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In natural disasters, a disability can be a death sentence

by keenanrobillard Posted on December 27, 2018

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This story was originally published by the HuffPost and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Several of the 88 people killed in the Camp Fire that devastated Butte County, California, in November had disabilities.

Their deaths were only the latest example of a tragic reality: When disaster strikes, people with disabilities are disproportionately affected. There are no statistics that show how many disabled people in the U.S. say they could easily evacuate in an emergency, but around the world, just 20 percent of disabled people say they would be able to do so. And only 31 percent said they would have someone to help them in an emergency, according to a 2013 United Nations global survey.

Surviving a disaster is a complicated process for disabled people, with barriers every step of the way. For visually and hearing impaired people, even being alerted to an emergency isn’t as simple as it is for everyone else. For physically disabled and low-mobility individuals, a quick evacuation is extremely difficult, if not impossible — especially in a natural disaster like the Camp Fire, which raged at the rate of destroying the equivalent of one football field per second.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. By inviting disabled people into conversations about disaster preparedness and response, investing in important equipment, and mandating that disaster response teams be knowledgeable on these issues, communities can reduce fatalities and offer a more humane and inclusive response to disasters.

Relying on luck

The Americans With Disabilities Act devotes chapters to emergency planning and recovery. However, states institute their own policies and codes for evacuation and emergency planning, and those policies aren’t always enforced, said Hector M. Ramirez, a Ventura County, California-based disabled man and board member of Disability Rights California.

Evacuation plans can be outdated, he said. And community members often aren’t aware of what those plans are even if they do exist. In fact, only 17 percent of disabled people were aware of their community’s emergency evacuation plan, according to the U.N. survey.

Some federal institutions, like the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, have created online resources about emergency preparedness and response. But disabled people are both frequently left out of developing emergency preparation plans and not made aware of the ones that are put in place, Ramirez said.

Plus, on-the-ground disaster response is often facilitated by well-meaning volunteers who might not be well-versed in the specific needs of the disabled community.

Federal, state, county, and nonprofit institutions all provide emergency response, and Ramirez said they all “need to familiarize themselves with our issues.”

And for many disabled people, getting out of their homes is only the beginning. Shelters often lack necessary equipment and medications for disabled people who do evacuate, like hearing aids, walkers, wheelchairs, or ventilators, Ramirez said. The prospect of rebuilding a home that had been built around an individual disability can also be daunting and expensive — particularly considering disabled workers typically earn significantly less than their able-bodied counterparts.

Mobility is the top issue in preparing disabled people for a disaster, said Evan LeVang, director of Butte County’s Disability Action Center. He recalled a horrifying phone call during the Camp Fire, during which a quadriplegic man was stuck in his second-floor apartment with a broken elevator. The caller said his goodbyes because he thought he was going to die.

“You could hear the propane tanks going off in the background,” LeVang said. “It was emotional.”

LeVang’s team managed to contact a first responder on the ground in the town of Paradise, and the man was saved — but there had been no system in place to make that rescue happen, other than the luck of getting through to that first responder.

There were plenty of “heroic acts” in Paradise during the fire, but LeVang said the disabled community shouldn’t have to solely rely on individual acts of heroism to survive.

For now, though, he said, the unfortunate reality is that disabled people may be left to do their own emergency planning.

‘Disabled people need to be part of the planning’

Some communities have taken steps to support disabled people, but there’s still a tremendous need for wider inclusion.

In 2007, the city of Oakland implemented a Functional Needs Annex to its Mass Care and Shelter plan, ensuring that disabled community members weren’t left out in an emergency. The annex is updated every few years to stay relevant to the community, and initial reports show the program helped identify more accessible shelters and more accessible alert notification systems. Kentucky has updated its disaster alerts systems by incorporating community training and committing to notifying disabled people in-person at the onset of a disaster. Arizona’s state health department purchased equipment to meet the needs of 1,000 disabled people in an emergency.

These are small and important steps, but “planning for this level of natural disasters hasn’t really begun,” Ramirez said. And until it does, the disabled community will continue to suffer — especially, Ramirez said, as climate change makes these incidents more frequent and more severe.

“I think it’s really important for us to ask [ourselves]: Can we really afford to not be doing this, knowing what we know now?” Ramirez asked.

Systemic change certainly needs to happen, but advocates like Ramirez and LeVang also want to encourage able-bodied people to show up for their disabled friends, family, neighbors, and loved ones whenever there’s an emergency.

“Always ask people if they need help,” he said, noting that not every disability is apparent. “Recognize that that’s going to be a transitional phase. There’s going to be need for support on the long term, a continuum of care.”

Ultimately, inclusion — on both a systemic and individual level — matters most.

