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Cities are shutting down bikeshares during curfews, stranding their own residents

by marylouoster162 Posted on June 3, 2020

Over the past several days, hundreds of thousands of Americans have hit the streets to protest the killing of George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man who was asphyxiated by a police officer on May 25 in Minneapolis. The protests started in the city where Floyd was killed and spread rapidly to all 50 U.S. states and at least three U.S territories.

In response, mayors and governors have instituted rare nighttime curfews in an effort to deter clashes between police and protestors — which videos show are often instigated by police — and waves of looting and property damage. But the curfews aren’t keeping protesters off the streets: People in major cities have been out long past nightfall protesting the national crisis of police brutality. And essential workers are largely exempt from the curfews, leading to confusion among people who work night shifts.

No matter the reason they’re out during curfew, people trying to get home are finding that their options are limited. Some cities, like Los Angeles and Chicago, have shut down public transportation systems in response to the protests, stranding people who are out after curfew. In some areas, like parts of Manhattan, even driving has been prohibited. And bikeshare programs, which have been a key source of safe transportation for essential workers during the coronavirus pandemic, have been directed to hit the pause button by city officials during the curfews.

That means protesters and other people just trying to get around in the middle of an ongoing pandemic are being forced to get places by foot. In New York City, the city’s privately-owned bikeshare program, CitiBike, was directed by the mayor to shut down during the curfew on Monday and Tuesday. “We disagree with this decision,” the company said in a tweet thread.

On Wednesday, CitiBike will be required to end service at 6 p.m. — two hours before the curfew begins.

Similar programs in D.C., Houston, Chicago, Minneapolis, and L.A. shut down during curfews too. Some of those programs, like Houston’s BCycle and Minneapolis’ Nice Ride, are owned by nonprofits. Others, like Chicago’s Divvy and D.C.’s Capital Bikeshare, are housed within each city’s Department of Transportation. Philadelphia’s city-run bikeshare program, Indego, bucked the trend by staying open during curfew.

Alan Mitchell, former chief of staff at Motivate, the company that owned and operated CitiBike before Lyft bought the program in 2018, thinks shutting down bikeshare programs amid protests is a bad idea. “I think it prevents essential workers from getting to their jobs, I think it makes people less safe, and I think it’s a disgrace for the mayor to have ordered that,” he told Grist, referring specifically to New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio.

As it is, bikeshare programs, which have been touted as a greener, healthier, and better way for city-dwellers to get around, have an equity problem. A huge majority of bikeshare users are white and wealthy, in large part because bikeshare docks tend to get built in majority-white neighborhoods while leaving majority-nonwhite neighborhoods behind. In D.C., a city that is 50 percent black, only 4 percent of bikeshare members were African American in 2016. Just 2 percent of Chicago’s bikeshare program users were black, according to 2017 data.

And when people of color do use bikeshare programs, or just cycle in general, they’re more likely to face police harassment for it. A study on sidewalk biking bans in NYC between 2008 and 2011 found that bans were disproportionately enforced on Black and Latino bikers. In Fort Lauderdale, Florida, 86 percent of police citations for biking violations were issued to African Americansin the years between 2010 and 2013.

On Wednesday, World Bicycle Day, Bublr Bikes, Milwaukee’s nonprofit bikeshare program, which stayed open during its city’s curfew, said it will commit to building a more just bikeshare program.

One way city officials and bikeshare programs could start doing just that? Make bikeshares available around the clock, whether or not there’s a curfew.

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Cities are shutting down bikeshares during curfews, stranding their own residents

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Climate change threatens the economy. Here’s what regulators can do right now.

by viflamar62285 Posted on June 2, 2020

Many of the economic risks of climate change are already crystal clear, and yet financial markets have yet to take them into account. That dangerous disconnect is the impetus behind a new report out on Monday from the sustainable finance nonprofit Ceres.

“U.S. financial regulators, who are responsible for protecting the stability and competitiveness of the U.S. economy, need to recognize and act on climate change as a systemic risk,” the report says. It calls on financial regulators across seven federal agencies as well as state agencies to do so, offering more than 50 recommendations that the authors believe are under the purview of regulators today, without the need for any additional legislation.

