Category Archives: Everyone

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.

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

Posted in alo, Casio, Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on CBO dismisses costs of global warming, posing hurdle for climate legislation

Quiz: Which 2018 climate trend is here to stay?

by richardcruz5161985 Posted on December 18, 2018

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You know what’s really hot right now? Yeah, it’s the entire world.

We kid, we kid. OK, the world is still hurtling toward an apocalyptic level of global warming, but we also made some interesting environmental headway this year. Climate was, dare we say it, trendy in 2018. From high-profile politicians championing a “Green New Deal” to dockless e-scooters invading car-loving cities across the country, green awareness seemed to hit the mainstream in a big way.

So are we at a turning point in our climate conversation? Or is burgeoning awareness just another flash-in-the-pan fad we’ll all laugh/cry about in 2019?

We asked a few Gristers to look back at the year that was and come up with a list of all the green trends that may or may not last the test of time. Don’t be shy about adding your own hot take on each issue by answering our — wait for it — POLLS below. Yes, power to the people in 2018, y’all (another trend!).

But first, a reminder of all the crazy shiz that happened in 2018

A LOT of things went down this year (but not the global average temperature … because that went up), and it’s tough to keep them all straight.

Remember Scott Pruitt? How could you not? Yeah, that guy was around for the first half of the year in a BIG way. The first-class upgrades, $43,000 soundproof phone booth, and systematic dismantling of the Environmental Protection Agency he was in charge of kept our newsroom humming (and also in a constant state of low-grade shock.) Pruitt bounced from scandal to scandal to unemployed when he resigned in early July. He was replaced by Pruitt 2.0, the former coal lobbyist Andrew Wheeler.

Not to be outdone by the EPA, the U.S. Department of the Interior (responsible for the management and conservation of most federal lands) had its own drama. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke quickly took the reins from Pruitt as the most scandal-plagued member of President Donald Trump’s cabinet. Zinke was both the face of Trump’s environmental rollbacks and the subject of several federal inquiries. He seemed to like his ethics the same way Alex Trebek likes his Jeopardy responses: questionable. Was anyone genuinely surprised when he announced his resignation this December? Don’t let those $139,000 office doors hit you on the way out.

2018 also gut-punched us with the scary reality of climate change-related disasters. We saw catastrophic flooding in the Midwest, a hurricane the size of North Carolina hit North Carolina, and another hurricane pummel the Florida panhandle just before the swing state’s midterm election. Not to mention that the world was boiling hot, and that California experienced the Camp Fire, the worst wildfire in state history, killing 86 people.

It was just plain bonkers. We can basically hum 2018’s throwbacks to the tune of Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire”: MeToo telling truth to power, kids take charge with Zero Hour, campaign ads with climate change, toxic algae getting strange; carbon taxes still a no, Brazil elects Bolsonaro, big reports make things seem scary, Meghan Markle wed Prince Harry; refugees and separation, U.S. is a holdout nation, U.N. probably broke your heart, Trump tweets something not that smart, wildfire, deer ticks, this Swedish teen could have the fix, AG Xavier Becerra, the Colorado’s running dry.

Is it stuck in your head yet?

We’d give this year a solid 6 out of 10 and are setting our sights on the new year, which, with any luck, will be the year climate change gets a massive kick in the pants. But fear not! We’ll be here to help you out and hold your hand through the whole goddamn thing.


Take Our Poll

Are we all caught up now? Oh good. On to the trends vs. turning points of the past year.

The year people actually cared about big climate reports

It was a landmark year for climate reports. In the fall, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s dire special report downward revised its “oh shit” global warming threshold to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), and the Trump administration’s 4th National Climate Assessment predicted catastrophic costs to Americans. Unlike other times that scientists have warned us about climate change, people seemed to actually pay attention.

Newly elected U.S. House Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez led a sit-in in Representative Nancy Pelosi’s office to demand Dems prioritize climate action. Washington Post columnist Margaret Sullivan said the media should cover climate change like it’s “the only story that matters.” CNN released a video debunking climate denier claims (using clips of climate deniers denying on their own network).

I’ve got not-so-great news folks: If you thought the IPCC report was daunting, those same scientists are gearing up for three more reports in 2019: one on oceans, one on ice, and one on land — which pretty much covers all the parts of the world in the process of breaking because of our addiction to fossil fuels.

On the bright side (no, really), that gives plenty of opportunity for activists and political leaders to use those reports’ messages to push for rapid societal changes. But as 2019 brings us one year closer to the future we fear — will people care enough to do something? Or are our attention spans (and our time on Earth) simply limited?


Take Our Poll

Cities were invaded by dockless scooters

2018 was the year everyone ditched their dockless bikes for … dockless scooters. This summer, the Grist video team explained the dockless bikeshare boom and hinted at the scooter-shaped glimmer we noticed in all the bikeshare executives’ eyes. (The scooter section starts at the 3:52 mark.)

Over the past year, Ford bought the now-former bikeshare company Spin, which  completely pivoted to scooters. Uber and Lyft now both own scooter spinoffs. And the scooter company Bird hit 10 million rides in its first year of operation.

Many of these companies think scooters are more appealing than bikes. You don’t get sweaty, you can ride no matter what you’re wearing, and they might be less intimidating for non-cyclists, said Isaac Gross, a general manager at Lime, in an interview this summer. In cities where they’ve deployed scooters, Lime said it’s seeing higher bike ridership too.

Meanwhile, many cities — including Grist’s hometown of Seattle — still aren’t convinced that scooters are a good idea. Some residents in scooter-riddled cities have complained about the vehicles being left all over the place and view the scooters as vehicles of gentrification. In SoCal, people have reportedly tossed scooters into the ocean, burned them, and buried them.


Take Our Poll

Vegan options got so big, the meat industry got scared

It feels like 2018 was the year vegan protein substitutes kind of blew up. All of a sudden, plant-based faux-beef patties cropped up on the menus of fast food chains like McDonald’s, White Castle, and TGI Friday’s. Oat milk became the stealth seed juice du jour (mmmm seed juice), and dairy farms across the Northeast anxiously noted the shrinking cow’s-milk market.

