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Saving Chaco: As coronavirus consumes New Mexico, drilling threatens sacred land

by Stacey5834 Posted on May 19, 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic has overwhelmed tribal communities in New Mexico, where Native Americans comprise about 11 percent of the state’s population but a staggering 56 percent of its recorded COVID-19 cases. Last week the Navajo Nation, whose territory stretches across northern Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico, recorded the highest number of coronavirus cases per capita in the country, surpassing New York and New Jersey.

It is against this backdrop that the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) just moved forward with its decision to hold a series of meetings to gather public input on a controversial oil and gas drilling plan for the Greater Chaco Region, a culturally and spiritually significant area for the Pueblo and Navajo peoples of northwestern New Mexico. Of course, the ongoing pandemic means that the meetings were held virtually — but because less than half of rural tribal households have fixed broadband access, critics say that these meetings were “public” in name only.

The meetings were intended to allow the public to give feedback on a proposed amendment to the region’s land use plan, which will update guidelines on how the BLM manages oil and gas development (such as fracking leases) on public land, as well as lands on which the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) has authority to issue leases. The plan could ultimately add more than 3,000 new oil and gas wells to the area. Air quality monitoring has already found unusually high and hazardous levels of particulate matter pollution in one of the affected counties — the exact kind of pollution that has recently been linked to COVID-19 deaths, and may be exacerbated by new drilling.

Local tribes were heavily involved in the public input process until the novel coronavirus hit. Now they say that it’s shortsighted and reckless for the agency to plow ahead with the comment period. On Friday, during the second of the BLM’s five virtual public meetings, Richard Smith Sr., the tribal historic preservation officer for the Pueblo of Laguna, told the agency that the pueblo’s leadership couldn’t attend any of the meetings because it remains laser-focused on addressing the urgent health and safety needs of its community during the COVID-19 pandemic. In March the tribe requested that the BLM extend the deadline for the public comment period — and the situation has only grown more dire since then, Smith said.

“It is simply unconscionable to continue with the current schedule … and on behalf of the Pueblo of Laguna I urge you to immediately halt the current schedule and work with tribes and other stakeholders on developing a feasible timeline,” said Smith Sr.

Known as the Farmington Mancos-Gallup Draft Resource Management Plan Amendment (RMPA) and Environmental Impact Statement, the draft land use plan was publicly released for a 90-day public comment period on February 28. Depending on which version of the plan is ultimately adopted, the BLM projects that there could be as many as 3,101 new oil and gas wells within the planning area. A broad coalition of tribal leaders, environmental groups, conservationists, and politicians — including U.S. Senator Tom Udall and the entire New Mexico congressional delegation — have urged the BLM and BIA to postpone the public comment period, which is currently set to expire at the end of this month.

“The Greater Chaco Canyon Region is a sacred landscape that we owe a duty to protect. We take that duty seriously,” said J. Michael Chavarria, governor of the Santa Clara Pueblo and chairman of the All Pueblo Council of Governors, during a recent press call with other tribal, state, and federal leaders. He noted that the council, which represents the 20 governors of the sovereign Pueblo nations of New Mexico and Texas, was shocked and dismayed that federal agencies decided to move forward with the meetings in the midst of the pandemic. The last of the five meetings concluded on Monday morning.

Santa Clara Pueblo Gov. J. Michael Chavarria, right, during a forum at the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center in Albuquerque, N.M., on Sept. 20, 2016. AP Photo / Russell Contreras

“Some of our pueblos have been hit hard by the virus and we cannot participate in meaningful consultation, even though it’s a virtual RMPA meeting,” said Chavarria.

The BLM began the amendment process in 2014 to update its current plan, and it pledged to address tribal concerns such as air quality, climate change, and environmental justice. The Greater Chaco Coalition, which represents more than 200 tribal, environmental, and community groups working to protect the region from further drilling, says that the draft plan shows that the agency has not followed through on these promises — and instead will facilitate more fracking. (The BLM did not respond to Grist’s request for comment.) Once approved, the plan will determine how land in the region is managed for the next 10 to 15 years.

Considered the cultural heart of the American Southwest, the Greater Chaco Region is home to ancient Puebloan ruins, including Chaco Canyon, where Chacoans built complex, multi-story buildings and flourished more than a millennium ago. While the canyon itself — which is now part of the Chaco Culture National Historical Park and a UNESCO World Heritage Site — is protected from drilling, the surrounding region within the San Juan Basin is not permanently protected.

The basin’s Mancos Shale rock formation is a major reservoir of natural gas and oil that has attracted industry attention in the past decade as new technologies emerged for horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. If the BLM doesn’t extend the public comment period, then it’s clear the federal agencies are intent on fast-tracking oil and gas development despite community opposition, according to Paul F. Reed, a preservation archaeologist and Chaco scholar with Archaeology Southwest, a conservation-focused nonprofit based in Tucson, Arizona.

“With the price of oil way down currently because of the crisis, there’s absolutely no reason to rush this planning process and thrust a hasty decision on New Mexicans that puts thousands and thousands of historic, sacred sites at risk as well as the folks living now at ground zero,” said Reed during the public comment portion of the BLM’s virtual meeting on Friday.

In court over the last five years, tribal, environmental, and legal organizations have successfully challenged the BLM’s approval of fracking and oil and gas drilling in the Greater Chaco Region, citing the agency’s failure to address the cumulative impacts of fracking on human health, the environment, and the cultural landscape. The agency has already leased more than 90 percent of federally managed land in the basin for drilling, including areas that intersect historic Chacoan roads and villages. But now those organizations say that long-protected areas are newly at risk for drilling. This comes as the Trump administration has dramatically increased drilling leases on public lands across the American West and the Gulf of Mexico.

“Part of the problem is that this [public input process] is now taking place in the context of an unprecedented health pandemic,” said attorney Kyle J. Tisdel, the climate and energy program director at the Western Environmental Law Center, which has taken the BLM to court over the cumulative effects of drilling since 2015. “That pandemic obviously has also an outsized impact on the Navajo Nation.”

