-share program on Jan 20, 2023.
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In early 1862, a storm of biblical proportions struck California, dropping more than 120 inches of rain and snow on the state over two months. The entire state flooded, but nowhere was the deluge worse than in the Central Valley, a gash of fertile land that runs down the middle of the state between two mountain ranges. In the spring, as melting snow mixed with torrential rain, the valley transformed into “a perfect sea,” as one observer put it, vanishing beneath 30 feet of water that poured from the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers. People rowed through town streets on canoes. A quarter of all the cows in the state drowned. It took months for the water to drain out.
More than 150 years later, climate scientists say the state is due for a repeat of that massive storm. A growing body of research has found that global warming is increasing the likelihood of a monster storm that could inundate the Central Valley once again, causing what one study from UCLA and the National Atmospheric Center called “historically unprecedented surface runoff” in the region. Not only would this runoff destroy thousands of homes, it would also ravage a region that serves as the nation’s foremost agricultural breadbasket. The study found that global warming has already increased the likelihood of such a storm by 234 percent.
In the crosshairs of that storm is the Stockton metropolitan area, which sits at the mouth of the San Joaquin River. Stockton and its neighboring suburbs are home to almost 800,000 people, and they rank among the most diverse places in the country — as well as some of the most economically distressed places in California. Thanks to decades of disinvestment, the city’s only flood protection comes from decades-old, leak-prone levees. If a major rain event caused enough runoff to surge down the mountains and northward along the San Joaquin, it could burst through those levees, inundating the city and flooding tens of thousands of homes. One federal study found that much of Stockton would vanish beneath 10 to 12 feet of water, and floods in the lowest-lying areas could be twice as deep. The result would be a humanitarian disaster just as costly and as deadly as Hurricane Katrina.
The “atmospheric river” rainstorms that rolled into California from the Pacific Ocean this month have underscored the Golden State’s vulnerability to floods, but experts insist that the destruction of Stockton isn’t inevitable. As is the case in flood-prone communities across the country, local officials know how to manage water on the San Joaquin River, but they’ve struggled to obtain funding for Stockton and other disadvantaged cities along the waterway. Even as California lawmakers have plowed money into drought response in recent years, they’ve left flood measures by the wayside, and the federal government has also been slow to fund major improvements.
“Areas like Stockton that don’t have political clout … often get bypassed terms of consideration for funding,” said Mike Machado, a former California state senator who has long advocated for better flood management in the Central Valley. “Even if any funding is available, Stockton is usually at the bottom of the list.”
Even as Stockton’s infrastructure decays, the city’s flood risk is only increasing thanks to climate change, which will cause more severe rains in the San Joaquin Valley and further stress the city’s levees. The city has grown at a rapid pace over the past two decades, but state and local officials have been more focused on protecting local agricultural irrigators from drought than on protecting the city’s residents from flooding. When the next big storm hits, it is Stockton’s communities of color, which make up more than 80 percent of the city’s population, that will see the worst of the damage.
“We are at the bottom of the bowl,” said Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla, the executive director of Restore the Delta, a Stockton-based environmental nonprofit. “We’re the drain. And they don’t value us.”
Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla, executive director of the Stockton-based community organization Restore the Delta, stands next to a flooded creek following a recent rainstorm. Gabriela Aoun / Grist
The Central Valley’s flood protection system has never been equal. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, farmers and ranchers constructed a hodgepodge of levees along rivers like the San Joaquin, piling sand only high enough so that water would flood someone else’s land rather than their own. The levees were owned and maintained by local districts, rather than any centralized governing body, so wealthier areas ended up with stronger defenses.
As the region’s flood protection system expanded, the San Joaquin region fell behind. To protect the state capital of Sacramento in the 1920s, the federal Army Corps of Engineers built a diversion system called the Yolo Bypass that funnels water away from the city, but Stockton never saw any similar investment. Local authorities couldn’t raise as much money to bolster levees as their counterparts around Sacramento, and money from the state and the federal government never filled the gap.
This is in part because lawmakers have overlooked Stockton’s vulnerable populations, according to Jane Dolan, president of the Central Valley Flood Protection Board, a state agency that oversees flood management. But Dolan says the disparity also exists because leaders along the San Joaquin River have long tended to focus more on securing water for agricultural irrigation than on managing the rivers, which has made it hard to secure momentum for big flood improvements.
“They don’t have that consensus about managing floodwaters and allowing space for the river,” she told Grist. “Politicians from city councils to Congress are all focused on water supply.”
Not only does the San Joaquin have the shoddiest flood protection infrastructure, but it also faces the greatest degree of risk from climate-fueled storms. Both the UCLA study and a separate study by Dolan’s organization found that warmer climates will increase runoff in the San Joaquin watershed by more than they will in the Sacramento watershed — in large part because higher temperatures will cause what used to be snow to fall as rain instead. Furthermore, Stockton faces flood risk from all sides: Not only does the San Joaquin River flood during rain events, but the Calaveras River on the city’s north side does as well. Water from the Pacific Ocean could even flood the city from the west during high tides as it pushes across a long flat expanse known as the Delta.