Because this is America, some lawsuits were bound to break out. Both Big Meat and Big Milk — a most unholy union in any kosher household — showed up in court this year to challenge the viability of their newly threatening vegan competitors. (Watch our video below to find out more.)

We can’t wait to see what kind of vegan courtroom drama 2019 brings.


Take Our Poll

Everyone decided to sue fossil fuel companies

To reverse climate change, we have tried all kinds of techniques: protests, monkeywrenching, inventing new technologies, recycling, multinational conferences, more multinational conferences, and, of course, lawsuits. And in 2018, Americans took a slightly different approach — targeting the energy industry directly.

Ideally, you’d wanna sue the problem itself, but climate change doesn’t care if some judge holds it in contempt. In the past (and some of the present), suing over climate change has been about suing the government.

This year, however, the states of New York and Rhode Island, eight cities, and six counties sued fossil fuel firms for creating and hiding a problem that’s forcing local and state governments to build seawalls and fight forest fires. Even the crabbing industry joined in, suing more than 30 oil companies for contributing to seafood-depleting ocean temperatures.

But 2018 was also the year judges started throwing out these lawsuits. The reasons one judge gave go back to that initial problem of not being able to sue climate change itself. These lawsuits take aim at companies that have profited from fossil fuels, but they are hardly the only villains.

If everything goes the plaintiffs’ way in the appeals process, these lawsuits could bankrupt some of the biggest corporations in the world, but the history of oil suggests that dozens more would rise to meet the demand from the rest of us climate change profiteers.


Take Our Poll

We started taking the Green New Deal seriously

The hottest deal of 2018 is new and green. Get it? The Green New Deal is a comprehensive economic and environmental plan that would create thousands of jobs in clean energy, a big ol’ 100 percent renewable target, and a greener banking system. The Green New Deal basically gives a giant middle finger to people who say you can’t have both economic growth and environmental regulation, and it’s being championed by the pied piper of climate activists, Representative-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Some advocates of this moon-shot plan say the Green New Deal represents the “civil rights movement” of our generation. Since it started circulating a few months ago, the deal has quickly amassed political fans. So far, 36 members of Congress want the House to create a select committee charged with writing a bill, and activists say more are sure to join when the 116th Congress starts up in January. Watch out, world: 2019 may just be the year of the deal.


Take Our Poll

Teens took charge of the climate movement

If existential crises were ever in vogue, teens have taken the experience to a whole new level. In 2018, teen activists increasingly took the lead on issues like gun violence, sexual harassment, and — you guessed it — climate change. From 15-year-old Swedish badass Greta Thunberg, who just made waves at the U.N. climate talks in Poland, to Zero Hour founder Jamie Margolin, who helped lead a teen march on Washington, D.C., young people are fighting for the future.

It might seem like these kids are too young to be taking over, but admit it: climate change poses a pretty big roadblock to basking in the fun and purity of childhood. It’s gotten to the point where some teen activists are even skipping school to fight the good fight.

Sure, it’s not the first time kids have stepped up on climate change and other big issues, but the stakes are certainly higher than ever. The teens of today also have a unique vantage point: They’ve lived with the reality of climate change and its increasingly obvious effects for their whole lives, and they’re going to shoulder the worst of the consequences.


Take Our Poll
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Quiz: Which 2018 climate trend is here to stay?

Posted in alo, Casio, Everyone, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, Landmark, LG, Mop, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Quiz: Which 2018 climate trend is here to stay?

Delicious Zero Waste Snacks to Pack for Your Next Flight

by AFGCarin221 Posted on December 16, 2018

Everyone knows the struggle that is airplane food. It’s expensive, tastes strange and usually comes wrapped beyond belief in plastic and tinfoil. Not good if you’re aiming for zero waste!

Fortunately, with a little bit of advanced planning you can avoid all the disappointment (both gastric and environmental), and save a lot of money in the process. Here are some of our favorite make-ahead airplane snacks that also happen to be totally zero waste. Enjoy!

Crispy roasted chickpeas

How to make them:

Drain and rinse a can of chickpeas, recycle the can
Toss in a generous amount of olive oil and sea salt
Lay out in a?single layer on a baking sheet
Roast for 30 minutes at 450 degrees until crispy

How to store them for your flight:

Store in an airtight container
Bring a hankie for oily fingers!

Cinnamon baked apple chips

How to make them:

Thinly slice two apples of your choice
Line a baking sheet with parchment
Place apples in a single layer and sprinkle with cinnamon
Bake for an hour at 200 degrees, flip and bake another hour
Remove from the oven, recycle the parchment paper

How to store them for your flight:

Store loosely in a TSA-approved quart silicon baggie
Place on top of other items to avoid crushing them

Garlic hummus with veggies

How to make them:

Mix 1 can chickpeas, 1/4 cup lemon juice, 1/4 cup tahini,?2T olive oil
Recycle the can
Blend in food processor until smooth, scraping the sides
Cream further with 2-3T of water
Season to taste with minced garlic, cumin and paprika
Slice veggies of choice and dip to your heart’s content!

How to store?it for your flight:

Store?hummus in a TSA-approved quart silicone baggie
Keep veggies in an airtight reusable container

Caprese sticks

How to make them:

Arrange cherry tomatoes, basil leaves and vegan cheese on wood skewers
Sprinkle with sea salt and a drizzle of olive oil

How to store them?for your flight:

Store in an airtight container
Bring a reusable hankie for messy fingers

Sesame pepper?popcorn

How to make them:

Pop 1/4 cup of popcorn kernels on the stove
Toss in 2T melted unsalted butter (or olive oil, if vegan)
Dust with?2T toasted sesame seeds, 1t sea salt and 1/2t pepper

How to store it for your flight:

Store in a rigid airtight container
Keep in a cool, dry place

Related Stories:

9 Secrets of Healthy Eaters
7 Essential Items for Zero Waste Travel
10 Ways to Start Living Zero Waste

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

Original source:  

Delicious Zero Waste Snacks to Pack for Your Next Flight

Posted in alo, bigo, Everyone, FF, food processor, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, oven, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Delicious Zero Waste Snacks to Pack for Your Next Flight

To clean up space junk, some people grabbed a net and harpoon

by ShawnaTao064 Posted on December 16, 2018

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

Clyde Tombaugh spent much of his life peering at telescope data. He discovered Pluto in 1930, and he spent years poking around the outer solar system. But as the scientific community began to dream about launching a vehicle into the great beyond, he focused his gaze much closer to home.

