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Remember that $20 million ocean cleanup project? It isn’t working.

by AundreaLyzht Posted on December 26, 2018

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The $20 million effort to clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch has hit a bit of a snafu.

Organizers for The Ocean Cleanup, which launched the project in September, already had their work cut out for them — the floating garbage patch is made up of an estimated 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic, which has coalesced into a field of debris twice the size of Texas, weighing in at 88,000 tons (that’s the equivalent of 500 jumbo jets, yikes).

In order to clean up the massive garbage island, engineers at the non-government organization built a U-shaped barrier, which they hoped would act like a coastline, trapping the plastic floating in large swathes of the patch. The system can communicate its whereabouts at all times, allowing a support vessel to come by periodically to pick up all the junk in the device’s trunk, so to speak, for recycling.

The highly anticipated endeavor deployed out of San Francisco in September, when the floating device — known as System 001 or Wilson — was towed out to the island of rubbish located between California and Hawaii. The goal of The Ocean Cleanup is to remove up to 50 percent of plastics in the area within five years.

But so far, the giant garbage catcher is having issues holding on to plastic waste.

George Leonard, chief scientist of the Ocean Conservancy, a non-profit environmental advocacy says the organization’s goal is admirable, but can’t be the only solution to ocean plastics pollution. He said a solution must include a multi-pronged approach, including stopping plastic from reaching the ocean in the first place. Humans dump more than 8 million tons of trash into the ocean each year — the equivalent of one dump truck full of plastic every minute.

“The clock is ticking; we must confront this challenge before plastics overwhelm the ocean,” Leonard said.

The Ocean Cleanup Fonder Boyan Slat said the slow speed of the solar-powered 600-meter long barrier isn’t allowing it to scoop up plastic from the swirling trash island. Over the next few weeks, a crew of engineers will make tweaks to the system. Slat says it’s all part of the process when you take on a project this ambitious (Forbes called it “the world’s largest ocean cleanup”).

In a statement released on December 20, Slat said that he always expected it was going to be a bit of an ongoing experiment. “What we’re trying to do has never been done before,” he said. “For the beta phase of [the] technology, this is already a success.”

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Remember that $20 million ocean cleanup project? It isn’t working.

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What is the Impact of Voting on the Environment?

by PatrickOtoole Posted on November 8, 2018

With the close of the midterm elections, many are glad to end the discussion on voting. With the constant barrage of political ads on TV and even via text message, the next proposition or candidate is the last thing on many voters? minds.

Even though election fever has subsided, one of the often-forgotten pieces of elections is the environmental impact of voting. Our society gets so caught up in policy and candidates that we fail to think about the impact that the physical process of voting has on the world around us.

How Does Voting Affect the Environment?

Almost all states use some form of paper ballot. There are only five states that run their elections without paper ballots ? Louisiana, Georgia, South Carolina, New Jersey, and Delaware. There are also nine other states that use a combination of both paper ballots and electronic machines ? Pennsylvania, Texas, Kansas, Florida, Tennessee, Arkansas, Indiana, Kentucky, and Mississippi.

Although the most secure, paper ballots generate plenty of waste. From the envelopes used for mail-in ballots to the physical ballots themselves, an election is a very paper-intensive project. After an election, ballots are stored for about 22 months, at which point local authorities can dispose of them, usually by shredding.

While it may not seem like a lot of waste, in the 2014 midterm election, there were over 83 million ballots counted. Current projections for the 2018 midterms put that figure in the 114 million range. And the examples above only include midterms. Turnout in presidential elections is generally much higher and local city elections happen all the time. Therefore, every year we are forced to scrap and attempt to recycle millions of pounds of paper, adding to the 71.8 million tons of paper waste that the US generates each year.

Are Electronic Voting Machines Any Better?

Some argue that electronic voting machines can have a positive environmental impact. While this is true regarding paper waste, there are a few important caveats with electronic voting machines:

-??????? Electronic voting machines need power. Unless they run on solar power, they would still be using resources.

-??????? With the pace that technology advances, these devices will become quickly outdated or need to be replaced, thus generating e-waste. In the United States, we already scrap about 400 million units of consumer electronics every year.

-??????? The simple act of driving to the nearest polling place likely does more environmental damage that the ballot you cast. Unless voters are able to walk or bike to the polls, they are still burning fuel and generating carbon dioxide to reach the ballot box.

