Category: Environment

Because Fracking Wasn’t Already Toxic Enough, the Oil and Gas Industry Decided to Add ‘Forever Chemicals’ to the Mix

Because Fracking Wasn’t Already Toxic Enough, the Oil and Gas Industry Decided to Add ‘Forever Chemicals’ to the Mix

Hannah Murphy                          
GettyImages-Fracking-520681118 - Credit: J Pat Carter/Getty Images
GettyImages-Fracking-520681118 – Credit: J Pat Carter/Getty Images

 

A fresh hazard has been uncovered in the oil and gas industry: For the past decade, the Environmental Protection Agency has knowingly allowed oil companies to use chemicals that could break down into PFAS — a class of highly toxic, long-lasting compounds also known as “forever chemicals,” which have been linked to cancers, birth defects, and other serious health problems, a new report has found.

The report, released by Physicians for Social Responsibility and first reported by The New York Times, is based on internal EPA documents obtained using the Freedom of Information Act. The documents show that the agency approved three new chemicals for use in drilling and fracking in 2011, despite clearly stated concerns about their safety: namely, that as the chemicals broke down, they would become PFAS, which, the agency said, could create a persistent, toxic threat. (The EPA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

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The EPA didn’t keep public records of where these chemicals were used, but through the FracFocus database, which tracks chemicals used in fracking around the country, the advocacy group determined that at least 1,200 wells across Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Texas, and Wyoming used PFAS — or chemicals that, once degraded, turn into PFAS — between 2012 and 2020. But because many states don’t require companies to report the chemicals that they inject, that number could be much higher.

The chain of possible exposure is vast — from workers in the oil fields, to truckers that haul the chemicals to disposal sites, to the communities and waterways that surround them. “The evidence that people could be unknowingly exposed to these extremely toxic chemicals through oil and gas operations is disturbing,” Dusty Horwitt, the author of the report, said in a statement. “Considering the terrible history of pollution associated with PFAS, EPA and state governments need to move quickly to ensure that the public knows where these chemicals have been used and is protected from their impacts.”

Details about the chemicals used in fracking and drilling are notoriously difficult to bring to light. The documents were heavily redacted — concealing trade names of chemicals and even the name of the company that applied for approval — likely due to a loophole that allows oil companies to conceal information about the chemicals they use as “trade-secrets.” But testing of oil and gas waste has found a wealth of carcinogens, heavy metals, and radioactive elements. One 2016 report from the EPA found more than 1,600 different chemicals involved in fracking alone.

But this is the first time that the use of PFAS in oil and gas drilling has been publicized, and the chemicals add a new layer of hazards to the industry.

There are thousands of PFAS chemicals — all man-made compounds of carbon and fluorine — and they are toxic even in minuscule concentrations; as little as one cup in 8 million gallons of water is enough to make the water toxic.

Of the thousands of PFAS compounds that have been developed, only some have been studied for their health impacts, but so far, they’ve all raised alarms. PFOA — the PFAS chemical that contaminated the drinking water around a DuPont Teflon plant in West Virginia and inspired the 2019 film Dark Waters — is linked to cancers, thyroid disease, high cholesterol, pre-eclampsia, and ulcerative colitis. In an EPA assessment of the two most common PFAS chemicals, studies found connections to birth defects, accelerated puberty, and damage to the liver and immune system. One study even found that infants who are exposed to PFAS have a weakened response to vaccines.

The dilemma, though, is that “PFAS are really useful chemicals,” said Linda Birnbaum, a toxicologist and former director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, in a press conference yesterday. They’re exceptionally slippery, and good at repelling water and oil — which is why, in the decades after their invention in the 1930s, they were used in everything from stain-resistant carpeting to fire-fighting foam to the plastic lining inside popcorn bags. And while the EPA documents don’t indicate how or where the chemicals were used in the process of oil and gas extraction, a 2008 paper written by a DuPont researcher found that the “exceptional” water-repelling characteristics of chemicals like PFAS showed promise for use in oil and gas extraction.

But for all of their usefulness, the chemical bonds in the man-made PFAS are impossible to break down, so the chemicals accumulate in our environment and in our bodies, earning them the nickname “forever chemicals.” One 2007 study found that more than 98 percent of Americans have them in their bloodstream. Parents are even able to pass PFAS to their children through breastfeeding.

For that reason, the EPA worked with manufacturers to phase out the use of PFAS chemicals, and they haven’t been produced in the U.S. since 2012. But it’s still possible to use existing stores of the chemicals, or to import products that use them, a workaround that the oil and gas industry appeared to use. The report found that oil companies started importing the chemicals for commercial use in November 2011, shortly after they were approved by the EPA, and continued until at least 2018.

In the report, Physicians for Social Responsibility urges the EPA to issue a moratorium on the use of PFAS in the oil and gas industry, track where they’ve been used, and begin health assessments on the communities and wildlife that surround the wells.

They also insist that the government hold the oil and gas industry responsible for removing PFAS from the environment, but that won’t be easy. Because PFAS compounds don’t break down, “once it’s in the environment, there’s no easy way to get rid of it,” said Birnbaum.

The leading cleanup method requires activated charcoal, “similar to what you find in a Brita filter, except the quantities have to be much, much greater,” explained Horwitt, the study’s author. “And then once that carbon fills up with PFAS — and perhaps other contaminants — you’d have to dispose of it somewhere. And landfills can be reluctant to accept this waste.”

