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It’s official: Parts of california are too wildfire-prone to insure

by Crystal6117 Posted on August 21, 2019

California is facing yet another real estate-related crisis, but we’re not talking about its sky-high home prices. According to newly released data, it’s simply become too risky to insure houses in big swaths of the wildfire-prone state.

Last winter when we wrote about home insurance rates possibly going up in the wake of California’s massive, deadly fires, the insurance industry representatives we interviewed were skeptical. They noted that the stories circulating in the media about people in forested areas losing their homeowners’ insurance was based on anecdotes, not data. But now, the data is in and it’s really happening: Insurance companies aren’t renewing policies areas climate scientists say are likely to burn in giant wildfires in coming years.

Between 2015 and 2018, the 10 California counties with the most homes in flammable forests saw a 177 percent increase in homeowners turning to an expensive state-backed insurance program because they could not find private insurance.

In some ways, this news is not surprising. According to a recent survey of insurance actuaries (the people who calculate insurance risks and premiums based on available data), the industry ranked climate change as the top risk for 2019, beating out concerns over cyber damages, financial instability, and terrorism. While having insurance companies on board with climate science is a good thing for, say, requiring cities to invest in more sustainable infrastructure, it’s bad news for homeowners who can’t simply pick up their lodgings and move elsewhere.

“We are seeing an increasing trend across California where people at risk of wildfires are being non-renewed by their insurer,” said California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara in a statement. “This data should be a wake-up call for state and local policymakers that without action to reduce the risk from extreme wildfires and preserve the insurance market we could see communities unraveling.”

A similar dynamic is likely unfolding across many other Western states, according to reporting from the New York Times.

To understand the data coming out of California we can use my own family as an example: A few months after Grist published a story about how my parent’s neighborhood is trying to fortify itself against future forest fires, my mom’s insurer informed her and my stepfather that they’d need to get home insurance elsewhere. For two months they called one insurer after another, but no company would take their premiums. So they turned to the state program as the insurer of last resort — which costs about three times more than they’d been spending under their previous, private insurer.

My folks have spent a lot of money clearing trees and brush from around their house. They’ve covered the walls in hard-to-burn cement panels, and the roof with metal. But insurance risk maps don’t adjust for these improvements. Instead, insurance companies seem to have made the call that the changing climate, along with years of fire suppression, have made houses in the midst of California’s dry forests a bad bet, and therefore uninsurable.

“For us, because we’ve done good financial planning and our house is paid off, it’s just an extra expense,” said my mom, Gail Johnson Vaughan. “But we have friends who have no choice but to leave.”

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It’s official: Parts of california are too wildfire-prone to insure

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California defies Trump to ban pesticide linked to childhood brain damage

by LeolaGeach156 Posted on May 11, 2019

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

California is banning a widely used pesticide that has been linked to brain damage in children, a major victory for public health advocates who have long fought to outlaw the toxic chemical in the agricultural industry.

The state ban on chlorpyrifos, a pesticide used on almonds, citrus, cotton, grapes, walnuts, and other crops, follows years of research finding the chemical causes serious health effects in children, including impaired brain and neurological development. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had moved to ban the chemical under Barack Obama, but the Trump administration reversed that effort, rejecting the scientific conclusions of its own government experts.

“Countless people have suffered as a result of this chemical,” the California EPA secretary, Jared Blumenfeld, said in an interview on Wednesday. “A lot of people live and work and go to school right next to fields that are being sprayed with chlorpyrifos … It’s an issue of environmental health and justice.”

The move in California, home to a vast agricultural sector responsible for growing a majority of the nation’s fruits and nuts, is the latest example of the state resisting Trump’s conservative agenda and policies. Environmental activists, however, have been pushing to stop chlorpyrifos use in the state for years in the wake of overwhelming evidence of harms caused by exposure.

“This is a very important and pivotal moment,” said Angel Garcia, the chair of the Coalition Advocating for Pesticide Safety, who has worked with families affected by chlorpyrifos. “It sends the message to communities that they are starting to be heard … People will now have a safer future.”

