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Meet the conservative answer to the Green New Deal

by YvonneRodriquez Posted on April 27, 2020

The American Conservation Coalition (ACC) might be the only environmental group on the planet that thinks the United States shouldn’t rejoin the Paris climate agreement. Started by a bunch of college Republicans in 2017, the nonprofit’s mission is to “empower conservatives to re-engage on environmental conversations.” “Environmental conservative” might sound like an oxymoron, but it’s not such an unusual phenomenon these days. Republicans, especially young Republicans, are starting to come around to the idea that the planet is warming and humans have something to do with it.

Those Republicans began bucking the party line right around the time that the Green New Deal — the progressive proposal to transition the United States economy from fossil fuels to renewable energy, and enact a host of social justice policies along the way — became the reigning environmental philosophy on the left.

On Tuesday, the ACC released its answer to the Green New Deal with a plan called the American Climate Contract. The contract champions policies with bipartisan support, existing climate and environmental legislation in Congress, and free-market principles. It doesn’t include many of the trappings of the climate change platforms floated by progressive thinkers and groups. You won’t find a carbon tax, the aforementioned Paris Agreement, or language about “solving” the climate crisis in the contract.

“We don’t think that there is a silver bullet approach to climate change,” Quillan Robinson, the vice president of government affairs for ACC who recently became its first-ever lobbyist, told Grist. “So there’s not a laundry list of policy things that we can do that, if we check all those off, climate change will be solved.”

Instead, ACC aims to hit refresh on the climate narrative by getting back to what the group considers the first and most important step in the effort to address the crisis: reducing emissions. Robinson says he’s happy to talk about health care or accessibility to education — two issues woven into the Green New Deal — “but if we’re gonna talk about climate change, let’s focus on climate change,” he said.

In order to do that, ACC’s climate contract suggests passing some of the climate and environment legislation stalled in the House and Senate right now (in no small part due to GOP leadership, which, as anyone who hasn’t been living under a boulder knows, has been a massive impediment to climate action so far). The Carbon Capture Modernization Act, for example, would incentivize the use of carbon capture and storage technology for coal plants by extending existing tax credits to coal companies that opt to retrofit their plants. The Expanding Access to Sustainable Energy Act would require the Department of Energy to award grants to rural energy cooperatives for renewable energy projects. In all, the group cites 14 bills that Congress could act on in the short term.

In the long term, the group advocates for investing heavily in clean energy research and development — an approach that some congressional Republicans have already voiced support for. It calls for expanding the nation’s nuclear energy portfolio, investing in carbon capture technology for all kinds of power plants,, and planting more trees — all things Republicans in Congress have said they support.

But the contract goes beyond what congressional Republicans have already endorsed. It proposes expanding battery storage capabilities; getting the federal government to invest in modern, green transportation infrastructure; and exporting American-made electric vehicles to developing countries to help reduce global emissions. It even suggests restoring and protecting ocean habitats (to better store “blue carbon” — the carbon sequestered in marine plants), something Senator Elizabeth Warren called for in a primary climate plan called the Blue New Deal. The plan has some components that would make congressional Democrats squirm, too: It advocates for building out pipeline infrastructure, exporting more natural gas, and deregulating the energy market.

“The contract makes a lot of sense,” Alex Trembath, deputy director of the Breakthrough Institute, a research center that focuses on technological solutions to environmental problems, told Grist. Trembath praised the plan’s focus on technology and innovation. “It’s not the end-all-be-all of climate policy, but it creates another policy platform — another way of thinking about the problem — that might get Republicans who weren’t enthusiastic or supportive of climate and clean energy policy to the table in a way that hasn’t been possible before.”

Not all climate hawks are as enthusiastic. “This ‘contract’ has some good ideas, like expanding renewables and restoring wetlands,” Jamie Henn, co-founder of 350.org and an organizer of the Stop the Money Pipeline campaign, told Grist, “and some really terrible ones, like building more pipelines and wasting money on carbon capture and sequestration.” Carbon capture proponents have been criticized for promising too much too soon — the technology isn’t where it needs to be in order to put a serious dent in carbon emissions, researchers say. Henn thinks that the only way to bend the emissions curve is to transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy by the end of this decade.

“The more we keep pushing forward, the more the right will keep running to catch up,” he added. “Now isn’t the time to compromise.”

For Robinson, though, compromise is the name of the game, especially in the aftermath of a pandemic. Stimulus legislation presents a significant opportunity “to figure out what the win-wins are in terms of getting Americans back to work, creating economic prosperity, but also addressing these important environmental issues and moving us forward in the fight against climate change,” he said.

“Let’s identify what we can agree on, work on the policies that fit with that, and then continue to move forward.”

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Meet the conservative answer to the Green New Deal

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These air pollution standards kept people out of the hospital. Trump just rolled them back.

by AnneQuiles Posted on April 21, 2020

The Trump administration isn’t letting the COVID-19 pandemic get in the way of its deregulatory agenda. Last week, the Environmental Protection Agency announced it would not tighten air quality standards for fine particle pollution, despite warnings from scientists, including former agency staffers, that the current rules were not strict enough and could result in tens of thousands of premature deaths. The agency then finalized a decision on the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, determining that it is not “appropriate and necessary” to regulate mercury and other pollutants from power plants despite the fact that utilities have already spent millions of dollars to comply with the standards.