Even if a system of removal and disposal was accessible to oil and gas companies, it’s still unlikely that the oil and gas industry will ultimately pay for this damage. They’ve already shirked responsibility for millions of “orphaned” wells across the country — which could cost as much as $300 billion to clean up. Not to mention that fracking and drilling companies have been declaring bankruptcy at an unprecedented pace. By the time the government could get around to holding them responsible, those companies are likely to be gone, says Silverio Caggiano, a hazardous waste expert who contributed to the report. “It’s going to be the taxpayer that gets caught with a bill for cleaning this all up.”

Microplastics are getting into our bodies. We need to understand what that means

Opinion: Microplastics are getting into our bodies. We need to understand what that means

Caroline Petrow-Cohen                   
recycling Plastic in junkyard wait for recycling.The plastic waste can reused many times ,decreased air pollution and greenhouse gases
Large pieces of plastic waste ultimately break down into tiny particles called microplastics. (Worradirek / Getty Images / iStockphoto)

 

Nobody wants to snack on plastic bags or soda rings, but according to a 2019 study from the University of Newcastle, we could be consuming roughly a credit card’s worth of plastic every week.

Microplastics, which are less than a quarter-inch in size and come in various shapes and textures, have contaminated the natural world and infiltrated our bodies. These particles are just about everywhere on Earth, including in drinking water and the air we breathe, but until recently we didn’t know how ubiquitous they really were.

Microplastics were first discovered in our oceans, and the vast majority of studies published since then focus on marine environments only. The threat to our oceans is indeed huge, but it’s not the full picture anymore.

The first clue to microplastic exposure in humans came around 2013, when scientists discovered plastic particles in seafood prepared for consumption. But by 2019, when the University of Newcastle study was published, the scientific community understood that the problem was considerably broader.

“We started to realize that we have exposure that’s much greater than just a fish at the grocery store,” said Dr. Chelsea Rochman, a University of Toronto professor who helped produce a report on microplastics in April for the California Ocean Science Trust. “The trend of the research at first was just to show that we were exposed, and then it became clear that we needed to understand how this impacts human health.”

Microplastics shed off of clothes and tires and have been found in beer, honey, table salt and other food items. We inhale plastic suspended in the air and drink plastic floating in our beverages. It’s no stretch to conclude that our exposure is significant. What we don’t know is what this means for us.

Researchers started to look seriously into the human health impacts of microplastic ingestion and inhalation just a few years ago. We’ve started to ask the right questions, but there’s a long way to go. If we’re going to get the answers in time, we need to prioritize this area and funnel resources into science that analyzes how microplastics interact with our bodies.

The amount of evidence collected on this subject is growing rapidly, according to Scott Coffin, a toxicologist also involved with the state report. Studies done on mice and rats have found that plastic contamination can reduce fertility, alter the gut microbiome and cause oxidative stress, which can severely damage cells.

These results aren’t directly translatable to people, however, and there are gaps in the research that make it difficult to draw conclusions. Most studies rely on polystyrene spheres, a specific kind of microplastic that can be purchased commercially but doesn’t reflect the vast range of plastics and chemicals in the natural environment.

Susanne Brander, an Oregon State University professor who also worked on the recent report, acknowledges these shortcomings. “More studies are needed on environmentally relevant plastic types before we can say with full confidence that the plastics you’re exposed to every day could harm you in these ways,” Brander said. “But I think it’s safe to say that it’s a concern, and if we’re seeing responses in mouse models, it’s likely that humans are also being affected.”

Toxicologists, ecologists and other scientists have been digging deep into these questions, but the scientific process is still in its infancy. Meanwhile, major environmental agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency and National Science Foundation have not provided funding for microplastic research regarding human health.

We already know enough to take action on the microplastics problem, but without all the details, it’s much more challenging to bring about change. If we could bring specifics to the table — for example, that these plastics cause cancer, damage organs, reduce fertility — there would be more pressure on public officials to pass sweeping regulations.

“We have to make a bit of a leap and say, whatever’s happening in rodents is happening at similar quantities in humans,” Coffin said, “and there is a little bit of a precautionary principle baked into that assumption.”

But will we be willing to make that leap? Because microplastics are too small to clean up, the only solution is to stop plastic waste at the source. And doing so would take a radical adjustment, given that plastics are deeply embedded in our economy and lifestyle. Weaning ourselves from them would fundamentally affect countless industries, including textiles, transportation and manufacturing.

“I think we’re going to need to have more studies coming out that are directly related to human health before we see a lot more concern from the general public,” Brander said. “It takes a lot to convince people that something that is really convenient for them to use is something they should sacrifice.”

The question of microplastics and human health needs more attention — from the scientific community, the general public, the government and funding groups. The issue isn’t being ignored, but it’s not being prioritized either.

In a perfect world, the knowledge we have now would be enough impetus for policy change. But in a society stuck in its ways and reluctant to alter the status quo, we need more than precaution to move the needle.

These Scientists Linked June’s Heat Wave to Climate Change in 9 Days. Their Work Could Revolutionize How We Talk About Climate

These Scientists Linked June’s Heat Wave to Climate Change in 9 Days. Their Work Could Revolutionize How We Talk About Climate

Alejandro de la Garza                       

Lighting strikes over Lake Mead as a storm rolls through the area Tuesday, June 29, 2021. Credit – Allen J. Schaben—Los Angeles Times/Getty Images

Long before most people in the U.S. Pacific Northwest had woken up on June 28—the hottest day in last month’s record-breaking heat wave—European climate scientists Geert Jan van Oldenborgh and Friederike Otto were preparing to determine the connection between that deadly weather phenomenon and the broader state of the global climate.

“Friederike and I looked at each other over the Zoom,” Van Oldenborgh told Dutch newspaper NRC on July 5. “The heat wave would peak that day. We said, ‘This is so beyond the expectation of a heat wave. We must investigate this.’”