At the time, the smaller stuff in our immediate space environment remained largely a mystery. People like Tombaugh worried whether orbiting gunk would make spaceflight that much harder. If they ever built a spaceship, would space litter pummel it irreparably?

As part of a 1950s Army project, Tombaugh tried to find out. But before he finished, the Soviets sent the world’s first object to orbit. When Sputnik first spun around Earth, in 1957, Tombaugh’s equipment caught it: a shiny sphere, just about two feet across. The fact that he could spot it meant that if dangerous debris had been orbiting, he likely would have found it, too. And he hadn’t. When he published his final report in 1959, Tombaugh concluded that rockets faced little risk of colliding with natural objects.

Humans have since sent thousands of rockets to space. In their cargo holds, they have stored satellites that help humans communicate, wage war, watch TV, and grok planetary processes. Sometimes, as Sputnik did not long after launch, these objects finish their useful lives, slip back into the surly bonds of Earth, and burn up in the atmosphere. There’s the glove that a Gemini astronaut let slip from the first spacewalk, and a spatula from a shuttle mission. Once, a tool bag escaped an ISS astronaut and floated around for eight months. Other times, however, junk remains in orbit long after it’s useful. A Chinese missile, for instance, smashed a Chinese satellite into thousands of pieces, some of which continue to circle and circle.

These pieces of trash could pose a version of the threat that Tombaugh had worried about: that they’ll get in the way of humans’ desire to send stuff to (and keep it in) space. Earth’s front porch is now littered with around 24,000 pieces of debris bigger than a large orange, and millions and millions of bits smaller than that. Meanwhile, the number of new satellites humans want to launch is on the rise. According to consulting company Euroconsult, around 7,000 smallsats may hop to orbit in the next decade. Elon Musk, though famous for missed deadlines, plans to launch the initial satellites in his space-internet megaconstellation in 2019, as does internet provider OneWeb.

Satellites in low Earth orbit are supposed to spiral back down, burning up in Earth’s atmosphere 25 years after they complete their missions. The process can happen naturally as their orbits decay over time. Alternately, these craft can point thrusters into space and willfully plunge into the atmosphere. But sometimes more aggressive measures are needed to clean up the junk circling overhead. Making sure satellites obey the 25-year guideline, and watching them closely in the meantime, has spawned a whole sector of creative solutions. Here are some of the latest experiments in de-junking space:

Grim Reapers

The satellite industry calls it “active debris removal,” but think of it as a space robot that’s out to kill. In June, scientists at Surrey Space Center and their partners dispatched a mission called RemoveDEBRIS from the International Space Station. Soon after, it deployed a net and captured a small CubeSat that the team had previously released. The net wrapped around the satellite, cocooning it and ending its life. RemoveDEBRIS will also test a harpoon on a dead satellite, and use a sail to then drag itself back down.

A company called Astroscale is pursuing a similar approach. “The best way to avoid a bunch of small pieces of debris that could harm large satellites is to remove large satellites that become small pieces of debris,” says Chris Blackerby, the company’s COO. Astroscale’s first mission, called ELSA-d, a cheery acronym that hides the ominous “End-of-Life Service” hidden within it, aims to show that a reaper-style space robot can find lost debris, match a dead satellite’s tumble, and dock.

Pushers

Traditionally, satellites have thrusters that push them to the orbits they need, keep them there, and then (assuming the gas gauge doesn’t read “empty”) send them shooting down to Earth when the time comes. But conventional chemical engines are way too heavy for small satellites, so lots of the little guys don’t really have propulsion systems — which can pose a space-junk problem if their orbits don’t wind down quickly. They need thrusters that are appropriately sized for smallsats.

“The use of propulsion is the beginning, middle, and end of a mission,” says Beau Jarvis, an exec at a propulsion company called PhaseFour. The PhaseFour system, which you will be able to plunk on your satellite, uses radio waves to turn gas into plasma, which shoots from the spacecraft, pushing it in the opposite direction.

Many similar gas pedals require expensive cathodes and anodes, but ones that don’t are easier to make en masse. Another engine-maker, Accion, also dispenses with the expensive parts: Its engines use a liquid salt that shoots from the craft. Zoom zoom.

Draggers

Not long ago, a distressed customer approached Roccor, a space manufacturer. “They had a satellite that was basically built and ready for launch,” says CEO Douglas Campbell. They had just one problem: Their de-orbit plan needed some work. So Roccor made them a new one, involving … space feathers.

At the end of a satellite’s life, two thin composite sheets — coiled tight like a tape measure during the rest of the mission — will pop from it, making the satellite resistant enough that it slips down and crosses the Kármán line that delineates Earth and space. The system weighs between around 1 and 4 kilograms (2.2 to 8.8 pounds), and is basically another way of doing a dragsail. “Low Earth orbit is beachfront property,” says Campbell, who plans to sell the “Rocfall” feathers so more satellites don’t become space junk. “Everyone wants to be there. We don’t want to ruin the environment.”

Stalkers

Two government groups in the U.S. keep abreast of what’s what in space, and help orbiters avoid collisions. NASA’s Orbital Debris Office deals with the minute, while the US Strategic Command tracks everything bigger than 10 centimeters (about 4 inches) and issues the “duck!” alerts to satellite operators. Last year, though, the Trump administration said it would turn some responsibility for space traffic management over to the Department of Commerce (although the details of how aren’t yet fully fleshed out). Why? Because satellites are increasingly commercial operations.