The announcements arrived the same week as a new study that links these two regulations to tangible public health improvements. When these rules, in addition to other air quality regulations, were strengthened under the Obama administration, Louisville Gas and Electric (LG&E), a utility in Kentucky, was forced to retire three coal plants and spent almost a billion dollars upgrading another plant to comply with the rules.

The study, published in the journal Nature Energy last week, analyzed public health data in Louisville to see how rates of asthma-related hospitalizations, ER visits, and symptom flare-ups changed in relation to improvements in air quality. Using zip code–level data from the city’s Department of Public Health and Wellness, the researchers found that after one of LG&E’s power plants in Louisville was retired in 2015, and pollution controls were installed on three other coal plants in the area, there were approximately three fewer asthma-related hospitalizations and ER visits per zip code per quarter over the following year across the county’s 35 zip codes. That adds up to nearly 400 avoided doctor visits.

The researchers also analyzed data from a program that tracked inhaler use among 207 residents with the help of digital inhalers, and found that after new pollution controls were added to one of the coal plants in 2016, average inhaler use went down by 17 percent. Among participants who had the highest inhaler usage before the controls were added, average use went down by 32 percent.

In Louisville, as in the rest of the country, the health impacts of air pollution aren’t distributed equally. The study shows a clear concentration of asthma-related hospitalizations and ER visits in the West End of Louisville, a predominantly African American neighborhood, even after the controls were installed. The coal plants are only one part of the picture there — the neighborhood is also home to a cluster of chemical and manufacturing plants dubbed “Rubbertown.”

The city implemented a toxic air reduction program in the early 2000s that was largely successful in reducing emissions from the Rubbertown plants, but the West End still suffers disproportionately from the impact of ongoing pollution. According to a health report published by the city in 2017, inpatient admissions for asthma in west Louisville are more than 10 times that of more affluent neighborhoods to the northeast. Higher cancer death rates and lower life expectancy are also clustered in the western half of the city.

The COVID-19 pandemic thrust the reality of these health disparities into the headlines recently, when a preliminary study showed that people who lived near major sources of pollution are more likely to die of the virus, and new data revealed that it is killing black Americans at higher rates than any other demographic. “Communities of color, they’ve always been the sacrifice zones,” said Mustafa Ali, the vice president of environmental justice, climate, and community revitalization for the National Wildlife Federation, in a recent Twitter video. “They’ve been the places where we’ve pushed things that nobody else wants.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the leading public health expert on President Trump’s coronavirus task force, acknowledged the structural inequality underlying the numbers during a White House press briefing earlier this month. “When all this is over — it will end, we will get over the coronavirus — but there will still be health disparities which we really do need to address in the African-American community,” he said. The research from Louisville shows that upholding — and strengthening — our air quality standards is one place to start.

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These air pollution standards kept people out of the hospital. Trump just rolled them back.

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What does Joe Biden have to do to win over the climate movement?

by JuanaBostic Posted on April 21, 2020

This story has been updated.

If Joe Biden had released his $1.7 trillion climate plan in a vacuum last year, the proposal would have been hailed as the most ambitious climate platform introduced by a presidential candidate in United States history. The 22-page plan aims to zero out emissions by 2050, protect disadvantaged communities from pollution, and create 10 million new jobs to boot.

Unfortunately for the former vice president, his proposal paled in comparison to plans from a number of his primary challengers that were three, five, and even 10 times as expensive. Bernie Sanders, for example, put out a $16 trillion climate plan called the Green New Deal that had the elderly pied piper of the progressive left collecting endorsements from climate groups like a Vermonter picking blueberries in July.

Whether progressives like it or not, Biden is the presumptive Democratic nominee for president. And on Monday, he snagged his first environmental endorsement from the League of Conservation Voters (LCV), a powerful environmental group that helps elect climate hawks to office and scores members of the House and Senate based on how they vote on environment and climate bills.

“We are confident that as president, Biden will immediately put our country on track for a 100 percent clean energy economy with policies centered in justice and equity that restore America’s global climate leadership,” Tiernan Sittenfeld, senior vice president of government affairs for LCV Action Fund, the political arm of the group, said in a statement.

Given that the choice in the general election comes down to Donald Trump, who has left no stone unturned in his effort to roll back environmental protections, and Biden, who has an 83 percent lifetime score for his environmental voting record from LCV, it’s not surprising that the group decided to endorse the former senator from Delaware.

What is surprising, and what might be welcome news to voters for whom climate change is a top priority, is that Biden plans to expand his climate platform. In his own statement in response to the LCV’s announcement, the former vice president said he was “honored” to receive the endorsement and indicated that there’s more to come. “In the months ahead, expanding this plan will be one of my key objectives,” he said, adding that he knows the issue “resonates” with young voters.