So began a nine-day round-the-clock scientific sprint, with dozens of climate researchers worldwide working in shifts to analyze the unprecedented temperatures that killed hundreds and hospitalized thousands across Oregon, Washington and Canada’s British Columbia. While it was clear that the blistering temperatures were caused by a heat dome—an atmospheric phenomenon wherein air heated by the ocean gets trapped over large areas of land—Van Oldenborgh and Otto’s team was racing to determine what role global warming played in triggering that condition. The results of that work—published on July 7, just days before another heat wave descended on the West Coast—were headlined by a disturbing conclusion: the heat wave that sent temperatures spiking to an unheard-of 116℉ in Portland, Ore. last month would have been virtually impossible without the effects of human-caused climate change.

Damaged structures are seen in Lytton, British Columbia, on July 9, 2021, after a wildfire destroyed most of the village on June 30.<span class="copyright">Darryl Dyck—The Canadian Press/AP</span>
Damaged structures are seen in Lytton, British Columbia, on July 9, 2021, after a wildfire destroyed most of the village on June 30.Darryl Dyck—The Canadian Press/AP

 

A decade ago, it might have taken months for such work to be published. The ability for scientists to determine within days the role human-caused global heating played in a given weather phenomena—a complex statistical process known as “extreme event attribution,” involving enormous quantities of weather data and cutting-edge climate models—has been years in the making, though it’s recently been accelerated by improved methodology and coordination among a small group of climate researchers, including Van Oldenborgh, of the Royal Dutch Meteorological Institute, and Otto, of the University of Oxford.

For those seeking to point to big, newsworthy weather events to emphasize the need to address climate change, such speed is crucial. Being able to confidently say that a given weather disaster was caused by climate change while said event still has the world’s attention can be an enormously useful tool to convince leaders, lawmakers and others that climate change is a threat that must be addressed. But that speed hasn’t been possible until relatively recently, thanks to the work of Van Oldenborgh, Otto and others like them.

“The problem has always been [that] if you want to have a very sophisticated statistical attribution, usually you’re not going to have the answer until the event itself is out of the news cycle,” says Jonathan Overpeck, a professor of environmental education at the University of Michigan, who was not involved in Van Oldenborgh and Otto’s recent study.

People visit the unofficial thermometer reading 133 degrees Fahrenheit/56 degrees Celsius at Furnace Creek Visitor Center on July 11, 2021 in Death Valley National Park, California.<span class="copyright">David Becker—Getty Images</span>
People visit the unofficial thermometer reading 133 degrees Fahrenheit/56 degrees Celsius at Furnace Creek Visitor Center on July 11, 2021 in Death Valley National Park, California. David Becker—Getty Images

 

The science of extreme event attribution began after a disastrous 2003 European heat wave killed at least 30,000 people over a series of blistering weeks hotter than anything recorded on the continent in 500 years. Scientists were eventually able to link the event to climate change, but those results were published more than a year after the phenomenon left the headlines. Scientists have since refined the basic methods used in that research, and in 2016 the U.S. National Academies of Science published a study of extreme event attribution that climate scientists say was pivotal in establishing confidence in the methodology. There was one problem, though: even as the science behind event attribution gained wide acceptance, it still wasn’t producing results fast enough to get attention from people outside the climate science world.

That’s changing thanks to the World Weather Attribution initiative (WWA), a global group of climate scientists led by Van Oldenborgh and Otto, which in 2014 set out to dramatically speed up the work of linking weather events to climate change. The WWA, which published the aforementioned Pacific Northwest heat wave report, has only gotten faster at its work in recent years. Maarten van Aalst, director of the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre and a co-author of the July 7 report, says it’s difficult to put an exact figure on the team’s improvement, but his sense is that it does the same scientific work two or three times faster than it did just five years ago, allowing for such breakneck speeds as seen with its latest report

It’s difficult to attribute those improvements to any one factor. Better forecasts have enabled scientists to start examining extreme weather events before they reach peak intensity, then retroactively plug in numbers from observations recorded on the ground. New, more powerful computers have allowed researchers to run more detailed climate models more frequently, and scientists have developed a wider variety of climate models since the early days of extreme event attribution, more of which are tuned specifically to answer questions about extreme weather events.

“Years ago, most of the questions were still about, ‘Is the climate changing, and, if it is, are humans to blame?’” says Van Aalst. “Now we’re really interested in the questions, ‘If the climate is changing, how is it going to materialize? What sort of impacts should we be worried about? How fast is it changing? And particularly not just how the average is changing, but how are these really extreme events that hit us much harder changing?’”

Experience has made a difference as well, with the teams’ efforts becoming more seamless and coordinated over time. “It’s partly the quality of the tools and the number of tools,” Van Aalst says, explaining how the attributions have gotten faster. “But it’s particularly our fine-tuning of the process. We’ve got these steps; we know what we need to do. We know how we need to line up with each other to be able to put these pieces together.”

“The group is often made up of people across many time zones,” adds Gabriel Vecchi, a Princeton University climate scientist involved in the recent study. “You’ll see the edits in the documents to proceed with the sun as it’s day somewhere.”