“In the past, the U.S. government got into ‘space situational awareness’ because it was primarily a military issue,” says Dan Ceperley, CEO of the private satellite-tracking company LeoLabs. It’s still a military issue — secret communications, spying, navigation — but it’s also morphed into an everyone-else issue. So the Department of Commerce and companies like LeoLabs will help shoulder some of the defense sector’s past burdens. LeoLabs has two radar systems, with plans for more, and they hope to give customers information about satellites’ whereabouts with more regularity than the government.

Beepers

Federal trackers traditionally find satellites using either radar or optical telescopes. But those devices don’t necessarily tell you whose object you’re pinging, or give you its position every hour of every day. You have to extrapolate an object’s orbit using physics, so there’s some fuzziness in the calculation of its position, and uncertainty in collision red-flags. But a scientist at the Aerospace Corporation, a federally funded research and development center, has a reasonable question. Why not put GPS transponders on new craft? Just like if you put one on your enemy’s car, you could know where it was, and what it was, all the time, no home radar required. Similarly, a Los Alamos project called ELROI proposes slapping laser-beaming “license plates” on orbiters so that they’re easier to detect and identify.

The metal bits and spent rocket stages already dirtying Earth orbit are unlikely to get license plates or GPS devices. They’ll continue to circle our planet like overhead reminders that our environmental contamination has expanded, like a growing gray cloud, beyond terra firma. But because there are so many clean-up artists, maybe it won’t be too late.

If we end up with too much trash, we won’t only make our desire to launch lots of little satellites untenably complicated. We could also, someday, make it impossible to send a rocket safely beyond Earth, just like Tombaugh and his cohort feared before anyone had even tried.

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To clean up space junk, some people grabbed a net and harpoon

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How cities can lead on climate change solutions

by Mari3383776606 Posted on December 11, 2018

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

This week, diplomats from about 130 countries are gathered in Katowice, Poland, for COP24, the latest in the annual series of climate change meetings convened under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. At the heart of the discussions this year is a grim report released in October by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — the Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 degrees C (SR1.5).

The product of more than 90 scientists working from thousands of peer-reviewed studies, SR1.5 laid out the catastrophic effects of exceeding 1.5 degrees C warming over the coming decades. Much of the global news coverage that followed the report’s release focused on a chilling projection in the form of a 12-year deadline the IPCC established to limit the most disastrous impacts of planetary warming. “It’s a line in the sand,” said Debra Roberts, a co-chair of Working Group II of SR1.5.

But the report wasn’t just a grave warning: It was also a roadmap to solutions. These solutions were organized around four areas, or systems — energy, land use and ecosystems, cities and infrastructure, and industry. And while urban issues comprise one of those four areas, actions in cities are integral to each system transformation. Put another way: There is no way to save the planet without serious changes in how city-dwellers live, work, and move. That’s a point stressed in this summary of the IPCC report aimed at urban policymakers, which was released at COP24. (I was one of the 21 co-authors of this report.) The necessary changes to limit warming must be made not only by national governments and the private sector, but also by city leaders and the residents of urban areas.

As a co-chair of the working group on impacts, Roberts led the world’s top climate scientists through the assessment, drafting, and approval process. A scientist herself, Roberts is the head of the Sustainable and Resilient City Initiatives Unit, eThekwini Municipality, Durban, South Africa. In other words, she is a rare climate expert who’s familiar with the scientific, diplomatic, and urban policy issues that this unparalleled global challenge represents.

CityLab asked Roberts to talk about the role city residents can play in delivering climate action, the critical importance of local political decisions, and the responsibility we all have to talk about — and act on — climate change with our neighbors.

Q. What should city residents, far removed from these diplomatic processes, take away from the current climate negotiations and SR1.5 in particular?

A. There are two really important sets of messages. First, we are probably facing a serious existential threat as a species. Along with that very serious message is a second key message about the need for rapid and ambitious action. We are probably living in the most important period of our species’ history. But when you face such a big call to action, such an historic moment, the individual can really feel lost.

What is profoundly important to me about the 1.5 report is that it points to lines of response to this big challenge that we face as a species by identifying four systems that need to go through rapid, unprecedented transformations: energy, land use and ecosystems, urban, and industry. While the public and private sectors certainly have input, the report also calls out that the individual has a role to play, too.

If you think about the energy system, the report tells me is that every element of action is important — all the way from the international to the national, to what I do in my life. Think about energy systems. I should be able to make choices about what energy I use in my home. Am I able to go off-grid, generate my own electricity, and if I generate excess, put it back in the grid? And if those choices aren’t there, then I need to reflect on why I don’t have those options. If I don’t have leadership which is making it easy for me to make these choices, then I need to change leadership. It’s a real call to action on personal choices, and that we need to be more cognizant of the leaders we put in place at all spheres of government.

Q. The possible impacts outlined in SR1.5 can make the individual feel irrelevant. But there’s this line that I found really striking: “Humans are at the center of global climate change: Their actions cause anthropogenic climate change, and social change is key to effectively respond to climate change.” How do you put the human back in a story that was once so focused on nation-states and climate regimes?

A. The scientific literature puts people back. That’s why those four systems transitions are so important. When it comes to urban systems, yes we can choose what kind of transport we use. When it comes to land systems, by changing our diets we change the pressures on land. When you think about industry, we are consumers. We are very powerful in terms of our ability to purchase, and we can be more critical of the things we choose to consume. Those four systems are in the real world. They define many of the ways we live our lives, and they give us the power to influence the outcome.

Every level of activity counts, all the way from changing your lightbulbs to the other end of the spectrum at the climate negotiations. So it’s empowering but it also involves a strong responsibility. The science is very clear: There is no physical or chemical law which will stop us from limiting warming to 1.5 degrees C. There is nothing that stands in our way. In fact, the key element is the political and societal will to make these changes.

Q. In the U.S. recently, there’s been talk about a “Green New Deal” for climate change. Huge, society-spanning transformation is needed, in other words. But when you look through SR1.5 at the things that every individual in a city can do, they’re things like riding a bike or line-drying laundry. It all sounds so far from this sweeping historical mission.

