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When disaster hits, solar power beats coal

by KarlaMelancon31 Posted on September 24, 2018

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

Within two weeks after Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, Richard Birt, a Las Vegas fire captain, flew to San Juan on what would be the first of many missions to try to get the island’s 96 fire stations up and running — not by fixing the problematical grid but by using solar power.

With the encouragement of San Juan fire chief Alberto Cruz Albarrán, logistical help from San Juan firefighters, and donated equipment from the company Sunrun, within a day-and-a-half a team outfitted the flat roofs of the fire department in Barrio Obrero — one of the poorer neighborhoods in San Juan — with solar panels. The panels and connected battery meant the station could be taken off the downed grid to run the most critical equipment including its 24-hour watch office that fielded calls, and its radio, lights, and doors.

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“When we got there the generator was broken, so there was no lights, no watch office, no radio, no anything,” Birt tells me in between his shifts at the Las Vegas fire station. “The idea [was] getting the watch office up so when someone walked up and said they had an emergency, they could respond.” With solar, the fire station had a backup option when the hastily repaired grid went down again — as it would repeatedly over the last 12 months. When Birt returned a few months later, he found that the crew had never unplugged the solar equipment. “With the grid going down, the firefighters felt they needed this up and running 24-hours a day and not have any gaps,” Birt recalls. “They said, ‘this works and the grid doesn’t.’”

Through the nonprofits Empowered By Light and Givepower, 10 fire stations in Puerto Rico have set up similar microgrids, and Birt hopes to raise millions more to finish the job. Other emergency responders have installed solar power as well. Solar panels filled the parking lot of a children’s hospital in San Juan, after Tesla made a donation to replace the hospital’s diesel generators.

Ensuring power for first responders in the wake of a disaster is a matter of life or death. “People died because of the lack of power,” Sunrun’s director of public policy in Puerto Rico Javier Rúa-Jovet said — 2,975 people in total. But the experiences of the children’s hospital in San Juan and the Barrio Obrero fire department are exceptions, because very few people in Puerto Rico have the option and resources to go solar.

Renewables account for just 2 percent of Puerto Rico’s electricity supply, making it among the most fossil-fuel reliant of nations and territories in the Caribbean. Which is to say, Puerto Rico is far from recognizing the vision solar companies had for a robust and self-reliant solar market. The reasons for this are a complicated mix of the lack of political will, legal obstacles, and the absence of enough federal assistance.

Maria, and the more recent storms like Hurricane Florence, tell a story about reliable power that’s quite different from what President Trump has claimed — which boils down to his usual support of fossil fuels. In a bid to subsidize the coal and nuclear plants that have struggled to compete economically against cheap gas and renewables, the Trump administration has floated a variety of plans — including stalling the retirements of coal plants for national security reasons and creating a strategic reserve for coal — that would allow it to subsidize these sources. One of the administration’s favorite arguments confuses the largely accurate observation that solar and wind are intermittent sources for energy (as in, the sun doesn’t always shine) with the more dubious logic that renewables are somehow more susceptible to security threats than a physical stockpile of coal.

It’s “a tremendous form of energy in the sense that in a military way — think of it — coal is indestructible,” Trump said at an August fundraiser on Long Island. “You can blow up a pipeline, you can blow up the windmills. You know, the windmills, boom, boom, boom, bing, that’s the end of that one.”

But that’s not what we’ve been seeing after catastrophic hurricanes. After Maria, solar power became a symbol for more reliable power, even if few had access to it. And more recently, Hurricane Florence tested the most solar-powered state after California. In North Carolina 4.6 percent of the state’s electricity comes from the sun. InsideClimate News reports that large solar farms and even rooftop solar (which face more variable conditions and are more susceptible to damage) remained intact following the storm. At the same time, those who live in North Carolina still saw massive power outages — at one point more than 300,000 residents were without power.

The upside of solar is that it easily lends itself to decentralized power and micro-grids that could maintain the power for more people in the wake of a disaster. Solar is “an easy distributed resource and obviously a clean one,” Vermont Law School’s Institute for Energy and the Environment Director Kevin Jones says. But the downside is that on its own it doesn’t lead to a more resilient a power grid, unless it is combined with advanced battery technology that allows people to disconnect from the grid to become self-reliant. Consider those fire stations: For a microgrid, panels on the roof had to be hooked up to long-lasting storage options. The combination of battery storage and solar could mean that “you have additional resilience when the grid goes down,” Jones notes.

An investigation by Puerto Rico’s Center for Investigative Journalism conducted after Hurricane Maria backs that up: “Most of the more than 10,362 renewable energy units installed by Puerto Ricans ended up as a roof ornaments,” they concluded. These units were connected to the grid; if they were microgrids with storage attached, things might have been different.

There are other barriers for more hurricane-resilient power. One is money. “You can have solar panels in a parking lot serving a children’s hospital in the short term, but in the longer term you have to put them in a place where you can have them permanently,” Jones says. “Those things take time and money and effort.” The second is public policy priorities. Supplying power to community members in a microgrid gets complicated, legally, because solar customers and companies must get permission from monopoly utilities. The uncertain future for Puerto Rico’s monopoly utility PREPA means an uncertain future for microgrids as well.

For now, multiple solar and storage companies are eyeing markets in Puerto Rico, and both companies and some residents have some hope for the future. Sunrun’s Javier Rúa-Jovet fits into both categories. He considers himself one of the lucky few who was able to take out a loan to buy a diesel generator after the storm, but remembers the frustration of dealing with maintaining and keeping the generator stocked with fuel, sometimes in the middle of a rainy night. “The costs aren’t only economical, there’s the psychological toll,” he said. But a switch to maintenance solar promises to be “a positive experience, not a stressful experience.”

