Category Archives: Cascade

TIME magazine devoted an entire issue to climate change AGAIN

by Madelai90A Posted on September 13, 2019

Every story in this week’s edition of TIME is about the climate crisis — one of only five times the magazine has devoted an entire issue to a single topic. “2050: The Fight for Earth” comes 30 years after TIME’s first climate issue, when they put “Endangered Earth” on the cover instead of their usual Person of the Year in 1989.

The threat to our planet posed by climate change, the TIME editorial staff decided, was “the most important story of the year.” Unfortunately, life on Earth is still in pretty imminent danger — even more than they realized it was back in 1989 — but the stories and articles just released detail how much our ability to address the climate has grown since then. We read it, of course, so you don’t have to — but we still hope you do. It’s well worth your time.

I know, reading an entire magazine’s worth of news about our heating planet probably seems like a good way to ensure that you spend the rest of your day steeped in extreme existential dread. But reading these stories actually made me feel … hopeful? Or at least, like doom isn’t necessarily inevitable (which might be the closest a climate reporter gets to hope these days).

To be sure, “2050: The Fight for Earth” is not filled with light reading material. A long multimedia piece viscerally documents the deforestation occurring in the Amazon right now. The piece is unequivocal about just how high the stakes are: “The Amazon tipping point could also lead to a cascade of other potential climate tipping points,” writes journalist Matt Sandy. “Scientists believe that these changes combined could result in runaway global warming that humans would find impossible to reverse.”

As you read more stories, a clear trend emerges: We aren’t doing enough, whether that means stopping deforestation and ocean warming, reforming manufacturing practices, or adapting to the changes already set in motion.

You’re probably thinking, that doesn’t sound hopeful at all. But the clear-eyed presentation of the severity of the problem makes me believe TIME’s writers and editors when they put forward solutions and reasons for hope. They don’t say it’ll be easy — in fact, they acknowledge it will be quite hard — and so I trust them when they say it is possible to avert the worst outcomes of global warming.

So what could we be doing? The issue includes an overview of much-needed technological innovations that are on the horizon. Profiles of 15 women leading the climate movement illustrate that many people, especially those who will bear more of the consequences of a hotter planet, are already doing incredible work to avert those outcomes. Al Gore chimes in (it’s the TIME climate issue — did you really think Al Gore wouldn’t be in this thing?) with a similar message: We need to support the work of young, frontline activists.

It’s easy for journalists to inspire despair when writing about something as dire as climate change or simply fall into the trap of oversimplifying the issue and making unrealistic promises about what options are still on the table. But especially given the dearth of climate coverage we’ve seen in past years, a whole issue that realistically, honestly examines how we may be able to move forward feels like a win worth celebrating.

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TIME magazine devoted an entire issue to climate change AGAIN

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Broke Is the New Green

by xcvreed45184506 Posted on August 2, 2019

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Planet-friendly products are getting easier to find, but they’re still too expensive for most people to buy.

If you can’t afford fair trade coffee, organic cotton towels, and reclaimed wood tables, environmentalism can seem like a cause you can’t join. It’s good to shop your values, but the truth is, you can’t shop your way to sustainability. If you’re too broke to shop green, there’s a pretty good chance that you are already living that way.

Housing

Housing ties with transportation as Americans’ biggest direct carbon impacts, making fantasies of off-grid homesteading or net-zero efficiency hard to resist. At least, they would be if they weren’t so expensive.

As inspiring as these sorts of homes are, it takes 15 to 20 years for a net-zero house to offset the carbon emissions from its own construction. Which means that energy retrofits to an old house are not only much cheaper than moving to a new one, they are just as green.

Density, meaning both the size of your home or the number of people you squeeze into it, lowers per capita emissions more than almost any other housing change. Besides reduced per capita energy consumption, the benefits cascade into reduced transportation emissions and consumer waste.

In fact, the U.S. could achieve half of its climate targets if everyone got a roommate.

Transportation

Feel guilty because you can’t afford a Prius? Don’t be too hard on yourself. It’s true that about 80 percent of a vehicle’s emissions result from driving it rather than manufacturing it. But the exact math on whether it’s greener to buy an efficient new car is not clear cut.

Replacing your 1970s Buick that gets 8 mpg with a 1990s Honda might be greener than buying a new electric vehicle (unless it’s a recycled EV). Next time your old car is in the shop, you can feel extra virtuous.

Walking, biking, and taking public transportation are all greener than driving, no matter what kind of car you own.

