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Every Tool’s a Hammer – Adam Savage

by Myrna Posted on May 7, 2019

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Every Tool’s a Hammer

Life Is What You Make It

Adam Savage

Genre: Science & Nature

Price: $12.99

Publish Date: May 7, 2019

Publisher: Atria Books

Seller: SIMON AND SCHUSTER DIGITAL SALES INC


“An imperative how-to for creativity.” —Nick Offerman Adam Savage—star of Discovery Channel’s Mythbusters and one of the most beloved figures in science and tech—shares his golden rules of creativity, from finding inspiration to following through and successfully making your idea a reality. Every Tool ’ s a Hammer is a chronicle of my life as a maker. It’s an exploration of making and of my own productive obsessions, but it’s also a permission slip of sorts from me to you. Permission to grab hold of the things you’re interested in, that fascinate you, and to dive deeper into them to see where they lead you. Through stories from forty-plus years of making and molding, building and break­ing, along with the lessons I learned along the way, this book is meant to be a toolbox of problem solving, complete with a shop’s worth of notes on the tools, techniques, and materials that I use most often. Things like: In Every Tool There Is a Hammer —don’t wait until everything is perfect to begin a project, and if you don’t have the exact right tool for a task, just use whatever’s handy; Increase Your Loose Tolerance —making is messy and filled with screwups, but that’s okay, as creativity is a path with twists and turns and not a straight line to be found; Use More Cooling Fluid —it prolongs the life of blades and bits, and it prevents tool failure, but beyond that it’s a reminder to slow down and reduce the fric­tion in your work and relationships; Screw Before You Glue —mechanical fasteners allow you to change and modify a project while glue is forever but sometimes you just need the right glue, so I dig into which ones will do the job with the least harm and best effects. This toolbox also includes lessons from many other incredible makers and creators, including: Jamie Hyneman, Nick Offerman, Pixar director Andrew Stanton, Oscar-winner Guillermo del Toro, artist Tom Sachs, and chef Traci Des Jardins. And if everything goes well, we will hopefully save you a few mistakes (and maybe fingers) as well as help you turn your curiosities into creations. I hope this book inspires you to build, make, invent, explore, and—most of all—enjoy the thrills of being a creator.

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Every Tool’s a Hammer – Adam Savage

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Can New York make buildings super-efficient, fast?

by dominikdriggers Posted on May 6, 2019

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

New York City passed the most aggressive climate bill in the nation in April, and the city got it done in a truly New York way.

The Climate Mobilization Act is the city’s effort to abide by the Paris climate-change agreement even after the Trump administration withdrew the U.S. from the global accords. Before its abrupt about-face, America’s plan had been to cut carbon emissions by 80 percent by the year 2050. New York is taking up that pledge by introducing new regulations to address the energy performance of buildings.

Buildings contribute a huge share of New York’s carbon emissions — nearly 70 percent, thanks to normal everyday use, but exacerbated by inefficient heating and cooling systems — so they’re an obvious target for regulation. But it’s less obvious how the building sector will answer this charge. There’s a fundamental mismatch in expertise: The people who know how old buildings really work aren’t the same people designing energy-efficient retrofits. Only a big push will get them in the same room (at great expense to landlords).

The city’s new “80-by-50” law prescribes several benchmarks along the way to the ultimate goal in 2050. Some buildings will need to produce real results soon; different types of buildings will be subject to specific targets. The city’s first big milestone arrives in 2030: By then, New York buildings will need to have collectively cut their carbon emissions by 40 percent. Any buildings larger than 25,000 square feet will be subject to the cap (with some key exceptions), which means around 50,000 buildings in total. For landlords and building owners, this is an enormous lift in just over 11 years. That’s by design.

“There’s still a lot of details to figure out as to how this gets implemented,” says Lindsay Robbins, a director for strategy and implementation at the Natural Resources Defense Council, which hashed out this policy’s compromises with the Real Estate Board of New York. “I don’t think any city has done this on this scale before.”

The hope is that New York’s climate law is awesomely burdensome. No, that doesn’t mean a ban on glass skyscrapers. But a law that turns over the everyday dealings of real estate in New York has a great deal of promise for upsetting how buildings work everywhere. That’s what this represents, according to supporters like John Mandyck, CEO of the Urban Green Council, a nonprofit devoted to making New York buildings sustainable. “This law could possibly be the largest disruption in our lifetime for the real-estate industry in New York City,” he says.

New York’s new law is an effort to make the road by walking: It’s not something anyone knows how to do until everyone commits to doing it. The fact that this legislation is sweeping in its scope is why it stands a chance of succeeding, its supporters say. It’s the first plank in the suite of legislation that Mayor Bill de Blasio describes as the city’s own Green New Deal. The idea is to build a durable industry in energy retrofitting, one that benefits everyone involved — and by doing so, establishing a model for other cities around the world. And the city can’t get there with a measure that asks building owners to simply swap out light bulbs.

“New York City is going to spend billions and billions of dollars to meet this new law. When we do that, New York Harbor is still going to flood if the rest of the world doesn’t enact aggressive climate reduction strategies as well,” Mandyck says. “Our point all along has been that if we’re going to spend the billions of dollars, let’s make sure we come up with policies that are exportable.”

New York is going it alone here

Other cities are looking at building performance, to be sure. Every city has an incentive to level up the energy efficiency of buildings: In New York, buildings alone account for 95 percent of electricity use for the city, according to the Urban Green Council. But most cities have not taken steps beyond tracking and disclosure.

More than 25 U.S. cities have adopted various energy-benchmarking policies, as have the states of California and Washington. These laws make it mandatory for building owners to report their energy use (namely their electric and gas bills). Disclosure laws have guided net-zero building codes and voluntary agreements. Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., were early signers.

It’s worth noting the limits of disclosure. Building owners who don’t meet voluntary standards don’t pay any price. Importantly, disclosure is not supposed to be a shaming tool: Benchmarking in New York might show a range in energy consumption by hotels, for example, with usage calculated per square foot so as to compare big hotels with small ones, without naming any specific buildings.

What New York is doing is more strident: It’s the first city to attach a dollar value to these disclosure figures. Washington, D.C., passed a building-energy performance standard in December for buildings over 50,000 square feet, and when buildings in the District fall out of compliance, those landlords will be moved into an advisory lane to get back on track. San Francisco passed a law this month requiring big buildings to switch to renewable electricity, an easier goal for a city with a forgiving climate located in a state with a cleaner grid.

In New York, building owners who don’t meet their carbon reduction requirements will pay fines. Potentially very large fines: The statute calls for a penalty of $268 per every assessed ton of carbon over the cap. For landlords just over the line, the fine will be nominal. But the city’s worst offenders could be looking at annual penalties of more than $1 million.

It’s a policy with teeth, in other words. Fortunately for landlords, there’s a lot of room for buildings to improve, according to Vivian Loftness, professor at Carnegie Mellon University and the Paul Mellon chair in architecture.

“Buildings in the U.S., and certainly commercial buildings, have been incredibly sloppy in their energy use,” Loftness says. “We’ve got [older] mechanical systems that are running at 50 percent efficiency, where there’s things on the market that will run at 95 percent efficiency. We’ve got a lot of room for upgrades for boilers and chillers, air-handling units, control systems — there’s so much room in just the hardware of buildings.”