Daniel E. Tso, who represents eight local government subdivisions, or chapters, within the Navajo Nation Council, the nation’s governing body, said in a letter to BLM officials last month that the leasing of land parcels for new oil well development throughout New Mexico’s tribal communities has worsened air pollution. This has weakened the respiratory health of residents, he wrote, making them more vulnerable to severe cases of COVID-19. One chapter, Counselor, has seen particularly heavy development by the oil and gas industry, and its neighboring chapters of Ojo Encino and Torreón-Starlake could experience an increase in oil lease sales if the new land use plan goes into effect.

For residents in these rural areas, there’s no escaping the presence of the oil industry, according to Tso, who noted during the recent press call that residents who travel long distances for medical treatments such as dialysis must share the road with heavy industry-related traffic. Given residents’ concerns around increased air pollution, it’s crucial that the comment period be delayed, Tso said during the press call.

“Nature has no boundaries, air has no boundaries. We are all connected in this aspect,” said Tso. “The greater Chaco area really needs to be saved for the future.”

Despite their concerns about the prospect of increased drilling, these Navajo communities were largely excluded from the BLM’s virtual public meetings because they either don’t have reliable high-speed internet access or lack it altogether, according to Tso. A 2019 Federal Communications Commission report found that less than half of households (46.6 percent) on rural tribal lands have access to fixed broadband service. Beyond the technological hurdles, many residents primarily speak Navajo, so virtual meetings conducted by the BLM in English present an added obstacle, said Tisdel of the Western Environmental Law Center.

“The notion that they’re going to just hold these public events and put them on Zoom calls is really problematic because that is not how Navajo communities engage in dialogue or communication,” he said.

Federal agencies are required by law to engage the public via robust outreach. If residents can’t meaningfully participate, then the agencies aren’t fulfilling that statutory obligation, noted Tisdel. The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) of 1970 requires that federal agencies assess the environmental effects of proposed actions such as federal infrastructure projects, while the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 has requirements to ensure public participation.

“The point of NEPA and the reason you have the comment period is to allow the public to engage and allow those comments to help shape the decision-making process — to help shape the ultimate choices that are made,” said Tisdel. “The key community is not going to have an opportunity, at least at this point, to be able to shape what that decision looks like.”

Though the BLM did not respond to Grist’s request for comment, the agency’s state director for New Mexico, Tim Spisak, used Friday’s virtual public meeting to acknowledge community pushback and defend the agency’s decision to move forward.

“We understand that these conversations are often preferred to be done in person, but right now it is critical that we do our part to keep the American public and BLM and BIA employees healthy and safe,” said Spisak. “It is also important though that we maintain a capable and functioning government to the greatest extent possible during the COVID-19 outbreak.”

Rebecca Sobel, a senior climate and energy campaigner with the environmental conservation nonprofit WildEarth Guardians, said during the same meeting that she would have preferred to cede her comment time to a local community member, person of color, or elder. But that’s not possible in a virtual forum, without face-to-face engagement where she could easily see all the attendees, she told the BLM.

“These meetings were pretty broadly and uniformly called out for their racism and inequitable access for participation,” said Sobel. She then proceeded to blast Twisted Sister’s hit 1984 song “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” which kicked off the public comment portion of the meeting on a raucous note.

The ruins of Pueblo Bonito house at Chaco Culture National Historical Park on May 20, 2015. Mladen Antonov / AFP via Getty Images

Compromised by Exposure

Earlier this spring, Harvard’s school of public health released a study that found a connection between elevated COVID-19 death rates and air pollution, specifically elevated levels of the particulate matter known as PM 2.5. The research, while not yet peer-reviewed, does suggest that people in counties with higher levels of PM 2.5 are more likely to die from the new coronavirus. This is a major concern for Navajo community leaders who have been studying the health effects of pollution connected to oil drilling in the Navajo chapter of Counselor in New Mexico’s Sandoval County, as well as the surrounding area.

The San Juan Basin, which has more than 300 oil fields and 40,000 drilled wells, encompasses the New Mexico counties of San Juan, McKinley, Rio Arriba, and Sandoval, all of which have land that will be assessed for additional drilling as part of the resource management plan. All of those counties, with the exception of Rio Arriba, are facing COVID-19 outbreaks, according to Senator Udall.

Five years ago, after residents began voicing concerns about unusual respiratory and health symptoms, the Counselor chapter submitted a resolution to the Navajo Nation calling for a moratorium on oil drilling. The chapter also undertook a health impact assessment to examine how oil and gas drilling is affecting residents in the Greater Chaco Region. One part of the assessment focused on air monitoring in Counselor, a rural community of about 700 residents that is part of a tri-county area (that also includes the chapters of Ojo Encino and Torreon) where there’s been a marked increase in fracking.

Community members formed the Counselor Health Impact Assessment Committee, which collected air monitoring data in 2018. The results were analyzed by the Southwest Pennsylvania Environmental Health Project, a nonprofit public health organization that assists communities impacted by oil and gas development. The outdoor measurements show that Counselor has higher-than-average levels of PM 2.5 compared to similar communities across the country — communities that are also near oil and gas drilling.

The air monitors also measured hazardous spikes of PM 2.5 in the air outside homes and well pads. All of this was concerning before COVID-19 struck, given that residents who live near a source of air pollution are at greater risk for developing or worsening respiratory or cardiovascular diseases. But the recent Harvard findings clarified just how dangerous even small increases in exposure to this type of fine particulate matter could be for residents with any kind of respiratory illness during the COVID-19 pandemic, said Teresa Seamster, who co-authored the 2019 assessment and is a volunteer researcher and member of the Counselor Health Committee.

“This is why in the Navajo Nation so many people are getting seriously ill,” said Seamster. “If you’re exposed to oil and gas emissions, it could be very serious for you because you’re compromised.”