Epidemiological studies have linked chlorpyrifos to a number of health conditions. Pregnant women living near fields and farms that use the chemical have an increased risk of having a child with autism. Exposure to low to moderate levels of chlorpyrifos during pregnancy have also been associated with lower IQs and memory problems. California officials cited a recent review by a state panel on toxic air contaminants, which found the effects in children could occur at lower levels than previously understood.

“The science is definitive,” said Blumenfeld, adding that he hoped the move would spur the federal government to take action. “This job really should have been done by the U.S. EPA.”

After environmental groups sued the Trump administration for reversing the Obama-era ban, a judge ordered the federal EPA to prohibit use of chlorpyrifos last year. But the government appealed that decision, and the courts have ordered the EPA to make a final decision about chlorpyrifos by July.

Activists have accused the Trump administration of backing the interests of DowDuPont, a chlorpyrifos manufacturer whose predecessor donated to the president.

DowDuPont is now “evaluating all options to challenge” California’s ban, spokesman Gregg Schmidt said in a statement, adding that eliminating chlorpyrifos would “remove an important tool for farmers and undermines the highly effective system for regulating pesticides that has been in place at the federal level and in the state of California for decades.” He also noted that the chemical is currently approved for use in roughly 100 countries.

The U.S. banned chlorpyrifos for residential use back in 2001. An expert panel of toxicologists last year recommended a ban on all organophosphates, the class of pesticides that includes chlorpyrifos. More than 10,000 tonnes of organophosphates are sprayed in 24 European countries each year.

In California, the process of banning chlorpyrifos use across the Central Valley agricultural regions could take up to two years, officials said. In 2015, the state implemented tighter restrictions on the use of chlorpyrifos, but critics have argued that a full ban was the only way to protect the health of farming communities.

The California governor, Gavin Newsom, has also proposed $5.7 million in new funding to support the transition from chlorpyrifos to “safer, more sustainable alternatives.”

Climate change is expected to worsen pest challenges in agriculture, which means the need to find alternatives to toxic chemicals is urgent, said Blumenfeld: “It’s not just about chlorpyrifos. It’s making sure we have a more holistic and nature-based approach.”

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California defies Trump to ban pesticide linked to childhood brain damage

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China’s plan to reduce smog in cities basically just moved it to other areas

by CharlaBodin5717 Posted on May 1, 2019

The Beijing air was so polluted, you couldn’t see to the other side of the street. Thousands of parents and children overflowed the hospitals, and rows of babies were hooked up to machines, suffering from respiratory issues. If you zoomed out on a map, the smog cloud covered one-sixth of the entire country.

It was 2013, and the particulate matter in China’s air, often bad, had gone off the charts into a full-on “airpocalypse,” due to increases in iron and steel production, diesel trucking, and coal-fired energy production.  

“A ‘normal bad’ pollution day is like a rating of 160. I think [one] day the rating was above 600,” said Anthony Singleterry, a Seattle resident who was living in Beijing at the time.

In response to the pollution, the Chinese government quickly drafted and launched a plan to mitigate smog in its big cities. It set aggressive clean air goals for the capital region, and met them, too: By 2017, particulate air pollution in the area was reduced by 25 percent.

But, as a team of Chinese and international scientists found, that quick pursuit of cleaner air for cities meant outsourcing much of the country’s coal-based energy production, and with it the air pollution, to poorer neighboring regions.

A new study in Science Advances looks at the unintended harm the plan did to bordering regions.

Under the policy, 53 percent of Beijing’s energy production was moved elsewhere. More rural regions often have less efficient technologies and lower environmental standards.

The study found that the plan actually increased particulate pollution and carbon emissions nationwide. It also resulted in increased water scarcity in the more rural provinces, which are now providing water to the coal plants. Overall, the study said, these measures may just be passing off pollution problems to less-developed regions of the country.

“Our intention is certainly not to blame or discourage environmental policies designed to reduce air pollution,” but rather to examine the unintended side effects of isolated environmental policies, said University of Maryland’s Kuishuang Feng, a co-author of the study. 

Some smog from these new power plants in neighboring areas will also travel back to the cities, canceling out some of the gains made in reaching the 25 percent pollution reduction goal.

“Especially with an issue like air pollution, it’s not the smartest scientific approach to these problems,” Chris Nielsen, executive director of the Harvard-China Project, told Grist and added that policies should be more holistic and long-term. “Chinese environmental air pollution policies can be overly narrow, both in their spatial focus and environmental focus by being single-pollutant driven.”