New York’s strict standard may work for landlords

The Climate Mobilization Act sets deep reduction targets over a fairly short period. Since the law establishes 2005 as the benchmark year  — meaning building energy consumption needs to fall 40 percent below 2005 levels by 2030 — landlords who have made some strides in energy reduction will get credit for their work. The poorest performers will need to show improvement sooner, by 2024, but about one-quarter of buildings won’t require substantial changes. Taking the progress already made into consideration, New York will need to level up its building-energy-performance game by 26 percent over the next 11 years.

Still, it’s significant, especially for New York landlords with multiple buildings in their portfolio. The Real Estate Board of New York, which represents many large developers, has vocally opposed the legislation. The legislation “does not take a comprehensive, city-wide approach needed to solve this complex issue,” said John H. Banks, the board’s president, in a statement. The group objects in particular to exemptions that they say put a greater strain on the building owners subject to this regulation.

“A coalition of stakeholders including environmental organizations, labor, engineering professionals, housing advocates and real estate owners came together and proposed comprehensive and balanced reforms that would have achieved these goals,” Banks said. “The bill that passed today, however, will fall short of achieving the 40 x 30 reduction by only including half of the city’s building stock.”

Douglas Durst, the chair of the Durst Organization, wrote in a letter to Crain’s New York Business that under this legislation, “empty buildings score better than occupied ones, and hundreds of thousands of inefficient and energy-intensive smaller, city-owned and [New York City Housing Authority] buildings have significantly less stringent standards.”

“To get down to even 20 percent from where I am today, with the technology that exists, there’s nothing more that I can do,” Ed Ermler, the board president for a group of condo buildings in Queens, told The New York Times. “It’s not like there’s this magic wand.”

It will take work, no question, says Lane Burt, managing principal for Ember Strategies, a consultancy and strategy firm. But it will not take a wizard. For starters, not every individual building needs to make the 40 percent mark: That’s an aggregate goal. And buildings don’t need to hit their target tomorrow.

“If you’re a building owner and your engineers are telling you, it’s impossible to get 20 percent carbon reduction or 30 percent carbon reduction, really, you need better engineers,” Burt says. “What I interpret from that concern is that the owners are saying, ‘It’s financially impossible for me to do this right now.’ And that I believe completely.” He adds, “The good news is, it might be financially impossible for them to do right now, but we’re not necessarily talking about right now. We’re talking about three decades.”

Over a long enough time span, in fact, the heavier lift makes it more likely that landlords will succeed, not less so, according to supporters of the bill.

“What’s smart about this bill is it doesn’t ask for a small increase. It asks for a big increase,” says Greg Kats, president of Capital-E, a clean-energy consultancy and capital firm. “It’s the kind of thing where if you’re going to do something, you should do quite a lot of it, because the transaction costs [for landlords] to set it up, to engage with tenants, are substantial fixed costs.”

Switching to solar might show gains in kilowatt hours fast. But often, measuring energy efficiency is trickier. It means achieving a negative outcome, a reduction in energy consumption, usually by introducing additive systems that contribute to an overall decrease. Buildings are complex systems: Higher-efficiency windows lead to lower air leakage, which reduces heat loss, which lowers heating bills. Buildings are all different, though, so figuring out the suite of improvements suited to a particular building is complicated.

After all, the work involved is interruptive, whether it means overhauling HVAC processes or considering more costly improvements to a building’s roof or facade. While tenants see the benefit of this work once it’s done, they hate it while it’s happening. With a long-enough runway, landlords can plan around the natural business cycle of a lease (around 10 years, generally) to find the lowest-cost window for this work. And given a tall order, building owners have an incentive to spend in order to achieve big savings.

The hassle of getting to a 10 or 15 percent reduction is not that different from reaching 40 percent, Kats says. Either way, a landlord needs to capture data, engage with landlords and utilities, meet with vendors and consultants, and buy new equipment. These transaction costs are high, but many of these costs are the same whether the goal is 15 percent or 40 percent.

A bad bill — something that asked landlords to make smaller changes more gradually, or with less certainty about future benchmarks or timing — might encourage landlords to look for the low-hanging fruit, the barest improvements necessary to meet the regulatory burden. But big asks translate into benefits that landlords can show to tenants. A law firm may not love an interruption from building management — but replacing office lighting with LED lamps that improve visual acuity? A promise against freezing-cold workspaces that landlords can actually keep? Tenants want those changes!

“If you go deep on [energy efficiency], there are some real economies of scale,” Kats says. Landlords can make changes “that save on capital costs or create more space for you that’s rentable space. It’s that kind of systems approach which deep upgrades allow that makes it much more cost effective.”

How will building owners come up with the capital?

Deep upgrades require capital, of course. Improvements for buildings are expensive, and the payback is long. Most investors don’t think of the building sector as a 50-year investment or even a 30-year investment. It’s rare for a building owner to weigh upfront investments against long-term operating costs, because the capital comes from different pockets, and the savings may variable or may not be guaranteed, according to Loftness. Building improvements ought to pay out within the lifetime of the equipment or materials, but not within, say, five years — so there’s a mismatch between up-front costs and long-term savings.

Owners who also occupy their buildings tend to have longer views about costs, she says, but they may not share the same long-term economics. The question is academic for a building owner who doesn’t have the capital to pay for building upgrades. So it’s good news, for both investors and owner-occupants alike, that the market has an answer to help New York meet this new burden.

The solution comes from California. When the state passed energy-conservation laws 30 years ago, it made utilities responsible for achieving those savings, with the idea being that utilities can bear to wait 30 or 50 years to see a gain. So California utilities have actively promoted investments, financed by the utilities themselves, as a way to meet the regulatory burden. A similar approach is likely to be popular in New York to meet the new energy benchmarks.

“Rather than you, the building owner, having to come up with the money, the utility is coming up with the money, and basically taking the payback through the energy savings,” Loftness says. “Your bill stays the same, but 10 years later, you’ve paid back the ‘loan’ of what they invested in the building.”

The most common category of energy-efficiency financing are negotiated payments known as energy service performance contracts (ESPCs). Under this arrangement, a third party finances the upgrade, sharing the savings with the property owner and making a profit. Third parties that develop, design, build, and fund these improvements are called energy service contract organizations (ESCOs). When utilities are directly involved, as in the California model, the savings-backed arrangements are called utility energy service performance contracts (UESPCs or USPCs), to complete the acronym soup of energy-efficiency financing.

Whether it’s Con Edison or Siemens, these organizations play an important function, as lenders, consultants, or engineers who help building owners bridge the gap for their capital needs.

The federal government, for example, can literally print the money it needs to invest in its own energy retrofits. But federal agencies have a hard time getting Congress to actually allocate the funds to meet these standards (namely set by the Energy Policy Act of 1992). So the government relies on ESCOs to finance and perform this work for federal buildings. As silly as it sounds, the federal government pays private entities to finance this work, through anticipated future savings, even though it’s a safe bet that the U.S. Department of Energy will still be here 50 years down the road.