Protecting a history

U.S. Interior Secretary David Bernhardt visited Chaco Culture National Historical Park last year. Afterward he implemented a one-year deferral on oil leasing in a 10-mile buffer zone around the park. That was supposed to give the BLM time to work on the resource management plan and also give Congress the time to vote on a bill that would permanently protect federal land within that zone from future oil and gas leasing. Now, that time is running out: The deferral is set to expire this month.

Among U.S. parks, Chaco Canyon is among the most threatened by oil and gas development, according to a National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA) report. For tribal leaders, Chaco scholars, and environmental conservationists, protecting the region surrounding the park is a top priority because it is part of the cultural and spiritual landscape for the area’s tribes. The region is a vital part of the present identity of residents of Laguna Pueblo, who interact with the land through song, prayer, and pilgrimage, said Smith Sr.

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“Now more than ever, connections to our pueblo identities are a source of strength in difficult times,” he said during Friday’s BLM meeting. “We must ensure that these connections will not be irreparably severed, but maintained intact for future generations that will surely follow this crisis.”

The NPCA, which has also urged the Department of Interior to pause the public input process during the pandemic, notes in its report that oil and gas development has resulted in pollution from flares, leaking infrastructure, and “rampant” methane waste — particularly in the San Juan Basin, which has created a 2,500-square-mile methane cloud over the Four Corners region, including the area around Chaco Park.

“This plan to further industrialize these areas immediately surrounding the park with more drilling risks further scarring the landscape and destroying archeological sites, while the increase in carbon emissions will affect local air quality and the climate,” said Emily Wolf, New Mexico program coordinator at NPCA, in a statement to Grist.

Preserving archaeological sites requires a regional approach that preserves landscapes so that Pueblo communities don’t lose cultural and spiritual connections, said Reed — for example, when a historic corridor is breached by a pipeline or a power line. This means not just preserving individual sites, but also protecting the broader landscape from oil and gas development.

“The sites become these islands of protected bits of history and important spiritual landscapes for tribal folks, but then we get infill all around it with the industrial landscape, so the character, the feeling, and some of the other spiritual and intangible aspects get lost through time,” said Reed.

Improving management of this landscape to maximize protection of these sites requires the input of tribes, but with stay-at-home orders limiting mobility and a broad lack of internet access impeding communication, this is all but impossible, according to tribal, state, and federal leaders who have submitted communiqués to the BLM.

The greater Chaco landscape “is a uniquely special place that we can’t get back once destroyed,” said Senator Udall. “The short extension of this process out of respect and concern for the tribes, pueblos, and communities impacted is imperative.”

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Saving Chaco: As coronavirus consumes New Mexico, drilling threatens sacred land

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Plastic recycling is broken. So why does Big Plastic want $1 billion to fix it?

by Willis51Qiab Posted on May 11, 2020

As the coronavirus pandemic cripples the U.S. economy, corporate giants are turning to Congress for help. Polluting industries have been among the first in line: Congress has already bailed out airlines, and coal companies have snagged over $30 million in federal small-business loans. Big Plastic is next in line with what might seem a surprising request: $1 billion to help fix the country’s recycling.

A group of plastic industry and trade groups sent a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on April 16, asking Congress to allocate $1 billion to municipal and state recycling infrastructure in the next pandemic stimulus bill. It would be part of legislation known as the RECOVER Act, first introduced in Congress last November. Recycling sounds great, and has long been an environmental policy that almost everyone — Republicans and Democrats both — can get behind. To some environmentalists and advocates, however, the latest push is simply the plastic industry trying to get the federal government to clean up mountains of plastic waste in an attempt to burnish Big Plastic’s image.

“Plastic recycling has been a failure,” said Judith Enck, a former regional director for the Environmental Protection Agency and the founder of the organization Beyond Plastics. “And there’s no reason to try to spend federal tax dollars to try to prop up plastic recycling when it really hasn’t worked for the last 30 years anyway.”

Put simply, very little of your plastic recycling actually gets recycled. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, less than 10 percent of the plastic produced in the past four decades has been recycled; the rest has wound up in landfills or been incinerated. In 2017, the U.S. produced over 35 million tons of plastic, yet less than 3 million tons was made into new products.

Part of the problem is that some items are composed of different types of plastic and chemicals, making them difficult to melt down and process. Only plastics with a “1” or “2” symbol are commonly recycled, and even then, they are more often “downcycled” into different types of products. A container of laundry detergent or a plastic soda bottle might be used for a new carpet or outdoor decking, but rarely into a new bottle. And downcycling is one step closer to the landfill. “The logo of recycling is the arrow that goes around and around — but that’s never been the case with plastic,” said Enck.

Big plastic-producing companies also have little incentive to use recycled materials rather than virgin materials. Plastics are made from petroleum, and when the price of crude oil is as low as it is now, it costs more to manufacture goods from recycled polymers than from crude.

Some analysts say that the RECOVER Act doesn’t take on these larger issues. The act is aimed at the “curbside” aspect of recycling: funding city and state recycling collection, improving sorting at processing plants, and encouraging consumer education — teaching people what can (and cannot) go into recycling bins. (The legislation is also backed by the American Chemistry Council, which represents Dow Chemical and ExxonMobil, and has long fought against municipal plastic bag bans.)

There are some curbside problems with recycling. If plastic bags or containers covered with food waste get into recycling bins, they can contaminate other items and make sorting and reuse more difficult.

But Jonathan Krones, a professor of environmental studies at Boston College, said the real problem isn’t at the curb. It’s that “there aren’t robust, long-term resilient end markets for recycled material.” Even if cities manage to collect and sort more recycling, without markets all those perfectly processed plastics have nowhere to go.

For decades the U.S. solved part of the problem by selling hundreds of thousands of tons of used plastics to China. Then, in 2018, the Chinese government implemented its “National Sword” policy, forbidding the import of 24 types of waste in a campaign against foreign trash. The U.S. suddenly had lost the biggest market for its used plastics, and cities across the U.S. began burning recyclables or sending them to landfills. Some cities have stopped recycling plastic and paper altogether.