What is the Best Option for the Environment?

Other than cutting down on paper waste, which can only be seen as a positive, electronic voting machines do not represent a large step forward for the environment. Coupled with the fact that electronic voting machines are not seen as secure, electronic voting machines do not seem like the right answer.

The most environmentally friendly form of voting would be to vote via the internet. Voters would not have to rely on paper ballots, drive to the nearest polling station, or use any devices other than the ones they already own. Moreover, even though 29 states have laws that allow you take time off work to vote, internet voting would reduce the transaction cost of participation and have a positive impact on turnout.

That said, the security technology is simply not there yet for a country as large as the United States and likely will not be for some time. With such high stakes, it is not a risk the country can afford to take. Estonia does have an e-voting system that has been in place since 2005, but it is a country of only about 1 million eligible voters with a national ID card system. Even then, a 2014 team at the University of Michigan found that interfering with Estonia?s election is possible, even though it may not have happened yet.

Therefore, it appears that until the technology is created, we are stuck with the traditional paper ballot methods that have been around since ancient Roman times. Hopefully with the rapid pace by which technology advances, one day soon we will have a voting system that maximizes both efficiency and care for the environment.

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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What is the Impact of Voting on the Environment?

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Here’s what climate scientist James Hansen would have said in the Valve Turner trial

by KathrinN44 Posted on October 18, 2018

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Most activists are relieved if a judge frees them from the charges brought against them. But when the tar sands “valve turners” found out last week that they had been acquitted, they had a different reaction — disappointment. They had hoped to use the trial to discuss the global climate threat posed by the controversial pipelines.

On October 11, 2016, this small group of activists manually shut down multiple pipelines carrying oil from Canadian tar sands to the United States. Reuters called it “the biggest coordinated move on U.S. energy infrastructure ever undertaken.” It wasn’t exactly “Mission Impossible.” More like Mission “righty-tighty.” They simply snuck into the stations in Washington, Montana, North Dakota and Minnesota and turned the valves clockwise to halt the flow of crude oil.

The “valve turners,” as the group came to be called, knew they’d be caught — they even called the operating companies 15 minutes before turning the valves to tell them what they were about to do. They wanted a proper trial as a kind of public forum to discuss the urgency of climate change. As one of the activists, Emily Johnson, told Democracy Now, “You know, we very much wanted everyone to be able to hear—for our jurors to be able to hear—from our expert witnesses.”

But on Tuesday of last week, just as their trial was getting started, the group was acquitted of all charges. Not to be deterred, one of the key experts who would have been called in the trial has made his would-be testimony public.

Former top NASA climate scientist James Hansen repurposed his testimony as an op-ed for the Denver Post. In the article, he describes the many ways we can observe climate change now: the spate of record-breaking hurricanes fueled by warming oceans, the way that bark beetles—a beneficiary of climate change—have destroyed millions of acres of Colorado forests, and how the island nation of Kiribati has had to negotiate to relocate all 103,000 of its people.

Hansen, who was arrested in 2011 at the Tar Sands protest, wanted to highlight the dire necessity behind the valve turners’ actions. He wrote, “[A]s I was prepared to swear under oath this week, we need to leave the vast majority of fossil fuels in the ground if we are to prevent truly catastrophic climate change.”

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Here’s what climate scientist James Hansen would have said in the Valve Turner trial

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Don’t blame Hurricane Michael victims for voting for climate deniers

by DebraTerpstra4 Posted on October 17, 2018

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When Hurricane Michael hit the Florida Panhandle and Southern Georgia last week, it devastated areas known for their poverty — and their conservative politics. And some media outlets didn’t hesitate to lean into the apparent irony.

A day after the calamity, while many were just beginning to process the scope of the damage, The Guardian ran a story originally titled “Victims of Hurricane Michael voted for climate deniers,” which some readers interpreted as victim-blaming. “Florida voters could put an end to this nonsense,” wrote the article’s author John Abraham. “Climate deniers are making these storms worse by stopping action on climate change. What the hell do we expect to happen when the deniers are writing the laws?”

The backlash to the article varied. Some people criticized the tone of the headline. Others, like Union of Concerned Scientists fellow Michael Lautner, had a different issue with the story — he saw the premise as patently flawed.