State and local governments offer their own avenue for financing energy retrofits. Known as property assessed clean energy (PACE) programs, these municipal assessments are effectively loans that are attached to the property. PACE programs, such as the one that New York is introducing with the Climate Mobilization Act, offer long-term financing for little or no money down, with an alternative approach to underwriting that opens up access to these loans to a greater number of consumers than private lenders might. By attaching a loan to a property (and not the property owner who takes out the loan), PACE assessments can transfer with the property when the title changes — meaning that a building’s former owner is not stuck with the tab.

Loftness says that she expects that this meta-industry around energy efficiency financing will be a much bigger part of the New York landscape by 2030 and beyond. “It makes financial sense,” Loftness says. “They make more money on the savings than they do on the expense to upgrade the building.”

An industry may emerge to fully support the changes coming to New York buildings. That doesn’t mean it won’t be a challenge. The city will need to help building operators and owners — the people who know the most about their buildings — talk with the people who can design the solutions to improve them over time. Operations and design engineering aren’t the same skill sets. It may take the full three decades between now and 2050 to find all the answers.

“The reality is, this is difficult. This is the engineering challenge of our time,” Burt says. “There’s not a lot of folks around who really understand how big buildings work, especially the way they were designed 50 or 60 years ago.”

This problem is not specific to New York. The knowledge gap between operating buildings in St. Louis and boosting building performance in St. Louis is just as wide. But if New York can figure out a solution that touches all the buildings in New York, then it will have necessarily developed the knowledge, the expertise, and the specialization that can serve the entire country. Or the world.

Saving the climate through better bureaucracy

New York’s law aims to put officials and experts in an optimal position to answer the questions that haven’t even come up yet. To that end, it creates a new sub-department under the New York Department of Buildings. While its precise mandate is still to be determined, this department will be outside the mayor’s office and fully integrated into the function of the city. “That’s the city sending a signal to building owners that this is something you need to manage, just like vacancy or rent,” Burt says.

The law also establishes an advisory board, with members appointed by the mayor and the city council, to evaluate several issues on an ongoing basis. The board will at times reconsider the per-square-foot carbon reduction goals for each of 10 building category types, from residential to hospitals to retail. While the legislation has set standards for the first compliance period, there are still a lot of details to determine for the next phase (2030–2034), and the fine print will fall to the Department of Buildings, the advisory board, and the Mayor’s Office of Sustainability.

“For this [policy], the Department of Buildings is also the same department that has administered the benchmarking legislation and the audit requirements that have been in place, so I think that’s they were also chosen to administer this,” Robbins says. “Since this is a whole other level of oversight and decision-making, and paperwork and processes, that’s why they decided to create a whole new division and a new person to head that up, to make sure this legislation is successfully implemented.”

The city’s forthcoming Office of Building Energy and Emissions Performance will be headed up by a registered design professional, the legislation stipulates. No director has been named yet.

Still to come: Carbon cap-and-trade for buildings

One of the most formidable policy ideas in the bill also falls in the TBD category: It sets the stage for a carbon-trading market between buildings. It authorizes a study and guidelines for implementing a real-estate carbon market by 2021. If and when carbon trading comes to town, building owners could trade carbon-emissions credits in order to meet the cap. Owners of large portfolios could trade between their buildings to meet targets.

If New York’s policy is done right, carbon trading could serve low-income neighborhoods in particular. Extra credit could be given to upgrades performed in distressed areas, creating an incentive in areas that lack access to capital, whether the factor is 2-to-1, 3-to-1, or 10-to-1. Picture an ESCO — a Siemens or a FirstEnergy — meeting with building owners in low-income neighborhoods and offering do the building upgrades in exchange for the credits.

“This creates an entirely different source of capital to finance efficiency upgrades in low-income neighborhoods,” Mandyck says.

“The overall importance of trading is that it’s globally relevant,” he adds. “It doesn’t matter what political system you have, what climate you’re in, what your building stock is. Building carbon trading can work anywhere in the world.”

There are still lingering questions that the Climate Mobilization Act hasn’t addressed. Some involve the carbon trading market: how those low-resource neighborhoods will engage in the carbon market shaping up around them, for example. Robbins notes that New York State has committed to a number of energy-efficiency investments; it’s unclear whether buildings owners can apply for these grants in order to meet New York City goals, or whether the state will deem them “free riders” for whatever political reasons.

Robbins also notes that an enormous chunk of New York City buildings were exempted from the guidelines. Any building with more than one rent-regulated housing unit will face a different regulatory path. If buildings with affordable housing — and this means buildings with any affordable housing — don’t comply with the carbon caps, they’ll face a list of “pre-set prescriptive measures,” Robbins says. A slap on the wrist compared to fines.

Residential buildings over 25,000 square feet with affordable units represent half the large buildings in New York. This means half of the applicable buildings won’t be required to meet the energy standards, which also means the other half will need to work that much harder to get to 40 percent by 2030 and 80 percent the following decade. New York lawmakers feared that the cost would be passed on to renters, or that rents on buildings might be raised to the point at which units are no longer considered rent stabilized.

“We understand the constraints and the reasons why rent-regulated housing was dealt with the way that it was,” Robbins says. “But that is such a huge swath of the multi-family buildings in this city, and it is a sector that we really want to see get the benefits of energy efficiency.”

There are other features of the bill that could produce big changes in industry. Mandyck notes that the law enables building owners to switch to renewable energy sources in order to get to compliance; currently, 70 percent of all electric energy use in New York City is generated through fossil fuels. He says that a renewable-energy credit will create a much higher demand for renewable energy in New York.

There are drawbacks to be addressed, too. Laurie Kerr, president of LK Policy Lab, a research and design institute for energy efficiency, says that it might be a mistake to set a single target for compliance in 2030. Rather than asking owners of half of New York’s buildings to hit a single deadline, the city might consider cascading annual targets for different building typologies.

But she praises the potential of a building-to-building carbon-trading market as a “least-cost path” for a bill that otherwise sets stringent targets for buildings. She points to a similar, smaller ordinance in Tokyo as a model for carbon trading. New York’s bill is strict, she says; any degree of freedom for building owners is going to help.

While the long runway and high benchmarks for success set by New York’s climate law makes it worth the trouble for building owners — and tenants, and providers, and consultants — it will still mark a huge shift for the city. The Real Estate Board of New York is joining forces with the Institute for Market Transformation, an energy-efficiency nonprofit, to provide training sessions to help the real-estate industry adjust.

It could fail — it could fall to corruption, incompetence, or politics. Sweeping climate answers such as the Paris accords have demonstrated that they are vulnerable to populism and the slow-moving wheel of democratic consensus.

But if New York real estate and New York regulators can get it right? If a climate bill can work in New York, it can work anywhere.

“There was a time before cities had departments of sanitation. There was a time before cities had departments of health,” Kerr says. “These were all game-changers in the histories of cities. This is another turning point.”

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Can New York make buildings super-efficient, fast?

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The tax bill for many big polluters last year: $0

by Hudson6754 Posted on May 6, 2019

Adapting to our warming world is expensive. It costs a lot to build sea walls, cure disease outbreaks, and rebuild after floods. It takes money to invent better batteries, turn farms into carbon sinks, and replace polluting power plants with clean energy.