The report highlights three ways climate change is a systemic risk to financial markets. There are the physical risks of a warming planet — droughts, wildfires, and more frequent and intense storms will cause direct economic losses. This reality is already abundantly clear: The 2017 hurricane season caused $58 to $63 billion in damages in Florida alone. In 2018, wildfires in California burned up $12 billion in insured losses and led to the bankruptcy of the state’s largest utility, which took criminal responsibility for starting one of the fires.

Then there are socioeconomic risks, which are manifold. Industries that rely on physical outdoor labor, like agriculture and construction, will see productivity losses as temperatures rise. Economies that rely on tourism could be hurt by not only the physical risks outlined above but also by biodiversity loss. Higher temperatures will come with significant health impacts, including respiratory issues, premature deaths, and the spread of disease as carriers like mosquitos move into new habitats.

The third category is transition risk — the idea that the transition to a carbon-neutral economy is inevitable, and that companies in denial about that are setting themselves up to lose money. Transition risk includes possibilities like a carbon tax, changes in consumer sentiment, or the loss of investments in fossil fuel assets with long lifespans, like pipelines, that could end up out of commission before they are paid off.

The report calls on the Federal Reserve System, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the Housing Finance Authority, and insurance regulators, among other financial regulatory bodies, to first and foremost acknowledge that climate change poses a systemic risk to financial market stability. Veena Ramani, Ceres’ senior program director for capital markets systems, said in a press call that once these agencies publicly affirm this fact, that will mean acknowledging that it’s within their mandate to address climate risks in their rulemaking.

So what might that look like? Ceres’ recommendations for regulatory agencies include doing deeper research on how climate change will affect the economic stability of the U.S. Regulators could also require banks and insurance companies to integrate climate change into their “stress tests” — analyses of how well an entity can withstand a financial crisis — and to reflect the costs of climate change in their decision making. The report also recommends that regulators encourage corporate transparency about climate risk — something that the SEC actually issued guidance on a decade ago, but then promptly eased up on enforcing. The SEC’s Division of Corporation Finance sent 49 comment letters to companies about their climate risk disclosures in 2010, but has sent only six such letters over the last four years.

Finally, the report advocates for financial regulators to require that banks disclose the carbon emissions from their lending and investment activities, and define which activities will make climate change worse and which will help mitigate the systemic risks posed by the crisis — and then reorient capital toward those solutions.

Many of the recommendations made in the report have already been implemented in other countries. For example, late last year, the Bank of England announced it would subject U.K. banks and insurers to climate resilience stress tests. Just this past Friday, the E.U.’s top banking regulator, the European Banking Authority, issued new guidelines that require banks to incorporate climate risks into their credit policies. The guidelines also say that banks should assess whether borrowers could be found responsible for contributing to global warming. They cite a European Commission report from 2018 that found that “close to 50% of the exposure of euro area institutions to risk is directly or indirectly linked to risks stemming from climate change.”

Also on Friday, the International Monetary Fund published a new chapter of its latest global financial stability report calling for climate risk to become a part of international reporting standards. The chapter highlights how little of an impact known risks like extreme weather events have had on markets.

In a press call about the Ceres report, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island said that industries are finally awakening to the fact that climate change is not just a public relations issue. “This is something for their risk managers, this is something for their chief executives,” he said. “Whether you’re in agriculture, or insurance, or banking, or investment, these are dire warnings pointing right at the heart of your business.”

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Climate change threatens the economy. Here’s what regulators can do right now.

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Here’s how coronavirus affected carbon emissions in every state

by NannieWhitelegg Posted on May 19, 2020

The pandemic is far from over, but some states are opening back up again, creating a situation where life is going back to some semblance of normal in some areas of the United States and staying eerily quiet in other places. A new analysis in the science journal Nature Climate Change sheds light on what happened to emissions during the months when the U.S. was maximally locked down.

Previous estimates of emissions reductions due to COVID-19 said the pandemic would take an 8 percent bite out of global emissions this year. This study, published Tuesday, is the first to analyze and quantify emissions drops on a day-to-day basis across 69 countries and state by state in the United States.

It found that the world is on track for the biggest emissions drop since World War II, or maybe even the biggest drop in history, depending on how long global lockdowns stay in place. (The study estimates that by the end of the year emissions could decline anywhere between 2 to 13 percent overall, depending on the nature and duration of governments’ lockdown policies.) During the peak of global lockdowns in early April, average daily emissions decreased by 17 percent compared to the 2019 average, hitting their lowest point since 2006. Nearly half of those emissions were from “surface transport,” like car rides.

