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5 Gorgeous Landmarks Threatened by Rising Seas

by Donekola Posted on July 10, 2013

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Because of climate change, postcard-perfect lighthouses, parks, and seaside city blocks could soon be swallowed into the ocean. So, you spent last weekend celebrating American independence with patriotic fervor and you’re now enthused about the preservation of American history and culture and all things awesome and bygone. Right? Keep that historical buzz going for a moment to contemplate five sites the National Trust for Historic Preservation—the country’s preservers-in-chief—thinks are most vulnerable to flooding caused by sea level rise. Even though the the Trust fields regular requests for planning assistance from coastal cities across country, the group says no comprehensive models yet exist to address sea level rise and its threat to historic landmarks. That’s bad, says Anthony Veerkamp, a program director with the Trust, because without first taking stock of what we might lose, “inevitably there will be adaptation strategies that do lesser or greater harm to historic resources.” Here are five sites the Trust are most worried about: 1. San Francisco’s Embarcadero California’s Bay Area can expect sea levels to rise by up to 55 inches by the end of the century, putting an estimated 270,000 people and $62 billion worth of San Francisco urbanbling at risk of increased flooding. That presents a major challenge to the three-mile stretch of San Francisco’s downtown Embarcadero district, which features more than twenty historic piers, a bulkhead wharf in twenty-one sections, a seawall built in the late 1800s, and the iconic Ferry Building, fully commissioned in 1903. California’s seasonal king tides already overflow San Francisco’s sea walls and occasionally spill into the Embaracadero, providing a preview for what might happen more regularly if sea levels continue to rise. 2. New York City’s Battery When Superstorm Sandy slammed New York City, waters surged with the added force of a high spring tide over Lower Manhattan’s sea walls, producing a “storm tide” more than 14 feet above the average, smashing a 50-year record. In the Battery—that most southern tip of Manhattan from where New York City boomed—flood waters rose in Castle Clinton, a fortress built to prevent a British invasion in 1812, now a museum and entry point for historical tours of New York harbor. Castle Clinton itself was transformed into New York’s first immigration facility: 8 million people entered the US through here (then called Castle Garden) from 1855-1890. The New York City Panel on Climate Change predicts flooding like this at the Battery will beup to five times more likely by mid-century. 3. Miami Beach Miami Beach might nowadays conjure images of bared flesh and art parties, but accompanying the polished pecs is a unique collection of Art Deco, Mediterranean Revival, and MiMo architecture (Miami Modernism is a flamboyant post-World War II style featuring sweeping curved walls, pylons, and stucco-colored avant garde shapes). “Miami beach is remarkably vulnerable,” Veerkamp says. “You’ve got threats coming from both sides, from the bay and the Atlantic.” The EPA suggests that, by the year 2100, there is a 50 percent chance of a 20-inch sea-level rise at Miami Beach. The majority of the city is a flood zone: the OECD lists Miami as the number-one most vulnerable city worldwide in terms of property damage, Jeff Goodell of Rolling Stone writes in his definitive article “Goodbye, Miami“, with more than $416 billion in assets at risk. 4. Gay Head Lighthouse, Mass. Perched on a spectacular escarpment in Martha’s Vineyard, the Gay Head Lighthouse was first lit in 1856 (for lighthouse nerds, it was one of the first in the US to receive a first-order Fresnel lens​, which has a jagged-surface that uses less glass and allows light to be projected over greater distances than previous models). The National Trust for Historical Preservation says the lighthouse is in danger of toppling over the edge of the Gay Head Cliffs, a consequence of a century’s worth of erosion which the Trust says is being accelerated by climate change-induced storms. It is estimated that in two years, there will not be enough land left to accommodate the machinery and equipment needed to move the tower. 5. Historic Downtown Annapolis

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5 Gorgeous Landmarks Threatened by Rising Seas

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5 Gorgeous Landmarks Threatened by Rising Seas

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Extreme heat reveals extreme infrastructure challenges

by Leoni Posted on July 9, 2013

Extreme heat reveals extreme infrastructure challenges

By Claire Thompson

WMATALast summer, high temperatures caused a “heat kink” in the D.C. metro tracks.

Having trouble beating the heat this summer? Imagine how your infrastructure feels.

Last summer, we told you about extreme heat leading to buckling roads, melting runways, and kinky railroad tracks. Now we’re also hearing about droopy power lines and grounded airplanes.

