Scientists have warned of these horrendous outcomes. But, like the doubters of the COVID-19 vaccine’s safety and efficacy, climate change deniers, many of whom are elected to leadership positions in this country, ignore facts and science as proof stares them in the face.
Hearing the regrets of many unvaccinated hospitalized COVID patients — now gasping for breath — makes for an ominous analogy. Will climate change deniers come around before civilization takes its last gasp in a man-made hostile environment?
Vaccine mandates may be coming, and so should stiffer mandates to end fossil fuel burning.
Gloria Sefton, Trabuco Canyon
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To the editor: Thank you for another insightful article on climate change. However, one primary driver of climate change conspicuously absent from the article was human overpopulation, something that scientists have been warning us about for years.
Earlier this month, the group Scientists Warning Europe stated unequivocally that climate change is being driven by both overconsumption and overpopulation, and that there is no hope of assuaging the ravages of climate change, let alone our planet’s nascent mass extinction event, unless we can reverse our 220,000-person-per-day growth. The group says this planet should have no more than 3 billion people on it; now, it has almost 7.9 billion.
If we are serious about mitigating climate change, we will soon need to break the taboo that prevents us from addressing overpopulation.
Robert Johnson, Santa Barbara
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To the editor: We have wildfires, floods, pandemics and rising homicides with more and more guns available —and yet there are billionaires having fun and escaping to space.
What is wrong with this picture? It’s like “The Twilight Zone” of my youth come to life.
I want to feel hopeful for the future, for my granddaughters. My family and I do our best in conserving. When will the tide turn and deniers wake up and come back to Earth?
‘The air is toxic’: how an idyllic California lake became a nightmare
Maanvi Singh in Calipatria and Salton City
Just to be safe, Noemí Vázquez keeps inhalers in almost every room of her house. She stashes them in her kitchen cupboard, a couple in her purse, one in the bathroom, and, of course, by her bedside.
And then there’s the large, black Puma knapsack where she keeps her nebulizer, several inhalers, and the montelukast pills she takes to treat her wheezing. Her four-year-old granddaughter has her own asthma kit – a neon pink and purple Trolls-themed lunch box that holds a small, child-sized nebulizer and a few inhalers. “She’s smart! She knows: this is her bag,” Vázquez said.
Asthma and allergies are a part of life here in Imperial county, California. A way of life, even, in a region shrouded by a grey-beige dust that haunts Vázquez’s days and nightmares. A few years ago, when the air was particularly thick, she awoke in the night unable to speak or breathe. Her skin was purple. “If my husband wasn’t sleeping next to me that night, I would have passed away,” she said. “I think about all those people who don’t have anyone sleeping next to them. About the kids who don’t know how to talk yet.”
Here, in California’s far south-east, there’s no escaping the noxious air. The haze that hovers over Imperial is a peculiar blend – incorporating pesticide plumes, exhaust fumes, factory emissions, and something curious: vaporized dust rising from the nearby Salton Sea.
The glimmering blue basin that stretches across the desert is either starkly beautiful or grotesque – depending on whom you ask. Formed more than a century ago by a breached canal, the Salton Sea is many things. It is California’s largest lake, an ecological oasis, a former mecca for famous vacationers, and a muddy sink for agricultural runoff. For decades, it has been shrinking, exposing a powdery arsenic-, selenium- and DDT-laced shoreline that wafts into the atmosphere.
Near the sea, hospitalization rates for children with asthma are double the state average, and one in five kids have the condition. Many of the mostly Mexican American farm workers and outdoor laborers who live and work in Imperial, one of the state’s poorest counties, breathe in a dangerous mix of Salton Sea dust and pesticide on a daily basis as well. In Calipatria, Brawley and Westmorland and other towns around the lake, adult asthma rates are among the highest in the state.
It can be a punishing place to live, said Amor García, 31, who moved to the area four years ago. “No one warned us it would be so bad for our health,” she said. On muggy mid-summer days, temperatures here creep up to 120F and the desert streams with a brown vapor. The hot, grimy air clings to hair and creeps under fingernails. The sea steams up a sulfurous stench.
García worries that in the coming years, if nothing is done to address the pollution crisis, the area will become almost unlivable. An unprecedented drought amplified by the climate crisis and growing demand for water in southern California are both hastening the Salton Sea’s decline. Researchers predict that the sea could lose nearly three-quarters of its volume by 2030. By some estimates, the declining water level could expose an additional 1000,000 acres of playa.
“All that dust that gets exposed would mean even more breathing problems and more allergies and asthma for the people who live here,” said Shohreh Farzan, an environmental epidemiologist at the University of Southern California who has been analyzing how the dust around the Salton Sea is affecting children.
A resort for celebrities and presidents
The Salton Sea was formed in 1905 when the Colorado River breached an irrigation canal and filled up an ancient basin in the desert, creating an oasis for migratory shorebirds and, by the middle of the 20th century, for celebrities and dignitaries. Developers dotted the shores with palm trees and built up luxury resorts around its perimeter, and the area became a destination for Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby and the Beach Boys. President Dwight Eisenhower used to come by the golf course.
Working-class families like Steve Johnson’s would also come and visit. His grandfather bought a small property by the beach, and as a kid Johnson would fish and swim in the lake during his summer vacations. “We didn’t really mingle with the celebrities – though Zeppo Marx, of the Marx Brothers, I did meet once,” Johnson, 59, recalls, as he nurses a Miller High Life at the Ski Inn, the best – and only – dive bar in Bombay Beach, a once-bustling vacation community by the sea that now houses a handful of mostly artists and anarchists. He moved here two decades ago. “It is just beautiful,” he said. And then he paused. “Well. It’s complicated.”
Johnson still swims in the lake sometimes – but nowadays he’s an exception. After the breached canal that created the lake was mended, it was mostly sustained by runoff water from nearby farms – water that was full of pesticides and nitrates, which blended with salt deposits in the lake bed to create an increasingly salty sea. By the 1990s, the sea had started getting even smaller, and saltier, killing off masses of fish and birthing noxious algal blooms. Over the past few decades, tens of thousands of migratory birds around the lake have died of either starvation or poisoning.
“And then came the odor,” said Miriam Juárez, 37, who has lived near the sea for most of her life. “It’s repugnant.” Her parents used to take her and her brothers to fish in the sea as well, she said. But her kids have only ever known the lake as a toxic void that periodically spews up fish bones and poison dust. On a searing summer day, as the mercury crept past 120F (48.9C), Juárez’s kids huddled into their air-conditioned bedrooms, her eight-year-old son occasionally popping out to grab a popsicle from the freezer. It’s often too hot and too dusty to play outside – so many local kids opt to get their exercise at the Crossfit gym nearby.
For many families – including Juárez’s – the pandemic has been especially traumatizing. Imperial county has been one of the hardest-hit regions in California, and the residents’ high rates of respiratory issues has made them especially vulnerable to complications from Covid-19. But it has come with a small silver lining for some: staying indoors and wearing masks for the past year and a half has ameliorated asthma and allergies. “We’re probably going to keep our masks on, even after the pandemic,” Juárez said. “To wear against the dust.”