Nielsen said there is a benefit, though, to the Chinese government in setting such narrow targets: They are easily measured, and easily communicated to the public. Multi-faceted environmental policy takes “messy, complicated science,” he said. “So it’s hard to explain what you’re chasing.”

Lara Cushing, a public health researcher at San Francisco State University, said she’s seen this kind of spillover effect before: here in the states. She’s published work on similar issues with California’s cap-and-trade emissions program.

“The challenge is that without a broader coordinated strategy, there’s these really big problems of leakage — of pollution just moving around,” Cushing said.

After a 2018 study found California had significantly lowered emissions statewide, but at the expense of poorer communities, the state developed its own environmental justice tool to map pollution by county, and show the areas where people are particularly vulnerable to its effects.

The China study is important, Cushing said, because it not only sheds light on the spillover effect; it shows how unintended consequences can impact water and climate, too.

Since meeting its initial goals set after the “airpocalypse” for 2017, China has rolled out a new climate plan that is a bit more comprehensive. Its name translates to: “Action Plan for Winning the Blue Sky War.” No city in China yet meets the World Health Organization’s recommended particulate levels, so the new policy expands air pollution goals to all cities, rather than just those in the capital region.

Since 2013, the Chinese government also restructured its environmental policy staff. Climate policy used to be under the economic and development commission, and now it has its own branch. This was done, according to Nielsen, to allow scientists to coordinate more closely with government officials on policy.

“It’s evidence that the government recognizes, at least to some degree, what is described in this paper,” Nielsen said.

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China’s plan to reduce smog in cities basically just moved it to other areas

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New York City’s newly passed Green New Deal, explained

by jenniewilshire4 Posted on April 19, 2019

This story has been updated.

As the rest of the country continues to go back and forth over the possibility of a nationwide Green New Deal, New York City is forging ahead with its own version. The Climate Mobilization Act passed the city council on Thursday with a vote of 45 to 2 amidst cheers and applause from those inside the chambers.

The bundle of 10 bills will keep the city in line with emissions reduction targets set by the Paris Climate Agreement. Mayor Bill de Blasio is expected to sign the bill into law in the coming weeks.*

“This package of bills will be the single largest carbon reduction effort in any city, anywhere, not just New York City, that has been put forward,” said Committee for Environmental Protection Chair Costa Constantinides in a committee hearing the morning of the vote. “By our calculations, it will result in the equivalent of taking more than one million cars off the road by 2030.” Proponents of the legislation say it will have a significant impact on air quality in the city, which has higher than the national average asthma rates and create thousands of new middle-class jobs for the city.

Making big changes to meet climate goals in New York City is tricky because so much of the city’s day-to-day operation–from public transportation to water, even its ability to ban plastic bags — is controlled by the state government. By focusing largely on local building standards, the city has been able to carve out green legislation within its jurisdiction.

The act’s pièce de résistance is a bill that requires many of city’s buildings to significantly slash their carbon emissions starting in 2024, reducing overall emissions by 40 percent by 2030. Buildings are responsible for almost 70 percent of New York City’s greenhouse gas emissions, according to a 2017 estimate. The Mayor’s Office of Sustainability estimates upgrades needed to meet the act’s emissions caps would cost building owners around $4 billion, according to the New York Times. The measure was vehemently opposed by the real estate industry, which argued the bill is costly, unrealistic and puts an unfair burden on the owners of buildings not exempted from the law.

New York’s powerful real estate lobby has been fighting energy-efficient building legislation as far back as 2009 when then-Mayor Bloomberg proposed a similar rule. So in a city where the real estate industry so often gets its way, today’s vote really stands out.

But the times are a’changing, and even skeptical New Yorkers (and potential 2020 presidential candidates) like Mayor Bill de Blasio, who recently called the act “very aggressive,” have come around in support of the measure. “Climate change poses an existential threat to New York City, and making buildings more sustainable and efficient is a key part of the solution,” said de Blasio’s Office of Sustainability via email. “Protecting New Yorkers from climate change is not optional.”

What does the act do?