Shopping Less

Four-fifths of the impacts that can be attributed to consumers are not direct impacts, but are secondary impacts, the environmental effects of producing the stuff we buy.

If your tight budget has you thinking twice before you head to the register, you are eliminating waste before it’s produced. That’s called precycling, and it’s the greenest consumer choice you can make.

When you really do need to buy stuff, a new organic cotton T-shirt is undoubtedly better than a new one made from conventional cotton. But life cycle analysis shows that by far the most important factor is the number of times consumers wear a garment before throwing it out. Buying second-hand is almost as good as not buying at all, because it extends the life of the product.

Cooking More

Forget fancy dinners at the latest organic, locavore restaurant. Even fast food is more expensive than cooking at home.

What you might not know is that cooking at home produces fewer greenhouse gases than eating the same meal at a restaurant. Plus, you have more influence over your own ingredient choices and food waste at home. Suddenly, making beans and rice starts to look like environmental activism.

Feature image courtesy of  1820796 from Pixabay 

 

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Broke Is the New Green

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Breathe easier: States are passing a buttload of clean-energy bills

by NevilleCaudill Posted on June 10, 2019

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Breathe easier: States are passing a buttload of clean-energy bills

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Best climate scenario is still too hot for many communities of color

by MilfordEdgell Posted on October 10, 2018

It’s no surprise that the U.N.’s new major climate report has a lot to say about heat. But as average global temperatures continue to rise, certain communities are more at risk of getting burned than others.

Extreme heat already kills more people in the United States than any other weather event, including hurricanes or flooding. And when it strikes, urban low-income and communities of color often pay the highest price.

To paint a picture of how serious this is, we’ll need to get into some numbers. Scientists say that if we want to prevent the most catastrophic effects of climate change, we have to stop the world from reaching 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by 2030. This is a hard number to hit, considering we’re currently on track to reach 3.4 Celsius by the end of the century. But even if we succeed, that moderate rate of warming would still lead to 38,000 more heat-related deaths each year compared to rates from the 1960s to 1990s.

Just how much heat mortality rates rise will depend on additional factors, including the vulnerability of specific populations, the built environment, and whether or not people have access to air conditioning. Older people, children, and people with pre-existing conditions are the most vulnerable to the heat. It can trigger asthma attacks and other complications as the body struggles to cool itself.

“You have more emergency room visits, more doctor visits, it’s just bad all around,” says Afif El-Hasan, a pediatrician and national spokesperson for the American Lung Association.

El-Hasan, who also serves on the Environmental Justice Advisory Group at the Southern California Air Quality Management District, says some of his low-income patients keep their windows open in lieu of air conditioning, inadvertently increasing their exposure to nearby sources of air pollution. Those pollutants can end up damaging their lungs, making them even more vulnerable to heat waves. The changing climate, coupled with socioeconomic inequities, trigger an avalanche of health risks, El-Hasan says. “Everything just cascades on top of each other and becomes a bigger problem than it might have otherwise been.”

Like real estate, heat vulnerability is very much about location. Not only are neighborhoods that border freeways more polluted, but they’re also actually hotter too. Plants and trees help cool the air, while dark pavement traps heat. As a result, places with more concrete and less green — often low-income, black and brown neighborhoods where there’s been a history of redlining or disinvestment — are several degrees warmer than their typically more affluent neighbors. It’s called the urban heat island effect, and in places like New York City, its consequences are stark. On average, 100 people die each year in the city — half of them African Americans, even though they only make up a quarter of the population.

“It’s becoming unlivable in urban cities,” says Cynthia Herrera, Environmental Policy and Advocacy Coordinator at WE ACT for Environmental Justice, a community-based organization in Harlem. Over the summer, her organization tracked the number of weather advisories in the hopes of gathering information to help the community adapt to a warming climate. They recorded four heat waves this past summer — a number that’s likely to rise but already feels overwhelming to residents.

“Even if we just stay the same and have four heat waves every summer for the next 10 years we’re not prepared,” she said.

Heat-related deaths are entirely preventable, and there are still ways for communities to adapt — like greening cities and making sure people have places to cool down. Kim Knowlton, senior scientist and deputy director at the National Resources Defence Council, has hope that the U.N. report will be a wake-up call.

“The science about this has to do with everyone,” Knowlton says. “I hope that people start to demand protections for themselves.”