The masks will be one more addition to the elaborate rituals the Juárez and others have adopted to survive in this dusty valley. She never opens her windows and stuffs towels under the doors of her home in Salton City, just west of the lake. Her kids’ schools have a system of raising green, yellow and red flags to indicate how bad the air pollution is on a given day – but even on so-called good days, many of the kids at her youngest daughter’s schools stay indoors for recess, to avoid aggravating their asthma.
Vázquez, 52, who runs her daycare out of her home, switches out her air filters every week, mops a few times a day, and requests that visitors wear disposable shoe covers – the kind they use in sterile operating rooms – to avoid tracking in dust. Out of the 10 or so kids currently under Vázquez’s charge, five use inhalers for asthma. Over the years she’s seen some really severe cases: kids that could hardly go outside without getting winded, two- or three-year-olds who couldn’t stop wheezing. Most children come to daycare carrying their own medical bags stocked with inhalers, creams and pills for allergies, saline nasal sprays for perpetually blocked noses and a change of clothes in case of nosebleeds, which kids in this neighborhood get constantly.
Seven-year-old Derek, whom Vázquez watched when he was a toddler, had it so bad he was constantly in and out of the hospital and urgent care. He was born prematurely, his lungs a bit underdeveloped, his mother, Melissa Fischer, said. She still has videos on her cellphone from the various times he was hospitalized as a baby and toddler – he’d be hooked up to an IV, and she’d sing to him to keep him calm and cheer him up. He’s doing better these days; he still wheezes on windy days, but his inhaler usually fixes him up.
“I don’t think he remembers being in the hospital,” said Fischer. “But I think it was traumatic.” He’s always exceptionally cautious about new places and experiences, Fischer said, looking over as her son played on the couch. “I think it instilled a fear in him.”
Generations have been harmed and traumatized by the pollution, Vázquez said. She, her 27-year-old-daughter and her four-year-old granddaughter all have severe asthma. The dust has been making generation after generation sick, she said. “And hardly anything has changed.”
A string of broken promises
In 2003, the local water authority in the region signed the largest agriculture-to-urban water transfer agreement in US history with San Diego. Imperial Irrigation District (IID) agreed to start selling much of its massive allotment of water from the Colorado River to city-dwellers and suburbanites along the coast. As part of the deal, IID agreed to send some water to the Salton Sea for 15 more years, buying it and other local authorities time to find a solution for the shrinking lake.
“And for 15 years, everyone just sat there and did a lot of nothing,” said Luis Olmedo, executive director of Comité Cívico Del Valle, a health and social services organization in Brawley, just south of the Salton Sea. A $8.9bn proposal in 2007 to rehabilitate the lake fell through as the Great Recession took hold. In 2015, local authorities broke ground on a project at Red Hill Bay, intending to flood the desiccated lakebed to the south of the lake with water from the sea and the nearby Alamo River, to keep down the dust and create wetlands for birds. Today, it remains flat, dry and dusty – the project has been derailed by budget issues, local politics and “just a lack of will”, said Olmedo. “They keep doing these ribbon-cutting ceremonies, and nothing happens.”
A dust-coated sign staked at the Red Hill site still optimistically promises: “Estimated construction in 2016.”
And still, consulting companies, advocacy groups and local officials have been dreaming up bigger, more creative plans to solve the problem. One idea was to pipe in water from the Sea of Cortez, desalinate it and pump it into the lake. Some local residents have wondered: why not pipe in water from the Pacific? “I mean, maybe that’s wild, but why not?” said Johnson. “We have to try something.”
In recent years, the state’s energy commission has become increasingly interested in the prospect of investing in lithium extraction from the area. It has doled out millions to energy companies to explore mining the element used in the batteries that power cellphones and electric cars. If one small-scale demonstration plant being developed by a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway Energy goes well, the company envisions that the Salton Sea region could produce a third of the world’s lithium, revive the region’s stalling economy and rev up the country’s ambitious plans to decarbonize transportation.
“It’s all just speculation,” sighs Olmedo, shaking his head at the oozing mud pots near one of the region’s existing geothermal energy plants. “While various companies are biding their time waiting for this lithium thing to take off, where does it leave the community? We’re still breathing the toxic air.”
Robert Schettler, a spokesperson for the irrigation district, said: “At IID, we, too, are frustrated with the progress at the Salton Sea, but we continue to work on things there.” The water agency’s leaders have pointed to various dust suppression projects they’ve undertaken in recent years, including planting vegetation to tamp the soil down and “surface roughening” – basically, digging ridges in the dried mud to break the wind and keep the playa from flying up.
The state has also started up a $206m project to restore habitat for fish and birds at the south-west edge of the lake. “Make no mistake, this is a challenging endeavor,” said Arturo Delgado, the assistant secretary for Salton Sea policy at the California Natural Resources Agency. But, he said in a statement to the Guardian, “progress is happening”.
Nancy del Castillo, 42, who lives with her husband and two kids in Salton City, said she had trouble trusting such reassurances. She’s been trying to save up for years to move to a different neighborhood, with better air. There’s still pollution from pesticides, and from diesel fumes up in Riverside and Coachella, to the north – but it’s not as bad.
“The earth has been raising toxic dust for years,” she said. “It seems ugly to me that officials keep deceiving people, telling us they’re going to fix it.”
Castillo and a group of her neighbors have been faithfully attending community meetings, local hearings and even bigger meetings on how to improve the Salton Sea situation for years, she said, and have grown increasingly frustrated.
Once, after she spoke about the air pollution in Imperial county at a meeting in Sacramento, California’s capital, Castillo said, she overheard a man dismiss the crisis: “Yeah, but there’s just a few people living there.” Many families in the region are Mexican immigrants, she said, people who work in the fields or in construction, who can’t afford to move somewhere else, who breathe the toxic air because they have no other choice. But to this man, she said, “it’s like we don’t even count”.
Meanwhile, many local residents worry that time is running out. “With more climate change and more desertification and drought,” the environmental and health issues are going to keep getting worse, said Ryan Sinclair, a professor of public health at Loma Linda University who has been mapping the sea’s decline. The current, unprecedented drought gripping the western US has only put more pressure on the shrinking Colorado River, which feeds 30 farms and cities up and down the region, further complicating the calculus and politics of how and where to send its waning waters. By 2045, researchers estimate that the sea could someday become 10 times as salty as the Pacific Ocean, making it completely uninhabitable for fish. Its receding shores could expose nearby communities to as much as 100 tons of dust each day.
Versions of the same apocalyptic vision are unfolding across the world. Utah’s Great Salt Lake has been shrinking and spitting up arsenic as well. Iran’s Lake Urmia is just about 10% of its original size. The ecological crisis at Kazakhstan’s diminished Aral Sea has become a perverse tourist attraction.