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When disaster hits, solar power beats coal

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Hurricane Florence’s catastrophic flooding is a sign of what’s to come

by Robbie4639 Posted on September 14, 2018

Since barreling into North Carolina on Friday morning with gusts of up to 112 mph, Hurricane Florence has already submerged homes, left nearly 700,000 households without power, and killed at least five people. More than 200 people were rescued in Bern, North Carolina, where a 10-foot storm surge flooded town.

The hurricane is massive: at 400 miles wide, its hurricane-force winds stretch across a 160-mile span, as ABC reported.

Yet the long-ranging, torrential winds are not the primary concern. It’s the sheer volume of water, in the form of tidal surges, rain, and anticipated flash flooding that make this Category 1 storm unusually dangerous. As meteorologist Janice Dean put it, “The legacy of the storm is not going to be the winds. It’s going to be the rain.”

Florence may drench the Carolinas with an unthinkable amount of water this weekend: 18 trillion gallons, or enough to fill the Chesapeake Bay. As of early Friday afternoon, 20 inches of rain had already fallen in parts of North Carolina — and some resolution models are predicting that by Sunday, the southeastern part of the state could see 50 inches of rain.

We’ve seen a slow-moving storm like Hurricane Florence before. Last year, Hurricane Harvey brought record-breaking rains to Southeast Texas. “Slower forward movement means a hurricane has more time to inundate a region with rain and storm surge,” an article in Vox explains. “It’s a longer time to blow dangerous, power line-snapping winds.”

The extreme level of rain from Florence and Harvey shouldn’t be chalked up to coincidence. Researchers at Stony Brook University and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimate that 50 percent of the rainfall from Hurricane Florence can be attributed to climate change.

Though Florence is a Category 1 storm, the risks from the staggering levels of water should not be underestimated. As an article in Time noted, “Hurricane Florence’s rapid downgrade from a Category 4 to a Category 1 underscores a potential public safety issue with the way hurricanes are measured and discussed.”

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Hurricane Florence’s catastrophic flooding is a sign of what’s to come

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Coal ash and hog manure could flood vulnerable communities in Hurricane Florence’s path

by ScottyCPUuos Posted on September 14, 2018

North Carolina is home to 31 coal ash pits where Duke Energy stores an estimated 111 million tons of toxic waste produced by coal-fired power plants. The state is also home to thousands of manure pits, known euphemistically as “lagoons,” which hold approximately 10 billion pounds of wet waste generated each year by swine, poultry, and cattle operations.

A handful of news outlets are reporting about the danger of coal ash and hog manure spilling into North Carolina’s waterways in the wake of Hurricane Florence. Bloomberg covered the serious environmental and public health risks and the Associated Press warned of a potential “noxious witches’ brew of waste.”

There’s precedent for these concerns. In 1999, Hurricane Floyd, which struck North Carolina as a Category 2 storm, washed 120 million gallons of hog waste into rivers, Rolling Stone later reported. As AP noted this week, that was just one part of the mess caused by Floyd:

The bloated carcasses of hundreds of thousands of hogs, chickens and other drowned livestock bobbed in a nose-stinging soup of fecal matter, pesticides, fertilizer and gasoline so toxic that fish flopped helplessly on the surface to escape it. Rescue workers smeared Vick’s Vapo-Rub under their noses to try to numb their senses against the stench.

The media has been amping up its coverage of potential Hurricane Florence damage. But so far they’re missing an important part of the story — that African-Americans and other communities of color could be hit particularly hard by the resulting pollution. They’re also failing to note how the Trump administration has been loosening regulations and oversight in ways that could make coal ash and hog-waste spills more likely.

There’s an environmental justice component to this story

After Floyd, North Carolina taxpayers bought out and closed down 43 hog factory farms located in floodplains in order to prevent a repeat disaster. But when Hurricane Matthew hit the Carolinas as a Category 1 storm in 2016, at least 14 manure lagoons still flooded.

Even if they’re not widespread, hog-waste spills can still be devastating to those who live nearby — and many of the unfortunate neighbors are low-income people of color.

Two epidemiology researchers at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill published a paper in 2014 with a very straightforward title: “Industrial Hog Operations in North Carolina Disproportionately Impact African-Americans, Hispanics and American Indians.” They wrote, “Overflow of waste pits during heavy rain events results in massive spills of animal waste into neighboring communities and waterways.”

A Hurricane Floyd-flooded hog waste lagoon.JOHN ALTHOUSE / AFP / Getty Images

Tom Philpott explained more about that research in Mother Jones in 2017:

As the late University of North Carolina researcher Steve Wing has demonstrated, [North Carolina’s industrial hog] operations are tightly clustered in a few counties on the coastal plain—the very part of the state that housed the most enslaved people prior to the Civil War. In the decades since, the region has retained the state’s densest population of rural African-American residents.

Even when hurricanes aren’t on the horizon, activists are pushing to clean up industrial hog operations. “From acrid odors to polluted waterways, factory farms in North Carolina are directly harming some of our state’s most vulnerable populations, particularly low-income communities and communities of color,” Naeema Muhammad of the North Carolina Environmental Justice Network said last year.

Poor and rural communities of color are heavily affected by coal ash dumps as well. The New York Times reported last month on an environmental-justice campaign against coal ash pollution in North Carolina. Lisa Evans, a lawyer with the environmental group Earthjustice, told the Times, “Coal ash ponds are in rural areas, particularly in the Southeast. Those communities have less power and less of a voice.”