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Best climate scenario is still too hot for many communities of color

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Carbon offsets for urban trees are on the horizon

by DelilaGreenup05 Posted on August 31, 2018

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

The evidence is in: Urban trees improve air and water quality, reduce energy costs, and improve human health, even as they offer the benefit of storing carbon. And in cities across the country, they are disappearing.

A recent paper by two U.S. Forest Service scientists reported that metropolitan areas in the U.S. are losing about 36 million trees each year. The paper, by David Nowak and Eric Greenfield, was an expansion of the same researchers’ 2012 study that found significant tree loss in 17 out of the 20 U.S. cities studied.

This arboreal decline is happening even in some areas that promote “million-tree” campaigns, Arbor Day plantings, and street-tree giveaways. Cash-strapped municipalities just can’t find enough green to maintain the green. Additionally, many cities are adjusting to population booms, and to temperature increases and drought due to climate change — both conditions that can be hard on trees (while increasing their value as sources of cooling and cleaner air). There’s also a growing recognition of the inequity of tree-canopy distribution in many cities, with lush cover in wealthy neighborhoods and far fewer trees in disadvantaged areas.

To find more funding for urban trees, some local governments, including Austin, Texas, and King County, Washington (where Seattle is located), are running pilot projects with a Seattle-based nonprofit called City Forest Credits (CFC). The nonprofit is developing a new approach: generating funding for city tree canopies from private companies (and individuals) that wish to offset their carbon emissions by buying credits for tree planting or preservation.

The vast majority of forest carbon credits worldwide have been issued for trees in tropical rainforests and other forests far from urban areas. A study released last year of the forest offsets in California’s cap-and-trade program found that they are effective at reducing emissions.

The new credits aim to quantify not only the carbon benefits of urban trees, but also rainfall interception, energy savings from cooling and heating effects, and air-quality benefits. CFC has no role in marketing or selling credits for specific projects, but maintains the standards (protocols) and credentialing for other organizations that sell them. A third-party firm, Ecofor, verifies compliance for tree-preservation projects. Tree-planting projects are either third-party verified, or, for smaller projects that cannot afford that, verified by CFC with peer review, using Google Earth and geocoded photos.

To be eligible for the credits, city tree projects must follow protocols created specifically for urban forests — rules governing such specifics as the location and duration of a project and how the carbon will be quantified.

The new credits “are specifically catered to the urban environment and the unique challenges and possibilities there, so they differ from traditional carbon credits,” said Ian Leahy, director of urban forestry programs at the nonprofit conservation group American Forests, and a member of the CFC protocol board.

“I think the work is innovative and potentially game-changing,” said Zach Baumer, climate program manager for the City of Austin. (Baumer also serves on the protocol board for CFC.) “To harness the market to create environmental benefits in cities is a great thing.”

Austin

The City of Austin aims to be carbon neutral in government operations by 2020. To get there, it has been reducing emissions through energy efficiency, renewable energy, alternative fuels, and hybrid and electric vehicles. But the city will still need offsets to claim neutrality.

If governments and businesses choose to purchase these credits, they could help fill that gap, and they can keep their dollars local. Austin is running two pilot projects this year with CFC: a riparian reforestation project near a creek and a tree-planting project on school-district land. The City of Austin is purchasing the credits for both projects from the nonprofit TreeFolks, via CFC.

The fact that credits can cover both stream-side plantings and trees on school property illustrates the complex task of developing a city credit — the protocols and quantification methods must work for the disparate tree species and stewardship strategies of an urban forest, in contrast to the more controlled setting of an industrial plantation.

CFC is eager to road-test the protocols in Austin, said its founder and executive director, Mark McPherson, a Seattle lawyer and businessperson who has dedicated pro bono hours throughout his career to city tree issues. “Even though you have a national drafting group that put the protocols together, that brings together lots of expertise, they’re still cooked in the lab, if you will,” he said. “They have to be tested in the real world.” The effort is being helped by McPherson’s older brother, E. Greg McPherson, a prominent scientist in the field of urban forestry who helped develop the protocols.

King County

Another piece of the puzzle is a pilot project in King County, where a new land conservation initiative (LCI) targets protection of 65,000 acres, spanning urban areas to farmland. “We really want to maintain this intact landscape — what I’d call our natural infrastructure — that is the foundation of the quality of life we have here,” said Charlie Governali, the land conservation projects manager at King County’s Department of Natural Resources & Parks.

King County has been working with CFC over the last year, piloting a carbon program to help protect about 1,500 acres of currently unprotected and threatened tree canopy in and around urban communities. The county will consider expansion to a full-blown program by the end of 2018. Governali said there are already businesses interested in buying credits.