“Still, I don’t want to leave here,” said Juárez. “I want to stay. I want to fight.” Her kids do, as well. She brings out a folder full of drawings and letters that her younger kids and their friends made at school. Her daughter Lisette’s appeal to local officials included a drawing of a stick figure in goggles swimming in the lake, while another stick figure lounges by the shore, under a striped umbrella, sipping a cold beverage. “Dear Sir or Madam, please help us save the Salton Sea,” she wrote above the picture. “Thank you!”
Thousands of Central Valley farmers may lose access to surface water amid worsening drought
Julia Wick
A worker sets up irrigation lines to water almond tree rootstocks along Road 36 in Tulare, Calif., in April. (Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)
As California endures an increasingly brutal second year of drought, state water regulators are considering an emergency order that would bar thousands of Central Valley farmers from using stream and river water to irrigate their crops.
On Friday, the State Water Resources Control Board released a draft “emergency curtailment” order for the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta watershed. The measure, which was first reported by the Sacramento Bee, would bar some water rights holders from diverting surface water for agricultural and other purposes.
The proposed regulation underscores just how dire matters have become as drought squeezes the American West.
“It says that this drought is really severe,” said Erik Ekdahl, deputy director of the state water board’s Division of Water Rights. The water board will consider the order’s approval on Aug. 3. If approved, it would go into effect about two weeks later at the earliest, Ekdahl added.
“This is probably the first time the board has contemplated curtailment orders for the entire bay delta watershed,” Ekdahl said. Some notices of water unavailability were sent out to water rights holders in the delta watershed during the 2014-15 time period, but this type of sweeping, formal order was not utilized, he said.
If approved, the order would be implemented first with junior water rights holders, then more senior water rights holders, and then the most senior. According to Ekdahl, the board believes that more than 10,000 water rights holders would be affected, with their water largely being used for agricultural irrigation purposes. Some municipal, industrial and commercial entities could also be affected.
The proposed regulation would carve out an exemption for health and human safety purposes, meaning that water for drinking, bathing and domestic purposes wouldn’t be subject to the curtailment. In mid-June, the board issued a notice of water unavailability — which urges, but does not order, people to stop diverting water — to many rights holders.
The proposed emergency regulation comes at a time when the primary Northern California reservoirs that feed into California’s lakes and streams are at about 30% of capacity, Ekdahl said. Unusually warm temperatures and dry soils have contributed to reductions in runoff from the Sierra snowpack. The water board has characterized the reductions as “unprecedented.”
According to a water board presentation, projections for this year’s conditions degraded significantly between April and May, when watershed runoff decreased by nearly 800,000 acre-feet — an amount that is nearly equivalent to the entire capacity of Folsom Reservoir.
“We’re in an extreme drought that’s come on extremely fast,” said Felicia Marcus, water policy expert and former state water board chair. According to Marcus, the proposed emergency regulation shows that the water board is working as it should to allocate water during the shortage.
“In theory, it’s a math thing. You’re looking at how much water is in the water course and if there’s not enough to meet all the water rights, then you issue curtailment notices and orders,” Marcus explained. “That’s the way the water rights system is supposed to work.”
Cherries have roasted on trees. Fields of canola and wheat have withered brown. On the shores, shellfish have popped open, broiling by the millions
A wildfire burns in the mountains north of Lytton, B.C., on Thursday, July 1, 2021.PHOTO BY DARRYL DYCK /The Canadian Press
As devastating heat waves sweep swaths of the globe, farmers in Canada are facing a crippling phenomenon: crops are baking in fields.
Cherries have roasted on trees. Fields of canola and wheat have withered brown. And as feed and safe water for animals grow scarce, ranchers may have no choice but to sell off their livestock.
“It will totally upend Canadian food production if this becomes a regular thing,” said Lenore Newman, director of the Food and Agriculture Institute at the University of the Fraser Valley in British Columbia.
A heat dome roasted Canada in late June, leading to hundreds of “sudden and unexpected” deaths, according to officials, and sparking fear among Canadian farmers and climate experts. A village in British Columbia claimed the nation’s highest recorded temperature, clocking in just shy of 46 degrees. This weekend, another scorching wave is expected return to the nation.
Newman said farmers are resilient and have been planning for slow, constant climate change. But no model predicted this summer’s spike, which she characterized as a “thousand-year” event that cannot become the norm.
“We can’t farm like this, where there’s a giant disruption every year,” she said. “Or we’re going to have to really rethink how we produce food.”
The climate stress is especially unwelcome at a time when the pandemic has put pressure on supply chains and food production. Floods, early freezes, droughts, pests and other emergencies have also strained Canada’s farming industry over the past several years. Multiple municipalities have declared states of agricultural disaster because of the heat and drought.
On the shores, shellfish have popped open, broiling by the millions. “You could smell the destruction,” Newman said.
Early this month at a news conference about the heat wave, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said the nation needs to reduce emissions and be a global leader on climate change.
“Extreme weather events are getting more frequent, and climate change has a significant role to play in that,” he said.
The heat waves are challenging all aspects of farm life.
Laborers can’t stay out in the fields when temperatures get so oppressive. Peak blueberry and cherry season should be approaching, but some farmers are already pulling workers from the fields for the season, Newman said. Others are turning livestock loose into growing fields, hoping to make some use of the toasted grains.
Farmers speak to a crop insurance field inspector (left) during a drought on a grain farm near Osler, Saskatchewan, on Tuesday, July 13, 2021.PHOTO BY KAYLE NEIS /Bloomberg
The outlook seems especially grim to many livestock farmers facing feed and clean water shortages for their animals.
“The damage is done,” Manitoba farmer Jason Bednarek told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. “The only solution is to stop the bleeding and slaughter the cows.”
Some cattle ranchers are asking grain farmers whose crops have been devalued by the heat to consider using some of their yield as cow feed.
“The cow herd is in jeopardy in Manitoba for this winter,” Andre Steppler, a district director for a nonprofit that represents beef producers across Manitoba province, said in a video posted to Twitter.
One of Canada’s main agricultural provinces, Saskatchewan, recently changed its crop insurance regulations to encourage growers to give unsellable crops for use as livestock feed.
“I want to encourage grain producers to work with neighboring livestock producers to make feed available,” Saskatchewan Agriculture Minister David Marit said in a statement.
You could smell the destruction
LENORE NEWMAN
Steppler told The Washington Post it’s the first time in his farm’s century-long history that wells and springs have dried up. He considers himself lucky because his farm also grows grain, so he’s less concerned about his herd than many other ranchers. But feeding his cattle that grain will be economically damaging, and he anticipates having to sell off a quarter to 30 per cent of the herd.
“For us, this is historic,” he said of the heat wave.
As a livestock producer, Steppler said it’s upsetting to have to sell cows whose genetics his family has been fine-tuning for decades. But Steppler’s main concern, he said, is the mental health of other producers. He said it’s crucial for federal and municipal governments to act swiftly to help farmers avoid financial ruin.
“We’re just coming out of COVID, people are already stressed, and now this is just another blow to their gut,” he said.
