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The climate fix you’ve been waiting for: Rock dust?

Scientists have been trying to figure out how to make use of one of nature’s tricks for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere with rock and rain. As rain washes away tiny particles of rock, newly exposed minerals bind with carbon, transforming carbon dioxide into new chemicals. It’s a simple combination of basic chemistry and erosion.

We can speed the process up by speeding up erosion, crushing tons and tons of rock and spreading it across the earth’s surface, if we had the money to do it and a vast area where inhabitants don’t mind trucks covering everything with a layer of rock dust once a year. Farms are the most likely candidate for such a massive undertaking, because farmers already do some incidental advanced weathering as a byproduct of “liming”, where they apply crushed limestone to fields when their soils become too acidic.

A paper just published in Nature provides the most detailed calculation to date of just how much carbon this technique, known as enhanced weathering, could capture and how much it would cost. Deploying the practice worldwide could remove 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the air every year — about a third of what the United States emits each year — and would run between $60 and $200 per ton of carbon to apply all that rock dust on fields, varying by country. It would be cheaper in places like Indonesia and India that have better conditions for weathering (warm, seasonally wet weather), and low labor and energy costs. The countries with the greatest potential to deploy enhanced weathering are, the researchers note, “coincidentally the highest CO2 fossil fuel emitters (China, USA, and India).”

One of the scientists involved in the study, James Hanson, the climate Cassandra and Columbia University climatologist, said in an email that he became interested in weathering because it can trap carbon for thousands of years. Hansen said other approaches, “such as reforestation, are important, but require management to assure that the carbon sink is maintained.”

The researchers estimate that if the United States spread rock dust on half the country’s farmland it could capture 420 million tons of carbon dioxide, at an annual cost of $225 for every American, or $176 for every ton of carbon. That’s a higher price tag than some other solutions. Building solar farms, for instance, currently cuts emissions at a rate of less than $40 per ton. But because the world is failing to slash emissions, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has determined that we will need to use “negative emissions,” expensive techniques to suck carbon out of the atmosphere, to avoid the most dangerous consequences of climate change.

Farmers stand to benefit, too. In theory, spreading much more rock dust on fields could improve soil health and crop yields. And that could help farmers get out of poverty and increase world food production at the same time they’re soaking up carbon. And, as with any major attempt at geoengineering our atmosphere, there’s likely to unforeseen pitfalls, and unexpected benefits, along the way.

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The climate fix you’ve been waiting for: Rock dust?

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Beyond Your Doorstep – Hal Borland

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Beyond Your Doorstep

A Handbook to the Country

Hal Borland

Genre: Nature

Price: $1.99

Publish Date: January 14, 2014

Publisher: Open Road Media

Seller: OpenRoad Integrated Media, LLC


The inspiring classic on the virtues of embracing the great outdoors from the national bestselling author of The Dog Who Came to Stay .  Over the course of his career, Hal Borland wrote eight nature books and hundreds of “outdoor editorials” for the Sunday  New York Times , extolling the virtues of the countryside. From his home on one hundred acres in rural Connecticut, Borland wrote of the natural wonders, both big and small, that surrounded him every day.  Beyond Your Doorstep  is his guide to venturing into the outdoors around your home, wherever it is, and discovering the countryside within reach. The beauty to be found in roadsides, meadows, woodlands, and bogs are explored in elegant prose. Borland takes up birds, animals, and plants—both edible and poisonous—and the miraculous ways in which they are threaded together throughout the natural world. Part introductory field guide and part incitement to exploration,  Beyond Your Doorstep  is a classic of nature writing and a must-read for anyone looking to renew his or her relationship to the outdoors.

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Beyond Your Doorstep – Hal Borland

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Study: Rising temperatures will double the risk to farmworkers in the coming decades

Farmworkers are on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic. But as they continue to feed a nation that is largely sheltered in place, the onset of summer presents them with a new set of risks — risks that could be dramatically exacerbated by climate change in the coming decades, according to a new study published in Environmental Research Letters.