Instead of maybe taxing carbon emissions to pay for all this, the United States is giving tax breaks to the giant corporations profiting from fossil fuels. Several of the biggest of them paid no taxes last year, according to a new report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, or ITEP, a nonpartisan think tank. It’s the first look at the effect of the 2017 Trump tax cuts, which slashed the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent. Companies are still finding ways to avoid paying anything.

Last year, for instance, Chevron made $4.5 billion in profits. If it had paid the (newly reduced) corporate tax rate of 21 percent, it would have coughed up $955 million in taxes. That’s enough money to triple funding for ARPA-E, the U.S. energy research and development program that pays for moonshot inventions like wind-turbines on kites. Instead, Uncle Sam handed Chevron $181 million at tax time.

Power utilities and oil and gas companies account for 22 of the 60 biggest companies that paid no taxes last year, according to ITEP’s study. Some of the well-known names on the list include Kinder Morgan, Occidental Petroleum, and Halliburton. The think tank didn’t crunch the most recent numbers for every company, just the biggest ones, but if you go back a few years, ITEP calculated that oil and gas companies avoided paying $27 billion in taxes from 2008 through 2015, while power utilities evaded $86 billion.

To be sure, there’s often a good reason for a tax break. Politicians use them to help get new industries — like the renewable energy industry — up on their feet. Duke Energy, for instance, got a tax credit of $129 million for renewable energy production in 2018. Economists call such credits and exemptions “tax expenditures.” It’s like the government is spending money because these tax breaks leave a hole in the federal budget.

The problem is that many of these subsidies outlive their usefulness.

“Unlike ARPA-E, which has to rationalize its existence and budget every year, these tax expenditures — and they are expenditures — just stay there even if they are no longer relevant,” said Matt Gardner, senior fellow at ITEP. “Are these tax breaks still useful? We want to be in a position where lawmakers are asking if they still make sense every year.”

And about ARPA-E’s budget. In the ten years of its existence, the program has yielded 1,500 inventions (of things like high-energy iron slurry batteries and clothes that automatically warm you up when it gets cold) and over 50 new companies. Nonpartisan groups say ARPA-E provides a good return on investment, and Republicans and Democrats come together to pay for it every year. But the Trump administration wants to cut its budget to zero.

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The tax bill for many big polluters last year: $0

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What if air conditioners could help save the planet instead of destroying it?

by AlejandPressley Posted on May 5, 2019

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

Earth’s climate is full of terrifying feedback loops: Decreased rainfall raises the risk of wildfires, which release yet more carbon dioxide. A warming Arctic could trigger the release of long-frozen methane, which would heat the planet even faster than carbon. A lesser-known climate feedback loop, though, is likely mere feet from where you’re sitting: the air conditioner. Use of the energy-intensive appliance causes emissions that contribute to higher global temperatures, which means we’re all using AC more, producing more emissions and more warming.

But what if we could weaponize air conditioning units to help pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere instead? According to a new paper in Nature, it’s feasible. Using technology currently in development, AC units in skyscrapers and even your home could get turned into machines that not only capture CO2, but transform the stuff into a fuel for powering vehicles that are difficult to electrify, like cargo ships. The concept, called crowd oil, is still theoretical and faces many challenges. But in these desperate times, crowd oil might have a place in the fight to curb climate change.

The problem with air conditioners isn’t just that they suck up lots of energy but that they also emit heat. “When you run an air conditioning system, you don’t get anything for nothing,” says materials chemist Geoffrey Ozin of the University of Toronto, coauthor on the new paper. “If you cool something, you heat something, and that heat goes into the cities.” Their use exacerbates the heat island effect of cities — lots of concrete soaks up lots of heat, which a city releases well after the sun sets.

To retrofit an air conditioner to capture CO2 and turn it into fuel, you’d need a rather extensive overhaul of the components. Meaning, you wouldn’t just be able to ship a universal device for folks to bolt onto their units. First of all, you’d need to incorporate a filter that would absorb CO2 and water from the air. You’d also need to include an electrolyzer to strip the oxygen molecule from H2O to get H2, which you’d then combine with CO2 to get hydrocarbon fuels. “Everyone can have their own oil well, basically,” Ozin says.

The researchers’ analysis found that the Frankfurt Fair Tower in Germany (chosen by lead author Roland Dittmeyer of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, by the way, because of its landmark status in the city’s skyline), with a total volume of about 200,000 cubic meters, could capture 1.5 metric tons of CO2 per hour and produce up to 4,000 metric tons of fuel a year. By comparison, the first commercial “direct air capture” plant, built by Climeworks in Switzerland, captures 900 metric tons of CO2 per year, about 10 times less, Dittmeyer says. An apartment building with five or six units could capture 0.5 kg of CO2 an hour with this proposed system.

Theoretically, anywhere you have an air conditioner, you have a way to make synthetic fuel. “The important point is that you can convert the CO2 into a liquid product onsite, and there are pilot-scale plants that can do that,” says Dittmeyer, who is working on one with colleagues that is able to produce 10 liters (2.6 gallons) a day. They hope to multiply that output by a factor of 20 in the next two years.

For this process to be carbon neutral, though, all those souped-up air conditioners would need to be powered with renewables, because burning the synthetic fuel would also produce emissions. To address that problem, Dittmeyer proposes turning whole buildings into solar panels — placing them not just on rooftops but potentially coating facades and windows with ultrathin, largely transparent panels. “It’s like a tree — the skyscraper or house you live in produces a chemical reaction,” Dittmeyer says. “It’s like the glucose that a tree is producing.” That kind of building transformation won’t happen overnight, of course, a reminder that installing carbon scrubbers is only ever one piece of the solution.

Scaling up the technology to many buildings and cities poses yet more challenges. Among them, how to store and then collect all that accumulated fuel. The idea is for trucks to gather and transport the stuff to a facility, or in some cases when the output is greater, pipelines would be built. That means both retrofitting a whole lot of AC units (the cost of which isn’t yet clear, since the technology isn’t finalized yet), and building out an infrastructure to ferry that fuel around for use in industry.

“Carbon-neutral hydrocarbon fuels from electricity can help solve two of our biggest energy challenges: managing intermittent renewables and decarbonizing the hard-to-electrify parts of transportation and industry,” says David Keith, acting chief scientist of Carbon Engineering, which is developing much larger stand-alone devices for sucking CO2 out of the air and storing it, known as carbon capture and storage, or CCS. “While I may be biased by my work with Carbon Engineering, I am deeply skeptical about a distributed solution. Economies of scale can’t be wished away. There’s a reason we have huge wind turbines, a reason we don’t feed yard waste into all-in-one nano-scale pulp-and-paper mills.”

Any carbon capture technology also faces the sticky problem of the moral hazard. The concern is that negative emissions technologies, like what Carbon Engineering is working on, and neutral emissions approaches, like this new framework, distract from the most critical objective for fighting climate change: reducing emissions, and fast. Some would argue that all money and time must go toward developing technologies that will allow any industry or vehicle to become carbon neutral or even carbon negative.