“I really think it’s important that people with disabilities be at the table making some of the decisions that impact our lives,” Ramirez said, “because when it doesn’t happen … a lot of the work falls short.”

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In natural disasters, a disability can be a death sentence

Posted in alo, Everyone, FF, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, OXO, Paradise, Prepara, PUR, Radius, Ultima, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on In natural disasters, a disability can be a death sentence

Remember that $20 million ocean cleanup project? It isn’t working.

by AundreaLyzht Posted on December 26, 2018

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The $20 million effort to clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch has hit a bit of a snafu.

Organizers for The Ocean Cleanup, which launched the project in September, already had their work cut out for them — the floating garbage patch is made up of an estimated 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic, which has coalesced into a field of debris twice the size of Texas, weighing in at 88,000 tons (that’s the equivalent of 500 jumbo jets, yikes).

In order to clean up the massive garbage island, engineers at the non-government organization built a U-shaped barrier, which they hoped would act like a coastline, trapping the plastic floating in large swathes of the patch. The system can communicate its whereabouts at all times, allowing a support vessel to come by periodically to pick up all the junk in the device’s trunk, so to speak, for recycling.

The highly anticipated endeavor deployed out of San Francisco in September, when the floating device — known as System 001 or Wilson — was towed out to the island of rubbish located between California and Hawaii. The goal of The Ocean Cleanup is to remove up to 50 percent of plastics in the area within five years.

But so far, the giant garbage catcher is having issues holding on to plastic waste.

George Leonard, chief scientist of the Ocean Conservancy, a non-profit environmental advocacy says the organization’s goal is admirable, but can’t be the only solution to ocean plastics pollution. He said a solution must include a multi-pronged approach, including stopping plastic from reaching the ocean in the first place. Humans dump more than 8 million tons of trash into the ocean each year — the equivalent of one dump truck full of plastic every minute.

“The clock is ticking; we must confront this challenge before plastics overwhelm the ocean,” Leonard said.

The Ocean Cleanup Fonder Boyan Slat said the slow speed of the solar-powered 600-meter long barrier isn’t allowing it to scoop up plastic from the swirling trash island. Over the next few weeks, a crew of engineers will make tweaks to the system. Slat says it’s all part of the process when you take on a project this ambitious (Forbes called it “the world’s largest ocean cleanup”).

In a statement released on December 20, Slat said that he always expected it was going to be a bit of an ongoing experiment. “What we’re trying to do has never been done before,” he said. “For the beta phase of [the] technology, this is already a success.”

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Remember that $20 million ocean cleanup project? It isn’t working.

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Factory farms no longer have to report their air emissions. That’s dangerous for their neighbors.

by emdk7z06 Posted on December 25, 2018

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This story was originally published by Mother Jones and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Rosemary Partridge has lived in Sac County, Iowa, for 40 years. She has watched the state’s agricultural landscape change, with large-scale hog farms taking over nearly all the land surrounding her home. The stink of the neighboring farms is “unbearable,” making her nauseous whenever she is outside. She and her husband, once cattle and crop farmers who now plant their land with native grasses, suffer health problems — including her husband’s chronic obstructive pulmonary disease — that they worry are a result of the pollution their neighbors are pumping into the air.

Eleven hundred miles to the east, Lisa Inzerillo wonders how much longer she and her husband can tolerate living across the street from six chicken barns, one of the many concentrated animal farming operations (CAFOs) that make the area the poultry production epicenter of Maryland’s Delmarva peninsula. She says she suffers chronic allergies and her husband has had several bouts of bronchitis since the chicken farm moved in about three years ago. “At night, you see the dust from these fans,” she says. “That’s fecal matter, that’s feathers, god knows what else. And if you’re seeing it, you’re breathing it.”

The two families are united by the experience of living near large-scale livestock operations: unable to use their porch or land on certain days, keeping windows closed, and worrying constantly about long-term health consequences. Until recently, though, they could at least be assured that in the case of a major emission of hazardous waste, farm operators would be required by law to notify state and federal responders.

But recent actions by the GOP-controlled Congress and the Trump administration have exempted big livestock farms from reporting air emissions. The moves follow a decade-long push by the livestock industry for exemption and leave neighbors of large-scale operations in the dark about what they’re inhaling. If that weren’t enough, environmental advocates warn that the failure to monitor those emissions makes it even harder to assess the climate effects of large-scale agriculture.

Carrie Apfel, an attorney for Earthjustice who is leading a lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency by a coalition of environmental and animal-welfare organizations, says the exemption indicates “further denial of the impact that these [emissions] are having, whether it’s on climate or whether it’s on public health.”