The Trump administration recently loosened coal ash rules

The first major rule finalized by Andrew Wheeler, acting head of the Environmental Protection Agency, loosened Obama-era requirements for coal ash disposal. The change, which will save industry millions of dollars a year, could lead to more dangerous pollution. The Washington Post reported about this in July:

Avner Vengosh, a Duke University expert on the environmental impacts of coal ash, said that scaling back monitoring requirements, in particular, could leave communities vulnerable to potential pollution.

“We have very clear evidence that coal ash ponds are leaking into groundwater sources,” Vengosh said. “The question is, has it reached areas where people use it for drinking water? We just don’t know. That’s the problem.”

The Trump administration is also going easy on factory farms like the industrial hog operations in North Carolina. Civil Eats reported in February that there’s “been a decline in the number of inspections and enforcement actions by the [EPA] against concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) since the final years of the Obama administration.” Last year, more than 30 advocacy groups filed a legal petition calling on Trump’s EPA to tighten rules to protect communities from factory farms.

North Carolina Republicans aren’t helping things either — they’ve gone easy on coal plants and hog operations. And in 2012, the GOP-controlled state legislature actually passed a law banning state officials from considering the latest sea-level rise science when doing coastal planning. ABC reported on the development at the time:

The law was drafted in response to an estimate by the state’s Coastal Resources Commission (CRC) that the sea level will rise by 39 inches in the next century, prompting fears of costlier home insurance and accusations of anti-development alarmism among residents and developers in the state’s coastal Outer Banks region. …

The bill’s passage in June triggered nationwide scorn by those who argued that the state was deliberately blinding itself to the effects of climate change. In a segment on the “Colbert Report,” comedian Stephen Colbert mocked North Carolina lawmakers’ efforts as an attempt to outlaw science.

“If your science gives you a result you don’t like, pass a law saying the result is illegal. Problem solved,” he joked.

As Hurricane Florence bears down on North Carolina, journalists should make sure that their stories include the people who will be hurt the most by waste spills and other impacts, as well as the businesses and lawmakers who have been making such environmental disasters much more likely to occur.

Lisa Hymas is director of the climate and energy program at Media Matters for America. She was previously a senior editor at Grist.

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Coal ash and hog manure could flood vulnerable communities in Hurricane Florence’s path

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Climate summit protesters want to save the world without screwing over people

by EdgardoCooney Posted on September 13, 2018

An international collection of delegates in suits filed into San Francisco’s Moscone Center Thursday morning to take action on climate change. They had assembled, in part, in defiance of the Trump administration’s dismissal of the global threat.

Outside the convention center, demonstrators in vibrant colors representing dozens of grassroots groups were arrayed, raising their voices to those headed indoors. They had gathered in defiance of initiatives that, yes, combat climate change, but don’t address the environmental inequities imposed on indigenous peoples, low-income communities, and communities of color.

For a moment inside this week’s Global Climate Action Summit, the two worlds collided. An opening plenary began with Kanyon Sayers-Roods, a representative of the Indian Canyon Muraun Band of Costanoan Ohlone People, offering a message and a song. The well-heeled crowd cheered her as she welcomed attendants to the Ohlone’s traditional territory.

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But her salutation came with a bold critique aimed at one of the solutions touted by the summit’s host, California Governor Jerry Brown: “Don’t support carbon trading.”

Schemes like California’s cap-and-trade program illustrate what those outside the summit want discussed within the Moscone Center. While carbon emissions have fallen statewide, communities located near heavy industry are experiencing an alarming uptick in airborne pollution.

Everyone on either side of the summit walls is in agreement that climate change needs to be stopped — and that it can be done in spite of Trump. But Sayers-Roods’ plea is part of an undercurrent at the gathering that’s pushing for action that goes one step further, ensuring that improving the health of our planet doesn’t come at the expense of vulnerable groups that are often left out of decision making. The protesters outside are calling for initiatives that are devised by, led by, and bring benefit to those excluded groups.

Activists interrupted Michael Bloomberg’s address inside the summit, chanting, “Our air is not for sale, our communities are not for sale.” Chuckling, Bloomberg responded, “Only in America, can you have environmentalists protesting an environmental conference.”

Ahead of the summit, more than 30,000 demonstrated in a people’s climate march in San Francisco over the weekend. Many have stayed on throughout the week, building a counter-culture of activists, artists, nonprofits, and labor. Here are a few of their biggest demands:

Carbon Trading

The summit is Brown’s attempt to bring state, city, corporate, and community actors together to take action on the climate. His state’s cap-and-trade system has been a feather in his climate cap — it’s placed a limit on how much carbon can be emitted statewide.

But it also allows companies to buy or trade allowances to pollute. As noted, the carbon “trade” has led to emissions being concentrated in hotspots — usually situated in low-income neighborhoods of color.

So when leaders at the summit promote the carbon market, says Greg Karras, a senior scientist with California-based nonprofit Communities for a Better Environment, “They’re selling the thing that’s not working — that’s disempowering our communities.”

A Just Recovery

Jesus Vasquez, an activist and attorney with Organización Boricuá de Agricultura Ecológica, traveled to San Francisco from Puerto Rico to support the grassroots groups that make up the Climate Justice Alliance. Those organizations were there for him in the wake of Hurricane Maria, he says, so he’s here to support their advocacy efforts.

It’s community-led groups and not companies, he believes, that will lead the way forward to a fossil-free future. So while the Global Climate Action Summit has its arms wide open to business and finance entities, Vasquez and others don’t want profit to be the motive behind efforts to rebuild his island. Otherwise, he explains, he’s worried that gentrification and the privatization of public land and services will follow.