“It’s not that [those affected by Hurricane Michael] are voting for climate deniers,” Lautner told Grist. “It’s that they don’t really have much of a choice to vote in the first place.”

According to Latner, officials in both Florida and Georgia have used a vast arsenal of voter suppression methods to reduce voter turnout and distort civic representation. He says these techniques include heavy gerrymandering in low-income communities — the same places that are often most vulnerable to environmental woes.

Many of the Florida and Georgia residents who were most dramatically affected by Hurricane Michael live in low-income communities. Think Calhoun County in Georgia with a 33 percent poverty rate or Franklin County in Florida with a 23.5 percent poverty rate. (The states’ poverty rates stands at about 15 percent and 14 percent, respectively.)

Both Georgia and Florida have specific policies that could result in voter suppression. Florida has disenfranchised an estimated 1.5 million ex-felons — that’s ten percent of the state’s adult population, including one in five African Americans. And earlier this year, Florida Governor Rick Scott, a known climate denier, banned early voting at university campuses, which represent a younger, more liberal, diverse and climate-conscious electorate. A federal judge halted the policy, but three Florida universities announced they still would not allow early voting at their campus polls.

In Georgia, secretary of state and current Republican gubernatorial hopeful Brian Kemp froze 53,000 voter registration applications, nearly 70 percent of which belonged to African Americans, because of a mismatch with drivers license or social security information. Georgia has also reduced the number of polling places, closing eight percent of the state’s total since 2012. Three-quarters of the counties affected are communities of color. In Randolph County, an area that’s now reeling from wide-spread damage due to Hurricane Michael, local election officials attempted to close seven of nine polling places in an overwhelmingly black area, abandoning the plan only when faced with a statewide protest.

It’s unclear what, if any, effect these policies have on election outcomes. But in states like Georgia and Florida, where gubernatorial races are known to be razor-close, both voter suppression and Hurricane recovery could be significant factors.

“[In Florida and Georgia] you have a combination of factors… that are often times worse off in environmental disasters,” Lautner said. “And in communities that are already overburdened with socioeconomic distress and the like, these barriers make a difference.”

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Don’t blame Hurricane Michael victims for voting for climate deniers

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Are Solar Panels Recyclable?

by DemetriBurbidge Posted on September 21, 2018

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Earth911 Quiz #29: Solar Progress Check

by KMEMichall Posted on September 20, 2018

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California is shattering renewable records. So why are greenhouse emissions creeping up?

by AntonBussey1724 Posted on May 23, 2018

The green beacon that is the state of California is making clean-energy strides, according to new stats out this week. It’s harnessing a record amount of solar power, building more turbines to capture wind power records, and closing in on the moment when the grid goes 100 percent carbon free.

And yet it’s also starting to generate more greenhouse gases. WTF?

Every month California’s electricity managers put out a report showing what that climate-conscious state is up to. And this one brings sunny signs of progress, unheralded achievements, and fun factoids. Earlier this month, for instance, California set a new record for solar power generated.

And on April 28, at precisely 1:25 p.m., renewables provided 72.7 percent of California’s electricity needs. That’s also a record, but not an aberration. It’s consistent with a longstanding trend as California’s policies connect more solar panels and wind turbines to the grid. As you can see in the next graph, California keeps hitting new records — usually around noon — when renewables provide the majority of the electricity for a few hours.

California Independent System Operator

Since 2015, renewables have helped California decrease the amount of greenhouse gases its power plants released into the atmosphere. But this past February, the state’s electricity was more carbon intensive than it was in 2017, and in March it was even worse:

California Independent System Operator

What’s that all about? There’s a hint in the report. California had to dump about 95,000 megawatt hours of renewable power in April, because all that power would otherwise have flooded onto the grid when people didn’t need it — blowing fuses, igniting fires, and melting every computer without a surge protector. That’s a lot of energy, enough to provide all of Guatemala’s electricity for the month.

Transporting electricity and storing it is expensive, so the people managing the electrical system ask power companies to stop putting power on the grid, to curtail their production. It’s called “curtailment” in electric-system jargon. As the number of solar panels feeding the grid increases, so do curtailments.

The thing is, every new panel sending electricity to the grid is still displacing fossil fuel electricity. So that can’t explain why California is burning more fossil fuels than in the last couple of years.

What’s the real problem, then? It’s almost certainly the lack of water. When wind and sun stop generating electrons, we’d like to have other low-carbon source of electricity that we could turn to — what some energy wonks call a “flexible base” of power generation.