Researchers from the University of Washington and Stanford University analyzed increasing temperatures in agricultural hotspots across the country. The average agricultural worker currently experiences 21 days each year in which the daily heat index surpasses workplace safety standards. However, based on new climate models that assume 2 degrees Celsius of global warming, the study shows that the average number of unsafe work days in crop-producing areas will nearly double by 2050, to 39 days each season. By 2100, farmworkers can expect 62 unsafe work days in a world that has warmed by an average of 4 degrees Celsius. That’s triple the exposure they currently experience.

“Both the vulnerability of agricultural workers and the rate and scale of climate change are the result of large structural issues that will not be solved with a single silver bullet,” Michelle Tigchelaar, the study’s lead author and a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University, told Grist. “One thing that immediately needs to happen though is for states and the federal government to include heat in their occupational health standards for outdoor workers.”

So far, only California and Washington have a formal policy that aims to protect workers from exposure to severe heat. Farmworker advocates have urged the federal government to implement such a policy nationwide in recent years. Tigchelaar said that a model framework would provide simple things like heat breaks, personal protective equipment (PPE), worker training, heat-appropriate housing, and medical and heat exposure monitoring.

“Our results also clearly indicate that quick gains could be made by developing and promoting PPE that is more breathable but still stands up to pesticides and dust,” she said. “We also need immigration, farm, and economic policy that promotes access to healthcare, social services, and a living wage, as well as rapid reduction of climate pollution.”

Farmworker communities currently face a plethora of risk factors including low wages, low rates of insurance, and vulnerable immigration status. Tigchelaar began her research after 28-year-old farmworker Silva Ibarra passed away in Bellingham, Washington, during a scorching summer in August 2017. She was working on a study of climate change impacts on maize yields at the time. But when she heard the news of Ibarra’s death, Tigchelaar realized that there was very little research done on the well-being of farmworkers in a changing climate.

Ibarra had left behind a family in Mexico and traveled north to Washington state on a temporary agricultural visa to work in the fields. But he started having migraines while working and was unable to convince his supervisor that he required medical attention or even a break. He later collapsed. He passed away two days later, and his death led 70 of his coworkers to participate in a farmers’ strike. It also led Tigchelaar to conduct the research she published this week.

“From an environmental justice perspective, our study is therefore unique in that it centers the health and well-being of a particularly vulnerable group of workers,” Tigchelaar said. The research also “points at their protection as essential for safeguarding the future of healthy food systems and communities.”

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Study: Rising temperatures will double the risk to farmworkers in the coming decades

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Amazon fires employees who spoke out about coronavirus and climate change

Amazon is trying to establish itself as the most essential of essential businesses during the coronavirus outbreak. But the tech giant is struggling to keep a lid on internal turmoil, both at its warehouses, where workers say they’re not being adequately protected from COVID-19, and at its corporate offices, where a showdown between tech employees and management over the company’s climate policies reached a tipping point last week.

Last Friday afternoon, Amazon fired two of its tech employees after they publicly criticized its coronavirus policies. Those employees, Emily Cunningham and Maren Costa, both user experience designers with 21 years of service at the company between them, were among the leaders of an internal worker group formed in December 2018 with the aim of pressuring Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to commit to more ambitious climate targets. The group, Amazon Employees for Climate Justice (AECJ), has recently widened its focus to embrace the struggles of frontline Amazon employees at fulfillment centers across the country.

Cunningham and Costa were fired after they wrote tweets criticizing the company for putting workers and the public at risk and offering to match up to $500 in donations to a fund for Amazon warehouse workers exposed to COVID-19.

In addition to firing Cunningham and Costa, AECJ says the company deleted an invitation to a virtual event that the worker group had sent to Amazon employees to allow them to “hear directly from Amazon warehouse workers as they talk honestly about the real problems they’re facing as well as solutions.”

The goal of the AECJ webcast, which was to feature author and climate justice activist Naomi Klein, was to explore questions like, “How are Covid-19, the climate crisis, and the struggles of warehouse workers connected? How are all of these issues tied to racism and inequity?” More than 1,000 employees had RSVPed to the event before it was taken down, AECJ said in a press release, adding that internal emails about the event had also been deleted by the company.