The act consists of 10 bills which aim to reduce the city’s greenhouse gas emissions in a myriad of ways. Some of the standouts:

  1. A bill that requires the city to conduct a feasibility study by 2021 looking at closing the city’s 24 gas- and oil-fueled power plants in favor of renewable sources and batteries to store excess energy. The study would be revisited every four years.
  2. Green roofs on new and smaller buildings: two bills in the package stipulate that roofs should be covered in plants, solar panels, mini wind turbines or some combination of the three. Green roofs help filter pollutants and add agricultural space in cities.
  3. The final resolution of the package calls upon the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation to deny the Water Quality Certification permit for the Williams Pipeline, which is proposed to bring fracked natural gas from Pennsylvania to the New York. Governor Cuomo banned fracking in New York in 2014, but proponents say the pipeline is necessary to meet the growing demand for natural gas, and that it will facilitate a city-mandated transition away from using dirtier oil for heating.
  4. It wasn’t voted on today, but an additional measure to convert all school buses to electric within 20 years was also included in the package, part of New York City’s goal to switch all public buses to electric by 2040. The council expects to vote on this bill by Earth day.

But the meatiest (veggiest?) bill of the bunch is unofficially known as the “Dirty Buildings Bill.” It requires around 50,000 of the city’s buildings to cut emissions by 40 percent by 2030 and 80 percent by 2050 by installing new windows, insulation and other retrofits to become more energy efficient. The legislation targets buildings over 25,000 square feet, which make up just 2 percent of the city’s real estate but account for about half of all building emissions. If landlords fail to meet targets, they will be forced to pay a fine of up to millions of dollars per year. Some of the guilty buildings will include Trump Tower, the Empire State Building, One World Trade Center, and 15 Central Park West.

Not every edifice will have to scramble to make energy-efficient updates. Non-profits, hospitals, religious sites, rent-controlled housing and residential buildings of four stories or less are exempted from the bill in various ways. The legislation also creates a low-interest energy loan program to help building owners get funding to make these green improvements. Councilmember Constantinides said that they designed the loans so that, most loan recipients should see a net gain after all is said and done after factoring in the cost savings from improved energy efficiency.

Who stands to benefit?

Well, the earth, naturally. But people-wise, NYC is hoping the construction work involved in the building overhaul bill will benefit the city’s shrinking middle class while simultaneously improving public health.

“By 2030, this bill will create 26,700 green jobs, and will prevent 43 premature deaths and 107 Emergency Room visits annually by 2030,” the Mayor’s Office of Sustainability wrote in an email to Grist.

A study by New York Working Families and the non-profit ALIGN NY found that the new laws would create 23,627 “direct construction jobs” implementing the retrofits, and 16,995 “indirect jobs” like building operation and maintenance jobs, manufacturing and professional services per year until 2030.

“We wanted to ensure legislation that tackled both climate change and inequality,” said Peter Sikora, the climate and inequality campaigns director with grassroots organization New York Communities for Change. “You can’t fight climate change on the backs of poor people of color, that’s not right.”

The bill looking at phasing out oil- and gas-fueled power plants could have a significant impact on air quality neighborhoods where existing plants are located. Many of the city’s power plants are in low-income areas, where local residents suffer from pollution.

Who put up a fight?

Hospitals and other healthcare facilities are among the biggest energy users among New York City buildings over 25,000 feet. Before the act passed, hospital representatives were seeking a total exemption from the “Dirty Buildings Bill” rules — but they were ultimately denied.

Hospitals are among the biggest energy users among buildings over 25,000 feet. . “Hospitals, in all fairness, are unusual because they’re 24-hour operations and have federal rules” such as replacing their indoor air a certain number of times per day, Sikora said. Still, “It’s ironic that healthcare institutions were lobbying against anti-pollution requirements.”

Although hospitals didn’t receive the full exemption from the new laws, they are being held to the lowest standard allowed by the “Dirty Buildings” bill, meaning they’ll still have to cut emissions, but not on the same timeline or to the same extent as other facilities.

What’s next?

Back to the power plant bill: Once the feasibility study is completed, what will be the next steps to start shutting down these pollution-spewing energy generators? There aren’t any guarantees or safeguards built into the legislation to say how, or when, the city council will use the study’s findings to begin divesting from the dirty fuel or shutting down power plants impacting lower-income communities.“The City Council will continue its work to move away from fossil fuel and into more renewable energy sources,” a spokesperson for New York City Council Speaker Corey Johnson told Grist.