Piles of plastic and paper at a city recycling processing plant in Brooklyn, New York. Andrew Lichtenstein / Corbis / Getty Images

So why is Big Plastic pushing the RECOVER Act? Some argue that petroleum companies are trying to paper over the failures of plastic recycling. If consumers realized that only 10 percent of their plastics are ultimately recycled, they might push for bans on plastic bags and other single-use items, or more stringent restrictions on packaging. Keeping the focus on recycling can distract public attention from the piles of plastic waste clogging up our landfills and oceans. And a recent investigation by NPR and Frontline revealed that since the 1970s the plastics industry has backed recycling programs to buttress its public image.

“Had this bill been proposed 10 years ago, I think I would have said it was a good idea,” Krones said, referring to the RECOVER Act. “But what has been revealed after National Sword is that this is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a technology problem. It’s a consumption problem and a manufacturing problem.” He argues that any attempt to fix plastic recycling should come with constraints on the production of new materials — only manufacturing plastics that can be easily broken down and reused, for example, or mandating that companies include a certain percentage of recycled materials in their products.

There are other ways to deal with the plastic problem. In February, Senator Tom Udall of New Mexico, a Democrat, introduced the Break Free from Plastic Pollution Act, which would phase out many single-use plastic items like utensils and straws and require big companies to pay for recycling and composting products — what’s known as “extended producer responsibility.” Other countries have similar laws on the books: Germany has required companies to take responsibility for their own packaging since 1991, and it’s been credited with dramatically reducing waste.

For now, plastic use is on the rise. According to Meidl, the pandemic is bringing piles of takeout boxes and plastic bags to landfills, as cities ban reusable bags and enforce social distancing. She thinks that the RECOVER Act could be helpful, but that it needs to be coupled with other interventions.

“No matter how much government funding is allocated towards recycling efforts, there first needs to be a significant paradigm in human behavior,” she said. “Where plastic is viewed as a resource, not a waste.”

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Plastic recycling is broken. So why does Big Plastic want $1 billion to fix it?

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Plastic recycling is broken. Why does Big Plastic want cities to get $1 billion to fix it?

by NatashaPerivolar Posted on May 11, 2020

As the coronavirus pandemic cripples the U.S. economy, corporate giants are turning to Congress for help. Polluting industries have been among the first in line: Congress has already bailed out airlines, and coal companies have snagged over $30 million in federal small-business loans. Big Plastic is next in line with what might seem a surprising request: $1 billion to help fix the country’s recycling.

A group of plastic industry and trade groups sent a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on April 16, asking Congress to allocate $1 billion to municipal and state recycling infrastructure in the next pandemic stimulus bill. It would be part of legislation known as the RECOVER Act, first introduced in Congress last November. Recycling sounds great, and has long been an environmental policy that almost everyone — Republicans and Democrats both — can get behind. To some environmentalists and advocates, however, the latest push is simply the plastic industry trying to get the federal government to clean up mountains of plastic waste in an attempt to burnish Big Plastic’s image.

“Plastic recycling has been a failure,” said Judith Enck, a former regional director for the Environmental Protection Agency and the founder of the organization Beyond Plastics. “And there’s no reason to try to spend federal tax dollars to try to prop up plastic recycling when it really hasn’t worked for the last 30 years anyway.”

Put simply, very little of your plastic recycling actually gets recycled. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, less than 10 percent of the plastic produced in the past four decades has been recycled; the rest has wound up in landfills or been incinerated. In 2017, the U.S. produced over 35 million tons of plastic, yet less than 3 million tons was made into new products.

Part of the problem is that some items are composed of different types of plastic and chemicals, making them difficult to melt down and process. Only plastics with a “1” or “2” symbol are commonly recycled, and even then, they are more often “downcycled” into different types of products. A container of laundry detergent or a plastic soda bottle might be used for a new carpet or outdoor decking, but rarely into a new bottle. And downcycling is one step closer to the landfill. “The logo of recycling is the arrow that goes around and around — but that’s never been the case with plastic,” said Enck.

Big plastic-producing companies also have little incentive to use recycled materials rather than virgin materials. Plastics are made from petroleum, and when the price of crude oil is as low as it is now, it costs more to manufacture goods from recycled polymers than from crude.

Some analysts say that the RECOVER Act doesn’t take on these larger issues. The act is aimed at the “curbside” aspect of recycling: funding city and state recycling collection, improving sorting at processing plants, and encouraging consumer education — teaching people what can (and cannot) go into recycling bins. (The legislation is also backed by the American Chemistry Council, which represents Dow Chemical and ExxonMobil, and has long fought against municipal plastic bag bans.)

There are some curbside problems with recycling. If plastic bags or containers covered with food waste get into recycling bins, they can contaminate other items and make sorting and reuse more difficult.

But Jonathan Krones, a professor of environmental studies at Boston College, said the real problem isn’t at the curb. It’s that “there aren’t robust, long-term resilient end markets for recycled material.” Even if cities manage to collect and sort more recycling, without markets all those perfectly processed plastics have nowhere to go.

For decades the U.S. solved part of the problem by selling hundreds of thousands of tons of used plastics to China. Then, in 2018, the Chinese government implemented its “National Sword” policy, forbidding the import of 24 types of waste in a campaign against foreign trash. The U.S. suddenly had lost the biggest market for its used plastics, and cities across the U.S. began burning recyclables or sending them to landfills. Some cities have stopped recycling plastic and paper altogether.

Piles of plastic and paper at a city recycling processing plant in Brooklyn, New York. Andrew Lichtenstein / Corbis / Getty Images

So why is Big Plastic pushing the RECOVER Act? Some argue that petroleum companies are trying to paper over the failures of plastic recycling. If consumers realized that only 10 percent of their plastics are ultimately recycled, they might push for bans on plastic bags and other single-use items, or more stringent restrictions on packaging. Keeping the focus on recycling can distract public attention from the piles of plastic waste clogging up our landfills and oceans. And a recent investigation by NPR and Frontline revealed that since the 1970s the plastics industry has backed recycling programs to buttress its public image.