The EPA declined a request for comment on the consequences of CAFO emissions for human health or the environment.

The two laws in question, the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA) and the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act (EPCRA), required farms to notify national and local emergency response committees, respectively, in the case of spills, leaks, or other discharge of hazardous waste. That included farm waste products like ammonia and hydrogen sulfide over a “reportable quantity” of 100 pounds. Most farms don’t meet that reporting standard, but large-scale livestock operations commonly do, according to researchers from the University of Iowa.

But in March, Congress added the Fair Agricultural Reporting Method (FARM) Act, which exempts farms from reporting air emissions under CERCLA, to its appropriations bill. And in November, Trump’s EPA issued proposed rules to exempt those same operations from air emissions reporting under the EPCRA. The agency’s public-comment period on the new rules ended December 14.

In response, a coalition of national and local advocacy groups — including Food & Water Watch, the Humane Society, Animal Legal Defense Fund, and North Carolina’s Rural Empowerment Association for Community Help — is suing the EPA. Advocates say these exemptions only serve the biggest farms and endanger community health and the environment. The EPA requested to stay the litigation for six months on November 29. The U.S. district court in Washington, D.C., has yet to rule on the motion.

These latest moves to exempt farms from reporting requirements follow a decade of push and pull between the livestock industry and community advocates. In 2008, at the tail end of the second Bush administration, the EPA issued its first EPCRA and CERCLA reporting exemption for farms. The exemption had been prompted by lobbying from the National Chicken Council, the National Turkey Federation, and the U.S. Poultry & Egg Association.

At the time, the EPA defended its decision by saying that “reports are unnecessary because, in most cases, a federal response is impractical and unlikely.” But the exemption was overturned by the court of appeals for the District of Columbia in April 2017, which said that “reports aren’t nearly as useless as the EPA makes them out to be.”

The livestock industry and its Republican supporters in Congress urged the EPA to challenge the court’s ruling. Several industry groups, including the U.S. Poultry & Egg Association, National Pork Producers Council, American Farm Bureau Federation, and National Cattlemen’s Beef Association met with EPA leaders in July 2018. But rather than challenge the court’s decision, the EPA turned to its own rule-making process to create a local reporting exemption that dovetailed with the FARM Act’s national reporting exemption.

The exemptions have ties to Big Ag, too. The FARM Act was introduced by Nebraska Senator Deb Fischer in February and supported by the livestock industry. Senator  Fischer received more than $230,000 from agribusiness PACs in 2017 and 2018.

These exemptions come as scientists, citizens, and even the EPA’s own researchers express concern about the environmental and human-health effects of emissions from large-scale livestock farms. A September 2017 report from the EPA’s Office of the Inspector General said that the agency had not found a reliable method for tracking emissions from animal farms or of ascertaining whether the farms comply with the Clean Air Act. A recent report from the World Resources Institute lists reducing air emissions from livestock farming as a major step in addressing climate change.

People who live near these large livestock operations have reason to worry that their health is at risk. The major chemicals being emitted are ammonia and hydrogen sulfide, which can interact with other air pollutants to reduce air quality. Animal farms are responsible for more than 70 percent of the ammonia emissions in the U.S. Chronic exposure to the levels of these chemicals that come from big farms can lead to a range of health problems, according to researchers from the University of Iowa, from headaches and nausea to respiratory damage. More than 100 farm workers have died after being exposed to high amounts of hydrogen sulfide in manure lagoons or elsewhere on large-scale farms.

In the absence of detailed federal monitoring, some communities rely on citizen scientists to monitor waterways and air for toxic emissions. In Iowa, Rosemary Partridge once tested local water for nitrates with Iowa’s IOWATER program, which trained residents to do basic water monitoring. But those local programs are also vulnerable — Iowa’s Department of Natural Resources ended IOWATER in 2016 after several years of underfunding.

Partridge says the stakes of not monitoring farm waste are clear. “[This] should be of monumental interest to everyone,” she says. “These are major greenhouse gases. People don’t even know about it,” she says, referring to other emissions from animal agriculture like methane.

Both Partridge and the Inzerillos in Maryland have weighed whether to stay on their family land or move away. Partridge says she and her husband decided against uprooting their lives. “We’re going to stay here until we can’t anymore,” she says. “We love our land. There’s no reason that an industry should drive us off our land.”

Lisa Inzerillo says she and her husband would like to leave but aren’t yet ready to walk away from land that once belonged to her grandparents. “It was a dream place for us,” she says. “But living long term there, I just don’t know.”

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Factory farms no longer have to report their air emissions. That’s dangerous for their neighbors.

Posted in alo, Citizen, Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Factory farms no longer have to report their air emissions. That’s dangerous for their neighbors.