One of the first commitments made through CFC is a planting project on a rare parcel of open space in the City of Shoreline, just north of Seattle, funded by Bank of America through American Forests.

According to a study by the nonprofit Forest Trends, in 2016, $662 million globally went toward the purchase of carbon offsets for the protection or restoration of forests and other natural landscapes. The usual model is that for-profit carbon project developers work with landowners to qualify large forests for credits. Doubters have questioned whether city trees offer enough scale to be worthwhile, McPherson noted. “Carbon developers are thinking they want to lock up 10,000 acres of forest land, so they don’t see the scale or the volume in what we’re doing.”

But Governali said that for King County, the carbon protocol offers something different — a way to protect a lot of urban green space cumulatively by selling credits over time, and for many small green spaces.

Urban credits will be expensive — many times what a commodity credit for carbon might cost. Urban land is not cheap, and urban trees are costly to plant and maintain compared to those on forest land.

However, urban trees offer more public benefits. “Compared to one additional tree left standing in a far-off industrial forest, each additional urban tree we protect has an outsized human impact,” argued Governali, because these trees bring cooling on hot days, better air quality, and even improved mental health. Finally, he noted, the sale of carbon credits from urban trees can help a municipality buy the underlying land and make it a public park, “a place for families to gather, relieve stress, get some exercise, relax, and for children to play and learn.”

At the outset, the work adds to already full urban-forest workloads and stretches budgets, at least until credit revenue from buyers can support the programs. “We’re good at planting trees, but documenting the work to create an official carbon credit is new for us,” said Austin’s Baumer. However, generating credits is one more way to stall or reverse tree loss at a time when people are just starting to understand how critical trees — whether elms, oaks, Douglas firs, or cedars — are to a city’s health and economy.

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Carbon offsets for urban trees are on the horizon

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Washington state residents resort to giant fans and throwing rocks at the smoke to get it to go away

by TraceeZerangue Posted on August 23, 2018

This week, breathing in Seattle air was the equivalent to smoking around a third of a pack of cigarettes a day, thanks to smoke from wildfires raging in Canada and the Cascades. On Monday, air quality in Spokane was the worst in the country, forcing people to don masks or stay inside. You know what they say: Desperate times call for desperate measures. Rather than wait for the interminable smoke to dissipate, some Washington residents elected to take matters into their own hands.

One Spokane Facebook event implored its nearly 2,000 attendees to: “Blow Spokane’s Smoke Back to Canada.” “To get rid of this smoke, we have to work together as a community,” the event’s description says. “After much deliberation and mathematical calculation, we have figured that it is absolutely possible for us to blow this smoke away with high powered fans.”

Thayne Jongeward

The haze may be thick and disorienting, but Spokanites know a couple thousand box fans can’t reverse the smoky effects of decades of forest mismanagement and rising temperatures. That didn’t stop them from taking credit, though, when the smoke finally started to lift on Thursday morning. “IT IS WORKING!!!” wrote one resident, adding: “KEEP PUFFING AND BLOWING, AND THANK YOU!!!”

Another Facebook event with over 43,000 attendees had a similar idea: Throw rocks at the smoke. “I strongly believe with enough rocks, we can make the smoke leave,” the event organizer wrote. Yet another page suggests positioning a giant fan over the state of Idaho. All of these satirical events promote ways to donate to B.C. food banks, animal shelters, and the Red Cross.

I asked my friend Alexandru Oarcea, who’s a hotshot firefighter with the U.S. Forest Service, about the box fan plan. He thought it was cute but pointed out a major flaw: “If, by some miracle they were able to create enough wind to start to push it to Canada, it would just suck the smoke from Oregon and California in behind it.”

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Washington state residents resort to giant fans and throwing rocks at the smoke to get it to go away

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Terrified by ‘hothouse Earth’? Don’t despair — do something.

by BerenicBabb Posted on August 7, 2018

A team of international researchers released what looks like a blueprint for catastrophe this week. On our current path, they warned, humanity might push the planet into an entirely new, hellish equilibrium, unseen since before the emergence of our species millions of years ago.

This doomsday scenario, which they dubbed “hothouse Earth,” could render large swaths of our planet uninhabitable. Their conclusion: “Humanity is now facing the need for critical decisions and actions that could influence our future for centuries, if not millennia.”

But that message got lost in the breathless media coverage over “hothouse Earth” — even though it’s the most important thing each one of us needs to hear at perhaps the most important turning point in our species’ history.