Pablo Miranda cools off in the Salmon Springs Fountain on June 27, 2021 in Portland, Oregon.<span class="copyright">Nathan Howard—Getty Images</span>
Pablo Miranda cools off in the Salmon Springs Fountain on June 27, 2021 in Portland, Oregon.Nathan Howard—Getty Images

 

The group’s findings on the recent heat wave sent ripples through the climate journalism community, shifting vague, hedging language (“likely linked to climate change”) into a more definitive and urgent framing backed up by the data—that this event would have been essentially impossible without human climate impacts. WWA scientists say they’re often able to analyze heat waves faster than other events, like hurricanes or drought, because the connection between a warming climate and localized temperature extremes is relatively straightforward, atmospherically speaking. (Attributing the catastrophic 2019-2020 Australian Bushfires to climate change, for instance, was a more complicated task, partly because the fires were driven by many different weather factors, like heat and lack of rain, each with their own relationship to the global climate.)

The report also noted other disconcerting implications of the heat wave that have made clear the importance—and sheer strangeness—of what occurred in the atmosphere over western North America last month, the period that the study covered. Namely, the Pacific Northwest heat wave was so extreme that it would be highly unlikely to occur even accounting for global warming caused by greenhouse gases, suggesting either climatory bad luck or a gap in scientific understanding of extreme heat events.

“We have to ask ourselves, ‘Are we missing something?’” says Vecchi. “It’s always possible that we were just unlucky; really, really unlucky. And it’s also possible that there is something that we still need to learn how to account for better.”

Even so, the WWA’s work represents a paradigm shift in a research world that typically runs at the months- or years-long timescales of journal publication and peer review. (The group submits its work for peer review, but publishes in pre-review form.) Facing a deepening climate crisis and continuing fossil fuel-sponsored misdirection and “greenwashing” initiatives, climate scientists may have little choice about changing the nature of their work to suit the times, both by accelerating their efforts and focusing on news-making and alarming events, like the recent heat wave.

“Now the studies are targeted to pick on events that are particularly important to people, and which the media might actually pay some attention to,” says Michael Oppenheimer, a Princeton climate scientist who serves on the board of Climate Central, a group that helped launch WWA. “There’s no point going through this exercise involving dozens of scientists if it’s something that you think no one’s going to care about.”

Red tide runs rampant across Tampa Bay again

Red tide runs rampant across Tampa Bay again

Ben Montgomery                  

 

Red tide is impacting humans’ own everyday lives — beyond impacting our wildlife — in ways large and small.

  • 🐟 St. Pete has removed more than 15 tons of dead fish from its waterways.
  • 🏝 Hillsborough County closed the beaches at Apollo Beach Nature Preserve and E.G. Simmons Conservation Park on Friday due to public health concerns.
  • 🏖 The National Weather Service issued a beach hazards statement Saturday night, in effect through tonight, advising people to avoid going into the water in coastal southern Pinellas County.

What they’re saying: People who live along the water in Coquina Key told WTSP they’ve never seen this many fish die because of red tide.

What we’re seeing: I went to Indian Rocks Beach on Saturday morning and, after a swim and about 20 minutes of sunning, was ready to pack it in.

  • My throat was itchy, my nose burned, and I noticed many beachgoers coughing.

Death Valley hits 130 degrees as relentless Western heat wave adds fuel to wildfires

Death Valley hits 130 degrees as relentless Western heat wave adds fuel to wildfires

Kathryn Prociv                       

On Friday, Death Valley, California, hit 130 degrees.

On Saturday, Las Vegas tied its hottest temperature, hitting 117 degrees, and Utah also tied its statewide record, hitting 117 in St. George.

On Sunday morning, nearly 30 million people remained under heat alerts across several Western states, where temperatures were forecast again soar to 10 to 20 degrees above average.

Las Vegas was forecast again to climb to near 117 degrees. If that happened for the second time in a row, it would be the first time in recorded history.

And all eyes were on Death Valley to see whether it would hit 130 degrees again for the second time in three days, or perhaps higher.

Death Valley is considered the hottest place in the world — it hit 134 degrees back in 1913. No reliable weather station has recorded a hotter temperature on Earth.

Overnight lows have also been very warm. Lows are failing to drop below the 90s in desert locations and below the 80s in several larger metro areas. When overnight hours provide little relief, it can strain infrastructure and increase the risk for heat illness.

Las Vegas, in fact, cooled down only to a suffocating 94 degrees Sunday morning, 1 degree shy of its warmest low of 95 degrees. The dangerously high temperatures are expected to last through the first half of the week for most of the Western region.

But parts of the desert Southwest and the Four Corners region of Colorado, Nevada, Utah and New Mexico may get some heat relief in monsoon showers and thunderstorms. They would be welcome after the most recent indicators revealed that a staggering nearly 95 percent of the West is in drought.

And the heat has continued to fuel the wildfire risk out West.

On Saturday, the Bootleg Fire in Oregon spread rapidly, and the Beckwourth Complex fire in northern California doubled in size. Two firefighters were killed fighting blazes in Arizona.

Because of climate change, heat waves are happening more frequently and lasting longer, and they are increasingly more intense. A study by World Weather Attribution, an international climate change institute, found that the Pacific Northwest heat wave at the end of June would have been “virtually impossible” without climate change. The warmer atmosphere, because of human-induced warming, made the heat wave 150 times more likely and on average 4 degrees hotter compared to the 1800s, it found.

The U.S. also just recorded its hottest June on record.

‘Wither away and die:’ U.S. Pacific Northwest heat wave bakes wheat, fruit crops

‘Wither away and die:’ U.S. Pacific Northwest heat wave bakes wheat, fruit crops

Julie Ingwersen                     

 

FILE PHOTO: A farmer plows a field with a tractor in rural Idaho

CHICAGO (Reuters) – An unprecedented heat wave and ongoing drought in the U.S. Pacific Northwest is damaging white wheat coveted by Asian buyers and forcing fruit farm workers to harvest in the middle of the night to salvage crops and avoid deadly heat.