Scott Pruitt never gave up on dream to debate climate science, EPA records show

by ModestoSpeckman Posted on December 24, 2018

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This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

In Scott Pruitt’s final weeks as the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, his political advisors were still considering ways to formally raise doubts about climate change science, agency records show.

The scandal-plagued Pruitt had long pushed for a public “red team, blue team” debate between mainstream scientists and the small minority of scientists who disagree with them about climate change and its causes. In late 2017, White House officials urged him to abandon the idea.

Yet according to emails obtained by the Guardian through a Freedom of Information Act request, as recently as mid-May 2018 aides were considering an alternative: The agency could ask for public comments on a 2009 legal finding that requires the U.S. government to regulate greenhouse gases.

If by that process the EPA could successfully rescind the conclusion that greenhouse gases endanger public health, the federal government would no longer have to regulate major sources of carbon pollution, including power plants.

According to a former senior administration official speaking on the condition of anonymity, the plan to ask for comments rather than hold a public debate was a compromise struck between the White House and the EPA. In July, however, Pruitt resigned, following dozens of stories about his ethical troubles.

The emails obtained by the Guardian offer a glimpse of how the Trump administration has struggled to settle on a position on climate change.

President Trump himself has repeatedly doubted overwhelming research that shows humans burning fossil fuels are emitting greenhouse gases that raise global temperatures and cause catastrophic environmental changes. A number of top officials have expressed similar feelings or questioned how bad climate change will be, and federal agencies are reversing climate change mitigation efforts for power plants and cars.

However, many Republicans and large energy companies urging Trump to rescind regulations do not want the EPA to debate the 2009 climate change finding, fearing a losing battle.

The Midwest power provider American Electric Power, for example, opposes reconsidering the finding. It has long relied on coal but is shifting its electricity mix.

“I don’t think the business community wants this at all,” said Paul Bledsoe, who was a climate change advisor to Bill Clinton. “They all came out against leaving [the Paris climate agreement]. They all have statements on their websites that they believe in climate science. The last thing they want is to get thrust into the middle of this.”

Pruitt’s most conservative supporters pushed him to reexamine the finding anyway, a move which would require a full scientific review and prompt massive legal battles.

It is not clear how serious the EPA considerations were or whether Pruitt’s staff intended to eventually propose a rollback. Attachments shared in emails between senior staff members included an “Endangerment ANPRM draft,” referring to an “advance notice of proposed rulemaking,” an early step in the regulatory process. Another email contained a version of talking points for a “Notice of Opportunity to Comment.”

Conservative groups, including the Competitive Enterprise Institute, had petitioned the EPA to reevaluate the endangerment finding. The EPA could have posted those petitions and asked for public comments. Or it could have solicited input as part of another climate-related rollback.

The documents referred to in the emails were not released, because the Freedom of Information Act does not require the government to release records that were part of ongoing deliberations. One subject line referenced an afternoon meeting.

The staffers exchanging the drafts, air official Mandy Gunasekara and the policy chief, Brittany Bolen, stayed at the EPA when Pruitt left. In a brief interview this month, Gunasekara said the agency’s “understanding of CO2 and greenhouse gases continues to evolve.” She declined to comment on the released emails. Spokespeople for the EPA and the White House did not respond to requests for comment.

Emails released to the Guardian also showed the EPA air chief, Bill Wehrum, planning in December to make an announcement about the “RTBT,” the notional “red team, blue team” debate.

This month, in a draft rule to ease standards for new coal plants, the EPA said it would accept comments on whether the agency had correctly interpreted the endangerment finding.

Climate advocates say the EPA should be transparent about its plans now.

“Americans deserve to know whether acting EPA head, Andrew Wheeler, nominated to be EPA administrator, disputes that carbon pollution endangers human health and the environment,” said John Walke, a senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

According to a peer-reviewed paper published last week in the journal Science, scientific evidence showing that greenhouse gases are dangerous to public health is even stronger than it was when the endangerment finding was established in 2009.