“We cannot permit that the solutions for climate change be driven by corporations,” says Vasquez. “Go to Puerto Rico and talk with the communities that are living this first hand. Listen and let those organizations and communities lead.”

Green Jobs

A transition to a green economy will fundamentally change the job market. But labor leaders and advocates want to make sure that fossil fuel workers aren’t left behind. That’s why demonstrations have been billed as: “Rise for Climate, Jobs, and Justice.”

“We need to makes sure that every new job in the clean energy economy pays a family-sustaining wage, has benefits, includes the right to unionize,” says Paul Getsos, national director of the Peoples Climate Movement.

Thanks to AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, who started his career as a coal miner, that message echoed inside the summit Thursday morning. “I ask each one of you: Does your plan for fighting climate change ask more from a sick, retired coal miner than it does from you and your family?” he said. “If it does, then you need to think again.”

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Climate summit protesters want to save the world without screwing over people

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The next best thing to Paris: California’s climate summit

by ShaylaBrake9866 Posted on September 11, 2018

The people flooding into San Francisco for the Global Climate Action Summit come in all shapes and sizes. There are legions of grungy anarchists and crisply ironed elites jostling through crowds in the Financial District. Partisan campaigners and meticulously nonpartisan scientists, wonks of the nonprofitariate and the wannabe renewable-industry tycoons, techies in branded hoodies and hippies in sarapes are squeezing into crowded BART cars.

The summit doesn’t officially kick off until Wednesday, but when you bring such a diverse group of people together who all want to fight climate change, things start happening fast. Over the weekend, tens of thousands of people marched down Market Street singing and carrying signs.

Indonesian officials met with Brazilian foresters at the downtown Parc 55 hotel on Monday, while indigenous people wearing feathers and face paint protested that meeting from the narrow street outside. A few blocks away, artists unspooled cables and wheeled massive lights to project art onto the face of the city hall. Talks and trainings, declamations and dialogues, had already sprung up by the dozen, all over town.

Spots for some of the climate events in San Francisco. Google Maps

California’s Governor Jerry Brown called for the conference nearly three years ago, in hopes of spurring action beyond the commitments countries made in Paris in 2015 to cut greenhouse gas emissions. But the event took on new meaning after President Donald Trump entered the White House and pulled the United States out of the Paris Agreement. Climate realists then pinned their hopes on California: If the state — home of the fifth-largest economy in the world — allied enough U.S. cities and states, perhaps they could simply vault over the federal government and land in a cooler, cleaner future.

There is some hope of actual progress. Politicians and corporations are sure to make impressive-sounding commitments, if only to have something to announce to the crowds. Sony already pledged to go 100 percent renewable, along with the Royal Bank of Scotland and the consultancy McKinsey & Company.

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The biggest commitment so far: Brown signed a law on Monday requiring California’s electrical generation to stop emitting greenhouse gasses, then tacked on an order for the state to choke off all emissions at the same time (a much, much higher bar, but an executive order is much, much more ineffectual than a law).

It’s one thing to pledge and another to deliver. A recent report suggests that the European countries are already falling behind on promises made in Paris. Instead of falling, global carbon emissions rose last year, and the fossil-fuel economy is still growing faster than the clean-energy one. Rich countries promised to pay poorer countries to combat climate change, but that money hasn’t materialized.

The real value of the summit will likely be humdrum and humanscale: People will meet face to face, argue, make connections, and walk away with new ideas.

But if you’re looking for tectonic shifts in the coming days, the biggest news could come from China. The largest polluter in the world is a primary partner in organizing the summit, and has arranged a “China Pavilion” where the first day of speeches will take place.

As Trump began rolling back Obama-era policies, Brown began looking for ways to make climate partnerships with China. He spent a week there last year, hand delivering a first-edition of John Muir’s book “The Mountains of California” to President Xi Jinping.

“California’s leading, China’s leading,” Brown said at a news conference after that meeting with Xi. “It’s true I didn’t come to Washington, I came to Beijing.”

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The next best thing to Paris: California’s climate summit

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While Trump rejects science, Obama and Clinton warn of climate change’s urgent danger

by FlynnBnthuuis Posted on September 7, 2018

The Democratic Party VIPs offered sobering remarks on the immediacy of climate change on Friday. Former President Obama and former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton warned separately that climate change is not an intangible, future threat, but one that is at this moment devastating the planet and its inhabitants.

During a “State of Democracy” speech at the University of Illinois, Obama offered a science-backed reminder: “We know that climate change isn’t just coming. It is here.”

Clinton issued a similar sentiment on Twitter. “We’re not fighting for the planet in some abstract sense here,” she said. “We’re fighting for our continued ability to live on it.” She pointed to record-high temperatures across the world, the biggest wildfire in California history, and an unprecedented red tide in Florida — all visible signs that climate change is something to be contending with right now.

Both of their remarks stood in contrast to the tide of climate denial under the current administration, from President Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement to the EPA’s ongoing censorship of climate science.

Obama noted how the current Congress has “rejected science, rejected facts on things like climate change.”

Clinton focused her tweet thread on Brett Kavanaugh’s lengthy record of undermining environmental policies, which Grist has examined. Kavanaugh, now in his fourth day of Supreme Court confirmation hearings, struck down a federal program to curb cross-state pollution from power plants in 2012 and just last year ruled that the EPA’s attempt to phase out hydrofluorocarbons was outside its authority, as Clinton tweeted.