Sikora agreed that the city’s Green New Deal plans are fuzzy for now. “There are loads of details and implementation issues and administrative actions and financing mechanisms that need to take place moving forward,” he said.

The fate of the Williams Pipeline also remains to be seen. Even though the Climate Mobilization Act includes a resolution condemning the pipeline, it’s still largely up to Governor Cuomo and the Department of Environmental Conservation, which has until May 16 to issue a key water certification that’d allow construction to begin this year. Even as environmental advocates celebrated New York’s Green New Deal vote, some participants peeled off for a march in protest of the fracked gas pipeline.

*This story previously stated that New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio signed the Climate Mobilization Act on Thursday. According to his spokesperson, he has not yet signed it, but will in the near future.

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New York City’s newly passed Green New Deal, explained

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What is your town’s risk of wildfire? New media tool lets you see for yourself

by EmmanueV06 Posted on April 11, 2019

Which California town might be the next to burn? That’s the driving question behind Destined to Burn, the brand new media package produced via a partnership between the AP, Gannet, McClatchy, and others. The project examines how California can prevent wildfire devastation.

Wildfires have always been a risk in drought-prone California. But due to climate change’s drying effects on the soil and vegetation, burns are getting bigger, deadlier, and more expensive for the Golden State. Just last year, the Camp Fire killed almost 90 people and completely leveled the town of Paradise in Northern California. The climate-induced tragedy was 2018’s most expensive natural disaster.

Since then, many communities throughout California have been grappling with how to adapt to this type of threat.

And they may be right to worry. One in 12 homes in the state of California is at high risk from wildfires. Using data from the U.S. Census Bureau and Cal Fire Maps, the Sacramento Bee recently released a search tool, which Californians can use to find out how much of their towns might be in the danger zone.

Based on their analysis, there are more than 75 California towns and cities in which at least 90 percent of residents live in “very high fire hazard severity zones,” as designated by Cal Fire. As part of the Destined to Burn package, The Sacramento Bee highlighted 10 California communities from that list: Shingletown, Nevada City, Colfax, Kings Beach, Pollock Pines, Arnold, Wofford Heights, La Cañada Flintridge, Rancho Palos Verdes, and Harbison Canyon.

In 6 out of these 10 communities, 100 percent of residents live in very high fire hazard zones — at least, according to 2010 census info. In Nevada City, the hometown of Grist’s very own Nathanael Johnson, 3,064 out of 3,068 residents live in high hazard areas. (A number that may leave some wondering: What’s the deal with those four lucky people?)

But aside from their exceptionally high wildfire risk, there isn’t that much that unites the communities on the Bee’s list. Residents of the affluent Rancho Palos Verdes (the most populated city on the list), for instance, don’t seem to be sweating too hard about wildfires. Scott Hale, an assistant fire chief for Los Angeles County, told the Sacramento Bee: “This being a coastal community, we don’t get the type of brush and that kind of fire behavior that you might get in somewhere like Paradise.”

Kings Beach, on the north shore of Lake Tahoe, is a popular tourist destination. Because so many of the homes there are vacation rentals, it could be harder to mobilize the local community to push for more fire prevention measures.

In contrast, Nevada City is taking its fire prevention measures seriously. The city launched a Goat Fund Me campaign in December, hoping to raise enough funds to rent brush-clearing ruminants to maintain the city’s lands, a method that has caught on throughout California and beyond. Residents have also taken fire prevention into their own hands, creating citizen-led controlled burn squads and even helping out neighbors who may have trouble clearing dry brush near their homes.

The list isn’t exactly intended to predict the next “Paradise.” The data has its limitations — age being one of them. A new census is approaching in 2020, and Cal Fire is currently at work on a new set of fire hazard maps, which will incorporate wind patterns and other important factors. Instead, the tools put together by Gannett, McClatchy, Media News, and the Associated Press, are designed to be used as a resource as communities figure out how to prepare for their unique wildfire risks.

“Our goal with this collaboration is to put a spotlight on policy issues that can and should be raised in the halls of the state Capitol and by local communities,” wrote McClatchy Regional Editor Lauren Gustus of the project. “This is a wicked problem with no easy answers. And the more information we can share about where and how we’re falling short, the quicker we can come together on potential solutions.”