California’s big source of reliable low-carbon electricity has been hydropower. But the state is bracing for a drought after a warm, dry winter. So California is hoarding water behind dams, rather than letting the water run through turbines to generate electricity. As a result, hydropower generation is down. And the state’s nuclear, geothermal and biomass plants are already running at capacity. As a result California is replacing the missing waterpower with fossil-fuel generation, namely natural gas.

All this serves as a good reminder that renewables can’t provide us with all of our electricity needs alone. We’ve also got to create bigger and better batteries, string up international transmission lines and build more low-carbon power plants that we can ramp up and down to complement those renewables. If California gets that done, its power grid will be cleaner and more energizing than a $5 shot of wheatgrass juice sold from a food truck by a man with a well-conditioned beard.

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California is shattering renewable records. So why are greenhouse emissions creeping up?

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California Mandates Solar Panels on New Homes

by BartRawlings Posted on May 9, 2018

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In a groundbreaking decision, the California Energy Commission voted today to require the installation of solar panels on most newly built single-family homes and multifamily buildings of three stories or fewer. The decision, which does not require the approval of the Legislature, will go into effect in 2020.

California Leads the Way

California becomes the first state to mandate solar panels, an approach in keeping with California’s efforts to slash carbon emissions 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030. The Energy Commission expects the effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 1.4 million metric tons over three years. It is also likely to give a tremendous boost to the solar installation industry. Reflecting on the requirement, Kelly Knutsen of the trade group California Solar and Storage Association said, “This is going to be a significant increase in the solar market in California. We are also sending a national message that … we are a leader in the clean energy economy.”

Increased Costs Offset by Energy Savings

The decision has its detractors among some business associations that have focused on the estimated $9,500 cost per building the requirement will add, in part to cover the Trump administration’s tariff on solar panels. But the California Building Industry Association, which supports the initiative, acknowledged that while the installation costs will be passed on to consumers as part of a home purchase, the cost will be offset by lowered energy costs over the term of a mortgage. They estimate that for every $40 in monthly payments the energy standards increase, consumers will save $80 in energy costs.

Solar panels are popular with California consumers for their effect on energy costs and already found on about 5 percent of homes.

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Former administrators say Pruitt’s impact on EPA can be reversed

by DomingoHolifiel Posted on April 12, 2018

Amid a deluge of ethical scandals, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt seems to be on the ropes, teetering between his apparent propensity for corruption and his perceived effectiveness as President Donald Trump’s master de-regulator.

Recent articles in The New York Times, Politico, and The New Republic point out that from a policy standpoint, a lot of what Pruitt’s done may not survive in courts or outlive his tenure. Basically, all of those splashy repeals of Obama-era regulations may not hold up because Pruitt often moves too quickly and poorly crafts his regulations. Other times, he simply trumpets a proposed change that could take years to come to fruition. For example, Politico points out that Pruitt’s announced intention to roll back car-emission regulations set by the Obama administration won’t happen anytime soon. Plus, it’s likely to face legal challenges.

But when Pruitt does leave the EPA, he will not leave it unscathed. Two former EPA chiefs tell Grist that, from a gutted staff to the agency’s recent disregard for science — the very principle that’s supposed to guide the organization — a major rebuild will be necessary when a new presidential administration takes office. It could take time, they say, but they both noted the EPA could rebound from its current state.

“Their biggest rebuilding is going to be in staffing,” says Christine Todd Whitman, who served as EPA administrator from 2001 to 2003 under President George W. Bush. “They’ve lost a lot of career staff — people who were dedicated to protecting the environment and have just been so frustrated that they have moved on. Once you lose that institutional knowledge, it’s very hard to rebuild.”

In a complicated government agency, this knowledge is particularly vital. With its credibility undermined, she says convincing people of the importance of working at the EPA could be challenging.

“Every week I hear about another person leaving and these are sort of the bread and butter of the agency — they have historic knowledge, the intellectual background to do the work,” adds Carol Browner, who was EPA administrator for President Bill Clinton’s entire eight-year term. “My sense is that they want these people to leave, so they’re making life miserable.”

Browner explains that Pruitt has dismantled the agency’s reliance on science, which is supposed to undergird the EPA’s decision-making. “There’s a lot of damage being done to scientific integrity and the sort of scientific body of work that’s available to the agency making pollution decisions,” she says.