Clinton came to a sober assessment of what’s at stake: “Replacing Kennedy with Kavanaugh would swing the Court to a new, hard-right majority that would rule against curbing greenhouse gases for years — maybe decades — that we can’t afford to waste on inaction.”

Both Obama and Clinton saw political engagement as part of the way out of this quagmire. “The antidote to a government controlled by a powerful few, a government that divides, is a government by the organized, energized, inclusive many,” said Obama.

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While Trump rejects science, Obama and Clinton warn of climate change’s urgent danger

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On a sinking island, climate science takes a back seat to the Bible

by fredricm23 Posted on September 3, 2018

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

“The good thing about science,” Neil deGrasse Tyson tells us, “is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.” Your stance on gravity is irrelevant. Either way, if you step off a cliff, you will most certainly fall. Likewise your stance on climate change. If you live on an island in the middle of 18 trillion gallons of warming, expanding water, you’re eventually going to sink no matter what you believe.

Tiny, waterlogged Tangier Island, off the coast of Virginia in Chesapeake Bay, is full of people of faith. They believe in God. Climate science, not so much. In recent years, they’ve garnered some media attention for the paradox of largely rejecting sea-level rise while simultaneously suffering its wrath. Earl Swift, an author of six previous books and a former correspondent for The Virginian-Pilot, immersed himself for the better part of two years with the 481 inhabitants of Tangier. His new book, Chesapeake Requiem: A Year with the Watermen of Vanishing Tangier Island, is part regional history, part crabber ride-along, part disaster narrative in slow motion.

At its best, Chesapeake Requiem is a meditation on belief and disbelief in an America shouting about fake news. Swift is unflinching about the catastrophe on the ground, but careful not to belittle the beliefs of those at the heart of the calamity. He works hard to move beyond fly-by descriptors like “quaint” or “lost in time,” which mainlanders often use to describe the isolated crabbing community. Instead, he penetrates a human community facing an existential threat in ways few of us can understand. They may not believe in a major factor of their own demise, but that doesn’t render their extinction any less real.

“We’ve actually got people sitting around debating whether these people are worth saving. How is that OK?” one islander tells Swift. “I don’t care if you want to call it erosion or sea-level rise or Aunt Sadie’s butt-boil. It doesn’t matter what’s causing it. The point is that this disaster is happening, and these people need help.”

Tangier’s situation is indeed dire. As if sea-level rise weren’t enough, the island has also long lost ground to erosion, and the entire region is sinking. Some 21,000 years ago, the Laurentide ice sheet stretched across the middle of the continent, its tremendous weight pushing down the earth below, while the ground around it curled upward. Now that the ice is gone, the land that seesawed up — including coastal Virginia — is seesawing back down. Scientists call it “glacial isostatic adjustment,” but to put it bluntly, the ground is falling while the water is rising.

Tangier, which Swift describes looking like “a board-flat green wafer just above the water,” will be uninhabitable by 2063, according to a 2015 study in Scientific Reports. The study’s lead author admits to Swift that the estimate was conservative. These days he puts the number of Tangier’s remaining years “probably closer to 25.”

“[I]f no action is taken, the citizens of Tangier may become among the first climate change refugees in the continental U.S.A.,” the 2015 report concluded.

This is not for a lack of proposals to save Tangier or at least delay its demise. The book charts decades of plans for jetties and seawalls — all scuttled by a lack of funding, calls for yet more studies, congressional distraction, or all of the above. Meanwhile, Congress has approved $1.4 billion to rebuild wetlands for nesting birds on a sinking island just 60 miles north of Tangier. The human population of that island is zero. Is it any wonder that these people are cynical about their own government?

Swift spends much of the book emptying crab pots with James Wyatt Eskridge, known simply as Ooker. Like many on the island, Ooker was born there, and his family has called it home since George Washington led the Continental Army in the Battle of Monmouth. In addition to his 50-plus years crabbing, Ooker has been Tangier’s mayor for the past eight. That makes him the go-to face of the island whenever CNN, The New Yorker, the BBC or any number of news outlets decide to mine the island for click-worthy quirks and contradictions.

Swift recounts a time Ooker appeared in a CNN town hall on climate change featuring the climate activist Al Gore. In a memorable exchange, Ooker asks Gore why — if the seas are indeed rising — he hasn’t he seen it in all his decades of working the Chesapeake Bay. “Our island is disappearing, but it’s because of erosion and not sea-level rise,” he tells the former vice president.

Rather than explain the individual imperceptibility of sea-level variations across decades, Gore instead answers with a parable. A man trapped in a flood rejects the help of passersby, insisting instead that “the Lord will provide.” When the man eventually dies and ascends to Heaven, he asks God why he didn’t provide, to which God insists that he did — in the form of the passersby offering their help.

It’s a powerful illustration of science and religion talking past one another — each side missing the other side’s relevance and meaning. The islanders felt that Ooker “won” the argument and that Gore had mocked their faith. (On Ooker’s crabbing shanty hangs an Ichthys — Jesus fish — and the words “WE BELIEVE.”) Swift offers readers a more nuanced take on the back and forth:

“The Lord has provided the islanders with minds for recognizing the danger that faces them. That might be the sum of what the Lord plans to provide them with, this time around. Denying that the danger exists — or expecting a miracle to chase it away — might not be what the Lord has in mind.”

There’s a difference between being saved and being saved, but the two aren’t mutually exclusive. Swift’s insight into the Ooker-Gore exchange is built on years of listening to both the science and the Sunday sermons at Tangier’s Swain Memorial. Swift, himself admittedly “no follower of organized religion,” employs his own imaginative faculties to behold the wicked problem of climate change in a way that Ooker might actually respect. (At least I hope so; it’s unclear if the writer shared his analysis of Gore’s parable with the crabber.) The coming decades will demand boatloads of that kind of empathy as more and more places like Tangier lose their battles to the sea.