Biden’s statement said he aims to “campaign on climate change and win on climate change,” which isn’t a bad plan if he’s looking to convince a wider swath of Democratic voters — and maybe even pick up a Republican or two. In poll after poll after poll, climate change and health care are the top two issues for Democrats this election cycle. And the issue is no longer relegated to one side of the political aisle. Polls also show that young Republicans may care as much about the warming planet as their blue counterparts.

By his own admission, Biden has a lot of work to do to earn the progressive movement’s vote. Many local chapters of the Sunrise Movement, a youth-led climate group that backed Bernie Sanders in the primary and has emerged as a powerful force in the activist landscape, have said they aren’t endorsing Biden. But that could change if the candidate steps up his climate game.

“We’ve tried to be super clear about the way that we need them to improve on not only their climate policy but their immigration, criminal justice, and financial regulation policies,” Varshini Prakash, Sunrise co-founder and executive director, told Vice News, referring to the Biden campaign. “We’ll see if that conversation translates into policy changes.” In an interview on the New York Times’ The Daily podcast, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democrat from New York who is one of the architects of the Green New Deal, expressed a similar sentiment and said she was waiting to fully endorse him.

Will Biden be able to win over diehard Sanders supporters? Probably not. Biden’s campaign is premised on returning to a time of relative normalcy, not turning the economic system on its head. But if he does scale up his climate plan, he might be able to rack up a few more endorsements from environmental heavyweights.

Update: On Tuesday, a group of more than 50 scientists and climate experts wrote an open letter endorsing Biden for president. “We are confident that, unlike President Trump, Joe Biden will respect, collaborate with, and listen to leaders in the scientific community and public health experts to confront the existential climate crisis and other environmental threats,” the letter said. Prominent climate scientists Michael Mann and Jane Lubchenco (formerly head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration under President Obama) are among the letter’s signatories.

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What does Joe Biden have to do to win over the climate movement?

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‘A threat multiplier’: The hidden factors contributing to New York City’s coronavirus disparities

by Aracely82H Posted on April 21, 2020

Earlier this month, the New York City health department released a map showing confirmed COVID-19 cases by zip code. The highest case counts were concentrated in lower-income neighborhoods in Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. The same week, the city released preliminary data highlighting higher rates of death among black and Latino New Yorkers.

Environmental advocates say that hazardous environmental conditions have contributed substantially to the coronavirus outbreak’s severity in New York City’s low-income communities of color.

The city’s data shows that a higher volume of cases are concentrated in neighborhoods with more environmental health hazards, according to Rachel Spector, director of the environmental justice program at New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, a nonprofit civil rights law firm. Major arterial highways, waste transfer facilities, power plants, and other polluting infrastructure create daily air quality challenges for residents of these neighborhoods — challenges that can take a cumulative toll on residents’ health, leading them to become more vulnerable in the face of a respiratory illness.

Three zip codes in Queens, for instance, have seen roughly 30 documented COVID-19 cases per thousand residents, which is double the citywide average. These neighborhoods — among them Astoria Heights, East Elmhurst, and Jackson Heights — are criss crossed by traffic-clogged highways like Interstate 278 and the Grand Central Parkway. Nearby sources of fine particulate matter — or PM 2.5, a pollutant particularly harmful to respiratory health — include LaGuardia Airport and several of the city’s power plants.

“It’s a classic environmental justice issue,” Spector told Grist. “You have a concentration of polluting infrastructure located in black and brown communities that are often high-poverty neighborhoods — people living in poor and crowded housing conditions, who continue to work and take public transportation because many of them are low-wage essential workers. So they’re disproportionately and continuously exposed.”

The coronavirus is not the only thing they’re exposed to, Spector added. Many of these communities disproportionately experience underlying health conditions as a result of years of chronic exposure to air pollution. The South Bronx, a predominantly low-income neighborhood of color, sees an annual average of 11 to 13 micrograms per cubic meter of fine particulate matter, compared to the World Health Organization’s air quality guideline of 10. The same area sees the city’s highest rate of emergency care visits for asthma as well as respiratory hospitalizations. It has also been among the neighborhoods hardest hit by COVID-19.

“The coronavirus is exposing the inequities that have been around for so long in our society,” Spector said.

The link between coronavirus deaths and pollution exposure is coming into focus. Earlier this month, Harvard researchers released a nationwide study that links long-term exposure to air pollution to increases in the exposed area’s COVID-19 death rate. They found that every additional microgram of PM 2.5 per cubic meter is associated with a 15 percent increase in the death rate from COVID-19.

Nevertheless, the EPA announced last week that it will not tighten or change the nation’s ambient air quality standards. Democratic lawmakers subsequently sent a letter to EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler criticizing the decision. The senators cited evidence that air pollution in the form of fine particulate matter is detrimental to human health and could increase COVID-19 vulnerability, using New York City as an example.