In the U.S., emissions dropped by about a third for a couple of weeks in April, a development that Robert Jackson, a co-author of the study and a Guggenheim fellow at Stanford University, told Grist was “absolutely unprecedented.” On a national level, emissions decreased by about a quarter on average during each country’s peak of confinement.

Jackson and his fellow researchers created a “confinement index” to describe how locked down 69 countries were between the months of January and April according to three levels of confinement ranging from broad travel restrictions to “policies that substantially restrict the daily routine of all but key workers.” By examining six economic sectors — aviation, electricity, transportation, public buildings and commerce, residential, and industry — the study’s authors were able to determine to what extent economic activity, and the carbon dioxide emissions that accompany it, slowed as a result of which lockdown measures. The 69 countries they analyzed represent 97 percent of global CO2 emissions.

In the U.S., the study showed some major differences between states’ daily maximum emissions reductions. Washington state, for example, saw a more than 40 percent drop in emissions during its peak confinement, whereas the pandemic swallowed up just under 18 percent of Iowa’s emissions during its peak. Jackson says there’s a fairly straightforward reason why some states saw such big emissions deficits. “In general, states that are more rural acted much more slowly than states with big cities,” he said. In a few months’ time, those differences between states could deepen even more as the easing of lockdown restrictions in some states spur an increase in emissions.

Clayton Aldern / Grist

For the most part, the emissions decline will only last as long as the lockdowns. “Previous crises have not dented emissions very much,” he said, referencing the 2008 financial crash that decreased emissions globally by 1.5 percent for a year. By 2010, emissions had come roaring back, increasing 5 percent globally. “We’re forcing people to stay at home,” Jackson said. “That won’t last. If they hop back in their cars and consume at the same levels things will go back to normal.”

But Jackson says the pandemic has provided an opportunity for people to rethink transportation, at the very least. Sitting in an hour of traffic to get to work doesn’t sound super appealing after months of commuting 30 seconds to the dining room table. “That could jolt us into a longer-term drop in emissions,” he said.

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Here’s how coronavirus affected carbon emissions in every state

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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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Coronavirus has erased 600,000 clean energy jobs in two months — and that’s just the start

by Rachel06Hscjsgt Posted on May 14, 2020

Renewable energy has been one of the few bright spots amid a global pandemic, as solar and wind power have surged across electricity grids worldwide. But the industry that supports renewable power is getting devastated: The U.S. economy lost nearly 600,000 clean energy jobs in March and April, setting what had been one of the country’s fastest-growing sources of employment on edge. All the job gains in renewables over the last five years have now been wiped out.

The numbers demolished earlier estimates. Jobs in energy efficiency, renewable energy, and electric vehicles tripled the losses originally reported for March, according to an analysis of Department of Labor data by BW Research. Their previous analysis had estimated that the industry would lose half a million jobs by the end of June; but that grim milestone arrived at the end of April instead.

“We saw those March figures and thought, ‘This is really quite severe and it’s going to get worse,’” said Gregory Wetstone, president and CEO of the American Council on Renewable Energy, one of the green energy groups which commissioned the report. “But I think what we didn’t realize is that March was just a signal of what was to come.”

With state governments locking down huge areas of the United States in an attempt to curb the coronavirus, the unemployment rate has jumped to almost 15 percent, the worst since the Great Depression. The Labor Department reported Thursday morning that claims for unemployment benefits have reached 36.5 million.

Clean energy workers are no exception. During the pandemic, workers are unable to enter homes and buildings to retrofit aging equipment to make it more efficient. Financing for clean energy projects has also dried up, as investors try to wait out the economic downturn. And even those projects that are up and running are struggling to buy panels and parts from shuttered factories around the world.

The clean energy industry employed over 3.4 million Americans last year, triple the number employed by the fossil fuel sector — and without federal aid, industry leaders warn that the situation could get much worse. BW Research now estimates that the industry could lose 850,000 jobs, a quarter of those employed in clean energy, by the end of June.

Wetstone said he hopes that the federal government will take a page out of the 2009 Obama-era Recovery Act, which helped renewable energy rebound from the Great Recession. That bill included a provision allowing wind and solar developers to continue to use federal tax credits.