On the crop front, losses are especially tough on farmers working with perennials who have spent years nurturing them to ensure they will bear fruit summer after summer.
Jocelyn Zurevinsky, president of Canadian Cherry Producers, said in an email that while her cherries in Saskatchewan saw rain in June, one of her orchards has been dry since May.
“The cherries bloomed well and the fruit set was fair, but the cherries are not filling,” she said. “We expect our entire harvest will go to juicing rather than the ingredient market for pies, spreads and syrups.”
While Newman doesn’t anticipate massive food shortages from the heat, she said consumers should expect a short-term spike in food prices.
Even as the heat has waned slightly, other threats have risen; most notably, wildfires ravaging parts of the nation.
Wildfire burns above the Fraser River Valley near Lytton, British Columbia, Canada, on Friday, July 2, 2021.PHOTO BY JAMES MACDONALD/BLOOMBERG
“Fire is the great enemy of farming,” Newman said. “It’s the last thing you ever want to see on the horizon.”
Smoke can damage crops, and wildfires can burn out slow-to-recover pasturelands, making it even more difficult for ranchers to bounce back. Fires are an especially frightening prospect in the prairies, where the land is checkered with farms.
Agriculture and Agri-Food Minister Marie-Claude Bibeau said in a statement Thursday she’s monitoring the drought drying out some of the nation’s farmland.
“My heart goes out to those farmers and ranchers feeling the impacts of the extreme heat wave and drought conditions,” she said. “Our Government is ready to assist and we will do what we can to make sure our programs are adequately responding to the crisis.
Bibeau promised to leverage government programs to support producers affected by extreme weather and droughts. One program, called AgriStability, functions like an income insurance program to protect farmers who are about to see a large dip in income after years of even averages.
Bibeau is also encouraging provinces to trigger the agricultural sector’s disaster relief program to help farmers with additional costs caused by the extreme heat and wildfires.
In Newman’s view, the only thin silver lining to the apocalyptic feel of this summer is that for some, it’s fast-forwarded the discussion on addressing climate change to preserve the food system. Even more conservative voices are now sounding the alarm, she said.
After the seemingly perpetual drought, Newman saw reason for a sliver of hope Saturday morning: A drizzle of rain was falling.
The biggest win for the working class in generations is within reach
Bernie Sanders
If our budget passes, it would be one of the most important pieces of legislation since the New Deal. But we must fight for it.
‘This legislation will create millions of good paying jobs as we address the long-neglected needs of working families and the planet.’ Photograph: Michael Reynolds/EPA.
Now is the time.
At a time when the gap between the very rich and everyone else is growing wider, when two people now own more wealth than the bottom 40% and when some of the wealthiest people and biggest businesses in the world pay nothing in federal income taxes, the billionaire class and large profitable corporations must finally start paying their fair share of taxes.
Now is the time.
At a time when real wages for workers have not gone up in almost 50 years, when over half our people live paycheck to paycheck, when over 90 million Americans are uninsured or underinsured, when working families cannot afford childcare or higher education for their kids, when many Americans no longer believe their government represents their interests, the US Congress must finally have the courage to represent the needs of working families and not just the 1% and their lobbyists.
Now is the time.
At a time of unprecedented heatwaves, drought, flooding, extreme weather disturbances and the acidification of the oceans, now is the time for the US government to make certain that the planet we leave our children and future generations is healthy and habitable. We must stand up to the greed of the fossil fuel industry, transform our energy system and lead the world in combating climate change.
As chairman of the US Senate budget committee I fought hard for a $6tn budget which would address these and other long-neglected needs. Not everyone in the Democratic caucus agreed with me and, after a lot of discussion and compromise within the budget committee, an agreement was reached on a smaller number. (Needless to say, no Republicans will support legislation which taxes the rich and protects working families.)
While this budget is less than I had wanted, let us be clear. This proposal, if passed, will be the most consequential piece of legislation for working people, the elderly, the children, the sick and the poor since FDR and the New Deal of the 1930s. It will also put the US in a global leadership position as we combat climate change. Further, and importantly, this legislation will create millions of good-paying jobs as we address the long-neglected needs of working families and the planet.
Why is this proposal so significant?
We will end the days of billionaires not paying a nickel in federal income taxes by making sure the wealthy and large corporations do not use their accountants and lawyers to avoid paying the massive amounts that they owe. This proposal will also raise the individual tax rate on the wealthiest Americans and the corporate tax rate for the most profitable companies in our country. Under this proposal, no family making under $400,000 a year will pay a nickel more in taxes and will, in fact, receive one of the largest tax cuts in American history.
We will aggressively reduce our childhood poverty rate by expanding the child tax credit so that families continue to receive monthly direct payments of up to $300 per child.
We will address the crisis in childcare by fighting to make sure that no working family pays more than 7% of their income on this basic need. Making childcare more accessible and affordable will also strengthen our economy by allowing millions more Americans (mostly women) to join the workforce.
We will provide universal pre-kindergarten to every three- and four-year-old.
We will end the international disgrace of the United States being the only major country on Earth not to guarantee paid family and medical leave as a right.
We will begin to address the crisis in higher education by making community colleges in America tuition-free.
We will address the disgrace of widespread homelessness in the United States and the reality that nearly 18m households are paying over 50% of their incomes for housing by an unprecedented investment in affordable housing.
We will ensure that people in an ageing society can receive the home healthcare they need and that the workers who provide that care aren’t forced to live on starvation wages.
We will save taxpayers hundreds of billions by having Medicare negotiate prescription drug prices with the pharmaceutical industry and use those savings to cover the dental care, hearing aids and eyeglasses that many seniors desperately need.
We will rebuild our crumbling roads, bridges, water systems, wastewater treatment plants, broadband and other aspects of our physical infrastructure.
We will take on the existential threat of climate change by transforming our energy systems away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy.
This effort will include a nationwide clean energy standard that moves our transportation system, electrical generation, buildings and housing and agriculture sector toward clean energy.
Through a Civilian Climate Corps we will give hundreds of thousands of young people good-paying jobs and educational benefits as they help us combat climate change.
We will fight to bring undocumented people out of the shadows and provide them with a pathway to citizenship, including those who courageously kept our economy running in the middle of a deadly pandemic.
In the midst of the many long-ignored crises that this legislation is attempting to address, we will not have one Republican senator voting for it. Tragically, many Republican leaders in Congress and around the country are just too busy continuing to lie about the 2020 presidential election, undermining democracy by suppressing voting rights, denying the reality of climate change and casting doubts about the efficacy of the Covid-19 vaccines.
That means that the 50 Democrats in the US Senate, plus the vice-president, will have to pass this most consequential piece of legislation alone. And that’s what we will do. The future of working families is at stake. The future of our democracy is at stake. The future of our planet is at stake.
Now is the time.