Spector says that the areas hardest hit by the coronavirus — parts of Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx — also face acute challenges posed by particulate matter pollution. Although levels of PM 2.5 across the city aren’t as bad as those in areas near large-scale oil, gas, and chemical infrastructure, the EPA’s Environmental Justice Screening and mapping tool indicates that these New York City neighborhoods still have higher risks of cancer and respiratory illnesses from inhaling diesel emissions — conditions that could make them more vulnerable to severe COVID-19 complications.

Priya Mulgaonkar, a resiliency planner for the NYC Environmental Justice Alliance, co-wrote a 2016 report that analyzes the impact of truck traffic on the city’s air quality and the communities that host waste transfer facilities. One of the report’s key findings is that commercial waste trucks accounted for a significant amount of truck traffic, worsening the air quality of nearby communities, particularly in the South Bronx. These same communities ended up being among the hardest hit by COVID-19.

“The disparities for COVID-19 really mirror the disparities that New York City’s environmental justice communities have faced for decades,” Mulgaonkar told Grist. “Similarly to climate change, COVID-19 is really acting as a threat multiplier: exacerbating a lot of these inequalities that are due to environmental racism in New York City.”

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‘A threat multiplier’: The hidden factors contributing to New York City’s coronavirus disparities

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Coronavirus myth-busting: The truth about empty shelves and toilet paper shortages

by Cherie65Cw Posted on April 8, 2020

My 8-year-old daughter only began to comprehend the absolute weirdness of living in this time of coronavirus on a recent trip to a grocery store.

The line outside to get in, the employee regulating traffic at the door, the gloops of hand sanitizer, the face masks — it was all bizarre. And stranger than strange were the empty shelves. For the first time, she could see that she was living through an extraordinary moment in history.

“That was super weird,” she said quietly, when we got home.

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The abundance of food in a grocery store is every bit as much a hallmark of Americana as Bugs Bunny and Major League Baseball. So it’s eerie to see those shelves bare.

What exactly is going on here? Are people irrationally hoarding beans and toilet paper? It turns out, not so much. To find out what’s really happening, I talked to a few people who study the country’s massive chain of farms, trucks, and warehouses that deliver the nutrients we all need to survive to ask how the system is holding up, what this stress test tells us about preparing for future shocks, and just what the fresh hell is happening with toilet paper.

What has changed?

The sudden shift in the way Americans shop is stunning.

“One stat I have heard from grocery store folks is that the traffic in their stores is up tremendously, like 300 percent,” said Jayson Lusk, an agricultural economist at Purdue University.

Grocery store sales reached the highest level in history in the week ending March 15, an eye-popping 62 percent higher than in the same week last year, according to the retail research company IRI. Americans are buying a lot of staples — bread, eggs, beans — but also just buying more of everything. Nail polish remover sales are up nearly 60 percent, too.

In turn, grocery stores have to order more from their suppliers, driving up prices. The wholesale price of a dozen eggs jumped from 90 cents at the start of the year to a recent $2.35.

We’re running out of food!

Not true. There are pigs aplenty and enough chickens for every pot. Cattle are copious.

“We’re actually on pace to produce more beef than we have in, really recorded history, this year,” Lusk said.

There’s plenty of wheat, too. But it has to be ground, baked into bread, and delivered. Before you can eat a sausage, someone needs to slaughter a pig, cut it up, and get it on a shelf. And that’s where there are bottlenecks.

“There’s only so many loading docks coming out of a distribution center,” said Shelie Miller, a professor at the University of Michigan who studies the environmental impacts of food systems. “The system is not designed for everyone to buy everything at once, but it will catch up.”

Why are we shopping more?

If you tell people they should be prepared to stay in their house for a long time, it only makes sense that they are going to fill up their pantries. That part is no mystery. But after the first week or two, you’d think people would go back to their normal shopping patterns and grocery stores shelves would be full again. After all, it’s not like we are eating more, right?

Turns out, we are eating more groceries. A lot more. You might have noticed the same thing that I’ve noticed in my house: Food seems to run low at an alarming pace. That’s because we are no longer eating out. Instead of getting food from school lunches, company cafeterias, and restaurants, Americans are now getting the bulk of their calories from grocery stores. Normally, the meat Americans eat is split evenly — half from restaurants (and schools, and office canteens) and half from stores. That has “drastically shifted,” with 85 percent of meat running through grocery stores, a Cargill executive told Food Navigator.

And it’s not like all the trucks full of food headed for restaurants can just turn around and drive to a grocery store instead. There’s only so much space on the shelf in every store, and it takes a while for grocers who need more milk, say, to figure out who has excess and negotiate a new deal. That’s why dairies are dumping truckloads of milk into fields around the country. But pretty soon, people will figure out how to divert the food headed for restaurants so that it gets to groceries instead. It’s already beginning to happen:

“Some of the big meatpackers have already said they are doing that,” Lusk said. “They are packing more individual items, rather than big cuts that normally go to restaurants.”

As a result, prices for meat have started to go down.

Where are the strains?

Anywhere the food system relies on workers: people who pick the veggies, drive the trucks, and restock the shelves. Many farmworkers come on special work visas from Mexico — now suspended. It’s likely that melons and lettuce will rot in the fields this year.