“Had this bill been proposed 10 years ago, I think I would have said it was a good idea,” Krones said, referring to the RECOVER Act. “But what has been revealed after National Sword is that this is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a technology problem. It’s a consumption problem and a manufacturing problem.” He argues that any attempt to fix plastic recycling should come with constraints on the production of new materials — only manufacturing plastics that can be easily broken down and reused, for example, or mandating that companies include a certain percentage of recycled materials in their products.

There are other ways to deal with the plastic problem. In February, Senator Tom Udall of New Mexico, a Democrat, introduced the Break Free from Plastic Pollution Act, which would phase out many single-use plastic items like utensils and straws and require big companies to pay for recycling and composting products — what’s known as “extended producer responsibility.” Other countries have similar laws on the books: Germany has required companies to take responsibility for their own packaging since 1991, and it’s been credited with dramatically reducing waste.

For now, plastic use is on the rise. According to Rachel Meidl, a fellow in energy and environment at Rice University, the pandemic is bringing piles of takeout boxes and plastic bags to landfills, as cities ban reusable bags and enforce social distancing. She thinks that the RECOVER Act could be helpful, but that it needs to be coupled with other interventions.

“No matter how much government funding is allocated towards recycling efforts, there first needs to be a significant paradigm in human behavior,” she said. “Where plastic is viewed as a resource, not a waste.”

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Plastic recycling is broken. Why does Big Plastic want cities to get $1 billion to fix it?

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Fire in Paradise: An American Tragedy – Alastair Gee & Dani Anguiano

by Myrna Posted on May 5, 2020

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

Fire in Paradise: An American Tragedy

Alastair Gee & Dani Anguiano

Genre: Nature

Price: $12.99

Publish Date: May 5, 2020

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Seller: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.


The harrowing story of the most destructive American wildfire in a century. There is no precedent in postwar American history for the destruction of the town of Paradise, California. On November 8, 2018, the community of 27,000 people was swallowed by the ferocious Camp Fire, which razed virtually every home and killed at least 85 people. The catastrophe seared the American imagination, taking the front page of every major national newspaper and top billing on the news networks. It displaced tens of thousands of people, yielding a refugee crisis that continues to unfold. Fire in Paradise is a dramatic and moving narrative of the disaster based on hundreds of in-depth interviews with residents, firefighters and police, and scientific experts. Alastair Gee and Dani Anguiano are California-based journalists who have reported on Paradise since the day the fire began. Together they reveal the heroics of the first responders, the miraculous escapes of those who got out of Paradise, and the horrors experienced by those who were trapped. Their accounts are intimate and unforgettable, including the local who left her home on foot as fire approached while her 82-year-old father stayed to battle it; the firefighter who drove into the heart of the inferno in his bulldozer; the police officer who switched on his body camera to record what he thought would be his final moments as the flames closed in; and the mother who, less than 12 hours after giving birth in the local hospital, thought she would die in the chaotic evacuation with her baby in her lap. Gee and Anguiano also explain the science of wildfires, write powerfully about the role of the power company PG&E in the blaze, and describe the poignant efforts to raise Paradise from the ruins. This is the story of a town at the forefront of a devastating global shift—of a remarkable landscape sucked ever drier of moisture and becoming inhospitable even to trees, now dying in their tens of millions and turning to kindling. It is also the story of a lost community, one that epitomized a provincial, affordable kind of Californian existence that is increasingly unattainable. It is, finally, a story of a new kind of fire behavior that firefighters have never witnessed before and barely know how to handle. What happened in Paradise was unprecedented in America. Yet according to climate scientists and fire experts, it will surely happen again.

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Fire in Paradise: An American Tragedy – Alastair Gee & Dani Anguiano

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Amazon fires employees who spoke out about coronavirus and climate change

by DennisTPWeivsg Posted on April 14, 2020

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Amazon fires employees who spoke out about coronavirus and climate change

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A jail built on a landfill is at the center of America’s coronavirus outbreak

by RoscoeKaur3 Posted on April 8, 2020

New York City is the epicenter of the country’s COVID-19 outbreak — and perhaps nowhere is that outbreak more dangerous than in the city’s most notorious jail complex: Rikers Island.

As of Tuesday morning, across the city 287 inmates (most of them at Rikers) and 406 corrections department staff members had already tested positive for COVID-19. On Sunday, the New York Times reported the first coronavirus death of a Rikers Island inmate. Recent news reports have indicated that inmates at Rikers lack even the luxury of basic precautions such as hand-washing (due to reported shortages of soap) and social distancing, which advocates and former inmates say is impossible to practice in the cramped facility.

Rikers Island, built on a landfill and surrounded by polluting infrastructure, has long suffered hazardous environmental conditions like extreme summer heat, flooding, and noxious pollution. These hazards exemplify the facility’s unpreparedness for a public health crisis like the novel coronavirus — and may have primed its inmates and staff to be especially vulnerable to the most severe effects of COVID-19.

Vidal Guzman remembers these hazards well. He was arrested twice as a teenager and spent a combined three years incarcerated on Rikers Island, awaiting trial.

“Living in Rikers means understanding not to drink the water, understanding how to be careful when rats and rodents are running around,” Guzman told Grist. “Having a rule to stay six feet away from each other for protection against the coronavirus — that is impossible in Rikers.”

Guzman, now 28, ultimately served five years in a state prison before going on to become the outreach and engagement organizer for Just Leadership USA, an organization that advocates for criminal justice reform. He recalls the “crazy rotten egg smell” that lingered at Rikers. The foul odor came from the landfill buried underneath the facility, which releases methane as the garbage decomposes over time and degrades the island’s air quality. The Poletti power plant, which was known as the biggest polluter in the Empire State before it closed in 2010, sat within a mile of Rikers when Guzman arrived there.