NPR’s Science Friday hosted a discussion last week with Vicki Arroyo, executive director of the Georgetown Climate Center, about how cities can adapt to hotter temperatures and other climate impacts like floods and rising sea levels. Here’s Arroyo:

… the thing to keep in mind is that this infrastructure is built for the past conditions in our local area. So, it’s not to say that we can’t change our infrastructure with climate change in mind, whether it be climate change impacts along the coast, like storm surge or sea level rise, but it’s obviously going to take time and it’s going to take money.

Arroyo and host Ira Flatow talked about some of the solutions cities are considering or already implementing to make their systems more resilient. The simplest and most obvious one: locating backup generators above ground level so flooding won’t render them useless. (Arroyo also points out the irony that backup generators are powered by fossil fuels.) Utilities have started to build power lines with shorter, squatter telephone poles less likely to be felled in a windstorm; D.C. is even beginning a project to bury its power lines underground, although that approach doesn’t make as much sense for flood-prone areas. A caller named Jim from St. George, Utah, talks about how reflective building materials enhance the urban heat island effect. D.C. is also helping property owners install green roofs with the revenue from a plastic-bag fee.

In terms of preventing the kind of massive system failure that, after Hurricane Sandy, stranded folks in high-rise apartment buildings without heat or electricity for over a week, Arroyo points to distributed power and smart grids as a solution, and also notes that having a fleet of vehicles not powered by oil comes in handy in a disaster situation:

Smart Grid, which we often think about [as necessary] for distributed generation and renewable power to come online, can also be an important solution when it comes to some of these extreme weather events because you can actually cut off the power of the system that’s down and you can reroute power, especially to the places like hospitals and schools that you need to [restore power to] right away. And we also saw after Superstorm Sandy that some of the clean fuel vehicles — the natural-gas trucks in Long Island, for example — were able to remove debris when everybody recalls there were those long lines for weeks at a time for regular gasoline and diesel.

But as Arroyo noted above, the problem with such large-scale solutions is — you guessed it — money. Government at every level, reluctant to push for any project that would incur more debt, is holding off on crucial infrastructure upgrades. But as a New York Times guest columnist points out, the future cost of not making these improvements is far greater:

A prudent investment is one whose future returns exceed its costs — including interest cost if the money is borrowed. Opportunities meeting that standard abound in the infrastructure domain. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, the nation has a backlog of some $3.6 trillion in overdue infrastructure maintenance. …

Austerity advocates object that more deficit spending now will burden our grandchildren with crushing debt. That might be true if the proposal were to build bigger houses and stage more lavish parties with borrowed money — as Americans, in fact, were doing in the first half of the last decade. But the objection makes no sense when applied to long-overdue infrastructure repairs. A failure to undertake that spending will gratuitously burden our grandchildren. …

Now austerity backers urge — preposterously — that infrastructure repairs be postponed until government budgets are in balance. But would they also tell an indebted family to postpone fixing a leaky roof until it paid off all its debts? Not only would the repair grow more costly with the delay, but the water damage would mount in the interim. Families should pay off debts, yes, but not in ways that actually increase their indebtedness in the longer term. The logic is the same for infrastructure.

While we’re waiting for lawmakers to figure out that infrastructure improvements — which also create jobs, by the way — are a worthy investment, here’s a sobering reminder from Arroyo of just how crucial an organized government response is in a disaster situation:

I mean, how many of us have provisions if we have an extreme storm event that puts out power for a few days to be able to, you know, have the food and the water that we need, to be able to have a backup if, you know, we’re only on cell phones and those go down. How do we communicate with people? I mean, people really do need to make plans for this at every level of government in our society.

Claire Thompson is an editorial assistant at Grist.

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How suburban sprawl makes wildfires more deadly

by Judith Kimbers Posted on July 2, 2013

How suburban sprawl makes wildfires more deadly

By Claire Thompson

Jeff Ruane

Mailboxes destroyed in the 2010 Fourmile Canyon fire outside Boulder, Colo.

Last year’s wildfire season was one of the worst on record, and whether or not this year’s tops it (a likely outcome), it’s already off to a horrifically tragic start: 19 elite firefighters perished in a blaze outside Prescott, Ariz., on Sunday — the most to die fighting a single wildfire in 80 years. Even before the deadly Yarnell Hill blaze began, the usual suspects were asking: What does climate change have to do with wildfires? James West of Climate Desk addressed this maddening question a couple of weeks ago and The New York Times addresses it today (and David Roberts addressed it last year).