A lot of the people who harvest and process our food can’t afford to quarantine themselves. Already a few workers at meatpacking houses have contracted the coronavirus. That’s concerning because these packing houses tend to be big; Big enough that when something goes wrong it can trigger shockwaves of shortages. If there aren’t enough workers to run any one of these food-processing links in the food chain, that could cause major problems.

“Last fall there was a lot of fervor when a fire in a Tyson meatpacking plant caused really big disruptions in the meat market,” Lusk said. “That one facility was about 5 percent of all the beef processing in the country.”

What does this stress test tell us about eating in a hotter future?

Big meatpacking plants are very good at producing affordable food. But their size also makes the country vulnerable to shocks: A single flood or fire could shut down a significant portion of the food system.

To prepare for future disasters we might want to encourage food companies to have five or six food processing plants scattered around the countryside, rather than one giant regional plant, Lusk said. That would cost more, but it would be more resilient.

Some help could come from abroad. If one giant slaughterhouse or grain-processing plant goes dark in the United States, there’s already a robust network of ships and rails to move food around the world.

“Globalized food systems require a lot more energy than local food systems, but there is also more redundancy,” Miller said. “If one part of the globe is experiencing a major climate event you have more options — there are lots of different suppliers in lots of different locations.”

But in many ways the coronavirus pandemic presents fundamentally different challenges than the slow emergency of climate change. Adapting to a hotter planet requires figuring out how to feed ourselves without releasing greenhouse gases, which means growing more food on less land, so that we can stop cutting down forests, and start growing more carbon-sucking trees.

Who gets left out?

There is a real danger that this pandemic causes many more people to go hungry, not because there isn’t enough food to go around, but because the economic slowdown leaves families without the money to buy it.

“COVID-19 is a health crisis. But it could also lead to a food security crisis if proper measures are not taken,” wrote Shenggen Fan, former director general of the International Food Policy Research Institute, which is funded by governments and foundations.

Researchers at IFPRI projected that the number of desperately poor people — those living on less than $1.90 a day — could surge by 14 million because of the virus to around 750 million. If the pandemic shuts down international trade, that could rise to 22 million. That increase of 2 or 3 percent is especially significant, because the number of people living in extreme poverty has been falling for years.

Will panic buying lead to rotten food?

It’s hard to tell. Americans are buying tons of food, and some of that could end up in the trash.

“As a general rule, Americans already tend to produce a lot of food waste,” Miller said. “Estimates are 30 to 40 percent of food that is grown ends up going to waste — and a lot of that happens in our own refrigerators where we buy produce and then let it wilt and rot.”

This has big environmental consequences. Just think of all the farmland that could be devoted to wildlife, all the water that wouldn’t need to be pumped out of aquifers to farmland, if we stopped letting so much food rot.

But we are also spending so much time at home that we have time to cook, and to plan out how we will use up food. That makes this quarantine period an important opportunity Miller said: “Because if we are doing it now we might be able to keep doing it when things go back to normal.”

It’s also an opportunity to think a little differently about food waste. It’s understandable that people want to overstock their pantries even if it means throwing some things out, Lusk said, because for any one person waste is better than scarcity. Ideally we’d have a food system with some excess — that produces a little waste in normal times but can fill bellies in emergencies — rather than a system that’s so lean that leads to hunger when something unexpected happens. As we can see with masks and ventilators, there can be tragic downsides to keeping a lean supply of surplus.

OK, so what the heck is going on with toilet paper?

The explanation for those empty shelves isn’t panic buying. Sure, some people are buying too much. But people really do need more toilet paper at home because they aren’t using the bathrooms in office buildings, airports and restaurants anymore, as Will Oremus of OneZero explained in a post on Medium. The paper giant Georgia Pacific estimated that people staying at home full time would need to buy 40 percent more TP.

The larger issue is that supply chains just aren’t cut out for the shift in demand. Just like food — which is split into two supply chains for restaurants and grocery stores — toilet paper is divided between industrial and consumer markets. That toilet paper in public restrooms comes in giant rolls. And so, just like food, companies can’t just turn the trucks headed for the office parks and send them to grocery warehouses. They need to retool their supply chains to deliver household-sized products to grocery stores.

And once stores ran out of TP, Lusk thinks store managers may have prioritized other goods:

“If a grocery store has one semi-truck showing up at their backdoor from the warehouse, what do you tell the warehouse to fill that truck up with? Toilet paper is big and bulky: It doesn’t take a lot to fill up the back of a semi truck. If your choices are toilet paper or bread and pasta you are going to choose the bread and pasta. “

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Coronavirus myth-busting: The truth about empty shelves and toilet paper shortages

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How vulnerable is your community to coronavirus? These new maps reveal a familiar pattern.

by FredricAIN Posted on April 2, 2020

The predominantly black and low-income communities living near the back-to-back petrochemical refineries of Louisiana’s “cancer alley” have long suffered compromised immune systems and high rates of disease. Now, the state’s fast-growing COVID-19 outbreak is poised to hit them especially hard.