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What is your town’s risk of wildfire? New media tool lets you see for yourself

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Climate change is overwhelming our crappy water infrastructure

by MerrillLabillier Posted on March 21, 2019

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Most of Nebraska is a disaster area with 95 percent of the state’s population affected by flooding. According to FEMA, total economic losses are approaching $1 billion, including more than $400 million to agriculture and more than $400 million to public infrastructure. Cascading levee failures along the Missouri River have meant that, for the time being, there’s essentially nothing holding back the floodwaters.

Six Nebraska public drinking water systems went offline, and dozens of wastewater treatment facilities failed — including one for Omaha which officials say could take weeks or months to restore. In several cases, raw sewage is being discharged into streams and rivers.

For rural residents who get their water from private wells, that added pollution could prove dangerous. Emergency room visits for gastrointestinal issues increase after heavy rains.

As climate change makes rainstorms more intense, this problem will only worsen. Across the Great Plains, the frequency of heavy downpours has increased by 29 percent over the past 60 years. Flooding isn’t just a quickly damaging natural disaster that destroys roads, bridges, homes, and factories — it’s a lingering public health issue.

This problem isn’t unique to Nebraska. In recent years, floods in Texas, the Carolinas, and coastal Virginia have swept hazardous material from the petrochemical industry, hog farms, and agricultural land into waterways, threatening public safety.

As of 2015, there were 772 cities — mostly in the Midwest and Northeast — with outdated sewer systems that funnel waste directly into streams as a matter of course even without record-breaking floods. These systems were cheap to build in the 1800s, but now people are starting to reconsider “combined sewer overflow” systems.

Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has campaigned on his record of using eco-friendly methods, like rain gardens and expanding parks near floodplains, and technology to deal with its combined sewer system. City officials say they’ve saved $500 million by adding smart sensors to its sewer system.

Cities are trying to hold polluters accountable for cleanup costs, too: A new wave of “failure to adapt” lawsuits might help put pressure on industry to put more foresight into how climate change might turn their infrastructure into toxic waste sites.

Lawsuits and tech aside, the most effective way of adapting to climate change may ultimately be a planned retreat from coastlines and waterways — giving more space for nature as a buffer.

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Climate change is overwhelming our crappy water infrastructure

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Record-breaking flooding in Nebraska is visible from space

by MarthaMunson Posted on March 18, 2019

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Governor Pete Ricketts has declared more than half of Nebraska’s 93 counties a disaster area as record-breaking spring floods have swollen into a catastrophe. “This really is the most devastating flooding we’ve probably ever had in our state’s history, from the standpoint of how widespread it is,” Ricketts told CNN on Monday. Even the National Weather Service in Omaha was forced to abandon their office due to flooding.

Here’s how it happened: Last week, a hurricane-strength storm system unleashed torrential rainfall over the deep Nebraska snowpack, flash-melting huge quantities of water and overwhelming dams and levees. Unusually warm temperatures have remained in place since the storm’s passage, worsening the runoff. The resulting flooding has been visible from space.

USGS Landsat Program

Spring flooding happens nearly every year in the upper Midwest, but current flooding has far surpassed previous all-time records on Nebraska’s major waterways. Climate change means springtime temperatures are arriving earlier with more intense early-season rains, worsening the risk of damaging floods. In one location, the Missouri River broke its previous record by nearly four feet.

The most spectacular flooding resulted from the failure of the 90-year-old Spencer Dam on the Niobrara River in north-central Nebraska when it unleashed an 11-foot wall of water on Thursday. Before the flood gauge on the river failed, “it looked like something incredible was happening that we couldn’t believe,” Jason Lambrecht, a Nebraska-based hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey told the Lincoln Journal-Star. “And suddenly, everything went dark.”

The flash flood destroyed roads, homes, and bridges before emptying into the Missouri River and joining with meltwater from South Dakota and Iowa. On Saturday, two levees breached on the Platte River, cutting off the town of Fremont, Nebraska — the state’s sixth-largest city. A volunteer airlift has been supplying the city over the weekend and performing rescues.