Even in good times, renewable developers often don’t owe enough in tax to the federal government to make green energy tax credits worthwhile, so they partner with big investors that can offset their own own taxes. When the economy slumps, however, investors don’t owe as much tax — and so are unwilling to participate. The 2009 bill bypassed this problem by turning those tax credits into grants. Doing that now, Wetstone said, could get many people back to work sooner.

So far, however, there are few signs that the federal government will help out the struggling renewable industry. “We’ve seen the president be outspoken in defense of the oil and gas sector,” Wetstone said. “And we certainly hope that our champions are willing to likewise stand up and provide the help that we’re seeking in the clean power sector.”

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Coronavirus has erased 600,000 clean energy jobs in two months — and that’s just the start

Posted in Accent, alo, Anker, FF, GE, green energy, LAI, ONA, solar, solar panels, Uncategorized, wind power | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Coronavirus has erased 600,000 clean energy jobs in two months — and that’s just the start

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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Trump’s EPA just introduced a historic CO2 rule for planes. Wait, what?

by earnestm73 Posted on May 8, 2020

Cars, power plants, and some buildings are subject to fuel and energy efficiency standards in the United States. Believe it or not, up until now, the nation’s aviation industry has been free to do whatever it wants when it comes to emissions. Left to their own devices, U.S. airlines have let their carbon emissions steadily rise and their fuel efficiency gains stagnate. Between 2016 and 2018, emissions rose 7 percent while fuel efficiency improved by a measly 3 percent.

On Monday, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) introduced the U.S.’s first-ever CO2 standard for airplanes. The rule would impose regulations restricting emissions from the aviation industry — something many other developed countries have already done. The EPA hasn’t released the full proposal yet, which means details about what the rule will actually do are still TBA.

But isn’t Trump’s EPA certifiably averse to regulating polluters in any way, shape, or form? To say that the current administration hasn’t made emissions standards a priority would be an understatement. In fact, the Trump administration is facing threats of lawsuits from environmental groups over its recently finalized rule weakening fuel efficiency standards for vehicles.

While the EPA’s new CO2 standard for airplanes is historic, it doesn’t necessarily signal that the agency is changing its industry-friendly ways. The EPA has basically had its hand forced by both domestic green groups and an international regulator.

The rule’s long and tortuous journey began in 2010, when a group of environmental organizations sued President Obama’s EPA for neglecting to regulate emissions from ships and airplanes. A year later, the U.S. District Court for Washington, D.C., ruled that the EPA had to make a determination on whether emissions from planes posed a threat to public health. If the answer to that question was yes, the agency would have to create new regulations limiting those emissions. In 2016, green groups filed another lawsuit against the agency for neglecting to finalize the court-mandated evaluation of whether emissions from planes are harmful to public health. The EPA finally did so later that year, finding that plane emissions are indeed harmful. But the agency has dragged its feet on proposing the actual emissions regulation until now.

Daniel Rutherford, shipping and aviation director at the nonprofit International Council on Clean Transportation, says airplane manufacturers are eager for the rule to take effect. “Without a CO2 standard, Boeing and Gulfstream, for example, can’t sell their aircraft internationally in the future,” he said. That’s because of standards set by the U.N.’s International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), which was formed at the behest of the U.S. toward the end of World War II to help the booming aviation industry achieve uniformity. American manufacturers have been meeting ICAO’s emissions standards voluntarily, but in the future, the lack of EPA pollution standards for planes will hinder their ability to be competitive in the international market. Starting in 2023, Boeing and other manufacturers will need to recertify their existing aircrafts under the EPA’s forthcoming standard, otherwise they won’t qualify for sale under ICAO’s guidelines. In other words, it’s a matter of paperwork.

Rutherford emphasized that ICAO’s guidelines aren’t exactly the gold standard — they compel airlines to do the bare minimum, and the strictest ICAO requirements won’t even take effect until 2028. Green groups hoped the U.S.’s standards would be more stringent. “The trick with ICAO is that it tends to introduce what we call ‘technology-following standards,’ so instead of looking ahead and setting new poles for technology, it tends to say, ‘OK, let’s see what’s already developed and see that it’s deployed in all aircrafts,’” Rutherford said. ICAO’s recommendations might’ve been groundbreaking a decade ago, but most new aircrafts already meet the recommendations easily. “It’s very clear that the standard as ICAO proposed and probably as the EPA will propose itself is too weak to reduce emissions” by much, he said.