Bernie Sanders is a US senator, and the ranking member of the Senate budget committee. He represents the state of Vermont, and is the longest-serving independent in the history of Congress
Climate, Not Conflict. Madagascar’s Famine is the First in Modern History to be Solely Caused by Global Warming
Aryn Baker
Cropland is covered by sand in Betsimeda, Maroalomainty commune, Ambovombe district. Cropland is covered by sand in Betsimeda, Maroalomainty commune, Ambovombe district, Madagascar May 2, 2021. Credit – Viviane Rakotoarivony/United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs/Reuters.
Heatwaves, wildfires, floods. If there’s still any doubt that the summer of 2021 is a turning point for a global awakening over the looming climate crisis, you can add one more plague of biblical proportions to the list: famine.
The southern part of the island nation of Madagascar, off the east coast of Africa, is experiencing its worst drought in four decades, with the World Food Program (WFP) warning recently that 1.14 million people are food-insecure and 400,000 people are headed for famine. Hunger is already driving people to eat raw cactus, wild leaves and locusts, a food source of last resort. The WFP, which is on the ground helping with food distribution, describes scenes of unimaginable suffering, with families bartering everything they have—even cooking pots and spoons—for the paltry tomatoes, scrawny chickens and few bags of rice still available in the markets. “The next planting season is less than two months away and the forecast for food production is bleak,” writes WFP spokesperson Shelley Thakral in a dispatch from the most affected area. “The land is covered by sand; there is no water and little chance of rain.”
The WFP warns that the number of locals facing phase 5 catastrophic food insecurity—development speak for famine—could double by October. And the group has the responsible party squarely in their sight. “This is not because of war or conflict, this is because of climate change,” says WFP Executive Director David Beasley.
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Historically, famines resulted from crop failure, disaster or pest invasion; modern famines are largely considered to be man-made—sparked by conflict combined with natural disasters or incompetence and political interference. Madagascar is facing none of those, making it the first famine in modern history to be caused solely by climate change alone. It’s unlikely to be the last, says Landry Ninteretse, the Africa director for climate advocacy organization 350.org. “In recent years we’ve seen climate calamities hitting one country after another. Before it was the horn of Africa, and now it is Madagascar. Tomorrow the cycle will go on, maybe in the northern part of Africa—the Sahel—or the west. And unfortunately, it is likely to continue happening because of climate change.”
Increasing temperatures are disrupting global weather patterns that farmers, particularly those in the developing world, have relied upon for centuries. Monsoons have become increasingly unpredictable, starting later than usual, showing up in the wrong place, or sometimes not showing up at all. This is wreaking havoc in places that depend on rain for agriculture. The southern part of Madagascar, a lush, largely tropical island famous for its biodiversity, has experienced below average rainfall for the past five years. Most people in the south depend on rain-fed, small-scale agriculture for survival, but because of the drought, rivers and irrigation dams have dried up.
The WFP says it needs $78.6 million dollars to provide lifesaving food for the next lean season in Madagascar, but it is going to take a lot more than that to help the countries most affected by climate change able to adapt in ways that prevent future famines. Southern Madagascar, for example, will probably need irrigation systems, along with more drought-tolerant crops and hardier breeds of cattle. Madagascar, one of the poorest nations in the world, is unlikely to be able to afford such innovations on its own.
As part of the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, wealthy nations agreed to set aside $100 billion a year in climate financing to help developing nations adapt, but they have yet to meet that goal. In 2018, the latest year for which data are available, donors were still short $20 billion. But investing in climate change adaptation and mitigation plays dividends in the long run. The World Bank estimates that climate change could cause more than 140 million people to move within their countries’ borders by 2050 in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Latin America, with severe consequences on economic development. Many others will seek to leave their countries entirely. “We used to see our brothers and sisters in the Sahel leaving because of conflict and looking for better economic opportunities, but now it is climate change that is becoming one of the major drivers, pushing out people who can no longer cultivate their land,” says Ninteretse. “This is not only going to impact Africa, but also Europe, Asia, and America as well, as people seek safer places where they can live.”
Madagascar may seem far away, but the issues should feel close to home, wherever “home” might be. “This famine in Madagascar, the heat wave in America, the floods in Germany, this is an indicator that climate change needs to be taken seriously,” says Ninteretse. “In the same way the world reacted the pandemic and were able to get vaccines in less than a year—If the world would have reacted in the same way when we started sending the first warning signals of climate change, the situation would be much better than what it is now.”
Scientists understood physics of climate change in the 1800s – thanks to a woman named Eunice Foote
Sylvia G. Dee July 22, 2021
Sylvia G. Dee, Assistant Professor of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences, Rice University
Eunice Foote described the greenhouse gas effects of carbon dioxide in 1856. Carlyn Iverson / NOAA Climate.gov
Long before the current political divide over climate change, and even before the U.S. Civil War (1861-1865), an American scientist named Eunice Foote documented the underlying cause of today’s climate change crisis.
The year was 1856. Foote’s brief scientific paper was the first to describe the extraordinary power of carbon dioxide gas to absorb heat – the driving force of global warming.
Carbon dioxide is an odorless, tasteless, transparent gas that forms when people burn fuels, including coal, oil, gasoline and wood.
As Earth’s surface heats, one might think that the heat would just radiate back into space. But, it’s not that simple. The atmosphere stays hotter than expected mainly due to greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane and atmospheric water vapor, which all absorb outgoing heat. They’re called “greenhouse gases” because, not unlike the glass of a greenhouse, they trap heat in Earth’s atmosphere and radiate it back to the planet’s surface. The idea that the atmosphere trapped heat was known, but not the cause.
Foote conducted a simple experiment. She put a thermometer in each of two glass cylinders, pumped carbon dioxide gas into one and air into the other and set the cylinders in the Sun. The cylinder containing carbon dioxide got much hotter than the one with air, and Foote realized that carbon dioxide would strongly absorb heat in the atmosphere.
Image of the journal showing the article
Foote’s discovery of the high heat absorption of carbon dioxide gas led her to conclude that “… if the air had mixed with it a higher proportion of carbon dioxide than at present, an increased temperature” would result.
A few years later, in 1861, the well-known Irish scientist John Tyndall also measured the heat absorption of carbon dioxide and was so surprised that something “so transparent to light” could so strongly absorb heat that he “made several hundred experiments with this single substance.”
Tyndall also recognized the possible effects on the climate, saying “every variation” of water vapor or carbon dioxide “must produce a change of climate.” He also noted the contribution other hydrocarbon gases, such as methane, could make to climate change, writing that “an almost inappreciable addition” of gases like methane would have “great effects on climate.”
Humans were already increasing carbon dioxide in the 1800’s
By the 1800’s, human activities were already dramatically increasing the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Burning more and more fossil fuels – coal and eventually oil and gas – added an ever-increasing amount of carbon dioxide into the air.
The first quantitative estimate of carbon dioxide-induced climate change was made by Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish scientist and Nobel laureate. In 1896, he calculated that “the temperature in the Arctic regions would rise 8 or 9 degrees Celsius if carbon dioxide increased to 2.5 or 3 times” its level at that time. Arrhenius’ estimate was likely conservative: Since 1900 atmospheric carbon dioxide has risen from about 300 parts per million to around 417 ppm as a result of human activities, and the Arctic has already warmed by about 3.8 C (6.8 F).