As of Monday, water levels have crested in most of the state, though major flooding will continue for several days. Offutt Air Force base near Omaha — the home of U.S. Strategic Command — remains inundated, a poignant sign of climate change as a national security risk. There are dozens of road closures across the area.

Eastern Nebraska is just the worst-hit region: Major flooding is currently underway in parts of seven states in the upper Midwest, with near-record flooding expected to spread northward into Minnesota and North Dakota in the coming weeks. In Minnesota, officials expect a greater than 95 percent chance of major flooding, possibly rivaling all-time records.

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Record-breaking flooding in Nebraska is visible from space

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Mardi Gras floods New Orleans in plastic beads. One scientist has a gooey fix.

by kelliedahlen28 Posted on March 5, 2019

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A herd of dragons, followed by a brass band, and a float full of Star Wars characters rolled down St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans earlier this week, pelting onlookers with shiny beads. When it was over, misthrown necklaces dangled from tree branches and pooled in streetcar tracks.

It’s a scene that played out dozens of times across greater New Orleans over recent weeks. And boy does it make a mess. The Mardi Gras season came to a close on Tuesday, but beads remain scattered everywhere, clogging the city’s sewers. Last year, New Orleans vacuumed 93,000 pounds of plastic beads out of its storm drains.

Someday, historians may look back on our current fossil-fueled plastic era — the geological layer peppered with K-cups, water bottles, and straws — as one particularly bad Fat Tuesday binge.

But at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, molecular biologist Naohiro Kato is working to fix the local version of the plastic problem: Kato has figured out how to fashion biodegradable beads and doubloons out of algae.

Naohiro KatoPaige Jarreau, LSU

Kato isn’t exactly into plastics — his research is all about finding medicines in algae. But back in 2013, a student forgot to put a test tube of algae back in a freezer. The next morning, they found a layer of oil had separated from the warm scum and floated to the top of the tube. You need oil, usually pumped out of the ground, to make plastic beads. But the algae in the test tube had pumped this oil out of the air — weaving together carbon-dioxide and water to make the hydrocarbons.

Starting with algae grown in a kiddie pool, Kato then managed to make a few doubloons and beads.

Plastic beads and doubloons made from algae oil will break down over time, rather than clogging sewers for decades.Paige Jarreau, LSU.

This is just one example of an ongoing revolution to replace petroleum-based chemistry with biology. In the 1950s, scientists broke open the secrets of polymers and, in a frenzy of discovery, figured out how to turn oil into hundreds of different kinds of plastics. Plastics to insulate wires, package food, grease engines, form medical devices, and of course, to shape into a trillion colorful party novelties that drunk tourists would drop in the French Quarter. Now scientists have begun unlocking a new treasure of secrets — working with living cells this time, rather than organic chemistry.

“How big of a deal could bioplastics be? Yeah, I think it could be huge,” said John Cumbers, the founder of SynBioBeta, a network of researchers and inventors involved in this new frenzy of discovery.

Cumbers noted that one startup, Mango Materials, has been capturing methane (a powerful greenhouse gas) and feeding it to bacteria. The bacteria then transform it into bio-polymer molecules, which can be made into plastics.

This isn’t just an exciting frontier for startups. Big companies have already demonstrated that biomaterials make sense. In the 1990s, DuPont began a moonshot effort to get yeast to build 1-3 propanediol, a molecule that’s incredibly difficult to make from petroleum. They succeeded, and soon it was replacing petro-chemicals in cosmetics, soaps, and fabrics. It won a presidential green chemistry award in 2003. Most of this propanediol goes to make a fabric called Sorona, which is woven into denim, carpets, wrinkle-free suits, and underwear. Compared to similar textiles, Sonora produces 60 percent less greenhouse gases over its life cycle, according to DuPont.

This biomaterial performs better and is cheaper than the alternatives, and so “we’ve been growing like gangbusters,” said Mike Saltzberg, who directs DuPont’s biomaterials efforts.

But that’s not always the case. The more environmentally responsible option is often more expensive. “When people say, ‘I’m not just looking at performance and cost, I’m also looking at the environment,’ that really gives bioproducts the advantage,” Saltzberg said.