“Why is Amazon so scared of workers talking with each other? No company should punish their employees for showing concern for one another, especially during a pandemic!” Costa said in a statement. She and Cunningham say they still plan to host the virtual event with a new RSVP link.

In a statement to the Washington Post, Amazon spokesperson Drew Herderner said, “We support every employee’s right to criticize their employer’s working conditions, but that does not come with blanket immunity against any and all internal policies.”

AECJ has been publicly pushing Jeff Bezos to reduce the company’s contributions to climate change for more than a year now. In the summer of 2019, the group called on the company’s shareholders to adopt a climate change resolution that was ultimately backed by more than 8,700 Amazon workers. It was voted down, but a few months later, Bezos unveiled a climate plan that aimed for net-zero carbon emissions by 2040 — a decade ahead of the deadline laid out in the Paris climate agreement. AECJ argued that the plan wasn’t comprehensive enough, and on September 20, in solidarity with the youth climate strikes happening all over the world, thousands of Amazon employees walked out of the company’s headquarters in downtown Seattle.

Around the same time, the company updated its communication policies to require employees to seek approval from management before speaking publicly about Amazon. In October, when two of its employees, Costa and Jamie Kowalski, publicly criticized one of company’s climate policies, telling the Washington Post that it “distracts from the fact that Amazon wants to profit in businesses that are directly contributing to climate catastrophe,” the employees were warned that speaking out again would result in “formal corrective action.”

In response, 400 Amazon employees risked their jobs to publicly speak out about the company’s climate policies. “We decided we couldn’t live with ourselves if we let a policy silence us in the face of an issue of such moral gravity like the climate crisis,” the group said in a tweet in January that has since been deleted.

It took a few months, but the company finally made good on its threat. Doesn’t look like the fired employees are going to stop speaking out anytime soon, though.

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Amazon fires employees who spoke out about coronavirus and climate change

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Here’s why the coronavirus pandemic has the U.S. oil industry feeling ill

Weeks before most Americans were aware that a pandemic would grind the United States economy to a halt, the Energy Information Administration released its short-term energy outlook. The federal agency predicted that carbon dioxide emissions from U.S. energy generation would fall by 2 percent this year and decrease another 1.5 percent in 2021. The decreases would bring emissions down to where they were before a 3 percent spike in 2018 — attributed to heavy use of air conditioning during a scorching summer and heating systems throughout a frigid winter.

That was in mid-January. On Tuesday, the Energy Information Administration, or EIA, put out a very different forecast.

Its latest outlook forecasts energy-related carbon emissions will fall by 7.5 percent this year due to the COVID-19 crisis. For an idea of how dramatic that is, consider this: Energy-related carbon emissions fell 7.1 percent in the wake of the financial crisis more than a decade ago. And that was the largest decrease in 19 years. The newly predicted emissions free fall can be attributed to an economy that’s suddenly in lockdown with millions of people staying home every day and industrial activity slowed.

On top of the new emissions forecast, the Energy Department has bad news for oil producers: U.S. officials will likely have to stop referring to the country as a net-exporter of oil, stymying a years-long march to become an international force in the crude oil game. The EIA estimates that U.S. oil production will drop by more than one million barrels per day due to the novel coronavirus. Americans will consume 9 percent less gasoline to fuel motor vehicles when compared to 2019, and jet fuel consumption will fall by 10 percent year over year. As a result, the agency estimates that the country will begin importing more oil than it exports sometime over the summer.

Back in February, Grist staff writer Naveena Sadasivam noted that in his State of the Union, President Trump took credit for the nation becoming energy independent. The U.S. officially became a net-exporter of oil products in November 2019. Sadasivam warned that with his claim the president ignored “the fact that the country is still subject to the global oil market.” Well, it still is, and a combination of plummeting demand due to coronavirus-influenced economic shutdowns and the inability of global oil powers to make a deal on oil production cuts are likely to blow that feather right out of his MAGA cap.

Oil isn’t the only fuel affected by an economy in the throes of a pandemic. The EIA expects coal generation to fall 20 percent in 2020, after previously projecting it would decline a more modest 16.9 percent. The natural gas industry may have the most on the line. Natural gas output is expected to drop 4.4 percent in 2021, the biggest dip since records began in 1998.