Yes, the prospect of runaway climate change is terrifying. But this dead world is not our destiny. It’s entirely avoidable. As the authors of the paper have argued in response to the coverage, implying otherwise is the same as giving up just as the fight gets tough.

Take a look at the leading sentences from some of the most widely-shared reports (and note the use of “will”):

CNN:

Scientists are warning that a domino effect will kick in if global temperatures rise more than 2°C above pre-industrial levels, leading to “hothouse” conditions and higher sea levels, making some areas on Earth uninhabitable.

The Guardian:

A domino-like cascade of melting ice, warming seas, shifting currents and dying forests could tilt the Earth into a “hothouse” state beyond which human efforts to reduce emissions will be increasingly futile.

This kind of framing is almost perfectly engineered to foster hopelessness. When coverage hinted at optimism, failure seemed built-in.

BBC:

Others are concerned that the authors’ faith in humanity to grasp the serious nature of the problem is misplaced. “Given the evidence of human history, this would seem a naive hope,” said Professor Chris Rapley, from University College London.

The paper paints a terrifying picture. It does a masterful job of compiling the evidence (some of which we’ve known for a long time) that our worst climate fears could come true and persist for millennia if Earth is just slightly more sensitive to greenhouse gases than we think. But that doesn’t change what we already know: We need a world that’s carbon neutral as quickly as possible.

With every year we wait — and our emissions continue to climb — this challenge becomes more and more difficult.

Seeing this, and seeing the still massive headwinds of state-sanctioned climate denial and the corrupting influence of fossil fuel money, a cynic might say: It’s too hard. Let’s just learn to adapt.

Well, the authors say, it will be existentially difficult to adapt to a world with runaway permafrost melt, global forest die-offs, rapid sea level rise, and supercharged extreme weather. These aren’t just tipping points. The authors call them tipping cascades. That kind of world will make the current version of Earth look like paradise.

But the bottom line is, we have no choice but to press on through this fear. This is our actual planet we’re talking about, the only place in the entire universe capable of supporting life as we know it.

The next decade will almost surely decide our fate. That should empower us. It means every act has meaning; we have the chance to save the world as we know it every single day. In this scenario we now find ourselves in, radical, disruptive climate action is the only course of action that makes sense.

To their credit, climate scientists of all stripes, including the paper’s authors, have been pushing back hard on the media’s framing of this research.

In a tweet, Diana Liverman, a climate scientist and co-author of the paper called out the media directly:

“Clearly people aren’t reading the paper we wrote where our point is exactly that Hothouse Earth is not our destiny and that social system feedbacks are starting to move us to the Stable Earth. But media goes for worst case and makes it sound certain.”

Liverman and the other authors anticipated a defeatist response and published a multi-page document of possible solutions which, when combined with other research on the most important actions people can take, gives a blueprint for hope, not despair.

In the paper, the authors sum this up into a single battle cry. To prevent a hothouse Earth, they say, we need “a coordinated, deliberate effort by human societies to manage our relationship with the rest of the Earth System.”

That sounds a lot like the message of a burgeoning global movement targeting the root causes of climate change. That scientists are increasingly comfortable with using language like this — not mincing words anymore — is nothing if not hopeful.

Building a world that works for everyone is exactly what we should refocus our efforts on doing when we read scientific studies that scare the hell out of us. As the researchers point out, there’s still time that we have to take advantage of. That’s why it’s so damn important to act boldly. Now.

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Terrified by ‘hothouse Earth’? Don’t despair — do something.

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A building El Niño in 2018 signals more extreme weather for 2019

by HarleyVest Posted on May 22, 2018

In case you couldn’t get enough extreme weather, the next 12 months or so could bring even more scorching temps, punishing droughts, and unstoppable wildfires.

It’s still early, but odds are quickly rising that another El Niño — the periodic warming of the tropical Pacific Ocean — could be forming. The latest official outlook from NOAA and Columbia University gives better-than-even odds of El Niño materializing by the end of this year, which could lead to a cascade of dangerous weather around the globe in 2019.

That’s a troubling development, especially when people worldwide are still suffering from the last El Niño, which ended two years ago.

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These early warnings come with a caveat: Predictions of El Niño at this time of year are notoriously fickle. If one comes, it’s impossible to know how strong it would be.