But there’s another human-caused problem making wildfires worse: the exurbs. Or, to use the technical term, the “wildland-urban interface” or WUI, where development meets and mingles with fire-prone wildlands. The New York Times describes such areas, which include Yarnell, Ariz.:

Those expanding communities, with rural views but more urban economies, have been the focus of concern among federal and state officials for a decade or more. While such regions are more plentiful in the East, it is in the areas west of the 100th longitude, reaching from West Texas and the Dakotas to the Pacific Ocean, where the natural aridity, increasingly exacerbated by climate change, makes fires a common threat.

In the West in the 1990s, more than 2.2 million housing units were added in these fire-prone areas, according to testimony by Roger B. Hammer [PDF], a demographer at Oregon State University and a leading authority on the issue. Speaking to a House subcommittee in 2008, he called this a “wicked problem,” and predicted an additional 12.3 million homes would be built in such areas in Western states — more than double the current numbers.

According to a U.S. Forest Service Study [PDF], one-third of all U.S. housing units now sit in the WUI, and the total area classified as WUI increased by 18 percent between 1990 and 2000. These neighborhoods, bucolic in theory with their combination of suburban amenities and easy access to wilderness, have become ubiquitous in the West, the study reports:

In the Rocky Mountains and the Southwest, virtually every urban area has a large ring of WUI, as a result of persistent population growth in the region that has generated medium and low-density housing in low-elevation forested areas.

Jeff Ruane

Ruins of a house burned in the Fourmile Canyon fire.

Think of the subdivisions wiped out by Colorado’s Waldo Canyon fire last year, or of the canyon outside Santa Barbara, Calif., where Grist writer Susie Cagle’s family home once burned to the ground. Wildfires in and of themselves are a natural and essential part of forest ecology, but more people living close to flammable wilderness means more people carelessly tossing smoldering cigarette butts or doing a shoddy job of putting out their campfires. From 2001 to 2011, an estimated 85 percent of wildfires in the U.S. were caused by people. And wooden houses, not to mention the aesthetically pleasing but non-native landscaping that often surrounds them, provide extra fuel for fires once they do start.

Fires that threaten to destroy homes end up costing much more to fight than those far from populated areas; according to the Forest Service study, there’s a “positive correlation between firefighting expenditures and the presence of housing and private lands.” Plus, as Outside Online points out, there’s extra pressure to stop a fire that puts property and human lives at risk, as so many more wildfires do these days:

In wildland firefighting, as with all firefighting, there’s nothing more important than protecting homes from destruction, but in the past decade, more than 20 million people have moved into the lands that will eventually be threatened by wildfire. Was … the field general in charge of making calls on the ground [while battling the Yarnell fire] more willing to expose his crew to risk because houses were at stake?

slworking2

A house destroyed by San Diego’s 2007 Witch Creek fire.

Ironically, the poor land-use planning that puts spread-out neighborhoods of sprawling homes right up next to fire-prone forests, exacerbating the potential for fire damage, is the same poor land-use planning that traps Americans in the kind of energy-intensive lifestyle that exacerbates climate change. For the most part, these WUI communities tend to represent the opposite of the kind of sustainable design we must strive for to reduce carbon emissions. They’re not dense or walkable or served well by public transit; they’re overwhelmingly residential, meaning you have to get in your car and drive just to get a roll of toilet paper or a quart of milk. And think of the energy cost of air-conditioning a five-bedroom house. Simply put, exurban development patterns worsen climate change, and they also make residents more vulnerable to one of climate change’s myriad indirect effects.

All this is not to demonize those who live in such places, because settling in the WUI has obvious appeal. If I lived in North Bend, Wash., for instance, I’d be steps from some of the region’s best hikes, and I might even be able to afford my own one-bedroom apartment. The Forest Service report outlines steps these communities can take to adapt and prepare for an increased threat of wildfires — educating residents about fire risk, removing flammable vegetation, changing building materials, planning new development to include better evacuation routes, etc.

But the question remains: Should we be building in such areas at all anymore (especially if living there necessitates a carbon-intensive lifestyle)? The same could be asked about building in flood zones or on steep seaside cliffs. Maybe, instead of pushing development ever further into the wilderness, we’d be better off inviting it back into the city.