A. What you and I do, literally in our day-to-day boring lives, is an important element in saving the world. This is a global project. Everybody has to be in on it. You cannot leave a single person out. Before, as you indicated, the scientific debate tended to alienate the person on the street with formulas and graphs and international negotiations that no one really understood. This report is clear: Hanging out your laundry counts. This change is possible, and we can all contribute to that change.

Q. How do you encourage the tougher choices that are tied to larger, structural issues — what are frequently referred to in climate science as enabling conditions — that are often determined at the regional and national levels?

A. We need multi-level governance structures that enable us to make choices well beyond the laundry. When I go to work, I must be able to take a public transport system or access a shared car. And if I’m driving that car, that car must be electrified. Those are the important things. Those are choices I do not have control over. I have control over the laundry I put out on the line. I don’t have a choice around bigger systems of transport, energy production systems, and so on. But the onus is still on me in terms of how democracies work — in calls to action, at the voting booth, in talking to my neighbors and talking to local leadership about this.

That requires more of you than the hanging of the washing. Those enabling conditions — which involve changing policies, promoting effective governance, deployment of technologies in the right kinds of spaces — require us to be active.

Q. In a previous conversation I did here with Michael Ignatieff, we talked about the roles that neighbors must play in making cities work. It’s an interesting frame in the climate space, when people sometimes feel helpless: Have they spoken with their neighbors?

A. Everyone has to be in, but it’s hard for me to imagine how I’m in a process with somebody sitting in Thailand. I’ve got a much better sense of the community I live in. I can say to my neighbors, “OK, where are your solar geysers [a kind of solar water heater]?” That puts it at a scale that is about human action, and I think that’s what this report does. It humanizes not only the impacts — look at how we are already impacted, and how the poor and vulnerable are already disadvantaged — but it put the humans back in the solution space again.

Q. You work in a city and in the international diplomatic arena. What is the status of urban expertise when you’re starting to develop a report like this?

A. The IPCC started out largely focused on the natural and physical sciences. But as it became clear that you weren’t going to be able to solve climate change through some mysterious new technology, or entirely mitigate your way out of it because of lack of political ambition, the social sciences have become a more prominent voice in the process. We have drawn in as many practitioners as we could as authors of the report, who have the ability to assess knowledge so that the report speaks to things that are important in the real world.

I, as a local government practitioner, can pick up the report and can see they’ve looked at the literature on things that are important to me. If you look to chapter 4, you’ll see a huge amount of work on the feasibility assessment. That’s what I need to know as a practitioner. I need to know if an action is likely to work, and what its enabling conditions are. There’s a drive to use the science to fulfill the original IPCC mandate of providing objective information on the causes of climate change, but we’re also becoming clearer and smarter around the solutions. The moment you talk about solutions, people must be in that space.

Q.The document has a unique place in diplomatic history, but is also part of a developing story where practitioners and urban perspectives are gaining prominence. But of course, if nation-states don’t step up, cities won’t have the enabling conditions they need to take action. You operate at both the municipal and international levels. How do you think about that landscape?

A. The practitioner community is a particularly important community. What do I do in my day job as a local government practitioner? I speak to local leadership and local communities about these issues. But I am sometimes limited by national laws and policies, then I have to go talk to the national government. Local government can become a force for change. We’ve experienced that throughout our own work at the city level. Often cities will lead best. People don’t phone the president if their house washes away. They phone the mayor. We’re most aware of where the challenges lie. Local government has an important role to knock on national government’s door and say, “Those policies work; those do not,” and explain how you might enable us to do our work better.

To me, the nation-state is not a hallowed thing. It must be in service of the people. And where it disconnects, we as local government bear that responsibility for refocusing their attention and resources where they need to be. The report underscores the importance of local government. It’s really where a lot of this action is going to happen.

Q. Local government possesses expertise, and, depending on the tax structure where you are, some resources. But you’re really talking about local government as advocate. A bit like the individual with his or her neighbor, the city must advocate with the nation-state.

A. I suppose that’s what we’re saying as a principle. To the individual, deal with your neighbor. As a local government, the national government is a neighbor of sorts. We need to pop our heads over the wall and say, look, we need things to change. This is not a time for complacency.

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How cities can lead on climate change solutions

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Team Trump promoted coal at the U.N. climate talks. Young activists busted it up.

by RussellCoverdal Posted on December 10, 2018

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KATOWICE, POLAND – In the middle of the Trump administration’s event to promote fossil fuels at the United Nations climate conference on Monday, the audience erupted into laughter. The laughter was the beginning of a protest, organized by a group of youth and indigenous organizations from the United States, a raucous response to yet another attempt by the Trump administration to tout fossil-fuels.

“Keep it in the ground!” protestors shouted, crowding the stage and blocking the panel — led by Wells Griffith, President Trump’s energy adviser — from view.

“My government has betrayed me,” said Vic Barrett, a 19-year-old protestor who is also one of the plaintiffs in the landmark climate lawsuit against the federal government. “They are perpetuating the global climate crisis.”

While Griffith and the rest of the men on the panel smirked and shifted awkwardly, a succession of young activists gave speeches, then marched out of the room, shouting “Shame on you.”

This was one of numerous protests launched by young activists over the past week. Along with the official delegations from almost 200 countries, young people from all around the globe have converged on Katowice to share strategies and plans for action.

“The reason that we’re out here is to encourage other youth across the world to take action and really care,” said Michael Charles, a member of the Diné tribe and the Navajo Nation.

Their lobbying, cajoling, and colorful, enthusiastic protests are in stark contrast to the painfully slow process of international negotiation. In many rooms of the Katowice’s gigantic Spodek conference center, suited delegates are grappling over hundreds of sometimes minute disagreements in the text of the new Paris “rulebook.”

These heads of state, diplomats, and dignitaries are trying to hash out their differences over what has been called “Paris 2.0.” The rulebook that they develop will guide how governments implement the landmark Paris agreement. The problem is, they rarely agree. They’re divided on questions of who will pay for what and how to measure and track emissions reductions. And they are still trying to address the terrifying gap between rapidly increasing emissions and slowly advancing efforts to curb them.