Stockton faces extreme flood risk from the San Joaquin River, which drains through the Central Valley toward the Pacific Ocean. The city’s only flood protection comes from decades-old levees. Grist
“The San Joaquin Valley is the most vulnerable to intense floods, because the climate science is clear that there will be less snow there, and more rain,” said Dolan. The river’s levee system was designed for a long snowmelt, not an all-at-once deluge, she added, which means that bigger atmospheric river storms are all but certain to overwhelm it.
Despite this risk, Stockton has expanded rapidly over the past few decades. Not only has the city grown into a hub for the valley’s all-important agricultural industry, its relatively cheap land and proximity to the populous San Francisco Bay Area has made it a boom site for new warehouses and packing facilities owned by companies like Amazon. During the last housing boom, developers built subdivision after subdivision along the San Joaquin River to house new arrivals, relying on the decades-old levees to protect them.
As it has grown, Stockton has become one of the most diverse cities in the country, with substantial Mexican, Filipino, Chinese, Cambodian, and African American communities. Many of these have poverty rates that are much higher than the state average, and they also face severe environmental justice risks: The neighborhoods of southwest Stockton are surrounded by freeways, factories, and port infrastructure, making them among the most exposed in the state to soot and diesel pollution.
“Because of redlining and historical discrimination, we have a lot of people of color, and people are at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale, right behind these levees,” said Barrigan-Parrilla.
Mary Gómez is a 50-year resident of the Conway Houses, a low-income housing development on the south side of Stockton. The development sits just feet from the Walker Slough, a small waterway that drains off the San Joaquin River. Gómez, 70, told Grist that she worries about flooding from the river frequently and feels the area doesn’t get enough attention from city officials.
“It’s because they think we’re ghetto,” she said. “We are worried, because what if it floods [upstream] and we don’t hear about it, and they don’t tell us? Who’s gonna come and help us, or get us out? There’s so many of us that don’t have cars, that have kids.”
Gómez said she also worries about whether the neighborhood’s elderly and disabled could get out in time. The last time it came close to flooding, she said, her neighbors told her that she should protect her house with sandbags.
Mary Gómez, a resident of the Conway Homes development in south Stockton. The community faces severe flood risk from the San Joaquin River.
Gabriela Aoun / Grist
For decades, local officials have tried to secure state and federal money for flood protection projects, but progress has been slow as the risk has only increased. Way back in 1995, when the federal government was weighing whether to deem the levees in north and central Stockton inadequate, the area’s flood control authority had to self-finance levee improvements through tax assessments on local property owners — a costly proposition in a relatively low-income area with a meager tax base.
“We have a severely disadvantaged community,” said Chris Elias, director of the San Joaquin Area Flood Control Agency, the authority that manages the region’s levees. “We cannot impose too much burden on them — they’ve borne too much burden already. So we explore those other funding avenues. But just like everything else, we are competing with a whole bunch of other priorities that the state has.”
The state has passed a number of bond measures over the years to fund flood improvements, but local officials say Stockton hasn’t received a fair share of that money. For every five dollars spent in Sacramento, Elias said, Stockton has seen only one dollar of spending. He said that’s in part because the state money went to projects that were already “shovel-ready,” and Stockton-area officials lacked the resources to design projects and apply for grants.
Federal help has also been hard to come by. In 2010 the Army Corps of Engineers finally decreed that many of Stockton’s levees were inadequate and that much of the city was vulnerable to massive flooding. The agency spent the next seven years studying the problem, but in the end it proposed only a partial solution. While the Corps agreed to pursue a $1.3 billion suite of levee repair projects in north and central Stockton, it punted on a proposal to bolster the levees in south Stockton and two nearby suburbs — the parts of the area that faced the greatest economic hardship and the greatest exposure to flooding on the San Joaquin. The agency’s argument was that repairing levees in those areas would encourage new development, thus increasing the risk. It has since agreed to revisit that decision, but in the meantime tens of thousands residents in the area are still just as vulnerable to flooding as they were a decade ago.
In response to questions from Grist, a spokesperson from the Corps’s Sacramento district said that the agency had been constrained by an executive order that limits federal investment in flood-prone areas.
“Deferring decisions regarding the area to the south of Stockton … allowed [the Corps] and its state and local partners to prevent further delays in gaining congressional authorization to protect Stockton from catastrophic flooding,” said the spokesperson. He added that the agency plans to “reexamine federal interest in the [area] and identify potential flood risk management and ecosystem restoration opportunities.… However, the outcomes of that study are not yet determined.”