Claire Thompson is an editorial assistant at Grist.

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After mass bumblebee die-off, activists call for new pesticide rules

by u60uurf Posted on June 26, 2013

After mass bumblebee die-off, activists call for new pesticide rules

By John Upton

jetsandzeppelins

If only bees could read.

Even as Oregonians are mourning and memorializing the tens of thousands of bees killed in a recent pesticide spraying, they’re also trying to prevent other bees from meeting a similarly tragic end. That means keeping the pollinators away from the poisoned trees that caused the deaths. And for some activists, it also means pushing for new rules and policies to curb use of neonicotinoid insecticides.

The tragedy started a week and a half ago when a landscaping company sprayed Safari neonic insecticide over 55 blooming trees around a Target parking lot in Wilsonville, Ore. Soon thereafter bees started dropping dead. The number of bees killed in the incident has risen to more than 50,000, making it the biggest known bumblebee die-off in American history. The insecticide was reportedly sprayed in an attempt to kill aphids.

Mace Vaughan / Xerces SocietyInsect-proof netting being draped over insecticide-drenched trees in Wilsonville, Ore.

To stop the slaughter, nets have been draped over the insecticide-drenched linden trees to prevent pollinators from reaching their flowers. The time and equipment needed for the draping were donated by five cities, three landscaping companies, and volunteers, according to the Xerces Society, a nonprofit that works to conserve insects and has been helping to coordinate the effort.

Xerces Executive Director Scott Black told Grist that the Wilsonville die-off, and a similar but less dramatic Safari-induced die-off in a linden tree in Hillsboro, Ore., represent the “tip” of a pollinator-killing iceberg.

“These insecticides are used throughout the country in both urban and agricultural environments,” Black said. “If these events had not happened over areas of concrete, I am not sure anyone would have ever noticed. The insects would just fall into the grass to be eaten by birds as well as ants and other insects.”

Black said his group will send letters to local and state agriculture departments across the country, urging them to end the use of neonicotinoid insecticides on trees, lawns, and for other cosmetic purposes on lands that they manage. He said such a policy is in place is Ontario.

(Separately, beekeepers and activists are suing the federal government in an effort to ban the use of neonicotinoids in America. The pesticides are deadly to pollinators and their use is being banned in Europe.)

Xerces also wants warning labels mandated in aisles of stores where insecticides are sold to help consumers understand their hazards.

“In urban areas, most of the pesticides used are purely cosmetic. It’s to have a perfect lawn. It’s to have a perfect rose. It’s to have a linden tree that doesn’t have aphids that drop honey dew,” Black said. “Losing valuable pollinators, such as bees, far outweighs the benefits of having well-manicured trees and lawns.”

Mace Vaughan / Xerces SocietyA bumblebee kept away from poisoned flowers by netting.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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After mass bumblebee die-off, activists call for new pesticide rules

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Kerry implores India to tackle climate change, ticks off Indian enviros

by kx93z6g Posted on June 24, 2013

Kerry implores India to tackle climate change, ticks off Indian enviros

By John Upton

U.S. Embassy New Delhi

IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri, an Indian, welcomes John Kerry. That’s America’s ambassador to India, Nancy Powell, in the background.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry arrived in India over the weekend and gave a speech urging the fast-developing country to work closely with the U.S. and other countries on solutions to climate change.

Kerry is leading a delegation to Delhi for U.S.-India talks focused on trade and energy; Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz is part of the visiting group. The stop in Delhi is one leg of a trip Kerry is making throughout the region.

The Americans’ arrival in Delhi coincided with deadly floods in northern India that some Indian officials have linked to global warming. But though climate change poses urgent dangers in India, Kerry’s speech was not received warmly by all of the nation’s environmentalists. Some felt they were being lectured to by the secretary of state, a representative of a nation that is second only to China in total greenhouse gas emissions.

Kerry has long warned of the dangers of climate change, and it’s been one of his favorite topics to discuss abroad since he was sworn in as Obama’s top diplomat. “Everywhere I travel as secretary of state — in every meeting, here at home and across the more than 100,000 miles I’ve traveled since I raised my hand and took the oath to serve in this office — I raise the concern of climate change,” he wrote just last week in an opinion piece in Grist.