Nils Ekholm, a Swedish meteorologist, agreed, writing in 1901 that “The present burning of pit-coal is so great that if it continues … it must undoubtedly cause a very obvious rise in the mean temperature of the earth.” Ekholm also noted that carbon dioxide acted in a layer high in the atmosphere, above water vapor layers, where small amounts of carbon dioxide mattered.
All of this was understood well over a century ago.
The Keeling curve tracks the changing carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere. Observations from Hawaii starting in 1958 show the rise and fall of the seasons as concentrations climb.Scripps Institution of Oceanography
Initially, scientists thought a possible small rise in the Earth’s temperature could be a benefit, but these scientists could not envision the coming huge increases in fossil fuel use. In 1937, English engineer Guy Callendar documented how rising temperatures correlated with rising carbon dioxide levels. “By fuel combustion, man has added about 150,000 million tons of carbon dioxide to the air during the past half century,” he wrote, and “world temperatures have actually increased ….”
A warning to the president in 1965, and then …
In 1965, scientists warned U.S. President Lyndon Johnson about the growing climate risk, concluding: “Man is unwittingly conducting a vast geophysical experiment. Within a few generations he is burning the fossil fuels that slowly accumulated in the earth over the past 500 million years.” The scientists issued clear warnings of high temperatures, melting ice caps, rising sea levels and acidification of ocean waters.
Scientific research has vastly strengthened the conclusion that human-generated emissions from the burning of fossil fuels are causing dangerous warming of the climate and a host of harmful effects. Politicians, however, have been slow to respond. Some follow an approach that has been used by some fossil fuel companies of denying and casting doubt on the truth, while others want to “wait and see,” despite the overwhelming evidence that harm and costs will continue to rise.
The world has known about the warming risk posed by excessive levels of carbon dioxide for decades, even before the invention of cars or coal-fired power stations. A rare female scientist in her time, Eunice Foote, explicitly warned about the basic science 165 years ago. Why haven’t we listened more closely?
Neil Anderson, a retired chemical engineer and chemistry teacher, contributed to this article.
Sylvia G. Dee receives funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
With Tampa Bay in grip of Red Tide, shrimpers turn their nets toward death
Zachary T. Sampson, Tampa Bay Times
ST. PETERSBURG — Toliver and Jessica Tucker are used to the dark, oily water, the bulging eyes, the gray flesh decaying to a pulp in the city’s bayous.
They have even become accustomed to the smell — God, the smell — of all the rotting fish in gruesome flotillas, victims of a toxic Red Tide in Tampa Bay.
But the maggots? The maggots are new. White and wriggling, they circle the scales of rotting sheepshead. They climb seawalls at the water’s edge.
The other day, Toliver saw one inching up the cockpit of the shrimp boat he and his wife sail as contractors in the urgent effort to drag millions of pounds of dead fish from Tampa Bay.
“These canals are sick,” said Toliver, 43. “It’s devastating. I’ve thought about crying.”
Pinellas County has hired an ad hoc armada of shrimp boats like the Tuckers’ to comb local waters with nets. About 30 boats have helped; in total, the county has collected more than 1,440 tons of dead sea life and debris from the beaches to the bay. And the work continues.
The boats are the most effective tool for keeping fish off land, where they are not only a grisly sight but harder to pick up once they become entangled in sand, trees and rocks. Cleaning the bay is not just a matter of vanity. The dead fish, if left to degrade, could supply more nutrients to fuel Red Tide.
Most days, the Tuckers wake up about 4:30 a.m. to drive south from their home in Spring Hill, sometimes with their son. They stripped the livewell from the center of their 25-foot boat, Southbound, to make room for all the dead fish they pick up. They start work just after dawn and don’t finish until dusk.
In that, they know, they are not alone.
• • •
The Tuckers’ first job gathering dead fish was in 2018, when a Red Tide bloom in the Gulf of Mexico cratered their bait shrimp business. No one was fishing near shore, and no one wanted to buy their shrimp.
The timing was awful. Married for nearly two decades, they were about to buy a house.
“We were broke and had nothing in the bank, and they wanted closing costs,” Jessica recalled. She was sure they would lose the property. Then the contracting gig came, giving them a steady paycheck.
So far, this year’s bloom hasn’t been as bad for Tuckers Flats Fishing. The couple works out of Hudson and was still running one boat and crew there to catch enough shrimp for continuing orders.
But if the bloom endures, sales could bottom out again.
The Tuckers sell shrimp for $60 per thousand. The boat they left behind hauled in 14,500 the other day.
In Pinellas, they make $170 an hour, Toliver said. They pay for their own gas and expenses and drive an hour or more to reach the boat launch each day. They trailer the Southbound every night. Another one of their boats, Westbound, was helping with Red Tide, but they recently sent it back to shrimping — typically an overnight job — because the crew struggled with the heat.
The pay is solid, Toliver said, but the work is brutal. “You’ve got to understand what we’re touching.”
Toliver grew up in Tarpon Springs and has long fished around Tampa Bay. The couple trawls for shrimp here each fall and winter.
The Tuckers know how life on Florida’s west coast rests on a ripple, always spreading from the water. It’s why people live here and why they visit, spending money on seaside hotel rooms and rum punches at tiki bars.
If there were no gulf, no Tampa Bay, this would just be another chunk of flat land.
The Southbound shoves off from a ramp at Demens Landing, passing Doc Ford’s Rum Bar & Grille on the St. Pete Pier, where the Tuckers like to grab lunch.
Sometimes, at the end of the day, Toliver lines up the boat and angles the motor so the wake hits the breakwater by the restaurant just right, freeing dead fish from the rocks so they can be netted.
• • •
The shrimp boats pass each other on a course entering and exiting Demens Landing, where a forklift hoists the loads of dead fish they collect into a series of dumpsters. While underway, outriggers stretched wide, the boats look like hulking birds. Each carries a couple of people to manage the nets cast over the edge.
Once the nets are full — and it doesn’t take long — the shrimpers gather them to release plumes of dead fish in the middle of the boats, filling green bags with long handles. In an hour or so, maybe even less, the Tuckers can haul away up to 3,000 pounds.
When they finish, spindly fish bones remain, piercing the Southbound’s nets.
Toliver and Jessica stretch dishwashing gloves over their hands, but inevitably, their bare skin ends up touching dead fish or Red Tide anyway. It feels like an alcohol burn. They carry a 5-gallon bucket of bleach water, in addition to hand sanitizer, wipes and antibiotic ointment.
The GPS screen plots their days in a spiderweb of green lines, past the Vinoy, a string of waterfront parks, around the Historic Old Northeast and up Coffee Pot Bayou.
This arm of the bay was a hotspot recently, Toliver says, swaths almost entirely covered in dead fish. Where the die-offs are most severe, rotting carcasses drift so close together they look like pavers. It’s as though someone could hop off a seawall and walk around without getting wet. The sour air smells like a hundred refrigerators packed with tuna were left unplugged to rot in a parking lot.