The extreme weather is another blow to farmers who have struggled with labor shortages and higher transportation costs during the pandemic and may further fuel global food inflation.

Cordell Kress, who farms in southeastern Idaho, expects his winter white wheat to produce about half as many bushels per acre as it does in a normal year when he begins to harvest next week, and he has already destroyed some of his withered canola and safflower oilseed crops.

The Pacific Northwest is the only part of the United States that grows soft white wheat used to make sponge cakes and noodles, and farmers were hoping to capitalize on high grain prices. Other countries including Australia and Canada grow white wheat, but the U.S. variety is especially prized by Asian buyers.

“The general mood among farmers in my area is as dire as I’ve ever seen it,” Kress said. “Something about a drought like this just wears on you. You see your blood, sweat and tears just slowly wither away and die.”

U.S. exports of white wheat in the marketing year that ended May 31 reached a 40-year high of 265 million bushels, driven by unprecedented demand from China.

But farmers may not have as much to sell this year.

“The Washington wheat crop is in pretty rough shape right now,” said Clark Neely, a Washington State University agronomist. The U.S. Agriculture Department this week rated 68% of the state’s spring wheat and 36% of its winter wheat in poor or very poor condition. A year ago, just 2% of the state’s winter wheat and 6% of its spring wheat were rated poor to very poor. [US/WHE]

On top of the expected yield losses, grain buyers worry about quality. Flour millers turn to Pacific Northwest soft white wheat for its low protein content, which is well-suited for pastries and crackers.

But the drought is shriveling wheat kernels and raising protein levels, making the some of the crop less valuable. “The protein is so high that you can’t use (it) for anything but cattle feed,” Kress said.

Low-protein “soft” wheats have lower gluten content than the “hard” wheats used for bread, producing a less-stretchy dough for delicate cakes and crackers.

The Washington State Agriculture Department said it was still too early to estimate lost revenue from crop damage.

The heat peaked in late June, in the thick of the harvest of cherries. Temperatures reached 118 degrees Fahrenheit (48 Celsius) on June 28 at The Dalles, Oregon, along the Washington border, near the heart of cherry country.

Scientists have said the suffocating heat that killed hundreds of people would have been “virtually impossible” without climate change and such events could become more common.

The National Weather Service posted weekend heat advisories for eastern Washington.

NIGHTTIME CHERRY HARVEST; SUN NETS FOR APPLES

On the hottest days last month, laborers who normally start picking cherries at 4 a.m. began at 1 a.m., armed with headlamps and roving spotlights to beat the daytime heat that threatened their safety and made the fruit too soft to harvest.

The region should still produce a roughly average-sized cherry harvest, but not the bumper crop initially expected, said B.J. Thurlby, president of the Northwest Cherry Growers, a grower-funded trade group representing top cherry producer Washington and other Western states.

“We think we probably lost about 20% of the crop,” Thurlby said, adding that growers simply had to abandon a portion of the heat-damaged cherries in their orchards.

The heat wave’s impact on Washington’s $2 billion apple crop – the state’s most valuable agricultural product – is uncertain, as harvest is at least six weeks away. Apple growers are used to sleepless nights as they respond to springtime frosts, but have little experience with sustained heat in June.

“We really don’t know what the effects are. We just have to ride it out,” said Todd Fryhover, president of the Washington Apple Commission.

Growers have been protecting their orchards with expansive nets that protect fruit against sunburn, and by spraying water vapor above the trees. Apples have stopped growing for the time being, Fryhover said, but it is possible the crop may make up for lost time if weather conditions normalize.

The state wine board in Oregon, known for its Pinot Noir, said the timing of the heat spike may have benefited grapes. Last year, late-summer wildfires and wind storms forced some West Coast vineyards to leave damaged grapes unharvested.

Washington’s wine grapes also seem fine so far, one vineyard manager said. “I think wine grapes are situated well to handle high heat in June,” said Sadie Drury, general manager of North Slope Management.

(Reporting by Julie Ingwersen in Chicago; Editing by Caroline Stauffer and Matthew Lewis)

You thought Monday was rainy in South Florida? Well, don’t plan on sunbathing Tuesday

You thought Monday was rainy in South Florida? Well, don’t plan on sunbathing Tuesday

David J. Neal                    

 

Monday’s rains turned your street into the Nile and the tropical storm wind gusts put stomach-flipping drama and delays into your friend’s flight landing at local airports. Once the flight landed, lightning kept the baggage handlers inside to continue arguing Suns-Bucks or Argentina-Brazil.

 

Get ready for more Tuesday and Wednesday, according to the National Weather Service.

The hazardous weather outlook says “Peak chances of showers and thunderstorms will be on Tuesday and Wednesday as a tropical wave passes by on Tuesday.”

Also, “the greatest flooding potential will be from Tuesday into Wednesday when there is a marginal risk of excessive rainfall.”

Drivers should avoid plowing through flooded streets if possible.

Rain is projected with gusts as high as 24 mph. On the upside, that’s half the 49 mph gust reported at Miami International Airport at 1:03 p.m. On the downside, that still means on the coasts from Key Biscayne to Miami Beach to Fort Lauderdale to Palm Beach, a high rip current risk stays in effect until 8 p.m. Tuesday.

“Swim near a lifeguard,” the NWS reminds swimmers. “If caught in a rip current, relax and float. Don`t swim against the current. If able, swim in a direction following the shoreline. If unable to escape, face the shore and call or wave for help.”