Kerry’s speech in India was part of a broader push by the Obama administration on climate change. The U.S. recently struck a deal with China to cooperate on reducing heat-trapping HFC emissions, and the president is preparing to make a big climate announcement on Tuesday.

The New York Times reports on Kerry’s speech:

“I do understand and fully sympathize with the notion that India’s paramount commitment to development and eradicating poverty [by increasing electricity supplies] is essential,” Mr. Kerry said in a speech at the start of a two-day visit. “But we have to recognize that a collective failure to meet our collective climate challenge would inhibit all countries’ dreams of growth and development.”

In an effort to prod the Indians to act, Mr. Kerry warned that climate change could cause India to endure excessive heat waves, prolonged droughts, intense flooding and shortages of food and water.

“The worst consequences of the climate crisis will confront people who are the least able to be able to cope with them,” he said. …

Mr. Kerry also pleaded with India to commit to working constructively on a global treaty to be negotiated under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

From Reuters:

Emerging economies like India have resisted pressure in global climate talks to commit to targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, in a dispute with rich nations over whose industries should bear the brunt of the cuts.

The 1.2 billion people who live in India use far less electricity than do Americans, but the nation’s growing economy and its dependance upon coal pose major global warming threats.

Chandra Bhushan, a senior official at the Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment, was unimpressed by Kerry’s speech, as he explained in an opinion piece in Down to Earth, a leading Indian environmental magazine published by his nonprofit:

I have no problems with [Kerry’s] pitch for countries coming together to develop renewable energy. But I have issues with the fact that nowhere in his speech did he mention what the US is doing on renewable energy or what is the renewable energy target that the US has set for itself for, say 2020. The fact is that today close to 20 per cent of India’s electricity supply is from renewable sources (including hydropower). India has set itself a target for renewable energy; the US has not.

The US today is going the fossil fuel route. It is moving to shale gas big time. Kerry should know that this shale gas mania would destroy the renewable future of the world that he so fervently preached yesterday.

I found his speech hypocritical. He talked about how India should reduce its emissions from residential sector but gave the massive energy consumption in residential and commercial sectors in the US a convenient miss. The US is the largest consumer of HFCs in the world, but Kerry did not throw light on what the US is doing to phase out the highly potent greenhouse gas, and how quickly. While I agree that India should also phase out HFCs, … it should not be through a deal that only benefits American multinational companies.

Though Kerry’s comments might not have pleased everybody, they were delivered in a country that is being hit especially hard by global warming — and that needs to do more to tackle and adapt to it.

Climate change is causing India’s once-predictable monsoon to become erratic. It is pushing up temperatures in a region already known for its scorching summers. And it is melting glaciers that are relied upon by hundreds of millions of people for year-round water supplies.

Last year, the subcontinent’s annual summer monsoon arrived months late, parching farms and causing widespread blackouts by reducing hydroelectric supplies.

This year, the monsoon appears to have arrived early, and when it reached the country’s north, it collided with low-pressure troughs that had pushed unusually far south. That collision of weather systems triggered remarkable deluges. Resultant floods have killed at least 5,000 people in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand. They also inundated Delhi’s international airport and pushed levels in the Yamuna River in the capital to their highest points since 1978.

Some Indian officials are saying climate change could be to blame for the flooding. There’s a paucity of scientific research into the possible effects of climate change on the nation, but some studies are underway. “We’re trying to assess the impacts of climate change on the regional climate and on the monsoons,” Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology monsoon researcher Raghavan Krishnan told Grist. “We’re trying to look at extreme precipitation.”

While the research continues, it may be a good idea for India to take stock of the global warming impacts that are already understood and at least follow America’s lead by starting to break its nasty coal addiction.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Coming soon: An Obama climate strategy

by dx1d3x0 Posted on June 20, 2013

Coming soon: An Obama climate strategy

By Claire Thompson

The White House

His big, new climate plan is coming any day now.

Rumors have been swirling that President Obama soon plans to unveil major new efforts to combat climate change. And today, White House officials confirmed that the announcement is coming soon — probably next month, but maybe as early as next week.