Renewables are still projected to outpace all other electricity types this year in terms of growth. But the EIA says annual additions to solar and wind capacity  are now likely 5 and 10 percent lower, respectively, than they were in the agency’s prior assessment.

The projected declines in oil and coal production and energy-related carbon emissions might seem like a major win for the planet, but alas, they’re not permanent. The EIA says emissions will rise 3.6 percent in 2021 (from 2020 levels) — the largest year-over-year growth in a decade — as the threat of coronavirus dissipates, and the economy roars back.

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Here’s why the coronavirus pandemic has the U.S. oil industry feeling ill

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Scooters return to their native habitat, and other brilliant coronavirus memes

In the weeks since Italy’s nationwide lockdown went into effect, reports of dolphins returning to the country’s waterways and canals running clear in Venice circulated on social media, prompting some to wonder whether humans, not COVID-19, were the real scourge. “Nature is reclaiming its spaces during quarantine,” one Twitter user said.

That sentiment may seem innocent enough — who doesn’t like to think about dolphins frolicking in a Venetian canal? — but it’s wrong on more than one front. Many of the reports of nature thriving in humans’ absence are bogus. Elephants getting drunk on wine and passing out in a field? Debunked. Water quality in Venice? More or less the same; the canals just look cleaner because boats aren’t churning up sediment every few minutes. Swans returning to Italian canals? They’ve always been there.

And there’s a darker — if unintended — side to claims that nature is better off without humans. It’s not only misanthropic to turn a blind eye to human suffering in the service of conservation; it also echoes some of the dark, racist strains of the environmentalist movement.

Luckily, Twitter has a way of simultaneously generating bad takes and quashing them. Those tweets about nature coming back spawned a new meme. Turns out, dolphins, swans, and elephants aren’t the only critters making a comeback thanks to the coronavirus.

Lime scooters returned to rivers, their native habitat.

Dinosaurs, thought to have gone extinct 65 million years ago, flocked to the streets of Lisbon.

While all of Italy was under quarantine, some of the region’s most iconic native fauna was spotted in nearby forests.

And London has seen a revival of its unique feral cat population:

See? Nature really is amazing. But, like it or not, humans are very much still here.

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Scooters return to their native habitat, and other brilliant coronavirus memes

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Touchdown! Car companies make electric cars look sexy at the Super Bowl

A recent analysis by Reuters found that automakers worldwide plan to invest $300 billion into electric vehicles. Now they just need people to start buying them: Last year, only 2 percent of cars sold in the U.S. were electric. So it’s heartening that, while the country was enjoying the last Super Bowl that Miami will likely be able to host before Hard Rock Stadium turns into an island, car companies threw major advertising dollars behind making their new electric vehicles look cool AF.

This year, companies forked over an average of $5.6 million for 30 seconds of airtime, not to mention the cost of producing the high-profile spots that featured celebrity cameos and complex narratives. The payoff is that the ads inevitably spark conversation and news articles in the days and weeks and potentially years after the event.

For last night’s game, GM enlisted LeBron James to introduce its new electric Hummer — a car that nobody asked for but hey, I’m not complaining.

Audi struck algorithmic gold with Game of Thrones fan favorite Maisie Williams singing Frozen’s “Let it Go” in an e-Tron Sportback.

Porsche kept it classic with a suspenseful heist set-up that led to flashy car chase through the streets of Stuttgart with its all-electric Taycan sports car.

Viewers in some regional markets saw a nostalgia-fueled ad by Ford for its new electric Mustang, featuring Idris Elba.

Will the ad blitz work? At the very least, it might help the average American realize that Tesla isn’t the only name in the EV game.

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Touchdown! Car companies make electric cars look sexy at the Super Bowl

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Another legacy of redlining: Unequal exposure to heat waves

Severe heat kills more people in the United States than any other hazardous weather-related event. As climate change accelerates, the sweltering heat will become much more extreme, and the associated mortality rate will rise.