At times, Chesapeake Requiem strays too far into tangents that distract from its important points. Swift isn’t the only writer to depict Tangier as a bellwether for how we handle climate refugees, and more hurried readers can get the gist elsewhere. Nevertheless, the book is a rich contribution to the growing genre of climate-science narrative nonfiction. Not just because Swift documents a culturally significant piece of America that will likely soon disappear, but also because he is trying to make sense of climate-change doubt in those with the greatest incentive to believe.

“We are here until he [God] says otherwise,” one islander tells Swift. At this point, even the science seems to agree that only a miracle could save Tangier.

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On a sinking island, climate science takes a back seat to the Bible

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Container ships are getting cleaner, but the effort is adrift

by MaiBQSTnub Posted on August 29, 2018

The giant vessels that carry colorful boxes of cargo around the world are becoming more energy efficient.

China’s COSCO Shipping has outfitted its container ships with new propellers and a protruding “bulbous bow” to reduce wave resistance and curb fuel consumption. CMA CGM of France has equipped vessels with electronically controlled engines to optimize performance, and more of its ships can plug into shoreside electricity supplies to avoid running their massive diesel engines at berth.

As a result, carbon emissions associated with moving those boxes have steadily declined in recent years. From 2009 to 2017, container ship emissions dropped roughly 37 percent on average — per container, per kilometer for global ocean transportation routes, the Clean Cargo Working Group reported earlier this month. (Per mile, that’s about a 60-percent reduction.)

But that progress is starting to level off, showing the limits of the shipping industry’s existing actions to tackle climate change, according to the new study.

Examining the emissions-reduction efforts of those operating container ships could help illuminate some of the challenges involved in getting oil tankers, bulk carriers, and other types of cargo vessels to curb pollution. Container ships account for only about 5.5 percent of the world’s merchant fleet, and it’s the only sector that reports its collective emissions in such a comprehensive way.

When it comes to emissions data, says Suzanne Greene of the MIT Center for Transportation & Logistics, “The shipping industry has so much potential to be more transparent.” (Greene was not a contributor to the new report.)

The container ship survey tallied annual data from about 3,200 vessels, or nearly two-thirds of the world’s container fleet, shared by 22 companies. The data don’t reveal exactly what portion of the reductions were due to energy-efficiency investments or were a result of external factors, such as the consolidation of major container carriers or shifting trade patterns, says Nate Springer, who manages the Clean Cargo Working Group for BSR, a sustainability-focused consultancy. However, he adds, “The consistent progress since 2009 provides compelling evidence that progress is due in large part to industry efforts.”

Like its rivals COSCO and CMA CGM, A.P. Moller-Maersk has invested in new, fuel-efficient vessels and retrofitted older ships with energy-saving designs. Its real-time tracking system allows it to avoid delays, maximize cargo space, and optimize ship speeds for fuel efficiency. Thanks to these measures, the company’s container division — the largest in the world — has seen a 43-percent drop in emissions per container moved since 2007.

Despite all of this, the rate of emissions reductions is slowing down for the broader container industry, the report said. Container-related emissions fell by 1 percent from 2016 to 2017 — below the 2.4 percent from 2015 to 2016, which was below the previous year’s reductions.

Springer says he expects container companies will continue reducing emissions. But he concedes: “We know that if the progress continues at this lower rate, then it will be difficult to remain on track to meet the ambitious climate goals recently announced in the International Maritime Organization climate strategy.”

Last April, the U.N.’s International Maritime Organization agreed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from global shipping by at least 50 percent from 2008 levels by 2050. If all types of cargo ships formed a country, their total annual emissions would rank in the top 10, between those of Japan and Germany.

The Clean Cargo data don’t provide a full picture as to why carbon reductions are shrinking. But one partial explanation could be that rising shipping activity is offsetting improvements in efficiency.

Container port traffic rose by nearly 15 percent from 2013 to 2017, while ships of all types unloaded more than 12 percent more cargo tonnage over that five-year period, according to a United Nations trade database. At the same time, the world’s container fleet has added dozens of new (and enormous) vessels.

Another explanation might be be that companies’ individual efforts are beginning to hit a wall. “We are reaching the point where it will be more and more challenging to drive significant CO2 efficiency on our own,” says John Bang Kornerup, head of sustainability strategy and shared value at Maersk.

Companies can only do so much to trim emissions from existing technology. To truly move the needle, the entire industry will need to shift toward cleaner fuels and zero-emissions propulsion technologies. That requires widespread investment in research and development to make alternatives more commercially viable, Kornerup says.

“Efficiency measures alone are not enough to deliver shipping’s share of achieving the Paris ambition,” he explains, referring to the landmark climate agreement. He adds that it is “an industry challenge to drive the needed innovation in new propulsion technologies.”

Yet many shipping companies, container or otherwise, still haven’t adopted even relatively straightforward strategies for curbing emissions, such as tracking and reporting their carbon footprints. Much of the data available today is based on averages from shipping routes or sectors, not individual ship performance.

Without more rigorous accounting, it will be difficult to truly know how well the industry is progressing toward meeting its climate targets, says Greene, the MIT logistics expert. That lack of data will also make it harder for major shipping customers — the IKEAs and DHLs of the world — to calculate their supply chain emissions.

“The bottom line in sustainability these days is really the carbon emissions number,” she notes. “And if that’s what we’re using, it should be decently accurate.”