This new framework isn’t meant to be a cure-all for climate change. After all, for it to be truly carbon neutral it’d need to run entirely on renewable energy. To that end, it would presumably encourage the development of those energy technologies. (The building-swaddling photovoltaics that Dittmeyer envisions are just becoming commercially available.) “I don’t think it would be ethically wrong to pursue this,” says environmental social scientist Selma L’Orange Seigo of ETH Zurich, who wasn’t involved in this research but has studied public perception of CCS. “It would be ethically wrong to only pursue this.”

One potential charm of this AC carbon-capture scenario, though, is that it attempts to address a common problem faced by CCS systems, which is that someone has to pay for it. That is, a business that captures and locks away its CO2 has nothing to sell. AC units that turn CO2 into fuel, though, would theoretically come with a revenue stream. “There’s definitely a market,” Seigo says. “That’s one of the big issues with CCS.”

Meanwhile, people will continue running their energy-hungry air conditioners. For sensitive populations like the elderly, access to AC during heat waves is a life or death matter: Consider that the crippling heat wave that struck Europe in August 2003 killed 35,000 people, and these sorts of events are growing more frequent and intense as the planet warms as a whole. A desert nation like Saudi Arabia, by the way, devotes a stunning 70 percent of its energy to powering AC units; in the near future, a whole lot of other places on Earth are going to feel a lot more like Saudi Arabia.

So no, carbon-capturing AC units won’t save the world on their own. But they could act as a valuable intermittent renewable as researchers figure out how to get certain industries and vehicles to go green.

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What if air conditioners could help save the planet instead of destroying it?

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Signature in the Cell – Stephen C. Meyer

by Myrna Posted on May 5, 2019

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Signature in the Cell

DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design

Stephen C. Meyer

Genre: Biology

Price: $1.99

Publish Date: June 23, 2009

Publisher: HarperOne

Seller: HARPERCOLLINS PUBLISHERS


“Signature in the Cell is a defining work in the discussion of life’s origins and the question of whether life is a product of unthinking matter or of an intelligent mind. For those who disagree with ID, the powerful case Meyer presents cannot be ignored in any honest debate. For those who may be sympathetic to ID, on the fence, or merely curious, this book is an engaging, eye-opening, and often eye-popping read” — American Spectator Named one of the top books of 2009 by the Times Literary Supplement (London), this controversial and compelling book from Dr. Stephen C. Meyer presents a convincing new case for intelligent design (ID), based on revolutionary discoveries in science and DNA. Along the way, Meyer argues that Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution as expounded in The Origin of Species did not, in fact, refute ID. If you enjoyed Francis Collins’s The Language of God, you’ll find much to ponder—about evolution, DNA, and intelligent design—in Signature in the Cell.

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Signature in the Cell – Stephen C. Meyer

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Evolution – Edward J. Larson

by Myrna Posted on May 4, 2019

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Evolution

The Remarkable History of a Scientific Theory

Edward J. Larson

Genre: Life Sciences

Price: $1.99

Publish Date: August 8, 2006

Publisher: Random House Publishing Group

Seller: Penguin Random House LLC


“I often said before starting, that I had no doubt I should frequently repent of the whole undertaking.” So wrote Charles Darwin aboard The Beagle , bound for the Galapagos Islands and what would arguably become the greatest and most controversial discovery in scientific history. But the theory of evolution did not spring full-blown from the head of Darwin. Since the dawn of humanity, priests, philosophers, and scientists have debated the origin and development of life on earth, and with modern science, that debate shifted into high gear. In this lively, deeply erudite work, Pulitzer Prize–winning science historian Edward J. Larson takes us on a guided tour of Darwin’s “dangerous idea,” from its theoretical antecedents in the early nineteenth century to the brilliant breakthroughs of Darwin and Wallace, to Watson and Crick’s stunning discovery of the DNA double helix, and to the triumphant neo-Darwinian synthesis and rising sociobiology today. Along the way, Larson expertly places the scientific upheaval of evolution in cultural perspective: the social and philosophical earthquake that was the French Revolution; the development, in England, of a laissez-faire capitalism in tune with a Darwinian ethos of “survival of the fittest”; the emergence of Social Darwinism and the dark science of eugenics against a backdrop of industrial revolution; the American Christian backlash against evolutionism that culminated in the famous Scopes trial; and on to today’s world, where religious fundamentalists litigate for the right to teach “creation science” alongside evolution in U.S. public schools, even as the theory itself continues to evolve in new and surprising directions. Throughout, Larson trains his spotlight on the lives and careers of the scientists, explorers, and eccentrics whose collaborations and competitions have driven the theory of evolution forward. Here are portraits of Cuvier, Lamarck, Darwin, Wallace, Haeckel, Galton, Huxley, Mendel, Morgan, Fisher, Dobzhansky, Watson and Crick, W. D. Hamilton, E. O. Wilson, and many others. Celebrated as one of mankind’s crowning scientific achievements and reviled as a threat to our deepest values, the theory of evolution has utterly transformed our view of life, religion, origins, and the theory itself, and remains controversial, especially in the United States (where 90% of adults do not subscribe to the full Darwinian vision). Replete with fresh material and new insights, Evolution will educate and inform while taking readers on a fascinating journey of discovery.

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Evolution – Edward J. Larson

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A tale of two Washingtons: How Jay Inslee aims to take his climate plan nationwide

by JoelCarlile5 Posted on May 3, 2019

On a recent spring evening in Seattle, a crowd of nearly 1,000 gathered for a glimpse at one of the Democratic Party’s rising stars. When Washington Governor Jay Inslee bounded on stage, the audience let out a gasp, and collectively rose to its feet to offer a standing ovation.

Inslee was actually there to introduce Stacey Abrams, the Georgia Democrat who narrowly missed becoming the first black woman to be elected governor of a state. “I speak on behalf of 7 million Washingtonians in welcoming Stacey Abrams to the great state of Washington,” Inslee proclaimed, inviting his colleague from the South to join him at the lectern.

Like Abrams, Inslee hopes his star is on the rise. It’s been more than two months since he jumped into a then-crowded, now-overflowing Democratic presidential primary with one major item on his agenda: climate change.

In some respects, Inslee’s decision to run as the climate candidate couldn’t come at a more opportune time. Recent polling shows warming is the No. 1 issue for Democratic voters. And Inslee is in the midst of signing a slew of bills into law that will make Washington a national leader on climate.

Outside of his home state, however, crowds would likely be less moved to standing Os if Inslee unexpectedly appeared in front of them. He is currently polling at 1 percent. When I brought that fact to his attention, he quipped, “Solid!” But that level of support is barely enough to qualify for the dozen primary debates that will commence this summer.

More importantly, though, candidates with higher name-recognition are beginning to encroach on the ground he’s staked out. In 2016, it would have been easy for Inslee to set himself apart as a climate champion — presidential candidates spent a total of 5 minutes and 27 seconds discussing the issue. In 2019, the topic is a top-tier primary issue.

Already, Senators Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker have released climate-related policy proposals focusing on public lands and environmental justice, respectively. This week, former Texas Representative Beto O’Rourke unveiled what was at the time the most comprehensive climate change plan of the bunch, aiming for net-zero emissions by 2050.