At a Washington, D.C., forum sponsored by The New Republic, Heather Zichal, White House coordinator for energy and climate change, said the president planned to unveil new policy initiatives and is “serious about making [climate change] a second-term priority.” She declined to give details, but according to The New York Times …

Ms. Zichal suggested in her remarks that a central part of the administration’s approach to dealing with climate change would be to use the authority given to the Environmental Protection Agency to address climate-altering pollutants from power plants under the Clean Air Act. …

The electric power sector is responsible for about a third of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions, and any serious effort to address climate change will require steps to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other climate pollutants from coal-burning power plants.

The administration has already proposed regulations that would crack down on carbon pollution from new power plants, effectively barring them from burning coal. But those regulations are being delayed, reportedly to make them stand up better under court challenge. A number of states and green groups had threatened to sue over the delay, but this week they backed off, saying they’d wait to see what climate initiatives Obama actually does announce.

The next big step would be regulating emissions from existing power plants, which could lead to the shuttering of coal-fired facilities. Climate hawks have been pushing for this. Here’s David Roberts on the tactic back in December (emphasis his):

This chance to spur decarbonization in the power sector is Obama’s greatest second-term opportunity on climate change. How EPA designs and implements these rules will help define his legacy. There is nothing else with as much potential that does not require the imprimatur of intransigent minorities in Congress.

Though such regulations do not have to be approved by Congress to go into effect, they’re expected to be the target of legal challenges from industry groups, and of intense opposition from lawmakers aligned with industry or representing coal-dependent states. From The New York Times:

The issue of power plant regulation is sensitive because it will … put further stress on the coal industry, which is already suffering from a lack of demand as utilities switch to natural gas, which is cheaper.

More regulations and a death blow to coal — the GOP will love it!

Speaking of things the GOP loves (to hate), Obama’s climate plan will likely also include expanded renewable-energy development on public land and increased focus on energy efficiency in buildings and equipment.

Claire Thompson is an editorial assistant at Grist.

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Are Fungus-Farming Ants the Key to Better Biofuel?

by apitjwdu Posted on June 18, 2013

green4us

Secrets from their underground fungus fields could help fight climate change. DavidDennisPhotos.com/Flickr “If you have ants in your house,” the great Harvard ecologist EO Wilson once said, “be kind to them.” Keep this in mind the next time you want to flick one off the kitchen table: The tiny critters, which collectively weigh about as much as all of humanity, could wield a big weapon in the fight against climate change. In the US, corn-based ethanol is a big business, consuming 40 percent of the domestic corn crop and providing roughly 10 percent of the fuel supply, which would otherwise be dirty fossil fuels. But the practice of topping your tank off with corn is fraught with problems: Some argue that the crop should be used for food; it’s sensitive to drought; and the ethanol-making process might be contributing to an E coli epidemic, to name a few. That’s why the Obama administration recently announced a plan to invest $2 billion in organic fuels that rely on things other than corn, including switchgrass and gas from cattle poo. But this weekend, a group of scientists discovered a chemical key that could revitalize corn-based ethanol by allowing it to be made from stalks, leaves, and other bits beside the cob itself. This won’t help much with the drought problem (less corn is still less corn), but it could alleviate the food-vs-fuel debate and the E coli problem as more kernels are saved to go straight to livestock. Turns out, the savior of ethanol could be the South American leafcutter ant. Leafcutter ants make some of the largest underground colonies in the world, some with as many as seven million residents. And, as the name suggests, many of them spend their days combing the rainforest for bits of leaves, gathering half the weight of a cow per colony every year. They carry this mass back into their tunnels and use as fertilizer for a crop of fungus, which they then eat. Ant experts (“myrmecologists,” if you care to know) have long believed that the fungus acts as a kind of external stomach for the ants, breaking down sugars in the leaves that the ants aren’t equipped to handle themselves. In fact, it’s not the fungus itself that breaks down the leaves, but chemical enzymes within it, and Frank Aylward, a microbiologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says those same enzymes could be used to help break down corn byproducts to make fuel. In a new study, Aylward sequenced the genome of the leafcutter ant’s symbiotic fungus, and identified for the first time the exact enzymes that have evolved over millennia to efficiently break down plant material stored in the ant’s underground tunnels. For making fuel, Aylward asks, “why don’t we use the rest of the corn plant? It’s because the sugars are tied up in cellulose and other things that are hard to break down. So we’re looking for enzymes that can help.” Enzymes are already used for this purpose, and a crop of businesses have sprung up in the biofuel boom to manufacture them, but Aylward believes his could be among the most efficient ever discovered. And using every part of the corn plant, including parts that typically go to waste, could make ethanol production more sustainable and boost its climate benefits. To study the ants, Aylward and his team traveled to Panama and Costa Rica to collect specimens (“The trick is to get the queen,” he says), then brought them to a lab in Wisconsin where they could take samples of the fungus as the ants cultivated it. While there are many microbes that can break down tough plant matter, he says, the ants do it exceptionally well: Collectively, they’re the largest herbivore on the continent. “We wanted to see if there was something that allowed them to do that so efficiently,” he said. Aylward’s findings pinpoint that secret ingredient enzyme, and he says he’s already been contacted by private businesses looking to manufacture the enzymes and get an early start on applying them to biofuel production; they could even be mixed and matched with other enzymes to take the ants work even further. “The ants are really successful at this,” he said, “and that’s the exact thing we want to do with plant biomass.”