But the young attendees at COP 24 keep pushing forward and learning from one another. “I come from a country that does not really acknowledge climate change,” a medical student from Egypt told Grist. “It’s not a priority for us. So it’s a very unique experience to see all the negotiations, all the youth activists, and learn about the efforts they are doing in their home countries.”

In Sweden, a teenager named Greta Thunberg is going on strike from school every Friday. In Australia, thousands of students are protesting government inaction on climate change and the construction of a new coal mine in central Queensland.

Here in Katowice, young people have to walk a fine line between either supporting or disrupting the delegations of their home country. Some activists are at COP24 to lobby negotiators on specific policies, like including human rights in the agreement and providing increased adaptation funding for developing countries.

But they’re aware government negotiators may not respond to their lobbying. “They do like to talk to us, and they are very open — but we don’t actually know how much they take our voices into consideration,” said João Henrique Alves Cerqueira, a young activist from Brazil.

Even when government negotiators are open and available, they are restrained by political pressures. “There’s an acknowledgement that what they do is not national policy,” said Eilidh Robb of U.K. Youth Climate Coalition, referring to negotiators from the U.K. “And they negotiate currently in the EU block – so to an extent we’re limited in what we can push, because they’re limited by an entire continent of voices and opinions.”

When working with delegations fails or falls short, young people turn to protest. Loudly. Almost every day in the hallways of Spodek, amid suited politicians and dignitaries, activists sing and chant their way to a better future. Last week, a group of young people presented the People’s Demands for Climate Justice, calling for an end to fossil-fuel extraction and an increase in financial support for developing countries. Other protests have pointed to the health consequences of climate change and criticized the role of big corporations in negotiations.

Poland’s security forces have cracked down on demonstrations, setting special rules banning spontaneous protests during the conference. Activism within the conference center is tightly controlled — some groups were told that even taking a photo with matching shirts was in violation of policy.

On Saturday, when thousands of conference attendees and environmentalists from across Poland and the rest of the continent staged a climate march in Katowice, they were met by heavily armed police officers in full riot gear. “What do we want? Climate justice! When do we want it? Now!” marchers chanted, as the officers paced the sidelines.

Meanwhile, inside the conference center, negotiators fought over whether to  “welcome” or “note” the recent, devastating IPCC report. When the U.S. and Russia (joined by Saudi Arabia and Kuwait) refused to “welcome” the report, the text was dropped entirely.

It felt like two different conferences — one old and one new, a generation with power and a generation struggling to take any action possible. “Wake up! Wake up!” marchers shouted, waving flags and banners. “It’s time to save our home.”

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Team Trump promoted coal at the U.N. climate talks. Young activists busted it up.

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Global carbon emissions are on the rise, but don’t let that dash your hopes

by ClaraAgosto Posted on December 6, 2018

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Carbon dioxide, that invisible, earth-warming gas you keep hearing about, is anticipated to hit an all-time high in 2018. Emissions are expected to rise by 2.7 percent this year, according to new research. That’s compared to a 1.6 percent rise in 2017 and a plateau between 2014 and 2016.

What’s behind this disturbing shift? A rise in coal usage, particularly in India and China, as well as the United States’ continued dependence on oil and gas. That’s according to two studies published Wednesday by the Global Carbon Project, a group of 100 scientists from around the world. Unveiled the same week as the United Nations climate change conference in Poland, the new research puts in sharp perspective just how far the world still needs to go to address carbon emissions, even with renewables booming.

“The growing global demand for energy is outpacing decarbonization for now,” Corinne Le Quéré, a French-Canadian climate scientist and lead author of the research, said in a statement. “This needs to change, and change quickly.”

There’s a lot a stake with this spike in emissions. Most recently, the United Nations IPCC climate report warned of a societal and ecological collapse if we don’t keep the world below 2 degrees C warming. When it comes down to it, climate change means the loss of lives — as emissions go up, we’ll see more intense heatwaves, hurricanes, and wildfires.

It all sounds pretty grim, but some of the same researchers behind these reports found things to be optimistic about. Le Quéré, along with former U.N. climate office head Christiana Figueres and other climate experts, authored an analysis in Nature of the Global Carbon Project’s findings. What we’ve achieved so far, they write, seemed “unimaginable a decade ago.” Here are the roses among the thorns:

  1. “If current trends continue, renewables will produce half of the world’s electricity by 2030.”

The future is renewable. This isn’t just a hopeful thought — it’s already poised to be. The cost of solar has dropped a whopping 80 percent in the past decade, and renewables are now cheaper than coal. We already have a lot of the systems in place to shift the world away from gas and oil. Worldwide, more than half of new capacity for generating electricity is renewables.

Developing countries are leading the way on this one; in many, renewables account for the majority of new power generation. Now, the world’s developed nations (the largest polluters) need to catch up.

  1. “Big batteries will spread beyond utilities.”

Renewables have some issues to work out — namely, how to keep delivering power even when clouds cover the sun and the wind stops blowing. The good news is that batteries offer a promising solution for beautiful, continuous power storage. They’ve certainly come a long way from the tiny, forgotten devices scattered about the catch-all drawer in your kitchen: Battery technology is quickly improving, and the price of battery storage is anticipated to halve by 2030.

Advances in battery technology have led to demand for electric vehicles, and many car manufacturers are shifting over. The transition to batteries will allow “developing regions to leapfrog the need for fossil-fuel power plants and conventional distribution grids, just as mobile phones overtook landlines,” according to the commentary.

  1. “Most U.S. citizens live in a jurisdiction that still supports the Paris goals.”

National governments in key countries like Brazil and the United States threaten to undermine global progress on climate change. The good news is that local governments and businesses are stepping up their game. After President Trump announced his intent to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement, thousands of city officials promised to stick with the country’s original goals.

As the Nature analysis notes, “globally, more than 9,000 cities and municipalities from 128 countries, representing 16 percent of the world’s population, have reiterated their commitment to the Paris Agreement.” On top of that, more than 6,000 companies around the world have committed to the climate agreement, and 1,400 companies have factored a price on carbon into their business plans.