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Scott Pruitt never gave up on dream to debate climate science, EPA records show

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Mycelium Running – Paul Stamets

by Myrna Posted on December 24, 2018

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

Mycelium Running
How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World
Paul Stamets

Genre: Nature

Price: $1.99

Publish Date: October 1, 2005

Publisher: Potter/Ten Speed/Harmony/Rodale

Seller: Penguin Random House LLC


Mycelium Running is a manual for the mycological rescue of the planet. That’s right: growing more mushrooms may be the best thing we can do to save the environment, and in this groundbreaking text from mushroom expert Paul Stamets, you’ll find out how.   The basic science goes like this: Microscopic cells called “mycelium”–the fruit of which are mushrooms–recycle carbon, nitrogen, and other essential elements as they break down plant and animal debris in the creation of rich new soil. What Stamets has discovered is that we can capitalize on mycelium’s digestive power and target it to decompose toxic wastes and pollutants (mycoremediation), catch and reduce silt from streambeds and pathogens from agricultural watersheds (mycofiltration), control insect populations (mycopesticides), and generally enhance the health of our forests and gardens (mycoforestry and myco-gardening).   In this comprehensive guide, you’ll find chapters detailing each of these four exciting branches of what Stamets has coined “mycorestoration,” as well as chapters on the medicinal and nutritional properties of mushrooms, inoculation methods, log and stump culture, and species selection for various environmental purposes. Heavily referenced and beautifully illustrated, this book is destined to be a classic reference for bemushroomed generations to come. From the Trade Paperback edition.

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Mycelium Running – Paul Stamets

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As anti-plastic movements sweep the globe, change doesn’t always come easy

by DannyBurden771 Posted on December 23, 2018

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This story was originally published by the HuffPost and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Australia’s two largest supermarket chains made waves earlier this year when they announced plans to ban single-use plastic bags in stores across the country. Environmentalists hailed the move, which according to new figures released this month, may have saved more than 1.5 billion bags from going into overstuffed kitchen drawers or landfills in less than six months.

The National Retail Association, a nonprofit group that represents the grocery industry, said in early December the entire country has seen an astonishing 80 percent drop in single-use plastic bags since Coles and Woolworths implemented the bans in July. The two supermarkets, which together own more than 60 percent of the grocery market in Australia, have each said they’ve kept more than 700 million plastic bags out of circulation this year.

But despite the good news, the proposal didn’t happen without some controversy.

Angry shoppers prompted outbursts in checkout lines in several Coles stores and the supermarket giant backflipped just weeks after implementing its ban amid vehement complaints. Coles stores quickly said they would provide heavier-duty, reusable bags for free for the foreseeable future, after some media outlets dubbed the phenomenon “bag rage.”

The reversal, however, created an even bigger outcry among environmental groups who claimed the chain had only increased the plastic problem by making single-use bags more durable and resistant to breaking down. The supermarket quickly backflipped again, saying it would provide those reusable bags for free for a short time before charging customers for them once more.

Both supermarket chains now provide several types of heavy-duty plastic bags for purchase that shoppers can pay for at a cost of about 11 cents apiece, or upwards of several dollars for nicer versions that double as coolers or are made of jute.

Some have worried that the more durable bags have only replaced cheaper single-use plastic bags, but both supermarket chains said they had seen a large uptick in customers bringing in their own bags in the five-month period since the old bags were phased out.

Both Coles and Woolworths declined to say how many new reusable bags they’ve sold. The 1.5 billion figure shared by the NRA doesn’t take into account any multi-use plastic products that have been handed out in their place. But Coles said the retailer was “delighted to see customers grow more accustomed to bringing” bags from home, a sentiment echoed by Woolworths.

“The majority of our customers are forming new habits by bringing their own shopping bags into stores,” a Woolworths spokesperson told HuffPost in an email. “This is reflected at the check out where we are seeing less and less transactions from customers having to buy new bags.”

Greenpeace Australia, which was heavily critical of Coles during its double-backflip on the ban, said the end of single-use plastic sales was a “great step in the right direction.” It also noted that on top of the grocery bans, every state in Australia has its own ban on plastic bags or one about to go into effect, except New South Wales (where the country’s largest city, Sydney, lies).

Zoë Deans, a campaigner at the environmental group said Greenpeace knew “people were happy to bring reusable bags with them” after an initial adjustment period, but said the change can take time.

“Switching to reusable bags can take a bit of adjustment, and our recommendation is to keep some in your car, by your front door, in your desk — make sure they’re accessible so you don’t forget them,” Deans told HuffPost. “We’d love to see supermarkets encouraging and trusting consumers to do so.”

Single-use plastic bags are produced en masse, but difficult to recycle. Australia has a population of just 25 million, but Coles and Woolworths estimated before the ban the chains used some 3.2 billion bags apiece for customers’ groceries.

The products can easily wind up in waterways, and a 2018 report by the Ocean Conservancy found plastic grocery bags to be the fifth most common item gathered during environmental clean-ups. Stories of animals who gorged to death on plastic have regularly appeared in the news, including a whale found with more than 80 bags in its stomach.

Bans or restrictions on plastic bags are now in effect in more than 40 countries, according to The New York Times.