Take Kato’s bio-beads. Right now they’d cost about a dollar per necklace to mass produce, which is a lot more that the competition (a dollar can buy you a dozen). But if you captured the byproducts of the algal supplements he’s working on, you might be able to make it much more cheaply. For example, you can sell algal fucoxanthin, a compound with potential medical properties for $50,000 a pound. And after you take out the fucoxanthin, you still have 98 percent of the algae you started with.

“That means, we can produce biodegradable Mardi Gras beds from almost all of the microalgae we cultivate,” Kato said. “A football-field size of pond can produce 130,000 pounds of biodegradable Mardi Gras beads, which is more amount than that clogged in catch basins in New Orleans last year.”

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Mardi Gras floods New Orleans in plastic beads. One scientist has a gooey fix.

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Trump’s trade war is hitting solar workers hard

by JacelynBrigham Posted on February 12, 2019

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While politicians are debating the merits of a massive job-creating effort known as the Green New Deal, jobs in solar power are getting harder to find.

The solar industry lost 8,000 jobs last year, a drop of 3.2 percent and the second straight year of declines, according to The Solar Foundation’s annual report out Tuesday. That’s a sharp change after six years of growth.

Solar jobs largely come from the manufacturing and construction of new rooftop panels and solar farms, so these employment numbers offer a snapshot of the entire industry. The losses come as experts call for a massive ramp up in solar power as part of a larger effort to displace electricity generated with fossil-fuels.

What’s driving this? The Solar Foundation, a nonprofit research firm, lays most of the blame for job losses on President Donald Trump’s tariffs. Trump imposed tariffs against imported solar panels, along with two key materials — steel and aluminum,. Companies, uncertain about exactly how these tariffs will work, have put the brakes on operations. By last June, companies had canceled or delayed the construction of $2.5 billion worth of solar facilities, according to Reuters.

We can also chalk up some of the job losses to more local government quirks.. The two states that saw the biggest job losses were California (9,576), and Massachusetts (1,320), according the report. California companies have less incentive to build more solar farms because the state is ahead of its targets for renewable energy. And there was some policy uncertainty in Massachusetts as the state government crafted new targets for solar power. It issued those targets last September, and afterward saw a rise in applications to build more panels.

The Solar Foundation

The Solar Foundation anticipates a turnaround soon. This year, for instance, solar companies will need to begin construction on projects to take advantage of a tax credit that expires next year.

“Despite two challenging years, the long-term outlook for this industry remains positive as even more Americans turn to low-cost solar energy and storage solutions to power their homes and businesses,” said Andrea Luecke, executive director of the foundation.

It’s important to remember that The Solar Foundation’s not-so sunny report is a single source of data (though the Department of Energy’s official numbers have been roughly in line with this nonprofit’s).

It’s also important to remember that solar is just one sector of a clean energy economy that includes everything from home insulators to train-engine designers. The DOE has not yet released its annual report on employment for 2018, but its report from May of last year showed increases in energy efficiency and wind power jobs dwarfed the contraction in solar jobs.

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Trump’s trade war is hitting solar workers hard

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The Physics of Life – Adrian Bejan

by Myrna Posted on February 2, 2019

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

The Physics of Life

The Evolution of Everything

Adrian Bejan

Genre: Physics

Price: $14.99

Publish Date: May 24, 2016

Publisher: St. Martin’s Press

Seller: Macmillan


The Physics of Life explores the roots of the big question by examining the deepest urges and properties of living things, both animate and inanimate: how to live longer, with food, warmth, power, movement and free access to other people and surroundings. Bejan explores controversial and relevant issues such as sustainability, water and food supply, fuel, and economy, to critique the state in which the world understands positions of power and freedom. Breaking down concepts such as desire and power, sports health and culture, the state of economy, water and energy, politics and distribution, Bejan uses the language of physics to explain how each system works in order to clarify the meaning of evolution in its broadest scientific sense, moving the reader towards a better understanding of the world's systems and the natural evolution of cultural and political development. The Physics of Life argues that the evolution phenomenon is much broader and older than the evolutionary designs that constitute the biosphere, empowering readers with a new view of the globe and the future, revealing that the urge to have better ideas has the same physical effect as the urge to have better laws and better government. This is evolution explained loudly but also elegantly, forging a path that flows sustainability.

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The Physics of Life – Adrian Bejan

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