Yet behind the veil of the pandemic, last week the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a temporary policy — with no end date specified — to suspend its enforcement of key environmental regulations, allowing industries like Louisiana’s petrochemical giants to make their own determinations as to whether or not they are complying with requirements to monitor pollution levels. Ironically, as the EPA relaxes its rules for polluters, the link between long-term exposure to environmental hazards and the most severe outcomes of coronavirus infections is starting to come into focus.

Jvion, a healthcare data firm, has collaborated with Microsoft to launch a new COVID-19 community vulnerability map to identify the populations most vulnerable to severe complications following a coronavirus outbreak. The interactive map aggregates socioeconomic and environmental factors, such as lack of access to transportation, exposure to toxins, unemployment, and mortality rate. According to the map, these factors make certain “cancer alley” communities particularly vulnerable.

“Our most heavily weighted and frequent determining risk factor was air quality, though that doesn’t mean that it’s the most predictive factor,” said John Showalter, chief product officer for Jvion. “There’s definitely a biologic rationale that environmental health hazards that lead to pulmonary and cardiovascular conditions would then lead people with those conditions to do poorly during a COVID-19 outbreak.”

JVION

Jvion used machine learning to analyze block-level data from the U.S. Census to help identify “environmental health hazard” as one key socioeconomic factor that makes a population more vulnerable to severe COVID-19 outcomes, based on the health effects of polluted air, contaminated water, and extreme heat. They also factored in how chronic exposure to outdoor air pollutants, such as fine particulate matter, can increase the risk of cancer, respiratory illnesses, and cardiovascular disease — preexisting conditions that physicians say can make the novel coronavirus more severe and fatal.

A side-by-side comparison of Jvion’s vulnerability map with the EPA’s Environmental Justice Screen (EJScreen) suggests a stark correlation between a community’s proximity to industrial facilities and its projected risk of severe COVID-19 outcomes.

Jvion labels Harris County, Texas, as having a high vulnerability for COVID-19 — and a key socioeconomic influencer for that determination is its “above average environmental health hazard.” A new analysis from the University of Texas Health Science Center echoes Jvion’s map: The report shows where risk factors for severe COVID-19 outcomes (mostly preexisting health conditions) are distributed across Harris County to determine which neighborhoods are most at-risk of hospitalization and intensive care for COVID-19. Cross-referencing the EJScreen, it becomes clear that the Harris County map highlights communities in close proximity to industrial facilities and those at a higher risk of cancer from breathing airborne toxins.

“There’s a familiar pattern in these maps, and it’s a pattern that you see in mobility rates and mortality rates, race and ethnicity demographics, as well as the distribution of industry in our country,” said Corey Williams, the research and policy director for Air Alliance Houston. “All those things overlap to a great extent, so there is a correlation, but it’s difficult to prove causation.”

Philadelphia has seen a rapid uptick in coronavirus cases, and its pockets of vulnerability have similar characteristics to Houston’s. Jvion’s map shows that the predominantly black and low-income neighborhoods of Point Breeze and Grays Ferry are considered to have an “extremely high” vulnerability risk for COVID-19 due to environmental hazards, elevated unemployment rates, and low incomes. The EJScreen shows that the areas are close to major highways with heavy traffic, wastewater plants, and industrial facilities.

It’s clear that the novel coronavirus is already compounding underlying systemic inequities in communities with more people of color, poverty, migrants, and those without access to resources like medical care. These maps can help ensure that government response and medical capacity in these at-risk populations can meet the needs of those likely to be severely ill from the virus, including those living near heavy industry and fossil fuel infrastructure.

In a letter submitted to the EPA last week, environmental groups demanded to know why polluting facilities are now excused from complying with environmental regulations, even as their operations continue relatively unfettered. “What is the basis for presuming that the pandemic means companies can no longer comply with environmental rules while they continue to operate and process all other forms of corporate ‘paperwork’?” the memo asked.

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How vulnerable is your community to coronavirus? These new maps reveal a familiar pattern.

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One state just banned reusable shopping bags to fight coronavirus

by heavenlywingsdc1965 Posted on March 24, 2020

New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu announced last week that reusable bags will be temporarily banned during the COVID-19 outbreak, and that all retail stores will be required to use single-use paper or plastic bags.

The move is a dramatic reversal of the recent trend of states and municipalities banning single-use plastic bags. Over the past few years, Hawaii, California, and more recently Oregon and New York have prohibited the use of plastic bags. The bans are an effort to reduce plastic pollution, which is driven by single-use plastics like shopping bags and has taken a terrible toll on ocean ecosystems.

“Our grocery store workers are on the front lines of COVID-19, working around the clock to keep New Hampshire families fed,” said Sununu, a Republican, in a statement announcing the executive order. “With identified community transmission, it is important that shoppers keep their reusable bags at home given the potential risk to baggers, grocers and customers.”

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New Hampshire isn’t the only state to revisit its plastic bag policies due to COVID-19: Maine has postponed a plastic bag ban that was set to go into effect on Earth Day, and New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation has said it won’t take any enforcement actions against retailers who violate the state’s new ban until May. But New Hampshire is the first state to take the additional step of banning reusable bags.