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There’s a greater risk of ‘domino effect’ with planet’s tipping points, study says

by SuzanneForwood Posted on December 22, 2018

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This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Policymakers have severely underestimated the risks of ecological tipping points, according to a study that shows 45 percent of all potential environmental collapses are interrelated and could amplify one another.

The authors said their paper, published in the journal Science, highlights how overstressed and overlapping natural systems are combining to throw up a growing number of unwelcome surprises.

“The risks are greater than assumed because the interactions are more dynamic,” said Juan Rocha of the Stockholm Resilience Center. “The important message is to recognize the wickedness of the problem that humanity faces.”

The study collated existing research on ecosystem transitions that can irreversibly tip to another state, such as coral reefs bleaching and being overrun by algae, forests becoming savannahs, and ice sheets melting into oceans. It then cross-referenced the 30 types of shift to examine the impacts they might have on one another and human society.

Only 19 percent were entirely isolated. Another 36 percent shared a common cause, but were not likely to interact. The remaining 45 percent had the potential to create either a one-way domino effect or mutually reinforcing feedbacks.

Among the latter pairings were Arctic ice sheets and boreal forests. When the former melt, there is less ice to reflect the sun’s heat so the temperature of the planet rises. This increases the risks of forest fires, which discharge carbon into the air that adds to the greenhouse effect, which melts more ice. Although geographically distant, each amplifies the other.

By contrast, a one-way domino-type impact is that between coral reefs and mangrove forests. When the former are destroyed, it weakens coastal defenses and exposes mangroves to storms and ocean surges.

The deforestation of the Amazon is responsible for multiple “cascading effects” — weakening rain systems, forests becoming savannah, and reduced water supplies for cities like São Paulo and crops in the foothills of the Andes. This, in turn, increases the pressure for more land clearance.

Until recently, the study of tipping points was controversial, but it is increasingly accepted as an explanation for climate changes that are happening with more speed and ferocity than earlier computer models predicted. The loss of coral reefs and Arctic sea ice may already be past the point of no return. There are signs the Antarctic is heading the same way faster than thought.

Co-author Garry Peterson said the tipping of the west Antarctic ice shelf was not on the radar of many scientists 10 years ago, but now there was overwhelming evidence of the risks — including losses of chunks of ice the size of New York — and some studies now suggest the tipping point may have already been passed by the southern ice sheet, which may now be releasing carbon into the atmosphere.

“We’re surprised at the rate of change in the Earth system. So much is happening at the same time and at a faster speed than we would have thought 20 years ago. That’s a real concern,” said Peterson. “We’re heading ever faster towards the edge of a cliff.”

The fourth most downloaded academic research of 2018 was the Hothouse Earth paper, which considered how tipping points could combine to push the global climate into an uninhabitable state.

The authors of the new paper say their work goes beyond climate studies by mapping a wider range of ecological stress points, such as biodiversity loss, agricultural expansion, urbanization, and soil erosion. It also focuses more on what is happening at the local level now, rather than projecting geo-planetary trends into the future.

“We’re looking at things that affect people in their daily lives. They’re things that are happening today,” said Peterson. “There is a positive message as it expands the range of options for action. It is not just at an international level. Mayors can also make a difference by addressing soil erosion, or putting in place social policies that place less stress on the environment, or building up natural coastal defenses.”

Rocha has spent 10 years building a database of tipping points, or “regime shifts” as he calls them. He urges policymakers to adopt a similar interdisciplinary approach so they can better grasp what is happening.

“We’re trying to connect the dots between different research communities,” said Rocha. “Governments also need to look more at interactions. They should stop compartmentalizing ministries like agriculture, fisheries, and international relations and try to manage environmental problems by embracing the diversity of causes and mechanisms underlying them. Policies need to match the scale of the problem.”

“It’s a little depressing knowing we are not on a trajectory to keep our ecosystem in a functional state,” Rocha continued, “but these connections are also a reason for hope; good management in one place can prevent severe environmental degradation elsewhere. Every action counts.”

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There’s a greater risk of ‘domino effect’ with planet’s tipping points, study says

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CBO dismisses costs of global warming, posing hurdle for climate legislation

by LynwoodKroll1 Posted on December 21, 2018

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This story was originally published by the HuffPost and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

In a baffling repudiation of the federal government’s own scientists, the Congressional Budget Office last week said that climate change poses little economic risk to the United States in the next decade.

The statement, which went so far as to highlight dubiously positive effects of rising global temperatures, poses a potential hurdle for future legislation to curb surging greenhouse gas emissions, experts said, and amounts to textbook climate change denial.

Buried on page 292 of a 316-page report titled “Options for Reducing the Deficit: 2019 to 2028,” the CBO said: “Many estimates suggest that the effect of climate change on the nation’s economic output, and hence on federal tax revenues, will probably be small over the next 30 years and larger, but still modest, in the following few decades.”