On Friday, Inslee came out with his own “100% Clean Energy for America Plan,” the first plank of a wider platform called the “Climate Mission.” It includes many of the positions that are gaining consensus among 2020 hopefuls: no drilling on public lands, re-enter the Paris climate agreement, ban highly polluting hydrofluorocarbons, and end tax breaks for fossil fuel companies, among other policies.

Where Inslee stakes out some new territory is with the three-pronged, central portion of his plan: Within a decade, he wants to eliminate pollution from new cars, new buildings, and our energy grid. Under the broader Climate Mission, he aims to get America to net-zero pollution by 2045 — five years sooner than Beto’s plan.

It’s an ambitious timeline, but by the time the debates roll around, Inslee expects to have a list of accomplishments in Washington that he can point to as evidence that his agenda could scale nationally. “Talk doesn’t cut it,” he told Grist. “You have to be able to actually do things, and frankly, I’m the only candidate in this race who has actually achieved results.”

Three climate-related measures proposed in Washington state — two of which Inslee will sign into law next week — appear to serve as mini-models for what he could push for if he landed in the White House.

Building efficiency

One of the bills the governor expects to sign soon will require new buildings in Washington to adhere to efficiency standards. The bill directs the state to develop efficiency standards that will ratchet down energy use over the next decade. The bill also includes incentives for existing buildings to be retrofitted to comply with the new standards. San Francisco and New York are in the midst of passing similar requirements, but Inslee says his is the first to include the retrofit component.

His presidential climate plan works much the same way. In it, he advocates for a national Zero-Carbon Building Standard by 2023 for new commercial and residential buildings, and notes that future proposals will include a plan to retrofit existing buildings. “It is a big deal because it is not romantic,” Inslee said, referring to building efficiency. “It’s the single most cost-effective, money-in-the-bank job creator of all the things we do.”

100-percent clean energy

Inslee also expects to sign a 100-percent clean electricity bill into law next week. It would eliminate use of coal power in his state by 2025 and require utilities to achieve 100 percent clean electricity generation by 2045. The law will also incorporate some of the environmental justice elements that Green New Deal advocates are championing. For instance, his bill would require that utilities take into consideration the social cost of carbon — the environmental and social damage inflicted per ton of emitted carbon. That’s another first nationwide, by the way. “It makes utilities potentially work on a performance-based system,” Inslee said, which means utilities will have incentives beyond profits for shareholders. “That’s a fundamental change.”

The national version of that bill looks similar on a slightly different timeline: It calls for retiring the U.S. coal fleet by 2030, and 100 percent carbon-neutral power by the same year (100 percent renewable electricity by 2035). And it includes a comparable switch to a performance-based system for the nation’s utilities, as well as measures that safeguard front-line communities against price hikes and pollution.

Clean vehicles

There are currently fewer than 43,000 electric cars on the road in Washington, but Inslee believes the state is still on track to meet his target of having 50,000 electric vehicles on its streets by 2020. The governor helped set up an electric vehicle charging system along his state’s highway system in 2018. He also pushed for a clean fuel standard that would have resulted in the emissions reductions equivalent to taking one-in-five cars off the road, but when that failed in the legislature, he changed course and tried to pass a state-wide cap on carbon emissions by executive action instead. It’s currently tied up in the state’s Supreme Court. “That would be the cherry on top if we got that,” he said.

His presidential plan is a bigger lift. It aims for zero emissions from new passenger cars, medium-duty trucks, and buses by 2030. That means that 100 percent of new lightweight and medium-duty cars sold in America would have to be zero emission within roughly 10 years. Inslee also aims to take a version of his low carbon fuel standard — the one that failed in his state — and apply it on a federal level. The same goes for a new nationwide EV charging system.

While Inslee’s on a bit of a roll of late, he hasn’t always had success with his climate initiatives. The governor presided over multiple carbon tax initiatives that failed both in the Washington legislature and at the voting booth. In a recent poll conducted by the New York Times, Inslee indicated he was undecided about implementing a carbon tax should he become president.

“If one thing is not working, you go to plan B, and that’s what we’ve done,” he told Grist. He added that if all of the recent climate bills he’s been championing manage to pass, it’ll have roughly the same CO2 savings as a carbon tax would have anyway.

While the legislation being passed in Olympia burnishes Inslee’s bona fides, working against him on the national stage is the prominence of the Green New Deal. Being pushed by the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, it’s quickly become a reference point for the climate conversation on the left. Many of Inslee’s fellow 2020 hopefuls have lined up behind the ambitious resolution — even though there’s no concrete policy tied to it yet.

When O’Rourke unveiled his surprisingly bold climate plan earlier this week, spokespeople for the Sunrise Movement, one of the main groups championing the Green New Deal, attacked his proposal. They criticized it as not aggressive enough and said that “the United States should do much more.” They argued that the 2050 goal post was insufficient and that the U.S. should shoot for net-zero domestic emissions by 2030 instead, a target widely considered impossible. (They’ve since walked back their criticism, calling O’Rourke’s plan “a great start.”) Compared to Beto’s plan, Inslee’s proposal is only five years closer to what Green New Dealers are demanding.

The question remains as to whether the Green New Deal will survive the primary season as the gold standard for climate action among Democrats, or if stances will soften heading into the general election. Back in 2007, Inslee co-authored a book called Apollo’s Fire: Igniting America’s Clean Energy Economy, which outlined a climate action plan very similar to the Green New Deal.

When I pressed him for a position on the proposal championed by progressive rock star Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others, the normally folksy Inslee seemed irritated. He’d heard this question many times before. “I support the Green New Deal, is that what you’d like to hear?” he asked, lifting his palms toward the ceiling in a hopeless gesture. “I support the Green New Deal.”

Honestly, it’d be hard for him not to back ambitious climate goals, given the sole focus of his platform. But if the climate candidate wants his star to rise above a crowded field, he has to hope that his longtime clean-energy evangelism and the most ambitious plan to tackle warming (so far) carries more weight than just being another hopeful willing to embrace the Green New Deal.

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A tale of two Washingtons: How Jay Inslee aims to take his climate plan nationwide

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‘Climate denial’ just made it into the dictionary. Wait, what?

by ChristinOlney9 Posted on May 2, 2019

The world is on fire, and so is our vocabulary. Merriam-Webster added 640 new words to its online dictionary last week. The additions include swole (“extremely muscular”), new meanings for snowflake (someone who is “treated as unique or special” or “overly sensitive”) and, you guessed it, a whole batch of neologisms tied to the environment.

“The work of revising a dictionary is constant, and it mirrors the culture’s need to make sense of the world with words,” the dictionary’s announcement reads.

Many of the new arrivals reflect the creative ways big corporations have found to trash the place. Our plastic pollution problem has brought us microplastic, “a piece of plastic that is five millimeters or smaller in size.” The natural gas industry (the folks who gave us “fracking”) introduced flowblack, “liquid used in fracking that returns to the surface after being injected into shale.” Then there’s omnicide, “the destruction of all life or all human life (as by nuclear war).”

Great, you say, any other downers? Of course! Bioaccumulation for the gradual buildup of contaminants, like pesticides and heavy metals, in an organism over time. And chronic wasting disease is an illness that afflicts deer, leading to weight loss, drooling, and listlessness.