But the EPA’s rule could still change to become more planet-friendly. Once the rule is released, the public will have an opportunity to comment, a process that could take a month or more. After that, the EPA will have to finalize the rule, which typically takes about a year, which means the process will stretch into the next administration. If that administration is Democratic, it could scrap the original version of the rule and go back to the drawing board.“There might be an about-face on the requirements for the final rule,” Rutherford said, “but it’s really dependent upon the presidential election.”

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Trump’s EPA just introduced a historic CO2 rule for planes. Wait, what?

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In the middle of a pandemic, renewables are taking over the grid

by kendrazimmermann Posted on May 1, 2020

The reduction in driving, flying, and industrial activity due to the COVID-19 pandemic has cleared the air in typically smog-choked cities all over the world, inspiring awe in residents who are seeing more blue skies and starry nights than ever before. While the drop in pollution doesn’t necessarily mean we’re making progress in mitigating climate change, it’s now proving to be a boon for solar energy generation.

Pollution blocks solar radiation, and the fine particles spat out during combustion can settle on the surface of solar panels, reducing their efficiency. Smog-free skies, along with a lucky combination of sunny days and cooler temperatures, which boost panel efficiency, have helped solar panels break records in the U.K., Germany, and Spain this spring. The trend points to the potential for a positive (and hopeful) feedback loop — as polluting energy sources are replaced by solar panels, those solar panels will be able to generate more energy.

In Germany, a record that was set in March was broken again on April 20, when solar generated 40 percent of the country’s electricity, while coal and nuclear power generated just 22 percent. It’s actually not unusual to see solar generation records this time of year, when new panels installed in the winter get their first time to shine in the spring weather. While the added capacity explains some of solar’s grid takeover, the drop in electricity demand right now due to the pandemic has also inflated its proportion in the total mix.

In the U.K., record solar power generation also helped coal plants set a major record, but the opposite kind. The entire U.K. energy system ran with zero coal-fired power plant generation for more than 18 days, the longest streak in more than a century. Britain has just four remaining coal plants, all of which are scheduled to close by 2025.

The COVID-19 pandemic has touched renewable energy in myriad ways, and not all good. In early March, it became clear that the virus was disrupting supply chains and financing, which will delay new solar and wind projects in the U.S. For the first time in decades, we probably won’t see increased growth in U.S. renewable energy capacity this year. But even if growth is slower, a new report from the International Energy Agency released Thursday predicts that renewables will likely be the only energy sector to see any growth in demand this year, and that coal is set for the largest decline in demand since World War II.

While it’s still hard to say how the industry will emerge from the rubble of a massive recession — especially as efforts to help it domestically have been a nonstarter in Congress — a new study by clean energy research firm BloombergNEF paints an optimistic picture that the renewable energy takeover will continue on a global scale. The financial research firm found that utility-scale solar farms and onshore wind farms now offer the cheapest source of electricity for about two-thirds of the world’s population.

The study finds that falling costs, more efficient technology, and government support in some parts of the world have fostered larger renewable power plants, with the average wind farm now double the size it was four years ago. The larger the plant, the lower the cost of generation. The price of electricity from onshore wind farms dropped 9 percent since mid-2019, and solar electricity prices likewise declined 4 percent.

The pandemic has depressed the price of coal and natural gas, so it remains to be seen whether and how quickly wind and solar will push them off the grid. But Tifenn Brandily, an analyst at BNEF, said in a statement that solar and wind prices haven’t hit the floor yet. “There are plenty of innovations in the pipeline that will drive down costs further,” he said.

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In the middle of a pandemic, renewables are taking over the grid

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Coronavirus’s next victim: Big Meat

by JulianeBurchfie Posted on April 30, 2020

Americans are soon going to be eating a lot less meat — just not in the way environmentalists had hoped that would happen. Coronavirus has shuttered so many meatpacking plants around the country that the number of cattle and pigs slaughtered every day is down 40 percent. Farmers are euthanizing pigs by the thousand and trucking the meat to landfills to rot.

“The food supply chain is breaking,” wrote John Tyson, chairman of Tyson Foods Inc. in a full-page that ran in major newspapers on Sunday.