A levee stands in front of the Weston Ranch development on the south side of Stockton, California. Gabriela Aoun / Grist
Another problem is that levees alone aren’t sufficient as a flood management strategy. No matter how high you build a levee, a future flood can always overtop it, and the consequences when a levee breaks are often worse than they would have been if the levee hadn’t been there in the first place, as was demonstrated in New Orleans after Katrina. Many local officials believe that, instead of just building more levees, the state should give flood waters another place to go by creating natural floodplains out of conserved land. That’s what the state did near Sacramento with the Yolo Bypass.
“You can build a levee stronger and better, but it’s still vulnerable to breaking,” said John Cain, director of conservation at River Partners, a nonprofit that advocates for such floodplain restoration projects. “If you want to have more resiliency in the system, you literally need more room.”
Cain’s organization has put this approach to the test about 20 miles upstream on the San Joaquin by purchasing unused land and converting it into a natural floodplain. During big rain events, water flowing downstream on the river can spill onto the reserved land instead of flowing toward Stockton, taking pressure off the city’s levees. Officials in Stockton have been trying to replicate this strategy closer to the city by creating a wide flood bypass called Paradise Cut on reserved farmland. The project would reduce the depth of potential flooding in the Stockton area by as much as two feet, but the Army Corps rejected that project back in 2018 as well, questioning whether it would pass a cost-benefit analysis.
Former California state senator Mike Machado at his farm in Linden, California. Machado has pushed for decades to secure increased flood protection for the Central Valley.
Gabriela Aoun / Grist
Meanwhile, state funding for flood management has all but dried up even as lawmakers plow billions into drought relief, leaving Stockton dependent on the slow-moving Army Corps of Engineers for project money. Governor Gavin Newsom’s proposed budget for the coming year proposes to spend just $135 million on flood management, less than a third of what Dolan’s organization says the state should be spending every year. The proposed budget also seeks to claw back $40 million that was allocated in last year’s budget for floodplain restoration along the San Joaquin River.
Newsom’s office did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.
Machado, the former state senator, hopes this month’s storms will bring some attention to flood risk in the state, but he’s not sure the attention will translate into new spending.
“After a flood, the holes get plugged, the sun comes out, and they forget,” he told Grist. “All of a sudden you’re in a drought period, or an extended period with no imminent threat of a flood, and it becomes a backburner issue.”
Gabriela Aoun contributed reporting to this story.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline California’s next flood could destroy one of its most diverse cities. Will lawmakers try to save it? on Jan 19, 2023.
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California has nearly seen the last of the relentless sequence of storms that inundated the state since late December, leading to tens of thousands of evacuations, at least 20 deaths, and an estimated $1 billion in damages.
From failed levees in the Central Valley counties of Merced and Sacramento to overflowing rivers along the coast, the rains touched almost every part of the state, with many areas receiving four to six times above average precipitation for the past several weeks. Mudslides closed major roads, thousands of homes were flooded, and trees knocked out power lines, with over 13,000 electric customers yet to regain service as of Tuesday afternoon.
Meteorologists expect that by Thursday, the last storm, this time a weaker one, will have cleared from the northern and central parts of California. But in the coming weeks, as flood waters recede and the rains’ full impact comes into view, many residents may find themselves facing a second crisis: A widespread lack of flood insurance that will leave thousands of homeowners grappling with the cost of repairing and rebuilding homes.
“California is a place where the preoccupation about water is about scarcity, not abundance,” said Rebecca Elliott, a professor at the London School of Economics who wrote a book about flood insurance in the United States. “Many, many thousands of Californians will assume that they have flood coverage and find out that they don’t.”
Standard homeowners insurance does not include flood coverage, even though, according to a recent survey, 47 percent of Americans assume that it does. Just 1.33 percent of California households have standalone policies through the National Flood Insurance Program, a federal-run system that makes up 95 percent of flood coverage in the United States. The share of private flood policies in California is even smaller. Yet as of earlier this month, 90 percent of the state’s population was under flood watch.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, requires homeowners with federally-underwritten mortgages to buy flood insurance if they are in what it designates as “special flood hazard areas.” That’s essentially the 100-year flood plain, or places that have a 1 percent annual chance of flooding. But the maps FEMA uses to delineate these areas are wildly out of date. First Street Foundation, a nonprofit that models flood risk, found there are 5.9 million property owners nationwide who face substantial flood risk outside FEMA’s official hazard areas.
“I show them the topography maps,” said Nick Ramirez, an insurance agent based in Los Angeles, of his clients who aren’t required by law to purchase flood insurance. “I say, ‘Do you want to protect yourself?’ Some say yes, and some just roll the dice.”
Streets and homes flooded in the Felton Grove neighborhood of Santa Cruz, California, on January 9.