When it’s active, El Niño is often a catch-all that’s blamed for all sorts of wild weather, so it’s worth a quick science-based refresher of what we’re talking about here:

El Niño has amazingly far-reaching effects, spurring droughts in Africa and typhoons swirling toward China and Japan. It’s a normal, natural ocean phenomenon, but there’s emerging evidence that climate change is spurring more extreme El Niño-related events.

On average though, El Niño boosts global temperatures and redistributes weather patterns worldwide in a pretty predictable way. In fact, the Red Cross is starting to use its predictability to prevent humanitarian weather catastrophes before they happen.

All told, the the U.N. estimates the 2016 El Niño directly affected nearly 100 million people worldwide, not to mention causing permanent damage to the world’s coral reefs, a surge in carbon dioxide emissions from a global outbreak of forest fires, and the warmest year in recorded history.

In Ethiopia, it spawned one of the worst droughts in decades. More than 8.5 million Ethiopians continue to rely on emergency assistance, according to the UN. That includes some 1.3 million people — a majority of whom are children — who have been forced to migrate from their homes.

Initial estimates show that, if the building El Niño actually arrives, 2019 would stand a good chance at knocking off 2016 as the warmest year on record. With a strong El Niño, next year might even tiptoe across the 1.5 degree-Celsius mark — the first major milestone that locks in at least some of global warming’s worst impacts.

Recently, the United Kingdom’s Met Office — the U.K’s version of the National Weather Service — placed a 10-percent chance of the world passing the 1.5 degree Celsius target before 2022. That target was a key goal of the 2015 Paris climate agreement because a sharp upward spike in temperature that severe, if sustained, would be potentially catastrophic — causing, among other impacts, “fundamental changes in ocean chemistry” that could linger for millennia, according to a draft UN report due out later this year.

Another El Niño is bad news, but it has been inevitable that another one will happen eventually. Knowing exactly when the next one is coming will give those in harm’s way more time to prepare.

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A building El Niño in 2018 signals more extreme weather for 2019

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The United States will start taxing solar panel imports.

by Chester70Z Posted on January 23, 2018

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission granted the PennEast Pipeline its certificate of public convenience and necessity on Friday, which also allows the company to acquire land through eminent domain.

The proposed $1 billion pipeline would run nearly 120 miles from Pennsylvania to New Jersey and transport up to 1 billion cubic feet of natural gas a day. Its opponents say it would threaten the health and safety of nearby communities and endanger natural and historic resources. Proponents maintain that the pipeline is an economic boon that will lower energy costs for residents.

After getting the OK from FERC, the company moved up its estimated in-service date to 2019, with construction to begin this year. But it won’t necessarily be an easy road ahead. The pipeline still needs permits from the State of New Jersey, Army Corps of Engineers, and the Delaware River Basin Commission. And while Chris Christie was a big fan of the pipeline, newly elected Governor Phil Murphy ran a campaign promising a green agenda and has already voiced opposition.

Pipeline opponents are demonstrating this afternoon and taking the developers to court. “It’s just the beginning. New Jersey doesn’t need or want this damaging pipeline, and has the power to stop it when it faces a more stringent state review,” Tom Gilbert, campaign director of the New Jersey Conservation Foundation, said in a statement.

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The United States will start taxing solar panel imports.

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The United States could become the world’s biggest oil producer. It’s been a while.

by SheriMarlow Posted on January 22, 2018

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission granted the PennEast Pipeline its certificate of public convenience and necessity on Friday, which also allows the company to acquire land through eminent domain.

The proposed $1 billion pipeline would run nearly 120 miles from Pennsylvania to New Jersey and transport up to 1 billion cubic feet of natural gas a day. Its opponents say it would threaten the health and safety of nearby communities and endanger natural and historic resources. Proponents maintain that the pipeline is an economic boon that will lower energy costs for residents.

After getting the OK from FERC, the company moved up its estimated in-service date to 2019, with construction to begin this year. But it won’t necessarily be an easy road ahead. The pipeline still needs permits from the State of New Jersey, Army Corps of Engineers, and the Delaware River Basin Commission. And while Chris Christie was a big fan of the pipeline, newly elected Governor Phil Murphy ran a campaign promising a green agenda and has already voiced opposition.

Pipeline opponents are demonstrating this afternoon and taking the developers to court. “It’s just the beginning. New Jersey doesn’t need or want this damaging pipeline, and has the power to stop it when it faces a more stringent state review,” Tom Gilbert, campaign director of the New Jersey Conservation Foundation, said in a statement.

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The United States could become the world’s biggest oil producer. It’s been a while.

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