As evidence, Browner points to Pruitt’s announcement last month to disregard studies using nonpublic data, such as databases of medical records that legally need to remain confidential, in EPA analyses. These studies, she says, have been vital in better understanding public health and pollution — a position echoed by Gina McCarthy, Pruitt’s immediate predecessor at the agency.

“He’s really shrinking the amount of science that will be available for important decisions,” Browner says, “I think it’s an intentional move.”

She adds that regulation enforcement is also down. A New York Times analysis showed that in the first nine months of Pruitt’s tenure, the number of civil cases brought by the EPA fell by a third compared to the same period under Obama’s first EPA administrator, Lisa Jackson. (The number of cases was down a quarter compared to the first nine months Whitman was on the job.) The analysis also found Pruitt’s EPA has gone after fewer civil penalties from polluters, and it’s ordered fewer factories make retrofits to lessen emissions.

“That’s pollution in the air that we’re not going to get back out,” Browner says. “That’s pollution in the water that we’re not going to get back out.”

In the face of these issues, paired with Pruitt’s ethical scandals, trust in the EPA will inevitably have to be rebuilt. But the current administrator’s reputation as a tool of industry could actually be a benefit in building back the agency he’s decimated.

“Everytime that they take a step that flies in the face of protection, it becomes an opportunity for the next administration to really rebuild public trust,” Browner says.

Trust within the agency is another big project awaiting a post-Trump administrator. Whitman notes that Pruitt’s antagonistic agenda has demoralized the EPA’s workforce. Restoring the morale and mission of the EPA will be critical to getting it back on track.

“A strong new president with a new administrator who actually believes in the role of the agency—which Scott Pruitt clearly does not—that will make a big difference,” Whitman says. “It can come back. It will come back.”

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Former administrators say Pruitt’s impact on EPA can be reversed

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Rich countries invested less money in renewables last year. U.S. cities are picking up the slack.

by DanielaGoldhar2 Posted on April 6, 2018

Here’s some bad news: A new report shows that U.S. investment in renewable energy fell by 6 percent last year. Ready for the good news? Six percent ain’t too shabby considering President Trump spent his first year in office announcing plans to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris agreement, slapping tariffs on solar panels, and reneging on decades of environmental policy.

In fact, despite federal setbacks, the report called the U.S. “relatively resilient.” Compare that 6 percent drop to Europe and the U.K, which saw investments in clean energy fall by 36 percent and 65 percent, respectively. The U.S. and its neighbors across the pond face a similar set of obstacles: the end of subsidies for renewables, growing interest rates, and policy uncertainties. In the U.K., the massive drop in investments coincides with the end of a big subsidy for renewables. By comparison, China invested 10 percent more in renewables than it did in 2016, and added 53 gigawatts of capacity — that’s equal to more than half of the world’s total renewable energy capacity.

One reason for U.S. resiliency? Our cities are stepping up to the plate. “The rise of solar power over the past decade has been largely driven by cities,” the Environment Texas Research & Policy Center found in a recent report. Researchers looked at the total solar photovoltaic capacity installed by 20 major cities across the U.S. and found that, as of the end of last year, those cities alone have more solar energy capacity than the entire country had installed by the end of 2010.

Grist / Environment Texas

Los Angeles, San Diego, Honolulu, Phoenix, and San Jose were the top five producers of solar photovoltaic capacity in 2017. But the report also highlighted 18 “Solar Stars” — cities that had 50 or more watts of solar installed per person. Honolulu is the shiniest of those solar stars, with three times as much capacity as the next runner up: San Diego. Fresno, California; Santa Fe, New Mexico; and Tucson, Arizona were close behind.

The groundswell of support for renewable energy in American cities is linked to the goals laid out in the Paris agreement. In 2017, Dan Firger (a member of Grist 50 2018) teamed up with former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg and California Governor Jerry Brown to launch a Bloomberg Philanthropies project called America’s Pledge. Since the project went live, 110 cities and have pledged to cut emissions, 13 leading academic institutions have signed on to reduce their environmental footprints, and even local businesses are taking steps to mitigate their impact on the climate. In all, this coalition accounts for half of the spending power in the U.S.

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Rich countries invested less money in renewables last year. U.S. cities are picking up the slack.

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