For a more cheerful phrase, take bluebird day, “a day marked by cloudless blue skies.” Sounds lovely until you learn about the potential cloudpocalypse (not an official dictionary entry, I just made that up) in which a lack of climate-regulating cloud cover brings about a scary global-warming feedback loop.

Another nice one: petrichor, the name for that pleasant, earthy smell that fills the air after a rain. Contributing to that odor is geosmin — an organic compound created by soil- and water-dwelling bacteria.

The ever-expanding agricultural lexicon brought us a few new selections, such as the verb hydroseed, for the spraying of a liquid seed-mulch-fertilizer mix, along with the easy-to-pronounce insecticide called imidacloprid.

The big surprise for me was that Merriam-Webster’s new additions included two compound nouns, climate change denial and climate change denier. Wait, haven’t those phrases been in frequent use for a long time? The reason for their inclusion gives us a glimpse into the inner workings of the dictionary and the painstaking process of deciding what makes the cut.

“Traditionally, we limited the entries for compounds because we were always trying to conserve space in the printed dictionary,” Peter Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster’s editor-at-large, wrote in an email. The online dictionary lifts this limitation, enabling more space for compounds like screen time and go-cup.

But not all compounds make it into the dictionary. Sokolowski pointed to a “longstanding rule not to enter terms that we consider to be self-evident or self-explanatory.”

Consider the phrase cattle ranch. You can look up the definitions for cattle and ranch and deduce the compound’s meaning. That’s why the phrase isn’t in the dictionary. But dude ranch? A large farm for raising … men? Hence, dude ranch gets an entry.

Whereas the meaning of climate change denial is self-evident, the shortened form climate denial could be confusing for those who don’t spend their days thinking about our planetary crisis. Climate, after all, is just a word for the prevailing weather conditions of an area over time. Why would anyone deny the rain dropping on their head?

“Therefore, because the variant needed entry, the expanded form gets an entry even though its meaning is transparent,” Sokolowski said.

Speaking of transparent, one thing couldn’t be clearer: The climate is changing and humans are the cause, as sure as petrichor after a rain.

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‘Climate denial’ just made it into the dictionary. Wait, what?

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Los Angeles launched its own Green New Deal

by Hiram53B0521 Posted on May 1, 2019

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

Los Angeles just launched its very own Green New Deal, setting up the second-largest city in the country to have a carbon-neutral economy by 2050.

“Politicians in Washington don’t have to look across the aisle in Congress to know what a Green New Deal is ― they can look across the country, to Los Angeles,” Mayor Eric Garcetti said in a statement Monday.

The city’s Green New Deal is an aggressive expansion of the Sustainable City pLAn the mayor created in 2015 to reflect more recent environmental studies that have shown the need for rapid and more radical solutions to combat climate change.

Garcetti was among the handful of mayors and governors to stick with the Paris climate agreement after President Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out of the accord. The mayor said his Green New Deal unveiled Monday is partially driven by his commitment to uphold the Paris Agreement.

The city’s Green New Deal would require all new city-owned buildings and major renovations to be “all-electric,” effective immediately. The plan also hopes to phase out styrofoam and to plant 90,000 trees by 2021, and to end plastic straws and single-use containers by 2028.

The initiative also includes Los Angeles recycling 100 percent of its wastewater by 2035 and building a zero-carbon electricity grid with the goal of reaching an 80 percent renewable energy supply by 2036.

By 2050, the city hopes to create 400,000 green jobs, have every building become emissions-free and halt sending trash to landfills. By then, the city’s plan is expected to save more than 1,600 lives, 660 trips to the hospital and $16 billion in avoided health care expenses every year.

“With flames on our hillsides and floods in our streets, cities cannot wait another moment to confront the climate crisis with everything we’ve got,” Garcetti said. “L.A. is leading the charge, with a clear vision for protecting the environment and making our economy work for everyone.”

Los Angeles joins New York City, the country’s largest and most economically influential city, in working to create more localized climate initiatives as progressive Democratic lawmakers in Washington push for a national Green New Deal, led by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) who introduced the resolution with Senator Ed Markey (D-Mass.) in February. New York City passed a historic bill on April 18 capping climate-changing pollution from big buildings and requiring massive cuts to greenhouse gases.

The L.A. City Council passed a motion earlier requiring the city to draft a Green New Deal plan to match Ocasio-Cortez and Markey’s resolution, which proposes increasing clean energy development, boosting electric vehicle manufacturing, and guaranteeing high-wage jobs fixing roads and rebuilding bridges.

The resolution in Congress is meant to be more of a guidance to eventually draft federal climate policy, but critics say that it’s a wish list of radical reforms. But the resolution does outline important steps for local leaders to take to combat climate change.

From 2017 to 2018, the number of cities pledging to use 100 percent renewable energy had doubled. More than a dozen states have passed or are considering setting 100 percent clean-electricity targets, according to a March report by consultant group EQ Research.

Some environmental groups, including the Sierra Club, applauded Garcetti for L.A.’s new initiative. But the city’s Sunrise Movement chapter said Monday that the plan will not do enough to combat climate change in time.

“Our generation’s future, as well as the future of Los Angeles and of the world, depends on us reaching net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. This is not a goal — it is a deadline,” the group said in a Medium post. “With Mayor Garcetti’s current plan for net-zero emissions by 2050, Los Angeles is on track to be 20 years too late. That is not a Green New Deal.”

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Los Angeles launched its own Green New Deal

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How Linda Garcia risked everything to keep Big Oil out of her community

by katiewalthall34 Posted on May 1, 2019

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

Every time Linda Garcia’s cellphone pings, she wonders if it will be another death threat. The environmental activist has been targeted by anonymous callers for five years since taking on Big Oil to save her community from environmental devastation.

Garcia lives in Fruit Valley, the kind of close-knit place where everybody knows everybody. The low-income community in Vancouver, Washington, sits just across the river from Portland, Oregon, and is home to a thousand households. It also has a severe air pollution problem. In 2013, when Garcia, 51, first heard of a plan to put a massive fossil fuel transportation hub on the edge of her neighborhood, Fruit Valley was suffering the worst air quality in the city. Parents were regularly warned to keep children indoors to protect them from the dark industrial smog that descended across the river.

Goldman Environmental Foundation

Concerned about how the new development might exacerbate the problems, Garcia, who was secretary of the Fruit Valley Neighborhood Association, started asking questions. She was skeptical of dubious claims being made by executives from Texas-headquartered oil company Tesoro (as it was then called) and elected officials about impressive job creation and minimal environmental risks.

“They made it sound amazing — jobs, jobs, jobs — which in a low-income community like Fruit Valley that was still recovering from the recession sounded great … But most of it turned out to be slick PR,” Garcia told HuffPost.

The deeper Garcia dug, the bleaker it looked: She believed the mega-terminal would have devastating consequences — health, environmental, and social — for the community and across the region.