So will the reusable bag ban make grocery store shoppers and workers safer? The science on that is somewhat shaky. It’s highly unlikely for the virus to spread from one person to another via a reusable cloth bag or another fabric, Vineet Menachery, an assistant professor of microbiology at the University of Texas Medical Branch, told Grist earlier this month. While the novel coronavirus, like previous coronaviruses, has been shown to survive for up to three days on plastic and stainless steel surfaces if left undisturbed, it’s easily destroyed with soap and water, or rubbing alcohol. So washing a cloth bag with detergent would stop the virus in its tracks.

That said, grocery store workers obviously don’t know whether a person bringing a reusable bag into a store has cleaned it recently or not. Sununu is right that grocery store workers are on the frontlines of this public health crisis, and we should all probably be doing what we can to make their lives easier and less stressful these days. And the climate impact of plastic vs. paper vs. cloth bags is actually more complicated than you might think — although reusing a bag you already own is always a more climate-friendly option than creating demand for a new bag.

So eco-conscious New Hampshirites shouldn’t feel too bad about obeying the governor’s order for now. Just make sure to keep tabs on your reusable bags so you don’t have to buy new ones once the pandemic is over.

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One state just banned reusable shopping bags to fight coronavirus

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Even coronavirus can’t stop Trump’s environmental rollbacks

by CamilleShedden Posted on March 23, 2020

On Thursday, political risk research and consulting firm the Eurasia Group released an updated version of its “Top Risks 2020” report to show how coronavirus has sped up the trends that worry the group the most. The new report warns that the public health crisis will pull attention and resources away from addressing climate change.

“With large-scale protest activity diminished because of social distancing, civil society actors will turn to cyber and online tools to apply pressure on companies and governments, most of which will have less appetite and ability to respond to climate change,” the report says.

In addition to climate action, environmental protection at large may be threatened. The Trump administration is in the process of implementing major environmental policy changes, such as a rule that would allow companies to kill birds without repercussions, a total overhaul of the bedrock National Environmental Protection Act, and new restrictions on the types of scientific research the EPA can use in decisions that affect public health. “The government has been trying to rush through and finalize rollbacks before the upcoming election,” said Kieran Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental nonprofit. “Trump wants to be able to say ‘I accomplished all this.’”

Even with the nation’s attention turned to a public health crisis, the administration does not appear to be slowing down. On Wednesday night, the EPA officially opened the required 30-day comment period for its proposal to limit science that can be used in regulatory decisions. Due to the coronavirus, there will be no public hearing.

On Thursday, the comment period for the Migratory Bird Treaty Act closed, despite pleas for an extension from conservation groups. Also on Thursday, the head of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission told reporters that he did not plan to delay the commission’s regulatory actions during the pandemic. And earlier last week, a BLM spokesperson told E&E News that the agency did not plan to postpone oil and gas lease sales.

Typically, when policy changes are proposed, they have to undergo a robust public input process, said Jesse Prentice-Dunn, Policy Director for the Center for Western Priorities. Legally, he said, agencies have to take the public’s comments into account, respond to them, and incorporate them into decision-making. “If you don’t actually have the public able to attend public meetings, able to really thoughtfully put together public comments, then that’s kind of short-circuiting that feedback process,” he said, and it allows agencies “to kind of move forward with whatever they want.”

More than 80 environmental organizations sent a letter to Secretary of the Interior David Bernhardt on Thursday requesting that the department suspend major policy and regulation changes, oil and gas lease sales, and public comment periods for the immediate future.

A spokesperson for the Department of the Interior told Grist, “All DOI actions, including comment periods and lease sales, are being evaluated on a case-by-case basis and adjustments are being made to ensure we are allowing for proper public input, while protecting the health and safety of the public and our employees.”

While the public at large may not have the mental bandwidth or physical ability to participate in rulemaking procedures right now, environmental organizations are keeping the pressure on, especially in the courts. “We’ve got about 100 active lawsuits to protect our air, water and endangered species and thus far they are proceeding,” said Suckling. “The federal courts have not stalled any of them yet.”

On Wednesday, after the Trump administration proceeded with an auction for offshore oil and gas leases in the Gulf of Mexico, environmental groups immediately filed a legal challenge to the sale. On Thursday, groups filed a lawsuit against the EPA for approving new chemicals without adequately informing the public, in violation of the Toxic Substances Control Act.

“[W]e are continuing to hold the Trump Administration accountable for its efforts to undermine our climate and clean air and water safeguards,” Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune said in a statement to Grist. “The work may look different right now, but we’re still pushing forward to create the world we want to see together.”

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Even coronavirus can’t stop Trump’s environmental rollbacks

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One more way the world wasn’t prepared for coronavirus: Air pollution

by DegaLockyer Posted on March 19, 2020

The coronavirus pandemic is changing everything — including the quality of the air we breathe.