As far as his business is concerned, Tyson is right: The meat industry has never experienced a crisis like this before. It’s likely to lead to many long term changes: more scrutiny of the industry’s consolidation, more support for smaller meat companies, and a renewed push for mechanization. In the short term, it means two things: scarcity and higher prices.

“It’s going to cause price spikes somewhere downstream,” said Rich Sexton, an agricultural economist at the University of California, Davis. But the average shopper might only notice empty shelves rather than higher prices, because “big grocery chains don’t like to jack up prices, especially in times like this.”

By the last week of April, some 16 plants had been shut down. In response, President Donald Trump issued an executive order Tuesday to reopen meatpacking plants, provoking protests from unions and Democratic politicians who say that the order doesn’t do enough to protect workers from getting infected. “We are really putting workers in grave danger today,” said Representative Rosa DeLauro from Connecticut at a press conference on Tuesday. At least 20 meat-processing workers have died from coronavirus so far.

It’s all frightening enough that very serious people are warning of a collapse that could end in food riots. So is it time to panic-buy for real? How could we protect the people risking their lives to produce food? And could this crisis wind up breaking the grip of the few companies that control most of meat processing in America? Here’s our explainer for anyone who wants to get beyond their reflexive Trump-fury and search for solutions.

Would people starve if the meatpacking plants stayed closed?

After Trump announced his order, Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa tweeted that “society is 9 meals away from food riots.” But, no, there are still plenty of calories to go around — even with farmers dumping mountains of potatoes and oceans of milk. Meatpacking plants are not an existential necessity, because humans survive primarily on grains; we are more seed eaters than beef eaters. The supply chains delivering bread, pasta, and rice are still working well because they rely on machines rather than virus-vulnerable human labor. And much more food is in storage.

“There’s still enough food, but it might not be what we wanted,” said Jayson Lusk, food economist at Purdue University.

What’s the argument for keeping these plants open?

Keeping even a few of the biggest meatpacking plants closed for more than a month could cripple every food business and farmer connected to them. And they are connected to almost everyone. The meat industry is shaped like an hourglass, with farmers at one end, eaters at the other, and a few enormous packing plants at the chokepoint. For example, just 15 slaughterhouses kill 60 percent of the pigs in America.

Purdue University

So the economists I talked to said it only made sense to find a way to get the plants running again as soon as possible.

Farmers are scrambling to find smaller slaughterhouses and meat packers, and those smaller businesses are benefiting, said Nelson Gaydos of the American Association of Meat Processors, which represents these smaller companies. “A lot of people are saying it’s like Christmas on steroids,” he said.

But the big boys are so enormous that the small- and medium-sized meat companies can’t make up for their losses. Imagine you ran a small slaughterhouse that killed 200 pigs a day from local farmers: That might sound like a lot, but you’d have to do that for 100 days to provide as much pork as one of the big plants butcher in a single day (Lusk did the math in a blog post).

Can the plants reopen safely this soon?

It’s tough to tell. Companies are giving workers masks, having them stand six feet apart, and putting up plexiglass barriers when they need to be closer, said Gaydos.

Democrats have said that the government should mandate worker protections rather than simply asking for good-faith efforts as Trump did in his executive order. “It is vital that we do everything we can to protect food supply workers,” wrote a group of Democratic senators in a letter to Trump. “Breakdowns in the food supply chain could have significant economic impacts for both consumers and agricultural producers.”

There’s only so much the government can do. Trump’s executive order releases meat companies from liability from worker’s lawsuits, and it overrules state and local authorities calling for shutdowns. But the president can’t force workers to come back to the job if they don’t feel safe.

How will this crisis change things?

A crisis exposes weaknesses. This one is revealing two major vulnerabilities in the meat industry: Its reliance on human labor and its concentration.

Henry Ford modeled his assembly lines after the disassembly lines he saw in meat packing plants. Automobile assembly lines grew more and more automated, while meat plants continued to rely mostly on dirty, dangerous grunt work. The experience of a pandemic could soon change that. There’s one slaughterhouse in Holland that is almost completely run by machines.

“There is going to be even more of a rush to automate farmwork and slaughterhouses,” Sexton said.