Our climate change turning point is right here, right now

Our climate change turning point is right here, right now

Rebecca Solnit                          
<span>Photograph: Kent Porter/AP</span>
Photograph: Kent Porter/AP

 

Human beings crave clarity, immediacy, landmark events. We seek turning points, because our minds are good at recognizing the specific – this time, this place, this sudden event, this tangible change. This is why we were never very good, most of us, at comprehending climate change in the first place. The climate was an overarching, underlying condition of our lives and planet, and the change was incremental and intricate and hard to recognize if you weren’t keeping track of this species or that temperature record. Climate catastrophe is a slow shattering of the stable patterns that governed the weather, the seasons, the species and migrations, all the beautifully orchestrated systems of the holocene era we exited when we manufactured the anthropocene through a couple of centuries of increasingly wanton greenhouse gas emissions and forest destruction.

This spring, when I saw the shockingly low water of Lake Powell, I thought that maybe this summer would be a turning point. At least for the engineering that turned the Southwest’s Colorado River into a sort of plumbing system for human use, with two huge dams that turned stretches of a mighty river into vast pools of stagnant water dubbed Lake Powell, on the eastern Utah/Arizona border, and Lake Mead, in southernmost Nevada. It’s been clear for years that the overconfident planners of the 1950s failed to anticipate that, while they tinkered with the river, industrial civilization was also tinkering with the systems that fed it.

The water they counted on is not there. Lake Powell is at about a third of its capacity this year, and thanks to a brutal drought there was no great spring runoff to replenish it. That’s if “drought” is even the right word for something that might be the new normal, not an exception. The US Bureau of Reclamation is overdue to make a declaration that there is not enough water for two huge desert reservoirs and likely give up on Powell to save Lake Mead.

I got to see the drought up close when I spent a week in June floating down the Green River, the Colorado River’s largest tributary. The skies of southern Utah were full of smoke from the Pack Creek wildfire that had been burning since June 9 near Moab, scorching thousands of acres of desert and forest and incinerating the ranch buildings and archives of the legendary river guide and environmentalist Ken Slight (fictionalized as Seldom Seen Slim in Edward Abbey’s novel The Monkey Wrench Gang), now 91. Climate chaos destroys the past as well as the future. As of July 6, the fire is still burning.

It wasn’t just the huge plume of smoke that filled us with dread about the adventure to come; the weather forecast of daily temperatures reaching 106 F made living out of doors for a week seem daunting. Water level in the river was far lower than normal and due to drop a lot more; the temperature on our rafts and kayaks just above the water was tolerable – but as soon as you walked any distance from the river’s edge, the heat came at you as though you’d opened an oven door.

We saw an unusual amount of wildlife on the trip too – mustangs, bighorn sheep, a lean black bear and her two cubs pacing the river’s edge – but any sense of wonder was tempered by the likelihood that thirst had driven them down from the drought-scorched stretches beyond the river. We need a new word for that feeling for nature that is love and wonder mingled with dread and sorrow, for when we see those things that are still beautiful, still powerful, but struggling under the burden of our mistakes.

Then came the heat dome over the Northwest, a story that didn’t appear to make the top headlines of many media outlets as it was happening. Much of the early coverage showed people in fountains and sprinklers as though this was just another hot day, rather than something sending people to hospitals in droves, killing hundreds (and likely well over a thousand) in Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia, devastating wildlife, crops, and domestic animals, setting up the conditions for wildfires, and breaking infrastructure designed for the holocene, not the anthropocene. It signified something much larger even than a crisis impacting a vast expanse of the continent: increasingly wild variations from the norm with increasing devastation that can and will happen anywhere. It seemed to get less coverage than the collapse of part of a single building in Florida.

A building collapsing is an ideal specimen of news, sudden and specific in time and place, and in the case of this one on the Florida coast, easy for the media to cover as a spectacle with straightforward causes and consequences. A crisis spread across three states and two Canadian provinces, with many kinds of impact, including untallied deaths, was in many ways its antithesis. There was a case to be made that climate change – in the form of rising saltwater intrusion – was a factor in the Florida building’s collapse, but climate change was far more dramatically present in the Pacific Northwest’s heat records being broken day after day and the consequences of that heat. In Canada the previous highest temperature was broken by eight degrees Fahrenheit, a big lurch into the dangerous new conditions human beings have made, and then most of the town in which that record was set burned down.

Later news stories focused on one aspect or another of the heat dome. A marine biologist at the University of British Columbia reported that the heat wave may have killed more than a billion seashore animals living on the coast of the Pacific Northwest. Lightning strikes in BC, generated by the heat, soared to unprecedented levels – inciting, by one account, 136 forest fires. The heat wave cooked fruit on the trees. It was a catastrophe with many aspects and impacts, as diffuse as it was intense. The sheer scale and impact were underplayed, along with the implications.

Political turning points are as manmade as climate catastrophe: we could have chosen to make turning points out of the western wildfires of the past four years – notably the incineration of the town of Paradise and more than 130 of its residents in 2018, but also last year’s California wildfires that included five of the six largest fires in state history. It could include the deluge that soaked Detroit with more than six inches of rain in a few hours last month or the ice storm in Texas earlier this year or catastrophic flooding in Houston (with 40 inches of rain in three days) and Nebraska in 2019 or the point at which the once-mythical Northwest Passage became real because of summer ice melt in the Arctic or the 118-degree weather in Siberia this summer or the meltwater pouring off the Greenland ice sheet.

A turning point is often something you individually or collectively choose, when you find the status quo unacceptable, when you turn yourself and your goals around. George Floyd’s murder was a turning point for racial justice in the US. Those who have been paying attention, those with expertise or imagination, found their turning points for the climate crisis years and decades back. For some it was Hurricane Sandy or their own home burning down or the permafrost of the far north turning to mush or the IPCC report in 2018 saying we had a decade to do what the planet needs of us. Greta Thunberg had her turning point, and so did the indigenous women leading the Line 3 pipeline protests.