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Are Fungus-Farming Ants the Key to Better Biofuel?

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No, we’re not running out of people

by John Grit Posted on June 17, 2013

No, we’re not running out of people

By Lisa Hymas

Shutterstock

No shortage in sight.

Every few months we see a spate of “news” stories warning that population growth rates are declining in the U.S. and/or the world, potentially leading to a shortage of babies and outright “demographic disaster.” In an extreme (and extremely stupid) example from January of this year, one Slate writer warned that if trends continue over the long term, “we could be looking at the literal extinction of humanity.”

Well, you can strike that worry off your list, according to the latest stats from the U.N.

The Associated Press sums up the news:

The United Nations forecast Thursday that the world’s population will increase from 7.2 billion today to 8.1 billion in 2025, with most growth in developing countries and more than half in Africa. By 2050, it will reach 9.6 billion. …

The report found global fertility rates are falling rapidly, though not nearly fast enough to avoid a significant population jump over the next decades. In fact, the U.N. revised its population projection upward since its last report two years ago, mostly due to higher fertility projections in the countries with the most children per women. The previous projection had the global population reaching 9.3 billion people in 2050.

So those are the global figures, but what about the United States? Are we headed for a domestic baby shortage? Again, nope.

The U.S. population currently stands at 316 million. That figure is expected rise to 351 million by 2025, and then 401 million by 2050, according to the U.N.’s medium-range projections. That’s right in line with the U.S. Census Bureau’s projection.

“The right wing’s fevered vision of a planet populated only by tumbleweeds and wolves is not in the offing,” says John Seager, president of the nonprofit Population Connection.

So you can file away those fears about a demographic winter and worry instead about a really hot summer.

Lisa Hymas is senior editor at Grist. You can follow her on Twitter and Google+.

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Whole Foods opens in Detroit, threatening stereotypes everywhere

by Carson Silverman Posted on June 7, 2013

Whole Foods opens in Detroit, threatening stereotypes everywhere

By Claire Thompson

Laura Taylor

Because any positive economic activity that happens in Detroit is apparently national news, the opening of a Whole Foods Wednesday in the city’s Midtown neighborhood has caused more fanfare than possibly any grocery-store debut in history. Hundreds reportedly waited in line to enter the store, and Whole Foods Co-CEO Walter Robb was present for the occasion, accompanied by “a marching band, speeches by civic leaders, specialty food vendors handing out samples of pickles, granola and other products, and a festive air of celebration,” according to the Detroit Free Press.

Why all the hoopla? After all, as Aaron Foley at Jalopnik Detroit points out in a level-headed post, the city, despite being labeled a “food desert,” already has its share of real grocery stores, including independent chains like Ye Olde Butcher Shoppe, not to mention its famous Eastern Market, the largest permanent farmers market in the U.S. So it’s not like Whole Foods is suddenly swooping in to deliver fresh vegetables where only Twinkies and Top Ramen existed before.

Much has been made of Whole Foods’ potential to attract further economic development, “a magnet for retail, in particular, and for development more generally,” as Free Press editor Stephen Henderson puts it. “A grocery store as a creator of density.” But would a concentration of high-end retail and condos in one neighborhood do anything to address this troubled city’s structural problems? Local investors and government officials seem to be betting so; the store was financed with the help of $5.8 million in state and local grants and tax credits.