Like so many aspects of the climate crisis, heat doesn’t affect all people equally. Marginalized low-income communities of color, especially those in larger cities such as New York and Los Angeles, bear the brunt of heat waves. These concrete jungles with barely any green space to cool them down are drastically hotter than their surrounding suburbs and rural areas — a phenomenon known as the “urban heat island effect.”

And that’s not an accident. It’s the result of decades-old policy choices that are still reverberating today. A new study published in the journal Climate found that the historical practice of “redlining” is a strong predictor of which neighborhoods are disproportionately exposed to extreme heat.

“Our zip codes are also one of the major predictors of our health,” said Vivek Shandas, one of the authors of the study and a professor of climate adaptation at Portland State University. “By separating housing policy from climate change, we’re doing a disservice to our ability to create safe spaces, particularly among those communities who don’t have a choice about where to live.”

Historically, redlining was an effort to segregate communities of color by refusing to give them housing loans and insurance. The federal government, faced with affordable housing shortages in the early 1930s, designed a housing plan that helped middle- and lower-class white families afford homes but left communities of color — particularly African-American communities — out of new suburban housing developments.

Although the practice of redlining was banned in the late 1960s, remnants of the discriminatory practice are still evident till this day — and are now being linked to the biggest existential threat of our time. The analysis examined 108 urban areas across the country, and found that 94 percent of historically redlined neighborhoods are consistently hotter than the rest of the neighborhoods in their cities, underscoring a major environmental justice issue. Portland, Oregon, showed one of the largest heat disparities between redlined and non-redlined communities — up to 12.6 degrees F.

Ongoing policy decisions make the disparities worse. For instance, the study points out that many vulnerable communities lack green spaces, which cool surface temperatures and provide significant health benefits to residents. Instead, city officials tend to invest in safe green parks built in wealthier neighborhoods. And without a social safety net, vulnerable communities may face financial burdens due to high energy consumption from air conditioner use and medical bills from conditions caused or exacerbated by heat.

Shandas hopes that his and his colleagues’ study will help policymakers understand the intersectionality of both housing and climate issues and help them create more equitable housing policies.

“The impacts of climate change are largely mediated by the way we build our cities and the places we call home,” Shandas said. “By ignoring the question of housing in climate change, we’re unable to understand who faces some of the greatest impacts.”

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Another legacy of redlining: Unequal exposure to heat waves

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Bernie Sanders inspired the Sunrise Movement, now has its endorsement

Sunrise Movement, the group of young climate activists who helped catapult the Green New Deal onto the national stage last year, is feeling the Bern. The organization used its oodles of Gen Z social capital to endorse Senator Bernie Sanders for president on Thursday.

In a statement, Varshini Prakash, the group’s executive director, said she believes a Sanders presidency “would provide the best political terrain” for Sunrise to accomplish its mission of enacting a Green New Deal. It’s no surprise that an organization founded by young adults inspired by Sanders’ presidential run in 2016 would throw its support behind the candidate. But the results of a survey of thousands of the group’s members, published Thursday, made it clear that the group is united behind the Vermont Senator.

Sunrise, which is comprised of a national leadership team and a series of autonomous “hubs” located across the country, started the process of endorsing a candidate last November. The six-week-long undertaking allowed the group’s 10,000 members to cast votes on two questions: should Sunrise endorse a candidate, and who should that candidate be? Eighty-five percent of its members voted in favor of endorsing, and 76 percent voted in favor of Sanders — a decisive victory by any measure. Senator Elizabeth Warren got 17.4 percent of the vote, and the remainder was split primarily among Pete Buttigieg, Andrew Yang, and “no preference.”

Sanders, who was the first candidate to unveil a climate change proposal actually called the Green New Deal, said on Thursday he was “honored” to receive Sunrise’s support. But he’s not the only candidate with a vision for a progressive climate action plan. Warren also has a plan called the Green New Deal and has been endorsed by one of the architects of Congress’s Green New Deal resolution, and all of the Democrats running for president have said they support the general idea of a Green New Deal. “I’m grateful for @SunriseMvmt’s leadership in this fight,” Warren, who clearly is not a sore loser, wrote on Twitter shortly after the group announced its endorsement of Sanders.