The project would be North America’s largest oil terminal. The plan was to transport up to 11 million gallons of oil every day halfway across the country on mile-and-a-half-long trains from fracking fields in North Dakota through the Columbia River to the industrial Port of Vancouver, where the proposed terminal would be located less than a mile from most Fruit Valley residents. The oil would then be loaded onto ocean tankers at the terminal and shipped to Asia, where rapidly rising energy demands are enticing U.S. fossil fuel companies.

The oil company’s environmental and safety track record rang alarm bells for Garcia, especially the death of seven workers at one of its refineries in nearby Anacortes in 2010. In 2016, as the community continued its fight, the Department of Justice and Environmental Protection Agency fined Tesoro $10.4 million for air pollution violations relating to six refineries and $720,000 for alleged safety breaches at Anacortes refinery.

The more Garcia chipped away at the project’s marketing veneer, the more worried she got, which motivated her to organize the community to oppose the oil giant and forestall environmental devastation. Over the course of her long campaign against the terminal, she kept up the momentum — despite multiple death threats that continue even today.“I didn’t give up; I’m not backing down. I am doing the right thing, that’s who I am,” she said.

Six years later, the Tesoro-Savage terminal is dead in the water and Garcia is the recipient of one of the world’s most prestigious environmental awards.

It was her steely determination that stood out to the committee, which awards the annual Goldman Environmental Prize to six grassroots environmentalists, one from each inhabited continent, in recognition of their leadership and efforts to protect the natural environment at significant personal cost. (This year’s other winners come from Chile, Liberia, North Macedonia, Cook Islands, and Mongolia.)

“Despite personal risks, political and legal obstacles in her path, and challenges with her own health, Linda demonstrated steady leadership throughout a long campaign — and didn’t stop until the terminal was defeated,” said Goldman prize spokesman Ilan Kayatsky.

Garcia was relentless. Through the neighborhood association, she met with company and council officials and organized public meetings to share information with friends, neighbors, and local businesses about the terminal.

Goldman Environmental Foundation

She also works with the Washington Environmental Council — a nonprofit that focuses on sustainability and climate action throughout Washington state — which helped her garner support from outside environmental groups like Columbia Riverkeeper and the Sierra Club. As the community got educated and organized, the company stopped turning up at public meetings.

In response, the community got political, voting out two of the three elected port authority commissioners who had twice voted for the mega-terminal despite widespread public opposition and growing concerns about safety.

Garcia testified as a community witness at public hearings and city council meetings, using general safety reports published by the federal agency PHMSA (Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration) and experience from similar projects to argue that the daily procession of rail and river traffic would threaten fish and wildlife species, and cause harmful air and water emissions damaging to human health.

The community was also deeply concerned about the risk of accidents and spills especially following the Lac-Megantic disaster in Quebec in July 2013, when a 14-car oil train derailed and killed 47 people in a fiery explosion. And in June 2016, as the battle heated up, a Union Pacific train carrying 3 million gallons of oil derailed in the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area in Oregon — the same area the Tesoro-Savage railway would pass through.

The company accused activists of using “scare tactics,” claiming the trains would be safe and the project would bring jobs and economic growth to the community.

As Garcia gained prominence as a key leader in the community resistance, the death threats started. In addition, she suffered a life-threatening illness during the campaign and would often travel directly from chemotherapy to council meetings to testify on behalf of Fruit Valley residents.

“I was fighting for my own life and the lives of others … I knew that the second the terminal went online we’d be living with 24/7 toxic fumes that would exacerbate or cause conditions people could die from,” she said. “This kept me motivated.”

Garcia and the other campaigners convinced the city council to appeal the project at the state level, and in late 2017, the Washington Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council (the state agency responsible for sanctioning new projects) recommended against the oil terminal on the grounds it posed significant, unavoidable harm to the environment and community. In January 2018, Governor Jay Inslee denied the necessary permits. It was over, Fruit Valley had defeated Big Oil.

Fruit Valley’s triumphant resistance was remarkable, but not isolated.

The Pacific Northwest, a politically progressive region that identifies strongly with the environmental movement, has for almost a decade been under siege by the fossil fuel industry as it eyes the lucrative Asian energy market.

The plan of energy companies was to turn the picturesque Pacific Northwest into a fossil fuel highway for the next 50 years by expanding refineries and building terminals, trains and pipelines to transport millions of tons of coal (from the Powder River Basin in Montana and Wyoming), oil (extracted by fracking in North Dakota), liquefied natural gas (from the Montney Formation in western Canada), and petrochemicals.

In total, 30 or so infrastructure projects were destined for communities in the region, including federally protected Indian tribal territories. If constructed, the combined capacity could be at least five times greater than the massive (and massively maligned) Keystone XL pipeline, according to analysis by Sightline Institute, a sustainability and energy think-tank, bringing huge pollution and climate implications.

But the region’s response was to unite. The coordinated opposition movement, known as the Thin Green Line, has beaten back all but four of the proposed projects (two relatively small expansion projects were sanctioned; two other battles are ongoing).

The unity took work. At first, communities and tribes took on the projects individually, until it became clear that the threat was regional, said Eric de Place, a researcher at Sightline Institute, which coined the term “Thin Green Line” to describe the commonality of the threats. Local and state organizations — including Garcia’s Washington Environmental Council — formed a coalition that spearheaded three campaigns: Power Past Coal, Stand Up to Oil, and Power Past Fracked Gas.

“Regional coordination stopped the industry being able to pit communities against each other, as together our negotiating bottom line was no, not one ton, not one community, just no,” de Place said.

The coalition pooled resources to investigate the economic, environmental and safety risks, which in turn helped persuade diverse sectors including tourism and commerce that it was in their interest to resist the fossil fuel corridor. Together, they turned out thousands of people to every public meeting, in every community, to take on the company executives and local officials.

“It was aggressive activism,” said de Place. “Our hard-line stance made it clear to elected officials that this was a binary issue and taking any money from coal or oil would be a political death sentence. This might not work everywhere, but it worked here.”

It’s noteworthy that the Pacific Northwest’s coordinated resistance has targeted transport and infrastructure projects, not the actual oil fields and coal mines. By disrupting the only economically viable transport options, they have made the intended extraction of millions of tons of coal economically unviable. “Find the weakest point in the supply chain, and go after it, that’s what we showed was possible,” said de Place.

The region’s opposition strategies and successes have served as rallying points for the larger climate movement and “keep it in the ground” campaign (which advocates against further fossil fuel burning), said Hilary Boudet, associate professor of sociology at Oregon State University’s School of Public Policy.

But, she warned, with huge profits at stake, Big Oil isn’t giving up. “A proposal’s defeat in one location doesn’t necessarily mean that fossil fuel export won’t happen somewhere else … The Trump administration has been very vocal about its policy of ‘energy dominance,’ which includes fossil fuel export,” Boudet said. Local and state-level politics are crucial to opposing this, she added.

As Garcia’s personal story shows, things can get ugly. At times, community leaders, especially tribal leaders, have been attacked as anti-development, anti-jobs, even anti-American for trying to protect their corner of the planet. But staying united has been their key to prevailing.

Garcia said: “There’s a tremendous sense of responsibility in our communities to take care of the planet so that it can be passed on to our children, and their children. We need more people to speak out, stand up, and form armies of resistance.”

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How Linda Garcia risked everything to keep Big Oil out of her community

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