In three coronavirus hotspots, satellite imagery revealed a dramatic decline in air pollution in recent weeks as China, Italy, and Iran were brought to a standstill. One Stanford scientist estimated that China’s coronavirus lockdown could have saved 77,000 lives by curbing emissions from factories and vehicles — nearly 10 times the number of deaths worldwide from the virus so far.

But the blue skies are unlikely to last. Just as the temporary dip in global carbon dioxide emissions could be reversed when companies eventually increase production to make up for lost time, air pollution could rebound with a vengeance when factories and traffic spring back to life. On Tuesday, the Chinese government said it plans to relax environmental standards so factories can speed up production.

Air pollution and the virus have a close relationship. Breathing unclean air is linked to high blood pressure, diabetes, and respiratory disease, conditions that doctors are starting to associate with higher death rates for COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. Physicians say that people with these chronic conditions may be less able to fight off infections and more likely to die of the disease.

“The air may be clearing in Italy, but the damage has already been done to human health and people’s ability to fight off infection,” said Sascha Marschang, acting secretary general of the European Public Health Alliance, in a statement.

Evidence suggests that bad air quality may have increased the death toll of a previous coronavirus outbreak, the SARS pandemic of 2003. One study of SARS patients found that people living in regions with a moderate amount of air pollution were 84 percent more likely to die than those in regions with cleaner air.

And now, health officials are warning that people who live in polluted places anywhere may be at greater risk again. “I can’t help but think of the many communities where residents breathe polluted air that can lead to chronic respiratory problems, cancer, and disease, which could make them more vulnerable to the worst impacts of COVID-19,” wrote Gina McCarthy, the president and CEO of the Natural Resources Defense Council, in a post this week about how the organization is responding to the coronavirus.

Clearing the air could help vulnerable people fight off the threat of deadly disease — during this pandemic as well as any future ones — and save millions of lives in the meantime. Governments already have a pretty good idea of how to clean up air pollution, and it doesn’t involve a global pandemic.

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One more way the world wasn’t prepared for coronavirus: Air pollution

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Solar power has been growing for decades. Then coronavirus rocked the market.

by MaddisoShort Posted on March 16, 2020

As the coronavirus outbreak rages on, renewable energy is taking a hit. Factory shutdowns in China have disrupted global supply chains for wind turbines and solar panels, with consequences for clean energy progress this year around the world.

The spread of COVID-19, now declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization, is expected to slow solar energy’s rate of growth for the first time since the 1980s. On Monday, two major solar panel manufacturers that supply the U.S. utility market, JinkoSolar Holding Co. and Canadian Solar Inc., both saw their stock prices fall by double digits. Bloomberg New Energy Finance, a research firm, previously predicted that global solar energy capacity would grow by 121 to 152 gigawatts this year, but on Friday, the group issued a new report dialing back its prediction to just 108 to 143 Gigawatts.

Solar’s rate of growth has been increasing for decades. Clayton Aldern / Grist

Disruption in supply is only part of the equation. The new report predicts that as policymakers and businesses focus on short-term stimulus packages to help the economy, energy infrastructure investments and planning will temporarily go by the wayside. This has already happened in Germany, where a scheduled government meeting to resolve questions over the future of renewable energy on Thursday was used instead to plan for the coronavirus. According to the Bloomberg analysis, these trends will slow battery demand and result in lower-than-expected returns on investments in wind.

In the U.S., the utility-scale wind and solar markets are dealing with uncertainty in their supply chains. Utility-scale wind developers have received “force majeure” notices from wind turbine suppliers in Asia who cannot fulfill their contract obligations in time. The term refers to a common clause in contracts that gives companies some leeway in the case of extreme disruptions, like wars, natural disasters, and pandemics. The delay jeopardizes wind projects that were banking on taking advantage of the wind production tax credit, which expires at the end of this year.

Meanwhile, major U.S. solar developers that can’t get their hands on enough panels are issuing their own “force majeure” notices to utilities. Invenergy and NextEra Energy, the developers of the first two utility-scale solar farms in the state of Wisconsin, both cited the clause in late February and warned of delays to the projects. Now NextEra claims its 150 megawatt solar farm is back on track, while Invenergy’s 300 megawatt project is still up in the air.

“I think you’re going to see a lot of force majeure claims under the coronavirus, up and down the supply chain,” Sheldon Kimber, CEO and co-founder of utility-scale clean energy developer Intersect Power, told Greentech Media.

Factories in China are reportedly starting up operations again, but the ripple effects of the short-term disruption strengthen the case for local manufacturing of renewable energy equipment, according to the Bloomberg analysis. If there’s any silver lining in this story, it’s that governments may now have an opportunity to do just that. Fatih Birol, Executive Director of the International Energy Agency, encouraged governments that are planning stimulus packages in the wake of the pandemic to prioritize green investments and capitalize on the downturn in oil prices to phase out fossil fuels.

“We have an important window of opportunity,” Birol told the Guardian. “We should not allow today’s crisis to compromise the clean energy transition.”

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Solar power has been growing for decades. Then coronavirus rocked the market.

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