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Container ships are getting cleaner, but the effort is adrift

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President Trump, these are the real reasons California is on fire

by JanelleWeldon2 Posted on August 6, 2018

President Trump has finally weighed in on the California wildfires that began last month. But it wasn’t to express condolences for the victims or to praise the incredible bravery of firefighters — it was to try to score political points.

And he did so by badly twisting the science of how wildfires work. In a now-deleted tweet from Sunday, Trump blamed “bad environmental laws” for “diverting” water into the Pacific Ocean. On Monday evening, Trump reposted essentially the same tweet:

And he doubled down on this flawed argument.

According to the Los Angeles Times’ Michael Hiltzik, Trump’s tweets on wildfires and water “deserve some sort of award for most glaring misstatements about those two issues in the smallest number of words.” I’d have to agree.

In Trump’s muddled mind, there’d be “plenty of water” if California rivers were exploited to the point they were completely dry at the end of the line — like the Colorado River now is.

The conservative agriculture community in the state’s Central Valley yields a substantial clue to where this weird idea came from. In the minds of some farmers there, allowing even a drop for endangered fish habitat means the government is stealing their water.

Beyond cutting down forests as a fire management strategy (you can’t have fires if you don’t have trees!), Trump seems to argue for airdropping huge quantities of water from reservoirs onto fires.

Given that Trump drinks bottled water with both hands, he should know this fundamental fact better than most: Water is heavy. And it takes a lot of effort to lift it into the sky and drop it on wildfires.

California’s reservoirs are actually near long-term average levels right now. The state’s firefighting resources are vastly overmatched, and help is pouring in from across the country and around the world. There’s even a newly converted Boeing 747 that’s been airdropping flame suppressant.

And still, a tiny bit of rain would do incredibly more good than any amount of water that could be diverted from the state’s lakes and reservoirs by firefighters. A barely measurable sprinkle over the amount of territory that’s currently on fire in California is about 6,000,000 gallons of water — about what the 747 fire bomber could carry in 300 loads, a month’s worth of round-the-clock operations. It’s not water availability in reservoirs that limits the ability to fight these fires — it’s logistics.

The massive Mendocino Complex, which could soon be the largest wildfire incident in California history, is burning right next to Clear Lake, the largest natural lake in the state. Firefighters are using water from the lake as fast as they can to help fight the fire. The fire is just 33 percent contained. So no, Mr. President, the fact that water exists in the state does not mean that it’s very useful to combat a fire like this.

Letting rivers run their natural course is not what causes massive wildfires. It’s year after year of hot and dry weather that causes wildfires. And, it just so happens, there’s something we’re doing that’s making weather hotter and drier.

Decades of misguided fire suppression policy and booming urban development in forested areas have contributed to this boom, but the main reason for the surge is climate change. (Even California’s chief firefighter agrees.) For the president to deny the central role of climate change in what’s happening is not only foolish, it’s dangerous.

July was the hottest month in history for many parts of California, and burnable vegetation is off the charts. Longer, hotter dry seasons, combined with timber die-offs due to drought and temperature-related insect infestation, have turned the state into a tinderbox ready to explode.

After the state’s worst drought in millennia, the very wet winter of 2016-17 created loads of grasses and shrub growth — perfect kindling for wildfire now that the drought has returned. Temperatures this week have surged, particularly at nighttime, fanning the flames further and giving firefighters little time to recover. Smoke from the wildfires is detectable across half the United States, creating a public health nightmare that’s trapping people indoors.

This is already one of the worst years for wildfires in U.S. history, in a decades-long streak of increasingly really bad wildfire seasons. Four of the 10 most destructive fires in California history have occurred in the past 10 months. Together, these four megafires have burned nearly 10,000 structures. That’s a mid-sized American city’s worth of homes, gone.

So far this year, about three times more land area has burned than normal. The deserted Yosemite National Park is indefinitely closed due to the Ferguson Fire, the largest wildfire ever recorded in the Sierra National Forest.

And wildfires are going to get much, much worse in the years to come if we don’t radically reduce fossil fuel emissions. Instead, Trump’s anti-environmental policy moves, like stopping California from having stricter standards on automobiles, will worsen climate change. Trump’s proposed 2019 budget eliminates federal funding for wildfire research.

When Trump was elected, I said that the effects of his climate denial would linger for hundreds of years. That fear now seems to be coming true.

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President Trump, these are the real reasons California is on fire

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The cost of flood insurance is a price worth paying

by CedricPettiford Posted on August 5, 2018

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

Almost 75 percent of declared disasters in the United States are flood-related, and flood risk continues to rise due to development in floodplains and a changing climate. The beleaguered National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), which was due to expire on July 31 but just got a four-month extension from Congress, can help lessen some of that risk and serve as a lifeline for survivors.

However, in reauthorizing the program, Congress did not fix its many problems. The need to make the NFIP more effective is urgent. And as America’s flood risk grows, we will be even more reliant on it.

The NFIP was created 50 years ago after losses mounted from disasters such as 1965’s Hurricane Betsy. In creating the program, Congress recognized three things: first, that the federal government would have to provide flood insurance because private insurers would not. Private insurers had, by and large, refused to cover floods since the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, the most destructive river flood in U.S. history to that point. Insurers must weigh the level of risk to individual properties, how much payouts will cost and how profitable policies are, and homeowners’ willingness to pay premiums — all of which are problematic for assessing flood risk.

Second, Congress knew that national flood risk was too high. The government had been working to address this through the Flood Control Act of 1938 and other laws. But by 1968, these policies had been relatively unsuccessful at lowering the risk; flood insurance was seen as a different strategy. Third, and finally, Congress realized that homeowners needed financial assistance to recover from floods.