The hourglass shape of the meat industry is another vulnerability. This concentration of just a few giant meat companies is able to put inexpensive meat on the plate of people at even the lowest income levels in America, but it can’t nimbly respond to changes.

Concentration causes other problems, too. For instance, the meat behemoth JBS recently sent a cease-and-desist letter to a union for conducting a “multi-faceted corporate campaign” to “coerce” the corporation to make worker-safety concessions at a plant in Greeley, Colorado.

Of course, unions exist to coerce companies to give workers more money and better conditions. The fact that JBS views the union demands as an illegal breach, rather than business as usual, suggests that it is not used to serious challenges to its authority.

The number of slaughterhouses has fallen 70 percent since the 1960s, a result of bigger companies swallowing up the little ones to grow even bigger. But the pandemic has put these giants in the spotlight. On Wednesday, a bipartisan pair of Senators asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate meatpacking consolidation.

And maybe this crisis will lead politicians to lift some of the regulatory barriers that keep smaller businesses out, Lusk said.

What about the environment? At the moment, that’s an afterthought. The attention right now is focused on ensuring Americans have a steady supply of meat, not on prodding the industry to become environmentally sustainable.

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Coronavirus’s next victim: Big Meat

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Study: Gas-powered appliances may be hazardous for your health

by Sang41834480885 Posted on April 30, 2020

Stay-at-home orders and other social distancing measures have dramatically improved outdoor air quality in cities around the world, but a new study published Tuesday shows that indoor air quality may pose acute risks of its own — especially now that the novel coronavirus has us all spending so much time at home.

The UCLA Fielding School of Public Health study found that after just an hour of using a gas-fired stove or oven, levels of nitrogen dioxide — one of a group of gases that contribute to smog formation and are considered harmful to human health — inside California homes reached levels that exceeded both state and national ambient air-quality standards. The compromised indoor air quality caused by gas-powered furnaces, stoves, and water heaters could increase the likelihood of respiratory and cardiovascular disease and premature death, according to the study.

“The goal of this report is to provide information to Californians on how pollution from gas-fired appliances affects the air they breathe, and the related health effects,” Yifang Zhu, the study’s lead researcher, said in a statement. “California’s state agencies often focus on greenhouse gas emissions and climate change impacts, but there has been much less focus on how fossil fuel use in household appliances can adversely impact indoor air quality and public health.”

The research, commissioned by Sierra Club, comes as recent studies have linked air pollution to higher rates of COVID-19 mortality. Inhaling nitrogen oxides poses especially acute risks to children and the elderly. Meanwhile, residential gas appliances emit approximately 16,000 tons of nitrogen oxides to outdoor air each year — which Rachel Golden, deputy director of Sierra Club’s building electrification program, notes is more than twice the NOx emissions from all of California’s gas-fired power plants combined.

Air pollution concentration matters a great deal, so residents of smaller homes and apartments often have it worse. Researchers found that after an hour of cooking in a small household, more than 90 percent of smaller residences had peak levels of nitrogen oxides that exceeded national ambient air quality standards. As Grist’s resident advice columnist Eve Andrews reminded us last week, indoor air quality isn’t always better than what you’re breathing outdoors.

The study also highlights environmental justice issues, since low-income households tend to have less space and more unmet maintenance needs, which can increase indoor emissions on top of being more at-risk for poor outdoor air quality. These factors may contribute to higher rates of respiratory challenges among low-income communities — particularly communities of color — which in turn may make residents more vulnerable to developing serious complications if they contract COVID-19.

To decrease indoor air pollution, the study proposes that households transition to zero-emission electric appliances. If all residential gas appliances in California were immediately replaced with clean energy alternatives, the resulting decrease in pollution would result in approximately 350 fewer deaths, 600 fewer cases of acute bronchitis, and 300 fewer cases of chronic bronchitis annually.

Without a massive public intervention, however, it seems unlikely that these appliances will be replaced at that scale, at least not in the homes of many low-income residents that could benefit the most. Golden says that policymakers can prioritize a just transition by focusing on efforts to reduce pollution and lower energy bills for vulnerable households, especially given the economic fallout from COVID-19.

“State agencies have a central role to play in helping people replace polluting gas appliances with clean, pollution-free electric alternatives like heat pumps and induction stoves,” Golden told Grist.

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Study: Gas-powered appliances may be hazardous for your health

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