“Being around people who were young and with asthma — I saw them having problems with their breathing,” Guzman said. “There were individuals on Rikers who were saying things like, ‘I got asthma, I can’t breathe.’ And the elders are saying, ‘Well, you can’t breathe because the ground we’re standing on is built on landfill.’”

“That’s when I started to put things together,” Guzman remembered.

Vidal Guzman pictured on Rikers Island during a land use review process in 2019. Courtesy of Vidal Guzman.

More than 10,000 people are normally incarcerated on the island at any given time. Roughly 90 percent of them are people of color, and 67 percent have not been convicted of a crime and are simply awaiting trial. Though the inmate population is currently around 5,000, the crowded shared spaces present unique challenges for social distancing. Guzman described beds that are only two to three feet apart in the dormitory housing units, an arrangement that appears to persist even as the facility faces down a pandemic. According to the New York City Department of Correction website, officials are attempting to ensure there is an empty bed in between inmates “where possible.”

“We are following the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene guidance to identify any individuals with whom patients had close contact,” the department told Grist in an email. “The health and well-being of our personnel and people in custody is our top priority.”

Public defenders and criminal justice reform advocates have been demanding the release of all inmates with preexisting medical conditions, anyone jailed for parole violations, and the elderly. The government response has been painstakingly slow, advocates say. Hundreds of inmates are now being held in isolation or in quarantined groups after being exposed to someone who tested positive. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio recently boasted that 900 inmates had been released from the city jail system, bringing the inmate population to the lowest it has been since 1949.

Last Tuesday, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo quietly introduced changes to the state budget’s legislative text that would completely overhaul the Empire State’s recent criminal justice reform, which has only been in effect for three months. The new provisions, which the state legislature voted to pass days later, would expand pretrial detention powers. Advocates fear that the new changes could exacerbate the coronavirus outbreak.

“As someone who was incarcerated and had $25,000 bail at 16 years old, I am very disappointed,” Guzman told Grist. “The new reform would undermine the presumption of innocence, dramatically increase jail populations across the state, and exacerbate racial disparities.”

Governor Cuomo’s office did not respond to a request for comment before publication.

After seven years of incarceration, Guzman returned home at 24 and has been working and organizing with a campaign to close the Rikers Island facilities and improve conditions within the New York City jail system. In 2019, the New York City Council approved an ambitious $8 billion plan to shutter the jail complex by 2026. Queens Councilmember Costa Constantinides, who represents Rikers Island and is the chair of the City Council’s Environmental Protection Committee, has long advocated to transform the 413-acre island into a renewable energy hub. To make that vision a reality, he introduced the Renewable Rikers Act alongside other lawmakers last June.

The Renewable Rikers Act would hand over control of the island from the Department of Correction to the Department of Environmental Protection. It would also invest in studies to determine if the island could be home to a wastewater treatment plant and explore the feasibility of building renewable energy sources such as solar panels and battery storage facilities on the island.

For now, however, advocates and medical professionals are focused on getting the city’s thousands of inmates and jail staff through the pandemic alive.

“The most important part, being in a pandemic right now, is staying in touch with our family members, especially the black and brown communities who are feeling the most of this,” Guzman said. “I’m gonna tell you straight up: I’m in fear of what’s next.”

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Living Terrors – Michael T. Osterholm Phd., M.P.H. & John Schwartz

by Myrna Posted on March 13, 2020

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Living Terrors

What America Needs to Know to Survive the Coming Bioterrorist Catastrophe

Michael T. Osterholm Phd., M.P.H. & John Schwartz

Genre: Science & Nature

Price: $4.99

Publish Date: September 12, 2000

Publisher: Random House Publishing Group

Seller: Penguin Random House LLC


America is one killer organism away from a living nightmare that threatens all we hold dear…. A deadly cloud of powdered anthrax spores settles unnoticed over a crowded football stadium…. A school cafeteria lunch is infected with a drug-resistant strain of E. coli…. Thousands in a bustling shopping mall inhale a lethal mist of smallpox, turning each individual into a highly infectious agent of suffering and death…. Dr. Michael Osterholm knows all too well the horrifying scenarios he describes. In this eye-opening account, the nation’s leading expert on bioterrorism sounds a wake-up call to the terrifying threat of biological attack — and America’s startling lack of preparedness. He demonstrates the havoc these silent killers can wreak, exposes the startling ease with which they can be deployed, and asks probing questions about America’s ability to respond to such attacks. Are most doctors and emergency rooms able to diagnose correctly and treat anthrax, smallpox, and other potential tools in the bioterrorist’s arsenal? Is the government developing the appropriate vaccines and treatments? The answers are here in riveting detail — what America has and hasn’t done to prevent the coming bioterrorist catastrophe. Impeccably researched, grippingly told, Living Terrors presents the unsettling truth about the magnitude of the threat. And more important, it presents the ultimate insider’s prescription for change: what we must do as a nation to secure our freedom, our future, our lives.

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Living Terrors – Michael T. Osterholm Phd., M.P.H. & John Schwartz

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Coronavirus fallout could be the ‘nail in the coffin’ for smaller oil companies

by CEQLionel770 Posted on March 13, 2020

At the State of the Union in February, President Trump boasted that his administration’s deregulatory agenda had made the U.S. “energy independent.” It was a dubious claim at the time, but recent events stemming from the outbreak of the novel coronavirus have shown it to be even more of a ruse.

This month oil prices plummeted about 25 percent and settled around $35 per barrel — the biggest slide in nearly 30 years. The slip started with reduced demand for oil in China and elsewhere due to the economic fallout of COVID-19. Then it accelerated dramatically this week, after Russia refused to sign onto a proposal from Saudi Arabia and other major oil producers to cut production in response to lower overall energy demand. With demand sagging and a sustained glut in the supply, the stage was set for prices to plummet.