In its first four decades, the program was generally solvent — that is, revenue from premiums was approximately equal to payouts. Between 1968 and 2005, when the program did incur debt, FEMA, which oversees the NFIP, borrowed money from the U.S. Treasury and quickly repaid it.

Then, in 2005, Hurricane Katrina and the resulting levee failure instigated an outpouring of anger and frustration with the NFIP. Katrina’s impacts were more severe than anything the United States had experienced since the program began. Post-Katrina, FEMA borrowed $18 billion from the Treasury without a repayment plan, instead of adding it to the supplemental appropriations passed by Congress. The agency borrowed billions more after Hurricane Sandy, and the debt eventually rose to $24.6 billion.

This debt has become the pressure point for the NFIP, with critics citing it as evidence of the program’s failure. But when we consider why the program was created, the debt shows just how vital the NFIP is. Private insurers could not provide affordable flood insurance to the people who needed it, but through subsidies, the federal government — and by extension, the American taxpayer — could. So complaints about insolvency seem misplaced, given that the program’s debt is an obvious outcome of its design.

Financial solvency is of clear interest to taxpayers and politicians. But it’s worth considering the other problems, besides the scarcity of private insurance, that Congress hoped to address by creating the NFIP: flood mitigation and recovery.

A key objective of emergency management is to prevent or limit risk from disasters. Homeowners tend not to voluntarily implement such measures, but the designers of the NFIP thought the program could be used to incentivize safer building and better land-use practices. To this end, the NFIP was intended to work in tandem with the community rating system (CRS), which scores communities for undertaking flood mitigation (by, for example, building levees or changing land-use policies) and offers commensurate reductions in premiums.

There is evidence that the NFIP has succeeded in improving mitigation. Even so, it could do more. The program could be reformed so that more communities are incentivized to join and participate fully in CRS, and it could refuse to cover repetitive-loss properties, or require that they be rebuilt to higher standards.

Repetitive-loss properties are a real problem: Less than 1 percent of homes insured under the program have been responsible for nearly 10 percent of paid claims. Allowing homes to be rebuilt or repaired multiple times without requiring sufficient modifications to prevent future damage is not an efficient use of taxpayer money, and this loophole needs to be closed.

The NFIP was designed to provide insurance to people who could not afford to pay its actuarial price. Critics claim that simply by offering affordable flood premiums, it incentivizes development in hazardous areas. In fact, researchers have found that other factors, such as the high desirability of beachfront property, road and bridge access, and the availability of public services, are equal if not bigger contributors to the increase of development in high-risk areas.

To the extent that the NFIP does help encourage such development, of course, it must be reformed to prevent that. For example, former FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate argued that future development in 100-year floodplains should be ineligible for NFIP coverage.

The NFIP was also designed as a resource for American homeowners during recovery from floods. Disaster survivors often describe recovery as “the second disaster,” a long, expensive process of cobbling together aid from savings accounts, second jobs, loans, friends, family, nonprofits, and the government.

Homeowners with flood insurance can receive substantially more money than those who are helped through FEMA’s individual-assistance program. The maximum NFIP payout is $350,000, whereas the largest possible individual-assistance payment is about $34,000. After Sandy, the average payout from FEMA’s individual-assistance program was only $8,000, compared with over $66,000 from the NFIP. Nevertheless, some survivors have struggled to access the NFIP funds they needed or were entitled to. An investigation following Sandy found evidence of poor management by both FEMA and the private insurance companies tasked with NFIP’s administration.

The extremely small number of people who carry policies also inhibits the program’s assistance in recovery. Currently, only about 5 million American households (or about 4 percent) hold flood-insurance policies, even though about 10 percent of households are located in the 100- or 500-year floodplain and face substantial risk. And the real number is likely higher, given the inaccuracy of flood maps.

These, too, are fixable problems. To improve NFIP’s effectiveness in recovery, FEMA must strengthen its oversight. The agency must provide clarity to policyholders about payout requirements and increase the number of people who buy flood insurance by updating flood maps and extending the requirement to purchase a policy to homeowners at lower risk of flooding.

Congress has, on numerous occasions, attempted to reform the NFIP so that it would avoid future debt. These efforts have consistently failed, because the financial burden they place on homeowners is so large and so politically unpalatable. As a result, the program has been caught in a cycle of short-term reauthorizations, with debt from Katrina and Sandy keeping it on the proverbial chopping block.

As attempts at reform have demonstrated, big, expensive changes to the program will be unpopular. Still, the NFIP has the potential to create safer communities and help people recover faster and more smoothly. Another way of looking at it: The federal government spent more than $100 billion on the response to and recovery from Katrina, and over $48 billion for Sandy. The NFIP’s debt of $24.6 billion is just what’s left of those bills.

That the NFIP costs American taxpayers money is the result of policy choices made over decades. We decided we weren’t going to pay up-front to avoid climate change, and we decided to build along the coasts and in floodplains. The debt the NFIP has incurred is expensive, and it will continue to grow. But it is only a small fraction of the interest on the loan that we’ve taken out on our future.

The debt also tends to overshadow the real good that the program does for Americans. Nearly 1.8 million losses have been paid out since the program’s inception. Without it, where would these survivors be in their recovery process?

Although the country has been debating whether and how to limit long-term climate change, we have done relatively little to protect ourselves from its consequences that are already here, including more flooding. The NFIP can help us manage the effects of climate change. But for it to be successful, we have to make it more effective and just — which means accepting its financial cost.

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The cost of flood insurance is a price worth paying

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