As global leaders now meet in Poland to determine how to hold onto a quickly destabilizing world, the task at hand is clear — at least in the abstract. The commentary states that the transition to renewables is “an economic imperative and an ecological necessity” and calls upon leaders to “accelerate that momentum and keep everyone on board.”

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Trump wants to ramp up coal. Spain has found a way to quit it.

by yettavlamingh21 Posted on December 6, 2018

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

Villablino, Spain — When the shutters come down on the last 10 privately owned pits in northwest Spain’s once mighty coal industry later this month, there will be tears and trauma in the region where the country’s mining unions were born.

There is also a fragile hope that a better, cleaner future could follow — but a barely hidden warning that the despair that propelled Trump to power in the U.S. lurks in the wings if it does not.

Spain’s uneconomic coal industry has been killed by a pincer movement: cheaper imports from developing countries on one flank and falling renewable energy prices on the other, fanned by binding E.U. targets to reduce emissions and a dawning awareness of coal’s climate and other environmental costs.

Industry shutdowns are painful, especially in sectors like coal mining which go back generations. The risk is unemployment and social dislocation. But this one may play out differently: in a “just transition” deal — brokered by unions and a new leftwing government — that could have implications for other coal-producing countries, including the U.S.

Spain plans to support laid-off miners and their communities by plowing $285 million over a decade into compensation payouts, retraining for low-carbon jobs and environmental restoration work in pit communities. The aim is to ensure a safety net to catch those whose jobs will disappear as the economy shifts to a low-carbon one. Politicians and union officials say the deal will ensure both environmental and social protection as the economy shifts away from coal.

However, on the ground in Spain, there is suspicion about this promised new future from workers who have watched an industry, identity, and way of life dying around for them for some two decades. More than a thousand miners and contractors will be laid off around Christmas, a third of them in the northern region of Castilla y León, home to Villablino, and there is concern over whether new jobs will materialize.

“New jobs are a utopia in our country,” says Salvador Osario, a 47-year-old miner from Castilla y León who took early retirement after 20 years of digging coal. “The miners are alone. No one wants to support us. Not the left- or the right-wing parties. Even the unions are divided.”

Salvador Osario, 47, is a retired miner in the Castilla y León region of northern Spain.Arthur Neslen / HuffPost

The valleys of Castilla y León once thrummed to the sound of the coal industry, and relics from its retreat are everywhere. Pit shafts litter the hillsides and monuments to miners are sprinkled around town squares. Diner cafes have stickers of miners on the doors, and coal train statuettes outside.

Coal workers here have a brave history of fighting fascism during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. In the early 1960s, miners in Villablino formed Spain’s first clandestine union, the Confederacion Sindical de Comisiones Obreras (CCOO), which continued the fight against the dictator General Franco.

Spain’s coal industry employed more than 100,000 miners back then. That number had fallen to 45,000 by the late 1980s — nearly half of them in Castilla y León — and it continued to drop. More than 5,000 still worked in the northwest mines of Castilla y León, Asturias, Aragón, and Palencia at the start of this century. Next year, there will be none.

A monument to coal miners in Villablino, Spain.Arthur Neslen / HuffPost

The dying embers of Spain’s coal industry may leave a sad legacy for the miners, but coal needs to be phased out if we are to keep temperature increases below the levels at which we’ll see catastrophic climate change, climate scientists say. Coal emits more carbon dioxide than any other fossil fuel, as well as deadly toxins such as sulphur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, and particulate matter, which are responsible for more than 20,000 deaths each year in Europe alone.

“The deal is a way forward for many problems that will appear and we are committed to it,” said Mariano Sanz Lubeiro, CCOO’s confederal secretary, from his Madrid office.

This sentiment is echoed by Teresa Ribera, Spain’s minister for the ecological transition. “We have worked hard to restore trust in regions that have suffered a long restructuring process, negotiating and coming up with social protection measures that the unions could accept,” she told HuffPost. “Now we have to deliver. Climate ambition and social protection have to go hand in hand if we want to succeed.”

“The objective we have is that the miners will be offered a [green-collar] job. We will have to register all of them. Instead of one year, it may take one year and three months, but that is very much the plan,”Laura Martin-Murillo, a government negotiator, said.

As well as work in solar or wind energy, she also believes there will be jobs in biomass, making energy from organic matter such as wood pellets or agricultural waste. They are also thinking about labor-intensive work such as retrofitting buildings to be more environmentally friendly.

But miners on eligible contracts will have to live on social benefits until an environmental restoration plan kicks in next autumn, at the earliest. Those who claim the retirement offer will take home around $20,000 a year on average.

This community has been here before. When the last round of closures happened 20 years ago, the miners affected felt it was not a just transition.

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Anxiety is clear in the bleary eyes of Rolando Prieto Perez, 43, an electrician in the century-old La Escondida pit who has just come off a night shift when I meet him in the Villablino CCOO office.

“We’re suffering from depression,” he says wearily. “We have the blues. The situation is unpredictable and our futures look bleak. Sometimes we just feel confused.”

Rolando Prieto Perez, 43, a miner.Arthur Neslen / HuffPost

Prieto Perez is a few years too young to qualify for early retirement, and while the government is registering all miners for new jobs, these could arrive at any time between March 2019 and March 2020: months, if not years, after the mine closures.

Stuck between the beneficiaries of the post-war boom and the clean energy transition, Prieto Perez says he is part of “the unlucky generation.”

Mining is “part of the DNA of this region and its people,” says Sanz Lubeiro, CCOO’s confederal secretary. “That is why its loss has been so traumatic for the community.”

“If the transition is not done right,” he added, “we are preparing the ground for populism which blames climate action or technology or migrant workers,” he says.

There are signs that this may already be beginning in Villablino. “I don’t support this climate change idea,”Prieto Perez says. “I consider this news very manipulated. The government only speaks about global warming, but they want to close the mine for [economic] reasons.”

Omar Garcia Alvarez, a local miners leader, claims that if every miner were guaranteed a job in clean energy, there would be no problem with closing the mines. But “there is no ecological transition,” he says. “We don’t believe in the deal because we don’t trust the government.”