The stench gives Toliver a headache. They don’t often wear masks, they say, because the boat has an open cockpit that allows for a breeze when they’re moving.
He and Jessica leave their rubber boots outside the house when their day is done. On one long drive back to Spring Hill, Toliver felt like he could smell death the whole way home.
They take turns at the wheel of the Southbound, and Jessica pulls out her phone in hopes of capturing some sense of what they are witnessing. Like when fish swim in spastic circles before suddenly turning belly up, dying in front of their eyes.
Toliver wishes Gov. Ron DeSantis would come for a ride on the Southbound, to see what they see.
• • •
The outboard motor makes the Tuckers’ boat maneuverable. Jay Gunter, the man running contractors like them in Pinellas, calls it a mini shrimp boat.
They can pull right up to the seawall by Straub Park, where city workers extend pool skimmers to scoop fish from the tideline.
The job is worse on land. It’s slow but necessary work. The Tuckers look on in pity from under the shade of a bimini top.
“They’re dying,” Toliver says of the crews. “There’s no breeze.”
Occasionally, city employees will call out, directing boats toward fish kills they cannot reach. In especially tight spaces, under docks and lifted boats, operators use Weedoos — essentially small, floating front-end loaders — to cart debris to the deck of an idling pontoon.
Toliver cuts the Southbound northeast, out of sight of downtown toward Venetian Isles. The shoreline is fully developed with luxury homes, touting panoramic views of Tampa Bay and bayside pools adorned by statues. Toliver scans the manicured lawns, trim and green as country club fairways.
Like others who work on the water, the Tuckers blame the April wastewater dump from the Piney Point fertilizer plant for polluting the bay and helping feed this bloom. But they know the release is only one source of contamination.
All the lush lawns around them likely use fertilizer, Toliver thinks, and the runoff puts more nutrients into the bay. He knows the unbroken line of manmade seawalls is not good, either, long ago crowding out mangroves and oyster beds that helped keep the bay clean and balanced.
The Tuckers pass other shrimpers and a woman on a center console cleaning out dead fish with a teenaged deckhand.
Toliver yells to them all, saying thank you.
He steers the Southbound through a marina by Smacks Bayou, where a day earlier they removed thousands of pounds of rotting fish. Toward the back, where the water meets Snell Isle Boulevard, the Tuckers find hundreds of dead fish in a shallow bend.
“Oh my God, it’s wretched,” Toliver says. “It’s just rotting corpses.”
The water is cloudy and lifeless. They know oxygen levels have plummeted so much that nothing can survive. For all the carcasses the couple removes, tides and winds blow in more each day.
Toliver thinks about how many families could have been fed with all this seafood, and how long the bigger fish might have lived.
“That’s a snook,” Jessica says.
“No,” Toliver says, peering down. “That was a grouper at one time.”
The cove would be too narrow for outriggers, so the Tuckers call for a Weedoo and head off, finding another putrid clot around Cordova Boulevard.
“This is horrible,” Tolliver says. He spots an eel, a few feet long, that he thinks was some kind of moray. It may be the biggest he’s seen. It floats upside down near an empty Four Loko can.
This also bothers the Tuckers, how there is always garbage mixed in with all the death.
Onshore, a woman spots their boat and steps out to a patio, letting two dogs run along the seawall above the Southbound.
Toliver looks up and yells.
“We got help on the way, hon.”
About this story: Times reporters went out for a few hours on the Southbound on Friday, July 16, with Toliver and Jessica Tucker. The couple gave reporters a tour of the area they have been working and spoke about the process of picking up dead fish. The bloom’s worst effects have since moved toward the gulf beaches.
• Florida Poison Control Centers have a toll-free 24/7 hotline to report illnesses, including from exposure to Red Tide: 1-800-222-1222
• To report dead fish for clean-up in Tampa Bay, call the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission at 1-800-636-0511 or file a fish kill report online.
• In St. Petersburg, call the Mayor’s Action Center at 727-893-7111 or use St. Petersburg’s seeclickfix website.
• Visit St. Pete/Clearwater, the county’s tourism wing, runs an online beach dashboard at www.beachesupdate.com.
How to stay safe near the water
• Do not swim around dead fish.
• Those with chronic respiratory problems should be careful and stay away from places with a Red Tide bloom. Leave if you think Red Tide is affecting you.
• Do not harvest or eat mollusks or distressed and dead fish from the area. Fillets of healthy fish should be rinsed with clean water, and the guts thrown out.
• Pet owners should keep their animals away from the water and from dead fish.
• Residents living near the beach should close their windows and run air conditioners with proper filters.
• Beachgoers can protect themselves by wearing masks.
Source: Florida Department of Health in Pinellas County
Red Tide may recede in Tampa Bay but worsen off Pinellas beaches
Zachary T. Sampson, Tampa Bay Times
Red Tide may recede in Tampa Bay but worsen off Pinellas beaches.
ST. PETERSBURG — The latest Red Tide monitoring shows some improvement within Tampa Bay, officials say, but conditions are worsening for several gulf beaches.
“Our aerial imagery is showing that the bloom has kind of transported out of the mouth over the last few days. Within the bay … it’s night and day from a week ago,” said Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission Executive Director Eric Sutton. “However the bloom has now moved, it’s off the coast, and it’s expanded, and we’ve seen high bloom concentrations from Longboat Key up essentially to Dunedin and that area.”
Red Tide is “pretty extensive” off the beaches, Sutton told the Tampa Bay Times on Tuesday. It is atypical for a toxic bloom to reach as far into the bay as it did this month, but more common in the gulf. In some spots on the western shore, Sutton said, the Red Tide has reached all the way up to the beach, while in other places it may be drifting a mile or so offshore. The bloom is not one unbroken block of algae but pockets that move according to winds, tides and other environmental factors.
The toxic algae have devastated waters around Tampa Bay, killing immense numbers of fish and other sea life. Sutton said the state has found multiple manatees — likely numbering in the single digits — that appear to have been affected by Red Tide, though the cause of their deaths will not be confirmed until researchers further study the animals’ bodies.
This has been a record year for manatee deaths, with 850 dying as of July 9, according to the state. That is largely attributed to the loss of sea-grasses on the east coast, where manatees have starved around wintering zones along their Atlantic migration route. Now Red Tide threatens them on the west coast.
The last time Florida saw a bloom like this, so far into Tampa Bay at this time of summer, was in 1971, according to a Conservation Commission researcher.
Pinellas County as of Monday had picked up more than 1,270 tons of dead marine life and debris. Workers were finding dead fish on beaches from Indian Shores to the south. On Tuesday, they saw a major fish kill by the Dunedin Causeway, said county spokesman Tony Fabrizio.
The bloom seems to have been carried out of the bay by standard forces, including currents and wind, Sutton said. Persistent rainfall has helped freshen the waters of Tampa Bay, he said, lowering salinity levels that had been high weeks ago. The salinity may have made the estuary conducive to growth of the organism behind Red Tide.