Summarizing the leaked contents of a forthcoming IPCC report, the Agence France-Presse reports: “Climate change will fundamentally reshape life on Earth in the coming decades, even if humans can tame planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions […] Species extinction, more widespread disease, unliveable heat, ecosystem collapse, cities menaced by rising seas – these and other devastating climate impacts are accelerating and bound to become painfully obvious before a child born today turns 30. The choices societies make now will determine whether our species thrives or simply survives as the 21st century unfolds…”

The phrase “the choices societies make” is a clear demand for a turning point, a turning away from fossil fuel and toward protection of the ecosystems that protect us.

Every week I temper the terrible news from catastrophes such as wildfires and from scientists measuring the chaos by trying to put them in the context of positive technological milestones and legislative shifts and their consequences. You could call each of them a turning point: The point last week at which Oregon passed the bill setting the most aggressive clean electricity standards in the US, 100% clean by 2040. The point at which Scotland began getting more electricity from renewables than it could use. The point at which New York State banned fracking. The Paris Climate Treaty in 2015. Of course, as with the climate itself, many of the changes were incremental: the stunning drop in cost and rise in efficiency of solar panels over the past four decades, the myriad solar and wind farms that have been installed worldwide.

The rise in public engagement with the climate crisis is harder to measure. It’s definitely growing, both as an increasingly powerful movement and as a matter of individual consciousness. Yet something about the scale and danger of the crisis still seems to challenge human psychology. Along with the fossil fuel industry, our own habits of mind are something we must overcome.

  • Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is also the author of Men Explain Things to Me and The Mother of All Questions. Her most recent book is Recollections of My Nonexistence

Aerial photos capture the devastation of the California drought that’s shriveling vegetation and drying up reservoirs

Aerial photos capture the devastation of the California drought that’s shriveling vegetation and drying up reservoirs

Avery Hartmans                     

 

Aerial photos capture the devastation of the California drought that’s shriveling vegetation and drying up reservoirs
Aerial view of docks sitting on dry land in California
An aerial view shows former docks on the beach at Salton Sea in California. Aude Guerrucci/Reuters

  • An extreme drought in California is drying up lakes and reservoirs and straining electrical grids.
  • Agriculture and tourism could be severely impacted, and wildfires are likely to rage this summer.
  • Aerial photographs show how much the drought has already devastated California’s landscape.

Boats sit on dry land. Once-lush palm trees are now brown and shriveled. And waterways that were formerly deep and flowing have been reduced to puddles of toxic residue.

This is the landscape in parts of California, which is experiencing a historic mega-drought that is expected to strain the state’s electrical grid and dry up water supplies – water levels are 50% lower than normal at more than 1,500 reservoirs statewide, Jay Lund, co-director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at University of California, Davis, told Morning Brew. Given that 25% of the nation’s food is grown in California, extreme droughts could decimate crops like avocados and almonds.

The drought has also made is harder for ranchers to supply water to their livestock, the state’s boating industry is taking a hit, and tourism, which supports roughly 2 million jobs in California, could be severely impacted by the dangerous heat waves.

As of Friday, more than 85% of the state was classified as being in “extreme drought,” according to the National Integrated Drought Information System, and experts say this is only the beginning: The dry conditions make California even more susceptible to deadly wildfires, which burned more than 4 million acres last year.

Read more: Meet the West Coast entrepreneurs founding startups to fight wildfires, combat the effects of climate change, and tap into a market potentially worth billions

“This current drought is potentially on track to become the worst that we’ve seen in at least 1,200 years. And the reason is linked directly to human-caused climate change,” Kathleen Johnson, a paleoclimatologist at the University of California, Irvine, told The Guardian.

On Thursday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom asked residents to cut back on their water usage by 15% by taking shorter showers and running dishwashers and washing machines more sparingly.

Amid the devastating conditions, Reuters photographer Aude Guerrucci captured aerial photos of the impacts of the drought on California’s landscape. Take a look:

Inside Shadow Lake Estates in Indio, California, an artificial lake glistens despite the scorched landscape surrounding it. Reservoirs and lakes are drying up statewide, with some turning completely to dust with no rain expected until later this year.

Lake surrounded by green grass sits in a desert in California
Aude Guerrucci/Reuters

Source: Insider

Elsewhere, dropping water levels have forced houseboat owners to remove their vessels from the water. These boats are anchored in Laka Oroville, the second-largest reservoir in the state, which is at less than 40% of its normal capacity.

Houseboats sit low in the water in a California reservoir
Aude Guerrucci/Reuters

Source: The Weather Channel

This canal in Salton City, California, is almost completely evaporated, leaving being only toxic residue. Salmon that typically swim in rivers and canals like this one between California’s Central Valley and the Pacific Ocean have had to be transported to the ocean via truck as those waterways become shallower and shallower.

Aerial view of evaporated canal with toxic residue at the bottom
Aude Guerrucci/Reuters

Source: Insider

The dried up bodies of water are visible from space. Here, boat pillars that used to be submerged in the Salton Sea in Southern California are exposed by the receding water levels.

Boat pillars that used to be in water sit on dry land
Aude Guerrucci/Reuters

Source: Insider

Heat waves are sending temperatures into the triple digits. As another heat wave arrives, the Central Valley could see temperatures as high as 113 degrees Fahrenheit, while Southern California, where this boat became beached, could reach 117 degrees.