Miners Salvador Osario and Omar Garcia Alvarez look through a window in derelict mine.Arthur Neslen / HuffPost

He notes that the $285 million will have to be split between four regions over 10 years — giving Castilla y León only 6 million euros (or $6.8 million) a year with which to heal its wounds.

Just 39 years old, Garcia Alvarez was forced to quit his pit job last August by spinal injuries caused by his job. He now speaks with a sense of romanticism about the industry and the solidarity it produced.

“All people have a right to defend their jobs,” he says when asked what he thinks about U.S. coal miners, who are facing their own struggle. “I don’t agree with Donald Trump’s politics, but if he supports the miners, it is very good news for them.” Appalachia’s miners are widely thought to have helped Donald Trump win in Kentucky.

Yet Trump’s promises to bring back coal haven’t been fulfilled. “Across the USA you can see the devastation already caused in communities that have lost livelihoods that were dependent on [fossil fuel] corporations who made the decision to exit,” said Sharan Burrow, general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation, the world’s largest trade union confederation.

Burrow said Spain’s scheme should be a model for countries such as the U.S. to achieve their own just transition away from fossil fuels. “We need urgent climate ambition to save the planet — and humanity itself,” she said. “But if you don’t negotiate with working people, if plans are not transparent and communities don’t have trust in their futures, then resistance to climate action is absolutely a risk.”

Clean air and a climate-safe future mean little when you can’t put food on the table right now, says Brad Markell, the executive director of the industrial union council of AFL-CIO, the largest federation of unions in the U.S.

“There is no question that people in coal mining regions and around coal-fired generation plants thought that Trump was going to save them. He said he would and they thought it was worth taking a chance on him,” he said.

Markell would not comment on the gamble’s wisdom, despite mounting evidence that miners are now suffering from it. But he questioned whether a deal like Spain’s would translate to the more cutthroat U.S. labor market, where it could involve a 50 percent pay cut on a fossil fuel worker’s hourly rate. Starting pay in the U.S. solar sector can be as low as $15 an hour.

“It would be to everyone’s benefit if the new jobs created in the clean energy sector were high paying — and made available to people losing their jobs — but they won’t be, because in the USA, you’re on your own. That’s how things work here. We have a general deficit of working-class power and until we are able to reclaim that, it will be difficult to achieve economic justice.”

The Spanish government will this month outline how its just transition strategy will be rolled out nationally across all industries, including the car industry.

The issue is also taking center stage at the U.N. climate summit in Katowice which started this week, with Poland trumpeting a just transition for weaning countries off fossil fuels. Critics, however, say the aim is to mask international divisions over emissions-cutting obligations and targets, and divert attention from Poland’s own lack of climate ambition.

In Villablino, Eduardo Gonzalez Menazas, 60, a retired miner turned environmental activist, agrees that a just transition is “fundamental, very necessary, but at the moment too slow.”

He estimates only around 30 percent of his fellow miners believe that global warming is a problem and that saddens him, he said. In his spare time he plants trees around deserted mines. Menazas has noticed that the valley’s climate is already warming, with less snow and bird species such as the capercaillie nesting higher up.

“All people in Spain are responsible for this disaster,” he said.

“The energy transition has to be just because miners also need help from the government,” Gonzalez Menazas said. “In this area, there are no choices for people and that is also a problem. The transition has to be for everyone.”

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Trump wants to ramp up coal. Spain has found a way to quit it.

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Another 2 billion people are coming to dinner. How do we feed them?

by ColleenMXZ Posted on December 5, 2018

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How do we feed the world’s growing population without wrecking the earth? It’s a question that looks especially urgent given estimates that some 9.8 billion people will inhabit the planet by 2050, up from 7.6 billion now. Without improving techniques and technology, feeding all of them would require putting an area twice the size of India under plow and pasture while emitting as much carbon as 13,000 coal plants running nonstop for a year, according to a report published on Wednesday by the World Resources Institute.

The Washington D.C.-based think tank has been working on this report for the last six years, looking for a solution to our existential triple challenge: feed everyone and shrink agricultural emissions to keep the world from heating more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, all without clearing more land for farming. The WRI’s report lays out a way that everyone could get enough to eat in 2050, even as we turn farmland into forest and allow carbon-sucking trees to spread their leaves over an area larger than Australia.

The report recommends an all-of-the-above approach starting with reducing the size of harvests needed. By eating less meat, leveling off population growth, reducing waste, and phasing out biofuels, we could reduce the amount of additional food needed by half:

World Resources Institute

But diminishing demand for meat by getting more people to go vegan just isn’t enough.

“There’s a tendency in this field for people to treat dietary change as a magic asterisk where somehow we wave our hands and there will be an overwhelming reduction in meat eating,” said Tim Searchinger the Princeton professor who led the research on this report. “We wanted to focus on things that were realistic and achievable.”

If we also develop better seeds and animal breeds and use existing farm and pasture-land more intensively, we could shrink our agricultural footprint by 800 million hectares, an area bigger than Texas.

That’s important, because the world needs to cover at least one Texas with trees to keep temperatures below 1.5 degrees of warming. And, as the chart below shows, we’d have to do all of the above and more if we want to make agriculture do its part in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Pulling all this off seems daunting, but the researchers divided the action needed into a 22-item “menu” with discrete recommendations like eating less beef and lamb, and breeding crops that can withstand higher temperatures.

“Not everything on the menu is going to be for everyone,” said Richard Waite, a WRI researcher who worked on the study. “But there’s something for everyone whether you are just shopping for your family, or in charge of food procurement for a major company,”

The report also points out that very little of the $600 billion a year governments spend on agriculture goes toward the innovations that would give us a sustainable food system. Agricultural research and development gets just $50 billion a year — that’s including private funding and public support.

World Resources Institute

Most of the money for agriculture comes in the form of subsidies and price-supports that shelter farmers from changes in the industry. The report says if those funds were diverted to programs that reduce food waste, squeeze more food from the ground, and study how to improve soil health, the world could solve this three-headed monster of a problem.

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Another 2 billion people are coming to dinner. How do we feed them?

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