The crash demonstrates the interconnected nature of the global oil market. The U.S. is now the largest oil producer in the world, but it still imports roughly 9 million barrels of petroleum per day. The cost and availability of oil is therefore still very much dependent on market activity elsewhere. In a globalized world, the U.S. economy cannot escape the effects of a global pandemic, geopolitical upheaval, and the subsequent plunge in oil prices.

With prices cratering, oil and gas market analysts expect a slate of bankruptcies, job cuts, and slashes in expenditures across the globe — and especially in the supposedly “independent” U.S. This could well result in operators idling or abandoning wells, which can have detrimental effects on the environment. Unplugged wells leak methane, a potent greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change, and can contaminate groundwater.

“If this price war continues for a year or more, it can really be the nail in the coffin for many companies,” said Audun Martinsen, head of oilfield service research at Rystad Energy, an energy consulting group based in Norway. Martinsen projected that oil and gas companies worldwide will scale back capital and operational expenses by $100 billion in 2020 and that the shale industry in the U.S. would bear the brunt of the economic effects. About half of the 10,900 wells planned for 2020 might not be dug at all, he said.

While there are climate benefits that come with decreased fossil fuel extraction, environmental groups fear that oil and gas producers will also respond to this week’s crash by simply pausing production at many wells for months or years until it becomes profitable to pump again — or abandoning them altogether, leaving taxpayers to pay for cleanup costs.

A recent investigation by the Los Angeles Times and the Center for Public Integrity found that in California alone about 35,000 wells are already in “idle” status. About half of them have not produced oil and gas in more than a decade. Companies are required to post bonds to ensure the state has money to plug disused wells and clean up abandoned oilfields, but the investigation found that operators had only posted $110 million in bonds — even though it would cost about $6 billion to fully remediate the sites.

A similar analysis by the Center for Western Priorities, a Colorado-based environmental group, found that it would cost about $6.1 billion to clean up all producible oil and gas wells on federal lands, but companies had only ponied up $162 million — less than 2 percent of the projected cost. The more operators that close up shop during this price shock, the higher the risk that they will walk away from their cleanup responsibilities and leave the federal government holding the bag.

That shortfall might ultimately become the responsibility of state and federal governments. At the same time, lower oil prices could also affect state budgets. For instance, in Wyoming, a $5 per barrel drop in oil prices results in a $70 million decrease in revenue for the state annually. State lawmakers there are already dealing with a $150 million deficit over the next two years, and that’s without taking this week’s price drop into consideration.

Major oil and gas companies like Exxon and Chevron are likely to weather prolonged low prices without serious consequence. So will midsize operators with private equity backing. But small, family-owned businesses will struggle to stay afloat, Martinsen said.

That’s because the coronavirus-fueled price decline this week comes on the heels of sustained low prices over the last few years. In 2014, crude oil prices dropped from about $110 per barrel to less than $60 per barrel. In an attempt to force the U.S. to decrease production, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) — a cartel of 13 oil exporters including Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Venezuela — refused to cut production, pushing prices down further. By the time OPEC agreed to scale back production in 2016, prices had dropped below $40 per barrel.

But the damage was already done. The low prices between 2014 and 2016 put dozens of shale drillers out of business.

“That was basically a bloodbath,” said Martinsen. “Big service companies were laying off big time and many remaining [companies] went under Chapter 11 [bankruptcy].”

U.S. oil production has continued to balloon since 2016, pushing prices down further. According to Haynes and Boone, a corporate law firm, nearly 200 oil and gas producers have filed for bankruptcies since 2015. As a result, many shale drillers facing this week’s drop in prices are already in a financially precarious situation.

Whether prices rebound again largely depends on whether OPEC and Russia can reach an agreement on cutting production, Martinsen said. Those efforts are further complicated by the spread of COVID-19. The two parties are scheduled to meet again in June, but Martinsen said “it is likely that they will not come to an agreement” then.

“It seems to be a challenging time ahead,” said Martinsen. “It’s all about trying to seek shelter — and trying to recover some of that potential loss that we’ll see in the future.”

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Report: Utilities are less likely to replace lead pipes in low-income communities of color

by BerryOberle Posted on March 12, 2020

Aging water infrastructure needs constant attention and investment to ensure safety for everyone — especially if the U.S. wants to avoid another Flint water crisis. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, water utility companies should invest more than $300 billion over the next two decades to renew and improve their networks of service lines and underground pipes, many of which contain lead. In part this is because the health effects of lead exposure are so severe: Even low levels can cause irreversible neurological damage.

Eliminating lead pipes across the country is the ultimate goal, but the standard practice of many utilities makes this exceptionally difficult. Utilities generally consider pipes on private property as belonging to customers — so they often won’t use government or utility money to replace them. Instead, they’ll opt to replace only the portion of the system on public property, unless homeowners volunteer to pay for service line replacements on their lots. If property owners fail to opt in, the lead service line is only partially replaced — and this ultimately provides limited or no long-term decrease in exposure risks. In fact, it can actually increase the possibility of lead seeping into drinking water in the short term.

As a result of this approach, low-income communities of color can see much spottier replacement rates in their neighborhoods — in large part because property owners in these areas are unwilling or simply unable to front the significant costs required to achieve a full replacement of service lines.

“If a program primarily benefits those with money, you’re going to have an environmental justice problem,” said Tom Neltner, chemicals policy director with the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF). “We need to make sure all residents, without regard to how much money they make or the color of their skin, benefit from these rules designed to protect people and protect public health.”

A new report from the EDF and American University’s Center for Environmental Policy bears this out. Researchers analyzed more than 3,400 lead service line replacements in Washington, D.C., that occurred between 2009 and 2018. During this 10-year period, the local water utility only covered the cost of replacing lead service lines on public property, requiring customers to pay for the remainder of the service occurring on private property.