“That’s just completely false,” Gary Yohe, an environmental economist at Wesleyan University, said by phone Wednesday. “There are no references to these ‘many estimates,’ and the following part of the paragraph cherry-picks.”

The report — first noted on Twitter by investigative reporter David Sirota — goes on to tout positive effects like “fewer deaths from cold weather” and “improvements in agricultural productivity” as some of “the more certain effects of climate change on humans over the next several decades.”

The stunning remarks directly contradict the National Climate Assessment, which found that, by 2100, crop damage, lost labor, and extreme weather will cost the U.S. economy upward of $500 billion a year. That’s “more than the current gross domestic product of many U.S. states,” according to the report, drafted by researchers at 13 federal agencies.

In October the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change determined that unabated global warming beyond 2.3 degrees F above preindustrial levels would cause $54 trillion in damage and that the world is likely to hit that average temperature increase unless world governments halve emissions by 2030.

In a lengthy statement to HuffPost, the CBO referred to three of its own past reports, including one that said, “Even under scenarios in which significant climate change is assumed, the projected long-term effects on GDP would tend to be modest relative to underlying economic growth.”

“Although CBO has not undertaken a full analysis of the budgetary costs stemming from climate change, it has recently analyzed the potential costs of future hurricane damage caused by climate change and coastal development,” read an excerpt from one report highlighted in the statement. “All told, CBO projects that the increase in the amount of hurricane damage attributable to coastal development and climate change will probably be less than 0.05 percent of GDP in the 2040s.”

The agency’s report attributed differing climate predictions to “the imperfect understanding of physical processes and of many aspects of the interacting components (land, air, water, ice, and all forms of life) that make up the Earth’s climate system.”

In an as-yet-unpublished study shared with HuffPost, Yohe calculated that hurricane damage alone totaled $2.9 trillion from 1998 to 2018. Of that, he found $2.25 trillion (about $107 billion per year) could be attributed to climate change. That sum is up from $900 billion ($45 billion per year) from 1978 to 1997.

The CBO finding could delay efforts to pass long-overdue climate legislation in the next few years and provide ammunition to combat any such measures for lawmakers who have long denied the scientific realities of global warming on ideological grounds.

“Anybody writing legislation is going to have to understand that using budgetary effects is not necessarily going to get you a long way to getting passage,” said Mark Harkins, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Government Affairs Institute.

The CBO, established as Congress’ official budget scorekeeper in 1974, may be identifying a “difference between the impact on the budget and the economy,” said Stan Collender, a federal spending expert who runs the website The Budget Guy.

“If CBO said it, it’s serious and credible,” he said, adding that the assessment “decreases the political imperative” for sweeping climate policies like the Green New Deal that Representative-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (a Democrat from New York) and more than 40 other Democrats have vowed to champion in the next Congress.

But some say the CBO increasingly poses an obstacle to policies needed to curb global warming and halt worsening poverty, in the name of misplaced concerns about the national deficit. Among them is Stephanie Kelton, an economist at Stony Brook University and a proponent of modern monetary theory, the concept that, under a currency like the dollar, a government can print as much money as it wants without fear of going bankrupt.

When the CBO found that Republican tax cuts to the rich and corporations would inflate the national deficit, the GOP attacked the nonpartisan agency, and the White House claimed the CBO’s math “doesn’t add up.” While objecting to the GOP’s tax cut for the wealthy in an era of climate crisis, Kelton lauded the political will to challenge the traditional debt calculus.

“Everyone’s got to stop being so freaking deferential to the CBO,” she said by phone. “Republicans weren’t afraid to call them out and say their numbers were wrong. They dismissed it. I just think Democrats need to stand up when it comes time.”

Federal efforts to combat climate change should be met with the kind of seemingly unlimited bipartisan support that exists for military spending to defend the country from foreign threats, Kelton said, calling the CBO report “out of step with what the scientific community and others are telling us.”

“You’ve got to figure out a way around the CBO,” she said. “If they’re going to become an obstacle, you either have to go around or through or you remove the obstacle.”

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CBO dismisses costs of global warming, posing hurdle for climate legislation

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Climate change activists vow to step up protests around world

by DanGetty38 Posted on December 21, 2018

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This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Civil society groups have pledged growing international protests to drive rapid action on global warming after the U.N. climate summit in Poland.

The summit agreed on rules for implementing the 2015 Paris agreement, which aims to keep global warming as close to 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F) as possible, but it made little progress in increasing governments’ commitments to cut emissions. The world remains on track for 3 degrees C of warming, which scientists says will bring catastrophic extreme weather.