But really, what seems to be causing the freakout over Whole Foods’ unlikely new location is just that: its unlikeliness, and the racist and classist assumptions underlying that assessment. Just listen to Kai Ryssdal of public radio’s Marketplace question CEO Robb at the opening. Ryssdal calls Whole Foods “a place that does not have the reputation of perhaps being a place where people would shop in Detroit,” and even asks, “Did you have to teach people how to shop here?” — as if navigating a Whole Foods requires some special sixth sense not innate to black and low-income people. Ryssdal, assuming Detroit doesn’t have the kind of customer base that could support a Whole Foods, goes on to ask Robb what the company plans to do if the store starts losing money. Robb responded that they’ve made a 25-year commitment to the location. “People perceive Whole Foods as only serving particular communities, and I don’t like that,” he said.

We’re all for Whole Paycheck making an effort to be more accessible. But Robb went so far as to say that Whole Foods, with its Detroit store, is “going after elitism, we’re going after racism.” The notion that a bourgie grocery store could meaningfully address racial inequality is ridiculous. If it has any effect at all, it could just as easily set in motion the kind of unchecked gentrification that deepens racial divisions.

Foley, for his part, sees the new Whole Foods neither as a vehicle for economic rebirth nor as a harbinger of hipster domination:

I was paying more attention to what people were wearing rather than the color of their skin. Lots of people – black, white, whatever – were there representing food co-ops, urban farms and other local initiatives proudly on T-shirts. …

What I realized [Wednesday] is that Detroit’s healthy-eating, locavore crowd is much bigger than I realized. Yes, I know – Whole Foods is a corporation, they have a bottom line, all corporations have dirty secrets, got all that. Still, if it’ll serve a market here in Detroit, then it’s still a nice option. Whole Foods’ biggest challenge is not the potential “Whole Foods effect” but how this community will respond and adapt to its presence.

And if the community response surprises both the skeptics and the cheerleaders, that may be the best outcome. Foley continues:

Detroit’s not saved, but it looks a little bit better. My only hope after this? That reporters won’t use Whole Foods as a constant reference point when giving progress reports about the city’s comeback.

Noted.

Claire Thompson is an editorial assistant at Grist.

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Connecticut will label GMOs if you do too

by Edbre23ne Posted on June 4, 2013

Connecticut will label GMOs if you do too

By Claire Thompson

CT Senate Democrats

Connecticut is poised to become the first state to require labeling of genetically engineered food — in theory, at least.

On Monday, the state House of Representatives passed an amended version of a labeling bill that the state Senate approved two weeks ago, and Gov. Dannel Malloy (D) has said he’ll sign it. The bipartisan bill passed unanimously in the Senate and 134-to-3 in the House, with little debate in either chamber — a major contrast to California’s contentious GMO-labeling ballot initiative that ultimately failed last year. Differences between the two states aside, it goes to show you how much more difficult passing such progressive measures becomes once corporate money and gullible voters are involved.

The Hartford Courant’s political blog reports that “Immediately after the vote, cheers could be heard outside the Hall of the House from advocates who had been pushing the labeling requirement.” The bill’s success is certainly an important victory for the GMO-labeling movement, which seems to have been motivated, not discouraged, by last year’s loss in California. Thirty-seven labeling proposals have been introduced in 21 states so far this year.

But the final version of the Connecticut bill includes quite a crucial catch: The labeling requirement won’t actually go into effect until similar legislation is passed by at least four other states, one of which borders Connecticut. Also, the labeling adopters must include Northeast states with an aggregate population of at least 20 million. So if, say, New York passed a labeling law, that would help a lot, as New York borders Connecticut and has a population of 19.5 million, which, combined with Connecticut’s 3.5 million, easily passes the population target.

This “trigger clause” is meant to allay fears that Connecticut could suffer negative economic impacts by going it alone — higher food prices and lawsuits from major food companies. Lawmakers are counting on safety in numbers, and hoping their state’s precedent will encourage others to follow suit. The Connecticut Post reports:

“Somebody has to go first and say it’s OK to do it with some kind of trigger,” [Senate Minority Leader John McKinney (R-Fairfield)] said. “This gives great momentum for advocates in Pennsylvania and New York, for example, for GMO labeling, because if they’re successful in New York we’ll probably see it along the entire East Coast.”

OK, Pennsylvania, New York, and all those other states considering GMO labeling: It’s on you now.

Claire Thompson is an editorial assistant at Grist.

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