An empty boat sits on dry land in California
Aude Guerrucci/Reuters

Source: The New York Times

These heat waves are occurring more often, starting earlier, and continuing later into the year now than they did in the 1960s, according to Environmental Protection Agency records. At the Salton Sea, docks sit on dry land, hundreds of feet from the water.

Broken dock with chair at the end sits on dry land
Aude Guerrucci/Reuters

Source: Insider

The extra-dry, extra-hot conditions are obliterating vegetation like these palm trees, and taxing power grids. As temperatures rise, people tend to turn up air conditioning units, increasing the potential for rolling blackouts.

Dead palm trees near the beach in California
Aude Guerrucci/Reuters

Source: Insider

In Mecca, California, in the Coachella Valley, agricultural fields reside amid a parched landscape. Agriculture is a roughly $50 billion business in California, and the severe drought could hamper the industry for years to come.

Aerial view of dry California fields with small patch of green
Aude Guerrucci/Reuters

Source: Insider

The conditions mean this year’s wildfire season could surpass the record-breaking devastation of 2020. “Much of the western United States will continue the trend of hot and dry weather, much like the summer of 2020,” Brandon Buckingham, a meteorologist at AccuWeather, recently told Insider. “Each and every western heat wave throughout the summer will only heighten wildfire risks.”

An &quot;End&quot; street sign sits at front of beach
Aude Guerrucci/Reuters

Source: Insider

A Wildfire Is Pushing California Toward the Brink of Blackouts

A Wildfire Is Pushing California Toward the Brink of Blackouts

Lynn Doan and Naureen S. Malik                       

(Bloomberg) — A wildfire raging uncontrollably across southern Oregon has knocked out three electrical lines so critical to the stability of grids in the western U.S. that California has warned of rotating blackouts and Nevada faced a power emergency.

The fast-moving Bootleg fire crippled a key transmission system known as the California Oregon Intertie that the Golden State has depended on for years for electricity imports.

Making matters worse: The takedown of the intertie has had a knock-on effect on another key import hub known as the Pacific DC Intertie that brings in electricity from the Pacific Northwest, California’s grid operator said in a media briefing Saturday. Power supplies to the area covered by the grid have been reduced by as much as 3,500 megawatts because of the fire.

After days of pushing state residents to limit energy use with the risk of rolling blackouts, Californians got a break Sunday as the grid operator said conditions were expected to be stable. With transmission lines knocked out by the fire still out of service, and high temperatures expected to persist as demand picks up in the new week, another statewide conservation push through a so-called flex alert has been issued for Monday.

“If demand still outstrips supply after a Flex Alert is in effect, the ISO could take the infrequent step of ordering California utilities to spread power outages of relatively short duration to effectively extend available electricity as much as possible,” it said in a statement Sunday.

The fact that a single wildfire has brought America’s most populous and affluent state to the brink of blackouts is among the most powerful demonstrations yet of how vulnerable the world’s power grids have become to the effects of climate change.

Read: Heat Scorches U.S. West as Records Fall Across the Region

Extreme heat, drought and dry conditions globally have shrunk hydropower reserves, driven up electricity demand to record levels and touched off some of the worst wildfire seasons in modern history.

Climate change is “forcing us to do things we never imagined” at this time of the year, said Elliot Mainzer, who took over as chief executive officer of grid manager California Independent System Operator nine months ago. The agency is “anticipating what could be a very long and hot summer,” he said.

California has emerged as the epicenter of climate disasters in the U.S. Wildfires burned an unprecedented 4.3 million acres across the state last year, killing 33 people and scorching nearly 10,500 structures.

Read More: Drought Indicators Across Western U.S. Warn of the ‘Big One’

Last August California suffered its first rolling blackouts since the U.S. West energy crisis two decades ago because of extremely hot weather. And in a foreshadowing of what was to come: Days before this year’s summer officially began, high temperatures forced the California ISO to make an unusually early call for conservation, allowing the region to duck another round of rotating outages.

“Bottom line is we took everything we learned from last summer, and we still came into this summer thinking our issues were going to primarily be associated with August and September,” Mainzer said, but “we had the first major heat wave four days before the official beginning of summer.”

On Friday evening, the grid operator took the rare step of ordering a Stage 2 emergency — one step away from rotating blackouts — to cope with the loss of import capacity. Energy conservation helped the state avert a crisis. But as temperatures rose yet again and supplies fell off the grid Saturday, Mainzer said, “We’re going to need more. Honestly, I think we are going to need more response than we saw last night.”

The grid operator issued an all-clear late Saturday after issuing a flex alert. Earlier in the day, Governor Gavin Newsom also signed an order to free up more energy capacity to help alleviate the supply crunch.

California wasn’t the only state facing power woes. Nevada’s power system was among those in the region that also faced emergency levels on Friday evening, said Mark Rothleder, California’s ISO’s chief operating officer. On top of managing California’s grid, the agency serves as a reliability coordinator and is responsible for monitoring conditions across the western region.

Nevada utility NV Energy Inc. said it wasn’t forced to resort to blackouts, but the company was calling for customers to conserve over the weekend.

Exactly when the Bootleg fire would subside enough to re-energize the California Oregon Intertie remains to be seen.

The Bootleg fire had burned through 143,607 acres of southern Oregon and still zero percent of it was contained as of Sunday, forcing evacuations in Klamath County and shutting sections of a national forest, according to an update from the U.S. Fire Service.

Temperatures across California were forecast to remain high into Monday. After hitting 102 degrees Fahrenheit (39 degrees Celsius) Sunday, Sacramento is expected to slip to a high of 94 degrees on Monday.

(Updates with grid operator’s comment in fifth paragraph.)