Many NGOs said national leaders at the summit had failed to address the urgency of climate change, which is already making heatwaves and storms more frequent and intense, harming millions of people.

May Boeve, the executive director of the 350.org climate change campaign group, said: “Hope now rests on the shoulders of the many people who are rising to take action: the inspiring children who started an unprecedented wave of strikes in schools to support a fossil-free future; the 1,000-plus institutions that committed to pull their money out of coal, oil, and gas, and the many communities worldwide who keep resisting fossil fuel development.”

The school strikes began in August as a solo protest by 15-year-old Greta Thunberg in Sweden. Addressing the summit in Poland, she said: “If children can get headlines all over the world just by not going to school, then imagine what we could all do together if we really wanted to.”

“You say you love your children above all else,” Thunberg continued, “and yet you are stealing their future in front of their very eyes. We have run out of excuses and we are running out of time. We have come here to let you know that change is coming, whether you like it or not. The real power belongs to the people.”

Members of the Extinction Rebellion (XR) movement said there was a rising tide of protest. “We pay tribute to activists, students, civil society, and the leaders of vulnerable countries who are rising up all over the world demanding more,” said Farhana Yamin, from XR U.K. “We need now to work together to build an emergency coalition focused squarely on tackling climate devastation.”

XR branches have been set up in 35 countries, organizers said. U.S. protesters aim to organize a day of action on January 26, 2019, and international activists are planning a global week of action from April 15, 2019. XR protests took place in more than a dozen towns across the U.K. over the weekend, from chalk-spraying a government building in Bristol to holding a “die-in” demonstration in Cambridge and handing out trees in Glasgow.

Patti Lynn, the executive director of the Corporate Accountability campaign group, said: “We will continue to build our movements at home and we will escalate global campaigns to hold big polluters accountable for their role in the climate crisis. The movement to demand climate justice has never been more united, organized, or determined. Our day is coming and we will win.”

Jennifer Morgan, the executive director of Greenpeace International, said: “People are fed up, outraged and are taking action to defend their homes and children and pushing their leaders to act. These people are the hope of our generation and governments must finally stand with them and give us all reasons for hope.”

In the U.S., Michael Brune, the head of the Sierra Club environmental campaign group, said: “The American people are joined by the rest of the world in signaling that they will not tolerate any more of Trump’s shameful blustering and inaction, and they have taken up the mantle of climate action while Trump abdicates any semblance of global leadership.” He said more than 100 U.S. cities had committed to 100 percent clean energy, covering 15 percent of the U.S. population.

Stephan Singer, a chief adviser at Climate Action Network, an umbrella group for 1,300 NGOs in more than 120 countries, pointed to the wide range of people taking action and demanding more, including youth and faith groups, indigenous peoples, health authorities, farmers, trade unions, city authorities, and some financial institutions. “All these actions and many more have to magnify and multiply in the next years,” he said.

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Climate change activists vow to step up protests around world

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130,000: The number of Puerto Ricans who never returned after Maria

by FranklyR14 Posted on December 20, 2018

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When Hurricane Maria smashed directly into Puerto Rico in September of last year, it took an enormous toll on the island. The near-peak-intensity Category 4 storm destroyed the island’s power grid, caused more than an estimated 100 billion dollars in damage, and resulted in the deaths of thousands of people.

Now we have the numbers to understand how much the storm and its widespread devastation sped up the pace of migration.

In the disarray that followed, there was a max exodus to the U.S. mainland. In Florida alone, 200,000 Puerto Ricans arrived within the first two months after the storm made landfall. Many Puerto Ricans eventually returned, but an estimated 130,000 people — almost 4 percent of the population — permanently left the island between July 2017 and July 2018, according to newly released United States Census Bureau data. That’s saying a lot: No state saw its population decrease more than 1 percent for that same period, and most saw increases.

“Puerto Rico has seen a steady decline in population over the last decade,” said Sandra Johnson, a statistician at the Census Bureau, in a press release. “Hurricane Maria in September of 2017 further impacted that loss, both before and during the recovery period.”

While the island’s population has been dwindling for several years, Maria made living in Puerto Rico much, much harder. According to Census data, Puerto Rico has lost an average of about 55,000 people a year over the last seven years. But last year’s exodus alone was double that number. And it’s no wonder people left: with the extended power outages, communication lapses, and infrastructure failures, a large chunk of the workforce was forced off the island. Others left simply in order to find some semblance of normalcy.

For now, about 3 million people remain in the Island of Enchantment, but unmitigated climate change will fuel even more humanitarian disasters — putting the island at risk of yet another mass exodus.

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130,000: The number of Puerto Ricans who never returned after Maria

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