After cross-examining the city’s neighborhood demographics and the participation rate of those who chose to front service costs, researchers discovered vast disparities between predominantly low-income African American households and wealthier white households. The city’s Ward 3, for instance, where the median household income is $107,499 and a large majority of residents don’t identify as black or African American, had the highest rate of customer-initiated lead service line replacements. Meanwhile, Wards 7 and 8, both predominantly low-income black neighborhoods, had the lowest rates of service replacements.

Clayton Aldern / Grist

“Washington D.C. was very aggressive in a good way in making it easy for residents to participate,” said Neltner. “But the numbers showed us results of the unintended consequence — where people with money participated in the program and those without, didn’t.”

The analysis also highlights that the Trump administration’s recent proposed revisions to the Lead and Copper Rule would amplify the financial burden on low-income communities of color by continuing the existing replacement paradigm, where utilities are only responsible for paying for lead pipe replacements on public property.

“We work closely with utilities across the country, and what they need is to find a way to move out of this paradigm that residents are fully responsible for paying to replace on private property,” Neltner said. “I want them to look and say: ‘We need to do this not only for public health benefit, but also because of environmental justice concerns.’”

As of today, Madison, Wisconsin, and Lansing, Michigan, are the only major cities ahead of the curve, having successfully removed all of their aging lead service lines. It wasn’t easy for Madison, but after court hearings and public battles, officials eventually launched an ambitious program in 2000 to replace every single lead service pipe across the city. Lansing, Michigan, followed suit and removed its last lead water service line in 2016. After what happened in Flint, Michigan, many other cities are also beginning to move more quickly towards the same goal of eliminating lead-based pipes.

Last year, Washington, D.C., passed a new law that bans partial lead service line replacements during infrastructure projects and emergency repairs — meaning property owners no longer have to shoulder the costs in these cases. The policy also amends the previous regulations by providing financial support to homeowners who didn’t get a chance to replace their pipes under the old policy.

“It’s going to take a while, but we need every opportunity we can get to fully replace these lines,” said Neltner. “Once you realize that lead pipes are a significant source of health risk to children and adults, you then realize you need to get them out of the ground.”

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Should Biden and Sanders steal Elizabeth Warren’s climate plans?

by HNYCorinne Posted on March 6, 2020

Elizabeth Warren dropped out of the 2020 presidential race on Thursday morning, 390 days after officially announcing her run. Several months ago, the senator from Massachusetts was widely regarded as a frontrunner with momentum to spare. But her support started to waver in the lead-up to the first contests in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada. Ultimately, she never placed higher than third in any of the state caucuses and primaries she competed in.

Warren’s slogan, “I have a plan for that,” is an apt description of her biggest contribution to the presidential race — especially when it comes to climate policy. Over the course of her campaign, she released more than a dozen proposals to address climate change — more plans than any other candidate. Warren left no stone unturned in her quest to come up with an answer to what is arguably the biggest threat facing the nation.

Her plans offered solutions to problems as big as warming oceans and as small as inaccessible national parks. She had a plan to green the military (think zero-emissions vehicles and combat bases that run on clean energy) and a plan to base trade agreements with other countries on their emissions goals. The strength of Warren’s climate game lay not just in the quantity of her plans but also in their quality.

Warren’s candidacy may be dead, but her 14 plans could live on. And there’s reason to believe they might. After Washington governor Jay Inslee dropped out of the race in August, he encouraged the remaining candidates to crib from his climate plans, which he called “open-source.” Warren adopted planks of his sweeping climate platform and even hired one of his climate advisers. There’s nothing stopping the remaining candidates from similarly picking over Warren’s plans now that she’s out of the race.

“Any candidate who wants to win Warren voters should think seriously about embracing Elizabeth’s climate platform,” a Warren aide told Grist.

Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, the two remaining candidates with a viable path to the nomination, both have comprehensive climate plans. Sanders’ plan earned him an A+ from Greenpeace, which ranks candidates based on their dedication to phasing out fossil fuels and passing a Green New Deal. Biden’s plans got him a B+. But both stand to benefit from adopting some of Warren’s plans, which got more and more ambitious in the lead-up to her decision to drop out. Here are three plans that deserve to outlive Warren’s campaign.

“Stop Wall Street From Financing the Climate Crisis.” This plan is aimed directly at making sure Wall Street doesn’t leave Americans high and dry by continuing to invest in oil and gas infrastructure that could lose all their value in the transition to clean energy. Climate change, Warren says, destabilizes the American financial system by jeopardizing Wall Street’s investments and inflicting physical property damage (think the wreckage of coastal cities in the wake of catastrophic hurricanes or Western towns post-wildfires). She proposed using the regulatory tools in the Dodd-Frank Act — enacted in the wake of the 2008 crash — to regulate Wall Street and address those risks.

Warren’s plan for public lands. In April 2019, Warren became the first front-runner to release a sweeping public lands plan aimed at reducing emissions from public lands. She set the bar for similar plans from other candidates by advocating for an executive order banning new fossil fuel leases on federally owned lands on her first day in office. Most interestingly, she introduced the framework for a conservation workforce that would put a smile on FDR’s face: the “21st Century Civilian Conservation Corps,” which would “create job opportunities for thousands of young Americans caring for our natural resources and public lands.”

“Fighting for justice as we combat the climate crisis.” This plan has a lot in common with environmental justice plans from other candidates. It would direct at least $1 trillion to low-income communities on the frontlines of climate change. But it differs in one important respect: It uses wildfire wisdom from tribes to help the U.S. prevent deadly wildfires like the one that razed Paradise, California in 2018. In addition to investing in wildfire prevention programs and improved mapping of active wildfires, she aimed to incorporate “traditional ecological practices” and explore “co-management and the return of public resources to indigenous protection wherever possible.”

Will Biden and Sanders poach Warren’s climate plans? Time will tell. Her campaign certainly hopes they will. “The urgency of the moment calls for it,” the Warren aide said.

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Should Biden and Sanders steal Elizabeth Warren’s climate plans?

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