But the algae have not left the area entirely, and scientists cannot be certain the bloom will continue to decline in the bay.
“The trend looks like it’s going down,” Sutton said, “but we’re not out of the woods.”
St. Petersburg officials and environmental organizations have made repeated calls for Gov. Ron DeSantis to declare a state of emergency. As of early this week, the state has agreed to provide $2.1 million to Pinellas for clean-up costs incurred by the county and city of St. Petersburg.
The governor’s office has said the Florida Department of Environmental Protection holds a fund to use in the response, so there’s no need to initiate a state of emergency, which is what happened during a bad Red Tide bloom in 2018.
The agency’s interim secretary, Shawn Hamilton, said that money is available specifically to help reimburse local governments for the cost of cleaning up fish kills. He said the agency has enough funding to surpass the aid it provided in 2018.
Pinellas alone picked up about 1,800 tons of dead sea life and debris that year.
“Those are the types of levels we’re ready to support if needed,” Hamilton said.
If the region suffers other damages, like business foundering due to a decline in tourism, Hamilton said the state tourism agency Visit Florida and the Department of Economic Opportunity, which administers state and federal aid programs, could step in to help.
The U.S. built the equivalent of 28 Keystone XLs over the past decade, but continent expected to become an increasingly inhospitable place for new projects, says a new report.
Yadullah Hussain July 21, 2021
Sections of the Enbridge Line 3 pipeline are seen on the construction site on the White Earth Nation Reservation near Wauburn, Minnesota, on June 5, 2021. PHOTO BY KEREM YUCEL/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES FILES
After a remarkable period of pipeline expansion, primarily in the United States over the past decade, North America is expected to become an increasingly inhospitable place for new projects, according to a new report.
While the upturn in crude oil prices, recovering oil demand and a surge in natural gas development for power generation will drive pipeline construction globally in the next few years, development of new pipelines in North America will be relatively subdued, says the report by Westwood Global Energy Group analysts Ben Wilby and Arindam Das.Globally, pipelines planned and spending on pipeline construction is set to rise US$45 billion in 2021, 10 per cent more than 2020, but still lower than the near-US$60 billion spent in 2019, according to the London, U.K.-based consultancy.
“Overall pipeline capex however, is forecast to be lower than the previous five-year period, predominantly due to a reduction in North American installation levels,” Wilby and Das said in the report. “Asia, Eastern Europe & FSU (former Soviet Union) and the Middle East are key to the realization of forecast activity levels and associated spend.”
Canada’s pipeline capital expenditures will reach US$6 billion this year, before falling to $4.7 billion in 2022 and $1.5 billion by 2023, Westwood estimates show. In terms of miles, Canada will account for 23 per cent of all North American pipeline installations until 2025.The findings may not come as a huge surprise as virtually every major North American crude oil pipeline has faced pressure from local activists and environmental groups over the past decade.
A call for climate action and Line 3 pipeline protest signs in Park Rapids, Minnesota on June 5, 2021.PHOTO BY KEREM YUCEL/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES FILES
The cancellation of TC Energy Corp.’s 1,947-kilometre Keystone XL pipeline by U.S. President Biden earlier this year has already cast a gloom over energy infrastructure spending across the continent, while Enbridge Inc.’s proposed changes to the operational Line 5 project also faces regulatory delays. TC Energy has filed a lawsuit against the U.S. government under NAFTA rules, while Enbridge is in mediation with the state of Michigan, which is opposed to the changes.
“The pendulum has swung towards a lot more focus on ESG (environmental, social and governance), and a lot more focus on transition and to the extent it is right now a significant consideration in North America,” Das said in an interview.Several other obstacles also hover on the horizon that suggest there are more downside risks to the forecast, especially in North America.
“Chief among these are geopolitics, focus on climate change and the increasing momentum of the energy transition particularly in the western hemisphere,” Westwood noted in its report. “There exists the potential risk of reduced appetite from financiers and lenders to project finance fossil fuel projects going forward. This has led to increased delays (and subsequently increased costs) on several projects as well as cancellations.”
The decline in North American pipeline capex is also a reflection of prospects of lower production. The U.S. Department of Energy expects U.S. oil output to decline to 11.1 million barrels per day this year, compared to 11.3 million bpd last year, while many analysts believe U.S. shale basins may not be able to repeat their rapid growth of the past decade.The U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics show the U.S. built 51,139 miles of oil pipelines, including 33,000 miles of crude pipelines — equivalent to 28 Keystone XL pipelines since the project was first proposed in 2008.
And while Canadian companies were unable to build the massive Energy East, Northern Gateway and Keystone XL pipelines, they still managed to build nearly 11,000 kilometers of liquids pipelines between 2010-19 — their most active construction period in over seven decades, according to the Canadian Energy Pipeline Association.
“The Canadian growth trajectory was always underpinned by U.S. demand, and to the extent net zero and ambition Biden is laying down are well underway to be achieved in the next 10-15 years, what you start to see is that demand for energy in the U.S. also starts to shift,” Das said. “And in that case, if demand profile starts to shift, the requirement for the demand for oil starts to change.”IHS Markit expects Canadian oilsands production to reach 3.6 million bpd by 2030, compared to its previous estimate of 3.8 million bpd. Heavy oil production stood at 2.48 million bpd in March, according to the Canada Energy Regulator.
“Even prior to the pandemic, IHS Markit expected the coming decade to be one of sustained-but-slower growth for the oilsands, with transportation constraints such as a lack of adequate pipeline capacity and the resulting sense of price insecurity in Western Canada weighing on new large-scale incremental investments,” the energy research firm said.
Canada’s pipeline capacity stands at around 4 million bpd. Enbridge’s Alberta-to-Minnesota Line 3 has a capacity of 370,000 bpd, while the Alberta-to-British Columbia Trans Mountain conduit will add 590,000 bpd to capacity.If Enbridge Line 3 and Trans Mountain pipeline, as well as other announced smaller expansion projects are able to proceed as planned, pipeline export capacity may be adequate to keep the market in balance. However, the absence of Keystone XL pipeline leaves little room to absorb any disruption to the system and could contribute to price volatility.
While private sector funding — and appetite — for financing new pipelines may be drying up in Canada, provincial and federal governments have stepped up to fill the gap.
The International Institute for Sustainable Development estimates that provincial and federal governments in Canada bankrolled three uncompleted pipeline projects in the country.“We found at least eight different types of financial support measures provided for Trans Mountain, two for Keystone XL, and two for Coastal GasLink,” according to an IISD report published earlier this month. “Cumulatively, Canadian governments have provided over $23 billion in government support since 2018. Of this, over $11 billion is in loans, and at least $10 billion is loan guarantees or liabilities. Over $10 billion in government support to pipelines was provided after the COVID-19 pandemic hit.”
The Institute said that it crunched the number after filing access to information requests, and the final figure is “likely an understatement.”