Regardless of how committed other candidates say they are to progressive proposals like the Green New Deal, Sanders’ seniority on these issues has made him a magnet for endorsements from progressive groups like Dream Defenders and People’s Action. Most importantly perhaps for the young members of Sunrise Movement, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, cosponsor of the Green New Deal resolution that was introduced in the House and rejected by the Senate last year, endorsed him in October.

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Bernie Sanders inspired the Sunrise Movement, now has its endorsement

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It’s not just Australia — Indonesia is facing its own climate disaster

It’s not just Australia that’s having a rough start to the new year. Indonesia’s sinking capital of Jakarta and the surrounding areas have been inundated with rain, triggering landslides and floods that have killed dozens of people.

As of Tuesday, the torrential downpours have left at least 67 people dead as rising waters deluged more than 180 neighborhoods and landslides buried at least a dozen Indonesians. Search missions for survivors are still ongoing, and officials say the death toll is expected to rise as more bodies are found.

Indonesia’s national meteorological agency said the rainfall on New Year’s Day was the heaviest downpour in a 24-hour period since Dutch colonists began record-keeping in the 1860s. Although floodwaters are starting to subside, the Indonesian Red Cross Society warned people to expect more severe rainfall in the coming days.

Dasril Roszandi / NurPhoto via Getty Images

The communities most vulnerable to flooding are those in poor neighborhoods — especially slums located near wastewater, which can spread pathogens when combined with flooding. More than 1,000 soldiers and health workers were dispatched to use disinfectant sprays in these areas on Sunday to prevent the spread of disease.

Jakarta, which is home to about 10 million people, is extremely vulnerable to the effects of climate change, including rising sea levels and extreme weather. It also has dangerous levels of air pollution and the largest uncovered landfill in Southeast Asia. On top of that, the city’s rapidly growing population has faced major water shortages in recent years due to a dearth of groundwater. Meanwhile, rivers are polluted with garbage, and researchers say that at least 20 tons of trash are dumped in the Jakarta Bay each day.

Donal Husni / NurPhoto via Getty Images

The city is sinking as quickly as 9 inches a year in some neighborhoods, and about half of it is already below sea level. The country is also the world’s fifth-largest emitter of greenhouse gasses, mostly due to the country’s deforestation habit. And if Indonesia and the rest of the world don’t take measures to slash emissions drastically, researchers say that 95 percent of northern Jakarta will be submerged by 2050.

The country has pledged to cut its carbon emissions by 29 percent by 2030 as part of the Paris Agreement, but the government is still set to rely on coal to generate electricity for the next decade. And a recent survey from YouGov and the University of Cambridge revealed that a whopping 18 percent of Indonesians believe there’s zero link between human activity and the climate crisis.

Ed Wray / Getty Images

Last summer, Indonesian President Joko Widodo announced that the capital city will be relocated to the island of Borneo, hundreds of miles northeast of Jakarta, by 2023. But don’t assume that amounts to an acknowledgement of the climate crisis.

“I don’t think the climate is necessarily the reason for the Indonesian government to move the capital,” Rukka Sombolinggi, an indigenous leader from the Toraja ethnic group, said during a press conference at the United Nations General Assembly last year. “It’s simply because the capital is just so overwhelmed and crowded with people, making the traffic and the quality of air and water terribly alarming.”

The irony is that Indonesia also holds one of the most effective tools to fight against climate change: mangroves. These tall trees growing in coastal waters can remove and store carbon humans have emitted into the atmosphere. But instead of protecting and expanding mangrove ecosystems, the government has continued to allow corporations to slash and burn mangroves for palm oil production, thus producing more carbon emissions.

And even in the wake of devastating floods, the Indonesian government plans to stay the course. Two government ministers told Reuters this week that they have no plans to change their climate policy after the New Year’s flooding. But the head of the country’s meteorological agency minced no words about the impact of climate change on the floods’ severity. “The impact of a 1-degree increase can be severe,” Dwikorita Karnawati told reporters on Friday. “Among that is these floods.”

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It’s not just Australia — Indonesia is facing its own climate disaster

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