Melina Mara/The Washington Post via Getty Images
FEMA’s California maps, most of which were last updated in the 1980s and early 90s, if not before, leave out about 80 percent of the state’s rivers and streams. They also don’t account for the worsening effects of climate change, which include expanded flood risk as the climate system shifts towards hydrological extremes. Part of the reason they haven’t been updated is the expense. Communities have also often resisted expanding the flood zones to avoid costs for homeowners and restrictions on development.
Where FEMA does require mandatory insurance, the policy is underenforced. Flood insurance requirements don’t apply to mortgages that have been paid off or to properties purchased in cash. And experts say it’s common for homeowners to let their policies lapse because mortgage companies don’t check up on them. According to Elliott, the fact that lenders securitize their mortgages may be one reason for why they aren’t paying close attention. “They’re chopping up those mortgages, bundling them, and selling them on,” she said.
In recent years, the number of Californians holding flood insurance policies has been declining in line with a national pattern. Experts attribute this in large part to premium costs, and particularly to an increase in insurance rates that occurred starting October 2021 under FEMA’s new pricing methodology called Risk Rating 2.0.
The National Flood Insurance Program, or NFIP, has long struggled with debt, the result of worsening climate-fueled disasters paired with static policy premiums. With Risk Rating 2.0, FEMA re-assessed flood risk using independent models and then adjusted pricing to better reflect today’s trends. The idea, according to the agency, was to make insurance more equitable, so that people in flood zones paid more in line with their level of risk, and people outside wouldn’t have to subsidize them. (The new maps did not impact who was required to hold a policy.)
The result, however, has been a precipitous decline in policies. “We had been seeing a nationwide drop in the number of people with flood insurance [for several years],” said Nick VinZant, a senior research analyst at QuoteWizard, an online platform that allows customers to shop for and compare insurance prices. “It really started to drop as soon as FEMA put Risk Rating 2.0 in place.”
Though the state as a whole paid less under the new program than it had previously, 73 percent of California policyholders saw a price increase, in some cases as substantial as $100 a month. Between March 2021 and August 2022, 11 percent of state policyholders dropped the plan, one of the largest decreases nationwide, according to VinZant. (Nationwide, the program lost 6 percent of policyholders in the same period).
Residents sweep water out of a flooded home on January 11 in Planada, California.
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
FEMA does not provide zip code-level data on policies in force, so it’s difficult to confirm that the places where premiums rose the most are the same places where people dropped the NFIP. But most experts think that’s what happened. “FEMA was very opaque. The numbers they gave were limited, so it’s hard to track,” said Nicholas Pinter, a professor and associate director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at the University of California, Davis. “There is strong suspicion that the increase in premiums has driven an exodus from the program.”
Another driver of the exodus: the multi-year mega-drought drying up rivers and reservoirs across the Western U.S. Typically, flood insurance policy enrollments increase after a flood and go down during dry years, when people forget about the potential for deluge. “Right now, my phone is ringing off the hook,” said Ramirez.
FEMA is running with the drought explanation. “There are many factors that could influence this drop in policyholders, including the economic impact of the pandemic, inflation, the housing market, affordability, or purchasing flood insurance from the private market,” David Maurstad, deputy associate administrator of resilience for FEMA, told Grist in a statement. “For California in particular, [it may be] due to the several years of drought in the area and the belief that flooding may not impact them.”
Given the increasing frequency of floods and the increasing cost of repair, Elliott believes it’s unrealistic to expect the National Flood Insurance Program to function like a private insurance company, charging enough to cover its risk and break even on its losses, while still being affordable. In California, the average cost of this insurance is $779 per year, though rates vary by region. Research by Pinter and his colleagues shows that besides a small number of waterfront communities like Malibu that have a lot of at-risk properties and high incomes, most of the state’s flood exposure is in low-income areas.
The national program tries to incentivize more flood-resilient building and planning by offering grants and lower rates to people and communities who take certain steps to protect their homes. But those investments can be costly and the agency has been criticized for not making enough support available and accessible. “We’ve been expecting [the NFIP] to underwrite the American dream of homeownership while also expecting it to signal risk, nudge people away from the water’s edge, and reduce overall exposure to flood risk,” said Elliott. “It has always had a really hard time doing all those things.” She says a better approach would be to think of insurance as just one part of the larger strategy and set of policies protecting people from floods.
On Saturday, President Biden approved California Governor Gavin Newsom’s request for a major disaster declaration in three counties, following the state’s emergency declaration for 41 of its 58 counties. Merced, Sacramento, and Santa Cruz are now eligible for grants for temporary housing and home repairs, low-cost loans to help cover uninsured property losses, and additional forms of support. More counties may be added as officials continue to assess the damage across the state.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline California’s storms are almost over. Its reckoning with flood insurance is about to begin. on Jan 18, 2023.
